Americanah (70 page)

And so began her heady days full of cliché: she felt fully alive, her heart beat faster when he arrived at her door, and she viewed each morning like the unwrapping of a gift. She would laugh, or cross her legs or slightly sway her hips, with a heightened awareness of herself. Her nightshirt smelled of his cologne, a muted citrus and wood scent, because she left it unwashed for as long as she could, and she delayed in wiping off a spill of hand cream he had left on her sink, and after they made love, she left untouched the indentation on the pillow, the soft groove where his head had lain, as though to preserve his essence until the next time. They often stood on her verandah and watched the peacocks on the roof of the abandoned house, from time to time slipping their hands into each other’s, and she would think of the next time, and the next, that they would do this together. This was love, to be eager for tomorrow. Had she felt this way as a teenager? The emotions seemed absurd. She fretted when he did not respond to her text right away. Her mind was darkened with jealousy about his past. “You are the great love of my life,” he told her, and she believed him, but still she was jealous of those women whom he had loved even if fleetingly, those women who had carved out space in his thoughts. She was jealous even of the women who liked him, imagining how much attention he got here in Lagos, good-looking as he was, and now also wealthy. The first time she introduced him to Zemaye, lissome Zemaye in her tight skirt and platform heels, she stifled her discomfort, because she saw in Zemaye’s alert appreciative eyes the eyes of all the hungry women in Lagos. It was a jealousy of her imagination, he did nothing to aid it; he was present and transparent in his devotion.
She marveled at what an intense, careful listener he was. He remembered everything she told him. She had never had this before, to be listened to, to be truly heard, and so he became newly precious; each time he said bye at the end of a telephone call, she felt a sinking panic. It was truly absurd. Their teenage love had been less melodramatic. Or perhaps it was because the circumstances were different, and looming over them now was the marriage he never talked about. Sometimes he said, “I can’t come on Sunday until midafternoon,” or “I have to leave early today,” all of which she knew were about his wife, but they did not talk further about it. He did not try to, and she did not want to, or she told herself that she did not want to. It surprised her, that he took her out openly, to lunch and to dinner, to his private club where the waiter called her “madam,” perhaps assuming she was his wife; that he stayed with her until past midnight and never showered after they made love; that he went home wearing her touch and her smell on his skin. He was determined to give their relationship as much dignity as he could, to pretend that he was not hiding even though he, of course, was. Once he said cryptically, as they lay entwined on her bed in the undecided light of late evening, “I can stay the night, I would like to stay.” She said a quick no and nothing else. She did not want to get used to waking up beside him, did not permit herself to think of why he could stay this night. And so his marriage hung above them, unspoken, unprobed, until one evening when she did not feel like eating out. He said eagerly, “You have spaghetti and onions. Let me cook for you.”

“As long as it doesn’t give me a stomachache.”

He laughed. “I miss cooking. I can’t cook at home.” And, in that instant, his wife became a dark spectral presence in the room. It was palpable and menacing in a way it had never been when he said, “I can’t come on Sunday until midafternoon,” or “I have to leave early today.” She turned away from him, and flipped open her laptop to check on the blog. A furnace had lit itself deep inside her. He sensed it, too, the sudden import of his words, because he came and stood beside her.

“Kosi never liked the idea of my cooking. She has really basic, mainstream ideas of what a wife should be and she thought my wanting to cook was an indictment of her, which I found silly. So I stopped, just to have peace. I make omelets but that’s it and we both pretend as if my onugbu soup isn’t better than hers. There’s a lot of pretending in my
marriage, Ifem.” He paused. “I married her when I was feeling vulnerable; I had a lot of upheaval in my life at the time.”

She said, her back turned to him, “Obinze, please just cook the spaghetti.”

“I feel a great responsibility for Kosi and that is all I feel. And I want you to know that.” He gently turned her around to face him, holding her shoulders, and he looked as if there were other things he wanted to say, but expected her to help him say them, and for this she felt the flare of a new resentment. She turned back to her laptop, choked with the urge to destroy, to slash and burn.

“I’m having dinner with Tunde Razaq tomorrow,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because I want to.”

“You said the other day that you wouldn’t.”

“What happens when you go home and climb into bed with your wife? What happens?” she asked, and felt herself wanting to cry. Something had cracked and spoiled between them.

“I think you should go,” she said.

“No.”

“Obinze, please just go.”

He refused to leave, and later she felt grateful that he had not left. He cooked spaghetti and she pushed it around her plate, her throat parched, her appetite gone.

“I’m never going to ask you for anything. I’m a grown woman and I knew your situation when I got into this,” she said.

“Please don’t say that,” he said. “It scares me. It makes me feel dispensable.”

“It’s not about you.”

“I know. I know it’s the only way you can feel a little dignity in this.”

She looked at him and even his reasonableness began to irritate her.

“I love you, Ifem. We love each other,” he said.

There were tears in his eyes. She began to cry, too, a helpless crying, and they held each other. Later, they lay in bed together, and the air was so still and noiseless that the gurgling sound from his stomach seemed loud.

“Was that my stomach or yours?” he asked, teasing.

“Of course it was yours.”

“Remember the first time we made love? You had just been standing on me. I loved you standing on me.”

“I can’t stand on you now. I’m too fat. You would die.”

“Stop it.”

Finally, he got up and pulled on his trousers, his movements slow and reluctant. “I can’t come tomorrow, Ifem. I have to take my daughter—”

She cut him short. “It’s okay.”

“I’m going to Abuja on Friday,” he said.

“Yes, you said.” She was trying to push away the sense of a coming abandonment; it would overwhelm her as soon as he left and she heard the click of the door closing.

“Come with me,” he said.

“What?”

“Come with me to Abuja. I just have two meetings and we can stay the weekend. It’ll be good for us to be in a different place, to talk. And you’ve never been to Abuja. I can book separate hotel rooms if you want me to. Say yes. Please.”

“Yes,” she said.

She had not permitted herself to do so earlier, but after he left, she looked at Kosi’s photographs on Facebook. Kosi’s beauty was startling, those cheekbones, that flawless skin, those perfect womanly curves. When she saw one photo taken at an unflattering angle, she examined it for a while and found in it a small and wicked pleasure.

SHE WAS
at the hair salon when he sent her a text:
I’m sorry Ifem but I think I should probably go alone to Abuja. I need some time to think things through. I love you
. She stared at the text and, fingers shaking, she wrote him back a two-word text:
Fucking coward
. Then she turned to the hair braider. “You are going to blow-dry my hair with that brush? You must be joking. Can’t you people think?”

The hair braider looked puzzled. “Aunty, sorry o, but that is what I use before in your hair.”

By the time Ifemelu drove into her compound, Obinze’s Range Rover was parked in front of her flat. He followed her upstairs.

“Ifem, please, I want you to understand. I think it has been a little too fast, everything between us, and I want to take some time to put things in perspective.”

“A little too fast,” she repeated. “How unoriginal. Not like you at all.”

“You are the woman I love. Nothing can change that. But I feel this sense of responsibility about what I need to do.”

She flinched from him, the hoarseness of his voice, the nebulous and easy meaninglessness of his words. What did “responsibility about what I need to do” mean? Did it mean that he wanted to continue seeing her but had to stay married? Did it mean that he could no longer continue seeing her? He communicated clearly when he wanted to, but now here he was, hiding behind watery words.

“What are you saying?” she asked him. “What are you trying to tell me?”

When he remained silent, she said, “Go to hell.”

She walked into her bedroom and locked the door. From her bedroom window, she watched his Range Rover until it disappeared down the bend in the road.

Abuja had far-flung horizons, wide roads, order; to come from Lagos was to be stunned here by sequence and space. The air smelled of power; here everyone sized everyone else up, wondering how much of a “somebody” each was. It smelled of money, easy money, easily exchanged money. It dripped, too, of sex. Obinze’s friend Chidi said he didn’t chase women in Abuja because he didn’t want to step on a minister’s or senator’s toes. Every attractive young woman here became mysteriously suspect. Abuja was more conservative than Lagos, Chidi said, because it was more Muslim than Lagos, and at parties women didn’t wear revealing clothing, yet you could buy and sell sex so much more easily here. It was in Abuja that Obinze had come close to cheating on Kosi, not with any of the flashy girls in colored contact lenses and tumbling hair weaves who endlessly propositioned him, but with a middle-aged woman in a caftan who sat next to him at the hotel bar, and said, “I know you are bored.” She looked hungry for recklessness, perhaps a repressed, frustrated wife who had broken free on this one night.

For a moment, lust, a quaking raw lust, overcame him, but he thought about how much more bored he would be afterwards, how keen to get her out of his hotel room, and it all seemed too much of an effort.

She would end up with one of the many men in Abuja who lived idle, oily lives in hotels and part-time homes, groveling and courting connected people so as to get a contract or to be paid for a contract. On Obinze’s last trip to Abuja, one such man, whom he hardly knew, had looked for a while at two young women at the other end of the bar and then asked him casually, “Do you have a spare condom?” and he had balked.

Now, sitting at a white-covered table in Protea Asokoro, waiting for Edusco, the businessman who wanted to buy his land, he imagined Ifemelu next to him, and wondered what she would make of Abuja. She would dislike it, the soullessness of it, or perhaps not. She was not easy to predict. Once, at dinner in a restaurant in Victoria Island, somber waiters hovering around, she had seemed distant, her eyes on the wall behind him, and he had worried that she was upset about something. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I am thinking of how all the paintings in Lagos always look crooked, never hung straight,” she said. He laughed, and thought how, with her, he was as he had never been with another woman: amused, alert, alive. Later, as they left the restaurant, he had watched as she briskly sidestepped the puddles of water in the potholes by the gate and felt a desire to smooth all the roads in Lagos, for her.

His mind was overwrought: one minute he thought it was the right decision not to have come to Abuja with her, because he needed to think things through, and the next he was filled with self-reproach. He might have pushed her away. He had called her many times, sent texts asking if they could talk, but she had ignored him, which was perhaps for the better because he did not know what he would say if they did talk.

Edusco had arrived. A loud voice bellowing from the restaurant foyer as he spoke on the phone. Obinze did not know him well—they had done business only once before, introduced by a mutual friend—but Obinze admired men like him, men who did not know any Big Man, who had no connections, and had made their money in a way that did not defy the simple logic of capitalism. Edusco had only a primary-school education before he began to apprentice for traders; he had started off with one stall in Onitsha and now owned the second-largest transport company in the country. He walked into the restaurant, bold-stepped and big-bellied, speaking his terrible English loudly; it did not occur to him to doubt himself.