The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (3 page)

G
ERALDINE
B
ROOKS

FROM
Granta

W
HEN OBINZE FIRST
saw her e-mail, he was sitting in the back of his Land Rover in still Lagos traffic, his jacket slung over the front seat, a rusty-haired child beggar glued to his window, a hawker pressing colorful CDs against the other window, the radio turned on low to the pidgin English news on Wazobia FM, and the gray gloom of imminent rain all around. He stared at his BlackBerry, his body suddenly rigid. First he skimmed the e-mail, dampened that it was not longer.
Ceiling
, kedu?
I saw Amaka yesterday in New York and she said you were doing well with work, wife—and a child! Proud Papa. Congratulations. I'm still teaching and doing some research, but seriously thinking of moving back to Nigeria soon. Let's keep in touch ? Ifemelu.

He read it again slowly and felt the urge to smooth something, his trousers, his shaved-bald head. She had called him Ceiling. In the last e-mail from her, sent just before he got married four years ago, she had called him Obinze, wished him happiness in breezy sentences, and mentioned the black American she was living with. A gracious e-mail. He had hated it. He had hated it so much that he googled the black American, a lecturer at Yale, and found it infuriating that she lived with a man who referred on his blog to friends as "cats," but it was the photo of the black American, oozing intellectual cool in distressed jeans and black-framed eyeglasses, that had tipped Obinze over, made him send her a cold reply.
Thank you for the good wishes, I have never been happier in my life
, he'd written. It was complete bullshit, stupid posturing, and she had to recognize this; nobody knew him as well as she did. He hoped she would write something mocking back—so unlike her, not to have been even vaguely tart—but she did not write at all, and when he e-mailed her again, after his honeymoon in Morocco, to say he wanted to keep in touch and wanted to talk sometime, she did not reply.

The traffic was moving. A light rain was falling. The child beggar ran along, his doe-eyed expression more theatrical, his motions frantic: bringing his hand to his mouth, over and over, fingertips pursed together. Obinze rolled down the window and held out a hundred-naira note. His driver, Gabriel, watched with grave disapproval from the rearview mirror.

"God bless you,
oga.
" the child beggar said.

"Don't be giving money to these beggars, sir," Gabriel said. "They are all rich. They are using begging to make big money in this Lagos. I heard about one that built a block of six flats in Ikeja!"

"So why are you working as a driver instead of a beggar, Gabriel?" Obinze asked and laughed, a little too heartily. He wanted to tell Gabriel that his girlfriend from university had just e-mailed him, actually his girlfriend from university
and
secondary school. The first time she let him take off her bra, she lay on her back moaning softly, her hands on his head, and afterward she said, "My eyes were open but I did not see the ceiling. This never happened before." She was seventeen and he was eighteen and other girls would have pretended that they had never let another boy touch them, but not her, never her. There was a vivid honesty about her, which he had found so disconcerting and then so irresistible.
Longing for ceiling, can't wait for my period to end
, she once wrote on the back of his notebook during a lecture. Then, later, she began to call him Ceiling, in a playful way, in a suggestive way—but when they fought or when she retreated into moodiness, she called him Obinze. "Why do you call him Ceiling anyway?" his friend Chidi once asked her, on one of those languorous days after first-semester exams. She had joined a group of his classmates sitting around a filthy plastic table in a beer parlor outside campus. She drank from her bottle of Maltina, swallowed, glanced at him, and said, "Because he is so tall his head touches the ceiling, can't you see?" Her deliberate slowness, the small smile that stretched her lips, made it clear that she wanted them to know that this was not why she called him Ceiling. And he was not tall. She kicked him under the table and he kicked her back, watching his laughing friends; they were all a little afraid of her and a little in love with her. Did she see the ceiling when the black American touched her? Had she used ceiling with other men? It upset him now to think that she might have. His phone rang and for a hopeful, confused moment he thought it was Ifemelu calling from America.

"Darling,
kedu ebe I no?
" His wife, Kosi, always began her calls to him with those words: where are you? He never asked where she was when he called her, but she would tell him anyway: I'm just getting to the salon. I'm on Third Mainland Bridge. It was as if she needed the reassurance of their concrete physicality when they were not together. She had a high, girlish voice. They were supposed to be at Chief's house for the party at 7:30
P.M.
and it was already past 6:00.

He told her he was in traffic. "But it's moving, and we've just turned into Ozumba Mbadiwe. I'm coming."

On Lekki Expressway the traffic moved swiftly in the waning rain, and soon Gabriel was sounding the horn in front of the high black gates of his home. Mohammed, the gateman, wiry in his dirty white kaftan, flung open the gates and raised a hand in greeting. Obinze looked at the yellow colonnaded house. Inside was his furniture, imported from Italy, his wife, his two-year-old daughter, Buchi, the nanny, Christiana, his wife's sister, Chioma, who was on a forced holiday because university lecturers were on strike yet again, and the new housegirl, Marie, who had been brought from Benin Republic after his wife decided that Nigerian housegirls were unsuitable. There would be the smell of cooking, the television downstairs would be showing a film on the Africa Magic channel, and pervading it all, the still air of well-being. He climbed out of the car. His gait was stiff, his legs difficult to lift. He had begun, in the past months, to feel bloated from all he had acquired—the family, the house, the other properties in Ikoyi and Abuja, the cars, the bank accounts in Dubai and London—and he would be overcome by the urge to prick everything with a pin, to deflate it all, to be free. He was no longer sure, he had in fact never been sure, whether he liked his life because he really did or whether he liked it because he was supposed to.

"Darling," Kosi said, opening the door before he got to it. Her dress was cinched at the waist and made her figure look very hour-glassy.

"Daddy-daddy!" Buchi said.

He swung her up and then hugged his wife, carefully avoiding her lips, painted pink and lined in a darker pink. "You look beautiful, babe," he said. "
Asa! Ugo!
"

She laughed. The same way she laughed, with an open, accepting enjoyment, when people asked her, "Is your mother white? Are you a half-caste?" because she was so fair-skinned. It had always discomfited him, the pleasure she took in being mistaken for mixed-race.

"Will you bathe or just change? I brought out your new blue kaftan. I knew you'd want to wear traditional," she said, following him upstairs. "Do you want to eat before we go? You know Chief will have nice food."

"I'll just change and we can go," he said.

He was tired. It was not a physical fatigue—he used his treadmill regularly and felt better than he had in years—but a draining lassitude that numbed the margins of his mind. He went out every day, he made money, he came home, he played with his daughter, he watched television, he ate, he read books, he slept with his wife. He did things because he did them.

Chief's party would bore him, as usual, but he went because he went to all of Chief's parties and perhaps because Kosi liked going. She enjoyed being surrounded by glittery people, hugging women she barely knew, calling the older ones Ma with exaggerated respect, soaking up their compliments, dispensing hers, basking in being so beautiful but flattening her personality so that her beauty was nonthreatening. He had always been struck by this, how important it was to her to be a wholesomely agreeable person, to have no sharp angles sticking out. On Sundays, she would invite his relatives for pounded yam and
onugbu
soup and then watch over to make sure everyone was suitably overfed.
Uncle, you must eat oh! There is more meat in the kitchen! Let me bring you another Guinness!
When they visited his mother's house in Enugu, she always flew up to help with serving the food, and when his mother made to clean up afterward, she would get up, offended, and say, "Mummy, how can I be here and you will be cleaning?" She ended every sentence she spoke to his uncles with "sir." She put ribbons in the hair of his cousins' daughters. There was something immodest about her modesty: it announced itself.

At the party, he watched her, gold shimmer on her eyelids, as she greeted Mrs. Akin-Cole, curtsying and smiling, and he thought about the day their baby, slippery, curly-haired Buchi, was born at the Portland Hospital in London, how she had turned to him while he was still fiddling with his latex gloves and said, with something like apology, "We'll have a boy next time." He had recoiled. What he felt for her then was a gentle contempt, for not knowing that he was indifferent about the gender of their child, for assuming that he would want a boy since most men wanted a boy. Perhaps he should have talked more with her, about the baby they were expecting and about everything else, because although they exchanged pleasant sounds and were good friends and shared comfortable silences, they did not really talk. Her worldview was a set of conventional options that she mulled over while he did not even consider any of those options; the questions he asked of life were entirely different from hers. Of course he knew this from the beginning, had sensed it in their first conversation after his friend Chidi introduced them at a wedding. She was wearing a lime-green bridesmaid's dress in satin, cut low to show a cleavage he could not stop looking at, and somebody was making a speech, describing the bride as "a woman of virtue," and Kosi nodded eagerly and whispered to him, "She is a true woman of virtue." Even then he had felt gentle contempt that she could use the word
virtue
without the slightest irony, as was done in the badly written articles in the women's section of the weekend newspapers. Still, he had wanted her, chased her with a lavish single-mindedness. He had never seen a woman with such a perfect incline to her cheekbones, that made her entire face seem so alive in an architectural way, lifting when she smiled, and he was newly disoriented from his quick wealth: one week he was squatting in his cousin's flat and sleeping on a thin mattress on the floor and the next he owned a house and two cars. He felt as if his life were no longer his. It was Kosi who made it start to seem believable. She moved into his new house from her hostel at the University of Lagos and arranged her perfume bottles on his dresser, citrusy scents that he came to associate with home, and she sat in the BMW beside him as though it had always been his car, and when they showered together, she scrubbed him with a rough sponge, even between his toes, until he felt reborn. Until he owned his new life. A year passed before she told him her relatives were asking what his intentions were. "They just keep asking," she said and stressed the
they
to exclude herself from the marriage clamor. He recognized, and disliked, her manipulation. (The same way he felt when, after months of trying to get pregnant, she began to say with sulky righteousness, "All my friends who lived very rough lives are pregnant.") Still, he married her. Perhaps he was already on autopilot then. He felt an obligation to do so, he was not unhappy, and he imagined that she would, with time, gain a certain heft. She had not, after almost five years, except physically, in a way that he thought made her look even more beautiful, fresher, with fuller hips and breasts, like a well-watered houseplant.

Watching her now as she talked to Mrs. Akin-Cole, he felt guilty about his thoughts. She was such a devoted woman, such a well-meaning, devoted woman. He reached out and held her hand. She often told him that her friends envied her, and said he behaved like a foreign husband, the way he took her to all his social events, made her breakfast on Sundays, stayed home every night.

Mrs. Akin-Cole was talking about sending Buchi to the French school. "They are very good, very rigorous. Of course, they teach in French, but it can only be good for the child to learn another civilized language, since she already learns English at home."

"Okay, Auntie. I'll go there and talk to them," Kosi said. "I know I have to start early."

"The French school is not bad, but I prefer Meadowland. They teach the complete British curriculum," the other woman, whose name Obinze had forgotten but who had made a lot of money during General Abacha's military government, said. The story was that she had been a pimp of some sort, providing women for army officers and getting inflated supply contracts in exchange.

"Oh, yes. Meadowland. I'll look at that one too," Kosi said.

"Why?" Obinze asked. "Didn't we all go to primary schools that taught the Nigerian curriculum?"

The women looked at him.

Finally Mrs. Akin-Cole said, "But things have changed, my dear Obinze," and shook her head pitifully, as though he were an adolescent.

"I agree," Kosi said, and Obinze wanted to ask what the fuck it was she agreed with anyway.

"If you decide to disadvantage your child by sending her to one of these schools with half-baked Nigerian teachers..." Mrs. Akin-Cole shrugged. She spoke with that unplaceable foreign accent, British and American and something else all at once, of the wealthy Nigerian who did not want the world to forget how worldly she was, how her British Airways executive card was choking with miles.

"One of my friends sent her child to St. Mary's, and do you know, they have only five computers in the whole school. Only five!" the other woman said.

"We'll go to the British school and French school," Kosi said and looked at him with a plea. He shrugged. He would ordinarily not have said anything at all to Mrs. Akin-Cole, but today he wanted to pluck the sneer from her face and crumple it and hurl it back. But Chief was upon them.