Americanah

“Your blog already has such a following,” he said.

“I have big plans for it. I’d like to travel through Nigeria and post dispatches from each state, with pictures and human stories, but I have to do things slowly first, establish it, make some money from advertising.”

“You need investors.”

“I don’t want your money,” she said, a little sharply, keeping her eyes levelly on the sunken roof of the abandoned house. She was irritated by his comment about an intelligent person because it was, it had to be, about his wife, and she wanted to ask why he was telling her that. Why had he married a woman who was not intelligent only to turn around and tell her that his wife was not intelligent?

“Look at the peacock, Ifem,” he said, gently, as though he sensed her irritation.

They watched the peacock walk out of the shadow of a tree, then its lugubrious flight up to its favorite perch on the roof, where it stood and surveyed the decayed kingdom below.

“How many are there?” he asked.

“One male and two females. I’ve been hoping to see the male do its mating dance but I never have. They wake me up in the morning with their cries. Have you heard them? Almost like a child that doesn’t want to do something.”

The peacock’s slender neck moved this way and that, and then, as though it had heard her, it cawed, its beak parted wide, the sounds pouring out of its throat.

“You were right about the sound,” he said, moving closer to her. “Something of a child about it. The compound reminds me of a property I have in Enugu. An old house. It was built before the war, and I bought it to tear it down, but then I decided to keep it. It’s very gracious and restful, big verandahs and old frangipani trees in the back. I’m redoing the interior completely, so it will be very modern inside, but the outside has its old look. Don’t laugh, but when I saw it, it reminded me of poetry.”

There was a boyishness in the way he said “Don’t laugh” that made her smile at him, half making fun of him, half letting him know she liked the idea of a house that had reminded him of poetry.

“I imagine one day when I run away from it all, I’ll go and live there,” he said.

“People really do become eccentric when they become rich.”

“Or maybe we all have eccentricity in us, we just don’t have the money to show it? I’d love to take you to see the house.”

She murmured something, a vague acquiescence.

His phone had been ringing for a while, an endless, dull buzzing in his pocket. Finally he brought it out, glanced at it, and said, “Sorry, I have to take this.” She nodded and went inside, wondering if it was his wife.

From the living room, she heard snatches of his voice, raised, lowered, and then raised again, speaking Igbo, and when he came inside, there was a tightening in his jaw.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

“It’s a boy from my hometown. I pay his school fees but he now has a mad sense of entitlement and this morning he sent me a text telling me he needs a cell phone and could I send it to him by Friday. A fifteen-year-old boy. The gall of it. And then he starts calling me. So I’ve just told him off and I’ve told him his scholarship is off, too, just to scare some sense into his head.”

“Is he related to you?”

“No.”

She waited, expecting more.

“Ifem, I do what rich people are supposed to do. I pay school fees for a hundred students in my village and my mum’s village.” He spoke with an awkward indifference; this was not a subject that he cared to talk about. He was standing by her bookshelf. “What a beautiful living room.”

“Thank you.”

“You shipped all your books back?”

“Most of them.”

“Ah. Derek Walcott.”

“I love him. I finally get some poetry.”

“I see Graham Greene.”

“I started reading him because of your mother. I love The Heart of the Matter.”

“I tried reading it after she died. I wanted to love it. I thought maybe if I could just love it …” He touched the book, his voice trailing away.

His wistfulness moved her. “It’s real literature, the kind of human story people will read in two hundred years,” she said. “You sound just like my mother,” he said.

He felt familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Through the parted curtains, a crescent of light fell across the living room. They were standing by the bookshelf and she was telling him about the first time she finally read The Heart of the Matter, and he was listening, in that intense manner of his, as though swallowing her words like a drink. They were standing by the bookshelf and laughing about how often his mother had tried to get him to read the book. And then they were standing by the bookshelf and kissing. A gentle kiss at first, lips pressed to lips, then their tongues were touching and she felt boneless against him. He pulled away first.

“I don’t have condoms,” she said, brazen, deliberately brazen.

“I didn’t know we needed condoms to have lunch.”

She hit him playfully. Her entire body was invaded by millions of uncertainties. She did not want to look at his face. “I have a girl who cleans and cooks so I have a lot of stew in my freezer and jollof rice in my fridge. We can have lunch here. Would you like something to drink?” She turned towards the kitchen.

“What happened in America?” he asked. “Why did you just cut off contact?”

Ifemelu kept walking to the kitchen.

“Why did you just cut off contact?” he repeated quietly. “Please tell me what happened.”

Before she sat opposite him at her small dining table and told him about the corrupt-eyed tennis coach in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, she poured them both some mango juice from a carton. She told him small details about the man’s office that were still fresh in her mind, the stacks of sports magazines, the smell of damp, but when she got to the part where he took her to his room, she said, simply, “I took off my clothes and did what he asked me to do. I couldn’t believe that I got wet. I hated him. I hated myself. I really hated myself. I felt like I had, I don’t know, betrayed myself.” She paused. “And you.”

For many long minutes, he said nothing, his eyes downcast, as though absorbing the story.

“I don’t really think about it much,” she added. “I remember it, but I don’t dwell on it, I don’t let myself dwell on it. It’s so strange now to actually talk about it. It seems a stupid reason to throw away what we had, but that’s why, and as more time passed, I just didn’t know how to go about fixing it.”

He was still silent. She stared at the framed caricature of Dike that hung on her wall, Dike’s ears comically pointed, and wondered what Obinze was feeling.

Finally, he said, “I can’t imagine how bad you must have felt, and how alone. You should have told me. I so wish you had told me.”

She heard his words like a melody and she felt herself breathing unevenly, gulping at the air. She would not cry, it was ridiculous to cry after so long, but her eyes were filling with tears and there was a boulder in her chest and a stinging in her throat. The tears felt itchy. She made no sound. He took her hand in his, both clasped on the table, and between them silence grew, an ancient silence that they both knew. She was inside this silence and she was safe.

CHAPTER 52

Let’s go and play table tennis. I belong to this small private club in Victoria Island,” he said.

“I haven’t played in ages.”

She remembered how she had always wanted to beat him, even though he was the school champion, and how he would tell her, teasingly, “Try more strategy and less force. Passion never wins any game, never mind what they say.” He said something similar now: “Excuses don’t win a game. You should try strategy.”

He had driven himself. In the car, he turned the engine on, and the music came on too. Bracket’s “Yori Yori.”

“Oh, I love this song,” she said.

He increased the volume and they sang along; there was an exuberance to the song, its rhythmic joyfulness, so free of artifice, that filled the air with lightness.

“Ahn-ahn! How long have you been back and you can already sing this so well?” he asked.

“First thing I did was brush up on all the contemporary music. It’s so exciting, all the new music.”

“It is. Now clubs play Nigerian music.”

She would remember this moment, sitting beside Obinze in his Range Rover, stalled in traffic, listening to “Yori Yori”—Your love dey make my heart do yori yori. Nobody can love you the way I do—beside them a shiny Honda, the latest model, and in front of them an ancient Datsun that looked a hundred years old.

After a few games of table tennis, all of which he won, all the time playfully taunting her, they had lunch in the small restaurant, where they were alone except for a woman reading newspapers at the bar. The manager, a round man who was almost bursting out of his ill-fitting black jacket, came over to their table often to say, “I hope everything is fine, sah. It is very good to see you again, sah. How is work, sah.”

Ifemelu leaned in and asked Obinze, “Is there a point at which you gag?”