Americanah

When she told him about her American life, he listened with a keenness close to desperation. He wanted to be a part of everything she had done, be familiar with every emotion she had felt. Once she had told him, “The thing about cross-cultural relationships is that you spend so much time explaining. My ex-boyfriends and I spent a lot of time explaining. I sometimes wondered whether we would even have anything at all to say to each other if we were from the same place,” and it pleased him to hear that, because it gave his relationship with her a depth, a lack of trifling novelty. They were from the same place and they still had a lot to say to each other.

They were talking about American politics once when she said, “I like America. It’s really the only place else where I could live apart from here. But one day a bunch of Blaine’s friends and I were talking about kids and I realized that if I ever have children, I don’t want them to have American childhoods. I don’t want them to say ‘Hi’ to adults, I want them to say ‘Good morning’ and ‘Good afternoon.’ I don’t want them to mumble ‘Good’ when somebody says ‘How are you?’ to them. Or to raise five fingers when asked how old they are. I want them to say ‘I’m fine, thank you’ and ‘I’m five years old.’ I don’t want a child who feeds on praise and expects a star for effort and talks back to adults in the name of self-expression. Is that terribly conservative? Blaine’s friends said it was and for them, ‘conservative’ is the worst insult you can get.”

He had laughed, wishing he had been there with the “bunch of friends,” and he wanted that imaginary child to be his, that conservative child with good manners. He told her, “The child will turn eighteen and paint her hair purple,” and she said, “Yes, but by then I would have kicked her out of the house.”

At the Abuja airport on his way back to Lagos, he thought of going to the international wing instead, buying a ticket to somewhere improbable, like Malabo. Then he felt a passing self-disgust because he would not, of course, do it; he would instead do what he was expected to do. He was boarding his Lagos flight when Kosi called.

“Is the flight on time? Remember we are taking Nigel out for his birthday,” she said.

“Of course I remember.”

A pause from her end. He had snapped.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have a funny headache.”

“Darling, ndo. I know you’re tired,” she said. “See you soon.”

He hung up and thought about the day their baby, slippery, curly-haired Buchi, was born at the Woodlands Hospital in Houston, how Kosi had turned to him while he was still fiddling with his latex gloves and said, with something like apology, “Darling, we’ll have a boy next time.” He had recoiled. He realized then that she did not know him. She did not know him at all. She did not know he was indifferent about the gender of their child. And he felt a gentle contempt towards her, for wanting a boy because they were supposed to want a boy, and for being able to say, fresh from birthing their first child, those words “we’ll have a boy next time.” 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. But he had never tried, because he knew that the questions he asked of life were entirely different from hers.

He knew this from the beginning, had sensed it in their first conversation after a friend introduced them at a wedding. She was wearing a satin bridesmaid’s dress in fuchsia, 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.” It surprised him, 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. The minister’s wife is a homely woman of virtue. 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, so architectural, lifting when she smiled. He was also newly rich and newly disoriented: one week he was broke and squatting in his cousin’s flat and the next he had millions of naira in his bank account. Kosi became a touchstone of realness. If he could be with her, so extraordinarily beautiful and yet so ordinary, predictable and domestic and dedicated, then perhaps his life would start to seem believably his. She moved into his house from the flat she shared with a friend 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 she casually suggested trips abroad as though he had always been able to travel, 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. She did not share his interests—she was a literal person who did not read, she was content rather than curious about the world—but he felt grateful to her, fortunate to be with her. Then 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. Still, he married her. They were living together anyway, and he was not unhappy, and he imagined that she would, with time, gain a certain heft. She had not, after four 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.

IT AMUSED OBINZE, that Nigel had decided to move to Nigeria, instead of simply visiting whenever Obinze needed to present his white General Manager. The money was good, Nigel could now live the kind of life in Essex that he would never have imagined before, but he wanted to live in Lagos, at least for a while. And so Obinze’s gleeful waiting commenced, for Nigel to weary of pepper soup and nightclubs and drinking at the shacks in Kuramo Beach. But Nigel was staying put, in his flat in Ikoyi, with a live-in house help and his dog. He no longer said, “Lagos has so much flavor,” and he complained more about the traffic and he had finally stopped moping about his last girlfriend, a girl from Benue with a pretty face and dissembling manner, who had left him for a wealthy Lebanese businessman.

“The bloke’s completely bald,” Nigel had told Obinze.

“The problem with you, my friend, is you love too easily and too much. Anybody could see the girl was a fake, looking for the next bigger thing,” Obinze told him.

“Don’t say ‘bigger thing’ like that, mate!” Nigel said.

Now he had met Ulrike, a lean, angular-faced woman with the body of a young man, who worked at an embassy and seemed determined to sulk her way through her Nigerian posting. At dinner, she wiped her cutlery with the napkin before she began eating.

“You don’t do that in your country, do you?” Obinze asked coldly. Nigel darted a startled glance at him.

“Actually I do,” Ulrike said, squarely meeting his gaze.

Kosi patted his thigh under the table, as though to calm him down, which irritated him. Nigel, too, was irritating him, suddenly talking about the town houses Obinze was planning to build, how exciting the new architect’s design was. A timid attempt to end Obinze’s conversation with Ulrike.

“Fantastic plan inside, made me think of some of those pictures of fancy lofts in New York,” Nigel said.

“Nigel, I’m not using that plan. An open kitchen plan will never work for Nigerians and we are targeting Nigerians because we are selling, not renting. Open kitchen plans are for expats and expats don’t buy property here.” He had already told Nigel many times that Nigerian cooking was not cosmetic, with all that pounding. It was sweaty and spicy and Nigerians preferred to present the final product, not the process.

“No more work talk!” Kosi said brightly. “Ulrike, have you tried any Nigerian food?”

Obinze got up abruptly and went into the bathroom. He called Ifemelu and felt himself getting enraged when she still did not pick up. He blamed her. He blamed her for making him a person who was not entirely in control of what he was feeling.

Nigel came into the bathroom. “What’s wrong, mate?” Nigel’s cheeks were bright red, as they always were when he drank. Obinze stood by the sink holding his phone, that drained lassitude spreading over him again. He wanted to tell Nigel, Nigel was perhaps the only friend he fully trusted, but Nigel fancied Kosi. “She’s all woman, mate,” Nigel had said to him once, and he saw in Nigel’s eyes the tender and crushed longing of a man for that which was forever unattainable. Nigel would listen to him, but Nigel would not understand.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have been rude to Ulrike,” Obinze said. “I’m just tired. I think I’m coming down with malaria.”

That night, Kosi sidled close to him, in offering. It was not a statement of desire, her caressing his chest and reaching down to take his penis in her hand, but a votive offering. A few months ago, she had said she wanted to start seriously “trying for our son.” She did not say “trying for our second child,” she said “trying for our son,” and it was the kind of thing she learned in her church. There is power in the spoken word. Claim your miracle. He remembered how, months into trying to get pregnant the first time, she began to say with sulky righteousness, “All my friends who lived very rough lives are pregnant.”