Americanah

SHE WAS reaching back to her past. She called Blaine to say hello, to tell him she had always thought he was too good, too pure, for her, and he was stilted over the phone, as though resentful of her call, but at the end he said, “I’m glad you called.” She called Curt and he sounded upbeat, thrilled to hear from her, and she imagined getting back together, being in a relationship free of depth and pain.

“Was it you, those large amounts of money I used to get for the blog?” she asked.

“No,” he said, and she wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not. “So you still blogging?”

“Yes.”

“About race?”

“No, just about life. Race doesn’t really work here. I feel like I got off the plane in Lagos and stopped being black.”

“I bet.”

She had forgotten how very American he sounded.

“It’s not been the same with anybody else,” he said. She liked hearing that. He called her late at night, Nigerian time, and they talked about what they used to do together. The memories seemed burnished now. He made vague references to visiting her in Lagos and she made vague sounds of assent.

One evening, while she was walking into Terra Kulture to see a play with Ranyinudo and Zemaye, she ran into Fred. They all sat in the restaurant afterwards, drinking smoothies.

“Nice guy,” Ranyinudo whispered to Ifemelu.

At first Fred talked, as before, about music and art, his spirit knotted up with the need to impress.

“I’d like to know what you’re like when you’re not performing,” Ifemelu said.

He laughed. “If you go out with me you’ll know.”

There was a silence, Ranyinudo and Zemaye looking at Ifemelu expectantly, and it amused her.

“I’ll go out with you,” she said.

He took her to a nightclub, and when she said she was bored by the too-loud music and the smoke and the barely clothed bodies of strangers too close to hers, he told her sheepishly that he, too, disliked nightclubs; he had assumed she liked them. They watched films together in her flat, and then in his house in Oniru, where arch paintings hung on his wall. It surprised her that they liked the same films. His cook, an elegant man from Cotonou, made a groundnut stew that she loved. Fred played the guitar for her, and sang, his voice husky, and told her how his dream was to be a lead singer in a folksy band. He was attractive, the kind of attractiveness that grew on you. She liked him. He reached out often to push his glasses up, a small push with his finger, and she thought this endearing. As they lay naked on her bed, all pleasant and all warm, she wished it were different. If only she could feel what she wanted to feel.

AND THEN, on a languorous Sunday evening, seven months since she had last seen him, there Obinze was, at the door of her flat. She stared at him.

“Ifem,” he said.

It was such a surprise to see him, his shaved-bald head and the beautiful gentleness of his face. His eyes were urgent, intense, and she could see the up-down chest movement of his heavy breathing. He was holding a long sheet of paper dense with writing. “I’ve written this for you. It’s what I would like to know if I were you. Where my mind has been. I’ve written everything.”

He was holding out the paper, his chest still heaving, and she stood there not reaching out for the paper.

“I know we could accept the things we can’t be for each other, and even turn it into the poetic tragedy of our lives. Or we could act. I want to act. I want this to happen. Kosi is a good woman and my marriage was a kind of floating-along contentment, but I should never have married her. I always knew that something was missing. I want to raise Buchi, I want to see her every day. But I’ve been pretending all these months and one day she’ll be old enough to know I’m pretending. I moved out of the house today. I’ll stay in my flat in Parkview for now and I hope to see Buchi every day if I can. I know it’s taken me too long and I know you’re moving on and I completely understand if you are ambivalent and need time.”

He paused, shifted. “Ifem, I’m chasing you. I’m going to chase you until you give this a chance.”

For a long time she stared at him. He was saying what she wanted to hear and yet she stared at him.

“Ceiling,” she said, finally. “Come in.”