And so it was the natural order of things, that the gods should match Obinze and Ginika. Kayode was throwing a hasty party in their guest quarters while his parents were away in London. He told Ginika, “I’m going to introduce you to my guy Zed at the party.”
“He’s not bad,” Ginika said, smiling.
“I hope he did not get his mother’s fighting genes o,” Ifemelu teased. It was nice to see Ginika interested in a boy; almost all the Big Guys in school had tried with her and none had lasted long; Obinze seemed quiet, a good match.
Ifemelu and Ginika arrived together, the party still at its dawn, the dance floor bare, boys running around with cassette tapes, shyness and awkwardness still undissolved. Each time Ifemelu came to Kayode’s house, she imagined what it was like to live here, in Ikoyi, in a gracious and graveled compound, with servants who wore white.
“See Kayode with the new guy,” Ifemelu said.
“I don’t want to look,” Ginika said. “Are they coming?”
“Yes.”
“My shoes are so tight.”
“You can dance in tight shoes,” Ifemelu said.
The boys were before them. Obinze looked overdressed, in a thick corduroy jacket, while Kayode wore a T-shirt and jeans.
“Hey, babes!” Kayode said. He was tall and rangy, with the easy manner of the entitled. “Ginika, meet my friend Obinze. Zed, this is Ginika, the queen God made for you if you are ready to work for it!” He was smirking, already a little drunk, the golden boy making a golden match.
“Hi,” Obinze said to Ginika.
“This is Ifemelu,” Kayode said. “Otherwise known as Ifemsco. She’s Ginika’s right-hand man. If you misbehave, she will flog you.”
They all laughed on cue.
“Hi,” Obinze said. His eyes met Ifemelu’s and held, and lingered.
Kayode was making small talk, telling Obinze that Ginika’s parents were also university professors. “So both of you are book people,” Kayode said. Obinze should have taken over and begun talking to Ginika, and Kayode would have left, and Ifemelu would have followed, and the will of the gods would have been fulfilled. But Obinze said little, and Kayode was left to carry the conversation, his voice getting boisterous, and from time to time he glanced at Obinze, as though to urge him on. Ifemelu was not sure when something happened, but in those moments, as Kayode talked, something strange happened. A quickening inside her, a dawning. She realized, quite suddenly, that she wanted to breathe the same air as Obinze. She became, also, acutely aware of the present, the now, Toni Braxton’s voice from the cassette player, be it fast or slow, it doesn’t let go, or shake me, the smell of Kayode’s father’s brandy, which had been sneaked out of the main house, and the tight white shirt that chafed at her armpits. Aunty Uju had made her tie it, in a loose bow, at her navel and she wondered now if it was truly stylish or if she looked silly.
The music stopped abruptly. Kayode said, “I’m coming,” and left to find out what was wrong, and in the new silence, Ginika fiddled with the metal bangle that encircled her wrist.
Obinze’s eyes met Ifemelu’s again.
“Aren’t you hot in that jacket?” Ifemelu asked. The question came out before she could restrain herself, so used was she to sharpening her words, to watching for terror in the eyes of boys. But he was smiling. He looked amused. He was not afraid of her.
“Very hot,” he said. “But I’m a country bumpkin and this is my first city party so you have to forgive me.” Slowly, he took his jacket off, green and padded at the elbows, under which he wore a long-sleeved shirt. “Now I’ll have to carry a jacket around with me.”
“I can hold it for you,” Ginika offered. “And don’t mind Ifem, the jacket is fine.”
“Thanks, but don’t worry. I should hold it, as punishment for wearing it in the first place.” He looked at Ifemelu, eyes twinkling.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Ifemelu said. “It’s just that this room is so hot and that jacket looks heavy.”
“I like your voice,” he said, almost cutting her short.
And she, who was never at a loss, croaked, “My voice?”
“Yes.”
The music had begun. “Let’s dance?” he asked.
She nodded.
He took her hand and then smiled at Ginika, as though to a nice chaperone whose job was now done. Ifemelu thought Mills and Boon romances were silly, she and her friends sometimes enacted the stories, Ifemelu or Ranyinudo would play the man and Ginika or Priye would play the woman—the man would grab the woman, the woman would fight weakly, then collapse against him with shrill moans—and they would all burst out laughing. But in the filling-up dance floor of Kayode’s party, she was jolted by a small truth in those romances. It was indeed true that because of a male, your stomach could tighten up and refuse to unknot itself, your body’s joints could unhinge, your limbs fail to move to music, and all effortless things suddenly become leaden. As she moved stiffly, she saw Ginika in her side vision, watching them, her expression puzzled, mouth slightly slack, as though she did not quite believe what had happened.
“You actually said ‘country bumpkin,’ ” Ifemelu said, her voice high above the music.
“What?”
“Nobody says ‘country bumpkin.’ It’s the kind of thing you read in a book.”
“You have to tell me what books you read,” he said.
He was teasing her, and she did not quite get the joke, but she laughed anyway. Later, she wished that she remembered every word they said to each other as they danced. She remembered, instead, feeling adrift. When the lights were turned off, and the blues dancing started, she wanted to be in his arms in a dark corner, but he said, “Let’s go outside and talk.”
They sat on cement blocks behind the guesthouse, next to what looked like the gateman’s bathroom, a narrow stall which, when the wind blew, brought a stale smell. They talked and talked, hungry to know each other. He told her that his father had died when he was seven, and how clearly he remembered his father teaching him to ride a tricycle on a tree-lined street near their campus home, but sometimes he would discover, in panic, that he could not remember his father’s face and a sense of betrayal would overwhelm him and he would hurry to examine the framed photo on their living room wall.
“Your mother never wanted to remarry?”
“Even if she wanted to, I don’t think she would, because of me. I want her to be happy, but I don’t want her to remarry.”
“I would feel the same way. Did she really fight with another professor?”
“So you heard that story.”
“They said it’s why she had to leave Nsukka University.”
“No, she didn’t fight. She was on a committee and they discovered that this professor had misused funds and my mother accused him publicly and he got angry and slapped her and said he could not take a woman talking to him like that. So my mother got up and locked the door of the conference room and put the key in her bra. She told him she could not slap him back because he was stronger than her, but he would have to apologize to her publicly, in front of all the people who had seen him slap her. So he did. But she knew he didn’t mean it. She said he did it in a kind of ‘okay sorry if that’s what you want to hear and just bring out the key’ way. She came home that day really angry, and she kept talking about how things had changed and what did it mean that now somebody could just slap another person. She wrote circulars and articles about it, and the student union got involved. People were saying, Oh, why did he slap her when she’s a widow, and that annoyed her even more. She said she should not have been slapped because she is a full human being, not because she doesn’t have a husband to speak for her. So some of her female students went and printed Full Human Being on T-shirts. I guess it made her well-known. She’s usually very quiet and doesn’t have many friends.”
“Is that why she came to Lagos?”
“No. She’s been scheduled to do this sabbatical for a while. I remember the first time she told me we would go away for her two-year sabbatical, and I was excited because I thought it would be in America, one of my friend’s dads had just gone to America, and then she said it was Lagos, and I asked her what was the point? We might as well just stay in Nsukka.”
Ifemelu laughed. “But at least you can still get on a plane to come to Lagos.”
“Yes, but we came by road,” Obinze said, laughing. “But now I’m happy it was Lagos or I would not have met you.”
“Or met Ginika,” she teased.
“Stop it.”
“Your guys will kill you. You’re supposed to be chasing her.”
“I’m chasing you.”
She would always remember this moment, those words. I’m chasing you.
“I saw you in school some time ago. I even asked Kay about you,” he said.
“Are you serious?”
“I saw you holding a James Hadley Chase, near the lab. And I said, Ah, correct, there is hope. She reads.”
“I think I’ve read them all.”
“Me too. What’s your favorite?”