“Was that my stomach or yours?” he asked, teasing.
“Of course it was yours.”
“Remember the first time we made love? You had just been standing on me. I loved you standing on me.”
“I can’t stand on you now. I’m too fat. You would die.”
“Stop it.”
Finally, he got up and pulled on his trousers, his movements slow and reluctant. “I can’t come tomorrow, Ifem. I have to take my daughter—”
She cut him short. “It’s okay.”
“I’m going to Abuja on Friday,” he said.
“Yes, you said.” She was trying to push away the sense of a coming abandonment; it would overwhelm her as soon as he left and she heard the click of the door closing.
“Come with me,” he said.
“What?”
“Come with me to Abuja. I just have two meetings and we can stay the weekend. It’ll be good for us to be in a different place, to talk. And you’ve never been to Abuja. I can book separate hotel rooms if you want me to. Say yes. Please.”
“Yes,” she said.
She had not permitted herself to do so earlier, but after he left, she looked at Kosi’s photographs on Facebook. Kosi’s beauty was startling, those cheekbones, that flawless skin, those perfect womanly curves. When she saw one photo taken at an unflattering angle, she examined it for a while and found in it a small and wicked pleasure.
SHE WAS at the hair salon when he sent her a text: I’m sorry Ifem but I think I should probably go alone to Abuja. I need some time to think things through. I love you. She stared at the text and, fingers shaking, she wrote him back a two-word text: Fucking coward. Then she turned to the hair braider. “You are going to blow-dry my hair with that brush? You must be joking. Can’t you people think?”
The hair braider looked puzzled. “Aunty, sorry o, but that is what I use before in your hair.”
By the time Ifemelu drove into her compound, Obinze’s Range Rover was parked in front of her flat. He followed her upstairs.
“Ifem, please, I want you to understand. I think it has been a little too fast, everything between us, and I want to take some time to put things in perspective.”
“A little too fast,” she repeated. “How unoriginal. Not like you at all.”
“You are the woman I love. Nothing can change that. But I feel this sense of responsibility about what I need to do.”
She flinched from him, the hoarseness of his voice, the nebulous and easy meaninglessness of his words. What did “responsibility about what I need to do” mean? Did it mean that he wanted to continue seeing her but had to stay married? Did it mean that he could no longer continue seeing her? He communicated clearly when he wanted to, but now here he was, hiding behind watery words.
“What are you saying?” she asked him. “What are you trying to tell me?”
When he remained silent, she said, “Go to hell.”
She walked into her bedroom and locked the door. From her bedroom window, she watched his Range Rover until it disappeared down the bend in the road.
CHAPTER 54
Abuja had far-flung horizons, wide roads, order; to come from Lagos was to be stunned here by sequence and space. The air smelled of power; here everyone sized everyone else up, wondering how much of a “somebody” each was. It smelled of money, easy money, easily exchanged money. It dripped, too, of sex. Obinze’s friend Chidi said he didn’t chase women in Abuja because he didn’t want to step on a minister’s or senator’s toes. Every attractive young woman here became mysteriously suspect. Abuja was more conservative than Lagos, Chidi said, because it was more Muslim than Lagos, and at parties women didn’t wear revealing clothing, yet you could buy and sell sex so much more easily here. It was in Abuja that Obinze had come close to cheating on Kosi, not with any of the flashy girls in colored contact lenses and tumbling hair weaves who endlessly propositioned him, but with a middle-aged woman in a caftan who sat next to him at the hotel bar, and said, “I know you are bored.” She looked hungry for recklessness, perhaps a repressed, frustrated wife who had broken free on this one night.
For a moment, lust, a quaking raw lust, overcame him, but he thought about how much more bored he would be afterwards, how keen to get her out of his hotel room, and it all seemed too much of an effort.
She would end up with one of the many men in Abuja who lived idle, oily lives in hotels and part-time homes, groveling and courting connected people so as to get a contract or to be paid for a contract. On Obinze’s last trip to Abuja, one such man, whom he hardly knew, had looked for a while at two young women at the other end of the bar and then asked him casually, “Do you have a spare condom?” and he had balked.
Now, sitting at a white-covered table in Protea Asokoro, waiting for Edusco, the businessman who wanted to buy his land, he imagined Ifemelu next to him, and wondered what she would make of Abuja. She would dislike it, the soullessness of it, or perhaps not. She was not easy to predict. Once, at dinner in a restaurant in Victoria Island, somber waiters hovering around, she had seemed distant, her eyes on the wall behind him, and he had worried that she was upset about something. “What are you thinking?” he asked.
“I am thinking of how all the paintings in Lagos always look crooked, never hung straight,” she said. He laughed, and thought how, with her, he was as he had never been with another woman: amused, alert, alive. Later, as they left the restaurant, he had watched as she briskly sidestepped the puddles of water in the potholes by the gate and felt a desire to smooth all the roads in Lagos, for her.
His mind was overwrought: one minute he thought it was the right decision not to have come to Abuja with her, because he needed to think things through, and the next he was filled with self-reproach. He might have pushed her away. He had called her many times, sent texts asking if they could talk, but she had ignored him, which was perhaps for the better because he did not know what he would say if they did talk.
Edusco had arrived. A loud voice bellowing from the restaurant foyer as he spoke on the phone. Obinze did not know him well—they had done business only once before, introduced by a mutual friend—but Obinze admired men like him, men who did not know any Big Man, who had no connections, and had made their money in a way that did not defy the simple logic of capitalism. Edusco had only a primary-school education before he began to apprentice for traders; he had started off with one stall in Onitsha and now owned the second-largest transport company in the country. He walked into the restaurant, bold-stepped and big-bellied, speaking his terrible English loudly; it did not occur to him to doubt himself.
Later, as they discussed the price of the land, Edusco said, “Look, my brother. You won’t sell it at that price, nobody will buy. Ife esika kita. The recession is biting everybody.”
“Bros, bring up your hand a little, this is land in Maitama we are talking about, not land in your village,” Obinze said.
“Your stomach is full. What else do you want? You see, this is the problem with you Igbo people. You don’t do brother-brother. That is why I like Yoruba people, they look out for one another. Do you know that the other day I went to the Inland Revenue office near my house and one man there, an Igbo man, I saw his name and spoke to him in Igbo and he did not even answer me! A Hausa man will speak Hausa to his fellow Hausa man. A Yoruba man will see a Yoruba person anywhere and speak Yoruba. But an Igbo man will speak English to an Igbo man. I am even surprised that you are speaking Igbo to me.”
“It’s true,” Obinze said. “It’s sad, it’s the legacy of being a defeated people. We lost the Biafran war and learned to be ashamed.”
“It is just selfishness!” Edusco said, uninterested in Obinze’s intellectualizing. “The Yoruba man is there helping his brother, but you Igbo people? I ga-asikwa. Look at you now quoting me this price.”
“Okay, Edusco, why don’t I give you the land for free? Let me go and bring the title and give it to you now.”
Edusco laughed. Edusco liked him, he could tell; he imagined Edusco talking about him in a gathering of other self-made Igbo men, men who were brash and striving, who juggled huge businesses and supported vast extended families. Obinze ma ife, he imagined Edusco saying. Obinze is not like some of these useless small boys with money. This one is not stupid.
Obinze looked at his almost-empty bottle of Gulder. It was strange how lost of luster everything was without Ifemelu; even the taste of his favorite beer was different. He should have brought her with him to Abuja. It was stupid to claim that he needed time to think things over when all he was doing was hiding from a truth he already knew. She had called him a coward, and there was indeed a cowardliness in his fear of disorder, of disrupting what he did not even want: his life with Kosi, that second skin that had never quite fit him snugly.
“Okay, Edusco,” Obinze said, suddenly feeling drained. “I am not going to eat the land if I don’t sell it.”
Edusco looked startled. “You mean you agree to my price?”
“Yes,” Obinze said.
After Edusco left, Obinze called Ifemelu over and over but she did not answer. Perhaps her ringer was switched off, and she was eating at her dining table, wearing that pink T-shirt she wore so often, with the small hole at the neck, and HEARTBREAKER CAFÉ written across the front; her nipples, when they got hard, would punctuate those words like inverted commas. Thinking of her pink T-shirt aroused him. Or perhaps she was reading in bed, her abada wrapper spread over her like a blanket, wearing plain black boyshorts and nothing else. All her underwear were plain black boyshorts; girly underwear amused her. Once, he had picked up those boyshorts from the floor where he had flung them after rolling them down her legs, and looked at the milky crust on the crotch, and she laughed and said, “Ah, you want to smell it? I’ve never understood that whole business of smelling underwear.” Or perhaps she was on her laptop, working on the blog. Or out with Ranyinudo. Or on the phone with Dike. Or perhaps with some man in her living room, telling him about Graham Greene. A queasiness roiled in him at the thought of her with anybody else. Of course she would not be with anyone else, not so soon. Still, there was that unpredictable stubbornness in her; she might do it to hurt him. When she told him, that first day, “I always saw the ceiling with other men,” he wondered how many there had been. He wanted to ask her, but he did not, because he feared she would tell him the truth and he feared he would forever be tormented by it. She knew, of course, that he loved her but he wondered if she knew how it consumed him, how each day was infected by her, affected by her; and how she wielded power over even his sleep. “Kimberly adores her husband, and her husband adores himself. She should leave him but she never will,” she said once, about the woman she had worked for in America, the woman with obi ocha. Ifemelu’s words had been light, free of shadow, and yet he heard in them the sting of other meanings.