“No, The Zed is not quiet because he is a gentleman,” Charlie Bombay said, in his slow manner, his thick Igbo accent adding extra syllables to his words, halfway through a bottle of cognac that he had put territorially in front of himself. “It is because he doesn’t want anybody to know how much money he has!”
They laughed. Obinze had always imagined that Charlie Bombay was a wife beater. There was no reason for him to; he knew nothing of Charlie Bombay’s personal life, had never even seen his wife. Still, every time he saw Charlie Bombay, he imagined him beating his wife with a thick leather belt. He seemed full of violence, this swaggering, powerful man, this godfather who had paid for his state governor’s campaign and now had a monopoly on almost every business in that state.
“Don’t mind The Zed, he thinks we don’t know that he owns half the land in Lekki,” Eze said.
Obinze produced an obligatory chuckle. He brought out his phone and quickly sent Ifemelu a text: Please talk to me.
“We haven’t met, I’m Dapo,” the man sitting on the other side of Okwudiba said, reaching across to shake Obinze’s hand enthusiastically, as though Obinze had just sprung into existence. Obinze enclosed his hand in a halfhearted shake. Charlie Bombay had mentioned his wealth, and suddenly he was interesting to Dapo.
“Are you into oil too?” Dapo asked.
“No,” Obinze said shortly. He had heard snatches of Dapo’s conversation earlier, his work in oil consulting, his children in London. Dapo was probably one of those who installed their wife and children in England and then came back to Nigeria to chase money.
“I was just saying that the Nigerians who keep complaining about the oil companies don’t understand that this economy will collapse without them,” Dapo said.
“You must be very confused if you think the oil companies are doing us a favor,” Obinze said. Okwudiba gave him an astonished look; the coldness of his tone was out of character. “The Nigerian government basically finances the oil industry with cash calls, and the big oils are planning to withdraw from onshore operations anyway. They want to leave that to the Chinese and focus on offshore operations only. It’s like a parallel economy; they keep offshore, only invest in high-tech equipment, pump up oil from thousands of kilometers deep. No local crew. Oil workers flown in from Houston and Scotland. So, no, they are not doing us a favor.”
“Yes!” Mekkus said. “And they are all common riffraff. All those underwater plumbers and deep-sea divers and people who know how to repair maintenance robots underwater. Common riffraff, all of them. You see them in the British Airways lounge. They have been on the rig for one month with no alcohol and by the time they get to the airport they are already stinking drunk and they make fools of themselves on the flight. My cousin used to be a flight attendant and she said that it got to a point that the airlines had to make these men sign agreements about drinking, otherwise they wouldn’t let them fly.”
“But The Zed doesn’t fly British Airways, so he wouldn’t know,” Ahmed said. He had once laughed at Obinze’s refusal to fly British Airways, because it was, after all, what the big boys flew.
“When I was a regular man in economy, British Airways treated me like shit from a bad diarrhea,” Obinze said.
The men laughed. Obinze was hoping his phone would vibrate, and chafing under his hope. He got up.
“I need to find the toilet.”
“It’s just straight down,” Mekkus said.
Okwudiba followed him out.
“I’m going home,” Obinze said. “Let me find Kosi and Buchi.”
“The Zed, o gini? What is it? Is it just tiredness?”
They were standing by the curving staircase, hemmed by an ornate balustrade.
“You know Ifemelu is back,” Obinze said, and just saying her name warmed him.
“I know.” Okwudiba meant that he knew more.
“It’s serious. I want to marry her.”
“Ahn-ahn, have you become a Muslim without telling us?”
“Okwu, I’m not joking. I should never have married Kosi. I knew it even then.”
Okwudiba took a deep breath and exhaled, as though to brush aside the alcohol. “Look, The Zed, many of us didn’t marry the woman we truly loved. We married the woman that was around when we were ready to marry. So forget this thing. You can keep seeing her, but no need for this kind of white-people behavior. If your wife has a child for somebody else or if you beat her, that is a reason for divorce. But to get up and say you have no problem with your wife but you are leaving for another woman? Haba. We don’t behave like that, please.”
Kosi and Buchi were standing at the bottom of the stairs. Buchi was crying. “She fell,” Kosi said. “She said Daddy must carry her.”
Obinze began to descend the stairs. “Buch-Buch! What happened?” Before he got to her, she already had her arms outstretched, waiting for him.
CHAPTER 55
One day, Ifemelu saw the male peacock dance, its feathers fanned out in a giant halo. The female stood by pecking at something on the ground and then, after a while, it walked away, indifferent to the male’s great flare of feathers. The male seemed suddenly to totter, perhaps from the weight of its feathers or from the weight of rejection. Ifemelu took a picture for her blog. She wondered what Obinze would think of it; she remembered how he had asked if she had ever seen the male dance. Memories of him so easily invaded her mind; she would, in the middle of a meeting at an advertising agency, remember Obinze pulling out an ingrown hair on her chin with tweezers, her faceup on a pillow, and him very close and very keen in examination. Each memory stunned her with its blinding luminosity. Each brought with it a sense of unassailable loss, a great burden hurtling towards her, and she wished she could duck, lower herself so that it would bypass her, so that she would save herself. Love was a kind of grief. This was what the novelists meant by suffering. She had often thought it a little silly, the idea of suffering for love, but now she understood. She carefully avoided the street in Victoria Island where his club was, and she no longer shopped at the Palms and she imagined him, too, avoiding her part of Ikoyi, keeping away from Jazzhole. She had not run into him anywhere.
At first she played “Yori Yori” and “Obi Mu O” endlessly and then she stopped, because the songs brought to her memories a finality, as though they were dirges. She was wounded by the halfheartedness in his texting and calling, the limpness of his efforts. He loved her, she knew, but he lacked a certain strength; his backbone was softened by duty. When she put up the post, written after a visit to Ranyinudo’s office, about the government’s demolishing of hawkers’ shacks, an anonymous commenter wrote, This is like poetry. And she knew it was him. She just knew.
It is morning. A truck, a government truck, stops near the tall office building, beside the hawkers’ shacks, and men spill out, men hitting and destroying and leveling and trampling. They destroy the shacks, reduce them to flat pieces of wood. They are doing their job, wearing “demolish” like crisp business suits. They themselves eat in shacks like these, and if all the shacks like these disappeared in Lagos, they will go lunchless, unable to afford anything else. But they are smashing, trampling, hitting. One of them slaps a woman, because she does not grab her pot and her wares and run. She stands there and tries to talk to them. Later, her face is burning from the slap as she watches her biscuits buried in dust. Her eyes trace a line towards the bleak sky. She does not know yet what she will do but she will do something, she will regroup and recoup and go somewhere else and sell her beans and rice and spaghetti cooked to a near mush, her Coke and sweets and biscuits.
It is evening. Outside the tall office building, daylight is fading and the staff buses are waiting. Women walk up to them, wearing flat slippers and telling slow stories of no consequence. Their high-heeled shoes are in their bags. From one woman’s unzipped bag, a heel sticks out like a dull dagger. The men walk more quickly to the buses. They walk under a cluster of trees which, only hours ago, housed the livelihoods of food hawkers. There, drivers and messengers bought their lunch. But now the shacks are gone. They are erased, and nothing is left, not a stray biscuit wrapper, not a bottle that once held water, nothing to suggest that they were once there.
Ranyinudo urged her, often, to go out more, to date. “Obinze always felt a little too cool with himself anyway,” Ranyinudo said, and although Ifemelu knew Ranyinudo was only trying to make her feel better, it still startled her, that everyone else did not think Obinze as near-perfect as she did.
She wrote her blog posts wondering what he would make of them. She wrote of a fashion show she had attended, how the model had twirled around in an ankara skirt, a vibrant swish of blues and greens, looking like a haughty butterfly. She wrote of the woman at the street corner in Victoria Island who joyously said, “Fine Aunty!” when Ifemelu stopped to buy apples and oranges. She wrote about the views from her bedroom window: a white egret drooped on the compound wall, exhausted from heat; the gateman helping a hawker raise her tray to her head, an act so full of grace that she stood watching long after the hawker had walked away. She wrote about the announcers on radio stations, with their accents so fake and so funny. She wrote about the tendency of Nigerian women to give advice, sincere advice dense with sanctimony. She wrote about the waterlogged neighborhood crammed with zinc houses, their roofs like squashed hats, and of the young women who lived there, fashionable and savvy in tight jeans, their lives speckled stubbornly with hope: they wanted to open hair salons, to go to university. They believed their turn would come. We are just one step away from this life in a slum, all of us who live air-conditioned middle-class lives, she wrote, and wondered if Obinze would agree. The pain of his absence did not decrease with time; it seemed instead to sink in deeper each day, to rouse in her even clearer memories. Still, she was at peace: to be home, to be writing her blog, to have discovered Lagos again. She had, finally, spun herself fully into being.