Two #3
When Kadiatou opened the door, I noticed she had powdered her face. How heartwarming that she had done the African thing of “looking presentable”
for a guest, and this for Darnell.
“Darnell, this is Kadiatou; Kadi, my boyfriend, Darnell.”
Darnell barely glanced at her, saying something like “How you doing?”
before he walked over to a painting in the foyer. Sometimes I wondered if he even knew that his casual rudeness was rude.
“Welcome,”
Kadiatou said to Darnell’s back, her expression serene, while Darnell stood with his legs wide apart, staring at the painting.
“It’s Ben Enwonwu,” I said.
“I know.”
He was in a bad mood and already I felt as if I had done something wrong, or would do something wrong, and this knowledge seemed inevitable, the weight of it crippling me.
“I didn’t realize how massive this place was. Your neighbor has a pool. How come you don’t? You certainly have the grounds.”
I made a sound, a half-laugh. There was simply no right answer to the question “Why don’t you have a pool?”
Especially not now, with his darkening mood.
“Remember the fellowship I applied for?” he asked.
“The Europe one? In Germany?”
“I didn’t get it.”
“Oh no,”
I said, and disappointment surged through me as if my body had drawn it from his.
“Third time certainly wasn’t the charm. There’s got to be somebody in the selection committee who hates me,” he said.
“I’m so sorry, Darnell.”
His reasoning seemed childish to me: somebody who hates me. Maybe he was right, and his rejection was indeed personal. I wanted to help him but didn’t know how. Whenever his mood smoldered like this, I stumbled clumsily for what to say or do, always worried about worsening it. I asked if he wanted to go out to eat. He said he wasn’t hungry. While he showered, I sat on the bed, fiddling and uncertain, thinking of what I could do to lift his spirits. His phone buzzed next to me and I saw on the screen the words You’ll have to use your imagination. Another buzz and I told myself not to look, but I couldn’t help it. Was going to send a visual aid but I better not.
I stared at it, confused, surprised. I almost jumped when he came out of the bathroom, a towel round his waist, and took the phone. “Might as well do some work emails while sitting on the throne,” he said.
I wouldn’t ask him about the text messages. Not today. But when would I ask and what would I ask? I didn’t know what rights I had, or if I had any rights at all. He would say his phone was his private business, or it was juvenile or melodramatic, or something about pop culture; or he might say my behavior was the semiotics of something or other. That night he didn’t touch me. He turned away and said he was tired, and I lay awake for hours, thinking I might have been too generous with the organic pillow spray. The next day he said he was leaving because he needed some space.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“What’s wrong?”
he repeated.
Before he could say more, I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be insensitive. Please stay. Let’s do something together to cheer you up.”
He was calling a taxi.
“Darnell, please.”
Still, he left. A taxi drove up and parked by the garage and Darnell got in and left. As the taxi drove away, I saw his head bend toward his phone, as if I was already dismissed, forgotten, his mind miles away.
—
I heard Kadiatou let herself in, and moments later she was at my bedroom door. “You don’t eat for three days,” she said.
“I ate. I’m okay, Kadi.”
“Nothing in fridge, no plate in dishwasher, nothing in kitchen trash.”
“I ate peanuts,” I said.
She left and returned with a plate of scrambled eggs and toast. The oily eggs would be too salty.
“Miss Chia. Please eat,” she said.
I smiled and felt false to be smiling falsely at Kadi. I didn’t want to smile. Darnell was not answering my calls or texts, and I didn’t know why.
“Daniel did something?”
she asked.
“Darnell. Not Daniel. He just left and now he’s not calling or texting.”
She was looking at me with an expression I could not read.
“Something inside you, not the heart. The spirit. The spirit cannot break, even if your heart break. Your spirit stay strong,” she said.
“Kadi, it’s not that serious!”
I said sharply. She was making assumptions, flirting with the unbearable possibility of finality; a broken heart, even a breaking heart, meant an ending.
“You want rice?”
she asked.
“No, Kadi. Thank you.”
Omelogor sent a text to ask if I had heard from Darnell. No, I said. Call him again, she said. Call him back-to-back twenty times. The least he owes you is a response. She sounded irritated, and I sensed with me as much as with Darnell. She thought everyone was born strong and bold like her, and even if they weren’t, she believed they could easily become so. How wrong she was. I didn’t call him back-to-back twenty times because I worried it would annoy him. Finally, he called me a week later and never said a thing about leaving so abruptly. He would come back to Maryland to visit, he said, if it was okay. I said, “Yes.”
I thought often of Kadiatou’s words: The spirit cannot break, even if your heart breaks. It had irritated me, but my irritation might have been the reflexive refusal of an unwanted truth. She was comforting me and maybe warning me. Don’t let your spirit be destroyed, even if he breaks your heart. Your heart can break while your spirit remains whole. But what of when a spirit breaks?
He will send people to kill me! He will send people to kill me!
Years later, when Kadiatou was staying in my house with Binta, to avoid the alarming crush of journalists chasing after her, I walked into the guest room without knocking, to coax her to eat, and there she was rolling on the floor from side to side. No, not rolling. Punishing. Those rough jerky movements uncaring of her body.
“They call me prostitute!”
she said. “Prostitute. My father in paradise can hear them. They call me prostitute!”
How primally African she looked, supine on the ground, as if reproaching her ancestors while also begging them, saying “Help me,”
and saying “How could you let this happen?”
She was moaning, drawn-out guttural primal sounds, her pain so great that to bear it quietly was to dishonor it. I lowered myself to the floor, to touch her without restraining her, to tell her she was not alone, and all the time thinking: Have they broken her spirit?
—
I always spent Christmas in Nigeria, but I told Omelogor I wasn’t sure this time, because I was hoping Darnell would say “Let’s spend Christmas together.”
I expected a bracing response from Omelogor, like I should not let Darnell dictate my life, which I didn’t want to hear. But all she said was “I want to get us VIP tickets to go to the Heineken concert in Lagos, before we leave for the village. I’ll still get them, in case Darnell forgets to ask you.”
Darnell didn’t ask to spend Christmas together. He asked when I would be back from Nigeria, and I hadn’t even left yet. If only he knew I wanted to spend Christmas wherever he wanted. I wished he would show some interest in visiting Nigeria, say something about wanting to see it, so that I could say, “Why don’t you come and visit?”
His hard walls would soften if he met my parents and saw that they weren’t about “net worth.”
But I was wary of just inviting him; I feared he might turn me down with cutting words.
—
Omelogor was in America for a conference and my stomach clenched and unclenched thinking of her meeting Darnell. I was afraid of what she would see. Best to have dinner at home and light some candles and pour some wine, and we would have a nice time, me, Omelogor and Darnell. Maybe Zikora, too, to neutralize things. And maybe LaShawn to balance things a bit, but LaShawn was away on a trip to Italy, and how ridiculous to fret so much about a simple dinner. Zikora and Omelogor would be perfect, my closest friend and my closest cousin, even though a fog always hung between them, the air never entirely clear. But it wasn’t dislike. They simply didn’t understand each other, being so different, and because I was the glue, the reason they even knew each other, I felt responsible.
Once Zikora said, “Omelogor is a bully,”
and I said, “She really isn’t; it’s just that her passion can be too much.”
But I understood why Zikora said that. Omelogor saw others so clearly and yet was blind to herself—how her certainties could intimidate, how her words scalded even if she didn’t mean them to. And maybe she wore her brilliance a little too easily. Sometimes people reacted to Omelogor as if her magnificence was not neutral but a conspiracy to force an inferior status on them. Zikora always hated to be wrong, but especially if Omelogor was there. With Omelogor she talked only of her victories, never her vulnerabilities. When she was studying for law school, Zikora had stopped answering my calls and so, worried, I went over and banged on her apartment door. She opened the door, her eyes glassy, wearing a dirty, slack T-shirt, her cornrows matted. She had not showered in days. She smiled and began talking to me about brutalist architecture, or something like that. I was too startled to really listen. I found the bottle of pinkish pills she had bought online, with “all night study aid”
written on the label in unserious-looking graffiti font. There were two other bottles of white pills.
“Zikora! What have you taken?”
She was still talking, and for a moment I worried that she didn’t even know who I was, until she said, “Chia, I’ve been up since Sunday. What’s today?”
“Wednesday.”
I called our family friend Dr. Maduka, who was a surgeon in Connecticut. “Is she making sense?”
he asked, and I said, “I think so, well yes, but what she’s saying has nothing to do with what she’s supposed to be studying for.”
He told me to make sure she drank a lot of water, to darken the room and put her books away and make her lie down. Zikora agreed to lie down, just for five minutes, still talking—“Raw concrete dominates, and patterns are made using boardmaking,”
she said a few times, until those words wormed their way into my ears, and for years afterwards the word “boardmaking”
brought to mind that frantic evening.
She was lying down but she was twitchy and shivery, unable to be still, and so I filled a bowl with ice and water and dumped it on her head. “Chia!”
she shouted, but the shout sounded less robotic and she accepted the towel I gave her and dried herself. Before, finally, she slept it off, she mumbled, “Chia, I have to get into Georgetown Law.”
I stayed until she was stable, and I took the pills with me but felt reluctant to throw them away, as if I needed proof of the strangeness of that day. Those pill bottles remained at the back of my drawer for years. “Don’t tell Omelogor”
was all Zikora said, and we never spoke of it again. Don’t tell Omelogor. Maybe because she knew Omelogor would easily get into Georgetown Law and never consider study-aid pills.
—
The dinner was going well. Two candles lit. Red wine poured. Kadiatou served the catered food, chicken and asparagus delivered oven-ready from D.C. in elegant foil pouches. It was going well, yes, but Omelogor was praising me excessively, and I remembered a novel about an unattractive Indian bride with an unimpressive dowry whose desperate family recited her virtues to potential grooms while she stood in the corner, looking down at her feet.
“Our relatives are always talking about how brave Chia is for deciding to do her own thing,”
Omelogor said, which was a lie. Omelogor lied only for reasons she thought worthwhile. Why was she lying? Zikora glanced at her with narrowed eyes that said, “What is she up to now?”
Darnell was opening a second bottle of wine, saying how good it was. Zikora and Darnell were joking about music, something I didn’t understand, but they were laughing and I loved to see Darnell laugh. Omelogor asked Darnell about his work, and he was surprised she knew about African American art.
“As soon as I could afford to buy myself a ticket to America, I wanted to visit MoMA, just to see Jacob Lawrence’s work,”
Omelogor said, and I could see Darnell liked that.
Kadiatou came in to clear things away and Zikora said, “Kadi, your fonio is better than this food, hands down.”
“This kind of food, I don’t eat. No taste,”
Kadiatou said with her quiet smile.
“So when you’re away, she’s here in the house?”
Darnell asked me after Kadiatou left.
“She comes and goes. She takes care of everything, she’s so trustworthy and dependable and lovely,” I said.
“It’s because she’s a Muslim,”
Omelogor said.
“What?”
Darnell looked at her.
“She’s trustworthy because she’s a Muslim. Like my Muslim gateman in Abuja. I trust him one hundred percent.”
“She’s trustworthy because she’s a Muslim?”
Darnell’s words came out slowly to emphasize his incredulity.
“All over Africa, a Muslim believer is more likely than a churchgoer to be honest in everyday life. Go and ask any Nigerian employer who they trust with money, their Christian houseboy or their Muslim gateman.”
I felt tight with discomfort. This conversation would be normal at a dinner in Lagos or Abuja, and everyone would talk like Omelogor, bold and baroque declarations topping one another. But here her words bruised the air. She didn’t know how to wear different selves like I did. I heightened my voice in Nigeria, and I swallowed more speech here. I was afraid to look at Darnell’s face.
“So it’s all about religious stereotypes, huh,”
Darnell said.
“Stereotypes are an exaggeration of reality,”
Omelogor said, stressing “reality,”
and reached over to refill Darnell’s glass.
“Interesting,”
Darnell said.
“Muslims are trustworthy until they start rioting and killing you because of a cartoon published in Denmark,”
Zikora said.
Goodness, not Zikora too. She was Americanized enough to know not to speak like this, but she was reacting to Omelogor; that prickliness between them again.
Omelogor looked at me, her eyes shaded, and I knew “rioting and killing”
had reminded her of our Uncle Hezekiah. I hoped she would not bring him up, I hoped she would let the shadow pass. And as if she heard me, her face brightened and she shrugged off Zikora’s caustic tone with a quick laugh.
“You can hedge that. My friend Ejiro pays her gateman extra every month; she calls it an information allowance, so the gateman will give them notice whenever Muslims are about to riot!”
“All this talk of servants,”
Darnell said.
“Tough life,”
Omelogor said, and I wished she wouldn’t joke about domestic help, as there was no telling what might offend Darnell.
“So how are you and Chia related again?”
Darnell asked. “Because you know Chia’s people probably sold my people? All that old Igbo money going back centuries. They sold more than palm fruit on that West African coast, because they certainly made a killing.”
There was a pause. Darnell’s favorite drunken quip didn’t fit here, at my dining table with two lit candles melting down.
“That is such a lazy thing to say,”
Omelogor said, so coldly it was hard to believe laughter had only just come from her.
“Why is it a lazy thing to say?”
Darnell’s slouchy cool had stiffened, unused to reproach. “You’re going to tell me the Romans practiced slavery and shit, so nobody can blame Africans?”
Omelogor was staring at him in that full-on way of hers, head tilted.
“It’s lazy because it’s simplistic nonsense,” she said.
“Slavery has existed throughout human history,”
I said, and instantly felt stupid. Why I had said that I did not know. I wanted only to return to safe waters.
Omelogor shot me an impatient glance, and then said slowly, “If your ancestor was a slave in Igboland a hundred years ago, nobody would know that today. You would have been absorbed into the family of your enslavers.”
“Jesus,”
Darnell said. “We’re doing a hierarchy of slavery here.”
“Of course there’s a hierarchy: one system was much more barbaric than the other. That’s a fact. Igbo slave traders could never have imagined the transatlantic slave trade, because it was nothing like the slavery they knew. The Europeans and Americans industrialized slavery. They turned people into things, like bits of wood. A piece of wood can never be part of your family. A piece of wood can never be human. In Igboland a slave was still human.”
“What page of the slavery apologist compendium is that?”
Darnell asked, pushing back his chair, but he didn’t get up.
“You know why else it’s lazy? Because you forget that Africans were also victims. You think the people sold into slavery weren’t missed and mourned? You think they weren’t loved? My grandfather was almost sold as a boy. In Igboland it was men from Aro who were the slave raiders. People were terrified of them. They appeared on my great-grandfather’s farm and kidnapped my grandfather and his brother, who were in the middle of harvesting cocoyams. My grandfather had a bad sore on his leg and so after a day’s walk, they set him free, saying nobody would buy him because of his sore. He refused to leave his brother, but they beat him badly. His brother was sold. My grandfather made his way back home from the coast, a boy who was saved by his sore but had lost his brother. He grieved his brother for the rest of his life. He named his first son after his lost brother. He never ate cocoyams, which is why today my mother’s onugbu soup is different, because she doesn’t use cocoyams. My mother was born very late in his life, but she says even then he always spoke of his lost brother.”
We were all still, as if stunned, even Omelogor. I felt close to tears. I had forgotten this story of her maternal grandfather. Aunty Chinwe told it one Christmas Eve. Everyone had gathered in our house before midnight Mass, and as Aunty Chinwe talked, my mother had shifted and sighed to show she didn’t care for this slavery story.
“Look, all I’m saying is Africans have a hard time with accountability, some Africans,”
Darnell said finally.
“And all I’m saying is don’t forget it’s a shared pain,”
Omelogor said.
“Hopefully the lecture is over now,”
Zikora said.
“By the way, I believe that the most remarkable ethnic group in the world is the Black American tribe. Look at them, cheated of so much, but their culture dominates the world,”
Omelogor said. My mad cousin who just did not know when to stop. I wished she would at least say “African American,”
to sound current, and why would she say “them”
like that, as if excluding Darnell, who was seated across from her. Darnell was staring at her, uncertain about just what to make of this. Seeing him look so nakedly unsure felt new.
“Should we play cards?” I asked.
“Yes, and maybe we can learn some accountability with Uno,”
Omelogor said, and laughed, and Darnell’s expression relaxed into a faint, almost reluctant grin.
—
“You hide your worth with him,”
Omelogor told me later.
“I’m happy.”
“Chia, it’s almost idolatrous,”
Omelogor said.
“What?”
“Your love for him.”
“Idolatrous. Talk like normal people, please.”
“Remember your half-caste boyfriend in primary school? Eric?”
“Yes?”
“Remember how your sneaker laces came undone during inter-house sports, and you were about to retie them and he said, ‘No, wait,’ and he bent down and retied them for you?”
“You weren’t even there. I told you the story.”
“That’s what you deserve, Chia, to be adored.”
“It’s different, but I’m happy.”
“Don’t decide that this is it. This person is not the love of your life.”
“Who said anything about being the love of my life?”
“I mean, apart from Nnamdi, of course,”
Omelogor said, gently; she knew how tender it still was, so many years after. Nnamdi, who died in a car accident when I was seventeen. Nnamdi, who on blustery harmattan mornings would drape his red and black sweater over my shoulders at morning assembly in secondary school. Nnamdi, the trembling delicious wetness of my life’s first kiss, both of us standing pressed together beneath the eave outside our kitchen. Nnamdi. Would we have stayed together? Would life have separated us? At seventeen, I was so sure. I had picked out the names of our two children—Richard and Daphne—this was before I became sophisticated enough to reject English names. I will love you forever, I wrote on his last birthday card, just weeks before he died. He was the love of my life, if anyone was.
—
Darnell wasn’t hopeful about the other fellowship that brought American academics to Paris for a year. The German fellowship was easier, and since he didn’t get that, no way would Paris happen. Which was why, after glancing at his phone one crisp fall morning, he jumped up and pumped his fist in the air and hugged me. For once I saw a glimpse of him free of poison, his armor lowered, his face beautiful uncaged.
He said casually, “You should come, Chia. They’re giving me an apartment. Certainly not up to your standards, but hopefully you can cope.”
He was asking me to live with him. Three years and he had never mentioned living together. Once, after I stayed the night, I left my sweater slung across his sofa, and the next day he had it folded on the table. “You forgot that.”
I immediately put the sweater in my handbag. I understood what he meant, that I could lay no claims. But of Paris, he said, “You should come,”
and so I eagerly bought a ticket. I felt a weightlessness, the ascent of hope. In Paris, I would finally blur his edges. I would pull him into the light. I would cure his insomnia and gently show him that we could need each other without losing ourselves. My illusions were so radiant then. At Charles de Gaulle airport, the young Black man who stamped my passport said, “Your eyes, very beautiful,”
and pulled his eyes, up and slanted, to show that he meant the almond shape of my eyes.
“Thank you!”
I said, delighted by the surprise that was this man, his twinkle of mischief, his cinnamon skin, sitting in the glass booth stamping passports. His compliment had to be an augury of my new life with Darnell in Paris: a life glazed with excitement and free of silences.
As we left immigration, Darnell said, “That was common.”
“Common?”
I asked. “How?”
“You were too obvious with him.”
“A compliment was the last thing I expected, with my sleepy mess of a face. It was just a nice surprise because I don’t feel beautiful at all. I don’t feel beautiful most of the time.”
“Always so interesting to hear a beautiful person moan about not feeling beautiful.”
“Darnell, I’m just trying to explain.”
“Doesn’t make it any less common.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I agreed and felt chastised. I would have delighted in Darnell’s jealousy, but it wasn’t jealousy, because he knew I was blind to everything but him. It was control, a rationing of what I was allowed. He squashed my smallest pleasures, and I helped him flatten them, sinking myself into the mean crevices of his will. I look back now and see my weakness in such sharp relief, being pliant and docile in exchange for nothing; the clarity of hindsight is bewildering. If only we could see our failings while we are still failing.
—
Darnell loved Paris because of James Baldwin; Heaven forbid he should love it for any of the conventional reasons. For him, a thing had value simply by being obscure; a man of the people who hated what the people liked. We broke up in Paris. We broke up because I ordered a mimosa in Paris. If there is a soundtrack to our ending, it is his Senegalese friend Mamadou’s voice saying, “Voltaire’s heart is in the Bibliothèque.”
Hélène, Mamadou’s friend, invited us to drinks because she wanted to meet Darnell. Darnell said she was “Parisian culture royalty,”
working on an exhibition of American artists, and she probably wanted to offer him a “gig.”
“Mamadou says there’s a pile of family cash behind her,”
Darnell said, his tone disapproving and admiring; he had fussed with his clothes and changed shirts twice. We were in an elegant hotel bar and the waiter arrived, notepad in hand. Mamadou ordered something in a stream of rapid French. Hélène asked for a Perrier, Darnell a red wine. I drank red wine, like Darnell, because of Darnell. But I had a sudden craving. “Can I have a mimosa, please,”
I said, the first to speak English.
“Mimosa?”
asked the perplexed waiter. “What is this, mimosa?”
“Don’t take her seriously,”
Darnell said in his Americanized French, which I would not have so easily understood if it had been better. “A mimosa is a vulgar drink. She’ll have the same as me.”
“Ah,”
the waiter said, with the expression of a person who did not get the joke.
“Okay, yes,”
I said. “I’ll have the same Bordeaux, thank you.”
Something shifted in the air. A lethal chill came from Darnell and unsettled me. I had done something wrong but did not know what. Mamadou was saying, “Voltaire’s heart is in the Bibliothèque.”
“His actual heart?” I asked.
“His actual heart. It is shriveled and black. The French removed his heart as a tribute to his greatness and put it in a library. If we Africans did this, they would call it uncivilized voodoo.”
Darnell laughed, his body now angled away from me.
“I didn’t know Voltaire was so heartless,”
I said, desperate to be funny, to salvage an unknown wrong.
Mamadou and Hélène laughed. Darnell did not.
“Chia, your face has such symmetry, so beautiful,”
Hélène said kindly.
“Thank you,” I said.
“There is a continual flow, and there’s a way in which that is formally significant, but the beauty is in the restlessness. Aesthetic success comes with not conforming, being offbeat, a tad askew,”
Darnell said, picking up the photos Hélène had brought, as though he was talking about the art installations. When I first looked at the photos, slices of metal hung on jagged ropes, I thought them cold and ugly.
“I agree, they’re gorgeous,”
I said, and Hélène cast me a pitying glance, but without contempt, as if she recognized women like me. For the rest of the evening, Darnell talked easily without ever looking at me, and a few times he flirted with Hélène. I sipped my wine, my stomach tightly knotted. Darnell’s words flowed—cosmopolitanism in African American painting and archival theory of African American modernisms and African American visuality or something. I didn’t speak. I didn’t know what to say, and I feared speaking at all might worsen whatever ruinous thing I had done. That Darnell did not look at me, not once, was wounding. I might as well have been a statue, a pillar of salt, empty air.
Back in his apartment, he waited until we had both showered, like a school headmaster delaying punishment, before he asked, “You ordered a mimosa at the Hotel Montalembert? Like it’s your favorite chain brunch spot in D.C.? Seriously?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“That’s some Ugly American shit right there. It’s not like you haven’t traveled the world.”
His beard oil glimmered in the light. An itchy rash had broken out on my cheeks when he first started growing his beard. I told him I was allergic to the oil and he said, “You’re probably hormonal.”
He never changed the beard oil, and each time after sex he watched me get up to wash my face. I hated his beard oil. It smelled of mildew. My fingers were trembling. Something in me long submerged had burst out growing claws.
“You’re angry because I ordered a mimosa? I don’t understand.”
“Pointing out something to you is not being angry.”
“I like mimosas. I don’t have to perform whatever you think Paris is supposed to be, just because you want to impress some Frenchwoman.”
“Okay, that’s patronizing classist shit.”
“How?”
For a moment, I wondered if I was wrong, but didn’t know how I was wrong. He made me doubt my right to anger. “How?”
He walked away and I heard the click as he locked the bedroom door. He locked the door, to fend me off, to keep away this person darkly guilty of ordering a mimosa in Paris. I slept on the thin sofa and awoke early in a kind of cold light. While he silently made coffee, I looked online for flight tickets to Washington, D.C.
I sent Omelogor a message to say I was leaving Paris today and it was over. Her response was Love you. Call once in the taxi.
It was done. Telling Omelogor made it real, and I heard in my head the sound of breaking spells. I had held on for so long, and now, letting go, it surprised me how quickly mystery dissolves to dust. There was no wavering will, no fear. We are in love and then we are not in love. Where does love go when we stop loving?