Dream Count

Three

In January, when the world knew of the virus brewing in China but lockdown was still unimaginable, Aunty Jane came to our house in the village and asked to see me. My mother’s sister and manic shadow, who made everybody’s business hers. I was packing for my return to America. I was bloated from too much Christmas chin-chin. I didn’t feel like seeing Aunty Jane; I already knew what she wanted to talk about, but I had never learned to disobey relatives older than me.

“Chia, you’re running out of time!”

she said, as soon as I stepped into the living room. “Your only option now is IVF. I know somebody that just had twins at forty-five. But you have to hurry up if you want to use your own eggs. Stop traveling up and down, and find a man to do IVF with. Or you can use donor sperm. All this travel, one day you will be tired, and without a child, your life will just feel empty and meaningless.”

It might have sounded cruel, but it wasn’t; she was only being benignly blunt, as Nigerians are wont. I was forty-four and I did not have a husband and I did not have a child, a calamity more confounding because it was not for lack of suitors.

“So a husband is no longer necessary, Aunty? You should have told me this ten years ago,”

I said, laughing.

The stipulations from my mother and my aunts, maternal and paternal, had started in my mid-twenties, firm and fine-edged, and repeated often: He must be Catholic and Igbo, have a university degree, and be able to maintain you. “Maintain you,”

always said in English. Such a strange expression, as though you were a machine needing frequent oiling. In my mid-thirties, the conditions began to wilt at the edges, my life by then rooted in America. A Christian was fine, of any denomination; a Nigerian of any ethnicity; or an African; or just a Black man; or, well, a man. Now, in my mid-forties, with my female eggs in an unforgiving rush to uselessness, marriage had become secondary. Have a child, by whatever means. My mother, on Christmas Day, had said while looking at the Nativity scene set out for the village children, “A child is more important than marriage.”

How slippery moralities are, how they circle and thin and change with circumstance. Imagine if I had decided to have a baby ten years ago, without a husband. Imagine my mother’s exploding horror.

“Aunty, I am still praying for a husband,” I said.

Aunty Jane looked skeptical, assessing me as if to divine what exactly was off.

I did want a husband and child, but not under any circumstances.

I didn’t want to be single, but being single was not intolerable.

Much worse was the prospect of a marriage that wasn’t a merging of souls, a baby not intensely born from love.

Even friends barely understood.

They thought all my talk of wanting the truest love was a false pose, a defensive sleight, because what else was I going to say, having failed to find a husband? Who lived in a fairy tale? A secondary-school classmate wrote on our class’s WhatsApp group: Who would have thought that Chia, rich man’s daughter, with all her beauty, is still unmarried while some of us, our children are finishing school? I skulked silently in the group, and tried to remember who the poster was, but she looked unfamiliar in her profile photo.

It was easier to pretend that I was as broken by singleness as I was expected to be.

People did not easily believe that you longed for the unusual.

I always said what women confronted by the crime of singleness said: I am praying, please pray for me, my own will come by God’s grace.

“Chia, what really happened with Chuka?”

Aunty Jane asked.

“We just didn’t make a good match.”

“But you were engaged.”

In response to my silent shrug, Aunty Jane prodded: “Did you discover something?”

“No. It just didn’t work out,”

I said firmly, and hoped she would leave it alone. If I had said he beat me, or he’s not actually divorced, or he is seeing another woman, Aunty Jane would have understood. Real meaty reasons, with sympathy poured on me, and opprobrium on him. But she would never have understood the truth, that I broke up with Chuka because I could no longer ignore that exquisite ache of wanting to love a lovely person that you do not love.

—

We met at a Nigerian wedding in Indiana. I hadn’t wanted to go, but my mother said they couldn’t come and I would have to represent them. Febechi told me, “There’s somebody here that is perfect for you. You people fit each other, children of Big Men.”

I didn’t know Febechi well; we were classmates in secondary school, and even then she always joked about my father with a slyness that felt too close to spite.

“Febechi, please let me eat my rice in peace, biko. ”

Nigerian wedding introductions were so lacking in wonder, so predictable, so planned, and they could not end with marriage as I believed marriage should be, a merging of two souls. And what slim sad pickings: wearied men in search of a Nigerian wife, any Nigerian wife, but preferably a nurse, because somebody somewhere had convinced Nigerians in America that nurses made good money and that men could not be nurses. Once, at a wedding in Houston, I overheard a man ask, “Are you willing to train as a nurse if we go ahead?”

Febechi ignored my groaning and brought Chuka to our table. He was umber-skinned, built as if he played rugby, his mustache linked to his short beard by a thin groomed line, his bald head shining in the ballroom’s chandelier light. There was a leonine quality to him. You noticed him; he subdued space. It surprised me that he needed to be introduced to anybody at all. He had an unusual self-possession, as though he would face emergencies with genuine calm. He was nine years older than me but seemed even older; not aged but vividly grown up, like an adult archetype, so courteous and proper, so sensible. He must have been a prefect in secondary school, the kind liked by both students and teachers, who could quiet a rowdy classroom but would also sneak out of school with friends for beer and cigarettes.

“It’s nice we both live in the DMV area,”

he said that first day, with quiet anticipation, and I smiled and said, “Yes.”

His living room in his house in Northern Virginia reminded me of our house in Enugu: tan leather sofas, a tan coffee table, and heavy tasseled tan curtains. I felt, for a moment, the strange sensation of being pursued by the past.

“Everything matches,”

I said in dismay, without meaning to sound so dismayed.

“Is that bad?” he asked.

“No, no, of course not.”

“You can change whatever you want to change.”

He signaled to permanence almost right away. “Chia, I’m too old to play games. I saw your picture on Febechi’s Facebook page and told her I wanted to meet you. My intention is marriage,”

he said, and I said nothing, knowing he would hear acquiescence in my silence. I had always imagined my choice of husband would be like my travel writing: unusual, but not so much as to alienate my parents. Somebody foreign, with poetry in his soul. Not a successful Igbo engineer who still shined his shoes with the Kiwi polish that everybody’s father in Nigeria had used. Where did he even buy the tin? His manners were those of a person with good “home-training,”

he was interested in my family, my friends, the people who mattered to me. He wanted to say hi to Afam and Bunachi when they called; he wanted to meet Omelogor; he came with me to see Zikora after she had her baby.

“Is your friend always this hostile?”

he asked as we left Zikora’s.

She had been sitting on a sofa, looking worn out and drawn, holding the baby. As Chuka came toward them, to bend and look at the baby, Zikora suddenly shifted, giving him her back, and shielded the baby with her body. In the awkwardness that followed, Chuka turned and sat away from her, next to her mother. Until we left, Zikora never looked at him. But her mother held our visit aloft, talking easily with Chuka, telling him about the two schools she owned in Enugu.

“It’s not personal. Zikor is dealing with a lot,” I said.

“It felt personal, as if she knows of something bad I did in the past,”

Chuka said.

Because I wanted to guard Zikora’s story, I jokingly asked, “So what bad thing did you do in the past?”

Later, Zikora said Chuka’s “good man”

air had set her off, and even she was surprised at the tumbling hostility she felt, which meant the true depth of her damage was still unknown to her. I told her I understood and that Chuka understood, even though he didn’t. He was always watchful with her afterwards, even after I told him her story, as if he expected an outburst of strange behavior from her at any time.

“She’s not an easy character”

was all he would say. But about Omelogor he said, “I like your cousin!”

He overheard my video-call conversation with Omelogor, no, with the warped person Omelogor became in graduate school in America. “Why do these Americans say ‘enjoy’ instead of ‘eat’? ‘I enjoy it with cheese. I think you should enjoy it with a side salad.’ How do you know I’m going to enjoy it? It’s so presumptuous; it’s from an entitlement worldview.”

“She has a point!”

Chuka said, amused, but I didn’t feel amused, because I was worried about her. It baffled me how, so quickly after she started graduate school, Omelogor changed and became leached of her light. One day she called me crying. I had seen her cry so few times that shock overwhelmed me, as if she was somehow built differently, without the crying gene. I remembered her weeping, properly weeping, only once, many years ago when a man was beheaded in the North, after Uncle Hezekiah’s death. She was in university then. But that was different; her distress was honed, focused on its cause, unlike this formless crumbling.

“Omelogor, Omelogor, o zugo, don’t cry,”

I said helplessly.

When she didn’t cry, she burned with a serrated anger, unlike her usual clear-thinking rage where she would argue in sharp slices. This anger was jagged, as if it impaired her, as if she was lost. She complained about things worth complaining about and things that were trivial and things I did not understand at all.

“I didn’t know ‘center’ had become a verb,”

she said, with a bitterness that did not match the subject. “They’re always talking of ‘centering minorities.’ It’s bad enough Americans turned ‘impact’ into a verb, but now ‘center’ too?”

“I think ‘center’ was always a verb,” I said.

“Not in the way they use it. You can use a preposition like ‘centered around’ but not ‘center indigenous people.’?”

“Okay.”

“It’s like that absurd American word ‘share,’ and now the whole world uses it—‘Share the document with her; oh, she shared that she won’t be at the meeting’—so nonsensical.”

I didn’t quite understand why “share”

was nonsensical.

“Start a conversation with Americans and before you know it, they’re saying, ‘It’s kind of like that movie.’ Always a stupid American film.”

Mostly I listened to her, silent and perplexed. Her grievances felt like balloons overfilled with air, unnecessary, that could only end in a pop. One day, she said, “Chia, the American,”

the closest she had ever come to sneering at me. And sneering was not her style, nor was spite. “The problem with Zikora is that she has always had a surfeit of that trait women are blessed with—the ability to tolerate nonsense from men,”

she said when I told her about Zikora’s situation, in a tone unlike her, her words shaped like weapons. I decided I would no longer discuss Zikora with her, at least until she became herself again. When she told me, “America makes more sense when you’re looking in from outside,”

I thought: She should have stayed looking in from outside. She was depressed. She was depressed, but it enraged her to hear me say so. She should not have left her life in banking to come to graduate school in America to study pornography. “I want to do something that actually helps people,”

she had said, as if to atone for her success in banking.

“By studying pornography?”

I asked, amused. I thought it was just Omelogor being Omelogor, but she convinced me. Pornography was a teacher for so many people, and it was a terrible teacher, and she wanted to study how the industry was built, so she could learn how its influence could be undone. Even that thesis she had given up, saying her adviser hated her, and “She hates me”

was not a sentence I thought I would ever hear from Omelogor. Now she was writing on her website, For Men Only, and sometimes she called to ask me questions like “What do you think of choking?”

—

Chuka found her website and read two posts aloud, laughing, and I thought about how rarely I saw him laugh like that, with abandon, unrestrained by his constant seriousness.

Dear men,

You know that she knows you love her. Maybe she knows, but she wants to hear you say it every day, just like you need to oil your beard every day to keep it groomed. (Do you have a beard? No? Okay, then your hair or your armpit or whatever you tend to every day.) See, love needs tending.

Tell her “I love you so much.”

If you can carry off some creativity, tell her “I love how you walk or talk or smile. I love hearing what you think of movies. I love that crazy look you have when you’re half asleep. I love it when you’re happy and laughing. I love you.”

I know, it’s a lot. Saying one or two extra sentences can be exhausting. But try it and see the benefits you’ll reap. Remember, I am on your side, dear men.

When Chuka read another post, he looked up and asked, “I hope you don’t have this problem with me.”

Dear men, solutions to three different permutations of the same general conundrum.

You told her “I’m sorry if I hurt you”

and she got even angrier. I know you didn’t mean any harm, but next time don’t say “if.”

“If”

means something may or may not have happened. To you, the “if”

is harmless. To her, it feels dismissive, as if you don’t really mean your apology. Try again without the “if.”

You sometimes do nice things for her after a fight, and it’s your way of saying sorry, but the best way to say sorry is to say sorry. Not to pretend that all is well and do nice things for her. It’s nice that you’re doing nice things, but doing nice things is not saying sorry. Saying sorry is saying sorry.

She said you’re ignoring the issue even though you’ve said sorry. I know you mean no harm when you say sorry. But to be effective and reduce resentment, always be specific when you apologize. Don’t just say “I’m sorry.”

Say “I’m sorry I didn’t do X. I should have done X. It was just wrong.”

I know talking is a drag. I get it, I really do. Remember, I’m on your side, dear men.

Chuka’s loudest laughter came after he read the last post.

Dear men,

Women do not always hear what you say, they hear what they want to hear. So please be very clear. If you’re not interested, don’t say you’re busy, say you’re not interested. I understand you want to be nice and protect her feelings, but that’s what got you into this problem. You told her you were busy when she asked for a second date and she then sent you a long stinker of a text about how you string women along. If you’re too nice to say you’re not interested, then invent a girlfriend or a wife. If you’re not interested, don’t leave the smallest space for doubt, because in the single and searching secret society of women, you will be burned at the stake as a wizard. Remember, I’m on your side, dear men.

—

Each day with Chuka I encountered his otherness. He made his bed as soon as he got up, sheets pulled taut and straight, and wore his shirts neatly tucked in, even on weekends. Nigerian boarding-school values. In his closet, his socks were curled in neat rows. He read books I did not think of as real books, about leadership and project management. He wrote his name on the title pages, at the top right corner, in a geometric hand, Chuka Aniegboka, which brought to me an odd rush of nostalgia, because I had last done that in primary school. He listened to the BBC World News every morning. He liked films that bored me, formulaic thrillers, and he watched them with intense focus. If I spoke, he would pause it and say, “I don’t want to miss anything.”

“But we already know what will happen!”

I would tease.

He was strong, he lifted weights in his basement, his toolboxes were tidily arranged in his garage, and he closed the jam jar so tight that I could not undo the lid myself. One day, watching him replace a door handle on his deck, I thought guiltily that he was like that door: sturdy, reassuring, uncreative. He always ordered a well-done steak at restaurants, never anything else, and back home he would promptly microwave a portion of jollof rice, which came in flimsy plastic containers from a Nigerian caterer in Baltimore, saying restaurant food never filled him. He crossed himself before he ate, and I thought how I had stopped crossing myself years ago because it felt unnecessary and showy. I planned a trip to Broadway, where he fell asleep in the middle of the play. I nudged him awake, and he said, “Sorry, I should have had coffee at the hotel,”

as if it was caffeine rather than interest that could keep him awake. He suggested brunch at The Four Seasons and I suggested something less stuffy.

“Okay,”

he said to my suggestion, doubtful but willing. “It’s just that The Four Seasons is a trusted brand.”

His was a life of faith in trusted brands. He flew only airlines that were “mainstream,”

even if it meant multiple connections, and he looked astounded that I never flew British Airways. He agreed the airline was pompous and, yes, a kind of petty pleasure always lit up the flight attendants’ faces as they demeaned Nigerian passengers, but was that reason enough to make me fly airlines that nobody really knew? Whenever I traveled, he dropped me off or picked me up at the airport, asking only if my trip went well, seeking no details of my adventures. He did not understand, he could not possibly understand. I imagined him saying, “You have a degree from a good school, why not get a proper job? You can still do your writing on weekends.”

He didn’t say this, he never did, but I imagined the words burning to roll off his tongue. He read my articles and always said, “Nice,”

as after tasting a tolerable food that still does not appeal.

San Blas Islands. Yes, the ocean really was clear as glass and I looked down from the canoe and saw starfish, but all that secluded tradition gets boring very quickly. After a while the other people on the canoe looked bored too and started swiping through photos on their phones. My highlight was a drink I had after we got off the canoe. Someone cut open a fresh coconut and splashed rum generously into it, stuck a straw in and handed it to me. It was so delicious because it was dirty. The knife looked suspicious. The rum was cheap. The guy didn’t wash his hands anywhere. And I want to go back just to drink it again.

“You liked it because it was dirty?”

Chuka asked, giving me the look you gave to Westerners who did foolish Westerner things, like not greeting their elders. He read my article about Greece, which began with “How do other tourists tolerate the smell of donkey shit in Santorini?”

Afterwards he said, vaguely, “Very nice.”

Not just his usual “Nice,”

but “Very nice,”

which must mean the donkey shit offended the properness at his core.

“I liked the other islands,”

I said, in penance. “We should go together when you’re on vacation.”

“We should go to Dubai,”

he said. “It’s a miracle of engineering and political will. Really what Nigeria should be.”

I thought Dubai all sterile kitsch, but it did not surprise me that Chuka liked Dubai, because Nigerians liked Dubai. He was a harking back to my Nigerian life, familiar but now made exotic by the wide gorge that separated me from it, like a fond anachronism. He told me, “I don’t want to rush you,”

as boys said to girls they were serious about; it made you special, exempt from the sex-haste reserved for less deserving girls. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to sleep with him at all. It took months before I let him undress me in his bedroom, not really wanting to, but feeling I should because I did like him and I was by most measures his girlfriend now and he somehow deserved it, being so proper and attentive. It would be predictable, I was sure, even perfunctory, but at least not unpleasant. How unutterably wrong I turned out to be. Chuka startled me with new and unexpected pleasures; doors never opened were suddenly flung apart, our bodies in riot and all the old laws undone. “You’re so sweet, you’re so sweet,”

he said, forceful and urgent, until I was heady with earthly power. I felt for the first time in my life an intensity of forgetting, those brief raw moments of bodily transport, of physical oblivion. Afterwards I lay dazed. “I love you,”

he said, and I said, “What did you just do to me?”

Already I wanted a repeat. Already I wanted and wanted.

—

I was telling Chuka a story about primary school, how the other children called me Milk Butter, because my hands were soft.

“I was maybe nine, and another school had come to ours for a debate competition. We were asked to shake hands and one of the boys let go of my hand very quickly, as if my palm was hot, and he said, ‘Your hand is too soft!’ I remember the debate topic: ‘Doctors are more important than lawyers.’ Our school won. I think that boy was just angry about losing, and so he started taunting me—‘Softy-softy hands, you don’t do any work at home, you’re not strong, you just eat milk and butter’—and soon the other children were calling me Milk and Butter, which then morphed to Milk Butter.”

“Milk Butter,”

Chuka repeated, and reached for my hand. “So soft. That boy wasn’t wrong.”

He was running his thumb over my palm and I was thinking of his tongue. My life had become a scattering of unexpected eroticism.

“You have the hands of a laborer,”

I teased. “So rough.”

“Oh my father did not play, I could change a car tire by the age of eight. When I moved to Lagos for university, I was so shocked to see men getting manicures in salons.”

“You should come with me to get a manicure.”

“I’ll do anything for you, but manicure in a salon? Mba .”

I loved his saying no to a manicure, and I loved it only from him. From other men it would be laughably backward. But Chuka was my old-fashioned fantasy, a manly man, he could sweep me into his arms, pick me up as if I weighed nothing, carry me, protect me. Refusing a manicure fit just right.

I would watch him immersed in the mundane and see only sensuality: Chuka cleaning his kitchen counter, thorough and broad-shouldered; Chuka paying for groceries at Whole Foods; Chuka driving, eyes trained on the road. Even his reticence with his friends felt sensual.

I watched him at cookouts in his friends’ yards during that summer’s lovely languid days. I liked to sit and listen to the loud Nigerian voices, sheltering in their presence, enjoying the newness of it, because I did not often go to Nigerian gatherings.

“Take her out of that public school now before she comes home and starts twerking,”

somebody said.

“Imagine, one White patient came into my consulting room and asked me where the doctor is, in this state of Maryland!”

another said.

“There is somebody in Bowie who can organize a goat for you,”

somebody else said.

His closest friends in America, Enyinnaya and Ifeyinwa, hosted Saturday gatherings in their house in Bethesda. Ifeyinwa was the kind of Igbo woman who intimidated me: sure-footed, bristling with capability, always able to handle things, and contemptuous of any foolishness. She had a big county job and I imagined her dogged climb up the ranks, while raising children and getting a master’s degree or two. She was tall and wore a short side-part wig that was uninterested in looking realistic. I desperately wanted her to like me. I brought bottles of wine when we visited. I sprang up to help her serve puff-puff and meat pies.

“Thank you, my dear, but please just sit down and relax,” she said.

She wasn’t unfriendly, but the coolness of her tone created distance. One Saturday, Chuka said Ifeyinwa’s sister was visiting from Nigeria, but I didn’t see her until late in the day, when the other guests had gone. She walked into the kitchen, in a cloud of heavy perfume. Upon seeing a beautiful woman, animosity erupts unprompted in some women. I knew from experience how to diagnose it. At first, I thought Ifeyinwa’s sister was afflicted with it, how she radiated hostility, not acknowledging me in a way that made clear she was not acknowledging me. She filled a glass of water at the dispenser, and then I realized that it wasn’t me. It was Chuka. The flounce in her manner. She was ignoring Chuka. That stir of defiance, even vengefulness, was for Chuka. They had a history. Or more than a history. What was their story? I felt a breathless stab of jealousy. Her long lustrous weave fell in waves to her shoulders. Her designer jeans were slightly pinched at the crotch. To douse the sudden charged air after her sister left with the glass of water, Ifeyinwa said, “Chuka, biko come and help me open this thing.”

Witnessing Chuka’s effect on Ifeyinwa’s sister left me shaken. I saw him anew and admired him anew, his vitality, the controlled, sustained energy of him. When he went to the living room, I got up and followed him. I sat by his side. Until we left, I kept him always in my line of sight, my jealousy mounting, climbing, enveloping me.

“Ifeyinwa’s sister was not very sociable,”

I said in the car, and then wished I had simply asked what their story was.

Chuka sighed and said Ifeyinwa had introduced her sister to him just after his divorce and they met once and he wasn’t interested. He had never given her any hope, never played games. He didn’t understand why she was so angry.

“Because she wants you,”

I said, suddenly light from relief. “Who wouldn’t want you?”

His smile was barely there, as if he didn’t quite know what to do with compliments.

—

I overheard Ifeyinwa say to a friend, with laughter, “Any Igbo man from Anambra State will cheat with a woman if she cooks ukwa for him. That’s why I married from Imo State. I didn’t want to lose my husband to ukwa.”

Chuka and I were always last to leave, and so in the waning evening, I went to the sink and began to rinse glasses and load the dishwasher.

“Oh, no…”

she started to protest.

“Sister Ify, I’ve been looking for ukwa to cook for Chuka,”

I said, a lie I had not planned on until it came floating out of my mouth. I hated the mealy oiliness of ukwa, I was the only one in my family who did, and I had no idea how it was cooked.

Ifeyinwa squinted slightly at me, surprised, no doubt thinking this Big Man’s daughter, with her “travel writing”

frippery of a job, was still solid enough to want to make ukwa for her man. It made me redeemable. She told me to try the African market in Catonsville. Days later, from the back of the store with its musty smell of stockfish, I sent her a text saying, Just bought ukwa, thank you!

At the counter, as the cashier rang me up, an African American woman in line behind me peered at the register and said, “Whatever that is better be worth it!”

I smiled at her. “It is. It’s a delicacy from the southeastern part of Nigeria. Breadfruit. I’m making it for my fiancé.”

“My fiancé.”

More words sailing unplanned out of my mouth. How was I slipping on this new persona like a T-shirt? I cooked from a YouTube video and laid out a surprise dinner for Chuka on my dining table.

“Chia!”

he said, lifting the lid of the Dutch oven. “Ahn-ahn! Where is this from? You can make ukwa? Baby, thank you, thank you so much,”

he said. Something about his expression made me teary. How easily he was made happy, how uncomplicated his conditions for fulfillment.

Soon after, Ifeyinwa began teasing Chuka about our getting married. Her approval felt like an accomplishment and warmed me like a compliment.

“Why are you wasting time, Chuka? See Chia’s pointed nose. Your children will win beauty contests.”

“Chia is the cause of the delay,”

Chuka said.

“Don’t mind him!”

I said, to appear eager for marriage, as she would expect.

Enyinnaya looked up from his phone screen.

“Look at this young Nigerian writer. She’s doing very well, we’re proud of her, but I heard she is married and decided to keep her maiden name. Why is she confusing young girls? If something is not broken, don’t fix it.”

He looked at me slyly, as though I, too, might commit this crime.

He was a small soft-bellied man, a neurosurgeon. On our first visit, he had thrust into my hand a hospital magazine from a pile on the coffee table which had his photo on the cover, and then hovered, waiting, until I awkwardly opened to the page filled with his face. “Congratulations,”

I said, unsure of what else to say, and he nodded, a monarch accepting his due adulation. How could this be Chuka’s closest friend? Their television was always turned to Fox News.

“The truth of the matter is that illegal immigration is killing this country! Democrats don’t want to admit it,”

Enyinnaya said.

“Your brother is an illegal immigrant in Texas looking for somebody to marry for papers,”

Ifeyinwa said briskly, and I wondered what they talked about when they were alone, if they talked at all.

Chuka laughed and told Enyinnaya, “Keep supporting people that don’t even want you.”

He was at the counter twisting a wine opener and fluidly removing the cork. Just hours before he had been lying in bed in his boxer shorts, wide-chested, saying, “Chia, I’m waiting for you.”

He didn’t strain to sound suggestive, it wasn’t his style; he simply said, “Chia, I’m waiting for you,”

and the evenness of his tone riotously lit my longing.

Ifeyinwa was saying something to him and he said, sensible as always, “They should send you the invoice first.”

She could not possibly guess how, with passion, his nature changed so wildly as to become someone else. A person’s surface was never the full story, or even the story. That I had this knowledge of Chuka, this shared secret, brought its own frisson. Suddenly I could not wait to go back to his house. I got up and whispered in his ear, “I want you.”

He smiled and briefly squeezed my hand, another tame gesture that said nothing about the latent fires. Later, we burned, and after we burned, we lay in slaked and sweaty silence, and I thought about how desire can live beside love without becoming love.

“Do you sometimes want to escape and find another life?”

I asked him.

“Find another life?”

He propped himself up to look at me, waiting for more details, but some things resist explanation; it takes instinct, intuition, a knowing at your center that is either there or isn’t. From the moment I saw his dutiful living room, its matching furniture, I knew there were large swaths of me that he would never understand.

—

Then came a moment of splendor. A Friday evening, and Chuka and I planned to go into the city later for some live music. An editor named Katie emailed me to ask if she could call—a proper publisher in New York finally interested in my book proposal. Finally. Before I took the call, I washed my face and put my braids in a bun to look presentable, as if Katie could see me. On the phone, Katie was talking about my title, actually talking about my title, with serious interest; no hazy words and no “We’ll see.”

Her voice was soothing, all creamy educated tones. She punctuated her sentences with the word “right?”

She said The Non-Adventurous Adventures of One African Woman was wonderful, but perhaps Black Woman in Transit was stronger, because “African”

was limiting and “Black”

opened it up more. I thought “Black”

too wide-ranging; “Black” didn’t explain the humiliations of my Nigerian passport, the rejected visas, the embassies leery of a Nigerian traveling just to explore. But I said, yes, it was a wonderful idea, I was happy with Black Woman in Transit. I said thank you, thank you, too many times. I said I was excited and wanted to make the book playful and personal. Yes, of course, she said, and then more gently added that she was wondering if maybe I should write a different book first, with more relevance, to create real debut buzz, right? I said maybe my piece “Dining in the Guineas” should open the book, because Conakry, Malabo, and Bissau were not well-known at all and visiting restaurants there made for interesting reading. She was still talking about a book with relevance, and I realized with a curdling anxiety that we were not talking about the same thing at all.

“Do you mind my asking what you mean by relevance?”

I asked, and she said, “I saw a news story about Congo, what women there are going through, right? The horrific rapes. It’s been going on for years. I’m not saying you have to travel there, we would need to be clear about where is safe to go, but a book on Congo and the struggles of the people there would really resonate right now.”

As soon as she said “struggles,”

the word lengthened piously, enunciated earnestly, I knew she saw me as an interpreter of struggles. She was saying, “Somalia or Sudan could work too. A more general introduction to what’s going on there. People will buy it even if they don’t actually read it; they’ll buy it to show they care, right?”

A soft underbelly of cynicism ran through her words. She was asking if I would think about it and let her know, and I said yes, of course, and I hung up quickly before my tears betrayed me. In the shortest moment, self-doubt can swoop down and swallow you whole, leaving nothing behind. It was pointless, all of this. It suddenly felt delusional to think anybody would publish a light and quirky travel book by a Black Nigerian woman; don’t forget the wealthy family, no struggle story, and her love of the nice parts of cities. Maybe I needed to go back and work for the family as my parents wanted. If nothing else, I could write reports, as spreadsheets would always be incomprehensible puzzles to me. My confidence, ounce by ounce, squeezed itself dry. I cried and stopped and started again.

I sent Chuka a text to say I didn’t feel up to our evening and he called right away. I said I felt a bit unwell and he said my voice sounded off. “I’m fine,”

I said, no point in telling him, because he wouldn’t understand. He didn’t tell me he was already getting in his car as we spoke, but when my doorbell rang, I knew it was him. I opened the door. Tears hijacked me. I hadn’t expected to cry, but at the first glance of Chuka at the door, in jeans and a button-down shirt, tucked in as ever, stable and steadfast, I burst into tears. He held me, enveloped in his musk, silent for long moments, as if to say whatever it was could be solved.

“What’s wrong?”

I told him. At least he would listen and maybe I needed that. “How can she want me to write about war in Sudan? War in Sudan!”

Chuka said nothing.

“I mean, don’t you see?”

I asked, desperate to make him understand. “I want to write light, funny takes on travel, and to her I’m just an African who should write about struggles.”

“The problem is that many of these White people don’t think we also dream,” he said.

I stared at him, astonished. “Yes,”

I said. “Yes, exactly.”

“Chia, you’ll find the right editor. There is definitely somebody in publishing who will understand. Just keep trying.”

My tears changed in tenor. I sobbed and sobbed, hugging him with a long exhalation of my body’s breath. He did understand me. He saw all the places where I shone and all the places where I could shine.

“You get it,”

I said, almost in wonder.

“Of course I do.”

“You never said anything.”

“You know I’m not a talker.”

Bolstered by the moment, the rapture of being known, our future together took shape for the first time. I told my mother about him, that he was divorced, no children, an engineer, Catholic, and not just Igbo but from Anambra State too. For a moment my mother was silent, stunned, because what were the odds—her free-range daughter untethered from the life expected of her, now ending up with just the right man from next door. A daughter almost forty years old too. In what world did a successful childless Igbo man marry a woman who was thirty-nine years old? My mother broke into song— Abu m onye n’uwa, Chineke na-echelu m echiche oma —which made me misty, because in my childhood, it was the church song she always sang in the face of joy. Chuka said his father was already making plans for the iku aka ceremony, and I thought how beautiful it sounded, the first stage of an Igbo marriage: iku aka, to knock on the door, to seek permission, to hope.

—

To our passion, hope was now added. Our relationship a soft riverbed, my feet easily sinking and rising. We spoke Igbo in public, and made fun of Americans in restaurants, and it was like crawling together into a delightful secret tent. Chuka read about the publishing industry and said it made no sense how they kept publishing writers who were only recently teenagers. What could they know, when they hadn’t lived life?

I enthusiastically agreed. I was always seeking out stories of writers who published their first books later in life. A new editor in New York, a woman named Molly who grew up in London, said, “I understand what you want to do, but what you have here won’t hold up for a book. You need more heft.”

“Then you’ll get more heft,”

Chuka said when I told him. “Chia, this is progress. You’re committed to this thing. You’ll get there.”

“Yes,”

I said. There is no elixir more potent than the genuine encouragement of a lovely person.

—

He called me Baby, in a tone that reminded me of an older person from an older time. At the high-school graduation party of Enyinnaya’s son, he called out “Baby!”

and at least five women looked up. They, too, were Baby. I had joined a cadre of women called Baby. I got up and went to him, smiling, thinking that the picture I carried in my mind of the life I wanted was not one in which I was called Baby. Babe or Babes, maybe, but not Baby.

We had arrived early for the party. My halter top began unraveling as I climbed out of the car. Chuka, amused, asked if we needed to go home so I could change, and hadn’t he said those ropes looked impractical? He took my handbag while I retied the top more tightly behind my neck.

I didn’t know Enyinnaya had walked up behind us until he said, “Ahn-ahn, Chuka, why are you holding her handbag like her houseboy?”

His first words. No greetings. It was an odd, tense moment, Enyinnaya stern and unsmiling, looking truly appalled. As if Chuka holding my bag was an existential failure. A sudden outsize tension hung between us on the driveway, the hum of arriving guests drowned by our silence. And this because of a handbag? All I wanted was to go back to a graduation party on a carefree summer day. I reached for the bag, but Chuka brushed me away.

“I am holding her handbag because I want to hold her handbag,”

Chuka said steadily. Enyinnaya shrugged and moved ahead. Chuka looked softly at me and said, “Sorry, sometimes Enyinnaya acts as if a nut in his head is loose, but he doesn’t mean harm.”

We walked into the house, Chuka still firmly holding my bag, and in my eyes, he swelled and became a hulking glorious god. Later, I told him I didn’t understand how Enyinnaya was his closest friend; there was nothing wrong with Enyinnaya, of course, I added hastily, but they were so dissimilar.

“He stood by me when I was at my lowest,”

Chuka said.

I looked at him and thought: He’s mine. This solid-gold hunk of a man is mine. This man who chooses his side and stays steadfast. This breathing paean to loyalty. I was content, sated. I was where I was supposed to be.

Yet in quiet moments, alone, I feared that my contentment was a kind of resignation.

—

Chuka said his family would go and see mine at the end of the month.

“I think we should compress as much as we can, do all the traditional ceremonies in one day, and then focus on the wedding, to save time,”

he said. By saving time I knew he meant my age. At thirty-nine, there was a shrinking stretch for the two children he so wanted to have.

“A smaller ceremony here is fine with me but you know they’ll want the wedding to be back home,” he said.

I stared at him. The wedding. I had never visualized a wedding. It existed only as a vague awareness somewhere in the back of my mind.

I thought of my mother saying “Why did she use local printers?”

about Mrs. Okoye’s daughter’s wedding invitation, while gleefully examining the deficient card. She and Mrs. Okoye detested each other and called each other friends. I imagined the wedding invitations my mother would print in London, two C s tastefully intertwined on champagne-pale paper. Soft tissue inside the envelope. he loved as an act of dependable duty, and wasn’t it childish of me to think this dull, to want an incandescent love, consuming, free of all onus? I stumbled through the following weeks, my mind furred in gloom. I was perplexed by the size of my own uncertainty. I woke with lucid visions of our passion, his urgency, my clothing drawn and pulled aside. What had I done, I asked myself, this wanton waste, this loss I had created for myself? But something was missing; it was there in the echo after sex, the silence we slipped into, which was not uncomfortable but empty. Did dreams serve a purpose and was it real to imagine what I wanted, and did it even exist? Febechi called me a few times, leaving curt “please call me”

messages; the peevish matchmaker whose project had failed. When I finally returned her call, she said, “Chia, this man is a catch. There isn’t anything better out there. Life is not a novel.”

She could not possibly know that I secretly dreamed of writing a novel, but it felt like an unfair punch, dismissing what I felt, whatever it was, by calling it fiction. Why was a novel a metaphor for unrealistic, anyway? Novels had always felt to me truer to what was real.

“Honestly, you were never grateful that he loved you,”

Febechi said with a sigh. For a long time afterwards, I thought of her accusation, because it was an accusation, that I was not grateful to have been loved. What is this gratitude to look like? Is it to be a state of being, to live adrift in gratitude because a man loves you?