Five
“I really thought he would propose on your birthday, Zikor,”
Chia said of that second thief of time. flinched. She didn’t want to bare her distress while eating pancakes in a new brunch spot in Dupont Circle. Especially not with Omelogor sitting beside her. She always felt on edge with Omelogor, as though she needed to be alert and keep watch, but for what she could never really say. Omelogor was always so singularly sure, so confident, her certainties thick with judgment, as if she was saying that everyone else was inadequate.
“ You should have proposed, ,”
Omelogor said. “If your relationship is solid, it shouldn’t matter who proposes.”
didn’t respond, irritation lodged like a tension in her temples. She sipped her latte and scanned news headlines on her phone. She should have declined Chia’s invitation, instead of bringing her deflated spirits here, to be further flattened. “Omelogor is in town, let’s do brunch, Zikor, just come, please, just come,”
Chia had said, Chia always wanting everybody to hold hands and go singing into the sunset.
“Men can be shy and weak. Sometimes they need a nudge to do what they want to do anyway,”
Omelogor said.
wished she would shut up, with her half-baked sense of omniscience, laying out opinions she thought were indelible truths.
Imagine asking her to propose to an Igbo man—as if Omelogor didn’t know the utter draining of dignity that would be. Omelogor’s was the kind of idea so removed from real life that you only suggested it to other people and never to yourself.
He was gone, anyway, that second thief of time. She had reined in her tending of him, to see if he might worry about losing her, and his response was simply to drift away.
“The problem is men are confused. The world is changing and they hear a lot of don’ts but nobody is telling them the dos.”
Omelogor was still blathering. Their table was spread with too much food, bean burritos and truffle eggs, French toast and avocado toast; Omelogor had ordered many dishes just “to try.”
recognized this profligate strain in Nigerians of means—her father did it too, when he visited America, excessively ordering what he wouldn’t eat and didn’t need, but for once it repulsed her.
“If he wanted to propose, he would have proposed,”
Chia said. Chia was drinking her second or third mimosa; her pale pink nails looked feminine, almost delicate, against the thin stem of her flute.
“ doesn’t have time for us today,”
Omelogor teased.
shrugged, not looking up from her phone. “Just reading about the pope.”
“I didn’t know popes could resign,”
Chia said.
“Retire,”
said. “He retired; resign makes it sound bad.”
“Abdicate. He abdicated his throne,”
Omelogor said, and chuckled. The waiter came by with a jug of ice water to refill their glasses.
Omelogor had placed her sunglasses case next to her glass, a tall domed case in navy suede that spoke of high style. The waiter said, “I love that!”
and Omelogor said, “Thank you,”
and the waiter said, “As beautiful as the owner,”
and Omelogor said, “How would you know?”
and the waiter laughed. Did that even make sense? “How would you know?” How would he know that she was as beautiful as her sunglasses case? But the waiter, with his short dreads and a dragon tattoo on his neck, already looked lovestruck, hovering and smiling at Omelogor. Omelogor asked for a whiskey and he asked if she meant a whiskey cocktail and she said she meant whiskey neat and then she asked him, “Don’t you like your things neat?”
Omelogor was enjoying it, looking him in the eye with her mystery, her bold playful manner which had mockery at its tips, as if she was sending an invitation that said things might be smooth or things might be rocky and she didn’t know which.
Chia once said Omelogor had turned down two marriage proposals in the space of months.
Why were men so drawn to her anyway? She was pretty enough, not stunning like Chia, and she had that kind of thick body men liked, large breasts and a behind entirely out of proportion that looked obscene in tight jeans.
But her interactions with men had an uncharitable air.
She wasn’t nurturing, she didn’t take care of men, and in this there was arrogance because she believed she didn’t need to.
Why did they keep coming after her?
The waiter had drifted from her attention, and she was talking about resigning from work to attend graduate school in America.
Next year, or the year after.
knew she was expected to join in the conversation, which felt to her like a gimmick.
Who in their right minds decided to return to graduate school to study pornography, for goodness’ sake? Omelogor was probably just running away from Nigeria.
Everyone knew she would be successful, but the speed of her success was suspect.
Ten years ago she could already afford to send her brother to England to do a postgraduate course.
Impossible on an honest banker’s salary alone.
Nigerian banks were cesspits; if you scraped the hands of all the successful bankers, you would get fetid manure.
Omelogor had no doubt soiled hers. Maybe she was about to be caught, and graduate school in America was her planned escape.
“The program director said I don’t need to take the GRE, which is good,”
Omelogor said.
Of course an exception had been made for her.
Even before they met in SS3, had thought of Omelogor as a person who expected that exceptions would be made for her, because exceptions were always being made for her.
and her friends in the university secondary school in Enugu campus knew the lore of Omelogor in Nsukka campus, the cool girl the boys were chasing who played all the time but always floated on top with the best results.
And she was so bright they let her take literature and geography, instead of choosing one.
And she got the best junior secondary school result in the history of both campuses of the school.
And she was dating older guys already in university.
“Pornography is not a moral issue, it’s a social issue. My theory is that it has become a teacher for young people and it’s a very bad teacher because it’s unrealistic and it demeans women and gives a false sense of what sex is. Young people get the wrong tools that they end up using for the rest of their lives,”
Omelogor said.
“That’s actually interesting. I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
Chia was crowing, as always in thrall to her cousin.
“We should be asking who is teaching children about sex,”
Omelogor said. “Where did you learn about sex, Chia?”
“From you, and no wonder I’m single,”
Chia said, and they laughed.
“I learned mostly from novels,”
Omelogor said. “Not the best teachers either.”
“Maybe after grad school, you’ll just stay, live here, and try and survive without being a Nigerian madam,”
Chia said, teasingly.
“Nothing beats living in your own country if you can afford the life you want,”
Omelogor said.
“Until you have an accident,”
said, looking up from her phone. “There isn’t one proper hospital trauma unit in the whole of Nigeria.”
“I know, it’s scary,”
Omelogor said, unfazed, and felt disappointed to have failed at annoying her.
“So you want to make people stop watching pornography? With an academic thesis?” asked.
“Oh no, people will always watch porn. I just want to get enough people to laugh at how stupid it is.”
had hoped for some defensiveness, and now felt at a loss. “Studying pornography feels too much like sensationalism for its own sake.”
“Pornography is one of the biggest industries in the world, with real social consequences. It is ‘sensationalism’ only if you think it’s a moral issue that we should pretend doesn’t exist.”
The criticism of Omelogor’s words nettled her. “And what are these real social consequences of pornography? Having sex?”
“Women are dying from what porn teaches men,”
Omelogor said. “I was looking at some statistics the other day, of hospital visits after forced anal, deaths and near deaths after choking.”
“Your waiter loverboy is hovering. Do you want another one?”
Chia asked, pointing at Omelogor’s glass. And then, as if to soften the air, or cheer up, or both, she said, “Zikor, I wonder who the new pope will be.”
“Somebody like Pope John Paul, I hope,” said.
“Ha!”
Omelogor said, a provocative mocking sound.
“Pope John Paul was lovely,”
Chia said. Chia was a hazy Catholic who sometimes went to Mass and sometimes didn’t, but knew she still retained the reticence about criticizing the church they had all absorbed while growing up.
“Pope John Paul was too much of a politician and a stage performer,”
Omelogor said.
“What are you talking about?”
felt irritation again tightening itself around her.
“Never mind Benedict the Wehrmacht soldier in Nazi Germany,”
Omelogor added, and laughed, leaning back, enjoying herself. She pronounced the German word with the V sound.
She had the kind of reckless insouciance of the deliberate blasphemers, those Catholics who thought themselves too clever, too full of information about the church.
didn’t even know if Omelogor still went to Mass, or if she had joined those Pentecostal churches led by Nigerian pastors with private jets.
She was at peace with the agnosticism of others, her faith a sufficient lone plant if it needed to be. Still, these displays irritated her.
“, where did you learn about sex?”
Omelogor asked, and pretended not to have heard. Suddenly she wanted the solitude of her apartment. She got up and told Chia she had to catch up on some work, but she was leaving to escape the hole of despair that threatened to swallow her whole.
—
would never admit this to anybody, but Pope Benedict left a sourness in her soul.
There was something shifty about his hooded sunken eyes.
She knew he had never been a Nazi, just a helpless young man forced to join the German army, but she felt nervous watching him on television, as though some unseemly secrets might suddenly tumble out and bring shame to the church.
She didn’t expect any pope to match John Paul II, but she at least wanted to feel an uplift of spirit on looking at the pope.
That Pope Benedict chose to retire made her hopeful and secretly happy.
She read articles on Catholic websites about the upcoming papal conclave, but the analysis felt too ordinary, too secular: how the Italians wanted an Italian, and Latin America was jostling for one of theirs, and nobody knew who the North Americans would back.
It brought a dismal terranean quality to an election she believed should be celestial, guided only by the Spirit.
So she stopped reading and looked away.
Just as she refused to think of the priests back home who were trailed by sordid stories: the priest professor who lured teenage girls into his bedroom and then locked the door, the campus chaplain who slapped Mass servers and had a wife and kids.
If she didn’t look, then she wouldn’t have to think, a habit of evasion steeped in the kind of fear she dared not even call fear, because if she called it fear, then her faith was not strong enough to bear what her thinking might reveal.
“If you start thinking, you never stop, so best not to start,”
somebody had said once in a fellowship group in university, and she remembered that quote, not quite agreeing but seeing the usefulness of it.
So she looked away.
Always she looked away.
If she saw news articles about Catholic priests abusing children, she quickly scrolled past, never reading them, because child sex abuse felt to her separate from the church she knew; it was an American thing, a Western thing, a depraved foreign thing.
Even though she stopped reading about the papal conclave, she still wondered who the pope might be.
What if it turned out to be Cardinal Arinze? Too exciting even to imagine, a Nigerian man, an Igbo man, her mother’s distant relative from Eziowelle, as the Vicar of Christ.
But even in her determination not to think of it politically, it felt too unlikely that an African would emerge pope.
On the first day of the conclave, her mother called to ask, “Are you following?”
“Yes,”
she said. They spoke so rarely, she and her mother, their silences often weighted with things unsaid. The only unburdened silence she remembered between them was in church, when they would arrive a little early for benediction on slow Sunday evenings and kneel next to each other in the incense-scented stillness, so close that their arms almost touched, until the Mass servers appeared to prepare the altar.
“They will most likely elect Cardinal Scola, the one from Milan, but the Argentinean is the better choice, because it’s the intelligence of the Jesuits that will save the church in the next century,”
her mother said, and made a sound to show she agreed, even though she didn’t know any details about the cardinals.
Black smoke rose from the Sistine Chapel on the first day of the conclave, and she watched on TV as it turned grayish before it disappeared and she wondered what they burned to make it so, feeling a depth of disappointment that jarred her.
A new pope meant a new beginning and she needed desperately to believe that it was not too late for her, almost thirty-nine years old and the future a wasteland scrubbed of eligible men.
When white smoke rose like purified clouds from the chimney the next day, her heart leaped.
And there was Pope Francis emerging on the balcony of St.
Peter’s Basilica, solemn and majestic and humble.
He was unselfconscious, she could see that right away; he did not regard himself, did not seek to admire himself through other people’s eyes, and so in this way he was Christlike, and when he spoke, he made a small joke, a joke that brought a smile to thousands of faces.
So beautiful to see his humor, his humanity, and by the time he began to lead the crowd in prayer, was in tears.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
She saw a blessing in this, a sign.
Excitement lifted and boosted her spirits.
The fate of her prayers was tied to this new pope.
Nothing else could explain why she went the next weekend to a vegan cookbook launch she hadn’t planned to attend, and minutes after she arrived Kwame was leaning toward her to ask, “When they say something tastes nutty, do we know which nut they mean?”