Five
I wake up in a fog of melancholy that I cannot dispel, and I blame the weather, because I need something to blame.
After all, harmattan can feed a nihilistic strain, when you watch the world afloat with dust, lit up in dust, blurred by dust, and start to wonder—what is the point of water, what is the point of life? On an impulse, I open my laptop and search for motherless babies homes in Awka, wondering which one Aunty Jane contacted.
Maybe I should adopt a child.
A ridiculous idea.
Still, I am curious about how it is done.
Do you walk into a room and pick out the baby you want? How do you know which baby you want, and how can your heart not break leaving behind a room full of motherless babies with hopeful eyes? I scan the news headlines about confirmed cases of coronavirus in France and Germany and Italy.
It sounds like a ghoulish stalker, this virus, appearing unannounced and unwanted everywhere you turn.
I text Chia to say maybe she shouldn’t go to Bilbao just yet; let’s wait and see how this virus goes.
Chia replies to say she’s already postponed Spain, and have I seen that the media has discovered Kadiatou’s man Amadou? She’s lying sleepless in bed at home in Maryland, worried about Kadiatou’s case, and she wants us to have a group call with Zikora, to put our heads together.
Put our heads together indeed.
Why Zikora and I need to put our heads together I do not know.
In Chia’s mind we are a united trio, as though her separate intimacy with each has somehow tightly knitted all, a delusion I do not understand.
How blind she is to Zikora’s venom, my darling Chia.
Read the article, she texts.
The article about Amadou is already growing tentacles online, being republished on different sites, sometimes with slight changes and sometimes not. One headline reads, “The convicted drug-dealer boyfriend of the hotel maid.”
They make him sound like a big mafia-style crook, rather than a man who sells fake bags that everyone knows are fake, and who from time to time once also sold small quantities of weed.
I remember Kadiatou once shyly showing Chia a fake designer bag from him, a tote in faux leather with cheap metal hardware.
Chia texts the time for our group video call and even though I don’t feel up to it, I cannot say no in the face of her worry.
On the call, Zikora is wearing makeup, her complexion evened out, her lashes long and sooty.
It is early Saturday morning her time, and if I wasn’t on the call, I know she would be in pajamas, face unwashed and night scarf wrapped around her head.
Chia looks puffy-eyed, clearly in need of sleep. “How can they publish all these lies about Kadi? People are reading and believing! I just saw one that claims she is a drug dealer because of the money in her account! I don’t know how to help her. Zikor, can we get somebody, like a media adviser?”
“There’s only so much a media adviser can do,”
Zikora says.
“What is her lawyer Junius saying?” I ask.
“You know, he’s actually a civil rights lawyer,”
Zikora says.
“What, you don’t think he’s right for her?” I ask.
“It concerns me, but let’s see,”
Zikora says.
That American word “concerns,”
another slimy slippery word, easy to shift and shape into meanings to free yourself, like “exploring”
difficult topics in graduate school. It concerns me. I don’t know if she is saying the lawyer is incompetent or not, and I don’t know why this concern is only now being known.
“Should she leave him?” I ask.
“The lawyer came to Kadi through Amadou’s uncle, who she respects,”
Chia says. “She won’t leave him.”
“Let me talk to him first,”
Zikora says. “Meanwhile the useless Amadou is in prison and Kadi is sending him care packages. Men. Honestly. You know he has a child that he didn’t tell her about for years? I can bet he will want to profit from this situation.”
“I don’t think so. He has his faults, but he cares about Kadi,”
Chia says.
Zikora snorts. “Yes, he cares so much about her that he secretly used her bank account to move drug money. She has to stop discussing the case with him.”
Chia makes as if to speak but doesn’t.
My melancholy heaves.
I wish I had not agreed to this doleful downer of a call.
After the father of her son abandoned her, a part of Zikora decayed into a bitterness which she imagines is wisdom.
Imagine asking Kadiatou to stop discussing the destruction of her life with Amadou.
What if Amadou is Kadiatou’s only real solace? What if he is the one person to understand her silences?
“A man with Amadou’s history will see this only as an opportunity to make money.
And he’ll lie about it.
They’re all the same. They will lie about everything. Sometimes it doesn’t even make sense, the kinds of things they lie about. Chia, just like your Englishman forgetting to tell you he was married.”
“What’s the point of bringing that up, Zikora?”
I ask. Chia’s Englishman, for goodness’ sake. From ten years ago.
“My point, which seems self-evident enough, is that every woman has a story like this, where a man has lied to her or betrayed her and left her with consequences. Look at Kadi now facing reputation damage simply because she trusted Amadou.”
“True,”
Chia says, and I think she merely wants to appease Zikora; this call cannot possibly be going as she planned.
“Every woman,”
Zikora repeats.
“Except , of course,”
Chia quips. She probably shouldn’t have, but she says it playfully to thin the heaviness of the call.
Zikora’s pause is expectant, even encouraging; she wants me to say that Chia is wrong. A story of how I discovered on Facebook that a boyfriend was engaged, or of how a boyfriend took my money for a fake business deal, or suddenly stopped calling me after proposing marriage, and she will lower her venom’s volume.
“I guess I’ve been lucky to be with mostly good men,” I say.
“Who all hate porn, I’m sure,”
Zikora says, her expression dark, as if confronting a traitor. She relates with women only through the pain caused them by men.
That I do not trade in stories of my love-inflicted wounds is my unforgivable failing. After we end the call, Chia calls me back, laughing, and I am happy to hear her laugh. “Mostly good men? Please, which of them were you with for long enough to know if he was mostly good?”
—
Chia coined the letters SPA for “short passion attack.”
I’ll tell her I met someone and she’ll croon, “New SPA alert!”
Jide says “thirst-quench,”
for both person and process, often shortened to “quench.”
“Are you seeing your quench today?”
he’ll ask, or he’ll say, “This poor quench is falling in love and he doesn’t know the quench is already coming to an end.”
I call it emotion. “Emotion happened”
is how I put it.
I met someone and emotion happened.
Sometimes I think emotion will happen with a self-aware or cerebral or very dark man, my usual draws, but it doesn’t.
Other times, with the most unlikely man there’s that crackle in the air and our shared and seeking eyes and a shiver down my neck.
I enter an exalted state of being, with everything exaggerated; his glance becomes a beam and my thoughts come in torrents.
Emotion happens, a rush and crush of emotion.
Always it brings happiness in reckless gusts.
It doesn’t grow; it strikes fully formed, electric and intense, my mind suffused by him, and I want it all right away, today, now.
It lasts a few months, at most.
Usually, I start it and always I end it.
I have never had regrets, except for with the Big Man with the big head, just before I left for America, my strangest and shortest case so far.
The first perfume he sent me was supposed to be a neutral gift, a thank-you for how well we advised Adic-Petroleum on raising money to buy their facility.
Then followed calls and texts and more perfumes that I gave away to friends.
He was not my Big Man type; my Big Man type was self-effacing, but he was puffed up like boiling beans.
When we first started the project, he questioned my competence, asking, “She is the team leader?”
with an arrogant raised brow.
I thought him boring and bush, an accidentally wealthy, ill-educated man; he said, “The individual communicated that he purchased the vehicle for the tertiary institution,”
because he believed it was too simple and therefore unimpressive to say, “The man said he bought the car for the university.”
I did not reply to his texts or return his calls until he appeared at my office door one morning, asking, “What do you want me to do so that you pick my call?”
He was smiling, and as he smiled, emotion happened and the air crackled, or so I thought.
I invited him to my house and he looked delighted but said he had to be security-conscious and preferred to host people in his guest house.
“Well, I’m not people,”
I said, and he chuckled.
He came to my house wearing a baseball hat perched atop his head, as though too small and unable to curve around his skull.
A certain kind of older Nigerian man thinks that to look youthful is to wear sneakers and a baseball hat.
He removed the enormous ring on his middle finger and he removed his watch, placing both on my nightstand with ceremonial care.
I knew there was some girth, his suits always seemed strained, but I was taken aback by the force of the full belly unleashed.
“Am I hurting you?” he asked, over and over, while I thought: Hurting me with what? I barely felt a thing, never mind navigating that belly.
I saw behind him a trail of faking women; it was the only reason he could ask, “Am I hurting you?”
He walked to the bathroom and back, walked to the window to draw the curtains, with no inhibitions at all, this bulky naked man who so loved his own inadequate bits. I felt he should have had the grace to be even if only fleetingly abashed.
“I will do for you what no other man has done for you,”
he said, and his lascivious smile repulsed me. As did his post-sex sprawl, legs spread out on my bed as if it were his. Why had I invited this man? Waves of disgust made my skin feel clammy. He tried to hold me again and I slid away to check the time on my phone.
“Please, you have to leave. I want to pray,” I said.
“Eh?” he asked.
“I pray at a particular time every night,”
I said, and his surprise changed to approval, or admiration, or both. He gathered his clothes, saying, “Okay. Text me when you wake up.”
I had never used that one before— I pray at a particular time at night— but I guessed it would work, as invoking religion invariably does.
Just the mention of prayer shuts down all thought.
And there is the superstitious flavor, too, because not only would my praying at a particular time at night lend me a moral star in his eyes, but he would not dare question it lest something bad happen to him.
I changed my sheets and scrubbed myself as if to slough off my self-disgust.
From men I steadily hear, “You’re so different.
I’ve never met a woman like you.”
Most are compliments and some are not.
With Big Head, it wasn’t, because he could not comprehend my cutting him off.
What kind of woman are you? was one of the many unanswered texts that flooded my phone before I blocked his number.
He lodged a complaint with CEO, claiming I had made a major error with the funding documents; his pettiness shouldn’t have shocked me but it did.
CEO laughed it off.
“Some men can be very childish.
I know he’s chasing you and didn’t get what he wants.”
But didn’t he? When I came back from America, I lost two consulting projects with two petroleum-servicing companies in quick succession.
Later it turned out that Big Head told the companies that I was incompetent and that CEO had recommended me only as reward for warming his bed.
Two whole years had passed and I was shocked by how long his wounded ego had bled and how far the blood had spooled.
I saw him recently at the wedding of a senator’s daughter, in Lagos, a senator I helped buy a house in Dubai with laundered money.
I had that intuition of being looked at and I turned to see him staring, his eyes beady with anticipation, keen to know what my reaction would be.
If I had imagined seeing him, I might have imagined I would feel enraged.
But he was simply one of the many Big Men who for some reason refused to have their tailors cut their caftans more generously, and so paraded themselves with their large bellies straining against cotton, groaning to be freed.
If I felt anything it was toward myself and not him: bewilderment, in a frame of self-loathing.
How could I have opened my door to this man who I did not want at all and could not possibly have wanted? I told Chia about him, how he had an object of insufficient size, further encumbered by a significant belly, and yet had the nerve, as he was huffing and puffing, to keep asking “Am I hurting you?”
Chia laughed as she always did about my stories of men, but I knew she sensed my self-disgust, how different this was beyond the details.
If I needed further proof that this was no emotion happening, it was the painful hailstorm of cascading regret that hit me each time I remembered him.
None of the others led to regret and all had better endings.
The ending with Arinze, who I briefly wondered if I loved because he lasted the longest at eleven months, was not as painless as the others but still brought no regrets.
I can tell the ending is near when I start talking to my curtains, saying words meant for the man while looking at the bronze-toned curtains drawn across my windows.
There was a man with long elegant fingers.
A charming secretive man, his mind full of dark alleyways.
I suspected he did credit-card fraud but he claimed he imported cars.
We laughed so much together.
We talked all night and into the morning about things we soon forgot, sometimes until I had to get up and get dressed for work feeling groggy and giddy.
“I haven’t suddenly lost the ability to drive in daytime,”
he told me, toward the end.
“What?”
“Just in case you think the sun is too bright for me to drive. Because you’ve stopped inviting me during the day, only at night now, and very late.”
We ended with laughter, and even now are good friends. There was a man who said “I love you”
over and over in bed, like an incantatory chant for raising the dead, which distracted and disrupted my desire.
“Stop saying that, please,”
I told him.
He looked warily at me.
He went to a Pentecostal church and I could only imagine his thoughts.
What else but a demon would cause a woman to say I don’t want to hear you say I love you? He had proposed not long after we met, saying the Spirit revealed to him that I was his wife.
I planted little heart stickers all over his things, his shoes, his laptop bag, and each time he discovered one he laughed and asked whose child’s pencil case I was raiding.
There was a lovely man who stared at me at a conference in Lagos until I went over and asked for his number.
He liked grilled croaker, and so I would order grilled croaker and have it delivered to him at random hours.
At the end he asked me, “Have I done anything wrong? Tell me what and I will correct it.”
His saying “correct”
and being so welcoming of blame filled me with wistful sorrow.
“No, no, it’s me. I’m sorry. I just switch off. I can’t do the kind of commitment you want,” I said.
—
There was a man I wish I could have loved, a man I wanted to love. Chijioke. It always felt comfortable being with him. I heard Chijioke’s voice before I saw his face. “Private equity is a terrible cancer, it always wins in the end,”
he was saying on a call, walking ahead of me in the hallway of the bank.
He was my type, erudite and self-possessed, and not crushingly handsome; nothing bores me more than the self-regard of men who have their whole lives been praised for their looks.
But when finally we met I didn’t feel that rising force, that burst of raw excitement.
CEO recruited him from England, and he spoke like a person who had lived there since he was six.
In meetings his rounded British voice was jolting, something off that did not belong.
While the directors talked casually of a loan that had to disappear, he stood nodding like an eager new apprentice.
Amanze said the directors called him London Goat.
In CEO’s office I heard him complaining about someone on his team.
“She just lied, but the evidence is there. She just lied to my face.”
He sounded stunned. CEO was mild and vague, murmuring that the person would be queried, while more interested in maneuvering a compliance issue.
There was no rush of emotion, and yet I felt a need to protect him, or preserve him.
As we left CEO’s office, I asked him to lunch. I felt hard and sophisticated and knowing. I wanted to teach him to survive here.
“Look, you have to understand that lying and deceiving are not moral issues in everyday life here, they are just tools, survival tools.
Compunction is not even an option, because you would need to think of these issues first as moral.
And many of our people just don’t.
When Nigerians talk of moral issues they really mean sex, and some of the more high-minded mean corruption.
But there’s a kind of amorality in everyday hypocrisies and pretenses, because they are just survival tools.
So don’t be so shocked about her lying, you should expect it and deal with it but don’t show them how shocked you are.”
He looked weary, eyes trained on his small bottled water.
“I know life is difficult for people,”
he said finally. “This is a poor country, after all.”
“There are poorer countries that do not have this kind of madness.”
He looked at me as if to say, “What exactly is your point, then?”
His lunch was untouched on his plate, stewed chicken garnished with two slices of green pepper.
“It’s not that Nigeria is poor, it’s that it’s virulently materialistic,”
I said. “Money is at the heart of everything, absolutely everything. We don’t admire principle or purpose. Even people who can afford to take ideas and ideals seriously don’t. We don’t live with grandeur.”
His eyes widened slightly and even I wondered where that had come from. I intended to toughen him up about life here, the son newly returned to a country both alien and his, and here I was rambling about grandeur.
But he was smiling a tender smile and later he said he fell in love at grandeur.
“Do you?” he asked.
“Do I what?”
“Admire principle and purpose.”
I wanted to say yes, but it felt like absolving myself too easily, so I made a facial shrug. Not long after, he left the bank to start a boutique investment firm and kept asking me to come join him. “I’m too tainted, Chijioke,”
I always replied. “You deserve better.”
—
When Jide is happy-drunk at my dinner parties he boasts about how quickly men fall in love with me, while I glancingly dip in and out.
They laugh and call me iron lady lover and teasingly wonder about the man who will finally make me fall.
Jamila, with her sly slanting manner, listened to Jide’s story the first time she heard it, then turned to me to ask, “Do you think you would try harder with men if you didn’t have money?”
“ has always been like this,”
Jide said, but Jamila was unconvinced.
“ Wallahi. It’s because has money,” she said.
I didn’t have money when I was sixteen and told the popular boy, Obinna, who I liked, that I didn’t want to be his girlfriend because I wanted to be free.
But Jamila is really saying that money is an armor and she is right.
Money is an armor but it is a porous armor.
No, money is an armor and it is a porous amour.
It shields you, feeds you the potent drug of independence, grants you time and choices.
Because of money I can go where I want and when I want, and this is still heady, and still intoxicates.
When I first began to make more than I imagined I would, I would cajole myself to spend, whispering to myself, “I can actually afford this now, I can afford this now.”
Then the implosion of money, almost overnight, when PGT went public and the shares made millionaires of us—us being a tight, tiny circle, the men in the secret cave and me.
I stared at the figures in my personal account, telling myself it really was mine and not a client’s, thrilled and dizzy, thinking of what I could now do for the people I loved, how I could reach out and touch dreams that just yesterday were too impossible to be dreamed.
Yet money deceives in how much it cannot prevent, and in what it cannot protect you from.