Four
Before I met Chuka, I did once say to a man, “I am grateful for you.”
But it was different from Febechi’s gratitude. Febechi meant the gratitude of a woman to be loved at all, which was not the same as a woman being loved in a way that made her feel whole. I said those words—“I am grateful for you”—in a bookshop café in London, to the married Englishman who did not tell me he was married. Around his wrist he wore a thin silver bracelet. Do we like men who wear jewelry? No, but we liked this one. It began online, on a Jan Morris fan site. His thoughtful comments fascinated me, and I plied them with stars, even before I saved his profile photo of a lean-faced handsome White man. I had never saved a profile photo before, but nothing wrong with mild curiosity. He was just so appealing; I felt in reading him that I was learning from a person who wished others well. Anyway, he could be ninety years old using a photo he had plucked off the Internet. It was a few years after Darnell, and I was still coiled, still watchful, unwilling even to date casually. The Englishman starred my comments too. I wrote, The real benefit of travel is that you encounter the comforting ordinariness of everyone else.
And he commented, Couldn’t have said this better. Soon we were sending each other private messages, musings and links to articles, and when he didn’t reply on weekends, I sent the subject line Waiting for Godot .
I’m going to be in London, I wrote to him, a trip I hadn’t planned on at all. Would you like to meet for a cup of tea? he asked, and suggested an independent bookshop. He told me later that he had slipped off his ring on the tube, just before walking the short distance to the bookshop. The slice of skin on his finger should have been lighter-toned and it wasn’t, but I did not even consider his ring finger until the evening, weeks later, when he told me he was married. That first day we drank Earl Grey tea, his with sugar, mine without, and he stirred his for too long. He was nervous, his movements unsmooth. I felt tense, unable to meet his gaze. Exchanging messages had felt so right, and now here was reality, brooding with the unknown. At least he looked like his photo, with light hair falling untended across his face. But he was much taller than I had imagined, and more well-worn, his fingernails rough, his brown leather jacket faded to beige at the elbows. Both our teas were half-finished when he abruptly asked, “Shall we take a walk?”
“Perfect idea!”
I said, feeling a little silly.
As we walked, the awkwardness melted away. He said it had never felt so nice to be in London; he hadn’t been in a while, he was hibernating at home writing his book. He said he thought much of poetry was really travel writing and I said much of poetry was poetry and he laughed. He flicked his hair back when he laughed. He looked at me—looked down at me, really, since he was so tall—his eyes tenderly baffled, as if he, too, was stunned to find such pleasure merely in walking the streets of London amid a cooling wind. “Sorry!”
he said to a man he nearly bumped into at a corner.
“You weren’t paying attention,” I teased.
“No,”
he said, and his “no”
spoke of unfolding mysteries. On a narrow street, he gestured and said this was the remnant of a century past. His arm brushed against mine. With evening fading, I felt a catch in my throat, as if I might burst into tears from a sense of impending loss.
Perhaps I fell in love that day; love happens long before we call it love. In the following weeks we took many long walks. I discovered how a city, because of another person’s eyes, can become a glimmering sanctum, everything alight with interest, everything worth exploring. We browsed in Daunt Books, his favorite haunt, and did I know, he asked, that it first specialized in travel writing? We ate at a small basement restaurant on the Strand, pizza at an Italian place in Marylebone, lingered reading menus at restaurant doors. One day he slid a slender manuscript across the café table and told me I was the first person to read it; even his editor hadn’t seen it yet. A history of English travel writing; he’d left his job in publishing to write it. I read it carefully, warmed by his trust. He wanted to read something of mine, and at first I balked. “It’s not very good,”
I said when I finally showed him my article about my trip to Qatar. We were walking across a rain-dampened park and he sat on a bench under an oak tree and read it aloud.
“?‘I have never heard a sound as beautiful as the Muslim call to prayer, at dawn, in Doha.’ What a marvelous beginning.”
His voice made me like my own words. He read poems aloud from an app on his phone and even when I didn’t like the poems, his voice was all that mattered. It was a throwback, his voice, a smoky masculine sound, and listening to him, especially as he read, I felt myself held by brute desire. He read from Arabian Sands, a book he loved, and said perhaps we could take a day trip to Oxford sometime to see Wilfred Thesiger’s photographs. A trip together.
“Yes, I’d love that,”
I said. Newly ebullient, I added, “I admire the curiosity and courage it took for people to go off to places they didn’t know.”
“Isn’t it more from disenchantment with their lives than curiosity about other lives?” he asked.
“Maybe both,”
I said. I mentioned a famous travel writer, about his age, whose book I had just read. “I think he has both.”
“Oh, he’s rubbish,”
he said, and his lips thinned and twisted, and his beauty was briefly lost. It was jealousy without envy’s bile. I was disappointed, absurdly, as if he should be above the base instincts in our nature.
“Are you living the life you imagined you would?” I asked.
“No, but who is?”
“I think some people are.”
“Some people think some people are.”
“What do you mean? That nobody is? That’s depressing.”
“Is it? I find it quite reassuring.”
“I need to believe some people are. Otherwise, what’s the point of it all?”
He looked sober. “Does it help to know that the world is full of people who are sadder than you?”
“But I’m not sad, I just dream,”
I said, and laughed to lighten what suddenly seemed a dark descent. Later I thought of his words, “Does it help to know that the world is full of people who are sadder than you?,”
because he said them when I did not know he was married, and after I knew he was married, they took on new meanings.
—
For him I adopted a fake English accent. I did not know when I did; so immersed in him, and in our long talks, that soon I was saying “heah”
for “here,”
and because I liked myself saying “heah”
I continued to say “heah.”
“I think I’m starting to sound like you,”
I said, and he said he had learned to sound posh at Oxford, but his Essex roots emerged when he said words like “male.” There was a grandeur to his simplicity, to what he valued: he never used a thesaurus, he finished every book he started, he didn’t eat fruit where it was not locally grown.
I felt the weight of fate in coincidences, saw signs in our similarities.
How could it not mean something, that we both disliked dogs?
“Joyce disliked dogs too,”
he said. “He carried stones in his pocket to throw at dogs.”
I patted playfully at his pocket and he laughed.
“I don’t wish them harm,”
he said. “I just want them to stay away from me. I do love animals in the wild.”
“Me too,” I said.
I felt, with him, that I could lay bare all my quiet hungers.
I told him I wanted to love lavishly and wanted to be loved lavishly.
I felt shy saying this, but I saw in his eyes that he understood.
At a tiny restaurant near the V he had decided but still needed my assent.
An English eccentricity, I thought, almost quaint, which only made him more desirable.
Without touching, I breathed him in, soaked him in.
I imagined that he lived in a small frayed flat full of books, and I imagined fixing up a flat that I had not seen.
He was uninterested in money, and it amused me to think of how my mother would view him, my mother with her Igbo ideals.
A man had to have money, preferably, and if he didn’t, then “potential” and “hard work” could temporarily suffice, but a man uninterested in money?
An absolute alien. Already I wanted him to meet my parents. Already I imagined our shared life between countries, England and America. One rainy afternoon, we were sitting in a casual bistro, a margherita pizza between us, and I watched him raise his glass of water to drink, and suddenly realized how happy I was. How very happy I was. From time to time, somebody would enter the restaurant, bringing a blast of cold air and the smell of wet roads.
“In America, this pizza would be twice as big with double the salt,”
I said, laughing.
“When I went to America, I was astonished to be served potatoes for breakfast,”
he said. “Potatoes!”
“Well, at least it’s made differently from dinner potatoes.”
“Americans have a sort of aggressive lack of sophistication, don’t they?” he said.
I knew what he meant, I agreed even, but his words rankled. “Every country has its philistines,” I said.
“I haven’t upset you, have I?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“By the way, the poem ‘America’ by Claude McKay. Do you know it?”
He sounded solicitous, pacifying.
“No.”
“?‘And see her might and granite wonders,’?”
he quoted.
“I don’t know it,” I said.
He was watching me. “I have upset you.”
“No, no. I think I just want you to like America, or at least not dislike it too much. Only because it’s where I call home, and I’d like you to visit me or maybe just spend some time…It’s stupid, I know.”
Why did I feel so upset, as if a brick was about to slip out from underneath a perfect precarious house? The freight of my feelings for him almost frightened me.
“I don’t dislike America, not at all. And now more so than ever. Why would you think that?”
“When we were talking about Jan Morris’s American and British covers, you said American publishers tend to fussiness.”
I began to laugh, because I knew how silly I sounded, and he laughed and said, “We better not talk about book covers, then.”
He shifted his glass of water away from the table edge. “You’re not going back very soon?”
There was a hesitation about him that might, in different circumstances, be read as weakness.
“Oh, no,” I said.
He leaned back, as if to take the full measure of me. We looked at each other. “It feels so precious.”
“What?”
“Everything.”
“Yes,”
I said. I was falling in love. I had fallen in love.
We took the same tube to the train station and then parted there, he to Essex and me to my parents’ house in Buckinghamshire. Weeks passed and we grew closer, but still he hugged me and then backed away. We had taken things slowly enough. Why did we always have to meet in London? Why couldn’t he ask me to dinner at his? He lived not far from where he grew up, and he made it sound very far away, a long unreachable distance, but when I checked online it was about forty minutes by train. I began to worry that he was closeted; there was his slightly effeminate manner, after all. He didn’t have the kind of unfettered masculinity that thrust itself into the center of everything. As a little boy he must have shared willingly; his mother would not have had to scold him to share. I told Omelogor that I was in love with the Englishman but things were still platonic. I was confused, reduced to reading unreadable signs.
“My only problem with White people is that they don’t shower with soap,”
Omelogor said.
“Omelogor!”
“When White people shower in films, have you ever seen them use soap? They just stand in the water for two seconds. They don’t scrub the folds and holes. How can somebody be clean after that?”
She was laughing her cackling laugh. “How can we be managing a White man who doesn’t use a sponge, and now on top of it, no action?”
I told her to be serious.
“Chia, you’ve never said that before,”
she said softly.
“What?”
“That you’re in love. You never said it with Darnell. Not in those words.”
“This is so different. I didn’t know love is supposed to be so easy.”
“Maybe he’s shy. Take the initiative. If you’re too shy to tell him, then show him.”
I channeled Omelogor’s courage. When we hugged at the train station, I gently lowered his face to mine and kissed him, all tongue and more tongue, and felt his desire until he drew away.
“I’m waiting for you to ask me to come home with you,”
I mumbled.
“Chia,”
he said. I looked up at him. Something spread on his face that made me anxious, as if a big engulfing flame were close, and I suddenly did not want him to say whatever it was he wanted to say.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I’m married.”
His words came out in a near-whisper, a secret only for me.
I stared blankly. “What do you mean? You’re separated?”
But he wasn’t separated, he was married, and she worked long hours in a hospital and he went home each night to her.
“I wanted to tell you, and every day I didn’t tell you, it became more impossible.”
My head felt light. I wondered what it said about my ability to see only what I wanted to see: his silence on weekends, his vagueness about the everyday details of his life.
“I was afraid of losing you. I know just how barking mad that sounds, but it’s true,” he said.
I said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I said nothing.
“I understand if you won’t see me anymore,” he said.
“No,”
I said, because already tomorrow without him felt like exile.
He exhaled, elaborately, from relief, taking my hands in his. “What are we going to do?”
he asked. I pulled my hands free. I felt ambushed, unfairly ensnared in a guilt that was not of my making. “What are we going to do?”
How could he ask me that? Why would he ask me that, so soon after his revelation, as though he had not deceived me? I wanted to say, “How dare you,”
and “This is your doing, not ours,”
but I knew that because I had not turned and walked away as soon as he said he was married, it had indeed become ours. We went into the last café that was still open, near the escalator, and talked, and I wondered what he would tell his wife about being home so late. I shocked myself by how quickly the idea of a wife had sunk in. How calm I was. He said she was lovely but his marriage was stale. Stale. For a long time afterwards, I could not bear to hear anybody describe bread as stale.
—
We made love for the first time in my parents’ house, on a flowered bedspread, in my room that reminded me of the year I failed my A levels, the year I lived there, mostly alone.
“I have my period,”
I said hesitantly, and he said, “Blood is what we are.”
He got up to get a towel from the bathroom and I touched the coffee-colored spots splattered on his back.
They would become so intimately known to me, those spots.
He kissed my collarbone and rested his cheek against mine.
So much tenderness.
It didn’t feel physical.
It was a merging of those parts of us that dream, a full unmasking of two human beings.
Afterwards he went to the bathroom and returned and began swiftly to get dressed.
He sat on a chair, away from me, and I saw in his eyes something like regret, a faraway look.
Moments before, hovering above me, he had said, “I want to look at you,”
and now there he was upright and remote, his face shuttered, his shirt slightly creased. I wanted to cry. I sensed his withdrawal, this man who was not at ease with lies, who had never cheated on his wife. I would not cry. I would not cry. I should have walked away when he said he was married but I hadn’t, and this was my fault. I thought of his question, “What are we going to do?,”
and my anger flared. I would wrap myself in anger, my anger would protect me until he left; and then I would cry. He got up and sat on the bed next to me. “Everything feels so precious,”
he said quietly, and all became as it should be in the world.
—
On travel-writing websites his posts were now different. It might be helpful, he wrote, to be more specific when we send guidelines about destinations. Diverse city but what kind of diversity, an open-minded region but open-minded to whom? A village might, for example, be welcoming to Japanese but not Zambian travelers. A Black lesbian and a White lesbian might fare differently in a country we consider friendly to sexual minorities.
I was proudly amused, and wondered what his readers would think. Would any of them think: He has fallen in love with a Black African woman and now sees the world through different eyes? As for me, I wrote my articles with only him in mind. He was my audience, before even myself. I read that Skopje was the most boring capital in Europe and decided to go, wondering what he would think of an article called “Being Bored in an Already Boring Place.”
I was going for two days, and before I left, we sat on a park bench looking at blog pictures of Skopje, so much unsaid between us, such as that we should have been going together, such as that we should not be as we were.
In Skopje, I sat in a rustic restaurant texting him.
They didn’t try to make their food decorative; my main was pork and leeks plopped onto a dish.
A woman at the next table asked in heavily accented English if she could take a photograph with me.
She was polite and nicely dressed, a silk scarf splashed on her neck, her jacket hem fashionably frayed.
I wanted to say I’m not famous, until I realized she didn’t think I was famous.
She was asking because I was Black.
I said yes and stood stiffly beside her as a smiling man, maybe her husband, took the picture.
They seemed like locals; it was not a touristy restaurant.
I almost wished I were famous, to bring some worth to their photos.
I sent the Englishman a surreptitious picture of the couple as they went back to their table.
This had never happened to me before, but I knew of Black travelers chased after and photographed, in central and eastern Europe and in Asia.
“Surely not in today’s world,”
the Englishman replied. He was sending me links to articles about an erupting volcano in Iceland, a forming ash cloud which meant that planes could not fly. I thought of tiny particles of ash keeping huge planes down. “I’m worried,”
he wrote. “I don’t want you stuck there with people taking circus pictures of you.”
True enough, my flights were canceled, from Skopje to Budapest and from Budapest to London.
In the airport I felt the hot flush of panic rise in my chest, thinking of being trapped here for days or weeks, away from the Englishman, in this city where I was a curiosity.
Every flight was canceled, airline staff befuddled at the counters, saying they were sorry they had no information.
I was feeling slightly unwell, my stomach unsteady, the smell of garlic rising from my pores.
In London the Englishman was searching for options online and he called to say I could take a bus to Germany, a twenty-four-hour drive, and I might be stuck in Germany, but better that than in Skopje, where people were photographing me like a bird with unusual feathers.
I told him I didn’t really mind the photographing.
“Do you think they would have asked you if I was there with you?” he asked.
His question surprised me. “I don’t know.”
“I wish I were there. I want to be trapped with you in a place that’s new to both of us.”
—
When finally I returned to London days later, he held me in a tight embrace that fell just short of dramatic, as if the ash cloud could have lasted forever. It must have roiled his balance, because that evening he said in a high voice, trying to convince himself, “Chia, I am going home to end my marriage.”
The next day he said she had nobody—her parents died when she was young, and just last year her sister died of cancer in her arms.
And so began a cycle: he would tell her this evening, next weekend, at the end of the month.
Then he said he hadn’t told her because he couldn’t tell her, as she had nobody, and her grief for her sister was still so young.
If the ash cloud hadn’t happened, all this talk of telling her might not have started.
I was sleeping poorly, awake before dawn wondering if he had finally done it.
Each time I saw his face, I knew he hadn’t and things formerly precious became tawdry and cheapened.
I told him I loved him but this wasn’t enough.
Many times I stopped talking to him and texting him and meeting in my parents’ house.
Only to start again.
I lied to friends and pretended he was single, but I lived always on the edge of panic, that something would slip and somebody would find out.
Only Omelogor and Zikora knew he was married.
One day we were walking from the station to my parents’ house and he said something about his childhood and crumpets, and I said, “Crumpets!”
and started laughing and he started laughing, and in the middle of my laughter I looked at a patch of dying winter grass and thought: I am sad.
There was a softness to my sadness but I was sad.
The last time I saw him, at the train station, I said I was returning to America and would not be back.
“Can I come and see you? I’ll come and see you, I’ll find a way…”
he said, and let his voice trail off.
He held my hand for a long time before he let go.
I did not go into that station for many years, and when one day I did, I walked in and memory came at me, swift as a punch.
The smell of a busy London train station, coffee and food and perfume and people, display boards blinking their train times, the bright shops and the escalators.
My body stalled, by itself, on its own.
I stumbled.
So visceral, so deep, was the tidal rush of memory and regret, and loss, and longing for what could have been.