Two
They met at a vegan cookbook launch that she almost didn’t attend. Stylish people milling about in a rooftop space downtown, while someone at the microphone described the complicated canapés circulating on trays. The author was a private chef, married to her colleague Jon.
“You two know each other?”
was how Jon introduced her and Kwame, and Kwame leaned toward her, an act of casual intimacy, surprising but not inappropriate, as though they did know each other but only as good friends.
“When they say something tastes nutty, do we know which nut they mean? Because a walnut tastes nothing like a cashew,”
Kwame said.
“I think they mean a texture, not a taste,”
she said, and laughed, a little too eagerly, because she hadn’t expected to meet anyone at this vegan cookbook launch, and now here was a clean-looking Black man and possibility trilling quietly in the air. On their first date he said, “You’re looking nutty good!”
He had a boyish quality, which was not, as in some men, mere cover for immaturity; he was a grown-up who could still reach and touch in himself the wonder and innocence of childhood. “Nutty”
became their word. They used it as an adverb, an endearment, an adjective; and even when it wasn’t funny, it was still theirs.
On the day they broke up, he said, looking her over, “Hey, you nutty gorgeous person.”
Neither of them knew they would break up that evening as they arrived at his law firm’s gala holding hands, in his dark suit and her emerald dress, an elegant Black couple in Washington, D.C., full of glittering starry promise. She had never known a man so attentive and free of restlessness.
He volunteered details about his life, and at first his openness confused her because she had dated men who were so guarded they made secrets of simple things.
When Kwame saw her, he let his face show its light; he didn’t mask his delight or pretend not to care too much. He said “I love you” before she did.
He was supposed to be like other single straight successful Black men in D.C.: intoxicated by his own rarity, replete with romance opportunities, always holding out for the next better thing.
At first she held her breath, waiting for him to change and rupture and reveal the sludgy sinister core.
But he remained as he was, and so she unfurled wholly into their life together. She was thirteen months older but sometimes she felt much older, as though she knew better than he how uneven life’s seams could be.
He was blind to the insincerity in people and the ill will of friends, so often self-evident to her. He said jokingly that she needed to vet his friends, to protect him, a joke with the undertones of truth. “You would have probably warned me about Maya,”
he said once, with a laugh. Maya, the long-term girlfriend from college and into law school, who told him she was done because she was bored, and left him reeling and celibate for years. knew that when he said he loved how she “got” him, left unsaid was that Maya hadn’t.
Or when he said he loved how similar their backgrounds were, he was saying Maya wasn’t African, and being African was a plus.
It pleased her competitive impulse, to have these advantages over his ex.
But his American childhood seemed fraught in ways quite different from her Nigerian one.
He had grown up in Northern Virginia with his dreams already dreamed for him.
His Ghanaian father’s immigrant intensity mixed with his African American mother, who was determined to open for him the many doors that history had slammed shut in her face.
He and his younger brother had violin lessons and went to private school in formal uniforms, and every summer his father arranged tutors and pasted reading lists on the refrigerator.
He had barely unsealed his undergrad acceptance letter from Cornell before his parents began talking about law school.
The first time he took her to Sunday lunch at his parents’ house in McLean, she was surprised by their warmth.
From his stories, she had expected them to warily welcome her and then spend the meal measuring her worthiness.
She hadn’t expected to be so at ease with them, but she knew their approval would have been slower had she not had the right bona fides.
His mother asked her about Watkins Dunn.
“The mayor’s husband was a founding partner before he passed,” she said, which hadn’t even known.
His father asked about her father’s oil business in Enugu, and said, “Well, oil-servicing,” a little surprised that Kwame had told them in that much detail about her life.
His father listened intently when others spoke, tilting his head of salt-and-pepper hair with the demeanor of a charming diplomat.
His mother mothered her, saying you haven’t eaten much, you do eat meat, don’t you, is the fruit tart okay.
After lunch, his mother said they had to show a special performance and she sat at the piano and began to play, while Kwame groaned and his father sang the Ghanaian national anthem.
“I’m so glad he’s finally moved on,”
his mother said in her ear as they hugged goodbye.
In the car Kwame said, “That could have gone a bit better,”
and she playfully punched his shoulder.
“Yours or mine?”
Kwame asked.
“Mine.”
He always asked, even though they spent more time at her apartment; it was bigger than his, with taller windows, the living area flooded with light.
He said all that natural light made his video games look better on the screen.
Every Sunday he went with her to Mass, and at brunch afterwards he joked about how the Black Baptist church hadn’t prepared him for all that Catholic sitting and standing. “But it’s all love,”
he said. “Martin Luther King said Jesus was ‘an extremist for love.’?”
He told her that his childhood visits to Ghana had petered out after his father became estranged from his family, over inheritance issues he never fully understood.
“My dad won’t even talk about it,” he said.
“It’s sad how these things can really divide families,” she said.
“I know. But we’ll get me back to my African roots, right?”
“We will,”
she said, and kissed his lips.
So this was happiness, to live in the first person plural. We need milk. How about we do a night in this weekend? We’re going to be late to this thing. Are we doing the museum or no?
—
They went to his mother’s summer family reunion and was moved to see that Kwame had ordered a T-shirt for her too, with his mother’s family name printed above an image of a multi-branched tree.
She wore it with a thrill of belonging as she watched him throw a Frisbee with the teenage boys in a field fringed by cherry trees.
They were shouting and teasing one another, and she could see how much they liked and looked up to him, this successful older cousin, a D.C.
lawyer steeped in cool.
The women relatives flirted with him and he, generously, harmlessly, paid them compliments.
How they loved him, eager to be near him, touch him, talk to him.
was sitting in the shade, eating watermelon with his parents, and from time to time they laughed at Kwame’s antics, their body language fluent with pride: he had turned out exactly as they had hoped.
When they laughed, his mother nudged , an invitation to join in their mirth.
felt herself sitting up straighter and eating more delicately, as though she had won a prize she was not sure she deserved and so needed to show her very best side.