Four
The first thief of time had eyes that were never still.
He was rabidly ambitious, restless, casting about for what business opportunity to try next, what new peaks to aim for.
Seated across from him in restaurants, she always felt like turning back or sideways to see what he was glancing at.
He wore too-strong cologne and everything he touched, every room he walked into, smelled of leathery rum.
It gave her a mild headache but she never told him.
He had a law degree from Enugu, an MBA from somewhere in the Midwest, and a master’s in public health from College Park.
He was always going to the Baltimore port to ship containers to Lagos, and he liked the word “dabble.”
I dabble in real estate.
I dabble in investments.
I dabble in pharmaceuticals.
The first time she visited him, she was stunned by the state of his house.
Cobwebs hung silkily from the ceiling, half-eaten yogurt furred by mold sat on his nightstand, and on the floor by his bed were cups with the dregs of sticky-looking liquid, old beer or maybe juice.
The dried pastry crumbs spread over his sofa seemed not just ignored but apparently unseen.
How could he appear in public washed and crisply ironed, haircut sharp and shoes shining, and yet insouciantly live in such filth? She felt almost frightened, as if his terrible hygiene held a meaning, a clue not yet deciphered but undoubtedly dark.
“Sorry, it’s just that I have not had a woman in this house in ages; you’re the first in a long time,”
he said, smiling, and waiting for her to look pleased. On her next visit, plates piled with the chewed remnants of chicken bones had been left on his dining table as if he hadn’t known she was coming. An oily spoon sat in a dirty bowl near his bed. He said, “I’ll clean it up, sorry,”
but he sounded unpersuasive, almost breezy, because he expected that she would offer to do it herself. And she did; in her high heels, she wiped his kitchen counters and washed his dishes before they went out to see a movie.
“Do you want children?”
he asked, more than a year into her waiting.
“Yes, very much.”
“Have you ever been pregnant before?”
His question was lightly asked but she heard its undertone of ruthless sniffing.
It surprised her, and upset her, to think he was the kind of Igbo man who wanted proof of fertility before he proposed.
Backward, uneducated men did this ugly hedging, this bartering of baby for marriage; not men like him with many degrees, who donated to the state Democratic Party and played golf with Americans in Turf Valley.
His progressive veneer must be thin, selective, maybe even all smoke, and she worried about what else was yet to be revealed.
In another time of her life, she would have told him to go to hell with that question.
“No,” she said.
“Your mother had problems having other children?”
“She got pregnant many times, she just had miscarriages,”
said and heard the defensiveness in her own voice. She saw now why he had asked: because she was an only child, she might be infected with the single-child curse at best and infertility at worst.
“We can start trying. What do you think?”
He was sitting up in bed looking at her, his expression magnanimous, pleased with himself, as if he was giving her a gift. Was it a proposal? Of course she wanted a proposal without being first asked to get pregnant, and yet her excitement was rising, despite herself.
“I think it’s not a bad idea,”
she said, and laughed.
“I don’t believe in nannies,” he said.
“What?”
“Once it happens, you need to organize your work situation, because I don’t believe in nannies.”
leaned back on the pillow and said nothing. Even the duvet smelled of his cologne.
“I will provide everything for you, my darling,”
he said, gently pulling her to him. “Of course I will; you don’t have to worry about that.”
He thought she needed reassurance that he would provide for her.
He could not comprehend that she might not want to be unemployed for years, or that she, too, needed to do things in the world, to own things for herself.
How baffling, this blindness of his, for someone so ambitious.
Or maybe it was the nature of ambition, to be unable to see other instances of itself.
She had felt from the beginning that she and the first thief of time saw life’s shape in sharply different ways, like those images people sent around asking if you saw gray or if you saw pink, because different people saw different colors even though they were looking at the same thing.
Still, she held on because people changed, and she could change him.
Let’s get married first, she thought, let me get pregnant first.
She continued washing the dishes left on his table; at least there was progress as he no longer kept any under his bed.
Once, when she had stopped taking her birth-control pills, he musingly said, “My father is a pillar of the Anglican church in Mbaise. I don’t mind a Catholic wedding, but I don’t know if he’ll accept it.”
“I’m flexible,”
she said, a little too quickly, before her face could show its dismay.
Holes cratered in her heart at the thought of a wedding that was not Catholic, an insipid ceremony in a Protestant church; she would not even feel married afterwards, but she didn’t want to dwell on it.
They could get a Catholic blessing after the wedding, and once they were in earnest planning, she might yet convince him that Protestants didn’t care about mixed marriages as Catholics did.
What mattered was that they first set sail.
Then Chidimma sent her a photo of a wedding invitation.
She was in CVS, after work, looking for a supplement she had read about that increased fertility.
Later, she would remember this with bitter irony, holding the bottle of pills in its pink and blue packet, while looking at the image on her screen.
Chidimma had been a forgettable person in secondary school, but after moving to Houston to marry a man who ended up in prison, she became the bulldog of gossip, sending unwanted updates to everyone about everyone else.
At first, was confused to see his full name in cursive font, before a cold shiver of realization dawned, that he was about to marry a girl in Nigeria.
She shook her head, and shook it again.
She felt herself suddenly inside a Nollywood film that relied cheaply on caprice and coincidence.
She wondered at the nature of deceit.
It seemed so unnecessary, that he would bother with this elaborate charade.
She was already sleeping with him and he hadn’t needed to lie about marriage, if sex was what he was after.
Or had he asked different women, planning to bestow the prize of marriage on whoever got pregnant first? She wanted to know, she really did, to quiet her mind, but Chia told her not to confront him, to simply block his number and move on.
“What is he going to tell you that will make sense to you?”
Chia asked.
felt a bifurcation of self, two parts of her existing in parallel. At work she was meticulous, skeptical, reading everything twice and asking questions, but with men she blundered ahead, wanting to believe whatever she was told.
—
The other thief of time was a man who sulked like a child. Sometimes for no reason at all he would go silent for hours or days, his lower lip jutting out like a toddler who believed himself unfairly deprived. If she tried talking to him before he was ready to talk, he would lapse into humming, tuneless humming. With him, she felt like a medium, intuiting reasons and mending faults whose boundaries were unknown to her. “I’m very sorry,”
she would end up saying, unsure what the apology was for. He liked her apologies best when they were tearful. He rained praises on Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Angela Merkel; “I love powerful women,”
he declared often; but whenever she disagreed with him, he snapped, “That’s disrespectful!”
He liked to talk about Nigerian politics and American politics, and he was insightful and funny—“American politicians are beggars and Nigerian politicians are thieves, but in the end all of them are obsessed with money,”
he said once—but of their relationship he said little, and so she was left searching his gestures for meaning. One day he brought her a surprise gift in an elegant paper bag, which was unlike him, to give a present for the sake of it. He was frugal, he considered restaurants a scam; scanning menus, he would say, “This entrée will pay for one week’s groceries.” A square box swaddled in soft cream paper. She felt her stomach knot and unknot, certain it was a ring because there was nothing else it could be. He had never asked what kind of ring she liked, but it didn’t matter because she could always buy herself another ring and of course tell everyone that it was from him. She lifted the soft paper sheet by sheet, to savor the moment before she got to the box, and glanced up to see him grinning down at her. The box revealed a pink candle, its wick sticking up tall.
“I remember you said you like scented candles,” he said.
She paused before she said thank you.
Humiliation swirled richly in that pause.
She had never told him she liked scented candles, because she did not like scented candles at all.
They were fire hazards for mundane rewards; she didn’t see the point when you could get air fresheners instead.
She left the scented candle, still in its box, on her dresser.
If he gave her a scented candle, it meant the person who liked scented candles was gone from the landscape of his life, or maybe the person who liked scented candles had angrily rejected this candle and was waiting for other forms of atonement from him.
She would never ask him about it; silence was her only refuge from the full force of humiliation that would shrink her and make her small.
She could have hidden or thrown away the candle, but each time she walked past her dresser she saw a reminder of what she had chosen to endure.
And endure she would, because she was acidly aware of time.
She was thirty-eight years old and he was a Catholic Igbo man, employed at the CDC, who was good company on his good days.
If he proposed soon, she could have her two children, back to back, before turning forty-two.
She had read somewhere that the risk of autism increased with the mother’s age, as if she didn’t have enough to worry about.
Somebody on one of her Catholic online groups posted: All of you waiting on God, remember that Sarah gave birth to Isaac at an advanced age.
Remember Elizabeth and John the Baptist.
Do not despair.
She did despair, because this was precisely the root of her fear, having a child at an advanced age.
She wanted to stop her birth control, but not unless she was sure he planned to propose, and in roundabout ways she tried to ask, but she could not ask directly.
Some last scraps of pride had to be preserved.
“What are we doing?”
she would ask, and he would say, “Enjoying each other.”
“What future do you see for us?”
and he would say, “A very bright future.”
Marriage self-help guides had always seemed silly to her, their generalizations too sweeping and coarse, but she began reading them because it couldn’t hurt just to see.
Be intentional.
Show you want to get married without showing you want to get married.
He’ll run if you’re too pushy.
It’s true about men and food.
Sometimes he met her at the metro stop, and as soon as they got back to her apartment, she would shrug off her work bag and pour him a beer, already heating up rice and stew and sliding salmon portions in the oven.
This to show how seamlessly she handled work and home.
When he stayed over, she packed his lunch for work, turkey and cheddar sandwiches wrapped in parchment to keep sogginess away.
Weekends she cooked batches of stew and okra soup and jollof rice, and took them to his apartment in containers for his freezer.
He didn’t propose.
Pretend you might be pregnant, the guide said, but that she couldn’t do.
She just couldn’t, and it was not only because pregnancy still brought a half shadow of pain from the past.
One Sunday he was sprawled on his sofa watching an English Premier League match on a sports channel had never heard of, shouting from time to time, “Come on, Arsenal! Come on, Arsenal!”
Next to his speaker lay his PlayStation, wires rolled up, like a patient mistress waiting for him. He sat up to open a carton of chicken wings delivered from a pizza place. He glanced sideways at her and asked, “You want wings, babe?”
She shook her head no and he ate two wings and went back to watching his game.
She knew in that moment that he was never going to propose.
He liked her, the convenience of her, but not enough to disrupt his life before he was ready.
And he wasn’t ready, he didn’t have to be ready, he wasn’t agonizing about the age of his eggs.
Whenever he was ready, there would be another woman willing to make his sandwiches and slip an apple into his bag for work.
almost envied him this, the luxury of walking at his own pace, free of biology’s hysterical constraints.