Americanah: Chapters 42–55

Sometimes the pain was as abrupt as it was on the day her house help called him sobbing to say she was lying unbreathing on her bed; other times, he forgot that she had died and would make cursory plans about flying to the east to see her.

She had looked askance at his new wealth, as though she did not understand a world in which a person could make so much so easily.

He had the car delivered to her house, a small Honda that she would not think too ostentatious, but each time he visited, he saw it parked in the garage, coated in a translucent haze of dust.

"Nobody goes to conferences. It’s like a shallow muddy pond that we are all wallowing in.”

She told herself this often, and yet endless, elliptical thoughts of what could have happened churned in her head.

Had buildings in Lagos always had this patina of decay?

No longer a ropy mass of gangly arms and gangly legs, but now a big, firm, curvy woman, exulting in her weight and height, and it made her imposing, a presence that drew the eyes.

Ifemelu had not noticed. And it piqued her. This was what a true Lagosian should have noticed: the generator house, the generator size.

“Yes, I am responsible,” she said, and feigned a simpering smile.

Where had that come from, the false bravado, the easy resort to threats?

"It is the final infantilization and informalization of America! It portends the end of the American empire, and they are killing themselves from within!” he pronounced.

And so she appeased Tochi, putting America down, talking only about the things she, too, disliked about America, exaggerating her non-American accent, until the conversation became an enervating charade.

Onikan was the old Lagos, a slice of the past, a temple to the faded splendor of the colonial years; Ifemelu remembered how houses here had sagged, unpainted and untended, and mold crept up the walls, and gate hinges rusted and atrophied.

She wore neatly pressed clothes and scuffed but carefully polished high heels, read books like Praying Your Way to Prosperity, and was superior with the drivers and ingratiating with the editors.

He was an impresario, well oiled and well practiced, the sort of man who did a good American accent and a good British accent, who knew what to say to foreigners, how to make foreigners comfortable, and who could easily get foreign grants for dubious projects.

Later, as they walked into Aunty Onenu’s office, Doris ahead, wearing a loose-fitting blue pinafore and black square-heeled mary janes, Zemaye asked Ifemelu, “Why does Doris wear rubbish to work? She looks like she is cracking a joke with her clothes.”

It was auspicious, his arrival, a day after she put up her blog and a week after she resigned.

Aunty Onenu did not seem surprised by her resignation, nor did she try to make her stay “Come and give me a hug, my dear," was all she said, smiling vacuously, while Ifemelu's pride soured.

But Ifemelu was full of sanguine expectations for The Small Redemptions of Lagos, with a dreamy photograph of an abandoned colonial house on its masthead.

She opened the windows, made him take off his shirt, and they lay side by side in bed talking, desultory talking, and she reached out and touched his forehead and left her hand there until she heard the gentle even breathing of his sleep.

There was a moment, a caving of the blue sky, an inertia of stillness, when neither of them knew what to do, he walking towards her, she standing there squinting, and then he was upon her and they hugged.

She thumped him on the back, once, twice, to make it a chummy-chummy hug, a platonic and safe chummy-chummy hug, but he pulled her ever so slightly close to him, and held her for a moment too long, as though to say he was not being chummy-chummy.

“And there is a certain bombast in the way we speak that I had also forgotten. I started feeling truly at home again when I started being bombastic!”

He said nothing; the slight sardonic raise of his eyebrows said that she, too, would have to grow up.

They watched the peacock walk out of the shadow of a tree, then its lugubrious flight up to its favorite perch on the roof, where it stood and surveyed the decayed kingdom below.

“It’s a boy from my hometown. I pay his school fees but he now has a mad sense of entitlement and this morning he sent me a text telling me he needs a cell phone and could I send it to him by Friday. A fifteen-year-old boy. The gall of it. And then he starts calling me. So I’ve just told him off and I’ve told him his scholarship is off, too, just to scare some, sense into his head.”

He increased the volume and they sang along; there was an exuberance to the song, its rhythmic joyfulness, so free of artifice, that filled the air with lightness.

“You’re married with a child and we are hot for each other. Who are we kidding with this chaste dating business? So we might as well get it over with.”

“What does it matter, married man, you?” she said, with an irony that sounded far too caustic; she wanted to be cool, distant, in control.

She had a sudden bilious terror about whatever it was he was going to say, which she did not want to hear, and so she said, wildly, “Zemaye wants to write a tongue-in-cheek guide for men who want to cheat..."

She had always thought the expression “making love” a little maudlin...

The first time she introduced him to Zemaye, lissome Zemaye in her tight skirt and platform heels, she stifled her discomfort, because she saw in Zemaye's alert appreciative eyes the eyes of all the hungry women in Lagos.

And, in that instant, his wife became a dark spectral presence in the room.

...he had balked.

A queasiness roiled in him at the thought of her with anybody else.

The minister’s wife is a homely woman of virtue.

He no longer said, "Lagos has so much flavor,” and he complained more about the traffic and he had finally stopped moping about his last girlfriend, a girl from Benue with a pretty face and dissembling manner, who had left him for a wealthy Lebanese businessman.

That night, Kosi sidled close to him, in offering.

But she always nodded, glib and accepting nods, when he told her he had been at the club.

Her palm was pale, almost diaphanous, and he could see the greenish criss-cross of her veins.

“Do something for him” meant give him money and Obinze, all of a sudden, hated that tendency of Igbo people to resort to euphemism whenever they spoke of money, to indirect references, to gesturing instead of pointing.

It riled him.

Obinze watched his daughter—her ungainly walk, the blue band, speckled with silk flowers, that sat on her head of thick hair, the way she looked up imploringly at Kosi, her expression reminding him of his mother.

Eze was the wealthiest man in the room, an owner of oil wells, and as many of the Nigerian wealthy were, he was free of angst, an obliviously happy man.

At first she played “Yori Yori” and “Obi Mu O” endlessly and then she stopped, because the songs brought to her memories a finality, as though they were dirges.