Americanah

CHAPTER 1

Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly. Philadelphia had the musty scent of history. New Haven smelled of neglect. Baltimore smelled of brine, and Brooklyn of sun-warmed garbage. But Princeton had no smell. She liked taking deep breaths here. She liked watching the locals who drove with pointed courtesy and parked their latest-model cars outside the organic grocery store on Nassau Street or outside the sushi restaurants or outside the ice cream shop that had fifty different flavors including red pepper or outside the post office where effusive staff bounded out to greet them at the entrance. She liked the campus, grave with knowledge, the Gothic buildings with their vine-laced walls, and the way everything transformed, in the half-light of night, into a ghostly scene. She liked, most of all, that in this place of affluent ease, she could pretend to be someone else, someone specially admitted into a hallowed American club, someone adorned with certainty.

But she did not like that she had to go to Trenton to braid her hair. It was unreasonable to expect a braiding salon in Princeton — the few black locals she had seen were so light-skinned and lank-haired she could not imagine them wearing braids — and yet as she waited at Princeton Junction station for the train, on an afternoon ablaze with heat, she wondered why there was no place where she could braid her hair. The chocolate bar in her handbag had melted. A few other people were waiting on the platform, all of them white and lean, in short, flimsy clothes. The man standing closest to her was eating an ice cream cone; she had always found it a little irresponsible, the eating of ice cream cones by grown-up American men, especially the eating of ice cream cones by grown-up American men in public. He turned to her and said, “About time,” when the train finally creaked in, with the familiarity strangers adopt with each other after sharing in the disappointment of a public service. She smiled at him. The graying hair on the back of his head was swept forward, a comical arrangement to disguise his bald spot. He had to be an academic, but not in the humanities or he would be more self-conscious. A firm science like chemistry, maybe. Before, she would have said, “I know,” that peculiar American expression that professed agreement rather than knowledge, and then she would have started a conversation with him, to see if he would say something she could use in her blog. People were flattered to be asked about themselves and if she said nothing after they spoke, it made them say more. They were conditioned to fill silences. If they asked what she did, she would say vaguely, “I write a lifestyle blog,” because saying “I write an anonymous blog called Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black” would make them uncomfortable. She had said it, though, a few times. Once to a dreadlocked white man who sat next to her on the train, his hair like old twine ropes that ended in a blond fuzz, his tattered shirt worn with enough piety to convince her that he was a social warrior and might make a good guest blogger. “Race is totally overhyped these days, black people need to get over themselves, it’s all about class now, the haves and the have-nots,” he told her evenly, and she used it as the opening sentence of a post titled “Not All Dreadlocked White American Guys Are Down.” Then there was the man from Ohio, who was squeezed next to her on a flight. A middle manager, she was sure, from his boxy suit and contrast collar. He wanted to know what she meant by “lifestyle blog,” and she told him, expecting him to become reserved, or to end the conversation by saying something defensively bland like “The only race that matters is the human race.” But he said, “Ever write about adoption? Nobody wants black babies in this country, and I don’t mean biracial, I mean black. Even the black families don’t want them.”

He told her that he and his wife had adopted a black child and their neighbors looked at them as though they had chosen to become martyrs for a dubious cause. Her blog post about him, “Badly-Dressed White Middle Managers from Ohio Are Not Always What You Think,” had received the highest number of comments for that month. She still wondered if he had read it. She hoped so. Often, she would sit in cafés, or airports, or train stations, watching strangers, imagining their lives, and wondering which of them were likely to have read her blog. Now her ex-blog. She had written the final post only days ago, trailed by two hundred and seventy-four comments so far. All those readers, growing month by month, linking and cross-posting, knowing so much more than she did; they had always frightened and exhilarated her. SapphicDerrida, one of the most frequent posters, wrote: I’m a bit surprised by how personally I am taking this. Good luck as you pursue the unnamed “life change” but please come back to the blogosphere soon. You’ve used your irreverent, hectoring, funny and thought-provoking voice to create a space for real conversations about an important subject. Readers like SapphicDerrida, who reeled off statistics and used words like “reify” in their comments, made Ifemelu nervous, eager to be fresh and to impress, so that she began, over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the carcasses of people’s stories for something she could use. Sometimes making fragile links to race. Sometimes not believing herself. The more she wrote, the less sure she became. Each post scraped off yet one more scale of self until she felt naked and false.

The ice-cream-eating man sat beside her on the train and, to discourage conversation, she stared fixedly at a brown stain near her feet, a spilled frozen Frappuccino, until they arrived at Trenton. The platform was crowded with black people, many of them fat, in short, flimsy clothes. It still startled her, what a difference a few minutes of train travel made. During her first year in America, when she took New Jersey Transit to Penn Station and then the subway to visit Aunty Uju in Flatlands, she was struck by how mostly slim white people got off at the stops in Manhattan and, as the train went further into Brooklyn, the people left were mostly black and fat. She had not thought of them as “fat,” though. She had thought of them as “big,” because one of the first things her friend Ginika told her was that “fat” in America was a bad word, heaving with moral judgment like “stupid” or “bastard,” and not a mere description like “short” or “tall.” So she had banished “fat” from her vocabulary. But “fat” came back to her last winter, after almost thirteen years, when a man in line behind her at the supermarket muttered, “Fat people don’t need to be eating that shit,” as she paid for her giant bag of Tostitos. She glanced at him, surprised, mildly offended, and thought it a perfect blog post, how this stranger had decided she was fat. She would file the post under the tag “race, gender and body size.” But back home, as she stood and faced the mirror’s truth, she realized that she had ignored, for too long, the new tightness of her clothes, the rubbing together of her inner thighs, the softer, rounder parts of her that shook when she moved. She was fat.

She said the word “fat” slowly, funneling it back and forward, and thought about all the other things she had learned not to say aloud in America. She was fat. She was not curvy or big-boned; she was fat, it was the only word that felt true. And she had ignored, too, the cement in her soul. Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine—“You are the absolute love of my life,” he’d written in her last birthday card — and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness. She scoured Nigerian websites, Nigerian profiles on Facebook, Nigerian blogs, and each click brought yet another story of a young person who had recently moved back home, clothed in American or British degrees, to start an investment company, a music production business, a fashion label, a magazine, a fast-food franchise. She looked at photographs of these men and women and felt the dull ache of loss, as though they had prised open her hand and taken something of hers. They were living her life. Nigeria became where she was supposed to be, the only place she could sink her roots in without the constant urge to tug them out and shake off the soil. And, of course, there was also Obinze. Her first love, her first lover, the only person with whom she had never felt the need to explain herself. He was now a husband and father, and they had not been in touch in years, yet she could not pretend that he was not a part of her homesickness, or that she did not often think of him, sifting through their past, looking for portents of what she could not name.

The rude stranger in the supermarket — who knew what problems he was wrestling with, haggard and thin-lipped as he was — had intended to offend her but had instead prodded her awake.

She began to plan and to dream, to apply for jobs in Lagos. She did not tell Blaine at first, because she wanted to finish her fellowship at Princeton, and then after her fellowship ended, she did not tell him because she wanted to give herself time to be sure. But as the weeks passed, she knew she would never be sure. So she told him that she was moving back home, and she added, “I have to,” knowing he would hear in her words the sound of an ending.

“Why?” Blaine asked, almost automatically, stunned by her announcement. There they were, in his living room in New Haven, awash in soft jazz and daylight, and she looked at him, her good, bewildered man, and felt the day take on a sad, epic quality. They had lived together for three years, three years free of crease, like a smoothly ironed sheet, until their only fight, months ago, when Blaine’s eyes froze with blame and he refused to speak to her. But they had survived that fight, mostly because of Barack Obama, bonding anew over their shared passion. On election night, before Blaine kissed her, his face wet with tears, he held her tightly as though Obama’s victory was also their personal victory. And now here she was telling him it was over. “Why?” he asked. He taught ideas of nuance and complexity in his classes and yet he was asking her for a single reason, the cause. But she had not had a bold epiphany and there was no cause; it was simply that layer after layer of discontent had settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled her. She did not tell him this, because it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.

“Take the plant,” he said to her, on the last day she saw him, when she was packing the clothes she kept in his apartment. He looked defeated, standing slump-shouldered in the kitchen. It was his houseplant, hopeful green leaves rising from three bamboo stems, and when she took it, a sudden crushing loneliness lanced through her and stayed with her for weeks. Sometimes, she still felt it. How was it possible to miss something you no longer wanted? Blaine needed what she was unable to give and she needed what he was unable to give, and she grieved this, the loss of what could have been.

So here she was, on a day filled with the opulence of summer, about to braid her hair for the journey home. Sticky heat sat on her skin. There were people thrice her size on the Trenton platform and she looked admiringly at one of them, a woman in a very short skirt. She thought nothing of slender legs shown off in miniskirts — it was safe and easy, after all, to display legs of which the world approved — but the fat woman’s act was about the quiet conviction that one shared only with oneself, a sense of rightness that others failed to see. Her decision to move back was similar; whenever she felt besieged by doubts, she would think of herself as standing valiantly alone, as almost heroic, so as to squash her uncertainty. The fat woman was co-coordinating a group of teenagers who looked sixteen and seventeen years old. They crowded around, a summer program advertised on the front and back of their yellow T-shirts, laughing and talking. They reminded Ifemelu of her cousin Dike. One of the boys, dark and tall, with the leanly muscled build of an athlete, looked just like Dike. Not that Dike would ever wear those shoes that looked like espadrilles. Weak kicks, he would call them. It was a new one; he first used it a few days ago when he told her about going shopping with Aunty Uju. “Mom wanted to buy me these crazy shoes. Come on, Coz, you know I can’t wear weak kicks!”

Ifemelu joined the taxi line outside the station. She hoped her driver would not be a Nigerian, because he, once he heard her accent, would either be aggressively eager to tell her that he had a master’s degree, the taxi was a second job, and his daughter was on the dean’s list at Rutgers; or he would drive in sullen silence, giving her change and ignoring her “thank you,” all the time nursing humiliation, that this fellow Nigerian, a small girl at that, who perhaps was a nurse or an accountant or even a doctor, was looking down on him. Nigerian taxi drivers in America were all convinced that they really were not taxi drivers. She was next in line. Her taxi driver was black and middle-aged. She opened the door and glanced at the back of the driver’s seat. Mervin Smith. Not Nigerian, but you could never be too sure. Nigerians took on all sorts of names here. Even she had once been somebody else.

“How you doing?” the man asked.

She could tell right away, with relief, that his accent was Caribbean.

“I’m very well. Thank you.” She gave him the address of Mariama African Hair Braiding. It was her first time at this salon — her regular one was closed because the owner had gone back to Côte d’Ivoire to get married — but it would look, she was sure, like all the other African hair braiding salons she had known: they were in the part of the city that had graffiti, dank buildings, and no white people, they displayed bright signboards with names like Aisha and Fatima African Hair Braiding, they had radiators that were too hot in the winter and air conditioners that did not cool in the summer, and they were full of Francophone West African women braiders, one of whom would be the owner and speak the best English and answer the phone and be deferred to by the others. Often, there was a baby tied to someone’s back with a piece of cloth. Or a toddler asleep on a wrapper spread over a battered sofa. Sometimes, older children stopped by. The conversations were loud and swift, in French or Wolof or Malinke, and when they spoke English to customers, it was broken, curious, as though they had not quite eased into the language itself before taking on a slangy Americanism. Words came out half-completed. Once a Guinean braider in Philadelphia had told Ifemelu, “Amma like, Oh Gad, Az someh.” It took many repetitions for Ifemelu to understand that the woman was saying, “I’m like, Oh God, I was so mad.”

Mervin Smith was upbeat and chatty. He talked, as he drove, about how hot it was, how rolling blackouts were sure to come.

“This is the kind of heat that kills old folks. If they don’t have air-conditioning, they have to go to the mall, you know. The mall is free air-conditioning. But sometimes there’s nobody to take them. People have to take care of the old folks,” he said, his jolly mood unfazed by Ifemelu’s silence.

“Here we are!” he said, parking in front of a shabby block. The salon was in the middle, between a Chinese restaurant called Happy Joy and a convenience store that sold lottery tickets. Inside, the room was thick with disregard, the paint peeling, the walls plastered with large posters of braided hairstyles and smaller posters that said QUICK TAX REFUND. Three women, all in T-shirts and knee-length shorts, were working on the hair of seated customers. A small TV mounted on a corner of the wall, the volume a little too loud, was showing a Nigerian film: a man beating his wife, the wife cowering and shouting, the poor audio quality jarring.

“Hi!” Ifemelu said.

They all turned to look at her, but only one, who had to be the eponymous Mariama, said, “Hi. Welcome.”

“I’d like to get braids.”

“What kind of braids you want?”

Ifemelu said she wanted a medium kinky twist and asked how much it was.

“Two hundred,” Mariama said.

“I paid one sixty last month.” She had last braided her hair three months ago.

Mariama said nothing for a while, her eyes back on the hair she was braiding.

“So one sixty?” Ifemelu asked.

Mariama shrugged and smiled. “Okay, but you have to come back next time. Sit down. Wait for Aisha. She will finish soon.” Mariama pointed at the smallest of the braiders, who had a skin condition, pinkish-cream whorls of discoloration on her arms and neck that looked worryingly infectious.

“Hi, Aisha,” Ifemelu said.

Aisha glanced at Ifemelu, nodding ever so slightly, her face blank, almost forbidding in its expressionlessness. There was something strange about her.

Ifemelu sat close to the door; the fan on the chipped table was turned on high but did little for the stuffiness in the room. Next to the fan were combs, packets of hair attachments, magazines bulky with loose pages, piles of colorful DVDs. A broom was propped in one corner, near the candy dispenser and the rusty hair dryer that had not been used in a hundred years. On the TV screen, a father was beating two children, wooden punches that hit the air above their heads.

“No! Bad father! Bad man!” the other braider said, staring at the TV and flinching.

“You from Nigeria?” Mariama asked.

“Yes,” Ifemelu said. “Where are you from?”

“Me and my sister Halima are from Mali. Aisha is from Senegal,” Mariama said.

Aisha did not look up, but Halima smiled at Ifemelu, a smile that, in its warm knowingness, said welcome to a fellow African; she would not smile at an American in the same way. She was severely cross-eyed, pupils darting in opposite directions, so that Ifemelu felt thrown offbalance, not sure which of Halima’s eyes was on her.

Ifemelu fanned herself with a magazine. “It’s so hot,” she said. At least, these women would not say to her “You’re hot? But you’re from Africa!”

“This heat wave is very bad. Sorry the air conditioner broke yesterday,” Mariama said.

Ifemelu knew the air conditioner had not broken yesterday, it had been broken for much longer, perhaps it had always been broken; still she nodded and said that perhaps it had packed up from overuse. The phone rang. Mariama picked it up and after a minute said, “Come now,” the very words that had made Ifemelu stop making appointments with African hair braiding salons. Come now, they always said, and then you arrived to find two people waiting to get micro braids and still the owner would tell you “Wait, my sister is coming to help.” The phone rang again and Mariama spoke in French, her voice rising, and she stopped braiding to gesture with her hand as she shouted into the phone. Then she unfolded a yellow Western Union form from her pocket and began reading out the numbers. “Trois! Cinq! Non, non, cinq!”

The woman whose hair she was braiding in tiny, painful-looking cornrows said sharply, “Come on! I’m not spending the whole day here!”

“Sorry, sorry,” Mariama said. Still, she finished repeating the Western Union numbers before she continued braiding, the phone lodged between her shoulder and ear.

Ifemelu opened her novel, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and skimmed a few pages. She had been meaning to read it for a while now, and imagined she would like it since Blaine did not. A precious performance, Blaine had called it, in that gently forbearing tone he used when they talked about novels, as though he was sure that she, with a little more time and a little more wisdom, would come to accept that the novels he liked were superior, novels written by young and youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness. She had read many of them, because he recommended them, but they were like cotton candy that so easily evaporated from her tongue’s memory.

She closed the novel; it was too hot to concentrate. She ate some melted chocolate, sent Dike a text to call her when he was finished with basketball practice, and fanned herself. She read the signs on the opposite wall — NO ADJUSTMENTS TO BRAIDS AFTER ONE WEEK. NO PERSONAL CHECKS. NO REFUNDS — but she carefully avoided looking at the corners of the room because she knew that clumps of moldy newspapers would be stuffed beneath pipes and grime and things long rotten.

Finally, Aisha finished with her customer and asked what color Ifemelu wanted for her hair attachments.

“Color four.”

“Not good color,” Aisha said promptly.

“That’s what I use.”

“It look dirty. You don’t want color one?”

“Color one is too black, it looks fake,” Ifemelu said, loosening her headwrap. “Sometimes I use color two but color four is closest to my natural color.”

Aisha shrugged, a haughty shrug, as though it was not her problem if her customer did not have good taste. She reached into a cupboard, brought out two packets of attachments, checked to make sure they were both the same color.

She touched Ifemelu’s hair. “Why you don’t have relaxer?”

“I like my hair the way God made it.”

“But how you comb it? Hard to comb,” Aisha said.

Ifemelu had brought her own comb. She gently combed her hair, dense, soft, and tightly coiled, until it framed her head like a halo. “It’s not hard to comb if you moisturize it properly,” she said, slipping into the coaxing tone of the proselytizer that she used whenever she was trying to convince other black women about the merits of wearing their hair natural. Aisha snorted; she clearly could not understand why anybody would choose to suffer through combing natural hair, instead of simply relaxing it. She sectioned out Ifemelu’s hair, plucked a little attachment from the pile on the table, and began deftly to twist.

“It’s too tight,” Ifemelu said. “Don’t make it tight.” Because Aisha kept twisting to the end, Ifemelu thought that perhaps she had not understood, and so Ifemelu touched the offending braid and said, “Tight, tight.”

Aisha pushed her hand away. “No. No. Leave it. It good.”

“It’s tight!” Ifemelu said. “Please loosen it.”

Mariama was watching them. A flow of French came from her. Aisha loosened the braid.

“Sorry,” Mariama said. “She doesn’t understand very well.”

But Ifemelu could see, from Aisha’s face, that she understood very well. Aisha was simply a true market woman, immune to the cosmetic niceties of American customer service. Ifemelu imagined her working in a market in Dakar, like the braiders in Lagos who would blow their noses and wipe their hands on their wrappers, roughly jerk their customers’ heads to position them better, complain about how full or how hard or how short the hair was, shout out to passing women, while all the time conversing too loudly and braiding too tightly.

“You know her?” Aisha asked, glancing at the television screen.

“What?”

Aisha repeated herself, and pointed at the actress on the screen.

“No,” Ifemelu said.

“But you Nigerian.”

“Yes, but I don’t know her.”

Aisha gestured to the pile of DVDs on the table. “Before, too much voodoo. Very bad. Now Nigeria film is very good. Big nice house!”

Ifemelu thought little of Nollywood films, with their exaggerated histrionics and their improbable plots, but she nodded in agreement because to hear “Nigeria” and “good” in the same sentence was a luxury, even coming from this strange Senegalese woman, and she chose to see in this an augury of her return home.

Everyone she had told she was moving back seemed surprised, expecting an explanation, and when she said she was doing it because she wanted to, puzzled lines would appear on foreheads.

“You are closing your blog and selling your condo to go back to Lagos and work for a magazine that doesn’t pay that well,” Aunty Uju had said and then repeated herself, as though to make Ifemelu see the gravity of her own foolishness. Only her old friend in Lagos, Ranyinudo, had made her return seem normal. “Lagos is now full of American returnees, so you better come back and join them. Every day you see them carrying a bottle of water as if they will die of heat if they are not drinking water every minute,” Ranyinudo said. They had kept in touch, she and Ranyinudo, throughout the years. At first, they wrote infrequent letters, but as cybercafés opened, cell phones spread, and Facebook flourished, they communicated more often. It was Ranyinudo who had told her, some years ago, that Obinze was getting married. “Meanwhile o, he has serious money now. See what you missed!” Ranyinudo had said. Ifemelu feigned indifference to this news. She had cut off contact with Obinze, after all, and so much time had passed, and she was newly in a relationship with Blaine, and happily easing herself into a shared life. But after she hung up, she thought endlessly of Obinze. Imagining him at his wedding left her with a feeling like sorrow, a faded sorrow. But she was pleased for him, she told herself, and to prove to herself that she was pleased for him, she decided to write him. She was not sure if he still used his old address and she sent the e-mail half expecting that he would not reply, but he did. She did not write again, because she by then had acknowledged her own small, still-burning light. It was best to leave things alone. Last December, when Ranyinudo told her she had run into him at the Palms mall, with his baby daughter (and Ifemelu still could not picture this new sprawling, modern mall in Lagos; all that came to mind when she tried to was the cramped Mega Plaza she remembered)—“He was looking so clean, and his daughter is so fine,” Ranyinudo said — Ifemelu felt a pang at all the changes that had happened in his life.

“Nigeria film very good now,” Aisha said again.

“Yes,” Ifemelu said enthusiastically. This was what she had become, a seeker of signs. Nigerian films were good, therefore her move back home would be good.

“You from Yoruba in Nigeria,” Aisha said.

“No. I am Igbo.”

“You Igbo?” For the first time, a smile appeared on Aisha’s face, a smile that showed as much of her small teeth as her dark gums. “I think you Yoruba because you dark and Igbo fair. I have two Igbo men. Very good. Igbo men take care of women real good.”

Aisha was almost whispering, a sexual suggestion in her tone, and in the mirror, the discoloration on her arms and neck became ghastly sores. Ifemelu imagined some bursting and oozing, others flaking. She looked away.

“Igbo men take care of women real good,” Aisha repeated. “I want marry. They love me but they say the family want Igbo woman. Because Igbo marry Igbo always.”

Ifemelu swallowed the urge to laugh. “You want to marry both of them?”

“No.” Aisha made an impatient gesture. “I want marry one. But this thing is true? Igbo marry Igbo always?”

“Igbo people marry all kinds of people. My cousin’s husband is Yoruba. My uncle’s wife is from Scotland.”

Aisha paused in her twisting, watching Ifemelu in the mirror, as though deciding whether to believe her.

“My sister say it is true. Igbo marry Igbo always,” she said.

“How does your sister know?”

“She know many Igbo people in Africa. She sell cloth.”

“Where is she?”

“In Africa.”

“Where? In Senegal?”

“Benin.”

“Why do you say Africa instead of just saying the country you mean?” Ifemelu asked.

Aisha clucked. “You don’t know America. You say Senegal and American people, they say, Where is that? My friend from Burkina Faso, they ask her, your country in Latin America?” Aisha resumed twisting, a sly smile on her face, and then asked, as if Ifemelu could not possibly understand how things were done here, “How long you in America?”

Ifemelu decided then that she did not like Aisha at all. She wanted to curtail the conversation now, so that they would say only what they needed to say during the six hours it would take to braid her hair, and so she pretended not to have heard and instead brought out her phone. Dike had still not replied to her text. He always replied within minutes, or maybe he was still at basketball practice, or with his friends, watching some silly video on YouTube. She called him and left a long message, raising her voice, going on and on about his basketball practice and was it as hot up in Massachusetts and was he still taking Page to see the movie today. Then, feeling reckless, she composed an e-mail to Obinze and, without permitting herself to reread it, she sent it off. She had written that she was moving back to Nigeria and, even though she had a job waiting for her, even though her car was already on a ship bound for Lagos, it suddenly felt true for the first time. I recently decided to move back to Nigeria.

Aisha was not discouraged. Once Ifemelu looked up from her phone, Aisha asked again, “How long you in America?”

Ifemelu took her time putting her phone back into her bag. Years ago, she had been asked a similar question, at a wedding of one of Aunty Uju’s friends, and she had said two years, which was the truth, but the jeer on the Nigerian’s face had taught her that, to earn the prize of being taken seriously among Nigerians in America, among Africans in America, indeed among immigrants in America, she needed more years. Six years, she began to say when it was just three and a half. Eight years, she said when it was five. Now that it was thirteen years, lying seemed unnecessary but she lied anyway.

“Fifteen years,” she said.

“Fifteen? That long time.” A new respect slipped into Aisha’s eyes.

“You live here in Trenton?”

“I live in Princeton.”

“Princeton.” Aisha paused. “You student?”

“I’ve just finished a fellowship,” she said, knowing that Aisha would not understand what a fellowship was, and in the rare moment that Aisha looked intimidated, Ifemelu felt a perverse pleasure. Yes, Princeton. Yes, the sort of place that Aisha could only imagine, the sort of place that would never have signs that said QUICK TAX REFUND; people in Princeton did not need quick tax refunds.

“But I’m going back home to Nigeria,” Ifemelu added, suddenly remorseful. “I’m going next week.”

“To see the family.”

“No. I’m moving back. To live in Nigeria.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why? Why not?”

“Better you send money back. Unless your father is big man? You have connections?”

“I’ve found a job there,” she said.

“You stay in America fifteen years and you just go back to work?”

Aisha smirked. “You can stay there?”

Aisha reminded her of what Aunty Uju had said, when she finally accepted that Ifemelu was serious about moving back—Will you be able to cope? — and the suggestion, that she was somehow irrevocably altered by America, had grown thorns on her skin. Her parents, too, seemed to think that she might not be able to “cope” with Nigeria. “At least you are now an American citizen so you can always return to America,” her father had said. Both of them had asked if Blaine would be coming with her, their question heavy with hope. It amused her how often they asked about Blaine now, since it had taken them a while to make peace with the idea of her black American boyfriend. She imagined them nursing quiet plans for her wedding; her mother would think of a caterer and colors, and her father would think of a distinguished friend he could ask to be the sponsor. Reluctant to flatten their hope, because it took so little to keep them hoping, which in turn kept them happy, she told her father, “We decided I will come back first and then Blaine will come after a few weeks.”

“Splendid,” her father said, and she said nothing else because it was best if things were simply left at splendid.

Aisha tugged a little too hard at her hair. “Fifteen years in America very long time,” Aisha said, as though she had been pondering this. “You have boyfriend? You marry?”

“I’m also going back to Nigeria to see my man,” Ifemelu said, surprising herself. My man. How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives that we have imagined.

“Oh! Okay!” Aisha said, excited; Ifemelu had finally given her a comprehensible reason for wanting to move back. “You will marry?”

“Maybe. We’ll see.”

“Oh!” Aisha stopped twisting and stared at her in the mirror, a dead stare, and Ifemelu feared, for a moment, that the woman had clairvoyant powers and could tell she was lying.

“I want you see my men. I call them. They come and you see them. First I call Chijioke. He work cab driver. Then Emeka. He work security. You see them.”

“You don’t have to call them just to meet me.”

“No. I call them. You tell them Igbo can marry not Igbo. They listen to you.”

“No, really. I can’t do that.”

Aisha kept speaking as if she hadn’t heard. “You tell them. They listen to you because you their Igbo sister. Any one is okay. I want marry.”

Ifemelu looked at Aisha, a small, ordinary-faced Senegalese woman with patchwork skin who had two Igbo boyfriends, implausible as it seemed, and who was now insistent that Ifemelu should meet them and urge them to marry her. It would have made for a good blog post: “A Peculiar Case of a Non-American Black, or How the Pressures of Immigrant Life Can Make You Act Crazy.”

CHAPTER 2

When Obinze first saw her e-mail, he was sitting in the back of his Range Rover in still Lagos traffic, his jacket slung over the front seat, a rusty-haired child beggar glued outside his window, a hawker pressing colorful CDs against the other window, the radio turned on low to the Pidgin English news on Wazobia FM, and the gray gloom of imminent rain all around. He stared at his BlackBerry, his body suddenly rigid. First, he skimmed the e-mail, instinctively wishing it were longer. Ceiling, kedu? Hope all is well with work and family. Ranyinudo said she ran into you some time ago and that you now have a child! Proud Papa. Congratulations. I recently decided to move back to Nigeria. Should be in Lagos in a week. Would love to keep in touch. Take care. Ifemelu.

He read it again slowly and felt the urge to smooth something, his trousers, his shaved-bald head. She had called him Ceiling. In the last e-mail from her, sent just before he got married, she had called him Obinze, apologized for her silence over the years, wished him happiness in sunny sentences, and mentioned the black American she was living with. A gracious e-mail. He had hated it. He had hated it so much that he Googled the black American — and why should she give him the man’s full name if not because she wanted him Googled? — a lecturer at Yale, and found it infuriating that she lived with a man who referred on his blog to friends as “cats,” but it was the photo of the black American, oozing intellectual cool in distressed jeans and black-framed eyeglasses, that had tipped Obinze over, made him send her a cold reply. Thank you for the good wishes, I have never been happier in my life, he’d written. He hoped she would write something mocking back — it was so unlike her, not to have been even vaguely tart in that first e-mail — but she did not write at all, and when he e-mailed her again, after his honeymoon in Morocco, to say he wanted to keep in touch and wanted to talk sometime, she did not reply.

The traffic was moving. A light rain was falling. The child beggar ran along, his doe-eyed expression more theatrical, his motions frantic: bringing his hand to his mouth again and again, fingertips pursed together. Obinze rolled down the window and held out a hundred-naira note. From the rearview mirror, his driver, Gabriel, watched with grave disapproval.

“God bless you, oga!” the child beggar said.

“Don’t be giving money to these beggars, sir,” Gabriel said. “They are all rich. They are using begging to make big money. I heard about one that built a block of six flats in Ikeja!”

“So why are you working as a driver instead of a beggar, Gabriel?” Obinze asked, and laughed, a little too heartily. He wanted to tell Gabriel that his girlfriend from university had just e-mailed him, actually his girlfriend from university and secondary school. The first time she let him take off her bra, she lay on her back moaning softly, her fingers splayed on his head, and afterwards she said, “My eyes were open but I did not see the ceiling. This never happened before.” Other girls would have pretended that they had never let another boy touch them, but not her, never her. There was a vivid honesty about her. She began to call what they did together ceiling, their warm entanglements on his bed when his mother was out, wearing only underwear, touching and kissing and sucking, hips moving in simulation. I’m longing for ceiling, she once wrote on the back of his geography notebook, and for a long time afterwards he could not look at that notebook without a gathering frisson, a sense of secret excitement. In university, when they finally stopped simulating, she began to call him Ceiling, in a playful way, in a suggestive way — but when they fought or when she retreated into moodiness, she called him Obinze. She had never called him The Zed, as his friends did. “Why do you call him Ceiling anyway?” his friend Okwudiba once asked her, on one of those languorous days after first semester exams. She had joined a group of his friends sitting around a filthy plastic table in a beer parlor off campus. She drank from her bottle of Maltina, swallowed, glanced at Obinze, and said, “Because he is so tall his head touches the ceiling, can’t you see?” Her deliberate slowness, the small smile that stretched her lips, made it clear that she wanted them to know that this was not why she called him Ceiling. And he was not tall. She kicked him under the table and he kicked her back, watching his laughing friends; they were all a little afraid of her and a little in love with her. Did she see the ceiling when the black American touched her? Had she used “ceiling” with other men? It upset him now to think that she might have. His phone rang and for a confused moment he thought it was Ifemelu calling from America.

“Darling, kedu ebe I no?” His wife, Kosi, always began her calls to him with those words: Where are you? He never asked where she was when he called her, but she would tell him, anyway: I’m just getting to the salon. I’m on Third Mainland Bridge. It was as if she needed the reassurance of their physicality when they were not together. She had a high, girlish voice. They were supposed to be at Chief’s house for the party at seven-thirty p.m. and it was already past six.

He told her he was in traffic. “But it’s moving, and we’ve just turned into Ozumba Mbadiwe. I’m coming.”

On Lekki Expressway, the traffic moved swiftly in the waning rain and soon Gabriel was pressing the horn in front of the high black gates of his home. Mohammed, the gateman, wiry in his dirty white caftan, flung open the gates, and raised a hand in greeting. Obinze looked at the tan colonnaded house. Inside was his furniture imported from Italy, his wife, his two-year-old daughter, Buchi, the nanny Christiana, his wife’s sister Chioma, who was on a forced holiday because university lecturers were on strike yet again, and the new housegirl, Marie, who had been brought from Benin Republic after his wife decided that Nigerian housegirls were unsuitable. The rooms would all be cool, air-conditioner vents swaying quietly, and the kitchen would be fragrant with curry and thyme, and CNN would be on downstairs, while the television upstairs would be turned to Cartoon Network, and pervading it all would be the undisturbed air of well-being. He climbed out of the car. His gait was stiff, his legs difficult to lift. He had begun, in the past months, to feel bloated from all he had acquired — the family, the houses, the cars, the bank accounts — and would, from time to time, be overcome by the urge to prick everything with a pin, to deflate it all, to be free. He was no longer sure, he had in fact never been sure, whether he liked his life because he really did or whether he liked it because he was supposed to.

“Darling,” Kosi said, opening the door before he got to it. She was all made-up, her complexion glowing, and he thought, as he often did, what a beautiful woman she was, eyes perfectly almond-shaped, a startling symmetry to her features. Her crushed-silk dress was cinched tightly at the waist and made her figure look very hourglassy. He hugged her, carefully avoiding her lips, painted pink and lined in a darker pink.

“Sunshine in the evening! Asa! Ugo!” he said. “Chief doesn’t need to put on any lights at the party, once you arrive.”

She laughed. The same way she laughed, with an open, accepting enjoyment of her own looks, when people asked her “Is your mother white? Are you a half-caste?” because she was so fair-skinned. It had always discomfited him, the pleasure she took in being mistaken for mixed-race.

“Daddy-daddy!” Buchi said, running to him in the slightly offbalance manner of toddlers. She was fresh from her evening bath, wearing her flowered pajamas and smelling sweetly of baby lotion. “Buch-buch! Daddy’s Buch!” He swung her up, kissed her, nuzzled her neck, and, because it always made her laugh, pretended to throw her down on the floor.

“Will you bathe or just change?” Kosi asked, following him upstairs, where she had laid out a blue caftan on his bed. He would have preferred a dress shirt or a simpler caftan instead of this, with its overly decorative embroidery, which Kosi had bought for an outrageous sum from one of those new pretentious fashion designers on The Island. But he would wear it to please her.

“I’ll just change,” he said.

“How was work?” she asked, in the vague, pleasant way that she always asked. He told her he was thinking about the new block of flats he had just completed in Parkview. He hoped Shell would rent it because the oil companies were always the best renters, never complaining about abrupt hikes, paying easily in American dollars so that nobody had to deal with the fluctuating naira.

“Don’t worry,” she said, and touched his shoulder. “God will bring Shell. We will be okay, darling.”

The flats were in fact already rented by an oil company, but he sometimes told her senseless lies such as this, because a part of him hoped she would ask a question or challenge him, though he knew she would not, because all she wanted was to make sure the conditions of their life remained the same, and how he made that happen she left entirely to him.

CHIEF’S PARTY WOULD bore him, as usual, but he went because he went to all of Chief’s parties, and each time he parked in front of Chief’s large compound, he remembered the first time he had come there, with his cousin Nneoma. He was newly back from England, had been in Lagos for only a week, but Nneoma was already grumbling about how he could not just lie around in her flat reading and moping.

“Ahn ahn! O gini? Are you the first person to have this problem? You have to get up and hustle. Everybody is hustling, Lagos is about hustling,” Nneoma said. She had thick-palmed, capable hands and many business interests; she traveled to Dubai to buy gold, to China to buy women’s clothing, and lately, she had become a distributor for a frozen chicken company. “I would have said you should come and help me in my business, but no, you are too soft, you speak too much English. I need somebody with gra-gra,” she said.

Obinze was still reeling from what had happened to him in England, still insulated in layers of his own self-pity, and to hear Nneoma’s dismissive question—“Are you the first person to have this problem?”—upset him. She had no idea, this cousin who had grown up in the village, who looked at the world with stark and insensitive eyes. But slowly, he realized she was right; he was not the first and he would not be the last. He began applying for jobs listed in newspapers, but nobody called him for an interview, and his friends from school, who were now working at banks and mobile phone companies, began to avoid him, worried that he would thrust yet another CV into their hands.

One day, Nneoma said, “I know this very rich man, Chief. The man chased and chased me, eh, but I refused. He has a serious problem with women, and he can give somebody AIDS. But you know these men, the one woman that says no to them is the one that they don’t forget. So from time to time, he will call me and sometimes I go and greet him. He even helped me with capital to start over my business after those children of Satan stole my money last year. He still thinks that one day I will agree for him. Ha, o di egwu, for where? I will take you to him. Once he is in a good mood, the man can be very generous. He knows everybody in this country. Maybe he will give us a note for a managing director somewhere.”

A steward let them in; Chief was sitting on a gilded chair that looked like a throne, sipping cognac and surrounded by guests. He sprang up, a smallish man, high-spirited and ebullient. “Nneoma! Is this you? So you remember me today!” he said. He hugged Nneoma, moved back to look boldly at her hips outlined in her fitted skirt, her long weave falling to her shoulders. “You want to give me heart attack, eh?”

“How can I give you heart attack? What will I do without you?” Nneoma said playfully.

“You know what to do,” Chief said, and his guests laughed, three guffawing, knowing men.

“Chief, this is my cousin, Obinze. His mother is my father’s sister, the professor,” Nneoma said. “She is the one that paid my school fees from beginning to end. If not for her, I don’t know where I would be today.”

“Wonderful, wonderful!” Chief said, looking at Obinze as though he was somehow responsible for this generosity.

“Good evening, sir,” Obinze said. It surprised him that Chief was something of a fop, with his air of fussy grooming: nails manicured and shiny, black velvet slippers at his feet, a diamond cross around his neck. He had expected a larger man and a rougher exterior.

“Sit down. What can I offer you?”

Big Men and Big Women, Obinze would later learn, did not talk to people, they instead talked at people, and that evening Chief had talked and talked, pontificating about politics, while his guests crowed, “Exactly! You are correct, Chief! Thank you!” They were wearing the uniform of the Lagos youngish and wealthyish — leather slippers, jeans and open-neck tight shirts, all with familiar designer logos — but there was, in their manner, the plowing eagerness of men in need.

After his guests left, Chief turned to Nneoma. “Do you know that song ‘No One Knows Tomorrow’?” Then he proceeded to sing the song with childish gusto. No one knows tomorrow! To-mor-row! No one knows tomorrow! Another generous splash of cognac in his glass. “That is the one principle that this country is based on. The major principle. No one knows tomorrow. Remember those big bankers during Abacha’s government? They thought they owned this country, and the next thing they knew, they were in prison. Look at that pauper who could not pay his rent before, then Babangida gave him an oil well, and now he has a private jet!” Chief spoke with a triumphant tone, mundane observations delivered as grand discoveries, while Nneoma listened and smiled and agreed. Her animation was exaggerated, as though a bigger smile and a quicker laugh, each ego-burnish shinier than the last, would ensure that Chief would help them. Obinze was amused by how obvious it seemed, how frank she was in her flirtations. But Chief merely gave them a case of red wine as a gift, and said vaguely to Obinze, “Come and see me next week.”

Obinze visited Chief the next week and then the next; Nneoma told him to just keep hanging around until Chief did something for him. Chief’s steward always served fresh pepper soup, deeply flavorful pieces of fish in a broth that made Obinze’s nose run, cleared his head, and somehow unclogged the future and filled him with hope, so that he sat contentedly, listening to Chief and his guests. They fascinated him, the unsubtle cowering of the almost rich in the presence of the rich, and the rich in the presence of the very rich; to have money, it seemed, was to be consumed by money. Obinze felt repulsion and longing; he pitied them, but he also imagined being like them. One day, Chief drank more cognac than usual, and talked haphazardly about people stabbing you in the back and small boys growing tails and ungrateful fools suddenly thinking they were sharp. Obinze was not sure what exactly had happened, but somebody had upset Chief, a gap had opened, and as soon as they were alone, he said, “Chief, if there is something I can help you do, please tell me. You can depend on me.” His own words surprised him. He had stepped out of himself. He was high on pepper soup. This was what it meant to hustle. He was in Lagos and he had to hustle.

Chief looked at him, a long, shrewd look. “We need more people like you in this country. People from good families, with good home training. You are a gentleman, I see it in your eyes. And your mother is a professor. It is not easy.”

Obinze half smiled, to seem humble in the face of this odd praise.

“You are hungry and honest, that is very rare in this country. Is that not so?” Chief asked.

“Yes,” Obinze said, even though he was not sure whether he was agreeing about his having this quality or about the rarity of this quality. But it did not matter, because Chief sounded certain.

“Everybody is hungry in this country, even the rich men are hungry, but nobody is honest.”

Obinze nodded, and Chief gave him another long look, before silently turning back to his cognac. On his next visit, Chief was his usual garrulous self.

“I was Babangida’s friend. I was Abacha’s friend. Now that the military has gone, Obasanjo is my friend,” he said. “Do you know why? Is it because I am stupid?”

“Of course not, Chief,” Obinze said.

“They said the National Farm Support Corporation is bankrupt and they’re going to privatize it. Do you know this? No. How do I know this? Because I have friends. By the time you know it, I would have taken a position and I would have benefited from the arbitrage. That is our free market!” Chief laughed. “The corporation was set up in the sixties and it owns property everywhere. The houses are all rotten and termites are eating the roofs. But they are selling them. I’m going to buy seven properties for five million each. You know what they are listed for in the books? One million. You know what the real worth is? Fifty million.” Chief paused to stare at one of his ringing cell phones — four were placed on the table next to him — and then ignored it and leaned back on the sofa. “I need somebody to front this deal.”

“Yes, sir, I can do that,” Obinze said.

Later, Nneoma sat on her bed, excited for him, giving him advice while smacking her head from time to time; her scalp was itchy beneath her weave and this was the closest she could come to scratching.

“This is your opportunity! The Zed, shine your eyes! They call it a big-big name, evaluation consulting, but it is not difficult. You undervalue the properties and make sure it looks as if you are following due process. You acquire the property, sell off half to pay your purchase price, and you are in business! You’ll register your own company. Next thing, you’ll build a house in Lekki and buy some cars and ask our hometown to give you some titles and your friends to put congratulatory messages in the newspapers for you and before you know, any bank you walk into, they will want to package a loan immediately and give it to you, because they think you no longer need the money! And after you register your own company, you must find a white man. Find one of your white friends in England. Tell everybody he is your General Manager. You will see how doors will open for you because you have an oyinbo General Manager. Even Chief has some white men that he brings in for show when he needs them. That is how Nigeria works. I’m telling you.”

And it was, indeed, how it worked and still worked for Obinze. The ease of it had dazed him. The first time he took his offer letter to the bank, he had felt surreal saying “fifty” and “fifty-five” and leaving out the “million” because there was no need to state the obvious. It had startled him, too, how easy many other things became, how even just the semblance of wealth oiled his paths. He had only to drive to a gate in his BMW and the gatemen would salute and open it for him, without asking questions. Even the American embassy was different. He had been refused a visa years ago, when he was newly graduated and drunk with American ambitions, but with his new bank statements, he easily got a visa. On his first trip, at the airport in Atlanta, the immigration officer was chatty and warm, asking him, “So how much cash you got?” When Obinze said he didn’t have much, the man looked surprised. “I see Nigerians like you declaring thousands and thousands of dollars all the time.”

This was what he now was, the kind of Nigerian expected to declare a lot of cash at the airport. It brought to him a disorienting strangeness, because his mind had not changed at the same pace as his life, and he felt a hollow space between himself and the person he was supposed to be.

He still did not understand why Chief had decided to help him, to use him while overlooking, even encouraging, the astonishing collateral benefits. There was, after all, a trail of prostrating visitors to Chief’s house, relatives and friends bringing other relatives and friends, their pockets full of requests and appeals. He sometimes wondered if Chief would one day ask something of him, the hungry and honest boy he had made big, and in his more melodramatic moments, he imagined Chief asking him to organize an assassination.

AS SOON AS they arrived at Chief’s party, Kosi led the way around the room, hugging men and women she barely knew, calling the older ones “ma” and “sir” with exaggerated respect, basking in the attention her face drew but flattening her personality so that her beauty did not threaten. She praised a woman’s hair, another’s dress, a man’s tie. She said “We thank God” often. When one woman asked her, in an accusing tone, “What cream do you use on your face? How can one person have this kind of perfect skin?” Kosi laughed graciously and promised to send the woman a text message with details of her skin-care routine.

Obinze had always been struck by how important it was to her to be a wholesomely agreeable person, to have no sharp angles sticking out. On Sundays, she would invite his relatives for pounded yam and onugbu soup and then watch over to make sure everyone was suitably overfed. Uncle, you must eat o! There is more meat in the kitchen! Let me bring you another Guinness! The first time he took her to his mother’s house in Nsukka, just before they got married, she leaped up to help with serving the food, and when his mother made to clean up afterwards, she got up, offended, and said, “Mummy, how can I be here and you will be cleaning?” She ended every sentence she spoke to his uncles with “sir.” She put ribbons in the hair of his cousins’ daughters. There was something immodest about her modesty: it announced itself.

Now she was curtseying and greeting Mrs. Akin-Cole, a famously old woman from a famously old family, who had the supercilious expression, eyebrows always raised, of a person used to receiving homage; Obinze often imagined her belching champagne bubbles.

“How is your child? Has she started school?” Mrs. Akin-Cole asked. “You must send her to the French school. They are very good, very rigorous. Of course they teach in French but it can only be good for the child to learn another civilized language, since she already learns English at home.”

“Okay, ma. I’ll look at the French school,” Kosi said.

“The French school is not bad, but I prefer Sidcot Hall. They teach the complete British curriculum,” said another woman, whose name Obinze had forgotten. He knew she had made a lot of money during General Abacha’s government. She had been a pimp, as the story went, providing young girls for the army officers who, in turn, gave her inflated supply contracts. Now, in her tight sequinned dress that outlined the swell of her lower belly, she had become a certain kind of middle-aged Lagos woman, dried up by disappointments, blighted by bitterness, the sprinkle of pimples on her forehead smothered in heavy foundation.

“Oh, yes, Sidcot Hall,” Kosi said. “It’s already on top of my list because I know they teach the British curriculum.”

Obinze would ordinarily not have said anything at all, just watched and listened, but today, for some reason, he said, “Didn’t we all go to primary schools that taught the Nigerian curriculum?”

The women looked at him; their puzzled expressions implied that he could not possibly be serious. And in some ways, he was not. Of course he, too, wanted the best for his daughter. Sometimes, like now, he felt like an intruder in his new circle, of people who believed that the latest schools, the latest curriculums, would ensure the wholeness of their children. He did not share their certainties. He spent too much time mourning what could have been and questioning what should be.

When he was younger, he had admired people with moneyed childhoods and foreign accents, but he had come to sense an unvoiced yearning in them, a sad search for something they could never find. He did not want a well-educated child enmeshed in insecurities. Buchi would not go to the French school, of that he was sure.

“If you decide to disadvantage your child by sending her to one of these schools with half-baked Nigerian teachers, then you only have yourself to blame,” Mrs. Akin-Cole said. She spoke with the unplaceable foreign accent, British and American and something else all at once, of the wealthy Nigerian who did not want the world to forget how worldly she was, how her British Airways executive card was choking with miles.

“One of my friends, her son goes to a school on the mainland and do you know, they have only five computers in the whole school. Only five!” the other woman said. Obinze remembered her name now. Adamma.

Mrs. Akin-Cole said, “Things have changed.”

“I agree,” Kosi said. “But I also see what Obinze is saying.”

She was taking two sides at once, to please everyone; she always chose peace over truth, was always eager to conform. Watching her now as she talked to Mrs. Akin-Cole, the gold shadow on her eyelids shimmering, he felt guilty about his thoughts. She was such a devoted woman, such a well-meaning, devoted woman. He reached out and held her hand.

“We’ll go to Sidcot Hall and the French school, and also look at some Nigerian schools like Crown Day,” Kosi said, and looked at him with a plea.

“Yes,” he said, squeezing her hand. She would know it was an apology, and later, he would apologize properly. He should have kept quiet, left her conversation unruffled. She often told him that her friends envied her, and said he behaved like a foreign husband, the way he made her breakfast on weekends and stayed home every night. And, in the pride in her eyes, he saw a shinier, better version of himself. He was about to say something to Mrs. Akin-Cole, something meaningless and mollifying, when he heard Chief’s raised voice behind him: “But you know that as we speak, oil is flowing through illegal pipes and they sell it in bottles in Cotonou! Yes! Yes!”

Chief was upon them.

“My beautiful princess!” Chief said to Kosi, and hugged her, pressing her close; Obinze wondered if Chief had ever propositioned her. It would not surprise him. He had once been at Chief’s house when a man brought his girlfriend to visit, and when she left the room to go to the toilet, Obinze heard Chief tell the man, “I like that girl. Give her to me and I will give you a nice plot of land in Ikeja.”

“You look so well, Chief,” Kosi said. “Ever young!”

“Ah, my dear, I try, I try.” Chief jokingly tugged at the satin lapels of his black jacket. He did look well, spare and upright, unlike many of his peers who looked like pregnant men.

“My boy!” he said to Obinze.

“Good evening, Chief.” Obinze shook his hand with both hands, bowing slightly. He watched the other men at the party bow, too, clustering around Chief, jostling to outlaugh one another when Chief made a joke.

The party was more crowded. Obinze looked up and saw Ferdinand, a stocky acquaintance of Chief’s who had run for governor in the last elections, had lost, and, as all losing politicians did, had gone to court to challenge the results. Ferdinand had a steely, amoral face; if one examined his hands, the blood of his enemies might be found crusted under his fingernails. Ferdinand’s eyes met his and Obinze looked away. He was worried that Ferdinand would come over to talk about the shady land deal he had mentioned the last time they ran into each other, and so he mumbled that he was going to the toilet and slipped away from the group.

At the buffet table, he saw a young man looking with sad disappointment at the cold cuts and pastas. Obinze was drawn to his gaucheness; in the young man’s clothes, and in the way that he stood, was an outsiderness he could not shield even if he had wanted to.

“There’s another table on the other side with Nigerian food,” Obinze told him, and the young man looked at him and laughed in gratitude. His name was Yemi and he was a newspaper journalist. Not surprising; pictures from Chief’s parties were always splattered in the weekend papers.

Yemi had studied English at university and Obinze asked him what books he liked, keen to talk about something interesting at last, but he soon realized that, for Yemi, a book did not qualify as literature unless it had polysyllabic words and incomprehensible passages.

“The problem is that the novel is too simple, the man does not even use any big words,” Yemi said.

It saddened Obinze that Yemi was so poorly educated and did not know that he was poorly educated. It made him want to be a teacher. He imagined himself standing in front of a class full of Yemis, teaching. It would suit him, the teaching life, as it had suited his mother. He often imagined other things he could have done, or that he could still do: teach in a university, edit a newspaper, coach professional table tennis.

“I don’t know what your line of business is, sir, but I am always looking for a better job. I’m completing my master’s now,” Yemi said, in the manner of the true Lagosian who was always hustling, eyes eternally alert to the brighter and the better; Obinze gave him his card before going back to find Kosi.

“I was wondering where you were,” she said.

“Sorry, I ran into somebody,” Obinze said. He reached into his pocket to touch his BlackBerry. Kosi was asking if he wanted more food. He didn’t. He wanted to go home. A rash eagerness had overcome him, to go into his study and reply to Ifemelu’s e-mail, something he had unconsciously been composing in his mind. If she was considering coming back to Nigeria, then it meant she was no longer with the black American. But she might be bringing him with her; she was after all the kind of woman who would make a man easily uproot his life, the kind who, because she did not expect or ask for certainty, made a certain kind of sureness become possible. When she held his hand during their campus days, she would squeeze until both palms became slick with sweat, and she would say, teasing, “Just in case this is the last time we hold hands, let’s really hold hands. Because a motorcycle or a car can kill us now, or I might see the real man of my dreams down the street and leave you or you might see the real woman of your dreams and leave me.” Perhaps the black American would come back to Nigeria, too, clinging on to her. Still, he sensed, from the e-mail, that she was single. He brought out his BlackBerry to calculate the American time when it had been sent. Early afternoon. Her sentences had a hasty quality; he wondered what she had been doing then. And he wondered what else Ranyinudo had told her about him.

On the Saturday in December when he ran into Ranyinudo at the Palms mall, he was carrying Buchi in one arm, waiting at the entrance for Gabriel to bring the car around, and holding a bag with Buchi’s biscuits in the other hand. “The Zed!” Ranyinudo called out. In secondary school she had been the bubbly tomboy, very tall and skinny and straightforward, not armed with the mysteriousness of girls. The boys had all liked her but never chased her, and they fondly called her Leave Me in Peace, because of how often she would say, whenever asked about her unusual name, “Yes, it is an Igbo name and it means ‘leave us in peace,’ so you leave me in peace!” He was surprised at how chic she looked now, and how different, with her short spiky hair and tight jeans, her body full and curvy.

“The Zed — The Zed! Longest time! You don’t ask about us again. Is this your daughter? Oh, bless! The other day I was with one my friends, Dele. You know Dele from Hale Bank? He said you own that building near the Ace office in Banana Island? Congratulations. You’ve really done well o. And Dele said you are so humble.”

He had been uncomfortable, with her overdone fussing, the deference that seeped subtly from her pores. He was, in her eyes, no longer The Zed from secondary school, and the stories of his wealth made her assume he had changed more than he possibly could have. People often told him how humble he was, but they did not mean real humility, it was merely that he did not flaunt his membership in the wealthy club, did not exercise the rights it brought — to be rude, to be inconsiderate, to be greeted rather than to greet — and because so many others like him exercised those rights, his choices were interpreted as humility. He did not boast, either, or speak about the things he owned, which made people assume he owned much more than he did. Even his closest friend, Okwudiba, often told him how humble he was, and it irked him slightly, because he wished Okwudiba would see that to call him humble was to make rudeness normal. Besides, humility had always seemed to him a specious thing, invented for the comfort of others; you were praised for humility by people because you did not make them feel any more lacking than they already did. It was honesty that he valued; he had always wished himself to be truly honest, and always feared that he was not.

In the car on the way home from Chief’s party, Kosi said, “Darling, you must be hungry. You ate only that spring roll?”

“And suya.”

“You need to eat. Thank God I asked Marie to cook,” she said, and added, giggling, “Me, I should have respected myself and left those snails alone! I think I ate up to ten. They were so nice and peppery.”

Obinze laughed, vaguely bored, but happy that she was happy.

MARIE WAS SLIGHT, and Obinze was not sure whether she was timid or whether her halting English made her seem so. She had been with them only a month. The last housegirl, brought by a relative of Gabriel’s, was thickset and had arrived clutching a duffel bag. He was not there when Kosi looked through it — she did that routinely with all domestic help because she wanted to know what was being brought into her home — but he came out when he heard Kosi shouting, in that impatient, shrill manner she put on with domestic help to command authority, to ward off disrespect. The girl’s bag was on the floor, open, clothing fluffing out. Kosi stood beside it, holding up, at the tips of her fingers, a packet of condoms.

“What is this for? Eh? You came to my house to be a prostitute?”

The girl looked down at first, silent, then she looked Kosi in the face and said quietly, “In my last job, my madam’s husband was always forcing me.”

Kosi’s eyes bulged. She moved forward for a moment, as though to attack the girl in some way, and then stopped.

“Please carry your bag and go now-now,” she said.

The girl shifted, looking a little surprised, and then she picked up her bag and turned to the door. After she left, Kosi said, “Can you believe the nonsense, darling? She came here with condoms and she actually opened her mouth to say that rubbish. Can you believe it?”

“Her former employer raped her so she decided to protect herself this time,” Obinze said.

Kosi stared at him. “You feel sorry for her. You don’t know these housegirls. How can you feel sorry for her?”

He wanted to ask, How can you not? But the tentative fear in her eyes silenced him. Her insecurity, so great and so ordinary, silenced him. She was worried about a housegirl whom it would never even occur to him to seduce. Lagos could do this to a woman married to a young and wealthy man; he knew how easy it was to slip into paranoia about housegirls, about secretaries, about Lagos Girls, those sophisticated monsters of glamour who swallowed husbands whole, slithering them down their jeweled throats. Still, he wished Kosi feared less, conformed less.

Some years ago, he had told her about an attractive banker who had come to his office to talk to him about opening an account, a young woman wearing a fitted shirt with an extra button undone, trying to hide the desperation in her eyes. “Darling, your secretary should not let any of these bank marketing girls come into your office!” Kosi had said, as though she seemed no longer to see him, Obinze, and instead saw blurred figures, classic types: a wealthy man, a female banker who had been given a target deposit amount, an easy exchange. Kosi expected him to cheat, and her concern was to minimize the possibilities he might have. “Kosi, nothing can happen unless I want it to. I will never want it to,” he had said, in what was both a reassurance and a rebuke.

She had, in the years since they got married, grown an intemperate dislike of single women and an intemperate love of God. Before they got married, she went to service once a week at the Anglican church on the Marina, a Sunday tick-the-box routine that she did because she had been brought up that way, but after their wedding, she switched to the House of David because, as she told him, it was a Bible-believing church. Later, when he found out that the House of David had a special prayer service for Keeping Your Husband, he had felt unsettled. Just as he had when he once asked why her best friend from university, Elohor, hardly visited them, and Kosi said, “She’s still single,” as though that was a self-evident reason.

MARIE KNOCKED on his study door and came in with a tray of rice and fried plantains. He ate slowly. He put in a Fela CD and then started to write the e-mail on his computer; his BlackBerry keyboard would cramp his fingers and his mind. He had introduced Ifemelu to Fela at university. She had, before then, thought of Fela as the mad weed-smoker who wore underwear at his concerts, but she had come to love the Afrobeat sound and they would lie on his mattress in Nsukka and listen to it and then she would leap up and make swift, vulgar movements with her hips when the run-run-run chorus came on. He wondered if she remembered that. He wondered if she remembered how his cousin had sent mix tapes from abroad, and how he made copies for her at the famous electronics shop in the market where music blared all day long, ringing in your ears even after you had left. He had wanted her to have the music he had. She had never really been interested in Biggie and Warren G and Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg but Fela was different. On Fela, they had agreed.

He wrote and rewrote the e-mail, not mentioning his wife or using the first person plural, trying for a balance between earnest and funny. He did not want to alienate her. He wanted to make sure she would reply this time. He clicked Send and then minutes later checked to see if she had replied. He was tired. It was not a physical fatigue — he went to the gym regularly and felt better than he had in years — but a draining lassitude that numbed the margins of his mind. He got up and went out to the verandah; the sudden hot air, the roar of his neighbor’s generator, the smell of diesel exhaust fumes brought a lightness to his head. Frantic winged insects flitted around the electric bulb. He felt, looking out at the muggy darkness farther away, as if he could float, and all he needed to do was to let himself go.