Americanah

CHAPTER 44

At first, Lagos assaulted her; the sun-dazed haste, the yellow buses full of squashed limbs, the sweating hawkers racing after cars, the advertisements on hulking billboards (others scrawled on walls — PLUMBER CALL 080177777) and the heaps of rubbish that rose on the roadsides like a taunt. Commerce thrummed too defiantly. And the air was dense with exaggeration, conversations full of overprotestations. One morning, a man’s body lay on Awolowo Road. Another morning, The Island flooded and cars became gasping boats. Here, she felt, anything could happen, a ripe tomato could burst out of solid stone. And so she had the dizzying sensation of falling, falling into the new person she had become, falling into the strange familiar. Had it always been like this or had it changed so much in her absence? When she left home, only the wealthy had cell phones, all the numbers started with 090, and girls wanted to date 090 men. Now, her hair braider had a cell phone, the plantain seller tending a blackened grill had a cell phone. She had grown up knowing all the bus stops and the side streets, understanding the cryptic codes of conductors and the body language of street hawkers. Now, she struggled to grasp the unspoken. When had shopkeepers become so rude? Had buildings in Lagos always had this patina of decay? And when did it become a city of people quick to beg and too enamored of free things?

“Americanah!” Ranyinudo teased her often. “You are looking at things with American eyes. But the problem is that you are not even a real Americanah. At least if you had an American accent we would tolerate your complaining!”

Ranyinudo picked her up from the airport, standing by the Arrivals exit in a billowy bridesmaid’s dress, her blusher too red on her cheeks like bruises, the green satin flowers in her hair now askew. Ifemelu was struck by how arresting, how attractive, she was. 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.

“Ranyi!” Ifemelu said. “I know my coming back is a big deal but I didn’t know it was big enough for a ball gown.”

“Idiot. I came straight from the wedding. I didn’t want to risk the traffic of going home first to change.”

They hugged, holding each other close. Ranyinudo smelled of a floral perfume and exhaust fumes and sweat; she smelled of Nigeria.

“You look amazing, Ranyi,” Ifemelu said. “I mean, underneath all that war paint. Your pictures didn’t even show you well.”

“Ifemsco, see you, beautiful babe, even after a long flight,” she said, laughing, dismissing the compliment, playing at her old role of the girl who was not the pretty one. Her looks had changed but the excitable, slightly reckless air about her had not. Unchanged, too, was the eternal gurgle in her voice, laughter just beneath the surface, ready to break free, to erupt. She drove fast, braking sharply and glancing often at the BlackBerry on her lap; whenever the traffic stilled, she picked it up and typed swiftly.

“Ranyi, you should text and drive only when you are alone so that you kill only yourself,” Ifemelu said.

“Haba! I don’t text and drive o. I text when I’m not driving,” she said. “This wedding was something else, the best wedding I’ve been to. I wonder if you’ll remember the bride. She was Funke’s very good friend in secondary school. Ijeoma, very yellow girl. She went to Holy Child but she used to come to our WAEC lesson with Funke. We became friends in university. If you see her now, eh, she’s a serious babe. Her husband has major money. Her engagement ring is bigger than Zuma Rock.”

Ifemelu stared out of the window, half listening, thinking how unpretty Lagos was, roads infested with potholes, houses springing up unplanned like weeds. Of her jumble of feelings, she recognized only confusion.

“Lime and peach,” Ranyinudo said.

“What?”

“The wedding colors. Lime and peach. The hall decoration was so nice and the cake was just beautiful. Look, I took some pictures. I’m going to put this one up on Facebook.” Ranyinudo gave Ifemelu her BlackBerry. Ifemelu held on to it so that Ranyinudo would focus on her driving.

“And I met someone o. He saw me when I was waiting outside for the mass to end. It was so hot, my foundation was melting on my face and I know I looked like a zombie, but he still came to talk to me! That’s a good sign. I think this one is serious husband material. Did I tell you my mother was seriously saying novenas to end my relationship when I was dating Ibrahim? At least she will not have a heart attack with this one. His name is Ndudi. Cool name, abi? You can’t get more Igbo than that. And you should have seen his watch! He’s into oil. His business card has Nigerian and international offices.”

“Why were you waiting outside during mass?”

“All the bridesmaids had to wait outside because our dresses were indecent.” Ranyinudo rolled “indecent” around her tongue and chuckled. “It happens all the time, especially in Catholic churches. We even had cover-ups but the priest said they were too lacy, so we just waited outside until the mass ended. But thank God for that or I would not have met this guy!”

Ifemelu looked at Ranyinudo’s dress, its thin straps, its pleated neckline that showed no cleavage. Before she left, were bridesmaids banished from church services because their dresses had spaghetti straps? She did not think so, but she was no longer sure. She was no longer sure what was new in Lagos and what was new in herself. Ranyinudo parked on a street in Lekki, which was bare reclaimed land when Ifemelu left, but now a cavalcade of large houses encircled by high walls.

“My flat is the smallest, so I don’t have parking space inside,” Ranyinudo said. “The other tenants park inside, but you should see all the shouting that happens in the morning when somebody does not move their car out of the way, and somebody else is late for work!”

Ifemelu climbed out of the car and into the loud, discordant drone of generators, too many generators; the sound pierced the soft middle of her ears and throbbed in her head.

“No light for the past week,” Ranyinudo said, shouting to be heard above the generators.

The gateman had hurried over to help with the suitcases.

“Welcome back, aunty,” he said to Ifemelu.

He had not merely said “welcome” but “welcome back,” as though he somehow knew that she was truly back. She thanked him, and in the gray of the evening darkness, the air burdened with smells, she ached with an almost unbearable emotion that she could not name. It was nostalgic and melancholy, a beautiful sadness for the things she had missed and the things she would never know. Later, sitting on the couch in Ranyinudo’s small stylish living room, her feet sunk into the too-soft carpet, the flat-screen TV perched on the opposite wall, Ifemelu looked unbelievingly at herself. She had done it. She had come back. She turned the TV on and searched for the Nigerian channels. On NTA, the first lady, blue scarf wrapped around her face, was addressing a rally of women, and crawling across the screen were the words “The First Lady is Empowering Women with Mosquito Nets.”

“I can’t remember the last time I watched that stupid station,” Ranyinudo said. “They lie for the government but they can’t even lie well.”

“So which Nigerian channel do you watch?”

“I don’t even really watch any o. I watch Style and E! Sometimes CNN and BBC.” Ranyinudo had changed into shorts and a T-shirt. “I have a girl who comes and cooks and cleans for me, but I made this stew myself because you were coming, so you must eat it o. What will you drink? I have malt and orange juice.”

“Malt! I’m going to drink all the malt in Nigeria. I used to buy it from a Hispanic supermarket in Baltimore, but it was not the same thing.”

“I ate really nice ofada rice at the wedding, I’m not hungry,” Ranyinudo said. But, after she served Ifemelu’s food on a dinner plate, she ate some rice and chicken stew from a plastic bowl, perched on the arm of the couch, while they gossiped about old friends: Priye was an event planner and had recently gone big time after being introduced to the governor’s wife. Tochi had lost her job at a bank after the last bank crisis, but she had married a wealthy lawyer and had a baby.

“Tochi used to tell me how much people had in their accounts,” Ranyinudo said. “Remember that guy Mekkus Parara who was dying for Ginika? Remember how he always had smelly yellow patches under his arms? He has major money now, but it is dirty money. You know, all these guys who do fraud in London and America, then run back to Nigeria with the money and build mighty houses in Victoria Garden City. Tochi told me that he never came to the bank himself. He used to send his boys with Ghana Must Go bags to carry ten million today, twenty million tomorrow. Me, I never wanted to work in a bank. The problem with working in a bank is that if you don’t get a good branch with high-net customers, you are finished. You will spend all your time attending to useless traders. Tochi was lucky with her job and she worked in a good branch and she met her husband there. Do you want another malt?”

Ranyinudo got up. There was a luxurious, womanly slowness to her gait, a lift, a roll, a toggle of her buttocks with each step. A Nigerian walk. A walk, too, that hinted at excess, as though it spoke of something in need of toning down. Ifemelu took the cold bottle of malt from Ranyinudo and wondered if this would have been her life if she had not left, if she would be like Ranyinudo, working for an advertising company, living in a one-bedroom flat whose rent her salary could not pay, attending a Pentecostal church where she was an usher, and dating a married chief executive who bought her business-class tickets to London. Ranyinudo showed Ifemelu his photographs on her phone. In one, he was bare-chested with the slight swell of a middle-aged belly, reclining on Ranyinudo’s bed, smiling the bashful smile of a man just sated from sex. In another, he was looking down in a close-up shot, his face a blurred and mysterious silhouette. There was something attractive, even distinguished, about his gray-speckled hair.

“Is it me or does he look like a tortoise?” Ifemelu said.

“It’s you. But Ifem, seriously, Don is a good man o. Not like many of these useless Lagos men running around town.”

“Ranyi, you told me it was just a passing thing. But two years is not a passing thing. I worry about you.”

“I have feelings for him, I won’t deny it, but I want to marry and he knows that. I used to think maybe I should have a child for him but look at Uche Okafor, remember her from Nsukka? She had a child for the managing director of Hale Bank and the man told her to go to hell, that he is not the father, and now she is left with raising a child alone. Na wa.”

Ranyinudo was looking at the photograph on her phone with a faint, fond smile. Earlier, on the drive back from the airport, she had said, as she slowed down to sink into, and then climb out of, a large pothole, “I really want Don to change this car. He has been promising for the past three months. I need a jeep. Do you see how terrible the roads are?” And Ifemelu felt something between fascination and longing for Ranyinudo’s life. A life in which she waved a hand and things fell from the sky, things that she quite simply expected should fall from the sky.

At midnight, Ranyinudo turned off her generator and opened the windows. “I have been running this generator for one straight week, can you imagine? The light situation has not been this bad in a long time.”

The coolness dissipated quickly. Warm, humid air gagged the room, and soon Ifemelu was tossing in the wetness of her own sweat. A painful throbbing had started behind her eyes and a mosquito was buzzing nearby and she felt suddenly, guiltily grateful that she had a blue American passport in her bag. It shielded her from choicelessness. She could always leave; she did not have to stay.

“What kind of humidity is this?” she said. She was on Ranyinudo’s bed, and Ranyinudo was on a mattress on the floor. “I can’t breathe.”

“I can’t breathe,” Ranyinudo mimicked, her voice laughter-filled. “Haba! Americanah!”

CHAPTER 45

Ifemelu had found the listing on Nigerian Jobs Online—“features editor for leading women’s monthly magazine.” She edited her résumé, invented past experience as a staff writer on a women’s magazine (“folded due to bankruptcy” in parentheses), and days after she sent it off by courier, the publisher of Zoe called from Lagos. There was, about the mature, friendly voice on the other end of the line, a vague air of inappropriateness. “Oh, call me Aunty Onenu,” she said cheerfully when Ifemelu asked who was speaking. Before she offered Ifemelu the job, she said, tone hushed in confidence, “My husband did not support me when I started this, because he thought men would chase me if I went to seek advertising.” Ifemelu sensed that the magazine was a hobby for Aunty Onenu, a hobby that meant something, but still a hobby. Not a passion. Not something that consumed her. And when she met Aunty Onenu, she felt this more strongly: here was a woman easy to like but difficult to take seriously.

Ifemelu went with Ranyinudo to Aunty Onenu’s home in Ikoyi. They sat on leather sofas that felt cold to the touch, and talked in low voices, until Aunty Onenu appeared. A slim, smiling, well-preserved woman, wearing leggings, a large T-shirt, and an overly youthful weave, the wavy hair trailing all the way to her back.

“My new features editor has come from America!” she said, hugging Ifemelu. It was difficult to tell her age, anything between fifty and sixty-five, but it was easy to tell that she had not been born with her light complexion, its sheen was too waxy and her knuckles were dark, as though those folds of skin had valiantly resisted her bleaching cream.

“I wanted you to come around before you start on Monday so I can welcome you personally,” Aunty Onenu said.

“Thank you.” Ifemelu thought the home visit unprofessional and odd, but this was a small magazine, and this was Nigeria, where boundaries were blurred, where work blended into life, and bosses were called Mummy. Besides, she already imagined taking over the running of Zoe, turning it into a vibrant, relevant companion for Nigerian women, and — who knew — perhaps one day buying out Aunty Onenu. And she would not welcome new recruits in her home.

“You are a pretty girl,” Aunty Onenu said, nodding, as though being pretty were needed for the job and she had worried that Ifemelu might not be. “I liked how you sounded on the phone. I am sure with you on board our circulation will soon surpass Glass. You know we are a much younger publication but already catching up to them!”

A steward in white, a grave, elderly man, emerged to ask what they would drink.

“Aunty Onenu, I’ve been reading back issues of both Glass and Zoe, and I have some ideas about what we can do differently,” Ifemelu said, after the steward left to get their orange juice.

“You are a real American! Ready to get to work, a no-nonsense person! Very good. First of all, tell me how you think we compare to Glass?”

Ifemelu had thought both magazines vapid, but Glass was better edited, the page colors did not bleed as badly as they did in Zoe, and it was more visible in traffic; whenever Ranyinudo’s car slowed, there was a hawker pressing a copy of Glass against her window. But because she could already see Aunty Onenu’s obsession with the competition, so nakedly personal, she said, “It’s about the same, but I think we can do better. We need to cut down the profile interviews and do just one a month and profile a woman who has actually achieved something real on her own. We need more personal columns, and we should introduce a rotating guest column, and do more health and money, have a stronger online presence, and stop lifting foreign magazine pieces. Most of your readers can’t go into the market and buy broccoli because we don’t have it in Nigeria, so why does this month’s Zoe have a recipe for cream of broccoli soup?”

“Yes, yes,” Aunty Onenu said, slowly. She seemed astonished. Then, as though recovering herself, she said, “Very good. We’ll discuss all this on Monday.”

In the car, Ranyinudo said, “Talking to your new boss like that, ha! If you had not come from America, she would have fired you immediately.”

“I wonder what the story is between her and the Glass publisher.”

“I read in one of the tabloids that they hate each other. I am sure it is man trouble, what else? Women, eh! I think Aunty Onenu started Zoe just to compete with Glass. As far as I’m concerned, she’s not a publisher, she’s just a rich woman who decided to start a magazine, and tomorrow she might close it and start a spa.”

“And what an ugly house,” Ifemelu said. It was monstrous, with two alabaster angels guarding the gate, and a dome-shaped fountain sputtering in the front yard.

“Ugly kwa? What are you talking about? The house is beautiful!”

“Not to me,” Ifemelu said, and yet she had once found houses like that beautiful. But here she was now, disliking it with the haughty confidence of a person who recognized kitsch.

“Her generator is as big as my flat and it is completely noiseless!” Ranyinudo said. “Did you notice the generator house on the side of the gate?”

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

On Kingsway Road, she thought she saw Obinze drive past in a low-slung black Mercedes and she sat up, straining and peering, but, slowed at a traffic jam, she saw that the man looked nothing like him. There were other imagined glimpses of Obinze over the next weeks, people she knew were not him but could have been: the straight-backed figure in a suit walking into Aunty Onenu’s office, the man in the back of a car with tinted windows, his face bent to a phone, the figure behind her in the supermarket line. She even imagined, when she first went to meet her landlord, that she would walk in and discover Obinze sitting there. The estate agent had told her that the landlord preferred expatriate renters. “But he relaxed when I told him you came from America,” he added. The landlord was an elderly man in a brown caftan and matching trousers; he had the weathered skin and wounded air of one who had endured much at the hands of others.

“I do not rent to Igbo people,” he said softly, startling her. Were such things now said so easily? Had they been said so easily and had she merely forgotten? “That is my policy since one Igbo man destroyed my house at Yaba. But you look like a responsible somebody.”

“Yes, I am responsible,” she said, and feigned a simpering smile. The other flats she liked were too expensive. Even though pipes poked out under the kitchen sink and the toilet was lopsided and the bathroom tiles shoddily laid, this was the best she could afford. She liked the airiness of the living room, with its large windows, and the narrow flight of stairs that led to a tiny verandah charmed her, but, most of all, it was in Ikoyi. And she wanted to live in Ikoyi. Growing up, Ikoyi had reeked of gentility, a faraway gentility that she could not touch: the people who lived in Ikoyi had faces free of pimples and drivers designated “the children’s driver.” The first day she saw the flat, she stood on the verandah and looked across at the compound next door, a grand colonial house, now yellowed from decay, the grounds swallowed in foliage, grass and shrubs climbing atop one another. On the roof of the house, a part of which had collapsed and sunk in, she saw a movement, a turquoise splash of feathers. It was a peacock. The estate agent told her that an army officer had lived there during General Abacha’s regime; now the house was tied up in court. And she imagined the people who had lived there fifteen years ago while she, in a little flat on the crowded mainland, longed for their spacious, serene lives.

She wrote the check for two years’ rent. This was why people took bribes and asked for bribes; how else could anyone honestly pay two years’ rent in advance? She planned to fill her verandah with white lilies in clay pots, and decorate her living room in pastels, but first, she had to find an electrician to install air conditioners, a painter to redo the oily walls, and somebody to lay new tiles in the kitchen and bathroom. The estate agent brought a man who did tiles. It took him a week and, when the estate agent called her to say that the work was done, she went eagerly to the flat. In the bathroom, she stared in disbelief. The tile edges were rough, tiny spaces gaping at the corners. One tile had an ugly crack across the middle. It looked like something done by an impatient child.

“What is this nonsense? Look at how rough this is! One tile is broken! This is even worse than the old tiles! How can you be happy with this useless work?” she asked the man.

He shrugged; he clearly thought she was making unnecessary trouble. “I am happy with the work, aunty.”

“You want me to pay you?”

A small smile. “Ah, aunty, but I have finish the work.”

The estate agent intervened. “Don’t worry, ma, he will repair the broken one.”

The tile man looked reluctant. “But I have finish the work. The problem is the tile is breaking very easily. It is the quality of tile.”

“You have finished? You do this rubbish job and say you have finished?” Her anger was growing, her voice rising and hardening. “I will not pay you what we agreed, no way, because you have not done what we agreed.”

The tile man was staring at her, eyes narrowed.

“And if you want trouble, trust me, you will get it,” Ifemelu said. “The first thing I will do is call the commissioner of police and they will lock you up in Alagbon Close!” She was screaming now. “Do you know who I am? You don’t know who I am, that is why you can do this kind of rubbish work for me!”

The man looked cowed. She had surprised herself. Where had that come from, the false bravado, the easy resort to threats? A memory came to her, undiminished after so many years, of the day Aunty Uju’s General died, how Aunty Uju had threatened his relatives. “No, don’t go, just stay there,” she had said to them. “Stay there while I go and call my boys from the army barracks.”

The estate agent said, “Aunty, don’t worry, he will do the work again.”

Later, Ranyinudo told her, “You are no longer behaving like an Americanah!” and despite herself, Ifemelu felt pleased to hear this.

“The problem is that we no longer have artisans in this country,” Ranyinudo said. “Ghanaians are better. My boss is building a house and he is using only Ghanaians to do his finishing. Nigerians will do rubbish for you. They do not take their time to finish things properly. It’s terrible. But Ifem, you should have called Obinze. He would have sorted everything out for you. This is what he does, after all. He must have all kinds of contacts. You should have called him before you even started looking for a flat. He could have given you reduced rent in one of his properties, even a free flat sef. I don’t know what you are waiting for before you call him.”

Ifemelu shook her head. Ranyinudo, for whom men existed only as sources of things. She could not imagine calling Obinze to ask him for reduced rent in one of his properties. Still, she did not know why she had not called him at all. She had thought of it many times, often bringing out her phone to scroll to his number, and yet she had not called. He still sent e-mails, saying he hoped she was fine, or he hoped Dike was doing better, and she replied to a few, always briefly, replies he would assume were sent from America.

CHAPTER 46

She spent weekends with her parents, in the old flat, happy simply to sit and look at the walls that had witnessed her childhood; only when she began to eat her mother’s stew, an oil layer floating on top of the pureed tomatoes, did she realize how much she had missed it. The neighbors stopped by to greet her, the daughter back from America. Many of them were new and unfamiliar, but she felt a sentimental fondness for them, because they reminded her of the others she had known, Mama Bomboy downstairs who had once pulled her ear when she was in primary school and said, “You do not greet your elders,” Oga Tony upstairs who smoked on his verandah, the trader next door who called her, for reasons she never knew, “champion.”

“They are just coming to see if you will give them anything,” her mother said, in a whisper, as if the neighbors who had all left might overhear. “They all expected me to buy something for them when we went to America, so I went to the market and bought small-small bottles of perfume and told them it was from America!”

Her parents liked to talk about their visit to Baltimore, her mother about the sales, her father about how he could not understand the news because Americans now used expressions like “divvy up” and “nuke” in serious news.

“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.

Ifemelu humored them, listening to their observations and memories, and hoped that neither of them would bring up Blaine; she had told them a work issue had delayed his visit.

She did not have to lie to her old friends about Blaine, but she did, telling them she was in a serious relationship and he would join her in Lagos soon. It surprised her how quickly, during reunions with old friends, the subject of marriage came up, a waspish tone in the voices of the unmarried, a smugness in those of the married. Ifemelu wanted to talk about the past, about the teachers they had mocked and the boys they had liked, but marriage was always the preferred topic — whose husband was a dog, who was on a desperate prowl, posting too many dressed-up pictures of herself on Facebook, whose man had disappointed her after four years and left her to marry a small girl he could control. (When Ifemelu told Ranyinudo that she had run into an old classmate, Vivian, at the bank, Ranyinudo’s first question was “Is she married?”) And so she used Blaine as armor. If they knew of Blaine, then the married friends would not tell her “Don’t worry, your own will come, just pray about it,” and the unmarried friends would not assume that she was a member of the self-pity party of the single. There was, also, a strained nostalgia in those reunions, some in Ranyinudo’s flat, some in hers, some in restaurants, because she struggled to find, in these adult women, some remnants from her past that were often no longer there.

Tochi was unrecognizable now, so fat that even her nose had changed shape, her double chin hanging below her face like a bread roll. She came to Ifemelu’s flat with her baby in one hand, her BlackBerry in the other, and a house help trailing behind, holding a canvas bag full of bottles and bibs. “Madam America” was Tochi’s greeting, and then she spoke, for the rest of her visit, in defensive spurts, as though she had come determined to battle Ifemelu’s Americanness.

“I buy only British clothes for my baby because American ones fade after one wash,” she said. “My husband wanted us to move to America but I refused, because the education system is so bad. An international agency rated it the lowest in the developed countries, you know.”

Tochi had always been perceptive and thoughtful; it was Tochi who had intervened with calm reason whenever Ifemelu and Ranyinudo argued in secondary school. In Tochi’s changed persona, in her need to defend against imagined slights, Ifemelu saw a great personal unhappiness. 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. Finally Tochi’s baby vomited, a yellowish liquid that the house help hastily wiped, and Tochi said, “We should go, baby wants to sleep.” Ifemelu, relieved, watched her leave. People changed, sometimes they changed too much.

Priye had not changed so much as hardened, her personality coated in chrome. She arrived at Ranyinudo’s flat with a pile of newspapers, full of photographs of the big wedding she had just planned. Ifemelu imagined how people would talk about Priye. She is doing well, they would say, she is really doing well.

“My phone has not stopped ringing since last week!” Priye said triumphantly, pushing back the auburn straight weave that fell across one eye; each time she raised a hand to push back the hair, which invariably fell back again across her eye since it had been sewn in to do so, Ifemelu was distracted by the brittle pink color of her nails. Priye had the sure, slightly sinister manner of someone who could get other people to do what she wanted. And she glittered — her yellow-gold earrings, the metal studs on her designer bag, the sparkly bronze lipstick.

“It was a very successful wedding: we had seven governors in attendance, seven!” she said.

“And none of them knew the couple, I’m sure,” Ifemelu said drily.

Priye gestured, a shrug, an upward flick of her palm, to show how irrelevant that was.

“Since when has the success of weddings been measured by how many governors attend?” Ifemelu asked.

“It shows you’re connected. It shows prestige. Do you know how powerful governors in this country are? Executive power is not a small thing,” Priye said.

“Me, I want as many governors as possible to come to my own wedding o. It shows levels, serious levels,” Ranyinudo said. She was studying the photographs, turning the newspaper pages slowly. “Priye, you heard Mosope is getting married in two weeks?”

“Yes. She approached me, but their budget was too small for me. That girl never understood the first rule of life in this Lagos. You do not marry the man you love. You marry the man who can best maintain you.”

“Amen!” Ranyinudo said, laughing. “But sometimes one man can be both o. This is the season of weddings. When will it be my turn, Father Lord?” She glanced upwards, raised her hands as though in prayer.

“I’ve told Ranyinudo that I’ll do her wedding at no commission,” Priye said to Ifemelu. “And I’ll do yours too, Ifem.”

“Thank you, but I think Blaine will prefer a governor-free event,” Ifemelu said, and they all laughed. “We’ll probably do something small on a beach.”

Sometimes she believed her own lies. She could see it now, she and Blaine wearing white on a beach in the Caribbean, surrounded by a few friends, running to a makeshift altar of sand and flowers, and Shan watching and hoping one of them would trip and fall.

CHAPTER 47

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. But developers were renovating and dismantling now, and on the ground floor of a newly refurbished three-story building, heavy glass doors opened into a reception area painted a terra-cotta orange, where a pleasant-faced receptionist, Esther, sat, and behind her loomed giant words in silver: ZOE MAGAZINE. Esther was full of small ambitions. Ifemelu imagined her combing through the piles of secondhand shoes and clothes in the side stalls of Tejuosho market, finding the best pieces and then haggling tirelessly with the trader. 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. “This your earring is very fine, ma,” she said to Ifemelu. “If you ever want to throw it away, please give it to me to help you throw it away.” And she ceaselessly invited Ifemelu to her church.

“Will you come this Sunday, ma? My pastor is a powerful man of God. So many people have testimonies of miracles that have happened in their lives because of him.”

“Why do you think I need to come to your church, Esther?”

“You will like it, ma. It is a spirit-filled church.”

At first, the “ma” had made Ifemelu uncomfortable, Esther was at least five years older than she was, but status, of course, surpassed age: she was the features editor, with a car and a driver and the spirit of America hanging over her head, and even Esther expected her to play the madam. And so she did, complimenting Esther and joking with Esther, but always in that manner that was both playful and patronizing, and sometimes giving Esther things, an old handbag, an old watch. Just as she did with her driver, Ayo. She complained about his speeding, threatened to fire him for being late again, asked him to repeat her instructions to make sure he had understood. Yet she always heard the unnatural high pitch of her voice when she said these things, unable fully to convince even herself of her own madamness.

Aunty Onenu liked to say, “Most of my staff are foreign graduates while that woman at Glass hires riffraff who cannot punctuate sentences!” Ifemelu imagined her saying this at a dinner party, “most of my staff” making the magazine sound like a large, busy operation, although it was an editorial staff of three, an administrative staff of four, and only Ifemelu and Doris, the editor, had foreign degrees. Doris, thin and hollow-eyed, a vegetarian who announced that she was a vegetarian as soon as she possibly could, spoke with a teenage American accent that made her sentences sound like questions, except for when she was speaking to her mother on the phone; then her English took on a flat, stolid Nigerianness. Her long sisterlocks were sun-bleached a coppery tone, and she dressed unusually — white socks and brogues, men’s shirts tucked into pedal pushers — which she considered original, and which everyone in the office forgave her for because she had come back from abroad. She wore no makeup except for bright-red lipstick, and it gave her face a certain shock value, that slash of crimson, which was probably her intent, but her unadorned skin tended towards ashy gray and Ifemelu’s first urge, when they met, was to suggest a good moisturizer.

“You went to Wellson in Philly? I went to Temple?” Doris said, as though to establish right away that they were members of the same superior club. “You’re going to be sharing this office with me and Zemaye. She’s the assistant editor, and she’s out on assignment until this afternoon, or maybe longer? She always stays as long as she wants.”

Ifemelu caught the malice. It was not subtle; Doris had meant for it to be caught.

“I thought you could, like, just spend this week getting used to things? See what we do? And then next week you can start some assignments?” Doris said.

“Okay,” Ifemelu said.

The office itself, a large room with four desks, on each of which sat a computer, looked bare and untested, as though it was everybody’s first day at work. Ifemelu was not sure what would make it look otherwise, perhaps pictures of family on the desks, or just more things, more files and papers and staplers, proof of its being inhabited.

“I had a great job in New York, but I decided to move back and settle down here?” Doris said. “Like, family pressure to settle down and stuff, you know? Like I’m the only daughter? When I first got back one of my aunts looked at me and said, ‘I can get you a job at a good bank, but you have to cut off that dada hair.’ ” She shook her head from side to side in mockery as she mimicked a Nigerian accent. “I swear to God this city is full of banks that just want you to be reasonably attractive in a kind of predictable way and you have a job in customer service? Anyway, I took this job because I’m interested in the magazine business? And this is like a good place to meet people, because of all the events we get to go to, you know?” Doris sounded as if she and Ifemelu somehow shared the same plot, the same view of the world. Ifemelu felt a small resentment at this, the arrogance of Doris’s certainty that she, too, would of course feel the same way as Doris.

Just before lunchtime, into the office walked a woman in a tight pencil skirt and patent shoes high as stilts, her straightened hair sleekly pulled back. She was not pretty, her facial features created no harmony, but she carried herself as though she was. Nubile. She made Ifemelu think of that word, with her shapely slenderness, her tiny waist and the unexpected high curves of her breasts.

“Hi. You’re Ifemelu, right? Welcome to Zoe. I’m Zemaye.” She shook Ifemelu’s hand, her face carefully neutral.

“Hi, Zemaye. It’s nice to meet you. You have a lovely name,” Ifemelu said.

“Thank you.” She was used to hearing it. “I hope you don’t like cold rooms.”

“Cold rooms?”

“Yes. Doris likes to put the AC on too high and I have to wear a sweater in the office, but now that you are here sharing the office, maybe we can vote,” Zemaye said, settling down at her desk.

“What are you talking about? Since when do you have to wear a sweater in the office?” Doris asked.

Zemaye raised her eyebrows and pulled out a thick shawl from her drawer.

“It’s the humidity that’s just so crazy?” Doris said, turning to Ifemelu, expecting agreement. “I felt like I couldn’t breathe when I first came back?”

Zemaye, too, turned to Ifemelu. “I am a Delta girl, homemade, born and bred. So I did not grow up with air conditioners and I can breathe without a room being cold.” She spoke in an impassive tone, and everything she said was delivered evenly, never rising or falling.

“Well, I don’t know about cold?” Doris said. “Most offices in Lagos have air conditioners?”

“Not turned to the lowest temperature,” Zemaye said.

“You’ve never said anything about it?”

“I tell you all the time, Doris.”

“I mean that it actually prevents you from working?”

“It’s cold, full stop,” Zemaye said.

Their mutual dislike was a smoldering, stalking leopard in the room.

“I don’t like cold,” Ifemelu said. “I think I would freeze if the AC was turned on to the lowest.”

Doris blinked. She looked not merely betrayed but surprised that she had been betrayed. “Well, okay, we can turn it off and on throughout the day? I have a hard time breathing without the AC and the windows are so damn small?”

“Okay,” Ifemelu said.

Zemaye said nothing; she had turned to her computer, as though indifferent to this small victory and Ifemelu felt unaccountably disappointed. She had taken sides, after all, boldly standing with Zemaye, and yet Zemaye remained expressionless, hard to read. Ifemelu wondered what her story was. Zemaye intrigued her.

Later, Doris and Zemaye were looking over photographs spread out on Doris’s table, of a portly woman wearing tight ruffled clothes, when Zemaye said, “Excuse me, I’m pressed,” and hurried to the door, her supple movements making Ifemelu want to lose weight. Doris’s eyes followed her too.

“Don’t you just hate it how people say ‘I’m pressed’ or ‘I want to ease myself’ when they want to go to the bathroom?” Doris asked.

Ifemelu laughed. “I know!”

“I guess ‘bathroom’ is very American. But there’s ‘toilet,’ ‘restroom,’ ‘the ladies.’ ”

“I never liked ‘the ladies.’ I like ‘toilet.’ ”

“Me too!” Doris said. “And don’t you just hate it when people here use ‘on’ as a verb? On the light!”

“You know what I can’t stand? When people say ‘take’ instead of ‘drink.’ I will take wine. I don’t take beer.”

“Oh God, I know!”

They were laughing when Zemaye came back in, and she looked at Ifemelu with her eerily neutral expression and said, “You people must be discussing the next Been-To meeting.”

“What’s that?” Ifemelu asked.

“Doris talks about them all the time, but she can’t invite me because it is only for people who have come from abroad.” If there was mockery in Zemaye’s tone, and there had to be, she kept it under her flat delivery.

“Oh, please. ‘Been-To’ is like so outdated? This is not 1960,” Doris said. Then to Ifemelu, she said, “I was actually going to tell you about it. It’s called the Nigerpolitan Club and it’s just a bunch of people who have recently moved back, some from England, but mostly from the U.S.? Really low-key, just like sharing experiences and networking? I bet you’ll know some of the people. You should totally come?”

“Yes, I’d like to.”

Doris got up and took her handbag. “I have to go to Aunty Onenu’s house.”

After she left, the room was silent, Zemaye typing at her computer, Ifemelu browsing the Internet, and wondering what Zemaye was thinking.

Finally, Zemaye said, “So you were a famous race blogger in America. When Aunty Onenu told us, I didn’t understand.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why race?”

“I discovered race in America and it fascinated me.”

“Hmm,” Zemaye murmured, as though she thought this, discovering race, an exotic and self-indulgent phenomenon. “Aunty Onenu said your boyfriend is a black American and he is coming soon?”

Ifemelu was surprised. Aunty Onenu had asked about her personal life, with a casualness that was also insistent, and she had told her the false story of Blaine, thinking that her boss had no business with her personal life anyway, and now it seemed that personal life had been shared with other staff. Perhaps she was being too American about it, fixating on privacy for its own sake. What did it really matter if Zemaye knew of Blaine?

“Yes. He should be here by next month,” she said.

“Why is it only black people that are criminals over there?”

Ifemelu opened her mouth and closed it. Here she was, famous race blogger, and she was lost for words.

“I love Cops. It is because of that show that I have DSTV,” Zemaye said. “And all the criminals are black people.”

“It’s like saying every Nigerian is a 419,” Ifemelu said finally. She sounded too limp, too insufficient.

“But it is true, all of us have small 419 in our blood!” Zemaye smiled with what seemed to be, for the first time, a real amusement in her eyes. Then she added, “Sorry o. I did not mean that your boyfriend is a criminal. I was just asking.”

CHAPTER 48

Ifemelu asked Ranyinudo to come with her and Doris to the Nigerpolitan meeting.

“I don’t have energy for you returnees, please,” Ranyinudo said. “Besides, Ndudi is finally back from all his traveling up and down and we’re going out.”

“Good luck choosing a man over your friend, you witch.”

“Yes o. Are you the person that will marry me? Meanwhile I told Don I am going out with you, so make sure you don’t go anywhere that he might go.” Ranyinudo was laughing. She was still seeing Don, waiting to make sure that Ndudi was “serious” before she stopped, and she hoped, too, that Don would get her the new car before then.

The Nigerpolitan Club meeting: a small cluster of people drinking champagne in paper cups, at the poolside of a home in Osborne Estate, chic people, all dripping with savoir faire, each nursing a self-styled quirkiness — a ginger-colored Afro, a T-shirt with a graphic of Thomas Sankara, oversize handmade earrings that hung like pieces of modern art. Their voices burred with foreign accents. You can’t find a decent smoothie in this city! Oh my God, were you at that conference? What this country needs is an active civil society. Ifemelu knew some of them. She chatted with Bisola and Yagazie, both of whom had natural hair, worn in a twist-out, a halo of spirals framing their faces. They talked about hair salons here, where the hairdressers struggled and fumbled to comb natural hair, as though it were an alien eruption, as though their own hair was not the same way before it was defeated by chemicals.

“The salon girls are always like, ‘Aunty, you don’t want to relax your hair?’ It’s ridiculous that Africans don’t value our natural hair in Africa,” Yagazie said.

“I know,” Ifemelu said, and she caught the righteousness in her voice, in all their voices. They were the sanctified, the returnees, back home with an extra gleaming layer. Ikenna joined them, a lawyer who had lived outside Philadelphia and whom she had met at a Blogging While Brown convention. And Fred joined them too. He had introduced himself to Ifemelu earlier, a pudgy, well-groomed man. “I lived in Boston until last year,” he said, in a falsely low-key way, because “Boston” was code for Harvard (otherwise he would say MIT or Tufts or anywhere else), just as another woman said, “I was in New Haven,” in that coy manner that pretended not to be coy, which meant that she had been at Yale. Other people joined them, all encircled by a familiarity, because they could reach so easily for the same references. Soon they were laughing and listing the things they missed about America.

“Low-fat soy milk, NPR, fast Internet,” Ifemelu said.

“Good customer service, good customer service, good customer service,” Bisola said. “Folks here behave as if they are doing you a favor by serving you. The high-end places are okay, not great, but the regular restaurants? Forget it. The other day I asked a waiter if I could get boiled yam with a different sauce than was on the menu and he just looked at me and said no. Hilarious.”

“But the American customer service can be so annoying. Someone hovering around and bothering you all the time. Are you still working on that? Since when did eating become work?” Yagazie said.

“I miss a decent vegetarian place?” Doris said, and then talked about her new house help who could not make a simple sandwich, about how she had ordered a vegetarian spring roll at a restaurant in Victoria Island, bit in and tasted chicken, and the waiter, when summoned, just smiled and said, “Maybe they put chicken today.” There was laughter. Fred said a good vegetarian place would open soon, now that there was so much new investment in the country; somebody would figure out that there was a vegetarian market to cater to.

“A vegetarian restaurant? Impossible. There are only four vegetarians in this country, including Doris,” Bisola said.

“You’re not vegetarian, are you?” Fred asked Ifemelu. He just wanted to talk to her. She had looked up from time to time to find his eyes on her.

“No,” she said.

“Oh, there’s this new place that opened on Akin Adesola,” Bisola said. “The brunch is really good. They have the kinds of things we can eat. We should go next Sunday.”

They have the kinds of things we can eat. An unease crept up on Ifemelu. She was comfortable here, and she wished she were not. She wished, too, that she was not so interested in this new restaurant, did not perk up, imagining fresh green salads and steamed still-firm vegetables. She loved eating all the things she had missed while away, jollof rice cooked with a lot of oil, fried plantains, boiled yams, but she longed, also, for the other things she had become used to in America, even quinoa, Blaine’s specialty, made with feta and tomatoes. This was what she hoped she had not become but feared that she had: a “they have the kinds of things we can eat” kind of person.

Fred was talking about Nollywood, speaking a little too loudly. “Nollywood is really public theater, and if you understand it like that, then it is more tolerable. It’s for public consumption, even mass participation, not the kind of individual experience that film is.” He was looking at her, soliciting her agreement with his eyes: they were not supposed to watch Nollywood, people like them, and if they did, then only as amusing anthropology.

“I like Nollywood,” Ifemelu said, even though she, too, thought Nollywood was more theater than film. The urge to be contrarian was strong. If she set herself apart, perhaps she would be less of the person she feared she had become. “Nollywood may be melodramatic, but life in Nigeria is very melodramatic.”

“Really?” the New Haven woman said, squeezing her paper cup in her hand, as though she thought it a great oddity, that a person at this gathering would like Nollywood. “It is so offensive to my intelligence. I mean, the products are just bad. What does it say about us?”

“But Hollywood makes equally bad movies. They just make them with better lighting,” Ifemelu said.

Fred laughed, too heartily, to let her know he was on her side.

“It’s not just about the technical stuff,” the New Haven woman said. “The industry is regressive. I mean, the portrayal of women? The films are more misogynistic than the society.”

Ifemelu saw a man across the pool whose wide shoulders reminded her of Obinze. But he was too tall to be Obinze. She wondered what Obinze would make of a gathering like this. Would he even come? He had been deported from England, after all, so perhaps he would not consider himself a returnee like them.

“Hey, come back,” Fred said, moving closer to her, claiming personal space. “Your mind isn’t here.”

She smiled thinly. “It is now.”

Fred knew things. He had the confidence of a person who knew practical things. He probably had a Harvard MBA and used words like “capacity” and “value” in conversation. He would not dream in imagery, but in facts and figures.

“There’s a concert tomorrow at MUSON. Do you like classical music?” he asked.

“No.” She had not expected that he would, either.

“Are you willing to like classical music?”

“Willing to like something, it’s a strange idea,” she said, now curious about him, vaguely interested in him. They talked. Fred mentioned Stravinsky and Strauss, Vermeer and Van Dyck, making unnecessary references, quoting too often, his spirits attuned across the Atlantic, too transparent in his performance, too eager to show how much he knew of the Western world. Ifemelu listened with a wide internal yawn. She had been wrong about him. He was not the MBA type who thought the world was a business. 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. She wondered what he was like beneath that practiced layer.

“So will you come for this drinks thing?” he asked.

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I think I’ll head home. But call me.”

CHAPTER 49

The speedboat was gliding on foaming water, past beaches of ivory sand, and trees a bursting, well-fed green. Ifemelu was laughing. She caught herself in mid-laughter, and looked at her present, an orange life jacket strapped around her, a ship in the graying distance, her friends in their sunglasses, on their way to Priye’s friend’s beach house, where they would grill meat and race barefoot. She thought: I’m really home. I’m home. She no longer sent Ranyinudo texts about what to do—Should I buy meat in Shoprite or send Iyabo to the market? Where should I buy hangers? Now she awoke to the sound of the peacocks, and got out of bed, with the shape of her day familiar and her routines unthinking. She had signed up at a gym, but had gone only twice, because after work she preferred to meet her friends, and even though she always planned not to eat, she ended up eating a club sandwich and drinking one or two Chapmans, and then she would decide to postpone the gym. Her clothes felt even tighter now. Somewhere, in a faraway part of her mind, she wanted to lose weight before she saw Obinze again. She had not called him; she would wait until she was back to her slender self.

At work, she felt an encroaching restlessness. Zoe stifled her. It was like wearing a scratchy sweater in the cold: she longed to yank it off, but was afraid of what would happen if she did. She thought often of starting a blog, writing about what she cared about, building it up slowly, and finally publishing her own magazine. But it was nebulous, too much of an unknown. Having this job, now that she was home, made her feel anchored. At first, she had enjoyed doing the features, interviewing society women in their homes, observing their lives and relearning old subtleties. But she soon became bored and she would sit through the interviews, half listening and half present. Each time she walked into their cemented compounds, she longed for sand in which to curl her toes. A servant or child would let her in, seat her in a living room of leather and marble that brought to mind a clean airport in a wealthy country. Then Madam would appear, warm and good-humored, offering her a drink, sometimes food, before settling on a sofa to talk. All of them, the madams she interviewed, boasted about what they owned and where they or their children had been and what they had done, and then they capped their boasts with God. We thank God. It is God that did it. God is faithful. Ifemelu thought, as she left, that she could write the features without doing the interviews.

She could, also, cover events without attending them. How common that word was in Lagos, and how popular: event. It could be a product rebranding, a fashion show, an album launch. Aunty Onenu always insisted that an editor go with the photographer. “Please make sure you mingle,” Aunty Onenu said. “If they are not advertising with us yet, we want them to start; if they have started, we want them to increase!” To Ifemelu, Aunty Onenu said “mingle” with great emphasis, as though this were something she thought Ifemelu did not do well. Perhaps Aunty Onenu was right. At those events, in halls aflame with balloons, rolls of silky cloth draped in corners, chairs covered in gauze, and too many ushers walking around, their faces gaudily bright with makeup, Ifemelu disliked talking to strangers about Zoe. She would spend her time exchanging texts with Ranyinudo or Priye or Zemaye, bored, waiting until when it would not be impolite to leave. There were always two or three meandering speeches, and all of them seemed written by the same verbose, insincere person. The wealthy and the famous were recognized—“We wish to recognize in our presence the former governor of …” Bottles were uncorked, juice cartons folded open, samosas and chicken satays served. Once, at an event she attended with Zemaye, the launch of a new beverage brand, she thought she saw Obinze walk past. She turned. It was not him, but it very well could have been. She imagined him attending events like this, in halls like this, with his wife by his side. Ranyinudo had told her that his wife, when she was a student, was voted the most beautiful girl at the University of Lagos, and in Ifemelu’s imagination, she looked like Bianca Onoh, that beauty icon of her teenage years, high-cheekboned and almond-eyed. And when Ranyinudo mentioned his wife’s name, Kosisochukwu, an uncommon name, Ifemelu imagined Obinze’s mother asking her to translate it. The thought of Obinze’s mother and Obinze’s wife deciding which translation was better — God’s Will or As It Pleases God — felt like a betrayal. That memory, of Obinze’s mother saying “translate it” all those years ago, seemed even more precious now that she had passed away.

As Ifemelu was leaving the event, she saw Don. “Ifemelu,” he said. It took her a moment to recognize him. Ranyinudo had introduced them one afternoon, months ago, when Don dropped by Ranyinudo’s flat on his way to his club, wearing tennis whites, and Ifemelu had left almost immediately, to give them privacy. He looked dapper in a navy suit, his gray-sprinkled hair burnished.

“Good evening,” she said.

“You’re looking well, very well,” he said, taking in her low-cut cocktail dress.

“Thank you.”

“You don’t ask about me.” As though there was a reason for her to ask about him. He gave her his card. “Call me, make sure you call me, eh. Let’s talk. Take care.”

He was not interested in her, not particularly; he was simply a big man in Lagos, she attractive and alone, and by the laws of their universe, he had to make a pass, even if a halfhearted pass, even if he was already dating her friend, and he expected, of course, that she would not tell her friend. She slipped his card into her bag and, back home, tore it into tiny bits which she watched float in the toilet water for a while before flushing. She was, strangely, angry with him. His action said something about her friendship with Ranyinudo that she disliked. She called Ranyinudo, and was about to tell her what happened, when Ranyinudo said, “Ifem, I’m so depressed.” And so Ifemelu merely listened. It was about Ndudi. “He’s such a child,” Ranyinudo said. “If you say something he doesn’t like, he will stop talking and start humming. Seriously humming, loud humming. How does a grown man behave so immaturely?”

IT WAS MONDAY MORNING. Ifemelu was reading Postbourgie, her favorite American blog. Zemaye was looking through a stash of glossy photographs. Doris was staring at her computer screen, cradling in her palms a mug that said I ♥ FLORIDA. On her desk, next to her computer, was a tin of loose-leaf tea.

“Ifemelu, I think this feature is too snarky?”

“Your editorial feedback is priceless,” Ifemelu said.

“What does ‘snarky’ mean? Please explain to some of us who did not go to school in America,” Zemaye said.

Doris ignored her completely.

“I just don’t think Aunty Onenu will want us to run this?”

“Convince her, you’re her editor,” Ifemelu said. “We need to get this magazine going.”

Doris shrugged and got up. “We’ll talk about it at the meeting?”

“I am so sleepy,” Zemaye said. “I’m going to send Esther to make Nescafé before I fall asleep in the meeting.”

“Instant coffee is just awful?” Doris said. “I’m so glad I’m not much of a coffee drinker or I would just die.”

“What is wrong with Nescafé?” Zemaye said.

“It shouldn’t even be called coffee?” Doris said. “It’s like beyond bad.”

Zemaye yawned and stretched. “Me, I like it. Coffee is coffee.”

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.”

They sat around the oval conference table in Aunty Onenu’s large office. Aunty Onenu’s weave was longer and more incongruous than the last, high and coiffed in front, with waves of hair floating to her back. She sipped from a bottle of diet Sprite and said she liked Doris’s piece “Marrying Your Best Friend.”

“Very good and inspirational,” she said.

“Ah, but Aunty Onenu, women should not marry their best friend because there is no sexual chemistry,” Zemaye said.

Aunty Onenu gave Zemaye the look given to the crazy student whom one could not take seriously, then she shuffled her papers and said she did not like Ifemelu’s profile of Mrs. Funmi King.

“Why did you say ‘she never looks at her steward when she speaks to him’?” Aunty Onenu asked.

“Because she didn’t,” Ifemelu said.

“But it makes her sound wicked,” Aunty Onenu said.

“I think it’s an interesting detail,” Ifemelu said.

“I agree with Aunty Onenu,” Doris said. “Interesting or not, it is judgmental?”

“The idea of interviewing someone and writing a profile is judgmental,” Ifemelu said. “It’s not about the subject. It’s about what the interviewer makes of the subject.”

Aunty Onenu shook her head. Doris shook her head.

“Why do we have to play it so safe?” Ifemelu asked.

Doris said, with false humor, “This isn’t your American race blog where you provoked everybody, Ifemelu. This is like a wholesome women’s magazine?”

“Yes, it is!” Aunty Onenu said.

“But Aunty Onenu, we will never beat Glass if we continue like this,” Ifemelu said.

Aunty Onenu’s eyes widened.

“Glass is doing exactly what we are doing,” Doris said quickly.

Esther came in to tell Aunty Onenu that her daughter had arrived.

Esther’s black high heels were shaky, and as she walked past, Ifemelu worried that the shoes would collapse and sprain Esther’s ankles. Earlier in the morning, Esther had told Ifemelu, “Aunty, your hair is jaga-jaga,” with a kind of sad honesty, about what Ifemelu considered an attractive twist-out style.

“Ehn, she is already here?” Aunty Onenu said. “Girls, please finish the meeting. I am taking my daughter to shop for a dress and I have an afternoon meeting with our distributors.”

Ifemelu was tired, bored. She thought, again, of starting a blog. Her phone was vibrating, Ranyinudo calling, and ordinarily she would have waited until the meeting was over to call her back. But she said, “Sorry, I have to take this, international call,” and hurried out. Ranyinudo was complaining about Don. “He said I am not the sweet girl I used to be. That I’ve changed. Meanwhile, I know he has bought the jeep for me and has even cleared it at the port, but now he doesn’t want to give it to me.”

Ifemelu thought about the expression “sweet girl.” Sweet girl meant that, for a long time, Don had molded Ranyinudo into a malleable shape, or that she had allowed him to think he had.

“What about Ndudi?”

Ranyinudo sighed loudly. “We haven’t talked since Sunday. Today he will forget to call me. Tomorrow he will be too busy. And so I told him that it’s not acceptable. Why should I be making all the effort? Now he is sulking. He can never initiate a conversation like an adult, or agree that he did something wrong.”

Later, back in the office, Esther came in to say that a Mr. Tolu wanted to see Zemaye.

“Is that the photographer you did the tailors article with?” Doris asked.

“Yes. He’s late. He has been dodging my calls for days,” Zemaye said.

Doris said, “You need to handle that and make sure I have the images by tomorrow afternoon? I need everything to get to the printer before three? I don’t want a repeat of the printer’s delay, especially now that Glass is printing in South Africa?”

“Okay.” Zemaye shook her mouse. “The server is so slow today. I just need to send this thing. Esther, tell him to wait.”

“Yes, ma.”

“You are feeling better, Esther?” Doris asked.

“Yes, ma, Thank you, ma.” Esther curtsied, Yoruba-style. She had been standing by the door as though waiting to be dismissed, listening in on the conversation. “I am taking the medicine for typhoid.”

“You have typhoid?” Ifemelu asked.

“Didn’t you notice how she looked on Monday? I gave her some money and told her to go to the hospital, not to a chemist?” Doris said. Ifemelu wished that she had noticed that Esther was unwell.

“Sorry, Esther,” Ifemelu said.

“Thank you, ma.”

“Esther, sorry o,” Zemaye said. “I saw her dull face, but I thought she was just fasting. You know she’s always fasting. She will fast and fast until God gives her a husband.”

Esther giggled.

“I remember I had this really bad case of typhoid when I was in secondary school,” Ifemelu said. “It was terrible, and it turned out I was taking an antibiotic that wasn’t strong enough. What are you taking, Esther?”

“Medicine, ma.”

“What antibiotic did they give you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know the name?”

“Let me bring them, ma.”

Esther came back with transparent packets of pills, on which instructions, but no names, were written in a crabbed handwriting in blue ink. Two to be taken morning and night. One to be taken three times daily.

“We should write about this, Doris. We should have a health column with useful practical information. Somebody should let the health minister know that ordinary Nigerians go to see a doctor and the doctor gives them unnamed medicines. This can kill you. How will anybody know what you have already taken, or what you shouldn’t take if you’re already taking something else?”

“Ahn-ahn, but that one is a small problem: they do it so that you don’t buy the medicine from someone else,” Zemaye said. “But what about fake drugs? Go to the market and see what they are selling.”

“Okay, let’s all calm down? No need to get all activist? We’re not doing investigative journalism here?” Doris said.

Ifemelu began then to visualize her new blog, a blue-and-white design, and, on the masthead, an aerial shot of a Lagos scene. Nothing familiar, not a traffic clog of yellow rusted buses or a water-logged slum of zinc shacks. Perhaps the abandoned house next to her flat would do. She would take the photo herself, in the haunted light of early evening, and hope to catch the male peacock in flight. The blog posts would be in a stark, readable font. An article about health care, using Esther’s story, with pictures of the packets of nameless medicine. A piece about the Nigerpolitan Club. A fashion article about clothes that women could actually afford. Posts about people helping others, but nothing like the Zoe stories that always featured a wealthy person, hugging children at a motherless babies’ home, with bags of rice and tins of powdered milk propped in the background.

“But, Esther, you have to stop all that fasting o,” Zemaye said. “You know, some months Esther will give her whole salary to her church, they call it ‘sowing a seed,’ then she will come and ask me to give her three hundred naira for transport.”

“But, ma, it is just small help. You are equal to the task,” Esther said, smiling.

“Last week she was fasting with a handkerchief,” Zemaye continued. “She kept it on her desk all day. She said somebody in her church got promoted after fasting with the handkerchief.”

“Is that what that handkerchief on her table was about?” Ifemelu asked.

“But I believe miracles totally work? I know my aunt was cured of cancer in her church?” Doris said.

“With a magic handkerchief, abi?” Zemaye scoffed.

“You don’t believe, ma? But it is true.” Esther was enjoying the camaraderie, reluctant to return to her desk.

“So you want a promotion, Esther? Which means you want my job?” Zemaye asked.

“No, ma! All of us will be promoted in Jesus’ name!” Esther said.

They were all laughing.

“Has Esther told you what spirit you have, Ifemelu?” Zemaye asked, walking to the door. “When I first started working here, she kept inviting me to her church and then one day she told me there would be a special prayer service for people with the spirit of seductiveness. People like me.”

“That’s not like entirely far-fetched?” Doris said and smirked.

“What is my spirit, Esther?” Ifemelu asked.

Esther shook her head, smiling, and left the office.

Ifemelu turned to her computer. The title for the blog had just come to her. The Small Redemptions of Lagos.

“I wonder who Zemaye is dating?” Doris said.

“She told me she doesn’t have a boyfriend.”

“Have you seen her car? Her salary can’t pay for the light in that car? It’s not like her family is rich or anything. I’ve been working with her almost a year now and I don’t know what she like really does?”

“Maybe she goes home and changes her clothes and becomes an armed robber at night,” Ifemelu said.

“Whatever,” Doris said.

“We should do a piece about churches,” Ifemelu said. “Like Esther’s church.”

“That’s not a good fit for Zoe?”

“It makes no sense that Aunty Onenu likes to run three profiles of these boring women who have achieved nothing and have nothing to say. Or the younger women with zero talent who have decided that they are fashion designers.”

“You know they pay Aunty Onenu, right?” Doris asked.

“They pay her?” Ifemelu stared. “No, I didn’t know. And you know I didn’t know.”

“Well, they do. Most of them. You have to realize a lot of things happen in this country like that?”

Ifemelu got up to gather her things. “I never know where you stand or if you stand on anything at all.”

“And you are such a judgmental bitch?” Doris screamed, her eyes bulging. Ifemelu, alarmed by the suddenness of the change, thought that perhaps Doris was, underneath her retro affectations, one of those women who could transform when provoked, and tear off their clothes and fight in the street.

“You sit there and judge everyone,” Doris was saying. “Who do you think you are? Why do you think this magazine should be about you? It isn’t yours. Aunty Onenu has told you what she wants her magazine to be and it’s either you do it or you shouldn’t be working here?”

“You need to get yourself a moisturizer and stop scaring people with that nasty red lipstick,” Ifemelu said. “And you need to get a life, and stop thinking that sucking up to Aunty Onenu and helping her publish a god-awful magazine will open doors for you, because it won’t.”

She left the office feeling common, shamed, by what had just happened. Perhaps this was a sign, to quit now and start her blog.

On her way out, Esther said, her voice earnest and low, “Ma? I think you have the spirit of husband-repelling. You are too hard, ma, you will not find a husband. But my pastor can destroy that spirit.”

CHAPTER 50

Dike was seeing a therapist three times a week. Ifemelu called him every other day, and sometimes he spoke about his session, and other times he did not, but always he wanted to hear about her new life. She told him about her flat, and how she had a driver who drove her to work, and how she was seeing her old friends, and how, on Sundays, she loved to drive herself because the roads were empty; Lagos became a gentler version of itself, and the people dressed in their bright church clothes looked, from far away, like flowers in the wind.

“You would like Lagos, I think,” she said, and he, eagerly, surprisingly, said, “Can I come visit you, Coz?”

Aunty Uju was reluctant at first. “Lagos? Is it safe? You know what he has been through. I don’t think he can handle it.”

“But he asked to come, Aunty.”

“He asked to come? Since when has he known what is good for him? Is he not the same person who wanted to make me childless?”

But Aunty Uju bought Dike’s ticket and now here they were, she and Dike in her car, crawling through the crush of traffic in Oshodi, Dike looking wide-eyed out of the window. “Oh my God, Coz, I’ve never seen so many black people in the same place!” he said.

They stopped at a fast-food place, where he ordered a hamburger. “Is this horse meat? Because it isn’t a hamburger.” Afterwards, he would eat only jollof rice and fried plantain.

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. Her first post was a short interview with Priye, with photographs from weddings Priye had planned. Ifemelu thought most of the décor fussy and overdone, but the post received enthusiastic comments, especially about the décor. Fantastic decoration. Madam Priye, I hope you will do my own wedding. Great work, carry go. Zemaye had written, under a pseudonym, a piece about body language and sex, “Can You Tell If Two People Are Doing It Just by Looking at Them Together?” That, too, drew many comments. But the most comments, by far, were for Ifemelu’s piece about the Nigerpolitan Club.

Lagos has never been, will never be, and has never aspired to be like New York, or anywhere else for that matter. Lagos has always been undisputably itself, but you would not know this at the meeting of the Nigerpolitan Club, a group of young returnees who gather every week to moan about the many ways that Lagos is not like New York as though Lagos had ever been close to being like New York. Full disclosure: I am one of them. Most of us have come back to make money in Nigeria, to start businesses, to seek government contracts and contacts. Others have come with dreams in their pockets and a hunger to change the country, but we spend all our time complaining about Nigeria, and even though our complaints are legitimate, I imagine myself as an outsider saying: Go back where you came from! If your cook cannot make the perfect panini, it is not because he is stupid. It is because Nigeria is not a nation of sandwich-eating people and his last oga did not eat bread in the afternoon. So he needs training and practice. And Nigeria is not a nation of people with food allergies, not a nation of picky eaters for whom food is about distinctions and separations. It is a nation of people who eat beef and chicken and cow skin and intestines and dried fish in a single bowl of soup, and it is called assorted, and so get over yourselves and realize that the way of life here is just that, assorted.

The first commenter wrote: Rubbish post. Who cares? The second wrote: Thank God somebody is finally talking about this. Na wa for arrogance of Nigerian returnees. My cousin came back after six years in America and the other morning she came with me to the nursery school at Unilag where I was dropping off my niece and, near the gate, she saw students standing in line for the bus and she said, “Wow, people actually stand in line here!” Another early commenter wrote: Why should Nigerians who school abroad have a choice of where to get posted for their national youth service? Nigerians who school in Nigeria are randomly posted so why shouldn’t Nigerians who school abroad be treated the same way? That comment sparked more responses than the original post had. By the sixth day, the blog had one thousand unique visitors.

Ifemelu moderated the comments, deleting anything obscene, reveling in the liveliness of it all, in the sense of herself at the surging forefront of something vibrant. She wrote a long post about the expensive lifestyles of some young women in Lagos, and a day after she put it up, Ranyinudo called her, furious, her breathing heavy over the phone.

“Ifem, how can you do this kind of thing? Anyone who knows me will know it’s me!”

“That’s not true, Ranyi. Your story is so common.”

“What are you saying? It is so obviously me! Look at this!” Ranyinudo paused and then began to read aloud.

There are many young women in Lagos with Unknown Sources of Wealth. They live lives they can’t afford. They have only ever traveled business class to Europe but have jobs that can’t even afford them a regular flight ticket. One of them is my friend, a beautiful, brilliant woman who works in advertising. She lives on The Island and is dating a big man banker. I worry that she will end up like many women in Lagos who define their lives by men they can never truly have, crippled by their culture of dependence, with desperation in their eyes and designer handbags on their wrists.

“Ranyi, honestly, nobody will know it’s you. All the comments so far have been from people saying that they identify. So many women lose themselves in relationships like that. What I really had in mind was Aunty Uju and The General. That relationship destroyed her. She became a different person because of The General and she couldn’t do anything for herself, and when he died, she lost herself.”

“And who are you to pass judgment? How is it different from you and the rich white guy in America? Would you have your U.S. citizenship today if not for him? How did you get your job in America? You need to stop this nonsense. Stop feeling so superior!”

Ranyinudo hung up on her. For a long time, Ifemelu stared at the silent phone, shaken. Then she took down the post and drove over to Ranyinudo’s place.

“Ranyi, I’m sorry. Please don’t be angry,” she said.

Ranyinudo gave her a long look.

“You’re right,” Ifemelu said. “It’s easy to be judgmental. But it was not personal, and it was not coming from a bad place. Please, biko. I will never invade your privacy like that again.”

Ranyinudo shook her head. “Ifemelunamma, your problem is emotional frustration. Go and find Obinze, please.”

Ifemelu laughed. It was what she least expected to hear.

“I have to lose weight first,” she said.

“You’re just afraid.”

Before Ifemelu left, they sat on the couch and drank malt and watched the latest celebrity news on E!.

DIKE VOLUNTEERED to moderate the blog comments, so that she could take a break.

“Oh my God, Coz, people take this stuff really personal!” he said. Sometimes he laughed aloud on reading a comment. Other times, he asked her what unfamiliar expressions meant. What’s “shine your eye”? The first time the power went off after he arrived, the buzzing, whirring, piping sounds of her UPS startled him. “Oh my God, is that like a fire alarm?” he asked.

“No, that’s just something that makes sure my TV doesn’t get destroyed by crazy power cuts.”

“That’s crazy,” Dike said, but only days later he was going to the back of the flat to turn on the generator himself when the power went off. Ranyinudo brought her cousins to meet him, girls who were close to his age, skinny jeans clinging to their slender hips, their budding breasts outlined in tight T-shirts. “Dike, you must marry one of them o,” Ranyinudo said. “We need fine children in our family.” “Ranyi!” her cousins said, abashed, hiding their shyness. They liked Dike. It was so easy to like him, with his charm and his humor and the vulnerability openly lurking underneath. On Facebook, he posted a picture Ifemelu had taken of him standing on the verandah with Ranyinudo’s cousins, and he captioned it: No lions yet to eat me, folks.

“I wish I spoke Igbo,” he told her after they had spent an evening with her parents.

“But you understand perfectly,” she said.

“I just wish I spoke.”

“You can still learn,” she said, suddenly feeling desperate, unsure how much this mattered to him, thinking again of him lying on the couch in the basement, drenched in sweat. She wondered if she should say more or not.

“Yes, I guess so,” he said, and shrugged, as though to say it was already too late.

Some days before he left, he asked her, “What was my father really like?”

“He loved you.”

“Did you like him?”

She did not want to lie to him. “I don’t know. He was a big man in a military government and that does something to you and the way you relate to people. I was worried for your mom because I thought she deserved better. But she loved him, she really did, and he loved you. He used to carry you with such tenderness.”

“I can’t believe Mom hid from me for so long that she was his mistress.”

“She was protecting you,” Ifemelu said.

“Can we go see the house in Dolphin Estate?”

“Yes.”

She drove him to Dolphin Estate, astounded by how much it had declined. The paint was peeling on buildings, the streets pitted with potholes, and the whole estate resigned to its own shabbiness. “It was so much nicer then,” she told him. He stood looking at the house for a while, until the gateman said, “Yes? Any problem?” and they got back into the car.

“Can I drive, Coz?” he asked.

“Are you sure?”

He nodded. She came out of the driver’s seat and went around to his. He drove them home, hesitating slightly before he merged onto Osborne Road, and then easing into traffic with more confidence. She knew it meant something to him that she could not name. That night, when the power went off, her generator would not come on, and she suspected that her driver, Ayo, had been sold diesel spiked with kerosene. Dike complained about the heat, about mosquitoes biting him. 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.

In the morning, the sky was overcast with slate-gray clouds, the air thick with rains foreboding. From nearby a clutch of birds screeched and flew away. The rain would come down, a sea unleashed from the sky, and DSTV images would get grainy, phone networks would clog, the roads would flood and traffic would gnarl. She stood with Dike on the verandah as the early droplets came down.

“I kind of like it here,” he told her.

She wanted to say, “You can live with me. There are good private schools here that you could go to,” but she did not.

She took him to the airport, and stayed watching until he went past security, waved, and turned the corner. Back home, she heard the hollowness in her steps as she walked from bedroom to living room to verandah and then back again. Later, Ranyinudo told her, “I don’t understand how a fine boy like Dike would want to kill himself. A boy living in America with everything. How can? That is very foreign behavior.”

“Foreign behavior? What the fuck are you talking about? Foreign behavior? Have you read Things Fall Apart?” Ifemelu asked, wishing she had not told Ranyinudo about Dike. She was angrier with Ranyinudo than she had ever been, yet she knew that Ranyinudo meant well, and had said what many other Nigerians would say, which was why she had not told anyone else about Dike’s suicide attempt since she came back.

CHAPTER 51

It had terrified her, the first time she came to the bank, to walk past the armed security guard, and into the beeping door, where she stood in the enclosure, sealed and airless like a standing coffin, until the light changed to green. Had banks always had this ostentatious security? Before she left America, she had wired some money to Nigeria, and Bank of America had made her speak to three different people, each one telling her that Nigeria was a high-risk country; if anything happened to her money, they would not be responsible. Did she understand? The last woman she spoke to made her repeat herself. Ma’am, I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. I need to know that you understand that Nigeria is a high-risk country. “I understand!” she said. They read her caveat after caveat, and she began to fear for her money, snaking its way through the air to Nigeria, and she worried even more when she came to the bank and saw the gaudy garlands of security at the entrance. But the money was safely in her account. And now, as she walked into the bank, she saw Obinze at the customer service section. He was standing with his back to her and she knew, from the height and the shape of the head, that it was him. She stopped, sick with apprehension, hoping he would not turn just yet until she had gathered her nerves. Then he turned and it was not Obinze. Her throat felt tight. Her head was filled with ghosts. Back in her car, she turned on the air conditioner and decided to call him, to free herself of the ghosts. His phone rang and rang. He was a big man now; he would not, of course, pick up a call from an unknown number. She sent a text: Ceiling, it’s me. Her phone rang almost immediately.

“Hello? Ifem?” That voice she had not heard in so long, and it sounded both changed and unchanged.

“Ceiling! How are you?”

“You’re back.”

“Yes.” Her hands were trembling. She should have sent an e-mail first. She should be chatty, ask about his wife and child, tell him that she had in fact been back for a while.

“So,” Obinze said, dragging the word. “How are you? Where are you? When can I see you?”

“What about now?” The recklessness that often emerged when she felt nervous had pushed out those words, but perhaps it was best to see him right away and get it over with. She wished she had dressed up a bit more, maybe worn her favorite wrap dress, with its slimming cut, but her knee-length skirt was not too bad, and her high heels always made her feel confident, and her Afro was, thankfully, not yet too shrunken from the humidity.

There was a pause on Obinze’s end — something hesitant? — which made her regret her rashness.

“I’m actually running a bit late for a meeting,” she added quickly. “But I just wanted to say hi and we can meet up soon …”

“Ifem, where are you?”

She told him she was on her way to Jazzhole to buy a book, and would be there in a few minutes. Half an hour later, she was standing in front of the bookshop when a black Range Rover pulled in and Obinze got out from the back.

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.

“Obinze Maduewesi! Long time! Look at you, you haven’t changed!” She was flustered, and the new shrillness in her voice annoyed her. He was looking at her, an open unabashed looking, and she would not hold his gaze. Her fingers were shaking of their own accord, which was bad enough, she did not need to stare into his eyes, both of them standing there, in the hot sun, in the fumes of traffic from Awolowo Road.

“It’s so good to see you, Ifem,” he said. He was calm. She had forgotten what a calm person he was. There was still, in his bearing, a trace of his teenage history: the one who didn’t try too hard, the one the girls wanted and the boys wanted to be.

“You’re bald,” she said.

He laughed and touched his head. “Yes. Mostly by choice.”

He had filled out, from the slight boy of their university days to a fleshier, more muscled man, and perhaps because he had filled out, he seemed shorter than she remembered. In her high heels, she was taller than he was. She had not forgotten, but merely remembered anew, how understated his manner was, his plain dark jeans, his leather slippers, the way he walked into the bookshop with no need to dominate it.

“Let’s sit down,” he said.

The bookshop was dimly cool, its air moody and eclectic, books, CDs, and magazines spread out on low shelves. A man standing near the entrance nodded at them in welcome, while adjusting the large headphones around his head. They sat opposite each other in the tiny café at the back and ordered fruit juice. Obinze put his two phones on the table; they lit up often, ringing in silent mode, and he would glance at them and then away. He worked out, she could tell from the firmness of his chest, across which stretched the double front pockets of his fitted shirt.

“You’ve been back for a while,” he said. He was watching her again, and she remembered how she had often felt as if he could see her mind, knew things about her that she might not consciously know.

“Yes,” she said.

“So what did you come to buy?”

“What?”

“The book you wanted to buy.”

“Actually I just wanted to meet you here. I thought if it turns out that seeing you again is something I’d like to remember, then I want to remember it in Jazzhole.”

“I want to remember it in Jazzhole,” he repeated, smiling as though only she could have come up with that expression. “You haven’t stopped being honest, Ifem. Thank God.”

“I already think I’m going to want to remember this.” Her nervousness was melting away; they had raced past the requisite moments of awkwardness.

“Do you need to be anywhere right now?” he asked. “Can you stay awhile?”

“Yes.”

He switched off both his phones. A rare declaration, in a city like Lagos for a man like him, that she had his absolute attention. “How is Dike? How is Aunty Uju?”

“They’re fine. He’s doing well now. He actually came to visit me here. He only just left.”

The waitress served tall cups of mango-orange juice.

“What has surprised you the most about being back?” he asked.

“Everything, honestly. I started wondering if something was wrong with me.”

“Oh, it’s normal,” he said, and she remembered how he had always been quick to reassure her, to make her feel better. “I was away for a much shorter time, obviously, but I was very surprised when I came back. I kept thinking that things should have waited for me but they hadn’t.”

“I’d forgotten that Lagos is so expensive. I can’t believe how much money the Nigerian wealthy spend.”

“Most of them are thieves or beggars.”

She laughed. “Thieves or beggars.”

“It’s true. And they don’t just spend a lot, they expect to spend a lot. I met this guy the other day, and he was telling me how he started his satellite-dish business about twenty years ago. This was when satellite dishes were still new in the country and so he was bringing in something most people didn’t know about. He put his business plan together, and came up with a good price that would fetch him a good profit. Another friend of his, who was already a businessman and was going to invest in the business, took a look at the price and asked him to double it. Otherwise, he said, the Nigerian wealthy would not buy. He doubled it and it worked.”

“Crazy,” she said. “Maybe it’s always been this way and we didn’t know, because we couldn’t know. It’s as if we are looking at an adult Nigeria that we didn’t know about.”

“Yes.” He liked that she had said “we,” she could tell, and she liked that “we” had slipped so easily out of her.

“It’s such a transactional city,” she said. “Depressingly transactional. Even relationships, they’re all transactional.”

“Some relationships.”

“Yes, some,” she agreed. They were telling each other something that neither could yet articulate. Because she felt the nervousness creeping up her fingers again, she turned to humor. “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!”

Obinze laughed. She liked his quiet laugh. “When I came back, I was shocked at how quickly my friends had all become fat, with big beer bellies. I thought: What is happening? Then I realized that they were the new middle class that our democracy created. They had jobs and they could afford to drink a lot more beer and to eat out, and you know eating out for us here is chicken and chips, and so they got fat.”

Ifemelu’s stomach clenched. “Well, if you look carefully you’ll notice it’s not only your friends.”

“Oh, no, Ifem, you’re not fat. You’re being very American about that. What Americans consider fat can just be normal. You need to see my guys to know what I am talking about. Remember Uche Okoye? Even Okwudiba? They can’t even button their shirts now.” Obinze paused. “You put on some weight and it suits you. I maka.”

She felt shy, a pleasant shyness, hearing him say she was beautiful.

“You used to tease me about not having an ass,” she said.

“I take my words back. At the door, I waited for you to go ahead for a reason.”

They laughed and then, laughter tapering off, were silent, smiling at each other in the strangeness of their intimacy. She remembered how, as she got up naked from his mattress on the floor in Nsukka, he would look up and say, “I was going to say shake it but there’s nothing to shake,” and she would playfully kick him in the shin. The clarity of that memory, the sudden stab of longing it brought, left her unsteady.

“But talk of being surprised, Ceiling,” she said. “Look at you. Big man with your Range Rover. Having money must have really changed things.”

“Yes, I guess it has.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “How?”

“People treat you differently. I don’t just mean strangers. Friends too. Even my cousin Nneoma. Suddenly you’re getting all of this sucking-up from people because they think you expect it, all this exaggerated politeness, exaggerated praise, even exaggerated respect that you haven’t earned at all, and it’s so fake and so garish, it’s like a bad overcolored painting, but sometimes you start believing a little bit of it yourself and sometimes you see yourself differently. One day I went to a wedding in my hometown, and the MC was doing a lot of silly praise-singing when I came in and I realized I was walking differently. I didn’t want to walk differently but I was.”

“What, like a swagger?” she teased. “Show me the walk!”

“You’ll have to sing my praises first.” He sipped his drink. “Nigerians can be so obsequious. We are a confident people but we are so obsequious. It’s not difficult for us to be insincere.”

“We have confidence but no dignity.”

“Yes.” He looked at her, recognition in his eyes. “And if you keep getting that overdone sucking-up, it makes you paranoid. You don’t know if anything is honest or true anymore. And then people become paranoid for you, but in a different way. My relatives are always telling me: Be careful where you eat. Even here in Lagos my friends tell me to watch what I eat. Don’t eat in a woman’s house because she’ll put something in your food.”

“And do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Watch what you eat?”

“I wouldn’t in your house.” A pause. He was being openly flirtatious and she was unsure what to say.

“But no,” he continued. “I like to think that if I wanted to eat in somebody’s house, it would be a person who would not think of slipping jazz into my food.”

“It all seems really desperate.”

“One of the things I’ve learned is that everybody in this country has the mentality of scarcity. We imagine that even the things that are not scarce are scarce. And it breeds a kind of desperation in everybody. Even the wealthy.”

“The wealthy like you, that is,” she quipped.

He paused. He often paused before he spoke. She thought this exquisite; it was as though he had such regard for his listener that he wanted his words strung together in the best possible way. “I like to think I don’t have that desperation. I sometimes feel as if the money I have isn’t really mine, as if I’m holding it for someone else for a while. After I bought my property in Dubai — it was my first property outside Nigeria — I felt almost frightened, and when I told Okwudiba how I felt, he said I was crazy and I should stop behaving as if life is one of the novels I read. He was so impressed by what I owned, and I just felt as if my life had become this layer of pretension after pretension and I started to get sentimental about the past. I would think about when I was staying with Okwudiba in his first small flat in Surulere and how we would heat the iron on the stove when NEPA took light. And how his neighbor downstairs used to shout ‘Praise the Lord!’ whenever the light came back and how even for me there was something so beautiful about the light coming back, when it’s out of your control because you don’t have a generator. But it’s a silly sort of romance, because of course I don’t want to go back to that life.”

She looked away, worried that the crush of emotions she had felt while he was speaking would now converge on her face. “Of course you don’t. You like your life,” she said.

“I live my life.”

“Oh, how mysterious we are.”

“What about you, famous race blogger, Princeton fellow, how have you changed?” he asked, smiling, leaning towards her with his elbows on the table.

“When I was babysitting in undergrad, one day I heard myself telling the kid I was babysitting, ‘You’re such a trouper!’ Is there another word more American than ‘trouper’?”

Obinze was laughing.

“That’s when I thought, yes, I may have changed a little,” she said.

“You don’t have an American accent.”

“I made an effort not to.”

“I was surprised when I read the archives of your blog. It didn’t sound like you.”

“I really don’t think I’ve changed that much, though.”

“Oh, you’ve changed,” he said with a certitude that she instinctively disliked.

“How?”

“I don’t know. You’re more self-aware. Maybe more guarded.”

“You sound like a disappointed uncle.”

“No.” Another one of his pauses, but this time he seemed to be holding back. “But your blog also made me proud. I thought: She’s gone, she’s learned, and she’s conquered.”

Again, she felt shy. “I don’t know about conquering.”

“Your aesthetics changed too,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Did you cure your own meats in America?”

“What?”

“I read a piece about this new movement among the American privileged classes. Where people want to drink milk straight from the cow and that sort of thing. I thought maybe you’re into that, now that you wear a flower in your hair.”

She burst out laughing.

“But really, tell me how you’ve changed.” His tone was teasing, yet she tensed slightly at his question; it seemed too close to her vulnerable, soft core. And so she said, in a breezy voice, “My taste, I guess. I can’t believe how much I find ugly now. I can’t stand most of the houses in this city. I’m now a person who has learned to admire exposed wooden rafters.” She rolled her eyes and he smiled at her self-mockery, a smile that seemed to her like a prize that she wanted to win over and over again.

“It’s really a kind of snobbery,” she added.

“It’s snobbery, not a kind,” he said. “I used to have that about books. Secretly feeling that your taste is superior.”

“The problem is I’m not always secret about it.”

He laughed. “Oh, we know that.”

“You said you used to? What happened?”

“What happened was that I grew up.”

“Ouch,” she said.

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

“What are you reading these days?” she asked. “I’m sure you’ve read every American novel ever published.”

“I’ve been reading a lot more nonfiction, history and biographies. About everything, not just America.”

“What, you fell out of love?”

“I realized I could buy America, and it lost its shine. When all I had was my passion for America, they didn’t give me a visa, but with my new bank account, getting a visa was very easy. I’ve visited a few times. I was looking into buying property in Miami.”

She felt a pang; he had visited America and she had not known.

“So what did you finally make of your dream country?”

“I remember when you first went to Manhattan and you wrote me and said ‘It’s wonderful but it’s not heaven.’ I thought of that when I took my first cab ride in Manhattan.”

She remembered writing that, too, not long before she stopped contacting him, before she pushed him behind many walls. “The best thing about America is that it gives you space. I like that. I like that you buy into the dream, it’s a lie but you buy into it and that’s all that matters.”

He looked down at his glass, uninterested in her philosophizing, and she wondered if what she had seen in his eyes was resentment, if he, too, was remembering how she had so completely shut him out. When he asked, “Are you still friends with your old friends?” she thought it a question about whom else she had shut out all these years. She wondered whether to bring it up herself, whether to wait for him to. She should bring it up, she owed him that, but a wordless fear had seized her, a fear of breaking delicate things.

“With Ranyinudo, yes. And Priye. The others are now people who used to be my friends. Kind of like you and Emenike. You know, when I read your e-mails, I wasn’t surprised that Emenike turned out like that. There was always something about him.”

He shook his head and finished his drink; he had earlier put the straw aside, sipping from the glass.

“Once I was with him in London and he was mocking this guy he worked with, a Nigerian guy, for not knowing how to pronounce F-e-a-t-h-e-r-s-t-o-n-e-h-a-u-g-h. He pronounced it phonetically like the guy had, which was obviously the wrong way, and he didn’t say it the right way. I didn’t know how to pronounce it either and he knew I didn’t know, and there were these horrible minutes when he pretended we were both laughing at the guy. When of course we weren’t. He was laughing at me too. I remember it as the moment when I realized he just had never been my friend.”

“He’s an asshole,” she said.

“Asshole. Very American word.”

“Is it?”

He half raised his eyebrows as though there was no need to state the obvious. “Emenike didn’t contact me at all after I was deported. Then, last year, after somebody must have told him I was now in the game, he started calling me.” Obinze said “in the game” in a voice thick with mockery. “He kept asking if there were any deals we could do together, that kind of nonsense. And one day I told him I really preferred his condescension, and he hasn’t called me since.”

“What of Kayode?”

“We’re in touch. He has a child with an American woman.”

Obinze looked at his watch and picked up his phones. “I hate to go but I have to.”

“Yes, me too.” She wanted to prolong this moment, sitting amid the scent of books, discovering Obinze again. Before they got into their separate cars, they hugged, both murmuring, “So good to see you,” and she imagined his driver and her driver watching them curiously.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, but she had hardly settled into the car when her phone beeped with a new text message from him. Are you free to have lunch tomorrow? She was free. It was a Saturday and she should ask why he would not be with his wife and child, and she should initiate a conversation about what they were doing exactly, but they had a history, a connection thick as twine, and it did not have to mean that they were doing anything, or that a conversation was necessary, and so she opened the door when he rang the bell and he came in and admired the flowers on her verandah, the white lilies that rose from the pots like swans.

“I spent the morning reading The Small Redemptions of Lagos. Scouring it, actually,” he said.

She felt pleased. “What did you think?”

“I liked the Nigerpolitan Club post. A little self-righteous, though.”

“I’m not sure how to take that.”

“As truth,” he said, with that half-raising of an eyebrow that had to be a new quirk; she did not remember him doing it in the past. “But it’s a fantastic blog. It’s brave and intelligent. I love the layout.” There he was again, reassuring her.

She pointed at the compound next door. “Do you recognize that?”

“Ah! Yes.”

“I thought it would be just perfect for the blog. Such a beautiful house and in this kind of magnificent ruin. Plus peacocks on the roof.”

“It looks a little like a courthouse. I’m always fascinated by these old houses and the stories they carry.” He tugged at the thin metal railing of her verandah, as though to check how durable it was, how safe, and she liked that he did that. “Somebody is going to snap it up soon, tear it down, and put up a gleaming block of overpriced luxury flats.”

“Somebody like you.”

“When I started in real estate, I considered renovating old houses instead of tearing them down, but it didn’t make sense. Nigerians don’t buy houses because they’re old. A renovated two-hundred-year-old mill granary, you know, the kind of thing Europeans like. It doesn’t work here at all. But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past.”

“Is it me or are you now given to delivering little lectures?” she asked.

“It’s just refreshing to have an intelligent person to talk to.”

She looked away, wondering if this was a reference to his wife, and disliking him for it.

“Your blog already has such a following,” he said.

“I have big plans for it. I’d like to travel through Nigeria and post dispatches from each state, with pictures and human stories, but I have to do things slowly first, establish it, make some money from advertising.”

“You need investors.”

“I don’t want your money,” she said, a little sharply, keeping her eyes levelly on the sunken roof of the abandoned house. She was irritated by his comment about an intelligent person because it was, it had to be, about his wife, and she wanted to ask why he was telling her that. Why had he married a woman who was not intelligent only to turn around and tell her that his wife was not intelligent?

“Look at the peacock, Ifem,” he said, gently, as though he sensed her irritation.

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.

“How many are there?” he asked.

“One male and two females. I’ve been hoping to see the male do its mating dance but I never have. They wake me up in the morning with their cries. Have you heard them? Almost like a child that doesn’t want to do something.”

The peacock’s slender neck moved this way and that, and then, as though it had heard her, it cawed, its beak parted wide, the sounds pouring out of its throat.

“You were right about the sound,” he said, moving closer to her. “Something of a child about it. The compound reminds me of a property I have in Enugu. An old house. It was built before the war, and I bought it to tear it down, but then I decided to keep it. It’s very gracious and restful, big verandahs and old frangipani trees in the back. I’m redoing the interior completely, so it will be very modern inside, but the outside has its old look. Don’t laugh, but when I saw it, it reminded me of poetry.”

There was a boyishness in the way he said “Don’t laugh” that made her smile at him, half making fun of him, half letting him know she liked the idea of a house that had reminded him of poetry.

“I imagine one day when I run away from it all, I’ll go and live there,” he said.

“People really do become eccentric when they become rich.”

“Or maybe we all have eccentricity in us, we just don’t have the money to show it? I’d love to take you to see the house.”

She murmured something, a vague acquiescence.

His phone had been ringing for a while, an endless, dull buzzing in his pocket. Finally he brought it out, glanced at it, and said, “Sorry, I have to take this.” She nodded and went inside, wondering if it was his wife.

From the living room, she heard snatches of his voice, raised, lowered, and then raised again, speaking Igbo, and when he came inside, there was a tightening in his jaw.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

“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.”

“Is he related to you?”

“No.”

She waited, expecting more.

“Ifem, I do what rich people are supposed to do. I pay school fees for a hundred students in my village and my mum’s village.” He spoke with an awkward indifference; this was not a subject that he cared to talk about. He was standing by her bookshelf. “What a beautiful living room.”

“Thank you.”

“You shipped all your books back?”

“Most of them.”

“Ah. Derek Walcott.”

“I love him. I finally get some poetry.”

“I see Graham Greene.”

“I started reading him because of your mother. I love The Heart of the Matter.”

“I tried reading it after she died. I wanted to love it. I thought maybe if I could just love it …” He touched the book, his voice trailing away.

His wistfulness moved her. “It’s real literature, the kind of human story people will read in two hundred years,” she said. “You sound just like my mother,” he said.

He felt familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Through the parted curtains, a crescent of light fell across the living room. They were standing by the bookshelf and she was telling him about the first time she finally read The Heart of the Matter, and he was listening, in that intense manner of his, as though swallowing her words like a drink. They were standing by the bookshelf and laughing about how often his mother had tried to get him to read the book. And then they were standing by the bookshelf and kissing. A gentle kiss at first, lips pressed to lips, then their tongues were touching and she felt boneless against him. He pulled away first.

“I don’t have condoms,” she said, brazen, deliberately brazen.

“I didn’t know we needed condoms to have lunch.”

She hit him playfully. Her entire body was invaded by millions of uncertainties. She did not want to look at his face. “I have a girl who cleans and cooks so I have a lot of stew in my freezer and jollof rice in my fridge. We can have lunch here. Would you like something to drink?” She turned towards the kitchen.

“What happened in America?” he asked. “Why did you just cut off contact?”

Ifemelu kept walking to the kitchen.

“Why did you just cut off contact?” he repeated quietly. “Please tell me what happened.”

Before she sat opposite him at her small dining table and told him about the corrupt-eyed tennis coach in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, she poured them both some mango juice from a carton. She told him small details about the man’s office that were still fresh in her mind, the stacks of sports magazines, the smell of damp, but when she got to the part where he took her to his room, she said, simply, “I took off my clothes and did what he asked me to do. I couldn’t believe that I got wet. I hated him. I hated myself. I really hated myself. I felt like I had, I don’t know, betrayed myself.” She paused. “And you.”

For many long minutes, he said nothing, his eyes downcast, as though absorbing the story.

“I don’t really think about it much,” she added. “I remember it, but I don’t dwell on it, I don’t let myself dwell on it. It’s so strange now to actually talk about it. It seems a stupid reason to throw away what we had, but that’s why, and as more time passed, I just didn’t know how to go about fixing it.”

He was still silent. She stared at the framed caricature of Dike that hung on her wall, Dike’s ears comically pointed, and wondered what Obinze was feeling.

Finally, he said, “I can’t imagine how bad you must have felt, and how alone. You should have told me. I so wish you had told me.”

She heard his words like a melody and she felt herself breathing unevenly, gulping at the air. She would not cry, it was ridiculous to cry after so long, but her eyes were filling with tears and there was a boulder in her chest and a stinging in her throat. The tears felt itchy. She made no sound. He took her hand in his, both clasped on the table, and between them silence grew, an ancient silence that they both knew. She was inside this silence and she was safe.

CHAPTER 52

Let’s go and play table tennis. I belong to this small private club in Victoria Island,” he said.

“I haven’t played in ages.”

She remembered how she had always wanted to beat him, even though he was the school champion, and how he would tell her, teasingly, “Try more strategy and less force. Passion never wins any game, never mind what they say.” He said something similar now: “Excuses don’t win a game. You should try strategy.”

He had driven himself. In the car, he turned the engine on, and the music came on too. Bracket’s “Yori Yori.”

“Oh, I love this song,” she said.

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.

“Ahn-ahn! How long have you been back and you can already sing this so well?” he asked.

“First thing I did was brush up on all the contemporary music. It’s so exciting, all the new music.”

“It is. Now clubs play Nigerian music.”

She would remember this moment, sitting beside Obinze in his Range Rover, stalled in traffic, listening to “Yori Yori”—Your love dey make my heart do yori yori. Nobody can love you the way I do—beside them a shiny Honda, the latest model, and in front of them an ancient Datsun that looked a hundred years old.

After a few games of table tennis, all of which he won, all the time playfully taunting her, they had lunch in the small restaurant, where they were alone except for a woman reading newspapers at the bar. The manager, a round man who was almost bursting out of his ill-fitting black jacket, came over to their table often to say, “I hope everything is fine, sah. It is very good to see you again, sah. How is work, sah.”

Ifemelu leaned in and asked Obinze, “Is there a point at which you gag?”

“The man wouldn’t come by so often if he didn’t think I was being neglected. You’re addicted to that phone.”

“Sorry. I was just checking the blog.” She felt relaxed and happy. “You know, you should write for me.”

“Me?”

“Yes, I’ll give you an assignment. How about the perils of being young and good-looking and rich?”

“I would be happy to write on a subject with which I can personally identify.”

“How about security? I want to do something on security. Have you had any experience on Third Mainland Bridge? Somebody was telling me about leaving a club late and going back to the mainland and their car tire burst on the bridge and they just kept going, because it’s so dangerous to stop on the bridge.”

“Ifem, I live in Lekki, and I don’t go clubbing. Not anymore.”

“Okay.” She glanced at her phone again. “I just want to have new, vibrant content often.”

“You’re distracted.”

“Do you know Tunde Razaq?”

“Who doesn’t? Why?”

“I want to interview him. I want to start this weekly feature of ‘Lagos from an Insider,’ and I want to start with the most interesting people.”

“What’s interesting about him? That he is a Lagos playboy living off his father’s money, said money accumulated from a diesel importation monopoly that they have because of their contact with the president?”

“He’s also a music producer, and apparently a champion at chess. My friend Zemaye knows him and he’s just written her to say he will do the interview only if I let him buy me dinner.”

“He’s probably seen a picture of you somewhere.” Obinze stood up and pushed back his chair with a force that surprised her. “The guy is a dog.”

“Be nice,” she said, amused; his jealousy pleased her. He played “Yori Yori” again on the drive back to her flat, and she swayed and danced with her arms, much to his amusement.

“I thought your Chapman was non-alcoholic,” he said. “I want to play another song. It makes me think of you.”

Obiwon’s “Obi Mu O” started and she sat still and silent as the words filled the car: This is that feeling that I’ve never felt … and I’m not gonna let it die. When the male and female voices sang in Igbo, Obinze sang along with them, glancing away from the road to look at her, as though he was telling her that this was really their conversation, he calling her beautiful, she calling him beautiful, both calling each other their true friends. Nwanyi oma, nwoke oma, omalicha nwa, ezigbo oyi m o.

When he dropped her off, he leaned across to kiss her cheek, hesitant to come too close or to hold her, as though afraid of being defeated by their attraction. “Can I see you tomorrow?” he asked, and she said yes. They went to a Brazilian restaurant by the lagoon, where the waiter brought skewer after skewer stacked with meat and seafood, until Ifemelu told him that she was about to be sick. The next day, he asked if she would have dinner with him, and he took her to an Italian restaurant, whose overpriced food she found bland, and the bow-tied waiters, doleful and slow-moving, filled her with faint sorrow.

They drove past Obalende on the way back, tables and stalls lining the bustling road, orange flames flickering from the hawkers’ lamps.

Ifemelu said, “Let’s stop and buy fried plantain!”

Obinze found a spot farther ahead, in front of a beer parlor, and he eased the car in. He greeted the men seated on benches drinking, his manner easy and warm, and they hailed him, “Chief! Carry go! Your car is safe!”

The fried plantain hawker tried to persuade Ifemelu to buy fried sweet potatoes as well.

“No, only plantain.”

“What about akara, aunty? I make am now. Very fresh.”

“Okay,” Ifemelu said. “Put four.”

“Why are you buying akara that you don’t want?” Obinze asked, amused.

“Because this is real enterprise. She’s selling what she makes. She’s not selling her location or the source of her oil or the name of the person that ground the beans. She’s simply selling what she makes.”

Back in the car, she opened the oily plastic bag of plantains, slid a small, perfectly fried yellow slice into her mouth. “This is so much better than that thing drenched in butter that I could hardly finish at the restaurant. And you know we can’t get food poisoning because the frying kills the germs,” she added.

He was watching her, smiling, and she suspected that she was talking too much. This memory, too, she would store, of Obalende at night, lit as it was by a hundred small lights, the raised voices of drunk men nearby, and the sway of a large madam’s hips, walking past the car.

HE ASKED if he could take her to lunch and she suggested a new casual place she had heard of, where she ordered a chicken sandwich and then complained about the man smoking in the corner. “How very American, complaining about smoke,” Obinze said, and she could not tell whether he meant it as a rebuke or not.

“The sandwich comes with chips?” Ifemelu asked the waiter.

“Yes, madam.”

“Do you have real potatoes?”

“Madam?”

“Are your potatoes the frozen imported ones, or do you cut and fry your potatoes?”

The waiter looked offended. “It is the imported frozen ones.”

As the waiter walked away, Ifemelu said, “Those frozen things taste horrible.”

“He can’t believe you’re actually asking for real potatoes,” Obinze said drily. “Real potatoes are backward for him. Remember this is our newly middle-class world. We haven’t completed the first cycle of prosperity, before going back to the beginning again, to drink milk from the cow’s udder.”

Each time he dropped her off, he kissed her on the cheek, both of them leaning toward each other, and then pulling back so that she could say “Bye” and climb out of his car. On the fifth day, as he drove into her compound, she asked, “Do you have condoms in your pocket?”

He said nothing for a while. “No, I don’t have condoms in my pocket.”

“Well, I bought a pack some days ago.”

“Ifem, why are you saying this?”

“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.”

“You are hiding behind sarcasm,” he said.

“Oh, how very lofty of you.” She was angry. It was barely a week since she first saw him but already she was angry, furious that he would drop her off and go home to his other life, his real life, and that she could not visualize the details of that life, did not know what kind of bed he slept in, what kind of plate he ate from. She had, since she began to gaze at her past, imagined a relationship with him, but only in faded images and faint lines. Now, faced with the reality of him, and of the silver ring on his finger, she was frightened of becoming used to him, of drowning. Or perhaps she was already drowned, and her fear came from that knowledge.

“Why didn’t you call me when you came back?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I wanted to settle down first.”

“I hoped I would help you settle down.”

She said nothing.

“Are you still with Blaine?”

“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.

“Can I come in for a bit? To talk?”

“No, I need to do some research for the blog.”

“Please, Ifem.”

She sighed. “Okay.”

In her flat, he sat on the couch while she sat on her armchair, as far from him as possible. 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 said her boyfriend was unreachable the other day and when he finally turned up, he told her that his phone had fallen into water. She said it’s the oldest story in the book, phone fell into water. I thought that was funny. I’ve never heard that before. So number one on her guide is never say your phone fell into water.”

“This doesn’t feel like cheating to me,” he said quietly.

“Does your wife know you’re here?” She was taunting him. “I wonder how many men say that when they cheat, that it doesn’t feel like cheating. I mean, would they actually ever say that it felt like cheating?”

He got up, his movements deliberate, and at first she thought he was coming closer to her, or perhaps wanted the toilet, but he walked to the front door, opened it, and left. She stared at the door. She sat still for a long time, and then she got up and paced, unable to focus, wondering whether to call him, debating with herself. She decided not to call him; she resented his behavior, his silence, his pretense. When her doorbell rang minutes later, a part of her was reluctant to open the door.

She let him in. They sat side by side on her couch.

“I’m sorry I left like that,” he said. “I just haven’t been myself since you came back and I didn’t like the way you talked as if what we have is common. It isn’t. And I think you know that. I think you were saying that to hurt me but mostly because you feel confused. I know it must be difficult for you, how we’ve seen each other and talked about so much but still avoided so much.”

“You’re speaking in code,” she said.

He looked stressed, tight-jawed, and she longed to kiss him. It was true that he was intelligent and sure of himself, but there was an innocence about him, too, a confidence without ego, a throwback to another time and place, which she found endearing.

“I haven’t said anything because sometimes I am just so happy being with you that I don’t want to spoil it,” he said. “And also because I want to have something to say first, before I say anything.”

“I touch myself thinking of you,” she said.

He stared at her, thrown slightly off balance.

“We’re not single people who are courting, Ceiling,” she said. “We can’t deny the attraction between us and maybe we should have a conversation about that.”

“You know this isn’t about sex,” he said. “This has never been about sex.”

“I know,” she said, and took his hand. There was, between them, a weightless, seamless desire. She leaned in and kissed him, and at first he was slow in his response, and then he was pulling up her blouse, pushing down her bra cups to free her breasts. She remembered clearly the firmness of his embrace, and yet there was, also, a newness to their union; their bodies remembered and did not remember. She touched the scar on his chest, remembering it again. She had always thought the expression “making love” a little maudlin; “having sex” felt truer and “fucking” was more arousing, but lying next to him afterwards, both of them smiling, sometimes laughing, her body suffused with peace, she thought how apt it was, that expression “making love.” There was an awakening even in her nails, in those parts of her body that had always been numb. She wanted to tell him, “There is no week that passed that I did not think of you.” But was that true? Of course there were weeks during which he was folded under layers of her life, but it felt true.

She propped herself up and said, “I always saw the ceiling with other men.”

He smiled a long, slow smile. “You know what I have felt for so long? As if I was waiting to be happy.”

He got up to go to the bathroom. She found it so attractive, his shortness, his solid firm shortness. She saw, in his shortness, a groundedness; he could weather anything, he would not easily be swayed. He came back and she said she was hungry and he found oranges in her fridge, and peeled them, and they ate the oranges, sitting up next to each other, and then they lay entwined, naked, in a full circle of completeness, and she fell asleep and did not know when he left. She woke up to a dark, overcast rainy morning. Her phone was ringing. It was Obinze.

“How are you?” he asked.

“Groggy. Not sure what happened yesterday. Did you seduce me?”

“I’m glad your door has a dead bolt. I would have hated to wake you up to lock the door.”

“So you did seduce me.”

He laughed. “Can I come to you?”

She liked the way he said “Can I come to you?”

“Yes. It’s raining crazily.”

“Really? It’s not raining here. I’m in Lekki.”

She found this foolishly exciting, that it was raining where she was and it was not raining where he was, only minutes from her, and so she waited, with impatience, with a charged delight, until they could both see the rain together.

CHAPTER 53

And so began her heady days full of cliché: she felt fully alive, her heart beat faster when he arrived at her door, and she viewed each morning like the unwrapping of a gift. She would laugh, or cross her legs or slightly sway her hips, with a heightened awareness of herself. Her nightshirt smelled of his cologne, a muted citrus and wood scent, because she left it unwashed for as long as she could, and she delayed in wiping off a spill of hand cream he had left on her sink, and after they made love, she left untouched the indentation on the pillow, the soft groove where his head had lain, as though to preserve his essence until the next time. They often stood on her verandah and watched the peacocks on the roof of the abandoned house, from time to time slipping their hands into each other’s, and she would think of the next time, and the next, that they would do this together. This was love, to be eager for tomorrow. Had she felt this way as a teenager? The emotions seemed absurd. She fretted when he did not respond to her text right away. Her mind was darkened with jealousy about his past. “You are the great love of my life,” he told her, and she believed him, but still she was jealous of those women whom he had loved even if fleetingly, those women who had carved out space in his thoughts. She was jealous even of the women who liked him, imagining how much attention he got here in Lagos, good-looking as he was, and now also wealthy. 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. It was a jealousy of her imagination, he did nothing to aid it; he was present and transparent in his devotion. She marveled at what an intense, careful listener he was. He remembered everything she told him. She had never had this before, to be listened to, to be truly heard, and so he became newly precious; each time he said bye at the end of a telephone call, she felt a sinking panic. It was truly absurd. Their teenage love had been less melodramatic. Or perhaps it was because the circumstances were different, and looming over them now was the marriage he never talked about. Sometimes he said, “I can’t come on Sunday until midafternoon,” or “I have to leave early today,” all of which she knew were about his wife, but they did not talk further about it. He did not try to, and she did not want to, or she told herself that she did not want to. It surprised her, that he took her out openly, to lunch and to dinner, to his private club where the waiter called her “madam,” perhaps assuming she was his wife; that he stayed with her until past midnight and never showered after they made love; that he went home wearing her touch and her smell on his skin. He was determined to give their relationship as much dignity as he could, to pretend that he was not hiding even though he, of course, was. Once he said cryptically, as they lay entwined on her bed in the undecided light of late evening, “I can stay the night, I would like to stay.” She said a quick no and nothing else. She did not want to get used to waking up beside him, did not permit herself to think of why he could stay this night. And so his marriage hung above them, unspoken, unprobed, until one evening when she did not feel like eating out. He said eagerly, “You have spaghetti and onions. Let me cook for you.”

“As long as it doesn’t give me a stomachache.”

He laughed. “I miss cooking. I can’t cook at home.” And, in that instant, his wife became a dark spectral presence in the room. It was palpable and menacing in a way it had never been when he said, “I can’t come on Sunday until midafternoon,” or “I have to leave early today.” She turned away from him, and flipped open her laptop to check on the blog. A furnace had lit itself deep inside her. He sensed it, too, the sudden import of his words, because he came and stood beside her.

“Kosi never liked the idea of my cooking. She has really basic, mainstream ideas of what a wife should be and she thought my wanting to cook was an indictment of her, which I found silly. So I stopped, just to have peace. I make omelets but that’s it and we both pretend as if my onugbu soup isn’t better than hers. There’s a lot of pretending in my marriage, Ifem.” He paused. “I married her when I was feeling vulnerable; I had a lot of upheaval in my life at the time.”

She said, her back turned to him, “Obinze, please just cook the spaghetti.”

“I feel a great responsibility for Kosi and that is all I feel. And I want you to know that.” He gently turned her around to face him, holding her shoulders, and he looked as if there were other things he wanted to say, but expected her to help him say them, and for this she felt the flare of a new resentment. She turned back to her laptop, choked with the urge to destroy, to slash and burn.

“I’m having dinner with Tunde Razaq tomorrow,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because I want to.”

“You said the other day that you wouldn’t.”

“What happens when you go home and climb into bed with your wife? What happens?” she asked, and felt herself wanting to cry. Something had cracked and spoiled between them.

“I think you should go,” she said.

“No.”

“Obinze, please just go.”

He refused to leave, and later she felt grateful that he had not left. He cooked spaghetti and she pushed it around her plate, her throat parched, her appetite gone.

“I’m never going to ask you for anything. I’m a grown woman and I knew your situation when I got into this,” she said.

“Please don’t say that,” he said. “It scares me. It makes me feel dispensable.”

“It’s not about you.”

“I know. I know it’s the only way you can feel a little dignity in this.”

She looked at him and even his reasonableness began to irritate her.

“I love you, Ifem. We love each other,” he said.

There were tears in his eyes. She began to cry, too, a helpless crying, and they held each other. Later, they lay in bed together, and the air was so still and noiseless that the gurgling sound from his stomach seemed loud.

“Was that my stomach or yours?” he asked, teasing.

“Of course it was yours.”

“Remember the first time we made love? You had just been standing on me. I loved you standing on me.”

“I can’t stand on you now. I’m too fat. You would die.”

“Stop it.”

Finally, he got up and pulled on his trousers, his movements slow and reluctant. “I can’t come tomorrow, Ifem. I have to take my daughter—”

She cut him short. “It’s okay.”

“I’m going to Abuja on Friday,” he said.

“Yes, you said.” She was trying to push away the sense of a coming abandonment; it would overwhelm her as soon as he left and she heard the click of the door closing.

“Come with me,” he said.

“What?”

“Come with me to Abuja. I just have two meetings and we can stay the weekend. It’ll be good for us to be in a different place, to talk. And you’ve never been to Abuja. I can book separate hotel rooms if you want me to. Say yes. Please.”

“Yes,” she said.

She had not permitted herself to do so earlier, but after he left, she looked at Kosi’s photographs on Facebook. Kosi’s beauty was startling, those cheekbones, that flawless skin, those perfect womanly curves. When she saw one photo taken at an unflattering angle, she examined it for a while and found in it a small and wicked pleasure.

SHE WAS at the hair salon when he sent her a text: I’m sorry Ifem but I think I should probably go alone to Abuja. I need some time to think things through. I love you. She stared at the text and, fingers shaking, she wrote him back a two-word text: Fucking coward. Then she turned to the hair braider. “You are going to blow-dry my hair with that brush? You must be joking. Can’t you people think?”

The hair braider looked puzzled. “Aunty, sorry o, but that is what I use before in your hair.”

By the time Ifemelu drove into her compound, Obinze’s Range Rover was parked in front of her flat. He followed her upstairs.

“Ifem, please, I want you to understand. I think it has been a little too fast, everything between us, and I want to take some time to put things in perspective.”

“A little too fast,” she repeated. “How unoriginal. Not like you at all.”

“You are the woman I love. Nothing can change that. But I feel this sense of responsibility about what I need to do.”

She flinched from him, the hoarseness of his voice, the nebulous and easy meaninglessness of his words. What did “responsibility about what I need to do” mean? Did it mean that he wanted to continue seeing her but had to stay married? Did it mean that he could no longer continue seeing her? He communicated clearly when he wanted to, but now here he was, hiding behind watery words.

“What are you saying?” she asked him. “What are you trying to tell me?”

When he remained silent, she said, “Go to hell.”

She walked into her bedroom and locked the door. From her bedroom window, she watched his Range Rover until it disappeared down the bend in the road.

CHAPTER 54

Abuja had far-flung horizons, wide roads, order; to come from Lagos was to be stunned here by sequence and space. The air smelled of power; here everyone sized everyone else up, wondering how much of a “somebody” each was. It smelled of money, easy money, easily exchanged money. It dripped, too, of sex. Obinze’s friend Chidi said he didn’t chase women in Abuja because he didn’t want to step on a minister’s or senator’s toes. Every attractive young woman here became mysteriously suspect. Abuja was more conservative than Lagos, Chidi said, because it was more Muslim than Lagos, and at parties women didn’t wear revealing clothing, yet you could buy and sell sex so much more easily here. It was in Abuja that Obinze had come close to cheating on Kosi, not with any of the flashy girls in colored contact lenses and tumbling hair weaves who endlessly propositioned him, but with a middle-aged woman in a caftan who sat next to him at the hotel bar, and said, “I know you are bored.” She looked hungry for recklessness, perhaps a repressed, frustrated wife who had broken free on this one night.

For a moment, lust, a quaking raw lust, overcame him, but he thought about how much more bored he would be afterwards, how keen to get her out of his hotel room, and it all seemed too much of an effort.

She would end up with one of the many men in Abuja who lived idle, oily lives in hotels and part-time homes, groveling and courting connected people so as to get a contract or to be paid for a contract. On Obinze’s last trip to Abuja, one such man, whom he hardly knew, had looked for a while at two young women at the other end of the bar and then asked him casually, “Do you have a spare condom?” and he had balked.

Now, sitting at a white-covered table in Protea Asokoro, waiting for Edusco, the businessman who wanted to buy his land, he imagined Ifemelu next to him, and wondered what she would make of Abuja. She would dislike it, the soullessness of it, or perhaps not. She was not easy to predict. Once, at dinner in a restaurant in Victoria Island, somber waiters hovering around, she had seemed distant, her eyes on the wall behind him, and he had worried that she was upset about something. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I am thinking of how all the paintings in Lagos always look crooked, never hung straight,” she said. He laughed, and thought how, with her, he was as he had never been with another woman: amused, alert, alive. Later, as they left the restaurant, he had watched as she briskly sidestepped the puddles of water in the potholes by the gate and felt a desire to smooth all the roads in Lagos, for her.

His mind was overwrought: one minute he thought it was the right decision not to have come to Abuja with her, because he needed to think things through, and the next he was filled with self-reproach. He might have pushed her away. He had called her many times, sent texts asking if they could talk, but she had ignored him, which was perhaps for the better because he did not know what he would say if they did talk.

Edusco had arrived. A loud voice bellowing from the restaurant foyer as he spoke on the phone. Obinze did not know him well — they had done business only once before, introduced by a mutual friend — but Obinze admired men like him, men who did not know any Big Man, who had no connections, and had made their money in a way that did not defy the simple logic of capitalism. Edusco had only a primary-school education before he began to apprentice for traders; he had started off with one stall in Onitsha and now owned the second-largest transport company in the country. He walked into the restaurant, bold-stepped and big-bellied, speaking his terrible English loudly; it did not occur to him to doubt himself.

Later, as they discussed the price of the land, Edusco said, “Look, my brother. You won’t sell it at that price, nobody will buy. Ife esika kita. The recession is biting everybody.”

“Bros, bring up your hand a little, this is land in Maitama we are talking about, not land in your village,” Obinze said.

“Your stomach is full. What else do you want? You see, this is the problem with you Igbo people. You don’t do brother-brother. That is why I like Yoruba people, they look out for one another. Do you know that the other day I went to the Inland Revenue office near my house and one man there, an Igbo man, I saw his name and spoke to him in Igbo and he did not even answer me! A Hausa man will speak Hausa to his fellow Hausa man. A Yoruba man will see a Yoruba person anywhere and speak Yoruba. But an Igbo man will speak English to an Igbo man. I am even surprised that you are speaking Igbo to me.”

“It’s true,” Obinze said. “It’s sad, it’s the legacy of being a defeated people. We lost the Biafran war and learned to be ashamed.”

“It is just selfishness!” Edusco said, uninterested in Obinze’s intellectualizing. “The Yoruba man is there helping his brother, but you Igbo people? I ga-asikwa. Look at you now quoting me this price.”

“Okay, Edusco, why don’t I give you the land for free? Let me go and bring the title and give it to you now.”

Edusco laughed. Edusco liked him, he could tell; he imagined Edusco talking about him in a gathering of other self-made Igbo men, men who were brash and striving, who juggled huge businesses and supported vast extended families. Obinze ma ife, he imagined Edusco saying. Obinze is not like some of these useless small boys with money. This one is not stupid.

Obinze looked at his almost-empty bottle of Gulder. It was strange how lost of luster everything was without Ifemelu; even the taste of his favorite beer was different. He should have brought her with him to Abuja. It was stupid to claim that he needed time to think things over when all he was doing was hiding from a truth he already knew. She had called him a coward, and there was indeed a cowardliness in his fear of disorder, of disrupting what he did not even want: his life with Kosi, that second skin that had never quite fit him snugly.

“Okay, Edusco,” Obinze said, suddenly feeling drained. “I am not going to eat the land if I don’t sell it.”

Edusco looked startled. “You mean you agree to my price?”

“Yes,” Obinze said.

After Edusco left, Obinze called Ifemelu over and over but she did not answer. Perhaps her ringer was switched off, and she was eating at her dining table, wearing that pink T-shirt she wore so often, with the small hole at the neck, and HEARTBREAKER CAFÉ written across the front; her nipples, when they got hard, would punctuate those words like inverted commas. Thinking of her pink T-shirt aroused him. Or perhaps she was reading in bed, her abada wrapper spread over her like a blanket, wearing plain black boyshorts and nothing else. All her underwear were plain black boyshorts; girly underwear amused her. Once, he had picked up those boyshorts from the floor where he had flung them after rolling them down her legs, and looked at the milky crust on the crotch, and she laughed and said, “Ah, you want to smell it? I’ve never understood that whole business of smelling underwear.” Or perhaps she was on her laptop, working on the blog. Or out with Ranyinudo. Or on the phone with Dike. Or perhaps with some man in her living room, telling him about Graham Greene. A queasiness roiled in him at the thought of her with anybody else. Of course she would not be with anyone else, not so soon. Still, there was that unpredictable stubbornness in her; she might do it to hurt him. When she told him, that first day, “I always saw the ceiling with other men,” he wondered how many there had been. He wanted to ask her, but he did not, because he feared she would tell him the truth and he feared he would forever be tormented by it. She knew, of course, that he loved her but he wondered if she knew how it consumed him, how each day was infected by her, affected by her; and how she wielded power over even his sleep. “Kimberly adores her husband, and her husband adores himself. She should leave him but she never will,” she said once, about the woman she had worked for in America, the woman with obi ocha. Ifemelu’s words had been light, free of shadow, and yet he heard in them the sting of other meanings.

When she told him about her American life, he listened with a keenness close to desperation. He wanted to be a part of everything she had done, be familiar with every emotion she had felt. Once she had told him, “The thing about cross-cultural relationships is that you spend so much time explaining. My ex-boyfriends and I spent a lot of time explaining. I sometimes wondered whether we would even have anything at all to say to each other if we were from the same place,” and it pleased him to hear that, because it gave his relationship with her a depth, a lack of trifling novelty. They were from the same place and they still had a lot to say to each other.

They were talking about American politics once when she said, “I like America. It’s really the only place else where I could live apart from here. But one day a bunch of Blaine’s friends and I were talking about kids and I realized that if I ever have children, I don’t want them to have American childhoods. I don’t want them to say ‘Hi’ to adults, I want them to say ‘Good morning’ and ‘Good afternoon.’ I don’t want them to mumble ‘Good’ when somebody says ‘How are you?’ to them. Or to raise five fingers when asked how old they are. I want them to say ‘I’m fine, thank you’ and ‘I’m five years old.’ I don’t want a child who feeds on praise and expects a star for effort and talks back to adults in the name of self-expression. Is that terribly conservative? Blaine’s friends said it was and for them, ‘conservative’ is the worst insult you can get.”

He had laughed, wishing he had been there with the “bunch of friends,” and he wanted that imaginary child to be his, that conservative child with good manners. He told her, “The child will turn eighteen and paint her hair purple,” and she said, “Yes, but by then I would have kicked her out of the house.”

At the Abuja airport on his way back to Lagos, he thought of going to the international wing instead, buying a ticket to somewhere improbable, like Malabo. Then he felt a passing self-disgust because he would not, of course, do it; he would instead do what he was expected to do. He was boarding his Lagos flight when Kosi called.

“Is the flight on time? Remember we are taking Nigel out for his birthday,” she said.

“Of course I remember.”

A pause from her end. He had snapped.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have a funny headache.”

“Darling, ndo. I know you’re tired,” she said. “See you soon.”

He hung up and thought about the day their baby, slippery, curly-haired Buchi, was born at the Woodlands Hospital in Houston, how Kosi had turned to him while he was still fiddling with his latex gloves and said, with something like apology, “Darling, we’ll have a boy next time.” He had recoiled. He realized then that she did not know him. She did not know him at all. She did not know he was indifferent about the gender of their child. And he felt a gentle contempt towards her, for wanting a boy because they were supposed to want a boy, and for being able to say, fresh from birthing their first child, those words “we’ll have a boy next time.” Perhaps he should have talked more with her, about the baby they were expecting and about everything else, because although they exchanged pleasant sounds and were good friends and shared comfortable silences, they did not really talk. But he had never tried, because he knew that the questions he asked of life were entirely different from hers.

He knew this from the beginning, had sensed it in their first conversation after a friend introduced them at a wedding. She was wearing a satin bridesmaid’s dress in fuchsia, cut low to show a cleavage he could not stop looking at, and somebody was making a speech, describing the bride as “a woman of virtue” and Kosi nodded eagerly and whispered to him, “She is a true woman of virtue.” It surprised him, that she could use the word “virtue” without the slightest irony, as was done in the badly written articles in the women’s section of the weekend newspapers. The minister’s wife is a homely woman of virtue. Still, he had wanted her, chased her with a lavish single-mindedness. He had never seen a woman with such a perfect incline to her cheekbones that made her entire face seem so alive, so architectural, lifting when she smiled. He was also newly rich and newly disoriented: one week he was broke and squatting in his cousin’s flat and the next he had millions of naira in his bank account. Kosi became a touchstone of realness. If he could be with her, so extraordinarily beautiful and yet so ordinary, predictable and domestic and dedicated, then perhaps his life would start to seem believably his. She moved into his house from the flat she shared with a friend and arranged her perfume bottles on his dresser, citrusy scents that he came to associate with home, and she sat in the BMW beside him as though it had always been his car, and she casually suggested trips abroad as though he had always been able to travel, and when they showered together, she scrubbed him with a rough sponge, even between his toes, until he felt reborn. Until he owned his new life. She did not share his interests — she was a literal person who did not read, she was content rather than curious about the world — but he felt grateful to her, fortunate to be with her. Then she told him her relatives were asking what his intentions were. “They just keep asking,” she said and stressed the “they,” to exclude herself from the marriage clamor. He recognized, and disliked, her manipulation. Still, he married her. They were living together anyway, and he was not unhappy, and he imagined that she would, with time, gain a certain heft. She had not, after four years, except physically, in a way that he thought made her look even more beautiful, fresher, with fuller hips and breasts, like a well-watered houseplant.

IT AMUSED OBINZE, that Nigel had decided to move to Nigeria, instead of simply visiting whenever Obinze needed to present his white General Manager. The money was good, Nigel could now live the kind of life in Essex that he would never have imagined before, but he wanted to live in Lagos, at least for a while. And so Obinze’s gleeful waiting commenced, for Nigel to weary of pepper soup and nightclubs and drinking at the shacks in Kuramo Beach. But Nigel was staying put, in his flat in Ikoyi, with a live-in house help and his dog. 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.

“The bloke’s completely bald,” Nigel had told Obinze.

“The problem with you, my friend, is you love too easily and too much. Anybody could see the girl was a fake, looking for the next bigger thing,” Obinze told him.

“Don’t say ‘bigger thing’ like that, mate!” Nigel said.

Now he had met Ulrike, a lean, angular-faced woman with the body of a young man, who worked at an embassy and seemed determined to sulk her way through her Nigerian posting. At dinner, she wiped her cutlery with the napkin before she began eating.

“You don’t do that in your country, do you?” Obinze asked coldly. Nigel darted a startled glance at him.

“Actually I do,” Ulrike said, squarely meeting his gaze.

Kosi patted his thigh under the table, as though to calm him down, which irritated him. Nigel, too, was irritating him, suddenly talking about the town houses Obinze was planning to build, how exciting the new architect’s design was. A timid attempt to end Obinze’s conversation with Ulrike.

“Fantastic plan inside, made me think of some of those pictures of fancy lofts in New York,” Nigel said.

“Nigel, I’m not using that plan. An open kitchen plan will never work for Nigerians and we are targeting Nigerians because we are selling, not renting. Open kitchen plans are for expats and expats don’t buy property here.” He had already told Nigel many times that Nigerian cooking was not cosmetic, with all that pounding. It was sweaty and spicy and Nigerians preferred to present the final product, not the process.

“No more work talk!” Kosi said brightly. “Ulrike, have you tried any Nigerian food?”

Obinze got up abruptly and went into the bathroom. He called Ifemelu and felt himself getting enraged when she still did not pick up. He blamed her. He blamed her for making him a person who was not entirely in control of what he was feeling.

Nigel came into the bathroom. “What’s wrong, mate?” Nigel’s cheeks were bright red, as they always were when he drank. Obinze stood by the sink holding his phone, that drained lassitude spreading over him again. He wanted to tell Nigel, Nigel was perhaps the only friend he fully trusted, but Nigel fancied Kosi. “She’s all woman, mate,” Nigel had said to him once, and he saw in Nigel’s eyes the tender and crushed longing of a man for that which was forever unattainable. Nigel would listen to him, but Nigel would not understand.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have been rude to Ulrike,” Obinze said. “I’m just tired. I think I’m coming down with malaria.”

That night, Kosi sidled close to him, in offering. It was not a statement of desire, her caressing his chest and reaching down to take his penis in her hand, but a votive offering. A few months ago, she had said she wanted to start seriously “trying for our son.” She did not say “trying for our second child,” she said “trying for our son,” and it was the kind of thing she learned in her church. There is power in the spoken word. Claim your miracle. He remembered how, months into trying to get pregnant the first time, she began to say with sulky righteousness, “All my friends who lived very rough lives are pregnant.”

After Buchi was born, he had agreed to a thanksgiving service at Kosi’s church, a crowded hall full of lavishly dressed people, people who were Kosi’s friends, Kosi’s kind. And he had thought of them as a sea of simple brutes, clapping, swaying simple brutes, all of them accepting and pliant before the pastor in his designer suit.

“What’s wrong, darling?” Kosi asked, when he remained limp in her hand. “Are you feeling well?”

“Just tired.”

Her hair was covered in a black hair net, her face coated in a cream that smelled of peppermint, which he had always liked. He turned away from her. He had been turning away since the day he first kissed Ifemelu. He should not compare, but he did. Ifemelu demanded of him. “No, don’t come yet, I’ll kill you if you come,” she would say, or “No, baby, don’t move,” then she would dig into his chest and move at her own rhythm, and when finally she arched her back and let out a sharp cry, he felt accomplished to have satisfied her. She expected to be satisfied, but Kosi did not. Kosi always met his touch with complaisance, and sometimes he would imagine her pastor telling her that a wife should have sex with her husband, even if she didn’t feel like it, otherwise the husband would find solace in a Jezebel.

“I hope you’re not getting sick,” she said.

“I’m okay.” Ordinarily he would hold her, slowly rub her back until she fell asleep. But he could not get himself to do so now. So many times in the past weeks he had started to tell her about Ifemelu but had stopped. What would he say? It would sound like something from a silly film. I am in love with another woman. There’s someone else. I’m leaving you. That these were words that anybody could say seriously, outside a film and outside the pages of a book, seemed odd. Kosi was wrapping her arms around him. He eased away and mumbled something about his stomach being upset and went into the toilet. She had put a new potpourri, a mix of dried leaves and seeds in a purple bowl, on the cover of the toilet tank. The too-strong lavender scent choked him. He emptied the bowl into the toilet and then instantly felt remorseful. She had meant well. She did not know that the too-strong scent of lavender would be unappealing to him, after all.

The first time he saw Ifemelu at Jazzhole, he had come home and told Kosi, “Ifemelu is in town. I had a drink with her,” and Kosi had said, “Oh, your girlfriend in university,” with an indifference so indifferent that he did not entirely trust it.

Why had he told her? Perhaps because he had sensed even then the force of what he felt, and he wanted to prepare her, to tell her in stages. But how could she not see that he had changed? How could she not see it on his face? In how much time he spent alone in his study, and in how often he went out, how late he stayed? He had hoped, selfishly, that it might alienate her, provoke her. But she always nodded, glib and accepting nods, when he told her he had been at the club. Or at Okwudiba’s. Once he said that he was still chasing the difficult deal with the new Arab owners of Megatel, and he had said “the deal” casually, as if she already knew about it, and she made vague, encouraging sounds. But he was not even involved at all with Megatel.

THE NEXT MORNING, he woke up unrested, his mind furred with a great sadness. Kosi was already up and bathed, sitting in front of her dressing table, which was full of creams and potions so carefully arranged that he sometimes imagined putting his hands under the table and overturning it, just to see how all those bottles would fare.

“You haven’t made me eggs in a while, The Zed,” she said, coming over to kiss him when she saw that he was awake. And so he made her eggs, and played with Buchi in the living room downstairs, and after Buchi fell asleep, he read the newspapers, all the time his head furred with that sadness. Ifemelu was still not taking his calls. He went upstairs to the bedroom. Kosi was cleaning out a closet. A pile of shoes, high heels sticking up, lay on the floor. He stood by the door and said quietly, “I’m not happy, Kosi. I love somebody else. I want a divorce. I will make sure you and Buchi lack nothing.”

“What?” She turned from the mirror to look at him blankly.

“I’m not happy.” It was not how he had planned to say it, but he had not even planned what to say. “I’m in love with somebody. I will make sure …”

She raised her hand, her open palm facing him, to make him stop talking. Say no more, her hand said. Say no more. And it irked him that she did not want to know more. Her palm was pale, almost diaphanous, and he could see the greenish criss-cross of her veins. She lowered her hand. Then, slowly, she sank to her knees. It was an easy descent for her, sinking to her knees, because she did that often when she prayed, in the TV room upstairs, with the house help and nanny and whoever else was staying with them. “Buchi, shh,” she would say in between the words of prayer, while Buchi would continue her toddler talk, but at the end Buchi always squeaked in a high piping voice, “Amen!” When Buchi said “Amen!” with that delight, that gusto, Obinze feared she would grow up to be a woman who, with that word “amen,” would squash the questions she wanted to ask of the world. And now Kosi was sinking to her knees before him and he did not want to comprehend what she was doing.

“Obinze, this is a family,” Kosi said. “We have a child. She needs you. I need you. We have to keep this family together.”

She was kneeling and begging him not to leave and he wished she would be furious instead.

“Kosi, I love another woman. I hate to hurt you like this and …”

“It’s not about another woman, Obinze,” Kosi said, rising to her feet, her voice steeling, her eyes hardening. “It’s about keeping this family together! You took a vow before God. I took a vow before God. I am a good wife. We have a marriage. Do you think you can just destroy this family because your old girlfriend came into town? Do you know what it means to be a responsible father? You have a responsibility to that child downstairs! What you do today can ruin her life and make her damaged until the day she dies! And all because your old girlfriend came back from America? Because you have had acrobatic sex that reminded you of your time in university?”

Obinze backed away. So she knew. He left and went into his study and locked the door. He loathed Kosi, for knowing all this time and pretending she didn’t know, and for the sludge of humiliation it left in his stomach. He had been keeping a secret that was not even a secret. A multilayered guilt weighed him down, guilt not only for wanting to leave Kosi, but for having married her at all. He could not first marry her, knowing very well that he should not have done so, and now, with a child, want to leave her. She was determined to remain married and it was the least he owed her, to remain married. Panic lanced through him at the thought of remaining married; without Ifemelu, the future loomed as an endless, joyless tedium. Then he told himself that he was being silly and dramatic. He had to think of his daughter. Yet as he sat on his chair and swiveled to look for a book on the shelf, he felt himself already in flight.

BECAUSE HE HAD RETREATED to his study, and slept on the couch there, because they had said nothing else to each other, he thought Kosi would not want to go to his friend Ahmed’s child’s christening party the next day. But in the morning Kosi laid out, on their bed, her blue lace long skirt, his blue Senegalese caftan, and in between, Buchi’s flouncy blue velvet dress. She had never done that before, laid out color-coordinated outfits for them all. Downstairs, he saw that she had made pancakes, the thick ones he liked, set out on the breakfast table. Buchi had spilled some Ovaltine on her table mat.

“Hezekiah has been calling me,” Kosi said musingly, about his cousin in Awka, who called only when he wanted money. “He sent a text to say he can’t reach you. I don’t know why he pretends not to know that you ignore his calls.”

It was an odd thing for her to say, talking about Hezekiah’s pretense while immersed in pretense herself; she was putting cubes of fresh pineapple on his plate, as if the previous night had never happened.

“But you should do something for him, no matter how small, otherwise he will not leave you alone,” she said.

“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. Find something for this person. Do something for that person. It riled him. It seemed cowardly, especially for a people who otherwise were blisteringly direct. Fucking coward, Ifemelu had called him. There was something cowardly even in his texting and calling her, knowing she would not respond; he could have gone over to her flat and knocked on her door, even if only to have her ask him to leave. And there was something cowardly in his not telling Kosi again that he wanted a divorce, in his leaning back into the ease of Kosi’s denial. Kosi took a piece of pineapple from his plate and ate it. She was unfaltering, single-minded, calm.

“Hold Daddy’s hand,” she told Buchi as they walked into Ahmed’s festive compound that afternoon. She wanted to will normalcy back.

She wanted to will a good marriage into being. She was carrying a present wrapped in silver paper, for Ahmed’s baby. In the car, she had told him what it was, but already he had forgotten. Canopies and buffet tables dotted the massive compound, which was green and landscaped, with the promise of a swimming pool in the back. A live band was playing. Two clowns were running around. Children dancing and shrieking.

“They are using the same band we used for Buchi’s party,” Kosi whispered. She had wanted a big party to celebrate Buchi’s birth, and he had floated through that day, a bubble of air between him and the party. When the MC said “the new father,” he had been strangely startled to realize that the MC meant him, that he was really the new father. A father.

Ahmed’s wife, Sike, was hugging him, tugging Buchi’s cheeks, people milling about, laughter thick in the air’s clasp. They admired the new baby, asleep in the crook of her bespectacled grandmother’s arms. And it struck Obinze that, a few years ago, they were attending weddings, now it was christenings and soon it would be funerals. They would die. They would all die after trudging through lives in which they were neither happy nor unhappy. He tried to shake off the morose shadow that was enveloping him. Kosi took Buchi over to the cluster of women and children near the living room entrance; there was some sort of game being played in a circle, at the center of which was a red-lipped clown. 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. He could not bear the thought of Buchi growing up to resent him, to lack something that he should have been for her. But it wasn’t whether or not he left Kosi that should matter, it was how often he saw Buchi. He would live in Lagos, after all, and he would make sure he saw her as often as he could. Many people grew up without fathers. He himself had, although he had always had the consoling spirit of his father, idealized, frozen in joyful childhood memories. Since Ifemelu came back, he found himself seeking stories of men who had left their marriages, and willing the stories to end well, the children more contented with separated parents than with married unhappy parents. But most of the stories were of resentful children who were bitter about divorce, children who had wanted even unhappy parents to remain together. Once, at his club, he had perked up as a young man talked to some friends about his own parents’ divorce, how he had felt relieved by it, because their unhappiness had been heavy. “Their marriage just blocked the blessings in our life, and the worst part is that they didn’t even fight.”

Obinze, from the other end of the bar, had said, “Good!” drawing strange looks from everyone.

He was still watching Kosi and Buchi talk to the red-lipped clown, when Okwudiba arrived. “The Zed!”

They hugged, thumped backs.

“How was China?” Obinze asked.

“These Chinese people, ehn. Very wily people. You know the previous idiots in my project had signed a lot of nonsense deals with the Chinese. We wanted to review some of the agreements but these Chinese, fifty of them will come to a meeting and bring papers and just tell you ‘Sign here, sign here!’ They will wear you down with negotiation until they have your money and also your wallet.” Okwudiba laughed. “Come, let’s go upstairs. I hear that Ahmed packed bottles of Dom Pérignon there.”

Upstairs, in what seemed to be a dining room, the heavy burgundy drapes were drawn, shutting out the daylight, and a bright elaborate chandelier, like a wedding cake made of crystals, hung down from the middle of the ceiling. Men were seated around the large oak table, which was crowded with bottles of wine and liquor, with dishes of rice and meat and salads. Ahmed was in and out, giving instructions to the server, listening in on conversations and adding a line or two.

“The wealthy don’t really care about tribe. But the lower you go, the more tribe matters,” Ahmed was saying when Obinze and Okwudiba came in. Obinze liked Ahmed’s sardonic nature. Ahmed had leased strategic rooftops in Lagos just as the mobile phone companies were coming in, and now he sublet the rooftops for their base stations and made what he wryly referred to as the only clean easy money in the country.

Obinze shook hands with the men, most of whom he knew, and asked the server, a young woman who had placed a wineglass in front of him, if he could have a Coke instead. Alcohol would sink him deeper into his marsh. He listened to the conversation around him, the joking, the needling, the telling and retelling. Then they began, as he knew they invariably would, to criticize the government — money stolen, contracts uncompleted, infrastructure left to rot.

“Look, it’s very hard to be a clean public official in this country. Everything is set up for you to steal. And the worst part is, people want you to steal. Your relatives want you to steal, your friends want you to steal,” Olu said. He was thin and slouchy, with the easy boastfulness that came with his inherited wealth, his famous surname. Once, he had apparently been offered a ministerial position and had responded, according to the urban legend, “But I can’t live in Abuja, there’s no water, I can’t survive without my boats.” Olu had just divorced his wife, Morenike, Kosi’s friend from university. He had often badgered Morenike, who was only slightly overweight, about losing weight, about keeping him interested by keeping herself fit. During their divorce, she discovered a cache of pornographic pictures on the home computer, all of obese women, arms and bellies in rolls of fat, and she had concluded, and Kosi agreed, that Olu had a spiritual problem.

“Why does everything have to be a spiritual problem? The man just has a fetish,” Obinze had told Kosi. Now, he sometimes found himself looking at Olu with curious amusement; you could never tell with people.

“The problem is not that public officials steal, the problem is that they steal too much,” Okwudiba said. “Look at all these governors. They leave their state and come to Lagos to buy up all the land and they will not touch it until they leave office. That is why nobody can afford to buy land these days.”

“It’s true! Land speculators are just spoiling prices for everybody. And the speculators are guys in government. We have serious problems in this country,” Ahmed said.

“But it’s not just Nigeria. There are land speculators everywhere in the world,” Eze said. 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. He collected art and he told everyone that he collected art. It reminded Obinze of his mother’s friend Aunty Chinelo, a professor of literature who had come back from a short stay at Harvard and told his mother over dinner at their dining table, “The problem is we have a very backward bourgeoisie in this country. They have money but they need to become sophisticated. They need to learn about wine.” And his mother had replied, mildly, “There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.” Later, after Aunty Chinelo left, his mother said, “How silly. Why should they learn about wine?” It had struck Obinze — they need to learn about wine — and, in a way, it had disappointed him, too, because he had always liked Aunty Chinelo. He imagined that somebody had told Eze something similar — you need to collect art, you need to learn about art — and so the man had gone after art with the zeal of an invented interest. Every time Obinze saw Eze, and heard him talk fumblingly about his collection, he was tempted to tell Eze to give it all away and free himself.

“Land prices are no problem for people like you, Eze,” Okwudiba said.

Eze laughed, a laugh of preening agreement. He had taken off his red blazer and hung it on his chair. He teetered, in the name of style, on dandyism; he always wore primary colors, and his belt buckles were always large and prominent, like buckteeth.

From the other end of the table, Mekkus was saying, “Do you know that my driver said he passed WAEC, but the other day I told him to write a list and he cannot write at all! He cannot spell ‘boy’ and ‘cat’! Wonderful!”

“Speaking of drivers, my friend was telling me the other day that his driver is an economic homosexual, that the man follows men who give him money, meanwhile he has a wife and children at home,” Ahmed said.

“Economic homosexual!” somebody repeated, to loud general laughter. Charlie Bombay seemed particularly amused. He had a rough scarred face, the kind of man who would be most himself in the middle of a pack of loud men, eating peppery meat, drinking beer, and watching Arsenal.

“The Zed! You are really quiet today,” Okwudiba said, now on his fifth glass of champagne. “Aru adikwa?”

Obinze shrugged. “I’m fine. Just tired.”

“But The Zed is always quiet,” Mekkus said. “He is a gentleman. Is it because he came here to sit with us? The man reads poems and Shakespeare. Correct Englishman.” Mekkus laughed loudly at his own non-joke. At university, he had been brilliant with electronics, he fixed CD players that were considered lost causes, and his was the first personal computer Obinze had ever seen. He graduated and went to America, then came back a short while afterwards, very furtive and very wealthy from what many said was a massive credit card fraud. His house was studded with CCTV cameras; his security men had automatic guns. And now, at the merest mention of America in a conversation, he would say, “You know I can never enter America after the deal I did there,” as though to take the sting from the whispers that trailed him.

“Yes, The Zed is a serious gentleman,” Ahmed said. “Can you imagine Sike was asking me whether I know anybody like The Zed that I can introduce to her sister? I said, Ahn-ahn, you are not looking for somebody like me to marry your sister and instead you are looking for somebody like The Zed, imagine o!”

“No, The Zed is not quiet because he is a gentleman,” Charlie Bombay said, in his slow manner, his thick Igbo accent adding extra syllables to his words, halfway through a bottle of cognac that he had put territorially in front of himself. “It is because he doesn’t want anybody to know how much money he has!”

They laughed. Obinze had always imagined that Charlie Bombay was a wife beater. There was no reason for him to; he knew nothing of Charlie Bombay’s personal life, had never even seen his wife. Still, every time he saw Charlie Bombay, he imagined him beating his wife with a thick leather belt. He seemed full of violence, this swaggering, powerful man, this godfather who had paid for his state governor’s campaign and now had a monopoly on almost every business in that state.

“Don’t mind The Zed, he thinks we don’t know that he owns half the land in Lekki,” Eze said.

Obinze produced an obligatory chuckle. He brought out his phone and quickly sent Ifemelu a text: Please talk to me.

“We haven’t met, I’m Dapo,” the man sitting on the other side of Okwudiba said, reaching across to shake Obinze’s hand enthusiastically, as though Obinze had just sprung into existence. Obinze enclosed his hand in a halfhearted shake. Charlie Bombay had mentioned his wealth, and suddenly he was interesting to Dapo.

“Are you into oil too?” Dapo asked.

“No,” Obinze said shortly. He had heard snatches of Dapo’s conversation earlier, his work in oil consulting, his children in London. Dapo was probably one of those who installed their wife and children in England and then came back to Nigeria to chase money.

“I was just saying that the Nigerians who keep complaining about the oil companies don’t understand that this economy will collapse without them,” Dapo said.

“You must be very confused if you think the oil companies are doing us a favor,” Obinze said. Okwudiba gave him an astonished look; the coldness of his tone was out of character. “The Nigerian government basically finances the oil industry with cash calls, and the big oils are planning to withdraw from onshore operations anyway. They want to leave that to the Chinese and focus on offshore operations only. It’s like a parallel economy; they keep offshore, only invest in high-tech equipment, pump up oil from thousands of kilometers deep. No local crew. Oil workers flown in from Houston and Scotland. So, no, they are not doing us a favor.”

“Yes!” Mekkus said. “And they are all common riffraff. All those underwater plumbers and deep-sea divers and people who know how to repair maintenance robots underwater. Common riffraff, all of them. You see them in the British Airways lounge. They have been on the rig for one month with no alcohol and by the time they get to the airport they are already stinking drunk and they make fools of themselves on the flight. My cousin used to be a flight attendant and she said that it got to a point that the airlines had to make these men sign agreements about drinking, otherwise they wouldn’t let them fly.”

“But The Zed doesn’t fly British Airways, so he wouldn’t know,” Ahmed said. He had once laughed at Obinze’s refusal to fly British Airways, because it was, after all, what the big boys flew.

“When I was a regular man in economy, British Airways treated me like shit from a bad diarrhea,” Obinze said.

The men laughed. Obinze was hoping his phone would vibrate, and chafing under his hope. He got up.

“I need to find the toilet.”

“It’s just straight down,” Mekkus said.

Okwudiba followed him out.

“I’m going home,” Obinze said. “Let me find Kosi and Buchi.”

“The Zed, o gini? What is it? Is it just tiredness?”

They were standing by the curving staircase, hemmed by an ornate balustrade.

“You know Ifemelu is back,” Obinze said, and just saying her name warmed him.

“I know.” Okwudiba meant that he knew more.

“It’s serious. I want to marry her.”

“Ahn-ahn, have you become a Muslim without telling us?”

“Okwu, I’m not joking. I should never have married Kosi. I knew it even then.”

Okwudiba took a deep breath and exhaled, as though to brush aside the alcohol. “Look, The Zed, many of us didn’t marry the woman we truly loved. We married the woman that was around when we were ready to marry. So forget this thing. You can keep seeing her, but no need for this kind of white-people behavior. If your wife has a child for somebody else or if you beat her, that is a reason for divorce. But to get up and say you have no problem with your wife but you are leaving for another woman? Haba. We don’t behave like that, please.”

Kosi and Buchi were standing at the bottom of the stairs. Buchi was crying. “She fell,” Kosi said. “She said Daddy must carry her.”

Obinze began to descend the stairs. “Buch-Buch! What happened?” Before he got to her, she already had her arms outstretched, waiting for him.

CHAPTER 55

One day, Ifemelu saw the male peacock dance, its feathers fanned out in a giant halo. The female stood by pecking at something on the ground and then, after a while, it walked away, indifferent to the male’s great flare of feathers. The male seemed suddenly to totter, perhaps from the weight of its feathers or from the weight of rejection. Ifemelu took a picture for her blog. She wondered what Obinze would think of it; she remembered how he had asked if she had ever seen the male dance. Memories of him so easily invaded her mind; she would, in the middle of a meeting at an advertising agency, remember Obinze pulling out an ingrown hair on her chin with tweezers, her faceup on a pillow, and him very close and very keen in examination. Each memory stunned her with its blinding luminosity. Each brought with it a sense of unassailable loss, a great burden hurtling towards her, and she wished she could duck, lower herself so that it would bypass her, so that she would save herself. Love was a kind of grief. This was what the novelists meant by suffering. She had often thought it a little silly, the idea of suffering for love, but now she understood. She carefully avoided the street in Victoria Island where his club was, and she no longer shopped at the Palms and she imagined him, too, avoiding her part of Ikoyi, keeping away from Jazzhole. She had not run into him anywhere.

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. She was wounded by the halfheartedness in his texting and calling, the limpness of his efforts. He loved her, she knew, but he lacked a certain strength; his backbone was softened by duty. When she put up the post, written after a visit to Ranyinudo’s office, about the government’s demolishing of hawkers’ shacks, an anonymous commenter wrote, This is like poetry. And she knew it was him. She just knew.

It is morning. A truck, a government truck, stops near the tall office building, beside the hawkers’ shacks, and men spill out, men hitting and destroying and leveling and trampling. They destroy the shacks, reduce them to flat pieces of wood. They are doing their job, wearing “demolish” like crisp business suits. They themselves eat in shacks like these, and if all the shacks like these disappeared in Lagos, they will go lunchless, unable to afford anything else. But they are smashing, trampling, hitting. One of them slaps a woman, because she does not grab her pot and her wares and run. She stands there and tries to talk to them. Later, her face is burning from the slap as she watches her biscuits buried in dust. Her eyes trace a line towards the bleak sky. She does not know yet what she will do but she will do something, she will regroup and recoup and go somewhere else and sell her beans and rice and spaghetti cooked to a near mush, her Coke and sweets and biscuits.

It is evening. Outside the tall office building, daylight is fading and the staff buses are waiting. Women walk up to them, wearing flat slippers and telling slow stories of no consequence. Their high-heeled shoes are in their bags. From one woman’s unzipped bag, a heel sticks out like a dull dagger. The men walk more quickly to the buses. They walk under a cluster of trees which, only hours ago, housed the livelihoods of food hawkers. There, drivers and messengers bought their lunch. But now the shacks are gone. They are erased, and nothing is left, not a stray biscuit wrapper, not a bottle that once held water, nothing to suggest that they were once there.

Ranyinudo urged her, often, to go out more, to date. “Obinze always felt a little too cool with himself anyway,” Ranyinudo said, and although Ifemelu knew Ranyinudo was only trying to make her feel better, it still startled her, that everyone else did not think Obinze as near-perfect as she did.

She wrote her blog posts wondering what he would make of them. She wrote of a fashion show she had attended, how the model had twirled around in an ankara skirt, a vibrant swish of blues and greens, looking like a haughty butterfly. She wrote of the woman at the street corner in Victoria Island who joyously said, “Fine Aunty!” when Ifemelu stopped to buy apples and oranges. She wrote about the views from her bedroom window: a white egret drooped on the compound wall, exhausted from heat; the gateman helping a hawker raise her tray to her head, an act so full of grace that she stood watching long after the hawker had walked away. She wrote about the announcers on radio stations, with their accents so fake and so funny. She wrote about the tendency of Nigerian women to give advice, sincere advice dense with sanctimony. She wrote about the waterlogged neighborhood crammed with zinc houses, their roofs like squashed hats, and of the young women who lived there, fashionable and savvy in tight jeans, their lives speckled stubbornly with hope: they wanted to open hair salons, to go to university. They believed their turn would come. We are just one step away from this life in a slum, all of us who live air-conditioned middle-class lives, she wrote, and wondered if Obinze would agree. The pain of his absence did not decrease with time; it seemed instead to sink in deeper each day, to rouse in her even clearer memories. Still, she was at peace: to be home, to be writing her blog, to have discovered Lagos again. She had, finally, spun herself fully into being.

SHE WAS reaching back to her past. She called Blaine to say hello, to tell him she had always thought he was too good, too pure, for her, and he was stilted over the phone, as though resentful of her call, but at the end he said, “I’m glad you called.” She called Curt and he sounded upbeat, thrilled to hear from her, and she imagined getting back together, being in a relationship free of depth and pain.

“Was it you, those large amounts of money I used to get for the blog?” she asked.

“No,” he said, and she wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not. “So you still blogging?”

“Yes.”

“About race?”

“No, just about life. Race doesn’t really work here. I feel like I got off the plane in Lagos and stopped being black.”

“I bet.”

She had forgotten how very American he sounded.

“It’s not been the same with anybody else,” he said. She liked hearing that. He called her late at night, Nigerian time, and they talked about what they used to do together. The memories seemed burnished now. He made vague references to visiting her in Lagos and she made vague sounds of assent.

One evening, while she was walking into Terra Kulture to see a play with Ranyinudo and Zemaye, she ran into Fred. They all sat in the restaurant afterwards, drinking smoothies.

“Nice guy,” Ranyinudo whispered to Ifemelu.

At first Fred talked, as before, about music and art, his spirit knotted up with the need to impress.

“I’d like to know what you’re like when you’re not performing,” Ifemelu said.

He laughed. “If you go out with me you’ll know.”

There was a silence, Ranyinudo and Zemaye looking at Ifemelu expectantly, and it amused her.

“I’ll go out with you,” she said.

He took her to a nightclub, and when she said she was bored by the too-loud music and the smoke and the barely clothed bodies of strangers too close to hers, he told her sheepishly that he, too, disliked nightclubs; he had assumed she liked them. They watched films together in her flat, and then in his house in Oniru, where arch paintings hung on his wall. It surprised her that they liked the same films. His cook, an elegant man from Cotonou, made a groundnut stew that she loved. Fred played the guitar for her, and sang, his voice husky, and told her how his dream was to be a lead singer in a folksy band. He was attractive, the kind of attractiveness that grew on you. She liked him. He reached out often to push his glasses up, a small push with his finger, and she thought this endearing. As they lay naked on her bed, all pleasant and all warm, she wished it were different. If only she could feel what she wanted to feel.

AND THEN, on a languorous Sunday evening, seven months since she had last seen him, there Obinze was, at the door of her flat. She stared at him.

“Ifem,” he said.

It was such a surprise to see him, his shaved-bald head and the beautiful gentleness of his face. His eyes were urgent, intense, and she could see the up-down chest movement of his heavy breathing. He was holding a long sheet of paper dense with writing. “I’ve written this for you. It’s what I would like to know if I were you. Where my mind has been. I’ve written everything.”

He was holding out the paper, his chest still heaving, and she stood there not reaching out for the paper.

“I know we could accept the things we can’t be for each other, and even turn it into the poetic tragedy of our lives. Or we could act. I want to act. I want this to happen. Kosi is a good woman and my marriage was a kind of floating-along contentment, but I should never have married her. I always knew that something was missing. I want to raise Buchi, I want to see her every day. But I’ve been pretending all these months and one day she’ll be old enough to know I’m pretending. I moved out of the house today. I’ll stay in my flat in Parkview for now and I hope to see Buchi every day if I can. I know it’s taken me too long and I know you’re moving on and I completely understand if you are ambivalent and need time.”

He paused, shifted. “Ifem, I’m chasing you. I’m going to chase you until you give this a chance.”

For a long time she stared at him. He was saying what she wanted to hear and yet she stared at him.

“Ceiling,” she said, finally. “Come in.”