Americanah

“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.”