Americanah

“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.”