Americanah

“I think we’ve lost that one,” Ifemelu said. The week before, a Frisbee had disappeared in there. Curt rose from the patio chair (he had been watching her every move, he told her later) and bounded into the bush, almost diving, as though into a pool, and emerged with the yellow ball.

“Yay! Uncle Curt!” Taylor said. But Curt did not give Taylor the ball; instead he held it out to Ifemelu. She saw in his eyes what he wanted her to see. She smiled and said, “Thank you.” Later in the kitchen, after she had put in a video for Taylor and was drinking a glass of water, he said, “This is where I ask you to dinner, but at this point, I’ll take anything I can get. May I buy you a drink, an ice cream, a meal, a movie ticket? This evening? This weekend before I go back to Maryland?”

He was looking at her with wonder, his head slightly lowered, and she felt an unfurling inside her. How glorious it was, to be so wanted, and by this man with the rakish metal band around his wrist and the cleft-chinned handsomeness of models in department store catalogues. She began to like him because he liked her. “You eat so delicately,” he told her on their first date, at an Italian restaurant in Old City. There was nothing particularly delicate about her raising a fork to her mouth but she liked that he thought that there was.

“So, I’m a rich white guy from Potomac, but I’m not nearly as much of an asshole as I’m supposed to be,” he said, in a way that made her feel he had said that before, and that it had been received well when he did. “Laura always says my mom is richer than God, but I’m not sure she is.”

He talked about himself with such gusto, as though determined to tell her everything there was to know, and all at once. His family had been hoteliers for a hundred years. He went to college in California to escape them. He graduated and traveled through Latin America and Asia. Something began to pull him homewards, perhaps his father’s death, perhaps his unhappiness with a relationship. So he moved, a year ago, back to Maryland, started a software business just so that he would not be in the family business, bought an apartment in Baltimore, and went down to Potomac every Sunday to have brunch with his mother. He talked about himself with an uncluttered simplicity, assuming that she enjoyed his stories simply because he enjoyed them himself. His boyish enthusiasm fascinated her. His body was firm as they hugged good night in front of her apartment.

“I’m about to move in for a kiss in exactly three seconds,” he said. “A real kiss that can take us places, so if you don’t want that to happen, you might want to back off right now.”

She did not back off. The kiss was arousing in the way that unknown things are arousing. Afterwards he said, with urgency, “We have to tell Kimberly.”

“Tell Kimberly what?”

“That we’re dating.”

“We are?”

He laughed, and she laughed, too, although she had not been joking. He was open and gushing; cynicism did not occur to him. She felt charmed and almost helpless in the face of this, carried along by him; perhaps they were indeed dating after one kiss since he was so sure that they were.

Kimberly’s greeting to her the next day was “Hello there, lovebird.”

“So you’ll forgive your cousin for asking out the help?” Ifemelu asked.

Kimberly laughed and then, in an act that both surprised and moved Ifemelu, Kimberly hugged her. They moved apart awkwardly. Oprah was on the TV in the den and she heard the audience erupt in applause.

“Well,” Kimberly said, looking a little startled by the hug herself. “I just wanted to say I’m really … happy for you both.”

“Thank you. But it’s only been one date and there has been no consummation.”

Kimberly giggled and for a moment it felt as though they were high school girlfriends gossiping about boys. Ifemelu sometimes sensed, underneath the well-oiled sequences of Kimberly’s life, a flash of regret not only for things she longed for in the present but for things she had longed for in the past.

“You should have seen Curt this morning,” Kimberly said. “I’ve never seen him like this! He’s really excited.”

“About what?” Morgan asked. She was standing by the kitchen entrance, her prepubescent body stiff with hostility. Behind her, Taylor was trying to straighten the legs of a small plastic robot.

“Well, honey, you’re going to have to ask Uncle Curt.”

Curt came into the kitchen, smiling shyly, his hair slightly wet, wearing a fresh, light cologne. “Hey,” he said. He had called her at night to say he couldn’t sleep. “This is really corny but I am so full of you, it’s like I’m breathing you, you know?” he had said, and she thought that the romance novelists were wrong and it was men, not women, who were the true romantics.

“Morgan is asking why you seem so excited,” Kimberly said.

“Well, Morg, I’m excited because I have a new girlfriend, somebody really special who you might know.”

Ifemelu wished Curt would remove the arm he had thrown around her shoulder; they were not announcing their engagement, for goodness’ sake. Morgan was staring at them. Ifemelu saw Curt through her eyes: the dashing uncle who traveled the world and told all the really funny jokes at Thanksgiving dinner, the cool one young enough to get her, but old enough to try and make her mother get her.

“Ifemelu is your girlfriend?” Morgan asked.

“Yes,” Curt said.

“That’s disgusting,” Morgan said, looking genuinely disgusted.

“Morgan!” Kimberly said.

Morgan turned and stalked off upstairs.

“She has a crush on Uncle Curt, and now the babysitter steps onto her turf. It can’t be easy,” Ifemelu said.

Taylor, who seemed happy both with the news and with having straightened out the robot’s legs, said, “Are you and Ifemelu going to get married and have a baby, Uncle Curt?”

“Well, buddy, right now we are just going to be spending a lot of time together, to get to know each other.”

“Oh, okay,” Taylor said, slightly dampened, but when Don came home, Taylor ran into his arms and said, “Ifemelu and Uncle Curt are going to get married and have a baby!”

“Oh,” Don said.

His surprise reminded Ifemelu of Abe in her ethics class: Don thought she was attractive and interesting, and thought Curt was attractive and interesting, but it did not occur to him to think of both of them, together, entangled in the delicate threads of romance.

CURT HAD NEVER BEEN with a black woman; he told her this after their first time, in his penthouse apartment in Baltimore, with a self-mocking toss of his head, as if this were something he should have done long ago but had somehow neglected.

“Here’s to a milestone, then,” she said, pretending to raise a glass.

Wambui once said, after Dorothy introduced them to her new Dutch boyfriend at an ASA meeting, “I can’t do a white man, I’d be scared to see him naked, all that paleness. Unless maybe an Italian with a serious tan. Or a Jewish guy, dark Jewish.” Ifemelu looked at Curt’s pale hair and pale skin, the rust-colored moles on his back, the fine sprinkle of golden chest hair, and thought how strongly, at this moment, she disagreed with Wambui.

“You are so sexy,” she said.

“You are sexier.”

He told her he had never been so attracted to a woman before, had never seen a body so beautiful, her perfect breasts, her perfect butt. It amused her, that he considered a perfect butt what Obinze called a flat ass, and she thought her breasts were ordinary big breasts, already with a downward slope. But his words pleased her, like an unnecessary lavish gift. He wanted to suck her finger, to lick honey from her nipple, to smear ice cream on her belly, as though it was not enough simply to lie bare skin to bare skin.

Later, when he wanted to do impersonations—“How about you be Foxy Brown,” he said—she thought it endearing, his ability to act, to lose himself so completely in character, and she played along, humoring him, pleased by his pleasure, although it puzzled her that this could be so exciting to him. Often, naked beside him, she found herself thinking of Obinze. She struggled not to compare Curt’s touch to his. She had told Curt about her secondary school boyfriend Mofe, but she said nothing about Obinze. It felt a sacrilege to discuss Obinze, to refer to him as an “ex,” that flippant word that said nothing and meant nothing. With each month of silence that passed between them, she felt the silence itself calcify, and become a hard and hulking statue, impossible to defeat. She still, often, began to write to him, but always she stopped, always she decided not to send the e-mails.

WITH CURT, she became, in her mind, a woman free of knots and cares, a woman running in the rain with the taste of sun-warmed strawberries in her mouth. “A drink” became a part of the architecture of her life, mojitos and martinis, dry whites and fruity reds. She went hiking with him, kayaking, camping near his family’s vacation home, all things she would never have imagined herself doing before. She was lighter and leaner; she was Curt’s Girlfriend, a role she slipped into as into a favorite, flattering dress. She laughed more because he laughed so much. His optimism blinded her. He was full of plans. “I have an idea!” he said often. She imagined him as a child surrounded by too many brightly colored toys, always being encouraged to carry out “projects,” always being told that his mundane ideas were wonderful.