“Chinedu drinks much more than I do,” Abidemi had said to Kemi, with her long weave-on and strapless yellow dress. She sat next to Abidemi, reaching out from time to time to brush something off his shirt, to refill his glass, to place a hand on his knee, and all the while her whole body was braced and attuned to his, as though ready to spring up and do whatever it took to please him. “You said I will grow a beer belly, abi?” Abidemi said, his hand on her thigh. “This man will grow one before me, I’m telling you.”
Chinedu had smiled tightly, a tension headache starting, his rage at Abidemi exploding. As Chinedu told Ukamaka this, how the anger of that evening had “scattered his head,” she noticed how tense he had become.
“You wished you hadn’t met his wife,” Ukamaka said.
“No. I wished he had been conflicted.”
“He must have been.”
“He wasn’t. I watched him that day, the way he was with both of us there, drinking stout and making jokes about me to her and about her to me, and I knew he would go to bed and sleep well at night. If we continued, he would come to me and then go home to her and sleep well every night. I wanted him not to sleep well sometimes.”
“And you ended it?”
“He was angry. He did not understand why I would not do what he wanted.”
“How can a person claim to love you and yet want you to do things that suit only them? Udenna was like that.”
Chinedu squeezed the pillow on his lap. “Ukamaka, not everything is about Udenna.”
“I’m just saying that Abidemi sounds a little bit like Udenna. I guess I just don’t understand that kind of love.”
“Maybe it wasn’t love,” Chinedu said, standing up abruptly from the couch. “Udenna did this to you and Udenna did that to you, but why did you let him? Why did you let him? Have you ever considered that it wasn’t love?”
It was so savagely cold, his tone, that for a moment Ukamaka felt frightened, then she felt angry and told him to get out of her apartment.
She had begun, before that day, to notice strange things about Chinedu. He never asked her up to his apartment, and once, after he told her which apartment was his, she looked at the mailbox and was surprised that it did not have his last name on it; the building superintendent was very strict about all the names of renters being on the mailbox. He did not ever seem to go to campus; the only time she asked him why, he had said something deliberately vague, which told her he did not want to talk about it, and she let it go because she suspected that he had academic problems, perhaps was grappling with a dissertation that was going nowhere. And so, a week after she asked him to get out of her apartment, a week of not speaking to him, she went up and knocked on his door, and when he opened it and looked at her warily, she asked, “Are you working on a dissertation?”
“I’m busy,” he said, shortly, and closed the door in her face.
She stood there for a while before going back to her apartment. She would never speak to him again, she told herself; he was a crude and rude person from the bush. But Sunday came and she had become used to driving him to his church in Lawrenceville before going to hers on Nassau Street. She hoped he would knock on her door and yet knew that he would not. She felt a sudden fear that he would ask somebody else on his floor to drop him off at church, and because she felt her fear becoming a panic, she went up and knocked on his door. It took him a while to open. He looked drawn and tired; his face was unwashed and ashy.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That question about whether you are working on a dissertation was just my stupid way of saying I’m sorry.”
“Next time if you want to say you’re sorry just say you’re sorry.”
“Do you want me to drop you off at church?”
“No.” He gestured for her to come in. The apartment was sparsely furnished with a couch, a table, and a TV; books were piled one on top of the other along the walls.
“Look, Ukamaka, I have to tell you what’s happening. Sit down.”
She sat down. A cartoon show was on TV, a Bible open facedown on the table, a cup of what looked like coffee next to it.
“I am out of status. My visa expired three years ago. This apartment belongs to a friend. He is in Peru for a semester and he said I should come and stay while I try to sort myself out.”
“You’re not here at Princeton?”
“I never said I was.” He turned away and closed the Bible. “I’m going to get a deportation notice from Immigration anytime soon. Nobody at home knows my real situation. I haven’t been able to send them much since I lost my construction job. My boss was a nice man and was paying me under the table but he said he did not want trouble now that they are talking about raiding workplaces.”
“Have you tried finding a lawyer?” she asked.
“A lawyer for what? I don’t have a case.” He was bitin
g his lower lip, and she had not seen him look so unattractive before, with his flaking facial skin and his shadowed eyes. She would not ask for more details because she knew he was unwilling to tell her more.
“You look terrible. You haven’t eaten much since I last saw you,” she said, thinking of all the weeks that she had spent talking about Udenna while Chinedu worried about being deported.
“I’m fasting.”