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.