“Thanks, but don’t worry. I should hold it, as punishment for wearing it in the first place.” He looked at Ifemelu, eyes twinkling.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Ifemelu said. “It’s just that this room is so hot and that jacket looks heavy.”
“I like your voice,” he said, almost cutting her short.
And she, who was never at a loss, croaked, “My voice?”
“Yes.”
The music had begun. “Let’s dance?” he asked.
She nodded.
He took her hand and then smiled at Ginika, as though to a nice chaperone whose job was now done. Ifemelu thought Mills and Boon romances were silly, she and her friends sometimes enacted the stories, Ifemelu or Ranyinudo would play the man and Ginika or Priye would play the woman—the man would grab the woman, the woman would fight weakly, then collapse against him with shrill moans—and they would all burst out laughing. But in the filling-up dance floor of Kayode’s party, she was jolted by a small truth in those romances. It was indeed true that because of a male, your stomach could tighten up and refuse to unknot itself, your body’s joints could unhinge, your limbs fail to move to music, and all effortless things suddenly become leaden. As she moved stiffly, she saw Ginika in her side vision, watching them, her expression puzzled, mouth slightly slack, as though she did not quite believe what had happened.
“You actually said ‘country bumpkin,’ ” Ifemelu said, her voice high above the music.
“What?”
“Nobody says ‘country bumpkin.’ It’s the kind of thing you read in a book.”
“You have to tell me what books you read,” he said.
He was teasing her, and she did not quite get the joke, but she laughed anyway. Later, she wished that she remembered every word they said to each other as they danced. She remembered, instead, feeling adrift. When the lights were turned off, and the blues dancing started, she wanted to be in his arms in a dark corner, but he said, “Let’s go outside and talk.”
They sat on cement blocks behind the guesthouse, next to what looked like the gateman’s bathroom, a narrow stall which, when the wind blew, brought a stale smell. They talked and talked, hungry to know each other. He told her that his father had died when he was seven, and how clearly he remembered his father teaching him to ride a tricycle on a tree-lined street near their campus home, but sometimes he would discover, in panic, that he could not remember his father’s face and a sense of betrayal would overwhelm him and he would hurry to examine the framed photo on their living room wall.
“Your mother never wanted to remarry?”
“Even if she wanted to, I don’t think she would, because of me. I want her to be happy, but I don’t want her to remarry.”
“I would feel the same way. Did she really fight with another professor?”
“So you heard that story.”
“They said it’s why she had to leave Nsukka University.”
“No, she didn’t fight. She was on a committee and they discovered that this professor had misused funds and my mother accused him publicly and he got angry and slapped her and said he could not take a woman talking to him like that. So my mother got up and locked the door of the conference room and put the key in her bra. She told him she could not slap him back because he was stronger than her, but he would have to apologize to her publicly, in front of all the people who had seen him slap her. So he did. But she knew he didn’t mean it. She said he did it in a kind of ‘okay sorry if that’s what you want to hear and just bring out the key’ way. She came home that day really angry, and she kept talking about how things had changed and what did it mean that now somebody could just slap another person. She wrote circulars and articles about it, and the student union got involved. People were saying, Oh, why did he slap her when she’s a widow, and that annoyed her even more. She said she should not have been slapped because she is a full human being, not because she doesn’t have a husband to speak for her. So some of her female students went and printed Full Human Being on T-shirts. I guess it made her well-known. She’s usually very quiet and doesn’t have many friends.”
“Is that why she came to Lagos?”
“No. She’s been scheduled to do this sabbatical for a while. I remember the first time she told me
we would go away for her two-year sabbatical, and I was excited because I thought it would be in America, one of my friend’s dads had just gone to America, and then she said it was Lagos, and I asked her what was the point? We might as well just stay in Nsukka.”
Ifemelu laughed. “But at least you can still get on a plane to come to Lagos.”
“Yes, but we came by road,” Obinze said, laughing. “But now I’m happy it was Lagos or I would not have met you.”
“Or met Ginika,” she teased.
“Stop it.”
“Your guys will kill you. You’re supposed to be chasing her.”
“I’m chasing you.”
She would always remember this moment, those words. I’m chasing you.