His apologizing surprised her, his expression so earnest and sincere that it seemed as though he had done something more offensive. “It’s okay,” she said, and smiled.
“How are you?” he asked.
She had learned to say “Good-how-are-you?” in that singsong American way, but now she said, “I’m well, thank you.”
“My name’s Blaine,” he said, and extended his hand.
He looked tall. A man with skin the color of gingerbread and the kind of lean, proportioned body that was perfect for a uniform, any uniform. She knew right away that he was African-American, not Caribbean, not African, not a child of immigrants from either place. She had not always been able to tell. Once she had asked a taxi driver, “So where are you from?” in a knowing, familiar tone, certain that he was from Ghana, and he said “Detroit” with a shrug. But the longer she spent in America, the better she had become at distinguishing, sometimes from looks and gait, but mostly from bearing and demeanor, that fine-grained mark that culture stamps on people. She felt confident about Blaine: he was a descendant of the black men and women who had been in America for hundreds of years.
“I’m Ifemelu, it’s nice to meet you,” she said.
“Are you Nigerian?”
“I am, yes.”
“Bourgie Nigerian,” he said, and smiled. There was a surprising and immediate intimacy to his teasing her, calling her privileged.
“Just as bourgie as you,” she said. They were on firm flirting territory now. She looked him over quietly, his light-colored khakis and navy shirt, the kind of outfit that was selected with the right amount of thought; a man who looked at himself in the mirror but did not look for too long. He knew about Nigerians, he told her, he was an assistant professor at Yale, and although his interest was mostly in southern Africa, how could he not know about Nigerians when they were everywhere?
“What is it, one in every five Africans is Nigerian?” he asked, still smiling. There was something both ironic and gentle about him. It was as if he believed that they shared a series of intrinsic jokes that did not need to be verbalized.
“Yes, we Nigerians get around. We have to. There are too many of us and not enough space,” she said, and it struck her how close to each other they were, separated only by the single armrest. He spoke the kind of American English that she had just given up, the kind that made race pollsters on the telephone assume th
at you were white and educated.
“So is southern Africa your discipline?” she asked.
“No. Comparative politics. You can’t do just Africa in political science graduate programs in this country. You can compare Africa to Poland or Israel but focusing on Africa itself? They don’t let you do that.”
His use of “they” suggested an “us,” which would be the both of them. His nails were clean. He was not wearing a wedding band. She began to imagine a relationship, both of them waking up in the winter, cuddling in the stark whiteness of the morning light, drinking English Breakfast tea; she hoped he was one of those Americans who liked tea. His juice, the bottle stuffed in the pouch in front of him, was organic pomegranate. A plain brown bottle with a plain brown label, both stylish and salutary. No chemicals in the juice and no ink wasted on decorative labels. Where had he bought it? It was not the sort of thing that was sold at the train station. Perhaps he was vegan and distrusted large corporations and shopped only at farmers markets and brought his own organic juice from home. She had little patience for Ginika’s friends, most of whom were like that, their righteousness made her feel both irritated and lacking, but she was prepared to forgive Blaine’s pieties. He was holding a hardcover library book whose title she could not see and had stuffed his New York Times next to the juice bottle. When he glanced at her magazine, she wished she had brought out the Esiaba Irobi book of poems that she planned to read on the train back. He would think that she read only shallow fashion magazines. She felt the sudden and unreasonable urge to tell him how much she loved the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa, to redeem herself. First, she shielded, with her palm, the bright red lipstick on the cover model’s face. Then, she reached forward and pushed the magazine into the pouch in front of her and said, with a slight sniff, that it was absurd how women’s magazines forced images of small-boned, small-breasted white women on the rest of the multi-boned, multi-ethnic world of women to emulate.
“But I keep reading them,” she said. “It’s like smoking, it’s bad for you but you do it anyway.”
“Multi-boned and multi-ethnic,” he said, amused, his eyes warm with unabashed interest; it charmed her that he was not the kind of man who, when he was interested in a woman, cultivated a certain cool, pretended indifference.
“Are you a grad student?” he asked.
“I’m a junior at Wellson.”
Did she imagine it or did his face fall, in disappointment, in surprise? “Really? You seem more mature.”
“I am. I’d done some college in Nigeria before I left to come here.”
She shifted on her seat, determined to get back on firm flirting ground. “You, on the other hand, look too young to be a professor. Your students must be confused about who the professor is.”
“I think they’re probably confused about a lot of stuff. This is my second year of teaching.” He paused. “Are you thinking of graduate school?”
“Yes, but I’m worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialectics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking academese instead of English and they don’t really know what’s happening in the real world.”
“That’s a pretty strong opinion.”
“I don’t know how to have any other kind.”
He laughed, and it pleased her to have made him laugh.
“But I hear you,” he said. “My research interests include social movements, the political economy of dictatorships, American voting rights and representation, race and ethnicity in politics, and campaign finance. That’s my classic spiel. Much of which is bullshit anyway. I teach my classes and I wonder if any of it matters to the kids.”
“Oh, I’m sure it does. I’d love to take one of your classes.” She had spoken too eagerly. It had not come out as she wanted. She had cast herself, without meaning to, in the role of a potential student. He seemed keen to change the direction of the conversation; perhaps he did not want to be her teacher either. He told her he was going back to New Haven after visiting friends in Washington, D.C. “So where are you headed?” he asked.