He wielded the word like a knife; it came out of his mouth sharp with loathing. To hear Curt say “bitch” so coldly felt surreal, and tears gathered in her eyes, knowing that she had turned him into a man who could say “bitch” so coldly, and wishing he was a man who would not have said “bitch” no matter what. Alone in her apartment, she cried and cried, crumpled on her living room rug that was so rarely used it still smelled of the store. Her relationship with Curt was what she wanted, a crested wave in her life, and yet she had taken an axe and hacked at it. Why had she destroyed it? She imagined her mother saying it was the devil. She wished she believed in the devil, in a being outside of yourself that invaded your mind and caused you to destroy that which you cared about.
She spent weeks calling Curt, waiting in front of his building until he came out, saying over and over how sorry she was, how much she wanted to work through things. On the day she woke up and finally accepted that Curt would not return her calls, would not open the door of his apartment no matter how hard she knocked, she went alone to their favorite bar downtown. The bartender, the one who knew them, gave her a gentle smile, a sympathy smile. She smiled back and ordered another mojito, thinking that perhaps the bartender was better suited for Curt, with her brown hair blow-dried to satin, her thin arms and tight black clothes and her ability always to be seamlessly, harmlessly chatty. She would also be seamlessly, harmlessly faithful; if she had a man like Curt, she would not be interested in a curiosity copulation with a stranger who played unharmonious music. Ifemelu stared into her glass. There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach. She got up and left a big tip on the counter. For a long time afterwards, her memory of the end with Curt was this: speeding down Charles Street in a taxi, a little drunk and a little relieved and a little lonely, with a Punjabi driver who was proudly telling her that his children did better than American children at school.
SOME YEARS LATER, at a dinner party in Manhattan, a day after Barack Obama became the Democratic Party’s candidate for President of the United States, surrounded by guests, all fervent Obama supporters who were dewy-eyed with wine and victory, a balding white man said, “Obama will end racism in this country,” and a large-hipped, stylish poet from Haiti agreed, nodding, her Afro bigger than Ifemelu’s, and said she had dated a white man for three years in California and race was never an issue for them.
“That’s a lie,” Ifemelu said to her.
“What?” the woman asked, as though she could not have heard properly.
“It’s a lie,” Ifemelu repeated.
The woman’s eyes bulged. “You’re telling me what my own experience was?”
Even though Ifemelu by then understood that people like the woman said what they said to keep others comfortable, and to show they appreciated How Far We Have Come; even though she was by then happily ensconced in a circle of Blaine’s friends, one of whom was the woman’s new boyfriend, and even though she should have left it alone, she did not. She could not. The words had, once again, overtaken her; they overpowered her throat, and tumbled out.
“The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable. It’s true. I speak from experience.”
The host, a Frenchwoman, gl
anced at her American husband, a slyly pleased smile on her face; the most unforgettable dinner parties happened when guests said unexpected, and potentially offensive, things.
The poet shook her head and said to the host, “I’d love to take some of that wonderful dip home if you have any left,” and looked at the others as though she could not believe they were actually listening to Ifemelu. But they were, all of them hushed, their eyes on Ifemelu as though she was about to give up a salacious secret that would both titillate and implicate them. Ifemelu had been drinking too much white wine; from time to time she had a swimming sensation in her head, and she would later send apology e-mails to the host and the poet. But everyone was watching her, even Blaine, whose expression she could not, for once, read clearly. And so she began to talk about Curt.
It was not that they avoided race, she and Curt. They talked about it in the slippery way that admitted nothing and engaged nothing and ended with the word “crazy,” like a curious nugget to be examined and then put aside. Or as jokes that left her with a small and numb discomfort that she never admitted to him. And it was not that Curt pretended that being black and being white were the same in America; he knew they were not. It was, instead, that she did not understand how he grasped one thing but was completely tone-deaf about another similar thing, how he could easily make one imaginative leap, but be crippled in the face of another. Before his cousin Ashleigh’s wedding, for example, he dropped her off at a small spa near his childhood home, to get her eyebrows shaped. Ifemelu walked in and smiled at the Asian woman behind the counter.
“Hi. I’d like to get my eyebrows waxed.”
“We don’t do curly,” the woman said.
“You don’t do curly?”
“No. Sorry.”
Ifemelu gave the woman a long look; it was not worth an argument. If they did not do curly, then they did not do curly, whatever curly was. She called Curt and asked him to turn around and come back for her because the salon did not do curly. Curt walked in, his blue eyes bluer, and said he wanted to talk to the manager right away. “You are going to fucking do my girlfriend’s eyebrows or I’ll shut down this fucking place. You don’t deserve to have a license.”
The woman transformed into a smiling, solicitous coquette. “I’m so sorry, it was a misunderstanding,” she said. Yes, they could do the eyebrows. Ifemelu did not want to, worried that the woman might scald her, rip her skin off, pinch her, but Curt was too outraged on her behalf, his anger smoldering in the closed air of the spa, and so she sat, tensely, as the woman waxed her eyebrows.
As they drove back, Curt asked, “How is the hair of your eyebrows curly anyway? And how is that hard to fucking wax?”
“Maybe they’ve never done a black woman’s eyebrows and so they think it’s different, because our hair is different, after all, but I guess now she knows the eyebrows are not that different.”
Curt scoffed, reaching across to take her hand, his palm warm. At the cocktail reception, he kept his fingers meshed with hers. Young females in tiny dresses, their breaths and bellies sucked in, trooped across to say hello to him and to flirt, asking if he remembered them, Ashleigh’s friend from high school, Ashleigh’s roommate in college. When Curt said, “This is my girlfriend, Ifemelu,” they looked at her with surprise, a surprise that some of them shielded and some of them did not, and in their expressions was the question “Why her?” It amused Ifemelu. She had seen that look before, on the faces of white women, strangers on the street, who would see her hand clasped in Curt’s and instantly cloud their faces with that look. The look of people confronting a great tribal loss. It was not merely because Curt was white, it was the kind of white he was, the untamed golden hair and handsome face, the athlete’s body, the sunny charm and the smell, around him, of money. If he were fat, older, poor, plain, eccentric, or dreadlocked, then it would be less remarkable, and the guardians of the tribe would be mollified. And it did not help that although she might be a pretty black girl, she was not the kind of black that they could, with an effort, imagine him with: she was not light-skinned, she was not biracial. At that party, as Curt held on to her hand, kissed her often, introduced her to everyone, her amusement curdled into exhaustion. The looks had begun to pierce her skin. She was tired even of Curt’s protection, tired of needing protection.
Curt leaned in and whispered, “That one, the one with the bad spray tan? She can’t even see her fucking boyfriend’s been checking you out since we walked in here.”
So he had noticed, and understood, the “Why her?” looks. It surprised her. Sometimes, in the middle of floating on his bubbly exuberance, he would have a flash of intuition, of surprising perception, and she would wonder if there were other more primal things she was missing about him. Such as when he told his mother, who had glanced at the Sunday newspaper and mumbled that some people were still looking for reasons to complain even though America was now color-blind, “Come on, Mother. What if ten people who look like Ifemelu suddenly walked in here to eat? You realize our fellow diners would be less than pleased?”
“Maybe,” his mother said, noncommittal, and shot an eyebrow-raise of accusation at Ifemelu, as though to say she knew very well who had turned her son into a pathetic race warrior. Ifemelu smiled a small, victorious smile.
And yet. Once, they visited his aunt, Claire, in Vermont, a woman who had an organic farm and walked around barefoot and talked about how connected to the earth it made her feel. Did Ifemelu have such an experience in Nigeria? she asked, and looked disappointed when Ifemelu said her mother would slap her if she ever stepped outside without shoes. Claire talked, throughout the visit, about her Kenyan safari, about Mandela’s grace, about her adoration for Harry Belafonte, and Ifemelu worried that she would lapse into Ebonics or Swahili. As they left her rambling house, Ifemelu said, “I bet she’s an interesting woman if she’d just be herself. I don’t need her to over-assure me that she likes black people.”
And Curt said it was not about race, it was just that his aunt was hyperaware of difference, any difference.
“She would have done the exact same thing if I had turned up with a blond Russian,” he said.
Of course his aunt would not have done the same thing with a blond Russian. A blond Russian was white, and his aunt would not feel the need to prove that she liked people who looked like the blond Russian. But Ifemelu did not tell Curt this because she wished it were obvious to him.
When they walked into a restaurant with linen-covered tables, and the host looked at them and asked Curt, “Table for one?” Curt hastily told her the host did not mean it “like that.” And she wanted to ask him, “How else could the host have meant it?” When the strawberry-haired owner of the bed-and-breakfast in Montreal refused to acknowledge her as they checked in, a steadfast refusal, smiling and looking only at Curt, she wanted to tell Curt how slighted she felt, worse because she was unsure whether the woman disliked black people or liked Curt. But she did not, because he would tell her she was overreacting or tired or both. There were, simply, times that he saw and times that he was unable to see. She knew that she should tell him these thoughts, that not telling him cast a shadow over them both. Still, she chose silence. Until the day they argued about her magazine. He had picked up a copy of Essence from the pile on her coffee table, on a rare morning that they spent in her apartment, the air still thick with the aroma of the omelets she had made.