“Then why eat it?”
“It’s good for me.”
He ran every morning and flossed every night. It seemed so American to her, flossing, that mechanical sliding of a string between teeth, inelegant and functional. “You should floss every day,” Blaine told her. And she began to floss, as she began to do other things that he did—going to the gym, eating more protein than carbohydrates—and she did them with a kind of grateful contentment, because they improved her. He was like a salutary tonic; with him, she could only inhabit a higher level of goodness.
HIS BEST FRIEND, Araminta, came up to visit him, and hugged Ifemelu warmly, as though they had met previously. “Blaine hasn’t really dated since he broke up with Paula. And now, he’s with a sister, and a chocolate sister at that. We’re making progress!” Araminta said.
“Mint, stop it,” Blaine said, but he was smiling. That his best friend was a woman, an architect with a long straight weave who wore high heels and tight jeans and colored contact lenses, said something about Blaine that Ifemelu liked.
“Blaine and I grew up together. In high school, we were the only black kids in our class. All our friends wanted us to date, you know how they think the two black kids just have to be together, but he so wasn’t my type,” Araminta said.
“You wish,” Blaine said.
“Ifemelu, can I just say how happy I am that you’re not an academic? Have you heard his friends talk? Nothing is just what it is. Everything has to mean something else. It’s ridiculous. The other day Marcia was talking about how black women are fat because their bodies are sites of anti-slavery resistance. Yes, that’s true, if burgers and sodas are anti-slavery resistance.”
“Anybody can see through that whole anti-intellectual pose thing, Miss Drinks at Harvard Club,” Blaine said.
“Come on. A good education isn’t the same thing as making the whole damn world something to be explained! Even Shan makes fun of you guys. She does a great imitation of you and Grace: canon formation and topography of the spatial and historical consciousness.” Araminta turned to Ifemelu. “You haven’t met his sister Shan?”
“No.”
Later, when Blaine was in the bedroom, Araminta said, “Shan’s an interesting character. Don’t take her too seriously when you meet her.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s great, she’s very seductive, but if you think she slights you or anything like that, it’s not you, it’s just the way she is.” And then she said, in a lower voice, “Blaine’s a really good guy, a really good guy.”
“I know.” Ifemelu sensed, in Araminta’s words, something that was either a warning or a plea.
Blaine asked her to move in after a month, but it took a year before she did, even though by then she was spending most of her time in New Haven, and had a Yale gym pass as a professor’s partner, and wrote her blogs from his apartment, at a desk he had placed for her near the bedroom window. At first, thrilled by his interest, graced by his intelligence, she let him read her blog posts before she put them up. She did not ask for his edits, but slowly she began to make changes, to add and remove, because of what he said. Then she began to resent it. Her posts sounded too academic, too much like him. She had written a post about inner cities—“Why Are the Dankest, Drabbest Parts of American Cities Full of American Blacks?”—and he told her to include details about government policy and redistricting. She did, but after rereading it, she took down the post.
“I don’t want to explain, I want to observe,” she said.
“Remember people are not reading you as entertainment, they’re reading you as cultural commentary. That’s a real responsibility. There are kids writing college essays about your blog,” he said. “I’m not saying you have to be academic or boring. Keep your style but add more depth.”
“It has enough depth,” she said, irritated, but with the niggling thought that he was right.
“You’re being lazy, Ifem.”
He used that word, “lazy,” often, for his students who did not hand in work on time, black celebrities who were not politically active, ideas that did not match his own. Sometimes she felt like his apprentice; when they wandered through museums, he would linger at abstract paintings, which bored her, and she would drift to the bold sculptures or the naturalistic paintings, and sense in his tight smile his disappointment that she had not yet learned enough from him. When he played selections from his complete John Coltrane, he would watch her as she listened, waiting for a rapture he was sure would glaze over her, and then at the end, when she remained untransported, he would quickly avert his eyes. She blogged about two novels she loved, by Ann Petry and Gayl Jones, and Blaine said, “They don’t push the boundaries.” He spoke gently, as though he did not want to upset her, but it still had to be said. His positions were firm, so thought-through and fully realized in his own mind that he sometimes seemed surprised that she, too, had not arrived at them herself. She felt a step removed from the things he believed, and the things he knew, and she was eager to play catch-up, fascinated by his sense of rightness. Once, as they walked down Elm Street, on their way to get a sandwich, they saw the plump black woman who was a fixture on campus: always standing near the coffee shop, a woolen hat squashed on her head, offering single plastic red roses to passersby and asking “You got any change?” Two students were talking to her, and then one of them gave her a cappuccino in a tall paper cup. The woman looked thrilled; she threw her head back and drank from the cup.
“That’s so disgusting,” Blaine said, as they walked past.
“I know,” Ifemelu said, although she did not quite understand why he felt so strongly about the homeless woman and her cappuccino gift. Weeks before, an older white woman standing in line behind them at the grocery store had said, “Your hair is so beautiful, can I touch it?” and Ifemelu said yes. The woman sank her fingers into her Afro. She sensed Blaine tense, saw the pulsing at his temples. “How could you let her do that?” he asked afterwards. “Why not? How else will she know what hair like mine feels like? She probably doesn’t know any black people.”
“And so you have to be her guinea pig?” Blaine asked. He expected her to feel what she did not know how to feel. There were things that existed for him that she could not penetrate. With his close friends, she often felt vaguely lost. They were youngish and well-dressed and righteous, their sentences filled with “sort of,” and “the ways in which”; they gathered at a bar every Thursday, and sometimes one of them had a dinner party, where Ifemelu mostly listened, saying little, looking at them in wonder: were they serious, these people who were so enraged about imported vegetables that ripened in trucks? They wanted to stop child labor in Africa. They would not buy clothes made by underpaid workers in Asia. They looked at the world with an impractical, luminous earnestness that moved her, but never convinced her. Surrounded by them, Blaine hummed with references unfamiliar to her, and he would seem far away, as though he belonged to them, and when he finally looked at her, his eyes warm and loving, she felt something like relief.
SHE TOLD her parents about Blaine, that she was leaving Baltimore and moving to New Haven to live with him. She could have lied, invented a new job, or simply said she wanted to move. “His nam
e is Blaine,” she said. “He’s an American.”
She heard the symbolism in her own words, traveling thousands of miles to Nigeria, and she knew what her parents would understand. She and Blaine had not talked about marriage, but the ground beneath her feet felt firm. She wanted her parents to know of him, and of how good he was. She used that word in describing him: “good.”
“An American Negro?” her father asked, sounding baffled.
Ifemelu burst out laughing. “Daddy, nobody says Negro anymore.”
“But why a Negro? Is there a substantive scarcity of Nigerians there?”