“Thank you,” Ifemelu said.
“I have a Nigerian friend who is a writer. Do you know Kelechi Garuba?”
“I’ve read his work.”
“We talked about your blog the other day and he said he was sure the Non-American Black was a Caribbean because Africans don’t care about race. He’ll be shocked when he meets you!” Shan paused to exchange the leg on the table, leaning in to grasp her foot.
“He’s always fretting about how his books don’t do well. I’ve told him he needs to write terrible things about his own people if he wants to do well. He needs to say Africans alone are to blame for African problems, and Europeans have helped Africa more than they’ve hurt Africa, and he’ll be famous and people will say he’s so honest!”
Ifemelu laughed.
“Interesting picture,” she said, gesturing to a photo on a side table, of Shan holding two bottles of champagne high above her head, surrounded by tattered, smiling, brown children in what looked like a Latin American slum, shacks with patched-up tin walls behind her. “I mean interesting literally.”
“Ovidio didn’t want it displayed but I insisted. It’s supposed to be ironic, obviously.”
Ifemelu imagined the insisting, a simple sentence, which would not need to be repeated and which would have Ovidio scrambling.
“So do you go home to Nigeria often?” Shan asked.
“No. Actually I haven’t been home since I came to the States.”
“Why?”
“At first I couldn’t afford to. Then I had work and just never seemed to make the time.”
Shan was facing her now, her arms stretched out and pushed back like wings.
“Nigerians call us acata, right? And it means wild animal?”
“I don’t know that it means wild animal, I really don’t know what it means, and I don’t use it.” Ifemelu found herself almost stammering. It was true and yet in the directness of Shan’s gaze, she felt guilty. Shan dripped power, a subtle and devastating kind.
Blaine emerged from the kitchen with two tall glasses of a reddish liquid.
“Virgin cocktails!” Shan said, with a childish delight, as she took a glass from Blaine.
“Pomegranate, sparkling water, and a bit of cranberry,” Blaine said, giving Ifemelu the other glass. “So when are you going to have the next salon, Shan? I was telling Ifemelu about them.”
When Blaine had told Ifemelu about Shan calling her gatherings “salons,” he had underlined the word with mockery, but now he said it with an earnestly French pronunciation: sa-lon.
“Oh, soon, I guess.” Shan shrugged, fond and offhand, sipped from her glass, and then leaned sideways in a stretch, like a tree bent by wind.
Shan’s cell phone rang. “Where did I put that phone? It’s probably David.”
The phone was on the table. “Oh, it’s Luc. I’ll call him back later.”
“Who’s Luc?” Blaine asked, coming out of the kitchen.
“This French guy, rich guy. It’s funny, I met him at the airport for f
uck’s sake. I tell him I have a boyfriend and he goes ‘Then I will admire from afar and bide my time.’ He actually said ‘bide.’ ” Shan sipped her drink. “It’s nice how in Europe, white men look at you like a woman, not a black woman. Now I don’t want to date them, hell no, I just want to know the possibility is there.”
Blaine was nodding, agreeing. If anybody else had said what Shan did, he would instantly comb through the words in search of nuance, and he would disagree with their sweep, their simplicity. Ifemelu had once told him, as they watched a news item about a celebrity divorce, that she did not understand the unbending, unambiguous honesties that Americans required in relationships. “What do you mean?” he asked her, and she heard a looming disagreement in his voice; he, too, believed in unbending, unambiguous honesties.
“It’s different for me and I think it’s because I’m from the Third World,” she said. “To be a child of the Third World is to be aware of the many different constituencies you have and how honesty and truth must always depend on context.” She had felt clever to have thought of this explanation but Blaine shook his head even before she finished speaking and said, “That is so lazy, to use the Third World like that.”
Now he was nodding as Shan said, “Europeans are just not as conservative and uptight about relationships as Americans are. In Europe the white men are thinking ‘I just want a hot woman.’ In America the white men are thinking ‘I won’t touch a black woman but I could maybe do Halle Berry.’ ”
“That’s funny,” Blaine said.