“I wanted you to come around before you start on Monday so I can welcome you personally,” Aunty Onenu said.
“Thank you.” Ifemelu thought the home visit unprofessional and odd, but this was a small magazine, and this was Nigeria, where boundaries were blurred, where work blended into life, and bosses were called Mummy. Besides, she already imagined taking over the running of Zoe, turning it into a vibrant, relevant companion for Nigerian women, and—who knew—perhaps one day buying out Aunty Onenu. And she would not welcome new recruits in her home.
“You are a pretty girl,” Aunty Onenu said, nodding, as though being pretty were needed for the job and she had worried that Ifemelu might not be. “I liked how you sounded on the phone. I am sure with you on board our circulation will soon surpass Glass. You know we are a much younger publication but already catching up to them!”
A steward in white, a grave, elderly man, emerged to ask what they would drink.
“Aunty Onenu, I’ve been reading back issues of both Glass and Zoe, and I have some ideas about what we can do differently,” Ifemelu said, after the steward left to get their orange juice.
“You are a real American! Ready to get to work, a no-nonsense person! Very good. First of all, tell me how you think we compare to Glass?”
Ifemelu had thought both magazines vapid, but Glass was better edited, the page colors did not bleed as badly as they did in Zoe, and it was more visible in traffic; whenever Ranyinudo’s car slowed, there was a hawker pressing a copy of Glass against her window. But because she could already see Aunty Onenu’s obsession with the competition, so nakedly personal, she said, “It’s about the same, but I think we can do better. We need to cut down the profile interviews and do just one a month and profile a woman who has actually achieved something real on her own. We need more personal columns, and we should introduce a rotating guest column, and do more health and money, have a stronger online presence, and stop lifting foreign magazine pieces. Most of your readers can’t go into the market and buy broccoli because we don’t have it in Nigeria, so why does this month’s Zoe have a recipe for cream of broccoli soup?”
“Yes, yes,” Aunty Onenu said, slowly. She seemed astonished. Then, as though recov
ering herself, she said, “Very good. We’ll discuss all this on Monday.”
In the car, Ranyinudo said, “Talking to your new boss like that, ha! If you had not come from America, she would have fired you immediately.”
“I wonder what the story is between her and the Glass publisher.”
“I read in one of the tabloids that they hate each other. I am sure it is man trouble, what else? Women, eh! I think Aunty Onenu started Zoe just to compete with Glass. As far as I’m concerned, she’s not a publisher, she’s just a rich woman who decided to start a magazine, and tomorrow she might close it and start a spa.”
“And what an ugly house,” Ifemelu said. It was monstrous, with two alabaster angels guarding the gate, and a dome-shaped fountain sputtering in the front yard.
“Ugly kwa? What are you talking about? The house is beautiful!”
“Not to me,” Ifemelu said, and yet she had once found houses like that beautiful. But here she was now, disliking it with the haughty confidence of a person who recognized kitsch.
“Her generator is as big as my flat and it is completely noiseless!” Ranyinudo said. “Did you notice the generator house on the side of the gate?”
Ifemelu had not noticed. And it piqued her. This was what a true Lagosian should have noticed: the generator house, the generator size.
On Kingsway Road, she thought she saw Obinze drive past in a low-slung black Mercedes and she sat up, straining and peering, but, slowed at a traffic jam, she saw that the man looked nothing like him. There were other imagined glimpses of Obinze over the next weeks, people she knew were not him but could have been: the straight-backed figure in a suit walking into Aunty Onenu’s office, the man in the back of a car with tinted windows, his face bent to a phone, the figure behind her in the supermarket line. She even imagined, when she first went to meet her landlord, that she would walk in and discover Obinze sitting there. The estate agent had told her that the landlord preferred expatriate renters. “But he relaxed when I told him you came from America,” he added. The landlord was an elderly man in a brown caftan and matching trousers; he had the weathered skin and wounded air of one who had endured much at the hands of others.
“I do not rent to Igbo people,” he said softly, startling her. Were such things now said so easily? Had they been said so easily and had she merely forgotten? “That is my policy since one Igbo man destroyed my house at Yaba. But you look like a responsible somebody.”
“Yes, I am responsible,” she said, and feigned a simpering smile. The other flats she liked were too expensive. Even though pipes poked out under the kitchen sink and the toilet was lopsided and the bathroom tiles shoddily laid, this was the best she could afford. She liked the airiness of the living room, with its large windows, and the narrow flight of stairs that led to a tiny verandah charmed her, but, most of all, it was in Ikoyi. And she wanted to live in Ikoyi. Growing up, Ikoyi had reeked of gentility, a faraway gentility that she could not touch: the people who lived in Ikoyi had faces free of pimples and drivers designated “the children’s driver.” The first day she saw the flat, she stood on the verandah and looked across at the compound next door, a grand colonial house, now yellowed from decay, the grounds swallowed in foliage, grass and shrubs climbing atop one another. On the roof of the house, a part of which had collapsed and sunk in, she saw a movement, a turquoise splash of feathers. It was a peacock. The estate agent told her that an army officer had lived there during General Abacha’s regime; now the house was tied up in court. And she imagined the people who had lived there fifteen years ago while she, in a little flat on the crowded mainland, longed for their spacious, serene lives.
She wrote the check for two years’ rent. This was why people took bribes and asked for bribes; how else could anyone honestly pay two years’ rent in advance? She planned to fill her verandah with white lilies in clay pots, and decorate her living room in pastels, but first, she had to find an electrician to install air conditioners, a painter to redo the oily walls, and somebody to lay new tiles in the kitchen and bathroom. The estate agent brought a man who did tiles. It took him a week and, when the estate agent called her to say that the work was done, she went eagerly to the flat. In the bathroom, she stared in disbelief. The tile edges were rough, tiny spaces gaping at the corners. One tile had an ugly crack across the middle. It looked like something done by an impatient child.
“What is this nonsense? Look at how rough this is! One tile is broken! This is even worse than the old tiles! How can you be happy with this useless work?” she asked the man.
He shrugged; he clearly thought she was making unnecessary trouble. “I am happy with the work, aunty.”
“You want me to pay you?”
A small smile. “Ah, aunty, but I have finish the work.”
The estate agent intervened. “Don’t worry, ma, he will repair the broken one.”
The tile man looked reluctant. “But I have finish the work. The problem is the tile is breaking very easily. It is the quality of tile.”
“You have finished? You do this rubbish job and say you have finished?” Her anger was growing, her voice rising and hardening. “I will not pay you what we agreed, no way, because you have not done what we agreed.”
The tile man was staring at her, eyes narrowed.
“And if you want trouble, trust me, you will get it,” Ifemelu said. “The first thing I will do is call the commissioner of police and they will lock you up in Alagbon Close!” She was screaming now. “Do you know who I am? You don’t know who I am, that is why you can do this kind of rubbish work for me!”