Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

“Make love to me,” she whispers. “Make love to me, make love to me.” She grabs his smooth head with such force that he gasps, looking up at her face, a pale mask of pure agony, such want and such need that she looks like someone else. He lifts her up easily with one of his arms, sets her down on the bed, and removes her few clothes. She unbuttons his trousers with rushed, famished movements and pushes them down to his knees with her feet. He presses her wrists down with one of his hands, both her arms stretched above her. “Make love to me. Please.”

In a moment he will: piercing body with body, pushing firmly through labia, palm to her mouth (though the moaning is his as he thrusts to her center), the slippery-pink tissue peeling willingly apart. His body will feel foreign at first, somehow larger, too large and too strong, like a thing that can hurt; for the first time he imagines himself, in his lover, as those words that he spoke, as an “African man.” He will start to pull out of her, afraid he is hurting her, afraid of the noises that slip past his palm, but Ling won’t allow it — and, clutching his buttocks, she’ll pull him yet deeper, in, farther, down, down. For now he just kneels there and pauses to see it: Ling’s body in this bedroom that isn’t their own, both their faces distorted by sorrow and longing and overhead lighting and truths newly told, but the forms still familiar to his fingertips, the landscape: bones, breasts, hips, rib, pubis, navel, birthmark, flesh, hair, skin: the woman’s body, a body , nothing sharp-edged or sterile, everything rounded and destructible and soft, and so home.

iii

Taiwo is on her side when he returns from the garden. He thinks she is sleeping and leaves the light off. He sets down his cell phone beside the pink flowers, on the small wooden nightstand, and kicks off his shoes.

“Who was on the phone?” she asks, not turning over. “I could hear you through the window.”

“My assistant,” he says. “We’re doing a show with those paintings you saw, of the Muses, in Greenpoint. A gallery show. They’re not done yet, I know, but I think I might like them. I think you might like them.” He is nervous. He stops.

“They’re incredible, K.”

She rolls over to face him, her cheek on the pillow, her hands just beneath — but he hears something else. Three other words, in her voice, in his head, just a snippet. Her thought among his. He feels his heart swell to have heard what she’s thinking, this briefest transmission, but something. Reception. Three words in silence, in the space between beds, her low voice in his head as he once used to hear. He looks at his sister, or tries, in the darkness. She looks at him back, a sad smile on her lips. They don’t state the obvious: that both have been crying. They look at each other with raw, swollen eyes.

“She’s pretty,” says Taiwo. “Your assistant.”

“I think so.” He hears her breath catch, the small knot in her throat. He remembers this sensation from their early adolescence, so particular a sensation that it has its own smell: teenage lotion, kiwi-strawberry. Jealousy. Or possessiveness. Possessiveness and embarrassment, which she needn’t have felt (for he’d felt the same way, that he was Taiwo’s possession. A thing that belonged to and with her. Box set).

“Do you like her?” asks Taiwo.

“I think so,” says Kehinde.

She rubs her eyes, sleepily. “I always kind of thought.”

The knot comes untangled. She shifts her position and lies on her back with her hands on her ribs. He stays where he is at the edge of the bed, seated upright across from her, too exhausted to move. He closes his eyes for an instant and hears them again, those three words, her low voice, close to his. Almost too close, he thinks. Is he hearing his sister, her thoughts in his head, or just hearing himself? His heart starts to sink, a small dip of a kite. He has waited so long to hear Taiwo again. To hear anything, any thought, much less this thought that he’s longed all these years to believe, dare believe. Was it his raspy voice that he heard and not Taiwo’s? The three words in silence his pardon, not hers? He opens his eyes, starts to ask her the question, but finds that her eyes have slipped shut.

She’s asleep.

He leans in to stare at her, elbows on kneecaps. Her face in the moon is impossibly still. When a thin film of sweat forms above her top lip, in an hour, he rises and wipes it away. He is tired. He sits on the bed by his sister. He smoothes down her dreadlocks, a tangle of snakes. He kisses her hands and he whispers, “Forgive me.” His body too weak from the day, he lies down.

iv

Later, a bit later, an hour before sunrise Taiwo wakes up as one does from a dream, as one does when she’s gone to sleep crying with clothes on; finds Kehinde beside her, his head by her feet. She sits up and looks at him, still in his clothing, his hand by his mouth, by the beard that he’s grown. She stands up very quietly and is heading to the bathroom when, thinking he has spoken, she turns back around. He is snoring. Lips moving. Three words, she thinks, maybe. She comes to the foot of the bed and looks down. His eyes are still bulbous as a child’s after tearshed. She looks at the hand, palm turned up, by his mouth. She touches the scar there, the T , only barely, but his hand shuts, a reflex, and squeezes her thumb. She stands there, not moving, not wanting to wake him. The birds in the garden begin their lament. She thinks it, though it hurts to, though she cannot yet speak it. His fingers relax and she slips out her thumb. She stands there and stares at his face until she sees it, fifteen seconds and not longer. A smile in his sleep.

v

In this way comes morning (death to wan gray, etc.); feeling something is missing, Sadie opens her eyes. Fola is missing, though her scent lies there lightly. The butterflies, too, have abandoned her chest. She feels with some wonder and a touch of suspicion the void in her middle, her shirt damp with sweat. She peers at the alarm by the little framed photo and laughs at the date on the analog clock. Christmas. No chestnuts, no baked beans, no sleigh bells. Pink blossoms, palms, bulbul, an Aspen chalet. She stands up the frame, tries to straighten the photo by tapping. Nothing doing. A terrible shot. But likely the last of the old family photos with all six together, she now understands. With everybody looking in a different direction, her father at the camera, she down at his head, her mother at her tutu, her brother at her mother, the twins at who knows what, all blurry, all there.

Mr. Lamptey sits, silent, at the edge of the garden, his legs wet with dewdrops, his joint dwindling down, with the saffron replaced by a heavy black linen, obscured by the shadow, the more for the black. He has done this since Monday, his three days of mourning: has sat by the wall at the edge of the grass, taking leave before sunrise, unseen by the woman who comes to the kitchen at a quarter past six. She doesn’t come out to the garden, or look; she just stands at the counter and fixes her drink with the frozen expression of grief before sorrow, the soft, pretty features gone hard with her shock. The dog came on Tuesday but found it too doleful and remained on the beach when he set off at dawn. The birds that he found in the fountain on Monday have yet to return, so he mourns on his own.

In a way he has come here to see the soft woman, to bid her “wake up” with his blue-bellied gaze, with the sense that his presence might send her a message, that all is not lost, that she isn’t alone. (In fact it is he who is lonely, uncharacteristically. He misses the man in the sunroom he built. He misses the wave of the napkin, the glasses, the spilling of coffee on trousers, their dance.) He sits with his joint at the back of the garden and puffs with great rue, idly stroking the grass. He wonders if the man ever noticed the plant here, the lush marijuana set back from the pinks? Likely not. He laughs sadly. He closes his eyes and exhales. It is sunrise. It is time to go home.