Julie Iromuanya - Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

“I tell you, Ifi. You see this? You see this? Watch this woman and learn how to become a queen of Africa and America.”

“Now, if my wife is the queen, I am assuming that makes me the king, no?” Emeka chimed in. Gladys nodded in approval. “And that, my friend, must make you — the man of humor tonight — court jester.” He laughed uproariously, and his daughters, linked together at the end of the table, smearing their fries with ketchup, joined in, the rush of their voices like that of bleating sheep. “Daddy, then we are princesses!”

Job smiled uneasily, and Ifi struggled once again to grasp the intent of Emeka’s humor. The image of a bumbling court jackal, remembered from books she’d read as a child, filled her mind, and she was immediately shamed. Why hadn’t Job said a word in his own defense? “I have not heard of a doctor who is a fool,” she said.

“No, no, of course not. Me, I am only teasing.” Emeka paused. “Though not everything is as it seems.”

Ifi frowned. Perhaps she had misunderstood. But once again she caught a shared glance between Gladys and Emeka. “What is it you mean by court fool then?”

Gladys lifted her face away, smothering a haughty chuckle. “Don’t mind him. My husband, he suffers me, oh.”

“Yes, listen to my wife,” Emeka said curtly. “Don’t mind me at all.”

Job chuckled. “Ifi, dear, I warned you about this one, did I not? Don’t find trouble with him.”

“Find trouble?” Why was he defending Emeka? Ifi wondered what it was that Job liked about these people, particularly Gladys; unfortunately, Job went on to explain.

“Do you remember the first time I met you?” He nodded at Gladys, who was carefully trimming away the fat surrounding her overcooked cut of steak. “When I first came to this country, Nigerians were few. Only Sundays playing soccer — football — did I meet the other Nigerians. Among them was this toothpick of a man with a fufu pregnancy.” He gestured toward Emeka’s protruding belly, and Ifi had no trouble imagining him nearly twenty years earlier. “We were playing one evening and we collided. Well, I am strong and younger, so I rose first, and when I looked, my friend was still asleep on the ground. All the women surrounded him, you know, and among the women was a tall, beautiful queen.” He paused. “As soon as this woman touched his face, his eyes opened,” Job continued, softly. “You see, he had been faking the entire time.”

Emeka gave a winsome smile. “Yes, and imagine, my friend, if you had not been in such a rush to show your strength, perhaps Gladys would have come to your aid.”

Ifi frowned as her gaze caught Gladys’s deliberate chuckle.

“Yes, it is strange. I saw her first,” Job admitted. “I saw her that day, sitting with her legs crossed on the far bench with a book propped in front of her, pretending not to pay any attention to foolish men pretending to be boys.”

Emeka smiled and pinched Gladys’s side. She feigned protest, hastily slapping his fingers away. Their daughters’ eyes lit up as they watched him. In spite of her irritation, Ifi felt a flash of tenderness. Were there any words to describe what she had witnessed other than love? She turned to Job, whose face was shiny with butter sauce. Emeka and Gladys were one and the same, but she and Job were cut from two different cloths.

“Yes,” Job ceded, “perhaps things would be different.”

In a way, his life in America was smaller than Ifi’s at home. There were no cousins or neighbors, no festivals or celebrations, no hawkers in the streets or church services blaring from megaphones. The streets were silent, and only occasionally did Ifi hear music buzzing from passing cars. His only friends, Emeka and Gladys — he had mentioned no others — and his hours at the hospital collided with the visions in Ifi’s imagination. She had pictured dinner parties with diplomats, doctors, and American businessmen, not eating in the shadow of Gladys’s arrogant laughter and Emeka’s churlish remarks. She had imagined a house with a white fence, jeweled chandeliers, marble floors — the house that the first dinner had confirmed belonged to Gladys and Emeka.

Nonetheless, over the next few months, Ifi would endure many tedious dinners, where Job and Emeka mocked one another for their boyish amusement as she and Gladys coldly sipped from the tops of their glasses of imported beer. They would invariably return to Divine Davinci’s, Applebee’s, and various other restaurants, flanked by Gladys’s daughters and the shrill squawk of their voices as they fought over their menus.

But that first night, as Ifi and Job prepared for bed, they did not know what awaited them. From the darkened corner of the room, where he was awake, Job imagined Ifi’s movements mimicking his on the night of their honeymoon, but in reverse. Rather than putting the jewelry and makeup on, she was removing the dangling baubles from her ears, neck, and wrist with ease. She wiped the makeup away with a damp washcloth. Rather than shining with beads of sweat running down the creases of her face, the flesh along her face, arms, and neck rippled with shivers. While Job had stripped slowly and clumsily on the night of their honeymoon, Ifi now undressed with economic precision, knowing how the surfaces of her body, its valleys and crags, responded to the dress; there was no battle with bra straps.

On both sides of the closed door, they were painfully embarrassed by the screaming silence. While Ifi urinated, she ran water in the sink. Job listened for the drunken sounds of the meatpackers on the other side of the fairgrounds, baying at the moon. Then, for several seconds, they lay in the dark, afraid to move, afraid to repeat the mistakes of their first night alone.

Although they completed the task, they got it all wrong by taking opposite approaches. Unlike that first night, Job was gentle, almost cautious. He fumbled through a kiss, pressing his tongue into the back of her throat. But Ifi choked him between her thighs. Her movements were furious, forced. His fingers were ensnared in her weave. Her eyes remained fixed in concentration through each thrust.

He even said to her, “I love you” and “You are beautiful.” Because right then, even more than on the night of their honeymoon, he believed it. In the silence, she should have replied. But what could she say? “Thank you.”

After, she flipped over. Because the bed was so large, or the room was so small, Ifi landed with her face inches from the wall.

Job was pleased that she enjoyed it; he was surprised that he did not.

One thought had troubled Ifi since dinner: the moment when he had paused and said that things could have been different, had he only risen first. Surprisingly, she had no difficulty reversing the images: Job alongside Gladys — one boastful remark after another — and Ifi alongside Emeka, with his mean-spirited humor. Still, she couldn’t see herself haughtily chuckling after his boorish humor like the “classical” Gladys. In spite of his simpler ways, Job was sincere; Emeka was a cunning schemer. Imagine the kind of man who could con a woman into loving him. Perhaps, in this way, Gladys and Emeka made the perfect pair. At least whatever Ifi needed to know of Job was direct. But what of his feelings for me? she thought. Ifi couldn’t help but ask, “So, you would be the one married to Gladys had you risen first?”

Job’s voice entered the dark. “Don’t mind Emeka. He is silly. I married you.”

His last words stayed with her— I married you. In spite of this, they slept with their backs pressed together. Ifi, with her naked arms wrapped around her head as if to protect herself from a fall; Ifi, with the silent picture of Gladys and her fur and her girls and her husband. All that was real.