Julie Iromuanya - Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

Family? How had it all begun anyway? This thing with Cheryl. At first he couldn’t recall, then suddenly he remembered that day all those years ago, the derision in Gladys’s laughter. Right then. That’s where it began. Well, I was weak then, he thought. Cheryl took advantage. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the sickening scent of her strawberry shampoo and the cigarettes. Her whiny voice. She never let him be anymore, always calling, always with that hungry sound in her voice, a voice so hungry that it had almost consumed him.

He wouldn’t have even called her if it hadn’t been for Ifi’s accident. Only Cheryl could talk to the police and get Ifi out of trouble. Because she is white, he told himself. Because she is an American. And she knew this. He had been forced to call her. She used it to her advantage, he thought. A conniver, she is. But I will not fall to her again. Never again. “No,” he said with ferocity.

At once, Ifi stood in the doorway, her eyes on him. Water still blasted behind her. He smiled, threw up his hands in feigned exasperation. “Telemarketers,” he said to her. “I am hanging up,” he said to the invisible merchant. “Stop disturbing my family with your calls. Never ever call this number again.”

After he hung up, Job marched past Ifi into the bathroom and turned off the running water faucet. By the time he returned to the living room, he had collected himself.

With the morning news blaring, Job and Ifi ate runny soup together on the couch. He watched her slow swallows, the exhaustion in her eyes, and it occurred to him that she was quite beautiful. In a plain, unencumbered way, her imploring eyes had a way of reviewing the world with calm incredulity. It was magnificent. As he watched her, it was impossible not to make comparisons. Ifi and Cheryl. Ifi’s caramel to Cheryl’s crème. Ifi’s fluffy, dark hair, thinning around the hairline from tight braids, to Cheryl and her flyaway red hair, with slants of gray straining around her pinkish ears. Ifi’s hard, set look; the whiskers around Cheryl’s eyes. Ifi’s slim waist, her lumpy round rump in a towel or a wrapper, like now. Cheryl. .

Ifi was beautiful and soft and hard all at once. Like his mother and his sisters and Gladys, and the first girl he fell for in secondary school, the girl with the gapped front teeth and crooked smile. She was a grown-up version of the Nigerian girls he and his friends taunted as they marched by, their massive backsides rhythmically drumming with each step. She was a Nigerian, like him.

Now she was the mother of his son, his wife. She was beautiful. This must have been what he saw that first time so long ago, the photograph that stood apart from the others. He must have seen it in her, the ability to become a part of him. All these years, he had imagined it as a random shuffling of a deck of cards in a hand, that his eyes should land on hers; that his parents should agree with his choice for her skin color, her shape, and her family name. But it was more. Perhaps his eyes were destined to stop on her picture, to return a second and then a third time, before the decision was made.

Before leaving for the airport, he pulled Ifi to him by the waist. A rush of feelings enveloped him. Is this what it feels like to truly love someone, he thought, like in Hollywood? He kissed her tenderly along the side of her face and told her he loved her. “When I return,” he whispered, “we can start over. We will have other children. This will not be the end of it.”

In ten minutes’ time a cab would arrive.

All of a sudden she clawed at his thighs, his chest, his penis. It excited him. Her eyes were fierce and probing. She forced her tongue into his mouth. This is not her way, he thought. Normally, her kisses were dry, her movements soft. She hissed. He fought to keep up with her tongue’s movements just as he struggled to keep up with the movements of her hips.

A car horn began to honk outside. The cab. I will miss my flight, he thought in panic.

“Biko,” he said. “Not now.” Still he dared not push the bound hands away. “Biko,” he said again and again, suddenly realizing her plan. Holding her damaged hands gently, he pulled away. “You will cause me to miss my plane.” When he pulled his shirt back on, he found the skin of his back and chest shredded from her fingernails.

At last Ifi said, “You will not take my son away.”

“What are you talking about?” Job asked.

“We will bury him here. In America.”

“No,” Job said. “He is a Nigerian.”

“He is an American.”

He should say something about the silly way she filled the boy with hot dogs and pizza, about her insistence on only speaking English to him instead of Igbo, but he didn’t. How could he dignify her claim with a response? None of it mattered anymore. My boy, he will never be a man, Job thought.

In a final stand, Ifi grabbed the squat center table and lunged forward with it. The table met the wall in a heavy thud that widened the hole that was already there. Surrounded by broken glass and papers, a huge, toothless mouth laughed at them.

JOB THOUGHT IT FITTING FOR VICTOR’S REMAINS TO BE FLOWN BACK TO Nigeria and buried in his father’s compound among the ancestors, so that the boy could rest in peace. In his mind, the small boy’s mourning would be fit for a chief. They would mourn the old way. A caravan would follow the boy’s small casket through the village. Ifi would shave her head. Among the female relations of his village and family compound, she would ululate her grief through the night. Under her rigid stiffness, Job would at last witness Ifi’s beating heart.

But these plans existed only in his mind. His wishes had been put to rest when Job woke to find Ifi’s date-stamped bereavement claim denied.

In his foolishness, he still hoped right up until the last minute that Ifi would arrive at the airport, that all would go as it should, but the funeral was nothing like his dreams. His old father and his youngest sister arrived at the Port Harcourt International Airport to pick him up. The rainy season had just ended. The air was dry. Soon, the dusty Harmattan winds would start. But he would be gone by then. Although his father leaned heavily against a cane, he looked well. His youngest sister Jenny’s lips and fingernails were glossy with red paint. When she hugged him, he could feel the sharpness of her nails against the frayed skin of his back. She ordered around the driver, an ashy-faced boy of sixteen.

After collecting all of Job’s suitcases, the driver motioned to the one remaining, the black leather briefcase containing Job’s stethoscope. “Docta?” the boy asked. “Me, I de take?” Although it was not a question, his voice rose at the end. After all, he was nothing but a houseboy dressed in a driver’s cap. He would also wash their linens and underpants, iron them too. The family had fallen that low. No more grand parties. No more visits from important diplomats. Just enough from Job’s monthly remittance to furnish the house and pay for a catch-all houseboy.

As always, Job forgot to respond. It was the first time that Job felt the weight of his lie.

“Docta?” the boy asked again as he reached out.

Job recoiled, hugging the briefcase to his body, thinking of Victor’s life slipping away from him, thinking of the voices of the men who called him doctor that night. “No, no need.”

Before heading to Abba, they spent the day in Port Harcourt making the last preparations for the funeral. His mother, sisters, and the housegirls filled the kitchen, preparing food for the feast that would follow the service. In a sad way, it was a joyous occasion, a reminder of the bygone wealth that had furnished Job’s trip to America to begin with.