Chimamanda Adichie - Americanah

HE ASKED if he could take her to lunch and she suggested a new casual place she had heard of, where she ordered a chicken sandwich and then complained about the man smoking in the corner. “How very American, complaining about smoke,” Obinze said, and she could not tell whether he meant it as a rebuke or not.

“The sandwich comes with chips?” Ifemelu asked the waiter.

“Yes, madam.”

“Do you have real potatoes?”

“Madam?”

“Are your potatoes the frozen imported ones, or do you cut and fry your potatoes?”

The waiter looked offended. “It is the imported frozen ones.”

As the waiter walked away, Ifemelu said, “Those frozen things taste horrible.”

“He can’t believe you’re actually asking for real potatoes,” Obinze said drily. “Real potatoes are backward for him. Remember this is our newly middle-class world. We haven’t completed the first cycle of prosperity, before going back to the beginning again, to drink milk from the cow’s udder.”

Each time he dropped her off, he kissed her on the cheek, both of them leaning toward each other, and then pulling back so that she could say “Bye” and climb out of his car. On the fifth day, as he drove into her compound, she asked, “Do you have condoms in your pocket?”

He said nothing for a while. “No, I don’t have condoms in my pocket.”

“Well, I bought a pack some days ago.”

“Ifem, why are you saying this?”

“You’re married with a child and we are hot for each other. Who are we kidding with this chaste dating business? So we might as well get it over with.”

“You are hiding behind sarcasm,” he said.

“Oh, how very lofty of you.” She was angry. It was barely a week since she first saw him but already she was angry, furious that he would drop her off and go home to his other life, his real life, and that she could not visualize the details of that life, did not know what kind of bed he slept in, what kind of plate he ate from. She had, since she began to gaze at her past, imagined a relationship with him, but only in faded images and faint lines. Now, faced with the reality of him, and of the silver ring on his finger, she was frightened of becoming used to him, of drowning. Or perhaps she was already drowned, and her fear came from that knowledge.

“Why didn’t you call me when you came back?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I wanted to settle down first.”

“I hoped I would help you settle down.”

She said nothing.

“Are you still with Blaine?”

“What does it matter, married man, you?” she said, with an irony that sounded far too caustic; she wanted to be cool, distant, in control.

“Can I come in for a bit? To talk?”

“No, I need to do some research for the blog.”

“Please, Ifem.”

She sighed. “Okay.”

In her flat, he sat on the couch while she sat on her armchair, as far from him as possible. She had a sudden bilious terror about whatever it was he was going to say, which she did not want to hear, and so she said, wildly, “Zemaye wants to write a tongue-in-cheek guide for men who want to cheat. She said her boyfriend was unreachable the other day and when he finally turned up, he told her that his phone had fallen into water. She said it’s the oldest story in the book, phone fell into water. I thought that was funny. I’ve never heard that before. So number one on her guide is never say your phone fell into water.”

“This doesn’t feel like cheating to me,” he said quietly.

“Does your wife know you’re here?” She was taunting him. “I wonder how many men say that when they cheat, that it doesn’t feel like cheating. I mean, would they actually ever say that it felt like cheating?”

He got up, his movements deliberate, and at first she thought he was coming closer to her, or perhaps wanted the toilet, but he walked to the front door, opened it, and left. She stared at the door. She sat still for a long time, and then she got up and paced, unable to focus, wondering whether to call him, debating with herself. She decided not to call him; she resented his behavior, his silence, his pretense. When her doorbell rang minutes later, a part of her was reluctant to open the door.

She let him in. They sat side by side on her couch.

“I’m sorry I left like that,” he said. “I just haven’t been myself since you came back and I didn’t like the way you talked as if what we have is common. It isn’t. And I think you know that. I think you were saying that to hurt me but mostly because you feel confused. I know it must be difficult for you, how we’ve seen each other and talked about so much but still avoided so much.”

“You’re speaking in code,” she said.

He looked stressed, tight-jawed, and she longed to kiss him. It was true that he was intelligent and sure of himself, but there was an innocence about him, too, a confidence without ego, a throwback to another time and place, which she found endearing.

“I haven’t said anything because sometimes I am just so happy being with you that I don’t want to spoil it,” he said. “And also because I want to have something to say first, before I say anything.”

“I touch myself thinking of you,” she said.

He stared at her, thrown slightly off balance.

“We’re not single people who are courting, Ceiling,” she said. “We can’t deny the attraction between us and maybe we should have a conversation about that.”

“You know this isn’t about sex,” he said. “This has never been about sex.”

“I know,” she said, and took his hand. There was, between them, a weightless, seamless desire. She leaned in and kissed him, and at first he was slow in his response, and then he was pulling up her blouse, pushing down her bra cups to free her breasts. She remembered clearly the firmness of his embrace, and yet there was, also, a newness to their union; their bodies remembered and did not remember. She touched the scar on his chest, remembering it again. She had always thought the expression “making love” a little maudlin; “having sex” felt truer and “fucking” was more arousing, but lying next to him afterwards, both of them smiling, sometimes laughing, her body suffused with peace, she thought how apt it was, that expression “making love.” There was an awakening even in her nails, in those parts of her body that had always been numb. She wanted to tell him, “There is no week that passed that I did not think of you.” But was that true? Of course there were weeks during which he was folded under layers of her life, but it felt true.

She propped herself up and said, “I always saw the ceiling with other men.”

He smiled a long, slow smile. “You know what I have felt for so long? As if I was waiting to be happy.”

He got up to go to the bathroom. She found it so attractive, his shortness, his solid firm shortness. She saw, in his shortness, a groundedness; he could weather anything, he would not easily be swayed. He came back and she said she was hungry and he found oranges in her fridge, and peeled them, and they ate the oranges, sitting up next to each other, and then they lay entwined, naked, in a full circle of completeness, and she fell asleep and did not know when he left. She woke up to a dark, overcast rainy morning. Her phone was ringing. It was Obinze.

“How are you?” he asked.

“Groggy. Not sure what happened yesterday. Did you seduce me?”

“I’m glad your door has a dead bolt. I would have hated to wake you up to lock the door.”

“So you did seduce me.”

He laughed. “Can I come to you?”

She liked the way he said “Can I come to you?”