“Let’s go to Paris tomorrow!” he said one weekend. “I know it’s totally unoriginal but you’ve never been and I love that I get to show you Paris!”
“I just can’t get up and go to Paris. I have a Nigerian passport. I need to apply for a visa, with bank statements and health insurance and all sorts of proof that I won’t stay and become a burden to Europe.”
“Yeah, I forgot about that. Okay, we’ll go next weekend. We’ll get the visa stuff done this week. I’ll get a copy of my bank statement tomorrow.”
“Curtis,” she said, a little sternly, to make him be reasonable, but standing there looking down at the city from so high up, she was already caught in the whirl of his excitement. He was upbeat, relentlessly so, in a way that only an American of his kind could be, and there was an infantile quality to this that she found admirable and repulsive. One day, they took a walk on South Street, because she had never seen what he told her was the best part of Philadelphia, and he slipped his hand into hers as they wandered past tattoo parlors and groups of boys with pink hair. Near Condom Kingdom, he ducked into a tiny tarot shop, pulling her along. A woman in a black veil told them, “I see light and long-term happiness ahead for you two,” and Curt said, “So do we!” and gave her an extra ten dollars. Later, when his ebullience became a temptation to Ifemelu, an unrelieved sunniness that made her want to strike at it, to crush it, this would be one of her best memories of Curt, as he was in the tarot shop on South Street on a day filled with the promise of summer: so handsome, so happy, a true believer. He believed in good omens and positive thoughts and happy endings to films, a trouble-free belief, because he had not considered them deeply before choosing to believe; he just simply believed.
CHAPTER 19
Curt’s mother had a bloodless elegance, her hair shiny, her complexion well-preserved, her tasteful and expensive clothes made to look tasteful and expensive; she seemed like the kind of wealthy person who did not tip well. Curt called her “Mother,” which had a certain formality, an archaic ring. On Sundays, they had brunch with her. Ifemelu enjoyed the Sunday ritual of those meals in the ornate hotel dining room, full of nicely dressed people, silver-haired couples with their grandchildren, middle-aged women with brooches pinned on their lapels. The only other black person was a stiffly dressed waiter. She ate fluffy eggs and thinly sliced salmon and crescents of fresh melon, watching Curt and his mother, both blindingly golden-haired. Curt talked, while his mother listened, rapt. She adored her son—the child born late in life when she wasn’t sure she could still have children, the charmer, the one whose manipulations she always gave in to. He was her adventurer who would bring back exotic species—he had dated a Japanese girl, a Venezuelan girl—but would, with time, settle down properly. She would tolerate anybody he liked, but she felt no obligation for affection.
“I’m Republican, our whole family is. We are very anti-welfare but we did very much support civil rights. I just want you to know the kind of Republicans we are,” she told Ifemelu when they first met, as though it was the most important thing to get out of the way.
“And would you like to know what kind of Republican I am?” Ifemelu asked.
His mother first looked surprised, and then her face stretched into a tight smile. “You’re funny,” she said.
Once, his mother told Ifemelu, “Your lashes are pretty,” abrupt, unexpected words, and then sipped her Bellini, as though she had not heard Ifemelu’s surprised “Thank you.”
On the drive back to Baltimore, Ifemelu said, “Lashes? She must have really tried hard to find something to compliment!”
Curt laughed. “Laura says my mother doesn’t like beautiful women.”
ONE WEEKEND, Morgan visited.
Kimberly and Don wanted to take the children to Florida, but Morgan refused to go. So Curt asked her to spend the weekend in Baltimore. He planned a boating trip, and Ifemelu thought he should have some time alone with Morgan. “You’re not coming, Ifemelu?” Morgan asked, looking deflated. “I thought we were all going together.” The word “together” said with more animation than Ifemelu had ever heard from Morgan. “Of course I’m coming,” she said. As she put on mascara and lip gloss, Morgan watched.
“Come here, Morg,” she said, and she ran the lip gloss over Morgan’s lips. “Smack your lips. Good. Now why are you so pretty, Miss Morgan?” Morgan laughed. On the pier, Ifemelu and Curt walked along, each holding Morgan’s hand, Morgan happy to have her hands held, and Ifemelu thought, as she sometimes fleetingly did, of being married to Curt, their life engraved in comfort, he getting along with her family and friends and she with his, except for his mother. They joked about marriage. Since she first told him about bride price ceremonies, that Igbo people did them before the wine-carrying and church wedding, he joked about going to Nigeria to pay her bride price, arriving at her ancestral home, sitting with her father and uncles, and insisting he get her for free. And she joked, in return, about walking down the aisle in a church in Virginia, to the tune of “Here Comes the Bride,” while his relatives stared in horror and asked one another, in whispers, why the help was wearing the bride’s dress.
THEY WERE CURLED UP on the couch, she reading a novel, he watching sports. She found it endearing, how absorbed he was in his games, eyes small and still in concentration. During commercial breaks, she teased him: Why did American football have no inherent logic, just overweight men jumping on top of one another? And why did baseball players spend so much time spitting and then making sudden incomprehensible runs? He laughed and tried to explain, yet again, the meaning of home runs and touchdowns, but she was uninterested, because understanding meant she could no longer tease him, and so she glanced back at her novel, ready to tease him again at the next break.
The couch was soft. Her skin was glowing. At school, she took extra credits and raised her GPA. Outside the tall living room windows, the Inner Harbor spread out below, water gleaming and lights twinkling. A sense of contentment overwhelmed her. That was what Curt had given her, this gift of contentment, of ease. How quickly she had become used to their life, her passport filled with visa stamps, the solicitousness of flight attendants in first-class cabins, the feathery bed linen in the hotels they stayed in and the little things she hoarded: jars of preserves from the breakfast tray, little vials of conditioner, woven slippers, even face towels if they were especially soft. She had slipped out of her old skin. She almost liked winter, the glittering coat of frosted ice on the tops of cars, the lush warmth of the cashmere sweaters Curt bought her. In stores, he did not look first at the prices of things. He bought her groceries and textbooks, sent her gift certificates for department stores, took her shopping himself. He asked her to give up babysitting; they could spend more time together if she didn’t have to work every day. But she refused. “I have to have a job,” she said.
She saved money, sent more home. She wanted her parents to move to a new flat. There had been an armed robbery in the block of flats next to theirs.
“Something bigger in a better neighborhood,” she said.
“We are okay here,” her mother said. “It is not too bad. They built a new gate in the street and banned okadas after six p.m., so it is safe.”
“A gate?”
“Yes, near the kiosk.”
“Which kiosk?”
“You don’t remember the kiosk?” her mother asked. Ifemelu paused. A sepia tone to her memories. She could not remember the kiosk.
Her father had, finally, found a job, as the deputy director of human resources in one of the new banks. He bought a mobile phone. He bought new tires for her mother’s car. Slowly, he was easing back into his monologues about Nigeria.
“One could not describe Obasanjo as a good man, but it must be conceded that he has done some good things in the country; there is a flourishing spirit of entrepreneurship,” he said.
It felt strange to call them directly, to hear her father’s “Hello?” after the second ring, and when he heard her voice, he raised his, almost shouting, as he always did with international calls. Her mother liked to take the phone out to the verandah, to make sure the neighbors overheard: “Ifem, how is the weather in America?”
Her mother asked breezy questions and accepted breezy replies. “Everything is going well?” and Ifemelu had no choice but to say yes. Her father remembered classes she’d mentioned, and asked about specifics. She chose her words, careful not to say anything about Curt. It was easier not to tell them about Curt.
“What are your employment prospects?” her father asked. Her graduation was approaching, her student visa expiring.
“I have been assigned to a career counselor, and I’m meeting her next week,” she said.
“All graduating students have a counselor assigned to them?”
“Yes.”
Her father made a sound, of admiring respect. “America is an organized place, and job opportunities are rife there.”
“Yes. They have placed many students in good jobs,” Ifemelu said. It was untrue, but it was what her father expected to hear. The career services office, an airless space, piles of files sitting forlornly on desks, was known to be full of counselors who reviewed résumés and asked you to change the font or format and gave you outdated contact information for people who never called you back. The first time Ifemelu went there, her counselor, Ruth, a caramel-skinned African-American woman, asked, “What do you really want to do?”