“Obinze Maduewesi! Long time! Look at you, you haven’t changed!” She was flustered, and the new shrillness in her voice annoyed her. He was looking at her, an open unabashed looking, and she would not hold his gaze. Her fingers were shaking of their own accord, which was bad enough, she did not need to stare into his eyes, both of them standing there, in the hot sun, in the fumes of traffic from Awolowo Road.
“It’s so good to see you, Ifem,” he said. He was calm. She had forgotten what a calm person he was. There was still, in his bearing, a trace of his teenage history: the one who didn’t try too hard, the one the girls wanted and the boys wanted to be.
“You’re bald,” she said.
He laughed and touched his head. “Yes. Mostly by choice.”
He had filled out, from the slight boy of their university days to a fleshier, more muscled man, and perhaps because he had filled out, he seemed shorter than she remembered. In her high heels, she was taller than he was. She had not forgotten, but merely remembered anew, how understated his manner was, his plain dark jeans, his leather slippers, the way he walked into the bookshop with no need to dominate it.
“Let’s sit down,” he said.
The bookshop was dimly cool, its air moody and eclectic, books, CDs, and magazines spread out on low shelves. A man standing near the entrance nodded at them in welcome, while adjusting the large headphones around his head. They sat opposite each other in the tiny café at the back and ordered fruit juice. Obinze put his two phones on the table; they lit up often, ringing in silent mode, and he would glance at them and then away. He worked out, she could tell from the firmness of his chest, across which stretched the double front pockets of his fitted shirt.
“You’ve been back for a while,” he said. He was watching her again, and she remembered how she had often felt as if he could see her mind, knew things about her that she might not consciously know.
“Yes,” she said.
“So what did you come to buy?”
“What?”
“The book you wanted to buy.”
“Actually I just wanted to meet you here. I thought if it turns out that seeing you again is something I’d like to remember, then I want to remember it in Jazzhole.”
“I want to remember it in Jazzhole,” he repeated, smiling as though only she could have come up with that expression. “You haven’t stopped being honest, Ifem. Thank God.”
“I already think I’m going to want to remember this.” Her nervousness was melting away; they had raced past the requisite moments of awkwardness.
“Do you need to be anywhere right now?” he asked. “Can you stay awhile?”
“Yes.”
He switched off both his phones. A rare declaration, in a city like Lagos for a man like him, that she had his absolute attention. “How is Dike? How is Aunty Uju?”
“They’re fine. He’s doing well now. He actually came to visit me here. He only just left.”
The waitress served tall cups of mango-orange juice.
“What has surprised you the most about being back?” he asked.
“Everything, honestly. I started wondering if something was wrong with me.”
“Oh, it’s normal,” he said, and she remembered how he had always been quick to reassure her, to make her feel better. “I was away for a much shorter time, obviously, but I was very surprised when I came back. I kept thinking that things should have waited for me but they hadn’t.”
“I’d forgotten that Lagos is so expensive. I can’t believe how much money the Nigerian wealthy spend.”
“Most of them are thieves or beggars.”
She laughed. “Thieves or beggars.”
“It’s true. And they don’t just spend a lot, they expect to spend a lot. I met this guy the other day, and he was telling me how he started his satellite-dish business about twenty years ago. This was when satellite dishes were still new in the country and so he was bringing in something most people didn’t know about. He put his business plan together, and came up with a good price that would fetch him a good profit. Another friend of his, who was already a businessman and was going to invest in the business, took a look at the price and asked him to double it. Otherwise, he said, the Nigerian wealthy would not buy. He doubled it and it worked.”
“Crazy,” she said. “Maybe it’s always been this way and we didn’t know, because we couldn’t know. It’s as if we are looking at an adult Nigeria that we didn’t know about.”
“Yes.” He liked that she had said “we,” she could tell, and she liked that “we” had slipped so easily out of her.
“It’s such a transactional city,” she said. “Depressingly transactional. Even relationships, they’re all transactional.”
“Some relationships.”
“Yes, some,” she agreed. They were telling each other something that neither could yet articulate. Because she felt the nervousness creeping up her fingers again, she turned to humor. “And there is a certain bombast in the way we speak that I had also forgotten. I started feeling truly at home again when I started being bombastic!”
Obinze laughed. She liked his quiet laugh. “When I came back, I was shocked at how quickly my friends had all become fat, with big beer bellies. I thought: What is happening? Then I realized that they were the new middle class that our democracy created. They had jobs and they could afford to drink a lot more beer and to eat out, and you know eating out for us here is chicken and chips, and so they got fat.”
Ifemelu’s stomach clenched. “Well, if you look carefully you’ll notice it’s not only your friends.”
“Oh, no, Ifem, you’re not fat. You’re being very American about that. What Americans consider fat can just be normal. You need to see my guys to know what I am talking about. Remember Uche Okoye? Even Okwudiba? They can’t even button their shirts now.” Obinze paused. “You put on some weight and it suits you. I maka.”
She felt shy, a pleasant shyness, hearing him say she was beautiful.
“You used to tease me about not having an ass,” she said.
“I take my words back. At the door, I waited for you to go ahead for a reason.”
They laughed and then, laughter tapering off, were silent, smiling at each other in the strangeness of their intimacy. She remembered how, as she got up naked from his mattress on the floor in Nsukka, he would look up and say, “I was going to say shake it but there’s nothing to shake,” and she would playfully kick him in the shin. The clarity of that memory, the sudden stab of longing it brought, left her unsteady.
“But talk of being surprised, Ceiling,” she said. “Look at you. Big man with your Range Rover. Having money must have really changed things.”
“Yes, I guess it has.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “How?”
“People treat you differently. I don’t just mean strangers. Friends too. Even my cousin Nneoma. Suddenly you’re getting all of this sucking-up from people because they think you expect it, all this exaggerated politeness, exaggerated praise, even exaggerated respect that you haven’t earned at all, and it’s so fake and so garish, it’s like a bad overcolored painting, but sometimes you start believing a little bit of it yourself and sometimes you see yourself differently. One day I went to a wedding in my hometown, and the MC was doing a lot of silly praise-singing when I came in and I realized I was walking differently. I didn’t want to walk differently but I was.”
“What, like a swagger?” she teased. “Show me the walk!”
“You’ll have to sing my praises first.” He sipped his drink. “Nigerians can be so obsequious. We are a confident people but we are so obsequious. It’s not difficult for us to be insincere.”
“We have confidence but no dignity.”
“Yes.” He looked at her, recognition in his eyes. “And if you keep getting that overdone sucking-up, it makes you paranoid. You don’t know if anything is honest or true anymore. And then people become paranoid for you, but in a different way. My relatives are always telling me: Be careful where you eat. Even here in Lagos my friends tell me to watch what I eat. Don’t eat in a woman’s house because she’ll put something in your food.”
“And do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Watch what you eat?”
“I wouldn’t in your house.” A pause. He was being openly flirtatious and she was unsure what to say.
“But no,” he continued. “I like to think that if I wanted to eat in somebody’s house, it would be a person who would not think of slipping jazz into my food.”
“It all seems really desperate.”
“One of the things I’ve learned is that everybody in this country has the mentality of scarcity. We imagine that even the things that are not scarce are scarce. And it breeds a kind of desperation in everybody. Even the wealthy.”
“The wealthy like you, that is,” she quipped.
He paused. He often paused before he spoke. She thought this exquisite; it was as though he had such regard for his listener that he wanted his words strung together in the best possible way. “I like to think I don’t have that desperation. I sometimes feel as if the money I have isn’t really mine, as if I’m holding it for someone else for a while. After I bought my property in Dubai—it was my first property outside Nigeria—I felt almost frightened, and when I told Okwudiba how I felt, he said I was crazy and I should stop behaving as if life is one of the novels I read. He was so impressed by what I owned, and I just felt as if my life had become this layer of pretension after pretension and I started to get sentimental about the past. I would think about when I was staying with Okwudiba in his first small flat in Surulere and how we would heat the iron on the stove when NEPA took light. And how his neighbor downstairs used to shout ‘Praise the Lord!’ whenever the light came back and how even for me there was something so beautiful about the light coming back, when it’s out of your control because you don’t have a generator. But it’s a silly sort of romance, because of course I don’t want to go back to that life.”