“I remember now that I once saw you on the shuttle. I knew you were African but I thought you might be from Ghana. You looked too gentle to be Nigerian.”
Chinedu laughed. “Who says I am gentle?” He mockingly puffed out his chest, his mouth full of rice. Udenna would have pointed out Chinedu’s forehead and said that one did not need to hear Chinedu’s accent to know that he was the sort of person who had gone to a community secondary school in his village and learned English by reading a dictionary in candlelight, because one could tell right away from his lumpy and vein-scarred forehead. It was what Udenna had said about the Nigerian student at Wharton whose friendship he consistently snubbed, whose e-mails he never replied to. The student, with his giveaway forehead and bush ways, simply did not make the cut. Make the cut. Udenna often used that expression and she at first thought it puerile but had begun, in the last year, to use it herself.
“Is the stew too peppery?” she asked, noticing how slowly Chinedu was eating.
“It’s fine. I’m used to eating pepper. I grew up in Lagos.”
“I never liked hot food until I met Udenna. I’m not even sure I like it now.”
“But you still cook with it.”
She did not like his saying that and she did not like that his face was closed, his expression unreadable, as he glanced at her and then back at his plate. She said, “Well, I guess I’m used to it now.”
“Can you check for the latest news?”
She pressed a key on her laptop, refreshed a Web page. All Killed in Nigeria Plane Crash. The government had confirmed that all one hundred and seventeen people aboard the airplane were dead.
“No survivors,” she said.
“Father, take control,” Chinedu said, exhaling loudly. He came and sat beside her to read from her laptop, their bodies close, the smell of her peppery stew on his breath. There were more photographs from the crash site. Ukamaka stared at one of shirtless men carrying a piece of metal that looked like the twisted frame of a bed; she could not imagine what part of the plane it could possibly have been.
“There is too much iniquity in our country,” Chinedu said, getting up. “Too much corruption. Too many things that we have to pray about.”
“Are you saying the crash was a punishment from God?”
“A punishment and a wake-up call.” Chinedu was eating the last of his rice. She found it distracting when he scraped the spoon against his teeth.
“I used to go to church every day when I was a teenager, morning Mass at six. I did it by myself, my family was a Sunday-Sunday family,” she said. “Then one day I just stopped going.”
“Everybody has a crisis of faith. It’s normal.”
“It wasn’t a crisis of faith. Church suddenly became like Father Christmas, something that you never question when you are a child but when you become an adult you realize that the man in that Father Christmas costume is actually your neighbor from down the street.”
Chinedu shrugged, as though he did not have much patience for this decadence, this ambivalence of hers. “Is the rice finished?”
“There’s more.” She took his plate to warm up some more rice and stew. When she handed it to him, she said, “I don’t know what I would have done if Udenna had died. I don’t even know what I would have felt.”
“You just have to be grateful to God.”
She walked to the window and adjusted the blinds. It was newly autumn. Outside, she could see the trees that lined Lawrence Drive, their foliage a mix of green and copper.
“Udenna never said ‘I love you’ to me because he thought it was a cliché. Once I told him I was sorry he felt bad about something and he started shouting and said I should not use an expression like ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’ because it was unoriginal. He used to make me feel that nothing I said was witty enough or sarcastic enough or smart enough. He was always struggling to be different, even when it didn’t matter. It was as if he was performing his life instead of living his life.”
Chinedu said nothing. He took full mouthfuls; sometimes he used a finger as a wedge to nudge more rice onto his spoon.
“He knew I loved being here, but he was always telling me how Princeton was a boring school, and that it was out of touch. If he thought I was too happy about something that did not have to do with him, he always found a way to put it down. How can you love somebody and yet want to manage the amount of happiness that person is allowed?”
Chinedu nodded; he both understood her and sided with her, she could tell. In the following days, days now cool enough for her knee-length leather boots, days in which she took the shuttle to campus, researched her dissertation at the library, met with her advisor, taught her undergraduate composition class, or met with students asking for permission to hand in assignments late, she would return to her apartment in the late evening and wait for Chinedu to visit so she could offer him rice or pizza or spaghetti. So she could talk about Udenna. She told Chinedu things she could not or did not want to tell Father Patrick. She liked that Chinedu said little, looking as if he was not only listening to her but also thinking about what she was saying. Once she thought idly of starting an affair with him, of indulging in the classic rebound, but there was a refreshingly asexual quality to him, something about him that made her feel that she did not have to pat some powder under her eyes to hide her dark circles.
—
Her apartment building was full of other foreigners. She and Udenna used to joke that it was the uncertainty of the foreigners’ new surroundings that had congealed into the indifference they showed to one another. They did not say hello in the hallways or elevators, nor did they meet one another’s eyes during the five-minute ride on the campus shuttle, these intellectual stars from Kenya and China and Russia, these graduate students and fellows who would go on to lead and heal and reinvent the world. And so it surprised her that as she and Chinedu walked to the parking lot, he would wave to somebody, say hi to another. He told her about the Japanese post-doc fellow who sometimes gave him a ride to the mall, the German doctoral student whose two-year-old daughter called him Chindle.
“Do you know them from your program?” she asked, and then added, “What program are you in?”
He had once said something about chemistry, and she assumed he was doing a doctorate in chemistry. It had to be why she never saw him on campus; the science labs were so far off and so alien.
“No. I met them when I came here.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Not long. Since spring.”
“When I first came to Princeton, I wasn’t sure I wanted to live in a house only for grad students and fellows, but I kind of like it now. The first time Udenna visited me, he said this square building was so ugly and charmless. Were you in graduate housing before?”
“No.” Chinedu paused and looked away. “I knew I had to make the effort to make friends in this building. How else will I get to the grocery store and to church? Thank God you have a car,” he said.
She liked that he had said “Thank God you have a car,” because it was a statement about friendship, about doing things together in the long term, about having somebody who would listen to her talk about Udenna.
On Sundays, she drove Chinedu to his Pentecostal church in Lawrenceville before going to the Catholic church on Nassau Street, and when she picked him up after service, they went grocery shopping at McCaffrey’s. She noticed how few groceries he bought and how carefully he scoured the sale flyers that Udenna had always ignored.
When she stopped at Wild Oats, where she and Udenna had bought organic vegetables, Chinedu shook his head in wonder because he did not understand why anybody would pay more money for the same vegetables just because they had been grown without chemicals. He was examining the grains displayed in large plastic dispensers while she selected broccoli and put it in a bag.
“Chemical-free this. Chemical-free that. People are wasting money for nothing. Aren’t the medicines they take to stay alive chemica
ls, too?”
“You know it’s not the same thing, Chinedu.”
“I don’t see the difference.”
Ukamaka laughed. “It doesn’t really matter to me either way, but Udenna always wanted us to buy organic fruits and vegetables. I think he had read somewhere that it was what somebody like him was supposed to buy.”
Chinedu looked at her with that unreadable closed expression again. Was he judging her? Trying to make up his mind about something he thought of her?
She said, as she opened the trunk to put in the grocery bag, “I’m starving. Should we get a sandwich somewhere?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“It’s my treat. Or do you prefer Chinese?”
“I’m fasting,” he said quietly.
“Oh.” As a teenager, she, too, had fasted, drinking only water from morning until evening for a whole week, asking God to help her get the best result in the Senior Secondary School exam. She got the third-best result.
“No wonder you didn’t eat any rice yesterday,” she said. “Will you sit with me while I eat then?”
“Sure.”
“Do you fast often, or is this a special prayer you are doing? Or is it too personal for me to ask?”
“It is too personal for you to ask,” Chinedu said with a mocking solemnity.
She took down the car windows as she backed out of Wild Oats, stopping to let two jacketless women walk past, their jeans tight, their blond hair blown sideways by the wind. It was a strangely warm day for late autumn.
“Fall sometimes reminds me of harmattan,” Chinedu said.
“I know,” Ukamaka said. “I love harmattan. I think it’s because of Christmas. I love the dryness and dust of Christmas. Udenna and I went back together for Christmas last year and he spent New Year’s Day with my family in Nimo and my uncle kept questioning him: ‘Young man, when will you bring your family to come and knock on our door? What are you studying in school?’ ” Ukamaka mimicked a gruff voice and Chinedu laughed.
“Have you gone home to visit since you left?” Ukamaka asked, and as soon as she did, she wished she had not. Of course he would not have been able to afford a ticket home to visit.
“No.” His tone was flat.
“I was planning to move back after graduate school and work with an NGO in Lagos, but Udenna wanted to go into politics, so I started planning to live in Abuja instead. Will you move back when you finish here? I can imagine the loads of money you’ll make at one of those oil companies in the Niger Delta, with your chemistry doctorate.” She knew she was speaking too fast, babbling, really, trying to make up for the discomfort she had felt earlier.
“I don’t know.” Chinedu shrugged. “Can I change the radio station?”
“Of course.” She sensed his mood shift in the way he kept his eyes focused on the window after he changed the radio from NPR to an FM station with loud music.
“I think I’ll get your favorite, sushi, instead of a sandwich,” she said, her tone teasing. She had once asked if he liked sushi and he had said, “God forbid. I am an African man. I eat only cooked food.” She added, “You really should try sushi sometime. How can you live in Princeton and not eat sashimi?”
He barely smiled. She drove slowly to the sandwich place, over-nodding to the music from the radio to show that she was enjoying it as he seemed to be.
“I’ll just pick up the sandwich,” she said, and he said he would wait in the car. The garlic flavors from the foil-wrapped chicken sandwich filled the car when she got back in.
“Your phone rang,” Chinedu said.
She picked up her cell phone, lodged by the shift, and looked at it. Rachel, a friend from her department, perhaps calling to find out if she wanted to go to the talk on morality and the novel at East Pyne the next day.
“I can’t believe Udenna hasn’t called me,” she said, and started the car. He had sent an e-mail to thank her for her concern while he was in Nigeria. He had removed her from his Instant Messenger buddy list so that she could no longer know when he was online. And he had not called.
“Maybe it’s best for him not to call,” Chinedu said. “So you can move on.”
“It’s not that simple,” she said, slightly annoyed, because she wanted Udenna to call, because the photo was still up on her bookcase, because Chinedu sounded as if he alone knew what was best for her. She waited until they were back at their apartment building and Chinedu had taken his bags up to his apartment and come back down before she said, “You know, it really isn’t as simple as you think it is. You don’t know what it is to love an asshole.”
“I do.”
She looked at him, wearing the same clothes he had worn the afternoon he first knocked on her door: a pair of jeans and an old sweatshirt with a saggy neckline, PRINCETON printed on the front in orange.
“You’ve never said anything about it,” she said.
“You’ve never asked.”
She placed her sandwich on a plate and sat down at the tiny dining table. “I didn’t know there was anything to ask. I thought you would just tell me.”
Chinedu said nothing.
“So tell me. Tell me about this love. Was it here or back home?”
“Back home. I was with him for almost two years.”
The moment was quiet. She picked up a napkin and realized that she had known intuitively, perhaps from the very beginning, but she said, because she thought he expected her to show surprise, “Oh, you’re gay.”
“Somebody once told me that I am the straightest gay person she knew, and I hated myself for liking that.” He was smiling; he looked relieved.
“So tell me about this love.”
The man’s name was Abidemi. Something about the way Chinedu said his name, Abidemi, made her think of gently pressing on a sore muscle, the kind of self-inflicted ache that is satisfying.
He spoke slowly, revising details that she thought made no difference—was it on a Wednesday or Thursday that Abidemi had taken him to a private gay club where they shook hands with a former head of state?—and she thought that this was a story he had not told often in its entirety, perhaps had never told. He talked as she finished her sandwich and sat beside him on the couch and she felt oddly nostalgic about the details of Abidemi: he drank Guinness stout, he sent his driver to buy roast plantains from the roadside hawkers, he went to House on the Rock Pentecostal church, he liked the Lebanese kibbe at Double Four restaurant, he played polo.
Abidemi was a banker, a Big Man’s son who had gone to university in England, the kind of guy who wore leather belts with elaborate designer logos as buckles. He had been wearing one of those when he came into the Lagos office of the mobile phone company where Chinedu worked in customer service. He had been almost rude, asking if there wasn’t somebody senior he could talk to, but Chinedu did not miss the look they exchanged, the heady thrill he had not felt since his first relationship with a sports prefect in secondary school. Abidemi gave him his card and said, curtly, “Call me.” It was the way Abidemi would run the relationship for the next two years, wanting to know where Chinedu went and what he did, buying him a car without consulting him, so that he was left in the awkward position of explaining to his family and friends how he had suddenly bought a Honda, asking him to come on trips to Calabar and Kaduna with only a day’s notice, sending vicious text messages when Chinedu missed his calls. Still, Chinedu had liked the possessiveness, the vitality of a relationship that consumed them both. Until Abidemi said he was getting married. Her name was Kemi and his parents and hers had known one another a long time. The inevitability of marriage had always been understood between them, unspoken but understood, and perhaps nothing would have changed if Chinedu had not met Kemi, at Abidemi’s parents’ wedding anniversary party. He had not wanted to go to the party—he stayed away from Abidemi’s family events—but Abidemi had insisted, saying he would survive the long evening only if Chinedu was there. Abidemi spoke in a voice lined with what seemed troublingly like laughter when he int
roduced Chinedu to Kemi as “my very good friend.”
“Chinedu drinks much more than I do,” Abidemi had said to Kemi, with her long weave-on and strapless yellow dress. She sat next to Abidemi, reaching out from time to time to brush something off his shirt, to refill his glass, to place a hand on his knee, and all the while her whole body was braced and attuned to his, as though ready to spring up and do whatever it took to please him. “You said I will grow a beer belly, abi?” Abidemi said, his hand on her thigh. “This man will grow one before me, I’m telling you.”
Chinedu had smiled tightly, a tension headache starting, his rage at Abidemi exploding. As Chinedu told Ukamaka this, how the anger of that evening had “scattered his head,” she noticed how tense he had become.
“You wished you hadn’t met his wife,” Ukamaka said.
“No. I wished he had been conflicted.”
“He must have been.”
“He wasn’t. I watched him that day, the way he was with both of us there, drinking stout and making jokes about me to her and about her to me, and I knew he would go to bed and sleep well at night. If we continued, he would come to me and then go home to her and sleep well every night. I wanted him not to sleep well sometimes.”
“And you ended it?”
“He was angry. He did not understand why I would not do what he wanted.”
“How can a person claim to love you and yet want you to do things that suit only them? Udenna was like that.”
Chinedu squeezed the pillow on his lap. “Ukamaka, not everything is about Udenna.”
“I’m just saying that Abidemi sounds a little bit like Udenna. I guess I just don’t understand that kind of love.”
“Maybe it wasn’t love,” Chinedu said, standing up abruptly from the couch. “Udenna did this to you and Udenna did that to you, but why did you let him? Why did you let him? Have you ever considered that it wasn’t love?”
It was so savagely cold, his tone, that for a moment Ukamaka felt frightened, then she felt angry and told him to get out of her apartment.
The Shivering (A Vintage Short) Page 2
