Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

by Julie Iromuanya

  Gladys arrived on time at the Union, a sports bar restaurant on the lower level of the Airport Holiday Inn. Even from a distance, Job was overcome by the tall plaits gathered in a single ponytail, the shapely body, and the soft eyes. Clutching a heavy tote bag, she frantically peered around the empty restaurant until Job stood and waved her over to his corner booth. Gladys was drenched from the rain and shivered as she set down her things. He waited for her to peel off her coat, but she didn’t. After hurriedly greeting him, she remained standing. Only after several moments did she finally take her place at the table.

  Once she was seated, Job asked after Emeka and her daughters.

  “They’re fine,” she said.

  “And what of your eldest?”

  “Fine.”

  “Are they faring well in their studies?”

  “Yes.”

  When she didn’t ask after his own family, he began immediately, telling her his son was holding his head upright. Gladys stiffened at his words, and he quickly shifted the discussion to work. “I am considering developing a practice of my own,” he said calmly. “Many have advised against it, but I think it’s wise at this juncture in my career.” After a moment, he added, “Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes.”

  Again, he waited a moment before continuing. “It is out of the question while my in-law is visiting.”

  “Yes, of course.” Her words were blind.

  Job’s ramble was snuffed into silence.

  A chomping Tchaikovsky erupted in the background, out of place among the large television screens and the shining wraparound bar. Job anxiously looked about the room at the round tables, the harsh lights, the dusty plastic trees bunched together at the center of the room, obscuring the only other couple in the restaurant, two men in dark suits. Both of the men ordered coffee, grits, and eggs. When the waiter stopped at their table, Job began to order the same, but Gladys stopped him. Instead, she waved away Job’s order and asked for two coffees.

  Golden baubles at her wrists clinked with her every motion, and it was the flurry of her movements more than her anxious eyes or her dismissal of his breakfast order that immediately set him on edge. In his anxiety, he told himself that he should place the money on the table and go home. He would arrive only a little later than he usually did, and he would not need to make any excuses about emergencies at the hospital. He would not need to bounce the wailing boy against his knee as Ifi and Aunty quarreled over the best way to reheat the soup that would already be cold.

  Even as the thoughts ran through Job’s mind, he knew that he would not leave. How can I? he thought. He was here with Gladys, giving her the money Emeka had been too proud to ask for on his own. Emeka’s fancy education and expensive salary couldn’t disguise the fact that he was nothing more than a bushman. After all, it was Job’s family that had the good name. What of the fact that Americans don’t understand family name and heritage? Job thought. For the rest of their days, Job would regard Emeka with a scolding look of pity.

  Two piping-hot black coffees arrived, but Gladys did not drink from hers.

  Job sipped from the coffee and grimaced at the taste of stale coffee grounds. He waved and hollered to the waiter. A tall man in head-to-toe black arrived, and Job chastised him for the coffees and ordered two fresh cups. When the cups came, Job sipped, but the coffee was lukewarm, and it had the same stale, earthy taste. Just the same he grunted, split open a packet of sugar, and dumped some crème into the coffee. He grabbed a handful of packets and offered Gladys some, but she refused.

  “I can order again,” he finally said.

  “It’s fine,” she said. Still, she refused to touch her lips to the mug in front of her.

  He hastily ripped a packet of sugar open and dumped it into the cup for her before returning his hand to the money in his pocket.

  “It’s fine,” she said sharply.

  Job jerked in nervousness, and the bills came up with his hand. It was too late to put them away, to offer his deliverance with finesse. Clumsily, he placed the bills on the table between them.

  Her eyes widened in shock, then doubt, and then suddenly something that crystallized into horror. Gladys thrust the money at Job, and the bills rained around him. “What is this, huh? What is this?”

  One of the businessmen at the other table stopped to watch the two. Leaning into the bar, the waiter crossed his arms and stared. Smiling and nodding, Job scrambled to collect the money. Perhaps she was ashamed to receive the money in public. Still, hadn’t she suggested this place?

  He was reminded of that afternoon all those years ago, waiting for Cheryl outside of the county clerk’s office. A weight dropped to the pit of his stomach. In his haste and excitement, he had forgotten about the meeting he had scheduled with Cheryl about the house. If she takes the money now, he decided, I can drive across town and meet Cheryl in time.

  Gladys’s eyes thinned into slits. “You think I am doing this for money?”

  Thinking of Cheryl, Job stiffened, and his own shock curdled to anger. “You should be so proud. For what? For nothing. You are just like Emeka. Take the money. Take it and I will go. Give him the money.”

  “Take your money.” Gladys collected the straps of her tote bag and began to rise. “What do you think I am, eh?”

  “If you don’t need the money, then why have you asked me here? Why are you wasting my time?”

  “This is just time to you,” she said near tears. “Yes, this is all about time.” Even as she stood before him, shaking with her anger and tears, she backed into her seat and remained there, her gaze cast out past Job to the large, dark windows overlooking the hotel’s near-empty parking lot.

  Job collected the bills, stacked them together, and once more placed them on the middle of the table.

  “Take your money,” she said softly. “My son. That is all I want.”

  “Your son?” Job asked.

  “My son.” With an even voice, her eyes rested on him.

  Suddenly, it began to make sense. All the money in the world and all of Emeka’s boasts. All the native doctors in the world could not give Gladys the boy she wanted. Emeka had failed at the largest charge for any man. She wants me to give her a son, it dawned on him. Numbness spread through his limbs. It settled at his lips so that when the first words issued from his tongue, he was forced to repeat himself for Gladys to understand. “Okie,” he said. “Let us go.”

  By the time they made it up the three flights of carpeted stairs, smudging the red floral print with their damp shoes, the weight in Job’s stomach had ballooned up to his chest. As he slipped the plastic key card into the lock, his hands trembled in anticipation. Even before the door snapped open, images of Gladys sprawled on the bed, breasts bobbing, gasping in elation, passed before his eyes.

  Inside the hotel room, the air was still and musty. He flung open the curtains, but it only swathed the room in a rectangle of bleached sunlight. Patches of brightness flickered across the bed and the desk just as the sun began to break through the clouds. Particles of dust rained on Job, and suddenly he felt dirty.

  Standing in the room, staring at the pillows propped on the bed and the still-life paintings on the wall, Job thought of his honeymoon with Ifi. Strange how no matter where he was in the world, a hotel could have the same haunting familiarity. At once he pushed the image of Ifi in her yellow dress on their honeymoon night to the corners of his mind. It took little effort, and this, more than the business at hand, gave him pause.

  “Will you hurry?” Gladys was standing in her undergarments, plain beige cotton panties and a bra that looked dirty under the slanting flurry of sunlit dust. Her clothes were in a heap by the door. He had imagined Gladys to be the kind of woman who would take her clothes off slowly and fold them into neat squares before laying them on a chair. The woman before him, with her clothes tossed about, would surely climb up after they had finished and slip into wrinkled clothes. Not his Gladys.

  Her eyebrows were furrowed. Impatien
tly, she crossed the room in three strides and hastily removed his lab coat for him. By the time he was down to his underwear, Fruit of the Loom briefs, he was overcome with shame. The underwear was tighter than he remembered, and he compensated by sucking in his hairy gut.

  When she began to advance toward him, a determined look on her face, he realized that she had finished undressing him.

  Thrusting his hand out, Job said, “Wait, Ifi—”

  By the time he caught his slip, Gladys’s scowl had deepened into a sneer, sending her penciled eyebrows up in stark arcs.

  “Sorry,” he said respectfully, “you are just too beautiful.”

  No reply. Feeling hot, suddenly exposed in the shaft of light, Job glanced about the room in search of a remedy.

  Without her smile, Gladys was nothing more than a scolding schoolteacher. After a moment, the scowl softened into a tight smirk. “Well?” she asked. “Come now.”

  A tan skirt and plum-colored blouse littered the floral-print carpet. Hose, the shed skin of a snake, was bunched up and tossed to a corner. I can’t, he thought to himself. Not with her clothes piled in a corner on the floor. Not like this. What kind of woman comports herself in such a way? He couldn’t cast away the image that would follow, of Gladys picking up the wrinkled clothes like a used carton of cigarettes.

  Job stepped out of the light, and as he folded the clothes, he remembered the night of his honeymoon. He reflected on Ifi’s face, the warmth that suddenly radiated as she had laughed at his body bulging through her yellow dress. Hadn’t it eased her anxiety? At just that moment, Ifi’s fierce expression had fallen away, and she was the easy-to-laugh girl that his in-laws had assured him of during the arrangements.

  At first, the look of interest on Gladys’s face inspired Job as he pulled on each article—the blouse, then the skirt, then finally, seductively, the stockings. Stockings were a mystery to him. Once on, they itched and were too snug in the crotch. His sweat and leg hair were trapped in the tiny punctures of the porous fibers. Tiny glittering buckles, like frog eyes, stared at him from the floor. Job slipped into the shoes. His feet dangled over the backs, and his large toes struggled to peep through the opening at the front. There was no makeup bag, no articles of jewelry, just Gladys standing before him in her faded panties.

  Like Ifi’s had, Gladys’s furrowed expression divided into a smile. Staggering for a moment, laughter bellowed from her chest, a deep, cavernous laugh that Job had never heard from Gladys. Strange how the wrong man could do that to a woman, keep the real laughter bottled up inside until the right man came along with the proper key. His mother had always said so. Now, Job was certain that he had unlocked such a place in Gladys. A twist there, a bend there; he smiled and did his dance.

  How marvelous! he thought, the way her eyes opened up, the way the laughter spilled from her body, rippling up through her ribs and her large breasts to her beautiful, full lips until the laughter was magnified—but Job began to realize that the look on her face was not one of pleasure, but derision. Now her lips were giant, her teeth too large, her eyes too open.

  Once he discovered his mistake, Job stopped immediately. But it was too late.

  “No, no, don’t stop!” she said through her laughter.

  But he couldn’t continue. Hastily, he struggled to peel off each article.

  “Is this what makes it work?” Gladys asked. “I have seen everything in America.”

  How could he explain himself? Suddenly, and with ferocity, he hated her. More than Emeka. More than Samuel. With his eyes turned away from her face, what he saw was the loose, dented skin of her thighs. Discolored scars stretched across her stomach. Pimples beaded her back. Clouds of acne peppered her shoulders.

  “Well?” she asked. “Come now.”

  When it was all over, Job apologized as he caught his breath. “We can do it again,” he said. “I need just five minutes.” But by the time he had flipped over onto his back, Gladys was already half dressed and heading for the door.

  “That was good enough.”

  Alone. A chill found him. The sheets were damp with his sweat and fluids. Wisps of smoke clouded the sun outside, but as the clouds split, he saw them for what they were: the skyward sandhill cranes.

  What would I say differently if I could do the morning all over again? he wondered. Standing naked in the hotel shower, his stomach suddenly and insistently growled. Well, for one, I would not have allowed her to cancel my breakfast order, he decided. That was the beginning of a bad ending. He would have forced Gladys to eat breakfast like a civilized person. He would have scolded the waiter for serving them that rubbish that he called coffee. I would have.

  As the water washed over him, rinsing the crusting semen and dust from his legs, Job remembered his meeting with Cheryl. By now she was surely heading home. By now she was shredding her housing documents.

  It is just the same, he decided. Emeka. He could hear his voice: “Ah-ah, A-mer-eeka. Job, my friend, me, I would not enter into any other agreement with a quack-quack. The woman has already made you a fool.”

  Fool. Meeting Gladys instead of Cheryl had been foolish. Gladys, like Emeka, had planned from the beginning to compete with Job. Hadn’t she said that it was they who had taught him to walk when he came to America? Job shuddered at the thought. Well, he would do exactly the opposite of what Emeka would advise. Job would be strong and forceful with Cheryl. Things would be done his way. In time, he would own a home, raise his son, and send him to the best schools, better than anything that Gladys and Emeka could offer their own children. Job remembered that day, sitting in the police station. Even then, the realization had begun to form: His own dreams no longer mattered to him. Nor did the money he had been saving all these years to return to school. I have been foolish, he thought. For too long. Now, he silently insisted: My son will be the doctor instead of me. My daughter will be the nurse instead of Ifi.

  Outside, the house was tall and willowy. Inside, it smelled of used cigarettes. A faint blue glow leaked from behind a closed door. A large, ragged hole stained the wall. Every space was filled with furniture, large plush couches and old wooden tables. The dining room table was piled with fashion magazines and books. On the chairs around the table lay broken computer parts and clothes. He sat stiffly on one of the plush couches and fingered the magazines on the table, careful to set each Cosmopolitan and Glamour magazine back exactly the way it was. He did not want to be labeled a thief in a white man’s house. Then he corrected himself: This is my house.

  All the arrangements had been made under the table. He’d handed over the one thousand dollars he had meant for Gladys to secure the late payment. Only a few final steps remained. It was quite simple. Job’s name already appeared on the title alongside Cheryl’s, so there would be no legal trappings to deal with. As soon as he withdrew the money from the savings account and made the payments, the danger of foreclosure would no longer be imminent. Cheryl wouldn’t even be in the picture anymore, renting from a friend in a nearby neighborhood. It had already been handled. Her only request was for her name to remain on the title. It’s only fair, she had said. I put so much into the place. It’s my daddy’s house and all. Together, when Job and Cheryl sold the house sometime in the distant future, when Job was ready to send his son to medical school or return to Nigeria and retire, she would have had enough time to raise the money. Then she would simply buy back his portion of the mortgage. Like an amicable divorce, she had said. People do it this way all the time. There was just one final step. Monday morning, Job would withdraw every cent from the savings account and make the mortgage payment. Once that was done, all foreclosure proceedings could come to an end.

  Of course Job felt some uncertainty. Will this woman crook me again? he asked himself. But something told Job to believe her this time. He knew how desperately Cheryl wanted to hold on to this house, this legacy of her father’s. After all, it was her desperation that had forced her hand in their arranged marriage. In a strange way, Job understo
od the feeling. It was the same pang that forced him to collect his father’s tuition money and keep it stored in his saving’s bond, despite his meager life.

  Not to mention that he would finally be a homeowner. All through the discussion with Cheryl, Job had flushed with scorn, picturing Gladys’s derisive laughter. Sitting in his new house, he pushed the hurt out of himself. Everything Gladys and Emeka owned and more would be his. His son would go to the best schools and befriend wealthy, successful, apple-cheeked Americans who lived in cul-de-sacs. It all began with this house.

  Underneath the piles of magazines, he noticed a book: Lonely Planet: Nigeria. He thumbed through the pages, recognizing the names of towns and monuments. There was a brief explanation of the Igbo, the Yoruba, the Hausa, and the Fulani. Someone had underlined passages and made notes. He pulled the book close to his nose. In astonishment, he read a question that someone had penned: Is he Yoruba or Igbo?

  Just then, Cheryl returned to the room, her hands full with two mugs of coffee. At the sight of him thumbing through her book, her pale complexion colored. He couldn’t help but smile. She wants to know about me, he thought. There were things that no one knew about him. All of his years of being acquainted with Gladys, and she knew so little about him. Sharing a bed and a home with Ifi had at first convinced him that she knew him inside and out. Now, he realized that it just wasn’t true. Cheryl, on the other hand, had the wherewithal to wonder about him. He felt the pride a man should.

  One of the cups flipped sideways and spilled on the book. In a wild panic, she rushed to blot out the coffee with her faded blue shirttail. “It’s not even mine,” she moaned. “How am I going to take it back to the library?”