Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

by Julie Iromuanya

  The truck slid down the embankment toward Job. As he scrambled away from it, all he could hear was the grumble of the engine, the traction of the tires on the dirt. This is a joke, he told himself again. Still laughing, a laughter like a rattle, bound up in his nerves and fear, Job blindly crawled and backpedaled.

  “I knew, my friend,” Emeka shouted out the window. “From the beginning, I had a feeling,” he sang, pushing the tires through the dirt. “Me, I was okay with it. My wife needed a son.” He paused. “But now, I am not okay with it.”

  A deafening blare of the horn cut the calm night air. Job clamped his hands over his ears until the blare stopped. He could see nothing but the glare of the lights. “You’re talking silly. Too much to drink,” he called back. He remembered that day with Gladys. Just one time. It only happened one time. It was a mistake, he thought. “What are you saying?” he called to Emeka. “You are drunk.”

  “I had a feeling.” Drunk with laughter, drunk with pain, Emeka sang in his beautiful, husky voice.

  The truck skidded.

  Out of breath. Nothing but plains for miles. Job’s heart ached. He had nowhere to hide. No trees. No brush. No scrubs. Nothing. Surrounded by fence posts and wire, Job was in a pen of sorts, and the headlights of Emeka’s truck formed the barrel of a cocked pistol. Bile filled his throat as he thought of that goat and the three shots it had taken to extinguish its life. He chuckled. Will I die such a pitiful death today? Soon he was falling to his knees, laughing and choking and spewing the bile from his mouth. The bile of Emeka, and Gladys, and Cheryl, and Samuel, and America, and Mr. Doctor.

  His face was shiny and slick with his tears, because suddenly, all he could think of were the good things, like Victor crashing his Big Wheel into walls, and his father clasping his shoulder in pride, and Ifi. And the curl of her lips in a smile, and the way she moved her hips to Fela. And his breath. And because of this, he wept and gasped for air. Because of this, he thought of that house and decided that Emeka was right. Whatever makes her happy. And because of this, a sudden sense of gratitude overwhelmed him. Samuel, Emeka, America—all of it had brought him to Ifi, and that was all that mattered.

  Emeka blared the horn and revved the engine.

  The truck lurched forward but suddenly jammed in the embankment.

  As Job watched in astonishment, Emeka put the truck in reverse, then forward, rocking it, but the tires only dug deeper. Finally, he laughed out the window at Job. “You are right, my friend. I am silly and drunk, no?” Emeka’s wheels spun. “Come, my friend. Let us stop playing our games. Help me free my vehicle.” As he stepped out of the SUV, he laughed again, but the laughter was without the vigor of pain. “Come, my man. We are both Igbos.” Emeka shrugged and reached out his hand.

  Job hesitated. Black sky wavered under the glare of the lights. He gazed up and down the long stretch of empty highway. He felt gratitude. I am alive, he thought. Ifi is alive. He took the hand and warily shook off the dirt that had gathered around his good slacks, his tie, and his good shirt. They worked together, rocking the truck with their backs and teeth and sweat, until it was free. All the while, Emeka’s beautiful voice sang, “Zombie o, zombie.”

  CHAPTER 21

  JOB HELD OUT A DAMP, CRUMPLED BOUQUET OF FLOWERS. “FOR YOU.” His dark suit was covered in dirt and twigs. Scrapes stained his anxious smile. He smelled strongly of liquor.

  Ifi snatched the flowers from him, looking anxiously about the room at the burgundy curtains that ended with a simple golden tassel, just the flourish a low-budget motel lobby could furnish. “Why are you here?” She looked again, but the front desk was still empty. The night manager had stepped away, and Ifi could breathe for just a moment. “You must go before someone sees you.”

  “We need to talk,” Job said. He hesitated. “I want to talk.”

  Having stepped away from his desk for just a moment, the night manager, an elderly man with a slight limp, returned. He considered the two. “Hello, sir,” he said. “Ifi.” His eyes fell on the flowers in her hand.

  Ifi quickly threw the flowers on the one round table propped in front of the chairs. “He is going.”

  “We must talk,” Job said.

  “What are you thinking, coming here?” she asked as she made her way to the sliding glass doors. “You need to go.”

  Job’s brows furrowed, but he didn’t follow. Without taking his eyes off her, he strode past Ifi to the night manager, slipped a credit card across the counter, and booked a room for the night. He swiveled his whole body to face her, his lips a tease, a sad tilt to his eyes. “I am a paying customer. I have as much right to be here as you.” Only once did he break her gaze to look at the manager. “Is that not right?”

  “Looks like your fellow got you there.” The night manager chuckled and smiled encouragingly at Ifi and then Job.

  Room 123. Ifi snatched the keys from Job and pushed past him up the worn carpeted floors to the room. She couldn’t risk any further disgrace. It was the farthest room on the floor. Once inside, she pushed the door shut behind her. Her heart raced, and she experienced, for the first time, something like a plea. This is all I have left, she thought. The motel. The steady paycheck. There was no home, no family, nothing to return to. So this must do. This must do until she could sort it all. “You cannot come here,” she said. “This is my workplace.”

  “Ndo, sorry. I did not come for trouble. I beg of you, listen to me.” Job took out a slip of paper from his pocket. He cleared his throat.

  Before he could read from it, Ifi snatched the letter. She read the first line to herself. I have come to ask for your hand in marriage. She crumpled it into a ball and threw it as hard as she could at the wastebasket in the rear of the room. She made it. “Ngwa, go.”

  “I have come,” he said anyway, “to say the things I should have said when I met you.”

  He stepped toward her, but all she could smell was the liquor. It angered her. “This is not Nigeria,” she said, remembering the fancy Presidential Hotel honeymoon suite. She recalled the elegant walls, the stylish drapery. Now, as she looked around the room, she could just make out the yellowed stains on the sheets that she would replace at the end of her shift, the frayed edges of the landscape portraits on each wall. How far they had fallen. “This is not Nigeria. And we are not young.”

  “I have come to tell you about my life in America,” he began. “In plain English. And if you are happy with my life in America, then come and be my wife.”

  “I do not care about your life in America.”

  Instead of the lies he courted her with, he began to speak the truth. “I live a simple life in America. I am not a big doctor. I am not a big man. I am not a big man, but I will care for you.” His voice faltered. “I am not a big man. I am a humble man, but I will buy you a fur coat to keep you warm in winter. I will paint your walls, I will buy you a big-screen TV, and I will buy you your first home.”

  Ifi swallowed. Yes, she recalled the paint on the walls and in his hair on the snowy day of her arrival. She remembered the fur coat of false pines. She remembered the big-screen TV with the crooked line splitting the rainy pictures. With a shiver, she even thought of the house. But it only angered her. In a way, he had usurped all of her dreams. An elegant coat, a large TV, a beautiful home. These were the things she had always hoped for. But Job had taken her dreams hostage and ransomed her future. “You lied,” she said.

  “Biko,” please, he said softly. “If you wanted a doctor, I would be a doctor. If you wanted a home, I would build you a home. If you wanted a family,” his eyes rested on hers, “I would build you a family.”

  Ifi tried to hold on to the anger, but tears swelled behind her lids. She closed her eyes and turned away. If she looked at Job, she would see Victor, and she could not have Victor clouding her judgment.

  “Ifi, darling, anything you want I will do for you whatever way I know how. Is that not true?”

  It is true, she thought. Like the wilted clump of twigs and pe
tals that were waiting for Ifi on the table in the lobby, these were his attempts at romance. She glanced uncomfortably at her uniform, at the look of her name stitched on the right pocket, at the slacks that were a little too tight at her hips and the too-long linen shirt, ironed into creases. She allowed her mind to fall away. All she could think was that before her shift ended, she would need to return to this very room to replace the damp, yellowing sheets with bleach-scented ones. She would need to fold triangles into the toilet paper roll and empty the waste receptacle of that single sheet of lined notebook paper with his words.

  “Whatever you like. I will build your new dreams for you,” Job said. “I will always do for you the best way I know how.”

  Ifi took a deep breath. “What happened?” she asked. Finally, she asked the question that had been on her mind since he stood in the glass doors, his suit covered in dirt and twigs.

  Job looked up with a start. He knew that she was not only asking about tonight, she was asking about it all. She was asking about their beginning. She was asking about their middle. She was asking about their ending.

  “Job,” she said softly. “What happened to us? I was once a girl who wanted to be a doctor’s nurse. I wanted to open a clinic in Nigeria for my mother’s memory. That was all I wanted. But instead, I am here cleaning sheets and emptying rubbish. Will this be the rest of my life?” Ifi thought back to that first night and all of its possibility and hope as Job, her new husband, stood before her in a white lab coat, a stethoscope protruding from his pocket. Everything but the darkness of his skin had been muted by the whiteness of the snow as it came down around his world. In those moments, the snow had been beautiful, magical, and she had believed anything was possible. When did this feeling leave us? she wondered.

  Job had been in America so long; why had he gone on pretending without going after his dreams? Now, more than ever, Ifi understood the need for lies, for the embellishments that cemented the difficulties of each day together. But why hadn’t he gone after his dream anyway, in secret at least? Why weren’t there journals, like her interior design magazines, something to show for his hopes?

  And then she understood. It came quietly as she followed the line of his slacks, perfectly creased in spite of the smudges and dirt. “Was there not something you wanted?” she asked.

  “I wanted to be a—”

  “You did not want to be a doctor,” Ifi said. “No more lies.” She met his eyes, finding their momentary confusion. “Your father sent you to America to become his doctor. You did not fail, Job.”

  He bristled. He frowned and backed away slowly.

  “You did not become a doctor because it was not your dream.” Ifi came toward him and clasped his hands.

  He stilled.

  As she said the words, she felt the weight of their certainty and the gentle touch of his pain. “Job, I was not your dream. You must not go on pretending.” Tears soaked her lashes. “You were not my dream. You were Aunty’s dream, and so I married you. And so I followed you to America. And then I had a boy, and I wanted him to be an American. And now he is gone. And now there is nothing left to build new dreams with.” Her voice was a whisper. “So I must find my way back to my old dreams.” Job’s hand trembled in hers, but she couldn’t stop herself. “And you must find your way to yours.”

  CHAPTER 22

  THROUGH THE TINY GAPS IN THE DRAPES OF ROOM 123, JOB OGBONNAYA could make out the edge of a flaming orange sun just appearing from behind the purple haze of dawn. He rolled over, instinctively feeling the other side of the bed, now suddenly cold and empty, a rumpled mass of sheets. He took a second to inhale the scent of Avon’s Chantilly Lace in the pillows and sighed deeply, allowing the vapor to rise through his body.

  A tiny shuffling and a click sounded, drawing his attention to the door. For a moment, he thought it would be Ifi. He begged for it to be her. If it was her, like their first night together in the Presidential Hotel, he’d find out what she needed and he’d be it. That was all he had ever wanted, wasn’t it?

  Through the nearsighted blur of his eyes, he could just make out a lone figure stooped in the doorway. Job slipped his plastic-framed glasses over his eyes. The door suddenly swung open, filling the room with remnants of the hot night air and a dangerous sun just beginning to crest.

  She paused in the doorway, her shiny blond wig sparkling against the light. The red lipstick, wet and dripping like watermelon, that had been so captivating the night before now smudged across her face, the weariness of a long night showing as she adjusted the collar of her jacket. She gave him a dubious expression and began to shrug her shoulders, but midshrug she seemed to change her mind before lunging for the day.

  “Wait.” Job leaned forward, searching through tangles of sheets for his trousers. “I have more. Just wait.”

  She rolled her eyes in exasperation. But she remained standing.

  He couldn’t be alone. Not now. “More beer is in the fridge.” He pointed to the stackable refrigerator in the corner of the room, already surrounded by a ring of smashed cans. He gave her a smile that he thought looked innocent enough, as if she were just a friend dropping over for a beer. “Help yourself.”

  For a second, she seemed to think it over. “Listen, I gotta go,” her mangled attempt at a Swedish accent forgotten. “I got places to be.”

  “I know, just wait.” His fingers snagged one of the belt loops in his trousers as he burrowed his hands into the pockets. He finally came up with a wad of cash, extracted from the ATM when their night began. He waved it at her now, suddenly relieved.

  She rolled her eyes again, but with less vigor as she swung the door shut behind her and sat on the edge of the bed.

  Job smiled, a crooked smile laced with an overdue buzz—the buzz he had been unable to commit himself to after all of those beers. He pulled himself close to her. He gazed into her eyes, remembering the warmth of her skin and the smell of her perfume, the scent of a woman.

  He stood up and pulled the tiny chain around the lightbulb, allowing the artificial light to spew over the two of them, the scattered orange deflected by dying flies. Her blond hair, although a wig, was suddenly captivating once more as the strings of synthetic hair caught the light. She was overweight, with flat, saddlebag breasts and varicose veins that shone like purple webs through her ghostly skin. Not at all the twenty-two that the whiskey had convinced Job and Emeka of just the night before. Yet under the orange glow, she was sultry and exotic. He struggled to remind himself of the Swedish girl who had stared down into his face at the bar as she danced, as Emeka introduced them to her one after another, two professional men, an engineer and a doctor, two professionals getting into a little trouble for the night. Job’s lips formed into an uneasy smile. He struggled to remember her face as she handed him her number. Him. The doctor, a man she could respect. A man she could admire. A man she could love and believe in. He smiled again, the smile one gives a patient. “You know,” he said, “the triple bypass surgery is a very complex procedure.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to my family for their continued faith in me, especially my mother, who helped me write my first query letter to a publisher at age eight and provided me a steady supply of typewriters each time one ran out of ink.

  I would not have completed this book without the encouragement and feedback of the faculty at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, especially Jonis Agee, the late Gerald Shapiro, Judith Slater, Amelia Montes, and Margaret Jacobs. Thank you to Tim O’Brien and my friends in his 2008 residency, whose initial questions urged me to continue writing beyond the first chapter. Thank you to David Mura and the folks in the VONA/Voices Workshop for their community. A warm thanks to Susan Hubbard, whose character sketch assignment led to the earliest incarnation of Job Ogbonnaya over a decade ago.

  A big thanks to the estates of Louise VanSickle, Wilbur and Elizabeth Gaffney, the University of Nebraska Office of Graduate Studies and the Presidential Fellowship committee, the faculty and s
taff at the University of Dayton, and the esteemed Herbert Woodward Martin, for whom the Herbert W. Martin Postgraduate fellowship is named. Your generous support enabled me to steal away the hours to write.

  And a very special thanks to Anitra Budd and Lisa Kopel, who always believed in the vision of the book and whose insights were invaluable.

  Excerpts have appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Tampa Review, and Passages North.

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