Married But Available

by B. Nyamnjoh

  Lilly Loveless smiled her fantasy to life. Sexy and juicy story, she thought.

  Smart girl, Mrs Lovemore acknowledged with mischievous eyes, before passing to her next story.

  “There is this one friend, a renowned playwright that I met, one rainy night, in a hotel lobby during a conference in Nyamandem, where he lectures at one of the universities.”

  “You and conferences,” Lilly Loveless remarked. She resisted the temptation of calling her a frequent flyer academic, about whom Bobinga Iroko was very disparaging in his criticism, saying they were more interested in flying around like cockroaches than in doing research of quality. He said their real value came more from the frequent flyer miles they accumulated than in anything they researched or presented. They were therefore a serious danger to scholars who thought and did otherwise. To mention it would have been to run the risk of sending Mrs Lovemore off another tangent completely, if not angering her to the point of no return.

  “Yes, I seem to strike it lucky at conferences, perhaps because I am far away from home, perhaps because conferences usually are quite boring,” Mrs Lovemore agreed with humour.

  “Someone said luck is when preparation meets opportunity.”

  “I agree. I do prepare thoroughly for my conferences.”

  They both laughed.

  “He beeped me on my cell one evening. I greeted him downstairs with a smile. And we went up from there and travelled to other worlds. Even from between his toes we could get to heaven. Being with him can feel luxurious at times, like being bedded in pink silk sheets and a purple velvet blanket.”

  This sounds over the top, thought Lilly Loveless, without saying a word.

  “And simple, like living on a woven mat and not wanting more, except to digest his words, his all from time to time infinitely. Sometimes it’s like a bubble bath, sometimes a spiritual bath: splendid, splashing, sparkling. When provoked he said my breath tickles the heart of his ears and the ears of his heart.”

  Sounds like Bobinga Iroko, Lilly Loveless told herself, in silence.

  “Being with him is like being on a magic carpet. Other times it’s like being on a playground, taking in the sunshine. Running and jumping from one delight to another. Sharing, smiling, sliding, whirling. Feeling bold enough to play with the sun’s rays, bending them, shaping them, sending them back out. He can put me on the edge of a precipice with his voice, his silence, his look, his touch, his breath, his all. And take me into a suspended state of lost time and space regained. Of holding on and letting go. Absorption. Becoming everything and nothing. His chuckles and laughter bring us back to our physical surroundings. His teasing is sometimes playful, sometimes pointed. He’s serious and light hearted. Sometimes he says we’re getting too serious and need to find substitutes for each other, but then he says only I can deliver like he likes it. Of course these are just his ways to try to keep the relationship salty.”

  How could this be possible? Another Bobinga Iroko in Nyamandem? Lilly Loveless could swear she would say the same thing about Bobinga Iroko, given the opportunity and experience. It was true that nature in its almighty wisdom produces nothing without its spare. Mrs Lovemore had found in distant Nyamandem a Bobinga Iroko look-alike. But why go that far to look for something that was right there under her nose, her husband’s best friend? Perhaps it was precisely because Bobinga Iroko was Dr Wiseman Lovemore’s best friend that Mrs Lovemore had gone looking for him in distant Nyamandem. It was interesting, to say the least, concluded Lilly Loveless, struck by the coincidence.

  “An empty moment for him is not negative or lacking but opportunity. It frees space, for energy and perspectives, new ideas, even identities. He’s a nothing-frozen man. All is fluid, fertile, in motion. Evolving, becoming. Being reconfigured and reconfiguring constantly. I like being part of this constellation. Pebbles and rocks intervene to adorn the path but no boulders yet.”

  Lilly Loveless felt like she was listening to music.

  “He is not married, but he is not available for keeps either. He is too self conscious to fall in love with marriage, but there is a certain humanity in him that makes me sure he is not taking advantage of me when he says he loves me.”

  “Interesting man,” Lilly Loveless commented. “Can I have his address?” she added, jokingly.

  “I can’t trust you with him,” Mrs Lovemore giggled. “For one thing, you are younger, more beautiful and livelier. Your eyes have a certain magic about them. He just might change his mind about marriage.”

  Lilly Loveless couldn’t tell whether she was serious or not, but thought it wise not to continue the line of conversation.

  “We’ve agreed that distance will not disrupt our desire to have coffee together every morning.”

  “So what do you do? Pour coffee down the cell phone?”

  “We make the cell phone our coffee. We SMS and call to synchronise the making of coffee, then sit and chat as we sip.”

  “Wow, really romantic.”

  “Morning cups of coffee have taken on a whole new sensational dimension since we met. Sometimes I yearn to feel a mixture of Robusta and Arabica grinds on my tongue and tickle his neurons as I submit.”

  “You really do know how to turn a man on,” remarked Lilly Loveless.

  Mrs Lovemore smiled, and carried on.

  “He is somewhat other worldly – lives outside convention, inside no box. For example when I offered him a book of poems I brought back from a trip to Muzunguland he refused, saying he does not believe in owning or owing things, even in the form of gifts. He offers me nothing material either. What he does is turn the world upside down and inside out all the time, which I find more gift than any. Whenever I talk with him, I learn something, I see differently. He is destabilizing in a good way. He doesn’t want the false intimacy of cheap friendship. But he says our calls are like a lifeline. I can’t ask for more, can I?”

  “Seems like a most unusual Mimbo man,” remarked Lilly Loveless. Again, she held herself back from mentioning Bobinga Iroko.

  “Our relationship is founded on absolute candour. That has been, and is, more incredible than I could have imagined. Our relationship is as open and honest and straightforward and natural as those I’ve previously experienced only with close female friends. I’ve never been able to say – with absolute honesty – that I would be comfortable with a husband or a boyfriend reading any of my emails, going through my diary, overhearing any of my conversations, knowing all my thoughts and grudges and fantasies and secrets... and I can say that about my playwright friend. I’ve never been happier, and I intend to keep him, even if it doesn’t result in marriage. After all, who wants marriage if all it brings is taking away the happiness I feel with him in our current relationship?”

  After a brief pause, Mrs Lovemore said, “Love comes in cycles as life goes in cycles. Love flows like the breath, like the ocean’s waves. It can’t be intense and coming on all the time. Regularly, it needs to recede, while still being present, to reconfigure, to reenergize, to regain and come on again, with refreshing intensity.”

  “That’s true,” Lilly Loveless agreed, looking out of the window at the rain clouds gathering, but not letting this dampen her enthusiasm. She had refused to let the capricious weather affect the fact that she had found in Puttkamerstown and its environs the perfect fulfilment of her tropical desires.

  “Do you fall out of love as easily as you fall in love?” asked Lilly Loveless.

  “Hmmm,” said Mrs Lovemore, marvelling at the curiosity of this girl. “In my experience, men fall out of lust just as you get deeply enthralled. By now, I recognise the signs and pull back. When the initial attraction fades, I always treasure the essence of the other, even, strange to say, of Dr Wiseman Lovemore.”

  Lilly Loveless pondered how she could say that after all she had recounted. Feeling completely comfortable with Mrs Lovemore, who seemed to have few hang-ups, she asked how she could recognise good sex.

  “Good sex?” murmured Mrs. Lovemore as s
he thought. “For me it is good if it comes back to me, later, in images and feelings. I can feel it all over again, days or weeks, even months or years later, you see.”

  “Really?” asked Lilly Loveless.

  “Yes,” confirmed Mrs. Lovemore. “Positive moments that come back to me, and sometimes provide inspiration during moments of creativity.”

  “Interesting,” said Lilly Loveless. “So you have strong conjuring powers, then?”

  Loveless and Lovemore laughed heartily together.

  “Have you ever related to a man as a friend, without sexual involvement? A platonic relationship, I mean?”

  Mrs Lovemore smiled to herself, as if to say, what does this girl take me for?

  “Yes, of course,” she replied. “Right here at the University of Mimbo. I have a friend, Dr Nosewordy Boiboibambeh, very close, yet very distant, if you know what I mean.”

  The name rang a bell. Could this be the same Dr Nosewordy Boiboibambeh, the colleague who betrayed Dr Wiseman Lovemore? If so, was their friendship meant to take attention away from the alleged relationship between Mrs Lovemore and Dr Simba Spineless the Reg? Not wanting to distract Mrs Lovemore from telling her story, Lilly Loveless decided to keep her curiosity and speculations to herself.

  So Mrs Lovemore continued uninterrupted, “It wasn’t his small office overflowing with papers that attracted me. It was I guess the glint in his eye when he saw me noticing his artwork on his walls. The work spoke to some sensitivity within him. That’s what attracted me. It’s not like I had to see him again. I’d seen so many other people during the course of the day. It just worked out that we saw each other again. At lunch the next day at the University of Mimbo Café, and ever since then, we have been friends.”

  Lilly Loveless nodded to show she was all ears.

  “In his office, when we first met, I learned he was too busy to get to what we were supposed to talk about during the appointment because he had been editing the VC’s speeches. So, when I really needed someone to look over my paper for a seminar we were having the next day, I phoned him. My husband, who hates to see him, had travelled to his home village. So Dr Nosewordy Boiboibambeh stopped by after work and read my paper. Then we talked a little and he said he had to go and I walked him to his car. The next day I phoned him to thank him and shared my compliments that were really for him. Someone had said, ‘Mrs Lovemore, you have improved your cultural theory remarkably since you started working with us a couple of years ago.’ He has an ear for language, Dr Nosewordy Boiboibambeh, and is well grounded in theory. Some people believe that too much brainpower has brought about his early baldness.”

  “Every scholar needs a friend like that,” said Lilly Loveless.

  “And, after that, he willingly accepted to spend an hour or two every other month or so reading and commenting on my papers, and directing my attention to innovative theories. I’m so grateful.

  “Once we attended a conference abroad together on ‘The Future of the African Breast in Literary Studies,’ organized as a twin conference to one on ‘The Political Economy of the Itinerant Penis in African Scholarly Circles,’ in view of establishing convergences and divergences.”

  Lilly Loveless giggled at the thought of a penis at a conference, almost about the only thing seen or felt of its owner, but came short of commenting on the reality of disembedded penises.

  “It was in Zanzibar,” Mrs Lovemore continued, “and we were lodged at a hotel with a beautiful view of the sea and I was desperate for him to have a look at my paper provocatively titled, ‘Bobi Tanap and Bobi Don Fall: Mine are not like yours mom. I’m not 40, I’ve not had kids. Mine are buoyant and bouncy, not like socks drying on the line.’ He said he’d after a session he was chairing. At about 6pm he phoned from his cell to my cell and said he was downstairs. I gave him my room number. He said, ‘No, you come down.’ When I did, before I asked my question, he answered it. ‘I would be too tempted to read you instead of your paper if I went upstairs.’

  “‘Oh,’ I said. I was surprised. And I smiled at that sensitivity that had attracted me to his being somehow, the first time I met him. ‘So let’s go to a café for a drink, or somewhere for dinner.’ And we did. And he did his reading of the paper and made a useful suggestion for me to include a section on breast ironing.”

  “What’s that?” inquired Lilly Loveless.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of breast ironing,” Mrs Lovemore eyed her curiously as if to say, ‘How could someone seriously researching sexuality miss out on that?’ Convinced that Lilly Loveless was not feigning ignorance, she proceeded to explain, “This is a widespread practice in Africa, Mimboland especially, whereby mothers use hot objects to massage the breasts of their daughters to stop them from growing.”

  “Why on earth would a mother do something like that?!” Lilly Loveless was perplexed.

  “It is from fear of unsolicited attention by men, unwanted and especially pre-marital pregnancies, and under-age girls getting carried away by sex. As African mothers say, ‘it is through the breasts that men determine whether or not a girl is ripe.”

  “But that could cause irreparable damage.”

  “I know, which is why I readily accepted to add the section he suggested to my paper, in the hope of drawing attention to this problematic practice.”

  “What else did he say about the paper?”

  “Not much else that I found useful.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If he succeeded in convincing me about breast ironing, I wasn’t going to let him think he could rewrite my entire paper. So I rejected his suggestion to provide for what he termed ‘a more nuanced argument downplaying the significance of global sisterhood as the answer to all ills that women suffer in society.’”

  “He suggested that?”

  “Yes, can you imagine?” said Mrs Lovemore. “‘You certainly cannot reduce all social interaction to a structured dominance of men over women,’ he told me. I also disagreed with his attempt to water down the moral superiority I accorded women over men, convinced as I still am that given their nurturing skills and caring nature, women would always be better leaders, better organisers and better members of institutions.”

  “And what did he have to say for himself?”

  “Of course, he argued, like every man in his position would, but I stood my ground.”

  “And that was it?”

  “There was another point I also shot down, his audacious claim that I was guilty of ‘sexism in reverse’, as my paper was silent on the need to distinguish between ‘male power structures’ and ‘men’. Kind and friendly though he is, Dr Nosewordy Boiboibambeh is little different from Wiseman or any other man for that matter, as even he shares their selfish argument that ‘men do not hold the monopoly over the potential to dominate.’”

  “So what happened when you finished discussing and disagreeing on your paper?”

  “We went back to the hotel afterwards. The taxi dropped us across from the entrance.”

  “Tell me more,” Lilly Loveless requested with enthusiasm in her eyes.

  “I shook his hand and thanked him again and wished him good night, saying I’d like him to attend my presentation. For a split second our eyes caught. His were soft and gushing with sentimentality. He reached for my elbows and started administering the typical Muzungu-inspired three kisses on the cheeks to say good night. And, strangely, there was a fourth kiss on the cheek, and a fifth, and a sixth. ‘OK, one extra round I thought.’ Then there was a seventh and I felt there might be an eighth and a ninth. Three complete rounds, wasn’t that... sufficient? But he continued. I took his elbows and he drew me in closer and we lost count. Back and forth, back and forth, not hurriedly, from one cheek to the other, we went. The night birds looked on. My cheeks burned and the next day they were chapped.”

  What from? His aftershave? Lilly Loveless wondered, but did not interrupt.

  “Our lips never met, never have, and never will,” Mrs Lovemore contin
ued.

  Why never will, Lilly Loveless wondered. Could it be more because of Dr Simba Spineless than because of the lack of spark between Dr Nosewordy Boiboibambeh and Mrs Lovemore?

  “He walked me right up tomy room. On theway he said, ‘Isn’t it nice to have a platonic relationship?’ I think I might have had to look up that word the next day.

  “And we’ve kept it that way, ever since. It’s refreshing, comfortable. We enjoy seeing each other without being bothered by frenetic sexual energy. When we meet at the university, in town or outside of Puttkamerstown, we find time to have a drink, just the two of us, not necessarily to catch up, like you do with a girlfriend, but just to chat, about everything and nothing. I even allow myself a smoke when with him, as he is a chronic smoker.”

  “And Mr Wiseman Lovemore,” ventured Lilly Loveless, “does he ever have platonic relationships with women?”

  Not even blinking at the boldness of the question, Mrs Lovemore responded, “What I know is that Mr Wiseman Lovemore seems to be moving on, from home and the university and Mountain Valley, to Muzunguland.”

  “He’s planning a trip there?” asked Lilly Loveless, surprised.

  “No, I think he’s investigating importation. I found one of those Internet love letters on his desk the other day, and the way he had underlined sections of it tells me he is interested in knowing more about this Elena who is 18 years old, 1.73m tall, weighs 63kg and whose heart is pumping in anticipation of the fire of her life.”