Married But Available

by B. Nyamnjoh

  Britney switched on the recorder, though not entirely convinced that Lilly Loveless’ heart was in her words. At least the recorder will be listening, she thought, but was reassured when Lilly Loveless perked up at the click of the recorder and picked up her pen expectantly.

  ***

  “I can’t tell you how I got the story,” Britney began, “but there was this couple at the university. They both worked there. They had wanted to get divorced ever since they married. But they stayed together for 20 years. And these were not happy years, starting and ending as they did, with quarrels and the headaches of living together despite yourselves. They had four children and then moved to Muzunguland where he taught African Studies, while she raised their children the Muzungu way. Many a time, their problems were compounded by cultural conflicts. There was for example, the fact that as parents they were not allowed to discipline their children with corporal punishment. In other instances, it was the man who felt cheated of not being able to discipline his wife the way he would ordinarily be able to do back here in Africa, without the police sticking its head through the door to ask silly questions. The wife, in addition to taking care of the children, also had to work in a boutique, selling beautiful imported handicrafts, just to enhance the family income. All the same, she developed a solid clientele, and with the taste that Africans have for higher education, even found the time and resources to do her PhD in education.”

  “I admire her resolve and resilience,” said Lilly Loveless.

  “Meanwhile, her husband went out with one woman after another. She was resentful. But she could not change him. She put up with him and his affairs. He even used the fact that his wife was doing a PhD to boost him, to draw other women to him. She was a source of pride to him. He claimed to read literature and write poetry, yet she said, ‘He doesn’t understand the human spirit and certainly not his, nor mine.’ She said she could write poems more intense by magnitudes than his.

  “She came to realize that some people just have a limited capacity to love and an overwhelming desire to screw up. And he was one of those. He continued to seek love in others and to wrap himself in a multitude of relationships in the hope of finding the love he lacked. Lovely feeling may blanket and keep you warm for a while, but it eventually turns cold, if not underpinned by real love. So when that happened, he would go hunting again. Unquenchable but sterile hunger was the name of his essence. Love on the surface, with nothing to draw it really close, nothing to take it deep, nothing solid on which to grow really strong.”

  Lilly Loveless saw that Britney was using notes to help her remember certain parts of the story.

  “You could see pots rubbing up against each other but no real sharing, blending or merging. No growing together, just rubbing. And with too much rubbing up against each other, two pots could break each other. In a way she pitied him, his cyclic searching, never coming face to face with the real him in him, never knowing what he really sought. Was he always incapable of love? Or had something happened to drain him of love? I suppose you have to have been loved to love…”

  Lilly Loveless looked up from her notebook trying to decipher Britney, to know if she was still telling the woman’s story or adding her own interrogations.

  “Finally she left him. Of course he accused her of the worst things. And all that hurt her. She received a letter in which he had put it all on paper. She cried for weeks. Can you believe she was ready even to go back to him, after all he had done? And this admission boosted him. He bragged about it, that his wife was going to come back to him. He still saw her as an acquisition. He used her submission to draw women to him. She realized, at long last, she couldn’t go down this road anymore. He had pulled her down to a point she could bear no more. She was at the edge of taking her life.

  “She called him, and released words that had been in her heart for years. She told him he was not the kind of man she could love or make love with. She told him how his heart had hardened, and how the light in his eyes had gone.

  “And with the words voiced, she felt better and lighter in her heart. She has since moved back here to Puttkamerstown with their two youngest children, a son and a daughter. She stays in daily contact with the two others who are abroad. Their father doesn’t seem to have even the love of a perfect stranger for them. But what do you expect of someone incapable of love in any form? Her son is right when he told me that there are all kinds of people in the world and we have to accept them and that there are those who love little, play a lot and inspire pain beyond measure. And one of those could be an uncle or a nephew, even a husband, a father, son or daughter. You can’t afford love only for those who deserve to be loved, can you? The world would be too ugly a place to look at, I swear.”

  Britney clicked the recorder off, and Lilly Loveless closed her notebook and put her pen down.

  That was enough for the day.

  They took a taxi back to Puttkamerstown, where they separated. It was Friday afternoon, and Lilly Loveless was keen to call Bobinga Iroko to find out what his plans were for the weekend.

  21

  The motor park was bustling as usual with drivers calling for passengers, boys selling airtime, and women vending all sorts of foodstuff including pineapples, avocado, oranges and sugar cane. Britney and Lilly Loveless negotiated their way through and sat on two high stools at a stand where they could get drinks and observe the goings on, after buying an assortment of fruits. Lilly Loveless added a special microphone to her recorder hoping it would pick up Britney’s voice and not the background symphony of purposeful cacophony by screaming humans and revving engines.

  To test the microphone, Lilly Loveless pressed record and told Britney, “You know you are my right hand woman.”

  “Does that mean you are my left hand man?” replied Britney.

  They both laughed. But inside, Britney felt tense. She was dying to ask Lilly Loveless where she had been all weekend. Britney had tried and failed to reach her by cell phone and, afraid something might have happened to her, had taken a taxi to her place Sunday afternoon. She had banged and banged on the door and concluded that only a sleep of death could account for Lilly Loveless not hearing the banging. She had either gone out or was up to something inside, she had thought as she left Desire’s place where Lilly Loveless stayed. Her worries refused to subside, to the point where she dreamt of confronting Lilly Loveless when she eventually caught up with her:

  ‘Have you abandoned me?’ she asked Lilly Loveless in the dream.

  ‘How can that be? Abandon you? Not even in my most conclusive moments of madness could a thought like that cross my mind.’

  ‘Are you mad sometimes then?’

  ‘Aren't we all?’

  ‘No,’ said Britney. ‘My state of mind does not allow me to be mad or to know about being mad without actually being mad.’

  ‘There is more to life than dialectics... did you know that?’

  ‘I am now getting very mad…’ Unable to resist the urge to know the truth any longer, Britney gave words to her curiosity, “I missed you last weekend. Where did you disappear to?”

  “What do you mean?” replied Lilly Loveless, not looking up. “I was in throughout,” she added, fiddling with the microphone.

  “Really?” Britney tried hard to disguise her skepticism.

  “Yes. All you needed to do was come by.”

  “I see,” said Britney. She wondered if it was Bobinga Iroko or if Lilly Loveless had met someone else to keep her busy all weekend. She felt wounded but tried not to show it. Masking her face with a smile, she turned her attention to the call of the moment.

  ***

  Satisfied with the playback, Britney began, making an effort to sound loud and normal, “Mrs James is a lady with three children. She married James, a businessman in Pawa-Town, purely for cash. The age difference is 28, and they’ve been married for eight years. Mrs James, who hates to be associated with the bush, knows very little about her home village. She tells herself that to keep wi
nning in this day and age, she must keep running away from everything traditional. And the fact that her husband is well to do is an added incentive. It all started when at the age of three, she was told the worst insult anyone could heap on another was to call them ‘villager’. She bleaches like mad, because she grew up in a context where only fair skinned women were visible to the eyes of men.

  “James decided to open a cosmetic store for his wife after six years of performing her role as a housewife. However, apart from ensuring her personal appetite for cosmetics, Mrs James revealed more academic ambitions than in running a store. So her husband decided she could enrol in the university here in Puttkamerstown.

  “She’s been reading social sciences for two years now and the most interesting part is when she goes on research or fieldwork every weekend that she does not go to Pawa-Town. Most often the husband comes stumbling in search of her, just to find a note for him that she has gone on an excursion.”

  “What kind of social science fieldwork excursions?” asked Lilly Loveless. “Drilling expeditions?” she joked.

  “Her husband had the same sort of question in his head,” responded Britney. “So one afternoon the husband created a sensation when he inquired from the whole mini-cité if these research fieldworks really existed. He was told that they did and that each department has its own way of organising them. Some do so during the week, while others with heavy programmes do so during weekends. Mrs James was saved by this favourable reply because she’s very friendly with everybody, and her door is open to anybody who feels hungry, which includes hunger for cosmetics.

  “Meanwhile Mrs James goes on her field trips to visit her young boyfriend who has grown rich overnight from the sale of petrol illegally imported from the neighbouring Kuti Republic.”

  “But,” interrupted Lilly Loveless, “you said Mrs James married Mr James for cash. He opened a cosmetic shop for her. He even agreed to put her through university. So what is she lacking that makes her have a boyfriend?”

  “She’s looking now for a little excitement down the generational ladder,” explained Britney, “someone to appreciate her nice fair complexion, to value it the way she wants to be valued. She wants someone to take her to paradise and shower her with basic pleasures. Dannyboy, the boyfriend, has two taxis and has resigned from his initial business to sell at a boutique he recently opened. Mrs James goes out with Dannyboy only in the night when they can sit and drink together mostly at odd places, where Mrs James cannot be identified by her husband’s friends whom he has instructed to spy on her round the clock.

  “Sometimes they go to Sawang to do some shopping, sightseeing and also to relax, especially when Mrs James complains she’s depressed.”

  “I see,” said Lilly Loveless.

  “Dannyboy scarcely comes to Mrs James’ apartment except on invitation. He knows what risk he is taking and sometimes he declines such an invitation, when he feels danger lurking in the wings. Mrs James is four years older than Dannyboy, and, according to what she says, she would like to divorce Mr James and marry him, if only she had the willpower.”

  “Just like that?” asked Lilly Loveless.

  “I guess, after satisfying her cash flow appetite, she grew weary of her old man of a husband,” said Britney. “Or perhaps the husband is threatening to retire to their home village.”

  “Husbands get traded in so easily?” asked Lilly Loveless.

  “I met Dannyboy by chance,” said Britney, “when I visited his boutique to buy a chain which I never bought because it was too expensive. Mrs James met me there, bought a bottle of Fanta for me and we chatted for a while. Then she rushed back to her apartment because she was expecting her husband. In her absence, Dannyboy wondered how I knew Mrs James. I told him she stays near my mini-cité and we studied together, especially during the exams.

  “Dannyboy told me a story about Mrs James. He said that she had lied to him that she had one child and that she was not married but was keeping a fiancé whose parents had approved of her as their son’s wife. Thus it was left for her parents to confirm the relationship, for the contract to be signed.

  “He also said Mrs James was very money-minded and a born flirt. That he had caught her twice with different men whom she later said were her husband’s business associates. He wondered what she was doing with such persons in a hotel bar at night.”

  “She was into broad fieldwork there,” noted Lilly Loveless.

  “Whatever the case he said he wanted to save his neck by dropping Mrs James because the whole town was already aware of the fact that he is going out with someone’s wife.

  “What’s funny is that once he threatens to end the relationship, she also threatens him with this knowledge. Dannyboy finally left his boutique in the care of his brother and disappeared from sight. The brother claimed he went to the village to carry out some traditional rites because he is his father’s successor.

  “The truth is that Dannyboy’s parents advised him to transfer to Sakersbeach. He couldn’t transfer his boutique but he certainly transferred himself. He is now like an armchair entrepreneur managing the business by phone from afar but intends to come back to Puttkamerstown when the affair dies down.”

  “Mr James started finding his wife at home on weekends. He must have wondered whatever became of research fieldwork,” remarked Lilly Loveless.

  “Just before the first semester of this university year ended, Mrs James was reliably informed that Dannyboy lived in Sakersbeach. Her informant said that she knew the street and area but not the particular home in which Dannyboy was living. And so she described it to Mrs James who took off for Sakersbeach the following day. When Mrs James knocked at the first door to inquire if a certain Dannyboy was staying around, Dannyboy himself opened the door and then they stood shocked, staring at each other.”

  “I sense fireworks,” said Lilly Loveless.

  “Dannyboy invited her in and brought her something to drink. And then explained to her how he was just from the village and wanted to open another boutique in Sakersbeach so that his brother could manage one. That’s why he had transferred to Sakersbeach. He further said that Mrs James had lied to him that she had only a child and was not married. He had risked his life enough because of her. Thus, enough was enough.”

  “That was pretty frank speaking,” commented Lilly Loveless.

  “That led to blows,” said Britney. “Mrs James stood up as if to go, then opened a good fight at Dannyboy’s house that only ended because of assistance from neighbours. She left Dannyboy’s home with a swollen eye, a fractured leg and a headache. When she reached her mini-cité, she summoned every neighbour around and told them that when her husband comes, they should say that a certain girl they don’t know came and attacked her in her room then ran away.

  “She then went to Mount Rebecca Hospital to consult, after which she phoned her husband and told him the framed lie.

  “Mr James was in Puttkamerstown the next day, but Mrs James only told him that the girl had come to her room twice to sell some earrings and dresses, which she carries around selling. Some girls in the mini-cité accepted that they saw her once but nobody could identify her or her name.

  “Mr James advised his wife to change her apartment, but she refused saying she had gotten so used to having her friends around. Moreover, they often helped her in her bookwork.

  “Even after the fighting and the telling off, Mrs James refused to give up on Dannyboy. She kept going to Sakersbeach and terrorizing him and all those who came to see him, until one day an idea struck him from nowhere. He invited her to his place and announced: ‘What I did was a test, to see if you really love me. Now that I am convinced you do, I have decided to marry you, give up everything in the city and take you with me back to my home village where I have acquired a huge plot of farmland. There we can farm for subsistence and for sale, and live peacefully and happily for the rest of our lives.’”

  “What did she say?” asked Lilly Loveless. “I bet she jumped at
the offer.”

  “She stormed out of the place as if attached by a swarm of killer bees, never to be seen or heard again.”

  “Amazing,” said Lilly Loveless. “It must have been something he said.”

  “I think it was the fact that he mentioned the words ‘village’ and ‘farming’, which were like mentioning the crucifix to Dracula.”

  “Hmmm,” uttered Lilly Loveless, “do you think Mrs James came out any wiser or that she’ll soon replace Dannyboy? What about her three children? And her studies? No family around to advise her? How did you advise her since you’re friends, sort of?”

  ***

  Britney smiled at the litany of questions and said, “Let me tell you about Barbie and the letters from Denis in Nyamandem, a flying-shirt fast making his way to becoming a Mboma. One Sunday morning as I left church and was returning to my room, I met Barbie, a classmate of mine, and a conservative feminist.”

  “Conservative feminist?” said Lilly Loveless.

  “Conservative because I asked her once what she thought about the changing role of the woman and she said that women may have two hundred thousand changing roles but the fact is that they will ever remain subordinate to men. Not only because of men, but because the woman is her own worst enemy. ‘Women complain about men test-driving women, but see how we fight one another to position ourselves to be test-driven. Married women think that single women are their enemies, while older women are convinced that their problem is the younger women,’ she explained. ‘The same is true of housekeeping,’ she added, ‘where for a woman to graduate to become a madam, she must trample upon the dignity of a fellow woman by reducing her to a maid.’ As a student of Women’s Studies she had come to the conclusion that ‘feminists and gender experts in Africa are, like rottweilers, more interested in frightening others into subservience than in developing theories and encouraging practices that mean much in real life.’”