Married But Available

by B. Nyamnjoh

  “What did he do?”

  “Oh men! I felt him tense up but I was not letting on. All I was doing was innocently watching a DVD. To tell you the truth, I don’t even remember what that DVD was about. He slowly went berserk. We had a beautiful weekend. When we came back home, he said we were going to go away more often.”

  “How lovely.”

  “I flirt a lot but I only tease a man when I know I’m ready to have sex. I enjoy sex when I make love but I’m not a connoisseur of lovemaking. I don’t collect sex for the sake of memoirs. I do it when it feels right and beautiful. The kind of sex that composes music, not noises. Sweet melodious music, spiritual harmony, not the cacophony of rain and hailstone on zinc roofs in a hailstorm. The kind of sex that makes both of us feel the other is very special even afterwards and not the sex that ends up making you feel used and debased.”

  “This means one night stands and flings are not your thing?”

  “That’s right,” said Britney. “So what happened to me last year? I still don’t understand. But I was already starving and though I tried to resist, I was weak. So I lost control. But I take consolation in the fact that it didn’t end up in sex. I don’t want to ever lose control again, so help me God.”

  “I’m listening,” said Lilly Loveless.

  “I don’t know how to say this, but a few weeks ago, I met someone from Nyamandem. Not a Mboma, but a young man of my age group, slightly older. Something clicked and we had a fling. He’s since gone back to Nyamandem.”

  Lilly Loveless crossed her legs the other way, her chin resting on her fist, her ears straining. “So you do have flings after all,” she said, half question, half statement.

  “Last night I called him and felt chastised. He said so many things. We’ve talked countless times but last night, the talk was deeper. I don’t even know what I’m saying. I’m a bit disorientated. I didn’t realise he would miss me that much or that my failure to get in touch would hurt him so much. It has dawned heavily on me now that he doesn’t want to lose touch with me. Despite everything, I still like him and it would be difficult to walk away if he doesn’t want to let go.”

  “Some have said there’s no such thing as a fling. Emotions are hard to police, illegal or not, and few want to settle for emotional undernourishment,” said Lilly Loveless, at the same time as she wrote it down in her notebook.

  “Meanwhile, guilt keeps eating at me and it gets heavier with time, the guilt, I mean. Perhaps partly because I realise that even distance and the passage of time do nothing to deaden the attraction, the emotions. Perhaps because some important people in both our lives would be devastated if they got to know. Perhaps because I turned my back on promises I’d made elsewhere. Perhaps because I discovered another part of me that I had never even imagined existed – that part that doesn’t apply gears of control, that wants to be set free and go wild.”

  “The ‘girl gone wild’ part of you,” suggested Lilly Loveless.

  “Absolutely,” agreed Britney. “He said that if he hadn’t been wary of the complications of breaking his commitments to his wife when he met me, he should have been with me by now. He even extracted a promise from me that I’d call him tonight at a set time. I wasn’t prepared for that level of intensity. I find myself going back but I know it’s not the best thing to do. Or maybe, we are destined to finish off what we started in order to put it behind us? So help me. Help me God!”

  “I’m sure you’ll come through it OK,” Lilly Loveless sought to reassure her.

  “Thanks.” Britney truly needed all the help she could get. “Honestly, were it not for distance, there is no way this new guy Ted could threaten Providence.”

  “Good. I’m sure you can manage distance by applying yourself to your studies and work. Fortunately your hands are full with work, and getting fuller by the day.”

  “Providence is a Godsend!” Britney recalled. “Before he left for Muzunguland, we were the perfect couple in the student community. He helped me clean up the house, made the bed, did the dishes for me anytime I cooked, and would go out of his way to bring me flowers, harvested from a nearby garden along his way to see me.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “He even helped me in the kitchen by chopping vegetables, doing this and that for me.”

  “It’s too good to be true,” Lilly Loveless said with an air of scepticism.

  “I’m serious, in God’s name,” Britney swore.

  “I believe you.”

  “Sometimes, he would bring me lunch at the university, prepared or heated up by him.”

  “Lucky girl.”

  Britney laughed appreciatively. “Yes, I believe I am. I’ve told him not to change or else. He says I shouldn’t change either. Well, and the more we made love, the better it got. That much I remember. Just imagine! Each time I discovered a new side to him, the good sides always outweighed the bad. I feel so lucky.”

  Lilly Loveless eyed her curiously. “No fights, ever?”

  “Of course we fight, but they never last.”

  Britney paused for a while then added, “His mom is the problem though. She doesn’t like the fact that Providence loves me. She hates me. When Providence was here, she didn’t want him spending much time with me. I don’t know what I’ve done to her, but when she sets eyes on me, I can almost hear her stomach start to churn. Sometimes I think the reason might be the fact that Providence lost his dad when he was a boy, and has grown up not only fathering himself, but also serving, in a symbolic way, as husband to his mom. But I loved every little time we had to ourselves. He would save up his meagre earnings, only to buy me a gift or to take me out. And once in a while on weekends, he’d even bring a bottle of wine along to my place, and we would drink it together, listening to music all night long.”

  Just then Britney’s cell phone rang. She identified the number of the caller with a sigh, and ignored the call.

  “Why don’t you answer?” Lilly Loveless was curious.

  “It’s my good friend Lovejoy, but I don’t want to take the call. I’m going to tell you why but please don’t expect me to be kind to him in my narrative because I am very angry with him.”

  “OK,” said Lilly Loveless, even more curious.

  “He’s not trustworthy,” Britney told her. “He’s been pursuing me with the hope that someday I might allow him to just inhale the scent of my panties.”

  Lilly Loveless tried not to show the twitch in her face.

  “He’s like a leech. I tried to peel him off my skin several times, but no! He wouldn’t budge.”

  “Interesting,” Lilly Loveless wetted her lips with beer. “What did he do instead?”

  “He is a funny guy. What hasn’t he done? He has showered me with so many gifts, appointed himself my personal chauffeur, become my bodyguard-cum-stalker, invaded my space, and turned into a cry baby whenever I ask him to leave me alone. He is obsessed with me.”

  Britney’s cell phone rang a second time. Britney ignored the call again and this time turned the phone off.

  “And you ignore all this attention?”

  “I’m not going to sleep with him because of all his dramatisation. This is a guy who lacks quality. No good sense of dressing, no fine way of speaking, bad grammar, a terrible accent, a pervading body odour crowned with a condition I simply have to diagnose as halitosis.”

  Lilly Loveless laughed.

  “You’d think these would be enough for him,” Britney laughed. “Surprise, surprise, sur-pr-i-s-e! He SPOKE with his mouth full, picked his nose and chewed gum in public like a cow chewing cud. Such a guy! I wouldn’t have been able to kiss him even if I’d wanted to for fear that his ‘fragrance’ would exacerbate my asthma.”

  Now Lilly Loveless understood why Britney sometimes spoke as if she was short of breathe.

  “Why don’t you blow him off,” asked Lilly Loveless?

  “He is a nuisance I had to tolerate not just because he was sometimes convenient, but because I hated to see him cry.
Till I realised what a snake he is…”

  “A snake? Really? In what way?… Smooth operator?”

  “When he met my friend Vicky, he pretended he didn’t like her. He even made a face as if he had just chanced upon maggot-infested carcass when he told me she was not pretty at all when all the time he was designing ways to lure her into assuaging his libido. He thought I was stupid but he knows better now.”

  “What happened? Tell me all.”

  Britney smiled. One of these days she will explain to Lilly Loveless the Mimboland equivalent of curiosity kills the cat.

  “Just imagine. He came to tell me he had a dream in which Vicky approached him for his cell phone number but he refused to give it to her with the excuse that she and I were friends. But in the dream, Vicky insisted that I already had someone so it was no big deal. To tell you the truth, that was what gave him away.”

  “How?”

  “Why would he tell me such a dream even if it was true?”

  “To strain your friendship with Vicky?”

  “Exactly! He wanted to mar our friendship. He thought wrongly that he was smart enough to emulate the strategy of our calculating colonial masters: divide and rule. He wouldn’t have let on about this so-called dream if he had envisaged the outcome.”

  “So what happened?”

  “So what do you think? Was I surprised when Vicky told me Lovejoy had been calling her behind my back? No, I wasn’t. It didn’t surprise me at all.”

  Lilly Loveless shook her head in empathy.

  “An incident happened some months back that made me suspect Lovejoy would do something stupid. He came right here to Mountain View to pick me up after work and as Vicky used to work here with me and was then stuck on a call with a customer, I asked him if we could wait for her. It made sense to wait for her as Vicky and I lived together at the same place as well.”

  “I bet he didn’t,” interjected Lilly Loveless.

  “He didn’t. Lovejoy was reluctant to wait with the excuse that he was in a hurry so we would have to leave Vicky to make her way home by taxi. So we left and he dropped me off at my place and said he had to rush somewhere. Now, that was a first! Lovejoy never left in a hurry to any place when I was around. It appeared strange to me but I was glad because I wanted him to leave anyway.

  “Five minutes later, as I was making dinner, Vicky walked in, to my amazement. So I asked her how she got home so early and she told me my friend Lovejoy had come to pick her up.

  “What?! You don’t mean it.”

  “True. But I never asked Lovejoy and true to type, he never mentioned it to me either. And this incident happened before he told me about his ridiculous dream.”

  “So how did things reach the present stage where you don’t want to answer his calls?”

  “I eventually had to move out of my old place. When I left Vicky quickly moved into my room because she preferred mine to hers.”

  “Was hers that bad?”

  “One thing I didn’t like about Vicky was her desire to be like me. But she can’t be like me.”

  Lilly Loveless grinned.

  “Neither can I be like her. It would be boring if she was me because then there would be no mystery to her and she would be boring.”

  They both laughed.

  “Anyway, Vicky approached me at work one day and said Lovejoy had been calling her on the land line which our landlord had installed as an extra incentive to keep us as tenants. Lovejoy knew that number because he used to call me on it. Vicky said Lovejoy was after her cell phone number but she had refused to give it to him. I told her that was quite surprising because the last I heard, she was the one chasing Lovejoy for his cell phone number – albeit in his dreams!”

  “You are vicious!”

  Britney laughed.

  “Of course Vicky did not like that at all and looked somewhat rattled when she realised that Lovejoy had mentioned her to me in the first place. I told her I had no interest whatsoever in Lovejoy and if she wasn’t interested in him as well, we could come together and teach him a little lesson for attempting to mess us about. We could beat him at his own game. I intimated to her that she could take advantage of him and enjoy his financial goodwill before leaving Puttkamerstown, as she was due to relocate, having completed her studies.”

  “You do like to be in control, don’t you? So what did she say?”

  “Vicky became very quiet after this, a bit withdrawn even from me, couldn’t look me in the face anymore and things became kind of tense between us for some days which led me to suspect, perhaps rightly, that Lovejoy had had his way with her.”

  “Poor thing,” said Lilly Loveless.

  “It’s her cup of tea,” Britney insisted before continuing. “Two weeks later, I was relaxing on one of the couches during break at work when Vicky came and sat across from me and told me she was up for the game. I asked her if she wanted to take him shopping and she said that would be a bit tricky for her because she mainly wanted just a cell phone. And I thought, ‘Why not?’ After all, if Lovejoy wanted Vicky’s cell phone number, why shouldn’t he buy her the phone in the first place?”

  “No phone no phone number, eh? Smart reasoning,” said Lilly Loveless.

  “As Vicky didn’t know how to go about it, I told her I would be the one to mention it casually in a conversation with Lovejoy that she, Vicky, had dropped her phone in water or into a pit latrine, or had to get a new one because the old one had stopped working. Then later when Lovejoy sneaked to her place behind my back, she could work on getting her phone from that angle. Her story would be all the more credible because I had already mentioned it to Lovejoy.”

  “Evil genius you are!”

  “Unfortunately for Lovejoy, before I could pass on the message, I had an accident with one of my cell phones which rendered it unusable. So I decided to get two phones instead of one: the first phone for me of course, and the other one for Vicky. I probably appear selfish but I had my reasons.”

  Lilly Loveless felt slightly ill at ease. She remembered her methodology courses on the importance of objectivity in research. “Britney, I’m here not to judge you but simply to hear your story, so don’t please feel I think you are selfish.”

  “That statement was more for me than for you,” Britney reassured her.

  “Back to the story,” said Britney. “So I got a new phone from Lovejoy for myself. It was quite easy because he had been wondering what to get for me for my Christmas present. The new phone therefore became my Christmas gift from him.”

  “Father Christmas named Lovejoy bearing a cell phone!”

  “When he brought the phone, I deliberately asked him if he saw a cheaper phone when he went to the phone shop. Naturally, he wanted to know why I was asking him that question so I casually mentioned to him as planned that Vicky wanted a cheap cell phone to buy as her cell phone had fallen into water and she was ‘broke.’”

  “How did he react?”

  “From his countenance after I’d told him this, I realized that he was thinking of how to help his Vicky.”

  Lilly Loveless smiled internally, remembering that Britney was apparently an adept reader of body language.

  “At that point I really couldn’t be bothered,” continued Britney. “When I got home that night I called Vicky to inform her that I had set the plan in motion and it was up to her to ‘play up’ if she wanted to get her phone.”

  “You’re terrific.”

  “That’s the same thing Vicky told me,” said Britney. “At any rate, I left for a two-week holiday to Zintgraffstown. Whilst I was there, Vicky called to tell me she had succeeded in getting her phone from Lovejoy but she needed one more thing from him and wanted my help, as Plan A had worked perfectly.”

  “I bet you were eager to come up with a Plan B.”

  “I was, and I did, of course! Vicky was due to go back to her parents in Nyamandem for good the following week and she needed to do some more shopping and wanted Lovejoy to bear the cost of her shopping
spree.”

  “You demons.”

  “She only had five days. Vicky had not told Lovejoy she was leaving and was not going to tell him at all. So we had to draw up Plan B.”

  “And what did you come up with?”

  “In this plan, Vicky was to get the funds she needed from Lovejoy by promising to pay at the end of the month when she received her salary, by which time she would be long gone out of Puttkamerstown anyway.”

  “Ingenious. Some would say cruel.”

  “I got to Zintgraffstown the night before Vicky was to leave Puttkamerstown but was unable to call her. However she called me the next day when she was about to leave for the bus station to tell me Plan B had been successful.”

  “Really?” said Lilly Loveless, excitedly.

  “She did. Vicky had succeeded in collecting her shopping money from Lovejoy with the explanation that she needed some funds to pay her rent in order not to be ejected from the house. Also Vicky told Lovejoy that as she had not been able to pay her rent the previous month, she needed a loan to pay her rent for two months. The loan, she said, would be paid back at the end of the month when she received her salary.”

  “Brilliant!”

  “Vicky left Puttkamerstown that day and a week later I had the satisfaction of breaking the news that she had left for good to Lovejoy who didn’t take it well at all. He got angry but I was gloating.”

  “Are you still in touch with Vicky?”

  “Now I don’t contact either of them anymore. I simply have no use for Lovejoy anymore, and I just can’t trust Vicky so there is no point in her hovering around in my life. After all, she did try to play by the rules but that was only after she realized that Lovejoy had taken her for a ride. The bottom line is she slept with him when she knew he was still interested in me, most probably with the idea of getting him to switch his attentions to her, very much like Alice in one of the stories I collected for you. Too late she realized her method would not work so she switched allegiance. The mere fact that the rain beats the leopard does not mean it washes its spots away.”