“I think we’ve lost that one,” Ifemelu said. The week before, a Frisbee had disappeared in there. Curt rose from the patio chair (he had been watching her every move, he told her later) and bounded into the bush, almost diving, as though into a pool, and emerged with the yellow ball.
“Yay! Uncle Curt!” Taylor said. But Curt did not give Taylor the ball; instead he held it out to Ifemelu. She saw in his eyes what he wanted her to see. She smiled and said, “Thank you.” Later in the kitchen, after she had put in a video for Taylor and was drinking a glass of water, he said, “This is where I ask you to dinner, but at this point, I’ll take anything I can get. May I buy you a drink, an ice cream, a meal, a movie ticket? This evening? This weekend before I go back to Maryland?”
He was looking at her with wonder, his head slightly lowered, and she felt an unfurling inside her. How glorious it was, to be so wanted, and by this man with the rakish metal band around his wrist and the cleft-chinned handsomeness of models in department store catalogues. She began to like him because he liked her. “You eat so delicately,” he told her on their first date, at an Italian restaurant in Old City. There was nothing particularly delicate about her raising a fork to her mouth but she liked that he thought that there was.
“So, I’m a rich white guy from Potomac, but I’m not nearly as much of an asshole as I’m supposed to be,” he said, in a way that made her feel he had said that before, and that it had been received well when he did. “Laura always says my mom is richer than God, but I’m not sure she is.”
He talked about himself with such gusto, as though determined to tell her everything there was to know, and all at once. His family had been hoteliers for a hundred years. He went to college in California to escape them. He graduated and traveled through Latin America and Asia. Something began to pull him homewards, perhaps his father’s death, perhaps his unhappiness with a relationship. So he moved, a year ago, back to Maryland, started a software business just so that he would not be in the family business, bought an apartment in Baltimore, and went down to Potomac every Sunday to have brunch with his mother. He talked about himself with an uncluttered simplicity, assuming that she enjoyed his stories simply because he enjoyed them himself. His boyish enthusiasm fascinated her. His body was firm as they hugged good night in front of her apartment.
“I’m about to move in for a kiss in exactly three seconds,” he said. “A real kiss that can take us places, so if you don’t want that to happen, you might want to back off right now.”
She did not back off. The kiss was arousing in the way that unknown things are arousing. Afterwards he said, with urgency, “We have to tell Kimberly.”
“Tell Kimberly what?”
“That we’re dating.”
“We are?”
He laughed, and she laughed, too, although she had not been joking. He was open and gushing; cynicism did not occur to him. She felt charmed and almost helpless in the face of this, carried along by him; perhaps they were indeed dating after one kiss since he was so sure that they were.
Kimberly’s greeting to her the next day was “Hello there, lovebird.”
“So you’ll forgive your cousin for asking out the help?” Ifemelu asked.
Kimberly laughed and then, in an act that both surprised and moved Ifemelu, Kimberly hugged her. They moved apart awkwardly. Oprah was on the TV in the den and she heard the audience erupt in applause.
“Well,” Kimberly said, looking a little startled by the hug herself. “I just wanted to say I’m really … happy for you both.”
“Thank you. But it’s only been one date and there has been no consummation.”
Kimberly giggled and for a moment it felt as though they were high school girlfriends gossiping about boys. Ifemelu sometimes sensed, underneath the well-oiled sequences of Kimberly’s life, a flash of regret not only for things she longed for in the present but for things she had longed for in the past.
“You should have seen Curt this morning,” Kimberly said. “I’ve never seen him like this! He’s really excited.”
“About what?” Morgan asked. She was standing by the kitchen entrance, her prepubescent body stiff with hostility. Behind her, Taylor was trying to straighten the legs of a small plastic robot.
“Well, honey, you’re going to have to ask Uncle Curt.”
Curt came into the kitchen, smiling shyly, his hair slightly wet, wearing a fresh, light cologne. “Hey,” he said. He had called her at night to say he couldn’t sleep. “This is really corny but I am so full of you, it’s like I’m breathing you, you know?” he had said, and she thought that the romance novelists were wrong and it was men, not women, who were the true romantics.
“Morgan is asking why you seem so excited,” Kimberly said.
“Well, Morg, I’m excited because I have a new girlfriend, somebody really special who you might know.”
Ifemelu wished Curt would remove the arm he had thrown around her shoulder; they were not announcing their engagement, for goodness’ sake. Morgan was staring at them. Ifemelu saw Curt through her eyes: the dashing uncle who traveled the world and told all the really funny jokes at Thanksgiving dinner, the cool one young enough to get her, but old enough to try and make her mother get her.
“Ifemelu is your girlfriend?” Morgan asked.
“Yes,” Curt said.
“That’s disgusting,” Morgan said, looking genuinely disgusted.
“Morgan!” Kimberly said.
Morgan turned and stalked off upstairs.
“She has a crush on Uncle Curt, and now the babysitter steps onto her turf. It can’t be easy,” Ifemelu said.
Taylor, who seemed happy both with the news and with having straightened out the robot’s legs, said, “Are you and Ifemelu going to get married and have a baby, Uncle Curt?”
“Well, buddy, right now we are just going to be spending a lot of time together, to get to know each other.”
“Oh, okay,” Taylor said, slightly dampened, but when Don came home, Taylor ran into his arms and said, “Ifemelu and Uncle Curt are going to get married and have a baby!”
“Oh,” Don said.
His surprise reminded Ifemelu of Abe in her ethics class: Don thought she was attractive and interesting, and thought Curt was attractive and interesting, but it did not occur to him to think of both of them, together, entangled in the delicate threads of romance.
CURT HAD NEVER BEEN with a black woman; he told her this after their first time, in his penthouse apartment in Baltimore, with a self-mocking toss of his head, as if this were something he should have done long ago but had somehow neglected.
“Here’s to a milestone, then,” she said, pretending to raise a glass.
Wambui once said, after Dorothy introduced them to her new Dutch boyfriend at an ASA meeting, “I can’t do a white man, I’d be scared to see him naked, all that paleness. Unless maybe an Italian with a serious tan. Or a Jewish guy, dark Jewish.” Ifemelu looked at Curt’s pale hair and pale skin, the rust-colored moles on his back, the fine sprinkle of golden chest hair, and thought how strongly, at this moment, she disagreed with Wambui.
“You are so sexy,” she said.
“You are sexier.”
He told her he had never been so attracted to a woman before, had never seen a body so beautiful, her perfect breasts, her perfect butt. It amused her, that he considered a perfect butt what Obinze called a flat ass, and she thought her breasts were ordinary big breasts, already with a downward slope. But his words pleased her, like an unnecessary lavish gift. He wanted to suck her finger, to lick honey from her nipple, to smear ice cream on her belly, as though it was not enough simply to lie bare skin to bare skin.
Later, when he wanted to do impersonations—“How about you be Foxy Brown,” he said—she thought it endearing, his ability to act, to lose himself so completely in character, and she played along, humoring him, pleased by his pleasure, although it puzzled her that this could be so exciting to him. Often, naked beside him, she found h
erself thinking of Obinze. She struggled not to compare Curt’s touch to his. She had told Curt about her secondary school boyfriend Mofe, but she said nothing about Obinze. It felt a sacrilege to discuss Obinze, to refer to him as an “ex,” that flippant word that said nothing and meant nothing. With each month of silence that passed between them, she felt the silence itself calcify, and become a hard and hulking statue, impossible to defeat. She still, often, began to write to him, but always she stopped, always she decided not to send the e-mails.
WITH CURT, she became, in her mind, a woman free of knots and cares, a woman running in the rain with the taste of sun-warmed strawberries in her mouth. “A drink” became a part of the architecture of her life, mojitos and martinis, dry whites and fruity reds. She went hiking with him, kayaking, camping near his family’s vacation home, all things she would never have imagined herself doing before. She was lighter and leaner; she was Curt’s Girlfriend, a role she slipped into as into a favorite, flattering dress. She laughed more because he laughed so much. His optimism blinded her. He was full of plans. “I have an idea!” he said often. She imagined him as a child surrounded by too many brightly colored toys, always being encouraged to carry out “projects,” always being told that his mundane ideas were wonderful.
“Let’s go to Paris tomorrow!” he said one weekend. “I know it’s totally unoriginal but you’ve never been and I love that I get to show you Paris!”
“I just can’t get up and go to Paris. I have a Nigerian passport. I need to apply for a visa, with bank statements and health insurance and all sorts of proof that I won’t stay and become a burden to Europe.”
“Yeah, I forgot about that. Okay, we’ll go next weekend. We’ll get the visa stuff done this week. I’ll get a copy of my bank statement tomorrow.”
“Curtis,” she said, a little sternly, to make him be reasonable, but standing there looking down at the city from so high up, she was already caught in the whirl of his excitement. He was upbeat, relentlessly so, in a way that only an American of his kind could be, and there was an infantile quality to this that she found admirable and repulsive. One day, they took a walk on South Street, because she had never seen what he told her was the best part of Philadelphia, and he slipped his hand into hers as they wandered past tattoo parlors and groups of boys with pink hair. Near Condom Kingdom, he ducked into a tiny tarot shop, pulling her along. A woman in a black veil told them, “I see light and long-term happiness ahead for you two,” and Curt said, “So do we!” and gave her an extra ten dollars. Later, when his ebullience became a temptation to Ifemelu, an unrelieved sunniness that made her want to strike at it, to crush it, this would be one of her best memories of Curt, as he was in the tarot shop on South Street on a day filled with the promise of summer: so handsome, so happy, a true believer. He believed in good omens and positive thoughts and happy endings to films, a trouble-free belief, because he had not considered them deeply before choosing to believe; he just simply believed.
CHAPTER 19
Curt’s mother had a bloodless elegance, her hair shiny, her complexion well-preserved, her tasteful and expensive clothes made to look tasteful and expensive; she seemed like the kind of wealthy person who did not tip well. Curt called her “Mother,” which had a certain formality, an archaic ring. On Sundays, they had brunch with her. Ifemelu enjoyed the Sunday ritual of those meals in the ornate hotel dining room, full of nicely dressed people, silver-haired couples with their grandchildren, middle-aged women with brooches pinned on their lapels. The only other black person was a stiffly dressed waiter. She ate fluffy eggs and thinly sliced salmon and crescents of fresh melon, watching Curt and his mother, both blindingly golden-haired. Curt talked, while his mother listened, rapt. She adored her son—the child born late in life when she wasn’t sure she could still have children, the charmer, the one whose manipulations she always gave in to. He was her adventurer who would bring back exotic species—he had dated a Japanese girl, a Venezuelan girl—but would, with time, settle down properly. She would tolerate anybody he liked, but she felt no obligation for affection.
“I’m Republican, our whole family is. We are very anti-welfare but we did very much support civil rights. I just want you to know the kind of Republicans we are,” she told Ifemelu when they first met, as though it was the most important thing to get out of the way.
“And would you like to know what kind of Republican I am?” Ifemelu asked.
His mother first looked surprised, and then her face stretched into a tight smile. “You’re funny,” she said.
Once, his mother told Ifemelu, “Your lashes are pretty,” abrupt, unexpected words, and then sipped her Bellini, as though she had not heard Ifemelu’s surprised “Thank you.”
On the drive back to Baltimore, Ifemelu said, “Lashes? She must have really tried hard to find something to compliment!”
Curt laughed. “Laura says my mother doesn’t like beautiful women.”
ONE WEEKEND, Morgan visited.
Kimberly and Don wanted to take the children to Florida, but Morgan refused to go. So Curt asked her to spend the weekend in Baltimore. He planned a boating trip, and Ifemelu thought he should have some time alone with Morgan. “You’re not coming, Ifemelu?” Morgan asked, looking deflated. “I thought we were all going together.” The word “together” said with more animation than Ifemelu had ever heard from Morgan. “Of course I’m coming,” she said. As she put on mascara and lip gloss, Morgan watched.
“Come here, Morg,” she said, and she ran the lip gloss over Morgan’s lips. “Smack your lips. Good. Now why are you so pretty, Miss Morgan?” Morgan laughed. On the pier, Ifemelu and Curt walked along, each holding Morgan’s hand, Morgan happy to have her hands held, and Ifemelu thought, as she sometimes fleetingly did, of being married to Curt, their life engraved in comfort, he getting along with her family and friends and she with his, except for his mother. They joked about marriage. Since she first told him about bride price ceremonies, that Igbo people did them before the wine-carrying and church wedding, he joked about going to Nigeria to pay her bride price, arriving at her ancestral home, sitting with her father and uncles, and insisting he get her for free. And she joked, in return, about walking down the aisle in a church in Virginia, to the tune of “Here Comes the Bride,” while his relatives stared in horror and asked one another, in whispers, why the help was wearing the bride’s dress.
THEY WERE CURLED UP on the couch, she reading a novel, he watching sports. She found it endearing, how absorbed he was in his games, eyes small and still in concentration. During commercial breaks, she teased him: Why did American football have no inherent logic, just overweight men jumping on top of one another? And why did baseball players spend so much time spitting and then making sudden incomprehensible runs? He laughed and tried to explain, yet again, the meaning of home runs and touchdowns, but she was uninterested, because understanding meant she could no longer tease him, and so she glanced back at her novel, ready to tease him again at the next break.
The couch was soft. Her skin was glowing. At school, she took extra credits and raised her GPA. Outside the tall living room windows, the Inner Harbor spread out below, water gleaming and lights twinkling. A sense of contentment overwhelmed her. That was what Curt had given her, this gift of contentment, of ease. How quickly she had become used to their life, her passport filled with visa stamps, the solicitousness of flight attendants in first-class cabins, the feathery bed linen in the hotels they stayed in and the little things she hoarded: jars of preserves from the breakfast tray, little vials of conditioner, woven slippers, even face towels if they were especially soft. She had slipped out of her old skin. She almost liked winter, the glittering coat of frosted ice on the tops of cars, the lush warmth of the cashmere sweaters Curt bought her. In stores, he did not look first at the prices of things. He bought her groceries and textbooks, sent her gift certificates for department stores, took her shopping himself. He asked her to give up babysitting; they could spend more time
together if she didn’t have to work every day. But she refused. “I have to have a job,” she said.
She saved money, sent more home. She wanted her parents to move to a new flat. There had been an armed robbery in the block of flats next to theirs.
“Something bigger in a better neighborhood,” she said.
“We are okay here,” her mother said. “It is not too bad. They built a new gate in the street and banned okadas after six p.m., so it is safe.”
“A gate?”
“Yes, near the kiosk.”
“Which kiosk?”
“You don’t remember the kiosk?” her mother asked. Ifemelu paused. A sepia tone to her memories. She could not remember the kiosk.
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