“I’m not sure Obinze will find it very interesting, darling,” Georgina said.
“Oh, I think he’ll like it,” Emenike said. Self-satisfaction, that was the difference in him. He was married to a British woman, lived in a British home, worked at a British job, traveled on a British passport, said “exercise” to refer to a mental rather than a physical activity. He had longed for this life, and never quite believed he would have it. Now his backbone was stiff with self-satisfaction. He was sated. In the restaurant in Kensington, a candle glowed on the table, and the blond waiter, who seemed too tall and handsome to be a waiter, served tiny bowls of what looked like green jelly.
“Our new lemon and thyme aperitif, with the compliments of the chef,” he said.
“Fantastic,” Emenike said, instantly sinking into one of the rituals of his new life: eyebrows furrowed, concentration sharp, sipping sparkling water and studying a restaurant menu. He and Georgina discussed the starters. The waiter was called to answer a question. It struck Obinze, how seriously Emenike took this initiation into the voodoo of fine dining, because when the waiter brought him what looked like three elegant bits of green weed, for which he would pay thirteen pounds, Emenike rubbed his palms together in delight. Obinze’s burger was served in four pieces, arranged in a large martini glass. When Georgina’s order arrived, a pile of red raw beef, an egg sunnily splayed on top of it, Obinze tried not to look at it as he ate, otherwise he might be tempted to vomit.
Emenike did most of the talking, telling Georgina about their time together at school, barely letting Obinze say anything. In the stories he told, he and Obinze were the popular rogues who always got into glamorous trouble. Obinze watched Georgina, only now becoming aware of how much older than Emenike she was. At least eight years. Her manly facial contours were softened by frequent brief smiles, but they were thoughtful smiles, the smiles of a natural skeptic, and he wondered how much she believed of Emenike’s stories, how much love had suspended her reason.
“We’re having a dinner party tomorow, Obinze,” Georgina said. “You must come.”
“Yes, I forgot to mention it,” Emenike said.
“You really must come. We’re having a few friends over and I think you’ll enjoy meeting them,” Georgina said.
“I would love to,” Obinze said.
THEIR TERRACED HOME in Islington, with its short flight of well-preserved steps that led to the green front door, smelled of roasting food when Obinze arrived. Emenike let him in. “The Zed! You’re early, we’re just finishing up in the kitchen. Come and stay in my study until the others come.” Emenike led him upstairs, and into the study, a clean, bright room made brighter by the white bookshelves and white curtains. The windows ate up large chunks of the walls, and Obinze imagined the room in the afternoon, flooded gloriously with light, and himself sunk in the armchair by the door, lost in a book.
“I’ll come and call you in a bit,” Emenike said.
There were, on a window ledge, photos of Emenike squinting in front of the Sistine Chapel, making a peace sign at the Acropolis, standing at the Colosseum, his shirt the same nutmeg color as the wall of the ruin. Obinze imagined him, dutiful and determined, visiting the places he was supposed to visit, thinking, as he did so, not of the things he was seeing but of the photos he would take of them and of the people who would see those photos. The people who would know that he had participated in these triumphs. On the bookshelf, Graham Greene caught his eye. He took The Heart of the Matter down and began to read the first chapter, suddenly nostalgic for his teenage years when his mother would reread it every few months.
Emenike came in. “Is that Waugh?”
“No.” He showed him the book cover. “My mother loves this book She was always trying to get me to love her English novels.”
“Waugh is the best of them. Brideshead is the closest I’ve read to a perfect novel.”
“I think Waugh is cartoonish. I just don’t get those so-called comic English novels. It’s as if they can’t deal with the real and deep complexity of human life and so they resort to doing this comic business. Greene is the other extreme, too morose.”
“No, man, you need to go and read Waugh again. Greene doesn’t really do it for me, but the first part of The End of the Affair is terrific.”
“This study is the dream,” Obinze said.
Emenike shrugged. “Do you want any books? Take anything you want.”
“Thanks, man,” Obinze said, knowing that he would not take any.
Emenike looked around, as though seeing the study through new eyes. “We found this desk in Edinburgh. Georgina already had some good pieces but we found some new things together.”
Obinze wondered if Emenike had so completely absorbed his own disguise that even when they were alone, he could talk about “good furniture,” as though the idea of “good furniture” was not alien in their Nigerian world, where new things were supposed to look new. Obinze might have said something to Emenike about it but not now; too much had already shifted in their relationship. Obinze followed him downstairs. The dining table was a riot of color, bright mismatched ceramic plates, some of them chipped at the edges, red wine goblets, deep blue napkins. In a silver bowl at the center of the table, delicate milky flowers floated in water. Emenike made the introductions.
“This is Georgina’s old friend Mark, and this is his wife, Hannah, who by the way is completing her PhD on the female orgasm, or the Israeli female orgasm.”
“Well, it isn’t quite that singularly focused,” Hannah said, to general laughter, warmly shaking Obinze’s hand. She had a tanned, broad-featured succoring face, the face of a person who could not abide conflict. Mark, pale-skinned and rumpled, squeezed her shoulder but did not laugh along with the others. He said “How do you do” to Obinze in an almost formal manner.
“This is our dear friend Phillip, who is the best solicitor in London, after Georgina of course,” Emenike said.
“Are all the men in Nigeria as gorgeous as you and your friend?” Phillip asked Emenike, swooning mockingly as he shook Obinze’s hand.
“You’ll have to come to Nigeria and see,” Emenike said, and winked, in what seemed to be a continuous flirtatiousness with Phillip.
Phillip was slender and elegant, his red silk shirt open at the neck. His mannerisms, supple gestures of his wrists, fingers swirling in the air, reminded Obinze of the boy in secondary school—his name was Hadome—who was said to pay junior students to suck his dick. Once, Emenike and two other boys had lured Hadome into the toilet and beat him up, Hadome’s eye swelling so quickly that, just before school was dismissed, it looked grotesque, like a big purple eggplant. Obinze had stood outside the toilet with other boys, boys who did not join in the beating but who laughed along, boys who taunted and goaded, boys who shouted “Homo! Homo!”
“This is our friend Alexa. Alexa’s just moved into a new place in Holland Park, after years in France, and so, lucky us, we’ll be seeing much more of her. She works in music publishing. She’s also a fantastic poet,” Emenike said.
“Oh, stop it,” Alexa said, and then turning to Obinze, she asked, “So where are you from, darling?”
“Nigeria.”
“No, no, I mean in London, darling.”
“I live in Essex, actually,” he said.
“I see,” she said, as though disappointed. She was a small woman with a very pale face and tomato-red hair. “Shall we eat, boys and girls?” She picked up one of the plates and examined it.
“I love these plates. Georgina and Emenike are never boring, are they?” Hannah said.
“We bought them from this bazaar in India,” Emenike said. “Handmade by rural women, just so beautiful. See the detail at the edges?” He raised one of the plates.
“Sublime,” Hannah said, and looked at Obinze.
“Yes, very nice,” Obinze mumbled. Those plates, with their amateur finishing, the slight lumpiness of the edges, would never be shown in the presence of guests in Nigeria. He stil
l was not sure whether Emenike had become a person who believed that something was beautiful because it was handmade by poor people in a foreign country, or whether he had simply learned to pretend so. Georgina poured the drinks. Emenike served the starter, crab with hard-boiled eggs. He had taken on a careful and calibrated charm. He said “Oh dear” often. When Phillip complained about the French couple building a house next to his in Cornwall, Emenike asked, “Are they between you and the sunset?”
Are they between you and the sunset? It would never occur to Obinze, or to anybody he had grown up with, to ask a question like that.
“So how was America?” Phillip asked.
“A fascinating place, really. We spent a few days with Hugo in Jackson, Wyoming. You met Hugo last Christmas, didn’t you, Mark?”
“Yes. So what’s he doing there?” Mark seemed unimpressed by the plates; he had not, like his wife, picked one up to look at it.
“It’s a ski resort, but it’s not pretentious. In Jackson, they say people who go to Aspen expect somebody to tie their ski boots up for them,” Georgina said.
“The thought of skiing in America makes me quite ill,” Alexa said.
“Why?” Hannah asked.
“Have they got a Disney station in the resort, with Mickey Mouse in ski gear?” Alexa asked.
“Alexa has only been to America once, when she was in school, but she loves to hate it from afar,” Georgina said.
“I’ve loved America from afar my whole life,” Obinze said. Alexa turned to him in slight surprise, as though she had not expected him to speak. Under the chandelier light, her red hair took on a strange, unnatural glow.
“What I’ve noticed being here is that many English people are in awe of America but also deeply resent it,” Obinze added.
“Perfectly true,” Phillip said, nodding at Obinze. “Perfectly true. It’s the resentment of a parent whose child has become far more beautiful and with a far more interesting life.”
“But the Americans love us Brits, they love the accent and the Queen and the double decker,” Emenike said. There, it had been said: the man considered himself British.
“And the great revelation Emenike had while we were there?” Georgina said, smiling. “The difference between the American and British ‘bye.’ ”
“Bye?” Alexa asked.
“Yes. He says the Brits draw it out much more, while Americans make it short.”
“That was a great revelation. It explained everything about the difference between both countries,” Emenike said, knowing that they would laugh, and they did. “I was also thinking about the difference in approaching foreignness. Americans will smile at you and be extremely friendly but if your name is not Cory or Chad, they make no effort at saying it properly. The Brits will be surly and will be suspicious if you’re too friendly but they will treat foreign names as though they are actually valid names.”
“That’s interesting,” Hannah said.
Georgina said, “It’s a bit tiresome to talk about America being insular, not that we help that much, since if something major happens in America, it is the headline in Britain; something major happens here, it is on the back page in America, if at all. But I do think the most troubling thing was the garishness of the nationalism, don’t you think so, darling?” Georgina turned to Emenike.
“Absolutely,” Emenike said. “Oh, and we went to a rodeo. Hugo thought we might fancy a bit of culture.”
There was a general, tittering laughter.
“And we saw this quite unbelievable parade of little children with heavily made-up faces and then there was a lot of flag-waving and a lot of ‘God Bless America.’ I was terrified that it was the sort of place where you did not know what might happen to you if you suddenly said, ‘I don’t like America.’ ”
“I found America quite jingoistic, too, when I did my fellowship training there,” Mark said.
“Mark is a pediatric surgeon,” Georgina said to Obinze.
“One got the sense that people—progressive people, that is, because American conservatives come from an entirely different planet, even to this Tory—felt that they could very well criticize their country but they didn’t like it at all when you did,” Mark said.
“Where were you?” Emenike asked, as if he knew America’s smallest corners.
“Philadelphia. A specialty hospital called the Children’s Hospital. It was quite a remarkable place and the training was very good. It might have taken me two years in England to see the rare cases that I had in a month there.”
“But you didn’t stay,” Alexa said, almost triumphantly.
“I hadn’t planned on staying.” Mark’s face never quite dissolved into any expression.
“Speaking of which, I’ve just got involved with this fantastic charity that’s trying to stop the UK from hiring so many African health workers,” Alexa said. “There are simply no doctors and nurses left on that continent. It’s an absolute tragedy! African doctors should stay in Africa.”
“Why shouldn’t they want to practice where there is regular electricity and regular pay?” Mark asked, his tone flat. Obinze sensed that he did not like Alexa at all. “I’m from Grimsby and I certainly don’t want to work in a district hospital there.”
“But it isn’t quite the same thing, is it? We’re speaking of some of the world’s poorest people. The doctors have a responsibility as Africans,” Alexa said. “Life isn’t fair, really. If they have the privilege of that medical degree then it comes with a responsibility to help their people.”
“I see. I don’t suppose any of us should have that responsibility for the blighted towns in the north of England?” Mark said.
Alexa’s face reddened. In the sudden tense silence, the air wrinkling between them all, Georgina got up and said, “Everyone ready for my roast lamb?”
They all praised the meat, which Obinze wished had stayed a little longer in the oven; he carefully cut around his slice, eating the sides that had grayed from cooking and leaving on his plate the bits stained with pinkish blood. Hannah led the conversation, as though to smooth the air, her voice calming, bringing up subjects they would all agree on, changing to something else if she sensed a looming disagreement. Their conversation was symphonic, voices flowing into one another, in agreement: how atrocious to treat those Chinese cockle pickers like that, how absurd, the idea of fees for higher education, how preposterous that fox-hunting supporters had stormed Parliament. They laughed when Obinze said, “I don’t understand why fox hunting is such a big issue in this country. Aren’t there more important things?”
“What could possibly be more important?” Mark asked drily.
“Well, it’s the only way we know how to fight our class warfare,” Alexa said. “The landed gentry and the aristocrats hunt, you see, and we liberal middle classes fume about it. We want to take their silly little toys away.”
“We certainly do,” Phillip said. “It’s monstrous.”
“Did you read about Blunkett saying he doesn’t know how many immigrants there are in the country?” Alexa asked, and Obinze immediately tensed, his chest tightening.
“ ‘Immigrant,’ of course, is code for Muslim,” Mark said.
“If he really wanted to know, he would go to all the construction sites in this country and do a head count,” Phillip said.
“It was quite interesting to see how this plays out in America,” Georgina said. “They’re kicking up a fuss about immigration as well. Although, of course, America has always been kinder to immigrants than Europe.”
“Well, yes, but that is because countries in Europe were based on exclusion and not, as in America, on inclusion,” Mark said.
“But it’s also a different psychology, isn’t it?” Hannah said. “European countries are surrounded by countries that are similar to one another, while America has Mexico, which is really a developing country, and so it creates a different psychology about immigration and borders.”
“But we don’t have immigrants from Denma
rk. We have immigrants from Eastern Europe, which is our Mexico,” Alexa said.
“Except, of course, for race,” Georgina said. “Eastern Europeans are white. Mexicans are not.”
“How did you see race in America, by the way, Emenike?” Alexa asked. “It’s an iniquitously racist country, isn’t it?”
“He doesn’t have to go to America for that, Alexa,” Georgina said.
“It seemed to me that in America blacks and whites work together but don’t play together, and here blacks and whites play together but don’t work together,” Emenike said.
The others nodded thoughtfully, as though he had said something profound, but Mark said, “I’m not sure I quite understand that.”
“I think class in this country is in the air that people breathe. Everyone knows their place. Even the people who are angry about class have somehow accepted their place,” Obinze said. “A white boy and a black girl who grow up in the same working-class town in this country can get together and race will be secondary, but in America, even if the white boy and black girl grow up in the same neighborhood, race would be primary.”
Alexa gave him another surprised look.
“A bit simplified but yes, that’s sort of what I meant,” Emenike said, slowly, leaning back on his chair, and Obinze sensed a rebuke. He should have been quiet; this, after all, was Emenike’s stage.
“But you haven’t really had to deal with any racism here, have you, Emenike?” Alexa asked, and her tone implied that she already knew the answer to the question was no. “Of course people are prejudiced, but aren’t we all prejudiced?”
“Well, no,” Georgina said firmly. “You should tell the story of the cabbie, darling.”
“Oh, that story,” Emenike said, as he got up to serve the cheese plate, murmuring something in Hannah’s ear that made her smile and touch his arm. How thrilled he was, to live in Georgina’s world.
“Do tell,” Hannah said.
And so Emenike did. He told the story of the taxi that he had hailed one night, on Upper Street; from afar the cab light was on but as the cab approached him, the light went off, and he assumed the driver was not on duty. After the cab passed him by, he looked back idly and saw that the cab light was back on and that, a little way up the street, it stopped for two white women.
Americanah Page 30