CHAPTER 35
Ifemelu woke up one night to go to the bathroom, and heard Blaine in the living room, talking on the phone, his tone gentle and solacing. “I’m sorry, did I wake you? That was my sister, Shan,” he said when he came back to bed. “She’s back in New York, from France. Her first book is about to be published and she’s having a small meltdown about it.” He paused. “Another small meltdown. Shan has lots of melt-downs. Will you go down to the city this weekend with me to see her?”
“Sure. What does she do again?”
“What doesn’t Shan do? She used to work at a hedge fund. Then she left and traveled all over the world and did a bit of journalism. She met this Haitian guy and moved to Paris to live with him. Then he got sick and died. It happened very quickly. She stayed for a while, and even after she decided to move back to the States, she kept the flat in Paris. She’s been with this new guy, Ovidio, for about a year now. He’s the first real relationship she’s had since Jerry died. Pretty decent cat. He’s away this week, on assignment in California, so Shan’s alone. She likes to have these gatherings, she calls them salons. She has an amazing group of friends, mostly artists and writers, and they get together at her place and have really good conversations.” He paused. “She’s a really special person.”
WHEN SHAN WALKED into a room, all the air disappeared. She did not breathe deeply; she did not need to: the air simply floated towards her, drawn by her natural authority, until there was nothing left for others. Ifemelu imagined Blaine’s airless childhood, running after Shan to impress her, to remind her of his existence. Even now, as an adult, he was still the little brother full of desperate love, trying to win an approval that he feared he never would. They arrived at Shan’s apartment early in the afternoon, and Blaine stopped to chat with the doorman, as he had chatted with their taxi driver from Penn Station, in that unforced manner that he had, forming alliances with janitors, with cleaning staff, with bus drivers. He knew how much they made and how many hours they worked; he knew they didn’t have health insurance.
“Hey, Jorge, how’s it going?” Blaine pronounced it the Spanish way: Hor-hay.
“Pretty good. How are your students over at Yale?” the doorman asked, looking pleased to see him and pleased that he taught at Yale.
“Driving me crazy as usual,” Blaine said. Then he pointed at the woman standing by the elevator with her back to them, cradling a pink yoga mat. “Oh, there’s Shan.” Shan was tiny and beautiful, with an oval face and high cheekbones, an imperious face.
“Hey!” she said, and hugged Blaine. She did not look once at Ifemelu. “I’m so glad I went to my Pilates class. It leaves you if you leave it. Did you go running today?”
“Yep.”
“I just talked to David again. He says he’ll send me alternative covers this evening. Finally they seem to be hearing me.” She rolled her eyes. The elevator’s doors slid open and she led the way in, still talking to Blaine, who now seemed uncomfortable, as though he was waiting for a moment to make introductions, a moment that Shan was not willing to give.
“The marketing director called me this morning. She had that really unbearable politeness that is worse than any insult, you know? And so she tells me how booksellers love the cover already and blah blah blah. It’s ridiculous,” Shan said.
“It’s the herd instinct of corporate publishing. They do what everyone else does,” Blaine said.
The elevator stopped at her floor, and she turned to Ifemelu. “Oh, sorry, I’m so stressed,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you. Blaine won’t stop talking about you.” She looked at Ifemelu, a frank sizing up that was not shy to be a frank sizing up. “You’re very pretty.”
“You’re very pretty,” Ifemelu said, surprising herself, because those were not the words she would have ordinarily said, but she felt already co-opted by Shan; Shan’s compliment had made her strangely happy. Shan is special, Blaine had said, and Ifemelu understood now what he meant. Shan had the air of a person who was somehow chosen. The gods had placed a wand on her. If she did ordinary things, they became enigmatic.
“Do you like the room?” Shan asked Ifemelu, with a sweep of her hand, taking in the dramatic furnishing: a red rug, a blue sofa, an orange sofa, a green armchair.
“I know it’s supposed to mean something but I don’t get it.”
Shan laughed, short sounds that seemed cut off prematurely, as though more were supposed to follow but did not, and because she merely laughed, not saying anything, Ifemelu added, “It’s interesting.”
“Yes, interesting.” Shan stood by the dining table and raised her leg onto it, leaning over to grasp her foot in her hand. Her body was a collection of graceful small curves, her buttocks, her breasts, her calves, and there was in her movement the entitlement of the chosen; she could stretch her leg on her dining table whenever she wanted, even with a guest in her apartment.
“Blaine introduced me to Raceteenth. It’s a great blog,” she said.
“Thank you,” Ifemelu said.
“I have a Nigerian friend who is a writer. Do you know Kelechi Garuba?”
“I’ve read his work.”
“We talked about your blog the other day and he said he was sure the Non-American Black was a Caribbean because Africans don’t care about race. He’ll be shocked when he meets you!” Shan paused to exchange the leg on the table, leaning in to grasp her foot.
“He’s always fretting about how his books don’t do well. I’ve told him he needs to write terrible things about his own people if he wants to do well. He needs to say Africans alone are to blame for African problems, and Europeans have helped Africa more than they’ve hurt Africa, and he’ll be famous and people will say he’s so honest!”
Ifemelu laughed.
“Interesting picture,” she said, gesturing to a photo on a side table, of Shan holding two bottles of champagne high above her head, surrounded by tattered, smiling, brown children in what looked like a Latin American slum, shacks with patched-up tin walls behind her. “I mean interesting literally.”
“Ovidio didn’t want it displayed but I insisted. It’s supposed to be ironic, obviously.”
Ifemelu imagined the insisting, a simple sentence, which would not need to be repeated and which would have Ovidio scrambling.
“So do you go home to Nigeria often?” Shan asked.
“No. Actually I haven’t been home since I came to the States.”
“Why?”
“At first I couldn’t afford to. Then I had work and just never seemed to make the time.”
Shan was facing her now, her arms stretched out and pushed back like wings.
“Nigerians call us acata, right? And it means wild animal?”
“I don’t know that it means wild animal, I really don’t know what it means, and I don’t use it.” Ifemelu found herself almost stammering. It was true and yet in the directness of Shan’s gaze, she felt guilty. Shan dripped power, a subtle and devastating kind.
Blaine emerged from the kitchen with two tall glasses of a reddish liquid.
“Virgin cocktails!” Shan said, with a childish delight, as she took a glass from Blaine.
“Pomegranate, sparkling water, and a bit of cranberry,” Blaine said, giving Ifemelu the other glass. “So when are you going to have the next salon, Shan? I was telling Ifemelu about them.”
When Blaine had told Ifemelu about Shan calling her gatherings “salons,” he had underlined the word with mockery, but now he said it with an earnestly French pronunciation: sa-lon.
“Oh, soon, I guess.” Shan shrugged, fond and offhand, sipped from her glass, and then leaned sideways in a stretch, like a tree bent by wind.
Shan’s cell phone rang. “Where did I put that phone? It’s probably David.”
The phone was on the table. “Oh, it’s Luc. I’ll call him back later.”
“Who’s Luc?” Blaine asked, coming out of the kitchen.
“This French guy, rich guy. It’s funny, I met him at the airport for f
uck’s sake. I tell him I have a boyfriend and he goes ‘Then I will admire from afar and bide my time.’ He actually said ‘bide.’ ” Shan sipped her drink. “It’s nice how in Europe, white men look at you like a woman, not a black woman. Now I don’t want to date them, hell no, I just want to know the possibility is there.”
Blaine was nodding, agreeing. If anybody else had said what Shan did, he would instantly comb through the words in search of nuance, and he would disagree with their sweep, their simplicity. Ifemelu had once told him, as they watched a news item about a celebrity divorce, that she did not understand the unbending, unambiguous honesties that Americans required in relationships. “What do you mean?” he asked her, and she heard a looming disagreement in his voice; he, too, believed in unbending, unambiguous honesties.
“It’s different for me and I think it’s because I’m from the Third World,” she said. “To be a child of the Third World is to be aware of the many different constituencies you have and how honesty and truth must always depend on context.” She had felt clever to have thought of this explanation but Blaine shook his head even before she finished speaking and said, “That is so lazy, to use the Third World like that.”
Now he was nodding as Shan said, “Europeans are just not as conservative and uptight about relationships as Americans are. In Europe the white men are thinking ‘I just want a hot woman.’ In America the white men are thinking ‘I won’t touch a black woman but I could maybe do Halle Berry.’ ”
“That’s funny,” Blaine said.
“Of course, there’s the niche of white men in this country who will only date black women, but that’s a kind of fetish and it’s nasty,” Shan said, and then turned her glowing gaze on Ifemelu.
Ifemelu was almost reluctant to disagree; it was strange, how much she wanted Shan to like her. “Actually my experience has been the opposite. I get a lot more interest from white men than from African-American men.”
“Really?” Shan paused. “I guess it’s your exotic credential, that whole Authentic African thing.”
It stung her, the rub of Shan’s dismissal, and then it became a prickly resentment directed at Blaine, because she wished he would not agree so heartily with his sister.
Shan’s phone rang again. “Oh, that had better be David!” She took the phone into the bedroom.
“David is her editor. They want to put this sexualized image, a black torso, on her cover and she’s fighting it,” Blaine said.
“Really.” Ifemelu sipped her drink and flipped through an art magazine, still irritated with him.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
Shan was back. Blaine looked at her. “All okay?”
She nodded. “They’re not using it. Everyone seems to be on the same page now.”
“That’s great,” Blaine said.
“You should be my guest blogger for a couple of days when your book comes out,” Ifemelu said. “You would be amazing. I would love to have you.”
Shan raised her eyebrows, an expression Ifemelu could not read, and she feared that she had been too gushing. “Yes, I guess I could,” Shan said.
Obama Can Win Only If He Remains the Magic Negro
His pastor is scary because it means maybe Obama is not the Magic Negro after all. By the way, the pastor is pretty melodramatic, but have you been to an old school American Black church? Pure theater. But this guy’s basic point is true: that American Blacks (certainly those his age) know an America different from American Whites; they know a harsher, uglier America. But you’re not supposed to say that, because in America everything is fine and everyone is the same. So now that the pastor’s said it, maybe Obama thinks so too, and if Obama thinks so then he isn’t the Magic Negro and only a Magic Negro can win an American election. And what’s a Magic Negro, you ask? The black man who is eternally wise and kind. He never reacts under great suffering, never gets angry, is never threatening. He always forgives all kinds of racist shit. He teaches the white person how to break down the sad but understandable prejudice in his heart. You see this man in many films. And Obama is straight from central casting.
CHAPTER 36
It was a surprise birthday party in Hamden, for Marcia, Blaine’s friend.
“Happy birthday, Marcia!” Ifemelu said in a chorus with the other friends, standing beside Blaine. Her tongue a little heavy in her mouth, her excitement a little forced. She had been with Blaine for more than a year, but she did not quite belong with his friends.
“You bastard!” Marcia said to her husband, Benny, laughing, tears in her eyes.
Marcia and Benny both taught history, they came from the South and they even looked alike, with their smallish bodies and honey complexions and long locs grazing their necks. They wore their love like a heavy perfume, exuding a transparent commitment, touching each other, referring to each other. Watching them, Ifemelu imagined this life for her and Blaine, in a small house on a quiet street, batiks hung on the walls, African sculptures glowering in corners, and both of them existing in a steady hum of happiness.
Benny was pouring drinks. Marcia was walking around, still stunned, looking into the trays of catered food spread on the dining table, and then up at the mass of balloons bobbing against the ceiling. “When did you do all this, baby? I was just gone an hour!”
She hugged everyone, while wiping the tears from her eyes. Before she hugged Ifemelu, a wrinkle of worry flickered on her face, and Ifemelu knew that Marcia had forgotten her name. “So good to see you again, thank you for coming,” she said, with an extra dose of sincerity, the “so” emphasized, as though to make up for forgetting Ifemelu’s name.
“Chile!” she said to Blaine, who hugged her and lifted her slightly off the floor, both of them laughing.
“You’re lighter than you were on your last birthday!” Blaine said.
“And she looks younger every day!” Paula, Blaine’s ex-girlfriend, said.
“Marcia, are you going to bottle your secret?” a woman whom Ifemelu did not know asked, her bleached hair bouffant like a platinum helmet.
“Her secret is good sex,” Grace said seriously, a Korean-American woman who taught African-American studies, tiny and slender, always in stylishly loose-fitting clothes, so that she seemed to float in a swish of silks. “I’m that rare thing, a Christian left-wing nut,” she had told Ifemelu when they first met.
“Did you hear that, Benny?” Marcia asked. “Our secret is good sex.”
“That’s right!” Benny said, and winked at her. “Hey, anybody see Barack Obama’s announcement this morning?”
“Yes, it’s been on the news all day,” Paula said. She was short and blond, with a clear pinkish complexion, outdoorsy and healthy, that made Ifemelu wonder if she rode horses.
“I don’t even have a television,” Grace said, with a self-mocking sigh. “I only recently sold out and got a cell phone.”
“They’ll replay it,” Benny said.
“Let’s eat!” It was Stirling, the wealthy one, who Blaine told her came from Boston old money; he and his father had been legacy students at Harvard. He was left-leaning and well-meaning, crippled by his acknowledgment of his own many privileges. He never allowed himself to have an opinion. “Yes, I see what you mean,” he said often.
The food was eaten with a lot of praise and wine, the fried chicken, the greens, the pies. Ifemelu took tiny portions, pleased she had snacked on some nuts before they left; she did not like soul food.
“I haven’t had corn bread this good in years,” Nathan said, seated beside her. He was a literature professor, neurotic and blinky behind his glasses, who Blaine once said was the only person at Yale that he trusted completely. Nathan had told her, some months earlier, in a voice filled with hauteur, that he did not read any fiction published after 1930. “It all went downhill after the thirties,” he said.
She had told Blaine about it later, and there was an impatience in her tone, almost an accusation, as she added that academics were
not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.
Blaine said, “Oh, Nathan just has his issues. It’s not about being an academic.” A new defensiveness had begun to creep into Blaine’s tone when they talked about his friends, perhaps because he sensed her discomfort with them. When she attended a talk with him, he would make sure to say it could have been better, or that the first ten minutes were boring, as though to preempt her own criticisms. The last talk they had attended was his ex-girlfriend Paula’s, at a college in Middletown, Paula standing in front of the classroom, in a dark-green wrap dress and boots, sounding fluid and convinced, provoking and charming her audience at the same time; the young pretty political scientist who would certainly get tenure. She had glanced often at Blaine, like a student at a professor, gauging her performance from his expression. As she spoke, Blaine nodded continously, and once even sighed aloud as though her words had brought to him a familiar and exquisite epiphany. They had remained good friends, Paula and Blaine, had kept in the same circle after she cheated on him with a woman also named Paula, and now called Pee to distinguish them from each other. “Our relationship had been in trouble for a while. She said she was just experimenting with Pee but I could tell it was much more, and I was right because they’re still together,” Blaine told Ifemelu, and it all seemed to her to be too tame, too civil. Even Paula’s friendliness towards her seemed too scrubbed clean.
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