The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [60]
“Yes, that is the great Udenna.” Ukamaka made a face and settled down at the tiny dining table with her plate. “I keep forgetting to remove that picture.” It was a lie. She had glanced at it often in the past month, sometimes reluctantly, always frightened of the finality of taking it down. She sensed that Chinedu knew it was a lie.
“Did you meet in Nigeria?” he asked.
“No, we met at my sister’s graduation party three years ago in New Haven. A friend of hers brought him. He was working on Wall Street and I was already in grad school here but we knew many of the same people from around Philadelphia. He went to UPenn for undergrad and I went to Bryn Mawr. It’s funny that we had so much in common but somehow we had never met until then. Both of us came to the U.S. to go to university at about the same time. It turned out we even took the SATs at the same center in Lagos and on the same day!”
“He looks tall,” Chinedu said, still standing by the bookcase, his plate balanced in his hand.
“He’s six feet four.” She heard the pride in her own voice. “That’s not his best picture. He looks a lot like Thomas Sankara. I had a crush on that man when I was a teenager. You know, the president of Burkina Faso, the popular president, the one they killed—”
“Of course I know Thomas Sankara.” Chinedu looked closely at the photograph for a moment, as though to search for traces of Sankara’s famed handsomeness. Then he said, “I saw both of you once outside in the parking lot and I knew you were from Nigeria. I wanted to come and introduce myself but I was in a rush to catch the shuttle.”
Ukamaka was pleased to hear this; his having seen them together made the relationship tangible. The past three years of sleeping with Udenna and aligning her plans to Udenna’s and cooking with peppers were not, after all, in her imagination. She restrained herself from asking what exactly Chinedu remembered: Had he seen Udenna’s hand placed on her lower back? Had he seen Udenna saying something suggestive to her, their faces close together?
“When did you see us?” she asked.
“About two months ago. You were walking toward your car.”
“How did you know we were Nigerian?”
“I can always tell.” He sat down opposite her. “But this morning I looked at the names on the mailboxes to find out which apartment was yours.”
“I remember now that I once saw you on the shuttle. I knew you were African but I thought you might be from Ghana. You looked too gentle to be Nigerian.”
Chinedu laughed. “Who says I am gentle?” He mockingly puffed out his chest, his mouth full of rice. Udenna would have pointed out Chinedu’s forehead and said that one did not need to hear Chinedu’s accent to know that he was the sort of person who had gone to a community secondary school in his village and learned English by reading a dictionary in candlelight, because one could tell right away from his lumpy and vein-scarred forehead. It was what Udenna had said about the Nigerian student at Wharton whose friendship he consistently snubbed, whose e-mails he never replied to. The student, with his giveaway forehead and bush ways, simply did not make the cut. Make the cut. Udenna often used that expression and she at first thought it puerile but had begun, in the last year, to use it herself.
“Is the stew too peppery?” she asked, noticing how slowly Chinedu was eating.
“It’s fine. I’m used to eating pepper. I grew up in Lagos.”
“I never liked hot food until I met Udenna. I’m not even sure I like it now.”
“But you still cook with it.”
She did not like his saying that and she did not like that his face was closed, his expression unreadable, as he glanced at her and then back at his plate. She said, “Well, I guess I’m used to it now.”
“Can you check for the latest news?”
She pressed a key on her laptop, refreshed a Web page. All