The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [63]
“Have you gone home to visit since you left?” Ukamaka asked, and as soon as she did, she wished she had not. Of course he would not have been able to afford a ticket home to visit.
“No.” His tone was flat.
“I was planning to move back after graduate school and work with an NGO in Lagos, but Udenna wanted to go into politics, so I started planning to live in Abuja instead. Will you move back when you finish here? I can imagine the loads of money you’ll make at one of those oil companies in the Niger Delta, with your chemistry doctorate.” She knew she was speaking too fast, babbling, really, trying to make up for the discomfort she had felt earlier.
“I don’t know.” Chinedu shrugged. “Can I change the radio station?”
“Of course.” She sensed his mood shift in the way he kept his eyes focused on the window after he changed the radio from NPR to an FM station with loud music.
“I think I’ll get your favorite, sushi, instead of a sandwich,” she said, her tone teasing. She had once asked if he liked sushi and he had said, “God forbid. I am an African man. I eat only cooked food.” She added, “You really should try sushi sometime. How can you live in Princeton and not eat sashimi?”
He barely smiled. She drove slowly to the sandwich place, over-nodding to the music from the radio to show that she was enjoying it as he seemed to be.
“I’ll just pick up the sandwich,” she said, and he said he would wait in the car. The garlic flavors from the foil-wrapped chicken sandwich filled the car when she got back in.
“Your phone rang,” Chinedu said.
She picked up her cell phone, lodged by the shift, and looked at it. Rachel, a friend from her department, perhaps calling to find out if she wanted to go to the talk on morality and the novel at East Pyne the next day.
“I can’t believe Udenna hasn’t called me,” she said, and started the car. He had sent an e-mail to thank her for her concern while he was in Nigeria. He had removed her from his Instant Messenger buddy list so that she could no longer know when he was online. And he had not called.
“Maybe it’s best for him not to call,” Chinedu said. “So you can move on.”
“It’s not that simple,” she said, slightly annoyed, because she wanted Udenna to call, because the photo was still up on her bookcase, because Chinedu sounded as if he alone knew what was best for her. She waited until they were back at their apartment building and Chinedu had taken his bags up to his apartment and come back down before she said, “You know, it really isn’t as simple as you think it is. You don’t know what it is to love an asshole.”
“I do.”
She looked at him, wearing the same clothes he had worn the afternoon he first knocked on her door: a pair of jeans and an old sweatshirt with a saggy neckline, princeton printed on the front in orange.
“You’ve never said anything about it,” she said.
“You’ve never asked.”
She placed her sandwich on a plate and sat down at the tiny dining table. “I didn’t know there was anything to ask. I thought you would just tell me.”
Chinedu said nothing.
“So tell me. Tell me about this love. Was it here or back home?”
“Back home. I was with him for almost two years.”
The moment was quiet. She picked up a napkin and realized that she had known intuitively, perhaps from the very beginning, but she said, because she thought he expected her to show surprise, “Oh, you’re gay.”
“Somebody once told me that I am the straightest gay person she knew, and I hated myself for liking that.” He was smiling; he looked relieved.
“So tell me about this love.”
The man’s name was Abidemi. Something about the way Chinedu said his name, Abidemi, made her think of gently pressing on a sore muscle, the kind of self-inflicted ache that is satisfying.
He spoke slowly, revising details that she thought