The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [64]
Abidemi was a banker, a Big Man’s son who had gone to university in England, the kind of guy who wore leather belts with elaborate designer logos as buckles. He had been wearing one of those when he came into the Lagos office of the mobile phone company where Chinedu worked in customer service. He had been almost rude, asking if there wasn’t somebody senior he could talk to, but Chinedu did not miss the look they exchanged, the heady thrill he had not felt since his first relationship with a sports prefect in secondary school. Abidemi gave him his card and said, curtly, “Call me.” It was the way Abidemi would run the relationship for the next two years, wanting to know where Chinedu went and what he did, buying him a car without consulting him, so that he was left in the awkward position of explaining to his family and friends how he had suddenly bought a Honda, asking him to come on trips to Calabar and Kaduna with only a day’s notice, sending vicious text messages when Chinedu missed his calls. Still, Chinedu had liked the possessiveness, the vitality of a relationship that consumed them both. Until Abidemi said he was getting married. Her name was Kemi and his parents and hers had known one another a long time. The inevitability of marriage had always been understood between them, unspoken but understood, and perhaps nothing would have changed if Chinedu had not met Kemi, at Abidemi’s parents’ wedding anniversary party. He had not wanted to go to the party—he stayed away from Abidemi’s family events—but Abidemi had insisted, saying he would survive the long evening only if Chinedu was there. Abidemi spoke in a voice lined with what seemed troublingly like laughter when he introduced Chinedu to Kemi as “my very good friend.”
“Chinedu drinks much more than I do,” Abidemi had said to Kemi, with her long weave-on and strapless yellow dress. She sat next to Abidemi, reaching out from time to time to brush something off his shirt, to refill his glass, to place a hand on his knee, and all the while her whole body was braced and attuned to his, as though ready to spring up and do whatever it took to please him. “You said I will grow a beer belly, abi?” Abidemi said, his hand on her thigh. “This man will grow one before me, I’m telling you.”
Chinedu had smiled tightly, a tension headache starting, his rage at Abidemi exploding. As Chinedu told Ukamaka this, how the anger of that evening had “scattered his head,” she noticed how tense he had become.
“You wished you hadn’t met his wife,” Ukamaka said.
“No. I wished he had been conflicted.”
“He must have been.”
“He wasn’t. I watched him that day, the way he was with both of us there, drinking stout and making jokes about me to her and about her to me, and I knew he would go to bed and sleep well at night. If we continued, he would come to me and then go home to her and sleep well every night. I wanted him not to sleep well sometimes.”
“And you ended it?”
“He was angry. He did not understand why I would not do what he wanted.”
“How can a person claim to love you and yet want you to do things that suit only them? Udenna was like that.”
Chinedu squeezed the pillow on his lap. “Ukamaka, not everything is about Udenna.”
“I’m just saying that Abidemi sounds a little bit like Udenna. I guess I just don’t understand that kind of love.”
“Maybe it wasn’t love,” Chinedu said, standing up abruptly from the couch. “Udenna did this to you and Udenna did that to you, but why did you let him? Why