Americanah Read Online Free Page B

sent just before he got married, she had called him Obinze, apologized for her silence over the years, wished him happiness in sunny sentences, and mentioned the black American she was living with. A gracious e-mail. He had hated it. He had hated it so much that he Googled the black American—and why should she give him the man’s full name if not because she wanted him Googled?—a lecturer at Yale, and found it infuriating that she lived with a man who referred on his blog to friends as “cats,” but it was the photo of the black American, oozing intellectual cool in distressed jeans and black-framed eyeglasses, that had tipped Obinze over, made him send her a cold reply.
Thank you for the good wishes, I have never been happier in my life
, he’d written. He hoped she would write something mocking back—it was so unlike her, not to have been even vaguely tart in that first e-mail—but she did not write at all, and when he e-mailed her again,after his honeymoon in Morocco, to say he wanted to keep in touch and wanted to talk sometime, she did not reply.
    The traffic was moving. A light rain was falling. The child beggar ran along, his doe-eyed expression more theatrical, his motions frantic: bringing his hand to his mouth again and again, fingertips pursed together. Obinze rolled down the window and held out a hundred-naira note. From the rearview mirror, his driver, Gabriel, watched with grave disapproval.
    “God bless you, oga!” the child beggar said.
    “Don’t be giving money to these beggars, sir,” Gabriel said. “They are all rich. They are using begging to make big money. I heard about one that built a block of six flats in Ikeja!”
    “So why are you working as a driver instead of a beggar, Gabriel?” Obinze asked, and laughed, a little too heartily. He wanted to tell Gabriel that his girlfriend from university had just e-mailed him, actually his girlfriend from university
and
secondary school. The first time she let him take off her bra, she lay on her back moaning softly, her fingers splayed on his head, and afterwards she said, “My eyes were open but I did not see the ceiling. This never happened before.” Other girls would have pretended that they had never let another boy touch them, but not her, never her. There was a vivid honesty about her. She began to call what they did together
ceiling
, their warm entanglements on his bed when his mother was out, wearing only underwear, touching and kissing and sucking, hips moving in simulation.
I’m longing for ceiling
, she once wrote on the back of his geography notebook, and for a long time afterwards he could not look at that notebook without a gathering frisson, a sense of secret excitement. In university, when they finally stopped simulating, she began to call
him
Ceiling, in a playful way, in a suggestive way—but when they fought or when she retreated into moodiness, she called him Obinze. She had never called him The Zed, as his friends did. “Why do you call him Ceiling anyway?” his friend Okwudiba once asked her, on one of those languorous days after first semester exams. She had joined a group of his friends sitting around a filthy plastic table in a beer parlor off campus. She drank from her bottle of Maltina, swallowed, glanced at Obinze, and said, “Because he is so tall his head touches the ceiling, can’t you see?” Her deliberate slowness, the small smile that stretched her lips, made it clear that shewanted them to know that this was not why she called him Ceiling. And he was not tall. She kicked him under the table and he kicked her back, watching his laughing friends; they were all a little afraid of her and a little in love with her. Did she see the ceiling when the black American touched her? Had she used “ceiling” with other men? It upset him now to think that she might have. His phone rang and for a confused moment he thought it was Ifemelu calling from America.
    “Darling,
kedu ebe I no
?” His wife, Kosi, always