The Thing Around Your Neck Read online

  “‘Have faith’ is not really like saying be tall and shapely. It’s more like saying be okay with the bulge and with having to wear Spanx,” he said. And she had laughed, too, surprised that this plump white man with silver hair knew what Spanx was.

  Ukamaka dished out some stew beside the already warmed rice on Chinedu’s plate. “If God prefers some people to others, it doesn’t make sense that it would be Udenna who would be spared. Udenna could not have been the nicest or kindest person who was booked on that flight,” she said.

  “You can’t use human reasoning for God.” Chinedu held up the fork she had placed on his plate. “Please give me a spoon.”

  She handed him one. Udenna would have been amused by Chinedu, would have said how very bush it was to eat rice with a spoon the way Chinedu did, gripping it with all his fingers—Udenna with his ability to glance at people and know, from their posture and their shoes, what kind of childhood they had had.

  “That’s Udenna, right?” Chinedu gestured toward the photo in the wicker frame, Udenna’s arm draped around her shoulders, both their faces open and smiling; it had been taken by a stranger at a restaurant in Philadelphia, a stranger who had said, “You are such a lovely couple, are you married?” and Udenna had replied, “Not yet,” in that flirty crooked-smile way he had with female strangers.

  “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 Killed in Nigeria Plane Crash. The government had confirmed that all one hundred and seventeen people aboard the airplane were dead.

  “No survivors,” she said.

  “Father, take control,” Chinedu said, exhaling loudly. He came and sat beside her to read from her laptop, their bodies close, the smell of her peppery stew on his breath. There were more photographs from the crash site. Ukamaka stared at one of shirtless men carrying a piece of metal that looked like the twisted frame of a bed; she could not imagine what part of the plane it could possibly have been.

  “There is too much iniquity in our country,” Chinedu said, getting up. “Too much corruption. Too many things that we have to pray about.”

  “Are you saying the crash was a punishment from God?”

  “A punishment and a wake-up call.” Chinedu was eating the last of his rice. She found it distracting when he scraped the spoon against his teeth.

  “I used to go to church every day when I was a teenager, morning Mass at six. I did it by myself, my family was a Sunday-Sunday family,” she said. “Then one day I just stopped going.”

  “Everybody has a crisis of faith. It’s normal.”

  “It wasn’t a crisis of faith. Church suddenly became like Father Christmas, something that you never question when you are a child but when you become an adult you realize that the man in that Father Christmas costume is actually your neighbor from down the street.”

  Chinedu shrugged, as though he did not have much patience for this decadence, this ambivalence of hers. “Is the rice finished?”

  “There’s more.” She took his plate to warm up some more rice and stew. When she handed it to him, she said, “I don’t know what I would have done if Udenna had died. I don’t even know what I would have felt.”

  “You just have to be grateful to God.”

  She walked to the window and adjusted the blinds. It was newly autumn. Outside, she could see the trees that lined Lawrence Drive, their foliage a mix of green and copper.

  “Udenna never said ‘I love you’ to me because he thought it was a cliché. Once I told him I was sorry he felt bad about something and he started shouting and said I should not use an expression like ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’ because it was unoriginal. He used to make me feel that nothing I said was witty enough or sarcastic enough or smart enough. He was always struggling to be different, even when it didn’t matter. It was as if he was performing his life instead of living his life.”

  Chinedu said nothing. He took full mouthfuls; sometimes he used a finger as a wedge to nudge more rice onto his spoon.

  “He knew I loved being here, but he was always telling me how Princeton was a boring school, and that it was out of touch. If he thought I was too happy about something that did not have to do with him, he always found a way to put it down. How can you love somebody and
yet want to manage the amount of happiness that person is allowed?”

  Chinedu nodded; he both understood her and sided with her, she could tell. In the following days, days now cool enough for her knee-length leather boots, days in which she took the shuttle to campus, researched her dissertation at the library, met with her advisor, taught her undergraduate composition class, or met with students asking for permission to hand in assignments late, she would return to her apartment in the late evening and wait for Chinedu to visit so she could offer him rice or pizza or spaghetti. So she could talk about Udenna. She told Chinedu things she could not or did not want to tell Father Patrick. She liked that Chinedu said little, looking as if he was not only listening to her but also thinking about what she was saying. Once she thought idly of starting an affair with him, of indulging in the classic rebound, but there was a refreshingly asexual quality to him, something about him that made her feel that she did not have to pat some powder under her eyes to hide her dark circles.

  Her apartment building was full of other foreigners. She and Udenna used to joke that it was the uncertainty of the foreigners’ new surroundings that had congealed into the indifference they showed to one another. They did not say hello in the hallways or elevators, nor did they meet one another’s eyes during the five-minute ride on the campus shuttle, these intellectual stars from Kenya and China and Russia, these graduate students and fellows who would go on to lead and heal and reinvent the world. And so it surprised her that as she and Chinedu walked to the parking lot, he would wave to somebody, say hi to another. He told her about the Japanese post-doc fellow who sometimes gave him a ride to the mall, the German doctoral student whose two-year-old daughter called him Chindle.

  “Do you know them from your program?” she asked, and then added, “What program are you in?”

  He had once said something about chemistry, and she assumed he was doing a doctorate in chemistry. It had to be why she never saw him on campus; the science labs were so far off and so alien.

  “No. I met them when I came here.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Not long. Since spring.”

  “When I first came to Princeton, I wasn’t sure I wanted to live in a house only for grad students and fellows, but I kind of like it now. The first time Udenna visited me, he said this square building was so ugly and charmless. Were you in graduate housing before?”

  “No.” Chinedu paused and looked away. “I knew I had to make the effort to make friends in this building. How else will I get to the grocery store and to church? Thank God you have a car,” he said.

  She liked that he had said “Thank God you have a car,” because it was a statement about friendship, about doing things together in the long term, about having somebody who would listen to her talk about Udenna.

  On Sundays, she drove Chinedu to his Pentecostal church in Lawrenceville before going to the Catholic church on Nassau Street, and when she picked him up after service, they went grocery shopping at McCaffrey’s. She noticed how few groceries he bought and how carefully he scoured the sale flyers that Udenna had always ignored.

  When she stopped at Wild Oats, where she and Udenna had bought organic vegetables, Chinedu shook his head in wonder because he did not understand why anybody would pay more money for the same vegetables just because they had been grown without chemicals. He was examining the grains displayed in large plastic dispensers while she selected broccoli and put it in a bag.

  “Chemical-free this. Chemical-free that. People are wasting money for nothing. Aren’t the medicines they take to stay alive chemicals, too?”

  “You know it’s not the same thing, Chinedu.”

  “I don’t see the difference.”

  Ukamaka laughed. “It doesn’t really matter to me either way, but Udenna always wanted us to buy organic fruits and vegetables. I think he had read somewhere that it was what somebody like him was supposed to buy.”

  Chinedu looked at her with that unreadable closed expression again. Was he judging her? Trying to make up his mind about something he thought of her?

  She said, as she opened the trunk to put in the grocery bag, “I’m starving. Should we get a sandwich somewhere?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “It’s my treat. Or do you prefer Chinese?”

  “I’m fasting,” he said quietly.

  “Oh.” As a teenager, she, too, had fasted, drinking only water from morning until evening for a whole week, asking God to help her get the best result in the Senior Secondary School exam. She got the third-best result.

  “No wonder you didn’t eat any rice yesterday,” she said. “Will you sit with me while I eat then?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you fast often, or is this a special prayer you are doing? Or is it too personal for me to ask?”

  “It is too personal for you to ask,” Chinedu said with a mocking solemnity.

  She took down the car windows as she backed out of Wild Oats, stopping to let two jacketless women walk past, their jeans tight, their blond hair blown sideways by the wind. It was a strangely warm day for late autumn.

  “Fall sometimes reminds me of harmattan,” Chinedu said.

  “I know,” Ukamaka said. “I love harmattan. I think it’s because of Christmas. I love the dryness and dust of Christmas. Udenna and I went back together for Christmas last year and he spent New Year’s Day with my family in Nimo and my uncle kept questioning him: ‘Young man, when will you bring your family to come and knock on our door? What are you studying in school?’” Ukamaka mimicked a gruff voice and Chinedu laughed.

  “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 t
heir 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.