Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, Purple Hibiscus: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Three-Book Collection
‘Good.’ She did not mean that. She had wanted to hear that Odenigbo could no longer bear to live the life that had been theirs.
When he visited her, she tried not to feel disappointment at how normal he looked. She stood at the door and gave noncommittal answers, resentful of his effortless volubility, of how casually he said, ‘You know I will never love another woman, nkem,’ as if he was certain that, with time, everything would be the same again. She resented, too, the romantic attention of other men. The single men took to stopping by her flat, the married ones to bumping into her outside her department. Their courting upset her because it – and they – assumed that her relationship with Odenigbo was permanently over. ‘I am not interested,’ she told them, and even as she said it, she hoped that it would not get back to Odenigbo because she did not want him to think she was pining. And she did not pine: she added new material to her lectures, cooked long meals, read new books, bought new records. She became secretary of the St Vincent de Paul Society, and after they donated food to the villages she wrote the minutes of their meetings in a notebook. She cultivated zinnias in her front yard and, finally, she cultivated a friendship with her black American neighbour, Edna Whaler.
Edna had a quiet laugh. She taught music and played jazz records a little too loudly and cooked tender pork chops and talked often about the man who had left her a week before their wedding in Montgomery and the uncle who had been lynched when she was a child. ‘You know what always amazed me?’ she would ask Olanna, as if she had not told her only a day previously. ‘That civilized white folk wore nice dresses and hats and gathered to watch a white man hang a black man from a tree.’
She would laugh her quiet laugh and pat her hair, which had the greasy shine of hot-pressing. At first, they did not talk about Odenigbo. It was refreshing for Olanna to be with somebody who was far removed from the circle of friends she had shared with Odenigbo. Then, once, as Edna sang along to Billie Holiday’s ‘My Man’, she asked, ‘Why do you love him?’
Olanna looked up. Her mind was a blank board. ‘Why do I love him?’
Edna raised her eyebrows, mouthing but not singing Billie Holiday’s words.
‘I don’t think love has a reason,’ Olanna said.
‘Sure it does.’
‘I think love comes first and then the reasons follow. When I am with him, I feel that I don’t need anything else.’ Olanna’s words surprised her, but the startling truth brought the urge to cry.
Edna was watching her. ‘You can’t keep lying to yourself that you’re okay.’
‘I’m not lying to myself,’ Olanna said. Billie Holiday’s plaintively scratchy voice had begun to irritate her. She didn’t know how transparent she was. She thought her frequent laughter was authentic and that Edna had no idea that she cried when she was alone in her flat.
‘I’m not the best person to talk to about men, but you need to talk this through with somebody,’ Edna said. ‘Maybe the priest, as payback for all those St Vincent de Paul charity trips you’ve made?’
Edna laughed and Olanna laughed along, but already she was thinking that perhaps she did need to talk to somebody, somebody neutral who would help her reclaim herself, deal with the stranger she had become. She started to drive to St Peter’s many times in the next few days but stopped and changed her mind. Finally, on a Monday afternoon, she went, driving quickly, ignoring speed bumps, so that she would not give herself any time to stop. She sat on a wooden bench in Father Damian’s airless office and kept her eyes focused on the filing cabinet labeled laity as she talked about Odenigbo.
‘I don’t go to the staff club because I don’t want to see him. I’ve lost my interest in tennis. He betrayed and hurt me, and yet it seems as if he’s running my life.’
Father Damian tugged at his collar, adjusted his glasses, and rubbed his nose, and she wondered if he was thinking of something, anything, to do since he had no answers for her.
‘I didn’t see you in church last Sunday,’ he said finally.
Olanna was disappointed, but he was a priest after all and this had to be his solution: Seek God. She had wanted him to make her feel justified, solidify her right to self-pity, encourage her to occupy a larger portion of the moral high ground. She wanted him to condemn Odenigbo.
‘You think I need to go to church more often?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
Olanna nodded and brought her bag closer, ready to get up and leave. She should not have come. She should not have expected a round-faced, voluntary eunuch in white robes to be in a position to understand how she felt. He was looking at her, his eyes large behind the lenses.
‘I also think that you should forgive Odenigbo,’ he said, and pulled at his collar as though it was choking him. For a moment, Olanna felt contempt for him. What he was saying was too easy, too predictable. She did not need to have come to hear it.
‘Okay.’ She got up. ‘Thank you.’
‘It’s not for him, you know. It’s for you.’
‘What?’ He was still sitting, so she looked down to meet his eyes.
‘Don’t see it as forgiving him. See it as allowing yourself to be happy. What will you do with the misery you have chosen? Will you eat misery?’
Olanna looked at the crucifix above the window, at the face of Christ serene in agony, and said nothing.
* * *
Odenigbo arrived very early, before she had had breakfast. She knew that something was wrong even before she unlocked the door and saw his sombre face.
‘What is it?’ she asked, and felt a sharp horror at the hope that sneaked into her mind: that his mother had died.
‘Amala is pregnant,’ he said. There was a selfless and steely tone to his voice, that of a person delivering bad news to other people while remaining strong on their behalf.
Olanna clutched the door handle. ‘What?’
‘Mama just came to tell me that Amala is pregnant with my child.’
Olanna began to laugh. She laughed and laughed and laughed because the present scene, the past weeks, suddenly seemed fantastical.
‘Let me come in,’ Odenigbo said. ‘Please.’
She moved back from the door. ‘Come in.’
He sat down on the edge of the chair, and she felt as if she had been gumming back the pieces of broken chinaware only to have them shatter all over again; the pain was not in the second shattering but in the realization that trying to put them back together had been of no consequence from the beginning.
‘Nkem, please, let’s deal with this together,’ he said. ‘We will do whatever you want. Please let’s do it together.’
Olanna went to the kitchen to turn the kettle off. She came back and sat down opposite him. ‘You said it happened just once. Just once and she got pregnant? Just once?’ She wished she had not raised her voice. But it was so implausible, so theatrically implausible, that he would sleep with a woman once in a drunken state and get her pregnant.
‘It was just once,’ he said. ‘Just once.’
‘I see.’ But she did not see at all. The urge came then, to slap his face, because the self-entitled way he stressed once made the act seem inevitable, as if the point was how many times it had happened rather than that it should not have happened at all.
‘I told Mama I’ll send Amala to Dr Okonkwo in Enugu, and she said it would be over her dead body. She said Amala will have the child and she will raise the child herself. There is a young man doing timber work in Ondo that Amala is to marry.’ Odenigbo stood up. ‘Mama planned this from the beginning. I see now how she made sure I was dead drunk before sending Amala to me. I feel as if I’ve been dropped