Behold the Dreamers(61)
“But what are you afraid of telling her?” Neni asked, walking back from the kitchen. “Do you know something that he’s hiding from her?”
Jende did not reply; he’d wanted to tell her for a long time.
When he first found out about the women, he’d thought it would be nice for her to know so they could gossip about it late at night, laugh about Mr. Edwards booking an appointment with a tall woman or a blond woman. Whenever he dropped Mr. Edwards at the Chelsea Hotel, he would tell her about it and they would laugh, and she would be grateful that he would never do such a thing because he was a good man, an honorable man, a man of integrity. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized how differently it could play out if he told her. She might become suspicious, even anxious. She would think: What if Mr. Edwards offered him a prostitute, too, as some sort of gift or bonus? What if Mr. Edwards indoctrinated him, contaminated him, made him feel as if it was every man’s God-given right to satisfy himself as often as he needed to? He could see her becoming needlessly terrified, especially now that her face had grown fat, her legs had grown fat, and her whole body looked like it would be fat for years to come. Which didn’t bother him. Didn’t bother him at all. But he knew that she thought he cared, which was why she bought all those magazines with skinny women on the cover and made sure she didn’t put too much palm oil in the food. Now she was talking about weight loss and calories and cholesterol and sugar-free this and fat-free that and stupid things no one in Limbe talked about. Now she was beginning to worry about nonsense. She was becoming a fearful wife.
He loved her so much (he wouldn’t have traded her even for an American passport), but he could understand why she was afraid. He was the only man she’d ever loved, just like her father was the only man her mother had ever loved. And then what happened? Twenty-four years into their marriage, the year after her father lost his job at the seaport, her mother found out that her father had impregnated a teenager who lived in Portor-Portor Quarters. Her mother had been humiliated; Neni had been humiliated more than her mother, if such a thing were possible. Her mother had caught her crying and yelled at her. Wipe those tears, she’d said. Men are ruled by a thing they cannot control. Neni had wanted to yell back at her mother and tell her to stop justifying her husband acting as if his unhappiness was everyone’s fault. She’d wanted to scream at her for staying married to an angry man who scolded her in front of her children, but she knew that with only a part-time secretarial job and eight children, her mother would struggle to start a new life. So she had dried her eyes and decided on that day that there was one thing she wanted in a man above all else: loyalty. And that was the one thing Jende was best at, above all other men she’d ever known: keeping his promises.
“Do you know something?” she asked him again.
“Why would he share his secret with me?” he said to her. “I’m his driver, not his friend.”
“Then so?” she said. “Tell her. I wouldn’t try to anger Mrs. Edwards if I were you.”
“I agree with Neni,” Winston said. He was now sitting on the sofa with Neni, while Jende sat alone at the table. “The moment Neni told us about the woman and her drugs, I knew something was not right with her.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“That means that, Bo, this woman can make you lose your job.”
“Rubbish!”
“It’s not rubbish, Jends.”
“Women can be very determined,” Winston said. “If you don’t give her what she wants, you could lose your job. He hired you, but she can fire you, I’m telling you.”
“But what am I supposed to do about that?” Jende said. “Why can’t she ask her own husband what she’s concerned about?”
“Who knows what kind of marriage they have? The kinds of marriage people have in this country, Bo, very strange. It’s not like back home where a man can do as he sees fit and a woman follows him. Over here it’s reversed. Women tell their men what they want and the men do it, because they say happy wife, happy life. This society is funny.”
“So what do you think I should do?” Jende asked Winston.
Winston looked at his cousin intently and scowled. “I just thought of something,” he said, crossing his legs and folding his arms.
“What?” Jende asked.
Winston uncrossed his legs, stood up, and untucked his shirt. “This house,” he said, “it’s so hot someone can fry puff-puff in the air.” He walked over to the window and cracked it open by two inches. “You guys should leave this window—”
“Forget about the window and come tell us something useful!” Neni said.
“Okay, okay, here’s what I’m thinking,” he said, beaming as he walked back to the sofa and sat next to Neni, loosening his tie in the process. “This is what you should do … but you have to do it without any worrying about if something goes wrong.”
“This one?” Neni said after a scoff. “His worrying is something else. Just tell us. If he cannot do it, I’ll do it.”
“No, he has to do it himself.”
Jende nodded.
Winston sat up and leaned forward.
“This is what you do,” he said, looking at Jende. “You go up to the woman. Not tomorrow. Maybe in two days’ time, so she knows you’ve had time to think about it, eh?”