Mr. and Mrs. Doctor Read online

Down the hall, the men glanced in their direction.

  “Lower your voice,” Job said.

  Cheryl’s lips had whitened. “You think just because you come to this country and we give you a job and you make a little money, you can do whatever you want. It ain’t fair.” She was near tears. “I mean, I was raised Catholic.” Her voice lowered. “Marriage is forever.”

  Job thought her words over. Cheryl had been married and divorced twice. That was not the problem.

  She gripped the edges of her skirt. “My parents, they would be turning in their graves over this. You.” Again, there was that peculiar note of disgust.

  Sweat dampened Job’s brow. “What is the problem?”

  “I’ll be sick. I ain’t some actor, you know. If I go in there feeling like this, I’ll give it all away. My brother has the liar’s face, not me.”

  Her brother. Job remembered the name on the card. Luther. He thought of his own brother, Samuel—older, taller, stronger, smarter—the first son, the one meant for America. “Luther,” he said, gently. “What is his age?”

  “He’s a year older—that makes him thirty-three,” Cheryl said. “But he’s no good. A prime-time bastard.”

  Again, Job thought of Samuel. Sharp in a way his father had glowingly called wit, tact. But was it really that?

  She clenched her fists at her sides. “I lose my job and everything goes to shit. We lose the house and then there’s nothing.”

  “Everything will be okie,” Job said. “We will finish and you will receive the second half of the money.”

  “No!” Cheryl said. She started to walk away. “Fuck it. I don’t need this. Fuck you and fuck Luther.”

  Job grabbed her by the wrist. “I paid you.” Glancing up, he met the eyes of the white man. The man untucked his shirt and started toward them.

  “It ain’t even enough money,” Cheryl said.

  “You will get the second half when we are finished.” Job’s voice was a whimper.

  “You can’t speak English? I said it ain’t enough.”

  “You want chips? You want Coca-Cola?” Job asked. “Fine. But I will not take you to eat in a restaurant.”

  “Is there a problem?” the man asked.

  “No problem,” Job said. Cheryl pushed out her lips.

  The man rushed toward Job and turned up the collar of his shirt. “Are you trying to run a scam?” The man looked to Cheryl for an answer, but she was suddenly still. He turned from her to Job and back to Cheryl again. “Silas said be here at four and you two don’t show up and it’s almost five. What’s going on?”

  “There is no problem,” Job said through gritted teeth. “I am paying the woman.” Without counting, Job reached into his pocket and produced the remainder of cash in his pocket. The man loosened his grip. Job adjusted his collar and flicked it where the man’s filthy hands had touched him. Only after he handed her the money did the man back away. Cheryl stuffed it into her purse.

  “And after we’re done, he’s gonna pay the other half, right?” she asked.

  The man looked from Job to Cheryl. Job’s fists tightened. He met the eyes of the other man, who gave him a long, tired look. It was as if he met this scene once a day. It was as if he was saying, You Africans fall for this every time. Job felt the blood rush to his face. He nodded slowly. Then, once again, he flicked away at the filth of the white man’s farmer hands from his neckline.

  Job sat licking the remnants of spicy pepper soup from his fingertips as he told Emeka about the blonde, tall-legged American model he had married earlier that afternoon. King Sunny Adé’s Explosion rumbled in the background, and Job shouted to be heard over the lyrics. “I am not lying,” he said. “She even offered to blow job me.”

  “You are lying, my friend,” Emeka said with a clap.

  A door swung open and closed. It was Emeka’s wife, Gladys, wrapper bound tightly at her armpits and stomach ballooning, pregnant even in shadow. In the five years that Job had known Emeka, he had watched him graduate from bachelor to married man. He had begun, like Job, as a student studying for a bachelor’s degree. Emeka studied engineering. Job studied molecular biology, the degree that was supposed to get him into medical school. Emeka, like Job, had worn wrinkled suits with high collars and wide legs even on the hottest of days.

  Five years later, Emeka was in graduate school, the civil engineering program at the University of Nebraska Omaha; Job had failed out of his undergraduate program and was employed as a nurse’s assistant at a local hospital. With his medical background, he earned the certificate quickly. All that mattered was that he worked in a hospital. The experience would help him in medical school, because eventually, he assured himself, he would make it there.

  Annually, when his father sent him tuition money, Job stored it in a savings bond. Even as his father’s businesses in Nigeria began their decline, somehow, faithfully, he managed to send Job the money to educate him abroad. His father even bragged to his friends that it was the duty of the old to care for the young, so the young could care for the old one day.

  At first Job thought about returning the money. After all, his family needed it. His father would never admit it, but his mother wore less jewelry with every annual visit. But there would be too many questions. What had he been doing in America all this time? How could he possibly have failed his classes? His father’s face would be hard, the look Job saw when Samuel disappointed them all by dying.

  There was also no sense in giving Emeka fodder for gossip or his unrelenting, unsolicited advice—You know, my friend, there are three things a man must do in his native land: marry, bury, and retire. America is the stepping-stone. If you cannot make it here, then go home a joke—and so they spent most free evenings in airless rooms, sweating into the yellowed armpits of old linen shirts as they discussed their favorite topic.

  “A-ah! A-mer-eeka!”

  “A-ah! A-mer-eeka!” Emeka clapped again.

  Gladys arched an eyebrow in the direction of the television, where Tom Brokaw spoke in measured syllables. Usually Brokaw elicited their exclamations. She dumped one of the children in Emeka’s lap, a girl, all legs with large wet eyes and a charcoal cotton ball of hair.

  But for the globe that Emeka carried for a stomach, he had changed little over the previous five years. The greatest change Job had noticed was in Gladys. In the beginning she wore her hair in neat plaits, a concentric design of endless circles woven together into tight bunches at her nape. Her nails were always a bright red, and her lips were painted to match. She was one of the big-bottomed women whom Job and his school friends would sing at as teenage boys as they hung from the limbs of the trees leading into town. They would promise the women that they would marry them and build them a palace of gold. They would line the streets with American dollars. They would dress the women in diamonds. There she is, Miss America, they would sing.

  Gladys would emerge from the wings of any room with two dripping mugs of Sapporo. When Job would lean to sip from his mug, Emeka would always smack Gladys’s bottom swiftly. Huffing at him, she would exclaim and straighten up just as Job looked in their direction. Always there was a look in her eyes that complemented that of Emeka’s, a look that said, This is the American Dream.

  That day, Gladys smelled of onions, Similac, and sweat. She swatted an errant fly and turned a fierce look at the girl. “Stay with your father!” Only then could Job make out another child, a baby girl jiggling against Gladys’s backside where she was bound tightly with cloth. Job could never keep count of the multiplying children, all girls. Gladys never joined Job and Emeka like she used to, balanced on one end of the sofa, her voice shrill as she interjected on behalf of one cause or the other.

  “Chai! I do not believe it,” Emeka said. His entire body shifted, and the child sprawled from his lap where she had just begun to nod to sleep. At that, the girl howled. Emeka pressed her face to his neck. Her cries were muffled, and his neck slickened with her saliva and mucous. Her cries went unabated. He jostled her,
his shoulder jutting in an uneven rhythm.

  “I cannot believe it, my friend,” he repeated.

  “I am not lying,” Job said with satisfaction.

  Suddenly a fan clicked on, and the chopped sound of another daughter’s voice joined it, following the fan as it turned a short arc. Like her father, she was all legs and stomach.

  “Turn that off! Can’t you see your father speaking?” Emeka bellowed in disgust. “Go help your mother.” The girl bounded to the kitchen, squealing as she thundered across the room.

  “The next one will be a boy,” Job assured him, knowing full well that Gladys and Emeka would never have a boy. In a small way, he relished that certainty.

  Just for a second, Emeka glared. Job rested his head on the wooden ridge of the La-Z-Boy in satisfaction.

  Emeka’s scorn was quickly replaced with amusement. “Tell me, now, what would I want with a boy?” He lifted the sniffling child’s face to his and blew a wet, airy kiss at her cheek. She shrieked. “Boys, they grow up and leave their fathers. They chase ugly American whores.” He met Job’s eyes with a wink. “These ones will all marry Nigerians. This one will marry a lawyer. You see how she cries and cries? She will win any argument. And that one—” he indicated the door. “That one will marry an engineer. You see how she looks at the fan? She is interested in the way machines work.” He stroked the puff of his daughter’s hair, wet with his sweat and her saliva. He looked into her watery eyes. “Your baby sister will marry a doctor.” He looked back at Job with an avuncular smile. “One day, maybe you will be so fortunate.”

  Job frowned, faltering for a moment. “I am a bachelor.” Mustering all the dignity he had, he added, “I am a free man.”

  “Yes, you are a free man, a bachelor,” Emeka conceded. “But you are free in the way of Americans.” He twisted his thumb at the storm of rioters on the television. The camera returned to Brokaw, who spoke in his gravelly voice about the scene. The Americans were in New York City’s Central Park, rallying against nuclear weapons. “The Americans are happy with nothing.”

  Bruce Springsteen and Linda Ronstadt were among the attendees. “Look at this nonsense,” Emeka said. “The Americans fight against the nuclear weapons they have made and given to other nations.” He jerked a thumb at Springsteen. “This one—I have heard his music, singing of crashing on the highway. What does he know of nuclear weapons? And this one, she should return to her husband and children. She has married the California governor, you know.”

  Under his breath, Job retorted, “When you make the rules, you do as you please. That is the golden rule.”

  “Ah, yes, the words of a Mobutu. A man like you would say such a thing.”

  Job thought of his brother, the one his father had lost in the war, the one they had all lost in the war because of his weakness, the arrogance of a small man. “What kind of nation can be ruled by a small man? Any man can tell you this.”

  Gladys returned just then, elbowing her way through the room with one child strapped to her back and another wrapped around her leg. The baby in Emeka’s lap was asleep now. “Good,” Gladys said. She began to reach for the girl, but Emeka stopped her.

  “Let me help, dear.”

  Job watched in silent disgust as Emeka carefully rose, making a show of his gentleness with his precious daughter. He kissed her forehead and cheeks multiple times, twirled his fingers through the tangles of her hair, and smoothed out the creases of her shrunken onesie. Emeka and Gladys marched toward the back room, where Job could already imagine the scene: Emeka laying the girl on the bed, the mother placing a kiss on her forehead. Just as they reentered the room, Emeka forcefully smacked Gladys’s rear. She feigned protest, a chuckle caught in an exclamation. Then she told him she needed milk. Like a soldier ready for battle, Emeka, armed with his shoes in one hand and his wallet in the other, headed for the door. Job followed.

  Night overtook them. Normally, they fought over who would drive. That day, Job didn’t have it in him. Walking to the car, Job dreaded the overstuffed seats piled with the children’s toys. After a short series of protests, the Audi started. It climbed the curb, toeing the pavement in a way that reminded Job of the way Emeka walked: forcefully, with all the weight bearing as far down as possible on his heels. They started through the night, hot wind blowing through the windows like stale breath, stopping once they reached a gas station.

  In the curt, overenunciated English Emeka used with Americans, he ordered the attendant to fill his car with plus unleaded fuel. “I do not want any of the impurities,” he explained. Then he burst forward in his long strides. Emeka bought the milk, a small bunch of lollipops for his daughters, and a pack of mints for Gladys. Job bought two bottles of Heineken.

  Just as they returned to the car, they could see the attendant slouched in his seat against the poles. A messy streak of dirty water still cut across the windshield, and the gas meter on the pump showed that he had fueled the car with regular unleaded. Emeka’s jaw tightened. In unrepentant disdain, the attendant turned his nose up and watched them. His mouth widened into a smile, revealing clean, straight teeth. It was a surprise hidden in his dirt-streaked, sun-browned face. Where the collar of his blue work shirt pulled away from his neck, a pink band of skin was exposed. He was the same trash that Job had recognized in Cheryl that morning. It filled him with disgust that inched toward rage.

  “This is not what my friend ordered.” Surely there would be no charge for the fuel. “This is not plus unleaded.”

  “Excuse me?” the attendant asked.

  “Do you not speak English?” Job asked, his voice rising.

  “Come again?”

  There was no crowd, just the three men, surrounded only by the rusted pillars that held the tarp over the gas pumps. Inside the convenience store, another man leaned heavily against his palm, staring blankly into the television screen.

  “Thank you, my good man,” Emeka said to the attendant. He stood between the two. “This is exactly what I ordered.”

  “No, this is regular unleaded.”

  “What are you talking about? I ordered regular unleaded. The man is correct.”

  The attendant nodded warily as Emeka’s declamations grew in gusto.

  “Job, my friend, you are not hearing well.”

  Job understood. He said no more.

  Emeka paid the attendant the money. Then, like an afterthought, he gave him a hefty tip. “Thank you, my good man,” Emeka said again.

  In the car, Emeka sat up straight in the driver’s seat, as proud as if he had won some war. Bright spots of headlights left a dazzling glare on the windshield.

  Job fumed with rage. “Way-o Americans. There was no need to give him a tip.”

  “Job, must you shame yourself wherever you go?” Emeka turned on the radio. A scratchy horn announced the beginning of a jazz song.

  They turned onto a narrow road. Weeds snapped across the beams of light. Job gazed out the window. He did not want to play Emeka’s games of diplomacy. He had been an accomplice many times, but today needed to be different. It was the arrogance in the man’s action. How easy it would have been for him to simply fill the tank properly, just as it would have been easy for those men to expose Cheryl for the fraud she was.

  And Job knew Emeka. He was just the way Job imagined Samuel would have been, if he had lived, if he had reached America instead of Job, like their father had planned. Perhaps it was Samuel’s arrogance that had killed him in the end, not any bullet. Perhaps in some strange way this was why Job had remained friends with Emeka all these years. After all, he reminded himself, he had not, in nearly a year, been able to admit to Emeka that he had flunked out of school. He could not be Emeka’s joke to Gladys over dinner. He could not be the joke of his hometown in Nigeria. He could not be his mother’s pity and his father’s failure. Because of this, Job and Emeka still met in the student union lounge several times a month to discuss their classes. “You have made your point.”

  Emeka whistled with the
song’s horn section and tapped his palm on the steering wheel in time with the drums. “So, you say this American woman asked to blow job you?” Emeka asked.

  A small smile widened on Job’s lips. “I’m not lying.”

  Emeka pulled a finger along his mustache. “Hey! American woman!” The familiar joviality had returned. “What did you say when she offered?”

  Job laughed heartily. “You know the answer.”

  Emeka turned to him. “You said yes, no?”

  Job fell back in his seat. “I am a man.” After a pause, he added, “Of course I said yes.”

  “Where did you take her?”

  Job had not thought so far ahead. “I took her behind the car.” He paused. “She insisted.”

  “Hmm.” Emeka sighed. “Me, no thanks.” He turned his head swiftly from side to side.

  It was Job’s turn to react with shock. “What is wrong with your head?” Job asked. “An American, tall-legged blonde.”

  “Only a fool would combine his business with his pleasures.” Emeka spat out the side of the window. “Have I not taught you well? America is for business. Marry, bury, and retire in Nigeria.” They had just pulled into his driveway, the gravel crunching under the car’s tires.

  Inside, the house was silent and still, each child asleep and King Sunny Adé at rest. Gladys received the milk. “What has taken you so long, oh?”

  “My wife, Job has been looking for trouble,” he said. With a small wink in Job’s direction, he added, “First he begins by harassing the store clerk. You see, if it had not been for me, World War III would begin today.”

  Job sulked. “Your husband is a United Nations peacekeeper.”

  Gladys smirked but said nothing. Instead, she poured some milk into a pot and set it to boil on the stove.

  When he had her full attention, Emeka continued. “My dear, you will never imagine the disgusting ideas in this man’s head.”

  Gladys drained a tin of Ovaltine into the boiling pot. She stirred slowly.

  “Imagine, sleeping with an American whore,” Emeka said.