Mr. and Mrs. Doctor Page 6

  Ifi met Gladys’s eye, woman to woman, a knowing glance. “I have not seen my husband in many months. It is not lobster that I am hungry for.”

  Gladys shriveled under Ifi’s gaze, and Emeka thundered into laughter. Gladys immediately turned on her heel, her fur coat sweeping the air in a smooth arc. At the hostess’s podium, all they could hear of her voice was the honey-silk tone. And then it was done. In a matter of minutes, both families occupied two tables pushed together at the rear of the restaurant, where glowing candles rippled against the hot breaths of each of Emeka and Gladys’s daughters.

  Ifi couldn’t help feeling annoyed by Gladys’s haughtiness as she responded to Job’s gushing compliments, which he delivered through bites of dripping lobster meat. He had all but forgotten Ifi. “Tell me now, how did you do that?” he asked.

  “Never mind, oh.” Gladys waved her hand at Job. “It takes nothing to speak to another human being in a civilized manner.”

  “No, that was medicine.” He chuckled. “Eh? How do you do it?” He beamed, turning from Gladys to Ifi. “Ifi, my dear, you must follow Gladys. Learn her ways. If you do, success will find you in America.”

  Ifi leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. The only reply she could muster was “Yes, of course.” She had not seen Job so animated since the night of their honeymoon when he danced before her, when he had forced a smile to her lips, though she had resisted it. He had, for that moment, shrouded in the flicker of shadow and light, taken over the muscles of her face and pressed her lips into a smile purely through his actions. That thought had sustained her and insisted that life with him would be something more, even on her loneliest nights with his family in Port Harcourt.

  Now, he swept one palm across his face, coating his mouth in butter sauce as he recounted Gladys’s many successes. In the course of an hour, Ifi learned that Gladys was a CPA, had a master’s in actuarial science and another in theology, was the leader of a women’s society at home in Nigeria, had sponsored two local businesses in her native town, and had begun second renovations—elaborate designs, imported furniture, marble—on their retirement home. Throughout the conversation, Job had not once mentioned any of Ifi’s achievements—her impressive JAMB scores, her proper soup, her skill with difficult stitching techniques, all praised during their courtship—but then, she admitted to herself, who could compete with Gladys?

  “I tell you, Ifi. You see this? You see this? Watch this woman and learn how to become a queen of Africa and America.”

  “Now, if my wife is the queen, I am assuming that makes me the king, no?” Emeka chimed in. Gladys nodded in approval. “And that, my friend, must make you—the man of humor tonight—court jester.” He laughed uproariously, and his daughters, linked together at the end of the table, smearing their fries with ketchup, joined in, the rush of their voices like that of bleating sheep. “Daddy, then we are princesses!”

  Job smiled uneasily, and Ifi struggled once again to grasp the intent of Emeka’s humor. The image of a bumbling court jackal, remembered from books she’d read as a child, filled her mind, and she was immediately shamed. Why hadn’t Job said a word in his own defense? “I have not heard of a doctor who is a fool,” she said.

  “No, no, of course not. Me, I am only teasing.” Emeka paused. “Though not everything is as it seems.”

  Ifi frowned. Perhaps she had misunderstood. But once again she caught a shared glance between Gladys and Emeka. “What is it you mean by court fool then?”

  Gladys lifted her face away, smothering a haughty chuckle. “Don’t mind him. My husband, he suffers me, oh.”

  “Yes, listen to my wife,” Emeka said curtly. “Don’t mind me at all.”

  Job chuckled. “Ifi, dear, I warned you about this one, did I not? Don’t find trouble with him.”

  “Find trouble?” Why was he defending Emeka? Ifi wondered what it was that Job liked about these people, particularly Gladys; unfortunately, Job went on to explain.

  “Do you remember the first time I met you?” He nodded at Gladys, who was carefully trimming away the fat surrounding her overcooked cut of steak. “When I first came to this country, Nigerians were few. Only Sundays playing soccer—football—did I meet the other Nigerians. Among them was this toothpick of a man with a fufu pregnancy.” He gestured toward Emeka’s protruding belly, and Ifi had no trouble imagining him nearly twenty years earlier. “We were playing one evening and we collided. Well, I am strong and younger, so I rose first, and when I looked, my friend was still asleep on the ground. All the women surrounded him, you know, and among the women was a tall, beautiful queen.” He paused. “As soon as this woman touched his face, his eyes opened,” Job continued, softly. “You see, he had been faking the entire time.”

  Emeka gave a winsome smile. “Yes, and imagine, my friend, if you had not been in such a rush to show your strength, perhaps Gladys would have come to your aid.”

  Ifi frowned as her gaze caught Gladys’s deliberate chuckle.

  “Yes, it is strange. I saw her first,” Job admitted. “I saw her that day, sitting with her legs crossed on the far bench with a book propped in front of her, pretending not to pay any attention to foolish men pretending to be boys.”

  Emeka smiled and pinched Gladys’s side. She feigned protest, hastily slapping his fingers away. Their daughters’ eyes lit up as they watched him. In spite of her irritation, Ifi felt a flash of tenderness. Were there any words to describe what she had witnessed other than love? She turned to Job, whose face was shiny with butter sauce. Emeka and Gladys were one and the same, but she and Job were cut from two different cloths.

  “Yes,” Job ceded, “perhaps things would be different.”

  In a way, his life in America was smaller than Ifi’s at home. There were no cousins or neighbors, no festivals or celebrations, no hawkers in the streets or church services blaring from megaphones. The streets were silent, and only occasionally did Ifi hear music buzzing from passing cars. His only friends, Emeka and Gladys—he had mentioned no others—and his hours at the hospital collided with the visions in Ifi’s imagination. She had pictured dinner parties with diplomats, doctors, and American businessmen, not eating in the shadow of Gladys’s arrogant laughter and Emeka’s churlish remarks. She had imagined a house with a white fence, jeweled chandeliers, marble floors—the house that the first dinner had confirmed belonged to Gladys and Emeka.

  Nonetheless, over the next few months, Ifi would endure many tedious dinners, where Job and Emeka mocked one another for their boyish amusement as she and Gladys coldly sipped from the tops of their glasses of imported beer. They would invariably return to Divine Davinci’s, Applebee’s, and various other restaurants, flanked by Gladys’s daughters and the shrill squawk of their voices as they fought over their menus.

  But that first night, as Ifi and Job prepared for bed, they did not know what awaited them. From the darkened corner of the room, where he was awake, Job imagined Ifi’s movements mimicking his on the night of their honeymoon, but in reverse. Rather than putting the jewelry and makeup on, she was removing the dangling baubles from her ears, neck, and wrist with ease. She wiped the makeup away with a damp washcloth. Rather than shining with beads of sweat running down the creases of her face, the flesh along her face, arms, and neck rippled with shivers. While Job had stripped slowly and clumsily on the night of their honeymoon, Ifi now undressed with economic precision, knowing how the surfaces of her body, its valleys and crags, responded to the dress; there was no battle with bra straps.

  On both sides of the closed door, they were painfully embarrassed by the screaming silence. While Ifi urinated, she ran water in the sink. Job listened for the drunken sounds of the meatpackers on the other side of the fairgrounds, baying at the moon. Then, for several seconds, they lay in the dark, afraid to move, afraid to repeat the mistakes of their first night alone.

  Although they completed the task, they got it all wrong by taking opposite approaches. Unlike that first night, Job was gentle, almost ca
utious. He fumbled through a kiss, pressing his tongue into the back of her throat. But Ifi choked him between her thighs. Her movements were furious, forced. His fingers were ensnared in her weave. Her eyes remained fixed in concentration through each thrust.

  He even said to her, “I love you” and “You are beautiful.” Because right then, even more than on the night of their honeymoon, he believed it. In the silence, she should have replied. But what could she say? “Thank you.”

  After, she flipped over. Because the bed was so large, or the room was so small, Ifi landed with her face inches from the wall.

  Job was pleased that she enjoyed it; he was surprised that he did not.

  One thought had troubled Ifi since dinner: the moment when he had paused and said that things could have been different, had he only risen first. Surprisingly, she had no difficulty reversing the images: Job alongside Gladys—one boastful remark after another—and Ifi alongside Emeka, with his mean-spirited humor. Still, she couldn’t see herself haughtily chuckling after his boorish humor like the “classical” Gladys. In spite of his simpler ways, Job was sincere; Emeka was a cunning schemer. Imagine the kind of man who could con a woman into loving him. Perhaps, in this way, Gladys and Emeka made the perfect pair. At least whatever Ifi needed to know of Job was direct. But what of his feelings for me? she thought. Ifi couldn’t help but ask, “So, you would be the one married to Gladys had you risen first?”

  Job’s voice entered the dark. “Don’t mind Emeka. He is silly. I married you.”

  His last words stayed with her—I married you. In spite of this, they slept with their backs pressed together. Ifi, with her naked arms wrapped around her head as if to protect herself from a fall; Ifi, with the silent picture of Gladys and her fur and her girls and her husband. All that was real.

  And snow fell outside, a dressed-up rain.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE TROUBLE BEGAN WITH A LETTER.

  Every night since the day of Ifi’s arrival, Job Ogbonnaya dressed in his white lab coat and black slacks and tucked his stethoscope into his pocket. In his other pocket, he took the mail. He sipped coffee from a Thermos and carried an empty briefcase to the door, the way he imagined a doctor would. He kissed Ifi good-night and from his car watched as the lights flickered off inside the apartment. Just like the night of Ifi’s arrival, a block before he reached the St. Ignatius Rehabilitation Hospital, Job turned into a parking lot abandoned to the night. Under the cover of darkness, he changed out of his lab coat and slacks and carefully folded each into a plastic grocery bag that he placed underneath the seat. Then he changed into pale blue scrubs and pinned himself with the nametag that read, Job Ogbonnaya, Certified Nursing Assistant.

  As he made his rounds that night, he told his patients the familiar story: he came from kings. It meant more to them than if he were to explain the truth: that his father was a chief and his father before him. Job told them he came from kings as he crouched to bathe them over the pot, to empty their bedpans, to wipe the caked spittle from around their mouths, to re-dress their wounds—the work that shamed him. Patients young and old listened to his stories: the little girl who lay in a coma for nine months, the woman with gums so bloodied and swollen she could only hum, the old man who forgot that he must remove his pants before relieving himself.

  Job was there now, kneeling before the old man. All the nurses and patients on the hall called the old man Captain. Long ago, he was a lawyer or an investment banker, something important like that. Perhaps, once, he was surrounded by important legal briefs and framed plaques on the walls. Today, a soiled heap of clothes lay on the tiled floor between them. “I come from kings,” Job was saying to him. “And I am a prince.”

  He waited for a reaction, an exclamation, something, but Captain said nothing.

  Job set him on the toilet seat. He placed Captain’s palms on each thigh, a reminder that the old man must remain sitting as he relieved himself. Captain scratched his head. Already his business was done, but Job had to make him remember. Captain’s eyes roamed the room, locked on the door. He began to rise.

  “Hakeem Olajuwon, you know him,” Job said, hurriedly. Captain stopped and listened. “I used to play basketball with him.” Each time Job told the man the story, he listened as if hearing it for the first time.

  “You don’t say?” he said.

  “Oh yes, it’s true.”

  “You mean that basketball player, the one from Africa, the one who played with Michael Jordan?”

  “Yes, that’s the one. He is from Nigeria, you know, like me,” Job said.

  “Ni-ger-i-a. That’s in Africa,” Captain said.

  “Oh yes, Olajuwon went to primary school with me.”

  “Primary school.”

  “Olajuwon was skinny, with legs as tall as a giraffe’s. But he was not always so good. I taught him to play. Every day, I explained to him the fundamentals of basketball,” Job said. “I taught him how to slam dunk and shoot a free throw from his ankles.”

  Job helped Captain off the toilet and wiped him. Like the first time, it brought him shame. He thought of his father. What disgrace his father would feel watching his “doctor” son at this. He looked away, but his eyes couldn’t escape the reflection in the mirror: the old man kneeling forward, his thin, sandy legs covered in sparse gray hairs, his withered testicles shamelessly dangling before him, and Job bent before the man like a beggar.

  “I explained everything he knows to him,” Job said quietly.

  “Doctor,” Captain said.

  “Yes?” He told him he was an African prince from an ancient empire. He told him he was a friend of Olajuwon. But each time he returned to this room, the one thing Captain remembered was that Job was a doctor. Of all his patients, Captain was the only one who called him Doctor, and for this Job believed they shared a secret kinship. He set a palm on the old man’s shoulder, kindly.

  “Did you marry that African queen?”

  “Yes.” Job beamed.

  “Good. Tell me about her. What’s her name?”

  “Gladys.” Job frowned, flustered. He corrected himself. “Ifi, I mean.”

  “Well, which is it?”

  “Ifi,” Job said. “My wife is Ifi. She is beautiful, tall, classical, a nurse. She is the woman I have made queen of my kingdom.” A mistake; nothing behind it. Still, best to be careful not to repeat such an error in front of Ifi or—dare he think it—Emeka. Admittedly, Job had felt something for Gladys, but that was long ago, he told himself. He was a mere boy then. Anything he felt now, a twinge here, a flurry there, was a bit of nostalgia and indigestion. He had grown old. Now he was a man, and a man was a decider. He had thumbed through the photographs and settled on Ifi’s picture, deciding on a future they would eventually share in America. He had chosen her. He hadn’t run around after Ifi like Emeka had for Gladys, sweating and stumbling over himself. He hadn’t deceived Ifi into loving him—not exactly. He had told Ifi he must care for patients each night. He just hadn’t clarified that he was here as their nurse, not their doctor.

  Half truths were of no consequence; he would become a doctor one day, and they would open a clinic together. Only not today. Job faced Captain, glaring into his heavy-lidded eyes. “She will make a fine mother. We are expecting our first child.”

  “Oh, I don’t like children.”

  “I don’t like them either,” Job admitted. “But it’s time. Some men have had six children by now, sef,” he said, thinking of Emeka. “Me, I have none. And what is a man without children to carry forward his name?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “We’re not getting any younger.”

  “But we’re getting prettier.” Job laughed at his joke. “You know, it was my junior brother who sat for the wedding in my place, so I could be here with my patients.” It must have confused Captain. Job wondered how to explain the way the arrangement happened, how he told his relatives that he couldn’t get away from the hospital, when it was really that he couldn’t possibly afford to mis
s so many shifts; how his junior brother took his place in the traditional ceremony; how they had agreed that once everything was settled, once Ifi came to America, he would marry her in a church and send the family photographs. There was the civil ceremony in Port Harcourt on the day of the honeymoon, but the church wedding in America hadn’t happened after all. It would be far too expensive and extravagant. But his family would never know.

  There were staged photographs instead, taken at the studio where Emeka took his family for photos on the day of Ifi’s arrival. Job had rented a tuxedo, and Ifi had worn a lacy white dress that Job found at a thrift store. In the photograph, she stared into the camera, hard, fierce, but beautiful, a bouquet of flowers hiding her protruding belly, a picture his family now hung with pride in their parlor. None of the small details matter, Job reminded himself. What mattered was that he had done something that made his father proud. “In a few months’ time,” he said to Captain, “my father will receive the photos of my first son.”

  “Well, that’s kind of you. You’re kind. My son doesn’t take care of me, but you take care of your father,” he said. “Just like a good son should.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve written him letters, and the boy still won’t reply.”

  “That’s terrible.” Job helped him back into his slacks and slippers.

  “I should never have left home. Doctor, when am I going home? I want to go home.”

  “We are going home right now,” Job said calmly. Just like that, he guided him through the bathroom doorway into his hospital room. “We are home, Captain,” Job said, and the old man began softly weeping, shaking his thin fists in front of him.

  A mute television, a bed surrounded by an aluminum railing, pictures scattered across a windowsill of people whose faces were cloudy to the old man—a daughter, tall and sturdy, pretty at just the right angle; the little boy whom she wrapped her arms around, the one Captain believed was his son, the one the old man wrote his letters to. The son he’d never had.