an odd emptiness, weightlessness, as if she were floating, as if for a moment she’d ceased to exist: some new odd sort of sadness, part grief, part compassion, a helium sadness, too airless to bear. In the future, in adulthood, when she feels this same airlessness, when she feels her very being rushing out of her like breath, she’ll long to touch and be touched, to make contact (and will, with an assortment of consequences). This longing, like most things, was innocent at birth, taking root in her hands and her fluttering heart: the urge to touch, to kiss his feet, to kiss-and-make-them better. Put her father back together. But she didn’t know how. She didn’t have the answer. She didn’t know this father. She knelt. Began to cry.
She was frightened for reasons she couldn’t explain, by a sense beyond reason but clear all the same: that something was about to go horribly wrong if it hadn’t already, that something had changed. Most of this was her inexplicably keen intuition (along with middle insomnia, undiagnosed at age twelve). But it came without thought, a feeling completely without narrative. An opening up.
Something had opened somewhere.
The fact of her father here slumped in the moonlight meant something was possible that she hadn’t perceived: that he was vulnerable. And that if he was — their solid wooden father — then that she was, they all were, and worse, might not know. He had hidden the soles of his feet her whole life, for twelve years; he could hide (anyone could hide) anything else. And finally, that he’d tried, that he had a thing to hide, meant her father felt shame. Which was unbearable somehow.
She rested her head on the stool by his feet. Whispered, “Daddy,” touched him lightly. He continued to snore. “Wake up,” she persisted. “Wake up.” But he didn’t. She noticed the slippers by her knees on the rug.
As gently as possible and as silently as she could, she slipped one of the slippers onto one of his feet. It dangled like a shoe on a shoe tree. Then the other. At the very least the bruises were hidden from view.
“No,” he said, barely.
Taiwo leapt up in panic, taking a single bound back from the window and moon into the depth of the dark where, concealed by the shadow, she closed her eyes, waiting for yelling. It didn’t come. He made another noise, a wet, fast-asleep noise, murmured “no” again, softly, then silence. Then snoring. She opened her eyes and stepped forward, still fearful. His head was now upright. He was talking in his sleep.
“It was too late,” he said, just as perfectly clearly as if he knew she was standing there watching him speak. But didn’t smile in his sleep as Kehinde would have at this juncture. His head slumped back over.
She ran for the stairs.
• • •
For all the years after, when Taiwo thinks of her father, when the thought slips in slyly through that crack in the wall — and the picture of him dead in a garden slips with it, his soles purpled, naked, for anyone to see — she’ll ask herself hopelessly, “Where were his slippers?” and as she did when she was twelve, she’ll start to cry.
9
Where are his slippers?
In the bedroom.
He considers.
His second wife Ama is asleep in that room, plum-brown lips slipped apart, the plump inside-pink showing, and he doesn’t want to wake her. A wonder the change.
Quite apart from the performances for himself and his cameraman, there is this new and genuine desire to accommodate his wife. It’s as if he’s a different (kinder) man in this marriage, which that Other Woman would argue is not his second but his third. That Other Woman is lying and the both of them know it: they were never close to married (though she’d lived in his house. He’d been desperate for warmth, for the weight of a body, the smell of perfume, even cheap Jean Naté. The thing had gone bust when she’d broken her promise to leave the apartment that morning in May, so as not to see Olu, who’d come for his birthday at last and who left at the first sight of June). With Ama, whom he married in a simple village ceremony, her incredulous extended-family members watching, mouths agape, he is gentle in a way that he wasn’t with Fola. Not that he was brutish with Fola. But this is different.
For instance.
If he raises his voice and Ama flinches, he stops shouting. Without pause. Like a light switch. She flinches, he stops. Or if she passes by his study door and coughs, he looks up; no matter what he’s doing, what he’s reading, Ama coughs, he stops. His children used to do the same, intentionally, just to test him, to weigh his devotion to his profession against his devotion to them. By then he’d moved the sextet to that massive house in Brookline, a veritable palace, although his study door, an original, didn’t close. They’d loiter in the hall outside the half-open door, giggling softly, whispering loudly to attract his attention, then peer in to see if he’d look up from reading his peer-reviewed journal, which he wouldn’t, to teach them. It was a logically flawed experiment. He’d have told them if they’d asked. His devotion to his profession kept a roof over their heads. It wasn’t comparative, a contest, either/or, job v. family. That was specious American logic, dramatic, “married to a job.” How? The hours he worked were an expression of his affection, in direct proportion to his commitment to keeping them welclass="underline" well educated, well traveled, well regarded by other adults. Well fed. What he wanted, and what he wasn’t, as a child.
When Ama loiters noisily — and she is testing him also, Kweku knows — he marks his sentence and lowers his book. He gestures that she enter and asks if she’s all right. She always says yes. She is always all right. And if they’re riding in the Land Cruiser and she shivers even a little, he orders Kofi, who’s started driving, to turn off the A/C (though he can’t stand the humidity, never could, even in the village; they used to mock him, call him obroni, albeit for other reasons, too). And if he’s watching CNN when she comes padding into the Living Wing in pink furry slippers, pink sponge rollers in her hair, he switches the channel instantly to the mind-numbing cacophony of the Nollywood movies that he hates and she loves.
And so forth: attends church (though he can’t stand the hoopla), buys scented Fa soap (though he can’t stand the smell), instructs Kofi to make the stew to her exact specifications (though he can’t stand the heat, weeps to eat it that hot). He wants her to be satisfied. He wants this because she can be. She is a woman who can be satisfied.
She is like no woman he’s known.
• • •
Or like no woman he’s loved.
He isn’t sure he ever knew them, or could, that a man can know a woman in the end. So, the women he’s loved. Who knew nothing of satisfaction. Who having gotten what they wanted always promptly wanted more. Not greedy. Never greedy. He’d never call his mother greedy, neither Fola nor his daughters (at least not Taiwo, at least not then). They were doers and thinkers and lovers and seekers and givers, but dreamers, most dangerously of all.
They were dreamer-women.
Very dangerous women.
Who looked at the world through their wide dreamer-eyes and saw it not as it was, “brutal, senseless,” etc., but worse, as it might be or might yet become.
So, insatiable women.
Un-pleasable women.
Who wanted above all things what could not be had. Not what they could not have — no such thing for such women — but what wasn’t there to be had in the first place. And worst: who looked at him and saw what he might yet become. More beautiful than he believes he could possibly be.