“Ghana. I know. I could tell.”
“Ey! How did you know that?”
“My mother’s Nigerian.”
“Bella naija!” He beams. “And this father you missed?”
“Did I say that?”
“You must have been thinking out loud.”
“Did I think that?” She’s smiling. Her BlackBerry rings.
“It’s your father!” He’s laughing, glancing back through the mirror.
She fumbles for the phone in the bag at her feet. It stops ringing. She finds it. “It’s my brother.” She’s frowning. She puts down the phone and leans back and is quiet. The radio plays softly, Wagadu-Gu, “Sweet Mother,” the merry Sierra Leonean Afro-pop hit. The driver stops laughing now, focused on the road again, knowing as cab drivers do when to stop, when the moment is over, how to exit a scene: keep one’s eyes on the road, turn the radio up.
Taiwo rests her head on the glass, out of habit, the phone in her fingers, “O. Sai” on the screen. She is glad that she missed him, she thinks (donning armor), does not need a lecture this time of the night, Olu’s five-minute speech about Sai family glory, what Others Must Think of Them, oh the shame.
No.
What would he know about shame, Perfect Olu, as clean cut and taut as the other once was, with his cold little life in cold Boston, his girlfriend, their cold-white apartment, white smiles on the walls, Ling-and-Olu do good in warm weather, two robots, degree-getting, grant-winning, good-doing androids, a picture of perfection, New Immigrant Perfection, of cowardice rewarded, she thinks (readied bow), an old habit, this, bad one, to attack her attackers or whomever she perceives to be planning attack, right or wrong, noting all of their flaws in her mind, in this manner discrediting them). What would he know?
Yes.
If one had just stayed on that carousel, amassing gold rings, seated, smiling, and safe, going round and round, living the same four years over, at Milton, Yale, med school, a life on repeat — (1) compete for acceptance to elite institution, (2) get accepted, (3) work hard, (4) do well, then start back at (1) four years later — then yes, one might lecture on “shame.” Might call her a “failure” for withdrawing from law school, condemn her as “reckless,” “disappointment to Mom,” the final blow to the production, Successful Family in shambles, curtains closed, theater shuttered forever. But how? How can he know what it is to be stared at and talked about; worse, not to care, to give in to it? He who knows nothing of hot things, of wrong things, of loss, failure, passion, lust, sorrow, or love? When even she can’t explain it, to Dr. Hass, to herself, doesn’t know where it comes from, the ravenous urge to be swallowed, digested, to pass through a body only to drag oneself back to the mouth of the beast?
Olu can’t.
So he lies there, mute, riddled with arrowheads, the fastidious-cum-favored-cum-fallen First Son, as she leans her head back on the cab seat, defended and spent by the act of resenting her brother.
It brings her no comfort, this felling of Olu. Instead, as she draws her mind closer to look, she sees her face, not Olu’s, her body, not his, pierced with sharp flint-knapped stone, bleeding out in the snow.
“No?” says the driver.
“I’m sorry?” says Taiwo.
The driver frowns, worried. “You just told me, ‘No!’”
“I meant no, don’t take 96th,” Taiwo lies quickly, dismayed by this new habit of thinking aloud. “If you exit at 125th it’ll be faster. Just go up to Amsterdam, right, and we’re there.”
“You got it,” says the driver. He glances at Taiwo.
She stares out the window, at blood in the snow.
• • •
And how had this happened?
The death of Darling Daughter. The brightest of pupils, who never looked out, who had spent half her life with her head in a book, learning Latin roots, spewing right answers. Alone. She had never been close to a man, not since Kehinde; her efforts to make or keep friends came to naught: there was always the issue of beauty between them, as envy in women, desire in men, indistinguishable in the end, lust and envy, co-original, the flower and leaf of the same twisted root. Regardless, when the press learned, they made it sound naturaclass="underline" a tale old as time, beauty, power, and sex, dean of law school in love tryst with editor of Law Review, BEAUTY AND THE DEAN! in “Page Six,” and the rest. And it was, in a way; it was natural, that it happened, that Girl in a city that adulates blondes should find Boy (fifty-two, former blond turned to silver-and-gold) in a city that adulates youth. The press didn’t say this. They said that Dean Rudd, born Rudinsky, the fund-raising whiz kid uptown, charming lawyer-turned-scholar with old money wife (noted New York Times food critic Lexi Choate-Rudd), one-time Marshall scholar, White House fellow, intern to Carter, special assistant to Clinton, the crown Prince of Gifts, had at last lost his titular Golden Boy glow and would step down at once, move downtown.
Curtains closed.
Dr. Hass, the psychotherapist appointed by the school to calm hypercompetitive postteens on the eve of exams, found it natural, too, albeit a good deal more interesting than the eating and anxiety disorders du jour. This is why, Taiwo has long since suspected, Dr. Hass had insisted they continue pro bono after the scandal erupted and Taiwo withdrew, with her Columbia Student Medical Insurance Plan abruptly canceled — and continues still now over a year and a half later, insistent that they finish, that they “see the work through.” With the thinly veiled references to quitting and abandoning. A valiant exemplar of how not to do both, Clara Hass, with her buzz cut and tortoiseshell frames and the voice of a DJ of late-night soft rock. Further tales: “father hunger,” “Electra Complex,” perfectly natural.
But nary a word about nature.
As if the thing could be accounted for by psychology, sociology, but not biology, given the different age and race, not by nature. By the basics of nature, senseless baseness of nature, instant-basic attraction, lust, visceral reactions, the thing that simply happens at times between humans as between animals crossing paths in the forest (or jungle): the one sees the other or catches its scent and is drawn as by magnet to mount it, to mate. The press didn’t consider this. Dr. Hass doesn’t believe this. That Taiwo, with no history whatsoever with older men, simply entered a room and saw this older man, this Dean Rudd, and he her, and it simply began.
• • •
“Dean, this is Taiwo.”
The assistant, Marissa.
The interview, March, winter dying outside, with the trees on the quad sprouting shy pinkish blossoms despite the loud protest of sharp, howling wind: female lead enters frame and stops short at the door at the edge of a carpet of mustards and wines — so much different then, younger, determined, believing, just back to New York after three years at Oxford, the god of Approval still fat on its altar — and stands, looking in from the threshold.
Feels tension.
In blue velvet blazer and dress-cum-dashiki, the tongue-in-cheek dress code, half devil-may-care, quarter Yoruba priestess, quarter prim British schoolgirl, her upsweep of locks dripping tendrils, high heels, with that feeling of conquest she still sometimes gets before entering rooms in which points must be won, in which men must be smiled at and women impressed, prey and predator both, stretching forelegs and jaw. Stopping short, with Marissa, both jarred by the tension, the male lead’s expression, the way he just stares.