miraculously
stayed
happy? Who has the
capacity
to stay happy, with him, over time?
Never.
He didn’t know this was humanly possible, or womanly possible, until fifty-three years old, when he packed up his tent and decamped to the Master Wing but finding it too quiet one day considered his nurse, and the rise of her buttocks, and the chime of her laugh, and the odd way she tittered and blushed when he approached, and asked if she might like to join him for dinner?
This is why (he believes) he loves Ama.
Because she said, “Thank you, I would, please,” and the same thing again when he asked her to marry him (she always says yes) and is loyal and simple and supple and young. Because her thoughts don’t explode over breakfast. He believes he loves Ama because of the symmetry between them, between his capacity for provision and her prerequisites for joy. Because he finds all symmetry elegant and
this
symmetry quiet: an elegant kind of quiet, here and there, around the house. He believes he loves Ama—although he once thought he didn’t, thought he cared for and was grateful for but didn’t “really love” her, and in the beginning he didn’t, before he recognized her genius—because he knows something, now, about women. He has come to understand his basic relationship to women, the very crux of it, the need to be finally sufficient.
To know he’s enough, once and for all, now and forever.
This is why (he believes) he loves Ama.
• • •
He is wrong.
In fact, it is because as she sleeps at night, with a thin film of sweat above her ripe plum-brown lip and her breath sounding sweetly and loudly beside him, she looks so uncannily like Taiwo. Like Taiwo when she wasn’t yet five years old and when he was a resident, postcall, staggering home, too tired to sleep, too sleepy to stand, too worked up to sit—and so pacing.
He’d pace to and fro about the narrow apartment (the best he could afford on his resident’s pay, the dim, skinnier half of a two-family duplex on Huntington Ave where the ghetto began, beneath the overpass that separates Boston from Brookline, the wealth from the want) in his scrubs, in the dark. Down the hallway, through the kitchen, to the first room, the boys’, with its rickety wooden bunk bed, Kehinde’s drawings on the walls. To the little windowed closet, from which he’d watch some minor drug trade. To the bathroom, where he’d wash his face.
Press a towel to it.
Hold.
But finally to the front room and to Taiwo on the pullout couch, with no bedroom of her own as he so wanted her to have, his first daughter, a complete mystery despite the resemblance to the brother. A girl-child. A new thing. More precious somehow.
With a thin film of sweat above her lip care of the “project heat.”
Which he’d wipe away, thinking
it’s the least I can do
.
For a girl with no bedroom and conch-shell-pink lips.
Where he’d fall asleep upright, sitting next to her.
• • •
In fact, he loves Ama because, asleep, she looks like Taiwo when his daughter wasn’t five and slept sweating on the couch, and because when she snores she sounds just like his mother, when
he
wasn’t five and slept sweating on the floor. In that same thatch-roofed hut where his sister would die, on a mat beside his siblings’ by the one wooden bed, where their mother snored sweetly and loudly, dreaming wildly, as her son listened carefully to the places she went (to the operas and jazz riffs and snare drums and war chants, to the fifties as they sounded in faraway lands, beyond the beach), dreaming aloud of on-the-radio-places that he’d never seen and that she’d never see. And this sight and this sound, these two senses—of his daughter, (a), a modern thing entirely and a product of
there
, North America, snow, cow products, thoughts of the future, of his mother, (b), an ancient thing, a product of
here
, hut, heat, raffia, West Africa, the perpetual past—wouldn’t otherwise
stayed
happy? Who has the
capacity
to stay happy, with him, over time?
Never.
He didn’t know this was humanly possible, or womanly possible, until fifty-three years old, when he packed up his tent and decamped to the Master Wing but finding it too quiet one day considered his nurse, and the rise of her buttocks, and the chime of her laugh, and the odd way she tittered and blushed when he approached, and asked if she might like to join him for dinner?
This is why (he believes) he loves Ama.
Because she said, “Thank you, I would, please,” and the same thing again when he asked her to marry him (she always says yes) and is loyal and simple and supple and young. Because her thoughts don’t explode over breakfast. He believes he loves Ama because of the symmetry between them, between his capacity for provision and her prerequisites for joy. Because he finds all symmetry elegant and
this
symmetry quiet: an elegant kind of quiet, here and there, around the house. He believes he loves Ama—although he once thought he didn’t, thought he cared for and was grateful for but didn’t “really love” her, and in the beginning he didn’t, before he recognized her genius—because he knows something, now, about women. He has come to understand his basic relationship to women, the very crux of it, the need to be finally sufficient.
To know he’s enough, once and for all, now and forever.
This is why (he believes) he loves Ama.
• • •
He is wrong.
In fact, it is because as she sleeps at night, with a thin film of sweat above her ripe plum-brown lip and her breath sounding sweetly and loudly beside him, she looks so uncannily like Taiwo. Like Taiwo when she wasn’t yet five years old and when he was a resident, postcall, staggering home, too tired to sleep, too sleepy to stand, too worked up to sit—and so pacing.
He’d pace to and fro about the narrow apartment (the best he could afford on his resident’s pay, the dim, skinnier half of a two-family duplex on Huntington Ave where the ghetto began, beneath the overpass that separates Boston from Brookline, the wealth from the want) in his scrubs, in the dark. Down the hallway, through the kitchen, to the first room, the boys’, with its rickety wooden bunk bed, Kehinde’s drawings on the walls. To the little windowed closet, from which he’d watch some minor drug trade. To the bathroom, where he’d wash his face.
Press a towel to it.
Hold.
But finally to the front room and to Taiwo on the pullout couch, with no bedroom of her own as he so wanted her to have, his first daughter, a complete mystery despite the resemblance to the brother. A girl-child. A new thing. More precious somehow.
With a thin film of sweat above her lip care of the “project heat.”
Which he’d wipe away, thinking
it’s the least I can do
.
For a girl with no bedroom and conch-shell-pink lips.
Where he’d fall asleep upright, sitting next to her.
• • •
In fact, he loves Ama because, asleep, she looks like Taiwo when his daughter wasn’t five and slept sweating on the couch, and because when she snores she sounds just like his mother, when
he
wasn’t five and slept sweating on the floor. In that same thatch-roofed hut where his sister would die, on a mat beside his siblings’ by the one wooden bed, where their mother snored sweetly and loudly, dreaming wildly, as her son listened carefully to the places she went (to the operas and jazz riffs and snare drums and war chants, to the fifties as they sounded in faraway lands, beyond the beach), dreaming aloud of on-the-radio-places that he’d never seen and that she’d never see. And this sight and this sound, these two senses—of his daughter, (a), a modern thing entirely and a product of
there
, North America, snow, cow products, thoughts of the future, of his mother, (b), an ancient thing, a product of
here
, hut, heat, raffia, West Africa, the perpetual past—wouldn’t otherwise
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