Bodies

by Iruoma Chukwuemeka

In the beginning, she is holding the wheel, and he is by her side, accomplice, acquaintance. The rest of the world hangs outside, buying her time to escape the swollen silence between them. She should fake a distress call and ask him to call a ride home, promising to call him tomorrow. The quaking under her skin does not mean her body is ready to accept new visitors: it is, in fact, the signal to flee. If she turns and waves goodnight, the night will end well. Her bed would be waiting in its pristine form, and she would hurry under the sheets. She is holding the wheel; she must not forget.

He covers her hand that is not on the steering. A storm of buildings passes quickly, and they are in her home. The dimmable bulbs respond when she turns the key. The jacket, the camisole, and the girdle fall off; she shimmies out of her last piece of clothing. He simply stands there, accelerating the awkwardness per second. He takes off his clothing in response. His body belongs to a gender of bodies that knew how to read their owner’s minds, to shrink quickly when the occasion arises, to plaster the right amount of flesh where it falls short. At first, his eyes are everywhere else but her body—the murals that did not crowd the white living space, her glassy awards littered on a hanging frame, the scented candles that say welcome.

He does not grab her head and lower it to his shaft. He sucks her chubby lips, seeking and finding other parts of her face, only to return to the lips too soon. He does not respond when she offers to blow him out. Instead, when they find the bed, they lay sideways. His initial thrusts are a petition for her body to open up, a slow, familiar chorus to a song their bodies seemed to have memorized but forgotten before they came to. Then, he begins this weird eulogy: he holds her mass of dreadlocks and calls it a goldmine, he lifts her legs to his shoulders and says they don’t weigh as much as they look in jeans; he puts her in front of the mirror and calls her and her house beautiful; and she points out that he is saying these things because his brain is pumped with demand. The comment was untimely, but she said it anyway because she believed it. As they lay, spent from all that movement, his fingers returned to the gash above her left nipple where the surgeon stitched her flesh, stroking it; he begged for a photograph of the scar with his Nixon.

She makes a small dinner as the midnight crawls into dawn, while he rolls some blunt. She only settles on a few puffs: that’s all the weed she can take. When they sit in her tiny kitchen, nude, eating noodles and drinking leftover wine over the vinyl, she considers the ease she is feeling. In the embrace of a stranger. The body opens up, becomes known to a second body, and does not remember the way back to its shell. He lets her talk about her disgust for Candace Owens’ stance on modern feminism, her girls' trip to the Namib desert that kisses the Atlantic, classes she was taking at their London Business School, schoolboys who fucked their head by smoking gum and now required her charity to be treated. He spares her the ‘That’s nice!’ and ‘Very impressive!’ or ‘Wonderful!’ and other exclamations Bumble men used to punctuate her speech—instead, he loans his hearing. And when he speaks, she learns he prefers to have a discourse rather than a conversation; he has a habit of eating until his stomok (rather than ‘stomach’) hurts; and his stint with photography had survived a furnace of emotions: curiosity, obsession, indifference, abandonment, and now equilibrium.

The day has dawned when he slips out. Her bed sheets still trap his aura, so she changes them. No messages from him all day. Three nights after, with the trembling fingers of a one-night stand, she dials his number. He apologizes; the Marina job had him taking too many calls, he only cared for his bed when he got off, but he will try to call her tomorrow morning. He makes a short laugh when she says she’ll be home all day tomorrow. He bargains to show up if only he could bring his Nixon. 

Propped in odd places around the house, she in thinly veiled clothing with nothing underneath, and he capturing her form. The wobbly skin where a flat belly could have been. Her salamander tattoo. Strands of beard budding beneath her chin. Stretchmarks evading the potency of creams. This is how it remained with them. Sometimes, he captures her while she sleeps or works, or while they fuck in the sparsely-lit bedroom. The expectancy on his tongue, when he asks if she came, the ecstasy he became from giving her multiple orgasms, the glory on his face when she reimagines their sexcapades in their video calls when he is not in her house. Bursting with ecstasy, she can barely reconcile having this beautiful body just because she wanted him. It is happening, she says to herself, enjoy it. He is in her ears when the water sprays from the shower onto her skin and disappears into the drain. He is underneath her clothes when she sits through those long meetings with teams scattered across the country, debating the next move on a developing news story. He is in her kitchen when the pots are empty and begging for attention. And she knows. Having him around is like wolfing down ice-cream, while despising the inevitable stomach upset. She would purge soon, retching all that sweetness, and despise herself for thinking it would not cause pain, eventually. That’s all he is: sweetened junk in a perfectly mined body. She also knows that the body is designed to withstand pain, to develop a consciousness that swallows exhaustion, until it can no longer stretch, and then gives itself away in death. 

*****

Come live with me.

In the middle, their union becomes flesh. He moves into her flat, taking up wardrobe space without calling attention to himself. When they are alone, she lets him take up more space. He plans and prepares their meals. He recalls deadlines she discussed with him, asking if the story is coming together, if the moneybag is getting secured. Many cases of sexual tsunami, they lay side by side, gripping and giving, inhaling and stimulating each other’s fluids. He, placing her in front of the bedroom mirror, moving into her from behind, urging her to watch, expending himself on her back afterward. She worries about this sometimes. His violence thwarts her perception of herself, especially because he does not know what she thinks of her body, as she herself is yet to know. A form of shapeshifting, to feel like the “sexy mama” he claims she is. Maybe he imagines that she is not too pleased with the shape of herself and tries to correct it by injecting love spasms, while she memorizes her reflection. Maybe, he just likes to do it in front of a mirror, some mini-fetish.

The days yawn into weeks and suddenly spin into months. He returns to new shirts, where his old ones have been, and puts them on without asking. She leaves her phone unlocked on the bed when she starts a bath, or runs hot and cold water simultaneously in the shower, so he can run through her Instagram and Snap, and notice that she isn’t talking to anyone else. If this is happily ever after in a slender body, she is ready to wrap it in a body bag and take it home.

One evening, during one of those long showers, curiosity bends his will, and he takes her phone. Her Insta feed is full of supple women in waist trainers, heavily edited carved hips (because he carved some himself), and beat-up facials. There are hundreds of good-looking women, selling beauty, promising the goodness of health in supplements. To him, it is unclear how an entire demographic is fixated on the idea of a perfect body, but he does not say this. Instead, he teases that since she enjoys looking at women, maybe she is bi. From the bath, her echoey voice reminds him that she has more testosterone than women, so, yes, maybe. Along an unending array of posts, he stumbles on a skinny body bearing flamingo legs, spaghetti arms, and shiny dark skin, too. The girl looked eighteen, non-Nigerian, but African, like she had been carved out of an artist’s black palette. He asks for the girl’s name. 

She snatches the phone and goes to sit by the dressing mirror. “Oh, that’s an old classmate. Aliya.”

“She’s your age?” He can see watery footmarks where her feet had been.

“She could be one year older, I don’t know. It’s been many years since secondary school.”

“Oh.”

Fears breed upon her epidermis, masquerading as goosebumps. She watches him avoid her face, her phone, the conversation, and find a new attraction on his laptop. She cannot excavate his exact thoughts from those blank eyes searching the large screen. As she creams in front of the mirror, her body stares back, as if poised for a fight, to remind her racing thoughts that there is no standard. Despite her desire to hug and caress this burgeoning skin, she cannot help that imagery often takes precedence over logic. Tonight, she does not wear her large sleeping gown. Next to him, she wants to talk about this thing ripping them apart: her body. The day he would finally see that there was a better body, with a brighter mind, those sweet things he said to her in front of the mirror would melt into lies. That classmate, Aliya, had been picked up by Vogue in her teens and went on to become a superstar model. She just enjoys going through the girl’s profile, to ogle at the things God did not make of her. She may have good legs, but they were short and not chiselled for runways. Fat tissues enjoy settling in her stomach, arms, and neck. They always ignored her buttocks, which are almost flat as an empty sack. She swallowed these thoughts before they evolved into speech. But he wouldn’t stop asking if she was alright, looking up from his laptop, touching her shoulder, refilling her cup of water, and later, he tables some scrambled eggs and herbal tea on the bed table. The air becomes tight as in a not-knowing-what’s-next situation. She is not sleeping, and not speaking either. He disappears into the studio.

The cleaner comes around the next morning, so they are stuck together in parts of the house she is not cleaning. This cleaner is not the one she wanted, her preferred candidate was a Cameroonian, who had cleaned the house for a few days until her medical tests came back. The woman had Hepatitis B and cried all night because it was also a revelation to her. Because she did not know where the Cameroonian's body had been; she had to let her go. This new person, a Nigerian like herself, was okay, but the woman was just a good cleaner. The story would've been a good conversation starter, but she is too bloated to start any communication with him. While she pretends to work on her laptop, taking up call sessions that were booked for weeks ahead, he leaves for the job at Marina - where he has already tendered a resignation letter. 

In his absence, his scent stays, egging her on to the new recipes taped to the kitchen walls in his attempt to experiment without leaving the place in flames; the attention he lavished on the window plants now blooming after months of neglect. Entering the other bedroom, she walks in on the monochromatic prints of her face, the gash over her breast, her hairy chest, and her upper-body, all stretched out on mirrored edge canvasses, scattered on the carpet. They are pieces in a puzzle that is herself, like he is an artist, molding her to stability; and in her hands, the unfinished work feels like a priceless treasure. It is beautiful, but as the muse, she does not know what to feel about his work.

He makes it easy to love him, to keep wanting, to put the voices inside her to sleep. When she withdrew, he waited, his silence making excuses for her nonchalance, his goodwill for her attitudes that she wouldn’t condone from anyone else, especially men. More like he kept his side of the deal, and still fulfilled hers, a working contract that she didn’t fully know its T&Cs. Did she really want this man? How does she let him know that his harmless attempts to make her forget her body, to quicken her to a superficial self-love is a sharp reminder of what it is not? His prolonged stares, lack of comments, builds questions inside of her that she is unwilling to confront, because it would mean crumbling the little thing they had going on; the independence she has gathered? Not at all. This man is good for her. No. They are good people: together. When he returns, she would sit up and be a woman.

*****

In the end, she holds her breath and taps the message box open. She has just returned from the north, after covering a mass kidnapping story where all action ended with reporting it. The house is untouched, and it is clear he has not used his keys to let himself in while she was away. She has not been to his house either, and she cannot go now because he did not leave an address. He is starting to slip out of memory, like grime off a disinfected surface. She shakes off the unease the memory of him brings; a feeling that persisted all along. In other exciting news, the Aliyah girl is happy; she reached out, and could squeeze in a meeting tomorrow evening, if possible. Aliya’s tone is not condescending but makes her feel like she is being considered, sorted into place, to fit or not to fit. Yet, she should be grateful because it cannot compete with the slander she endured in secondary school for being the girl with overgrown breasts, hairy legs, and a bulky frame. That subdued girl is buried: she no longer lives. The woman she is now has expanded to accommodate her own self, bigness and all, but the model girl doesn't know that, or know her. Maybe, it is time to make new friends. Extending grace to herself may also mean throwing her arms open to female friendships again. Sunset has streaked into her bedroom, breaking into thought, reminding her of dinner. Dinner. Back in this house again, the absence of him engulfs her good reasoning.

“I have some friends coming over tomorrow,” she says over the phone. “Please, can you make us one of your impossible recipes?”

He is wearing a shirt she did not purchase when he arrives. She does not question it, even as he comes over and wraps himself around her from behind, his jaw leaning on her shoulder. This life must weigh lightly on his skin, or he just enjoyed the comfort that came with being with her because he regards everything loosely. When he asked why she ignored his messages, she wanted to ask why he did not call instead. Neither of them presses further.

“What do you want me to cook?”

“Any of your specials.”

That evening is regular except for the presence of Aliya, who is chattering away, telling them how she has never paid for clothing or accommodation or flights since she started appearing on runways. The pasta is cooked in a sauce she has tasted before, intercontinental, and she commends the man’s cooking as he pours her another glass of sparkling wine. This is what they learn, both of them, chewing silently, estimating Aliya’s wonder: she is the type of woman to come between them. Shiny, dark skin enhanced by years of intensive care; a svelte body that promises adventure; a face able to pin men down and keep women on their guard. She quickly informs Aliya that he is good with realistic photography if she is looking to add anyone to her team. He says she will be a good shoot if he can make some time in his packed schedule. Aliya’s eyes, roaming from one to the other, note that he is arrogant and should not be granted any free passes to a good time anytime soon. Everyone laughs.

By the time she closed the door behind Aliya, he had started gathering the dishes. Her phone beeps. Aliya and a man in bright, colorful pixels— she forwarded the pictures with the caption: RUN! This man is unfamiliar, but it is the same man. At least, he is not the man who held her in front of the mirror, pointing her face into her reflection. Not the one who sat in her kitchen, high and drunk, spilling all secrets from his past life. Still, it is him. After sorting the dishes, he moves all over the house, gathering personal things, with an air heavy with more secrets that could implode those eyes any minute. He has not seen the pictures Aliya sent to her, but he must know that she knows. He does not stay for the night; does not say when he is returning. When the house is empty of him again, she reasons that it is her fault. She should have accepted that she was enough for him, this way, for anyone at all, in any way. She should not have put her fears and fantasies in one place, not have introduced them to one another. It is easier for her to conclude that things went this way: she had seen disaster stocked on the shelf, put it in her shopping bag, and headed for the counter. It is the woman’s fault when things fall apart, so she would carry her blame. Later that night, she awakes to pee, picks up her phone, and unfollows both of them on Instagram. A new story is brewing on her laptop, so she gets to it.

*****

Just before the end begins, she is away in another city covering a story that is taking time to concretize. He is in Aliya’s apartment again, enumerating the things he loves about women. One, the sweetness behind their indecisiveness. Two, constantly requiring reassurance. Most importantly, never asking for what they want. They settle much longer over the last one, because the girl refuses, saying that feminists are now demanding, that she wants him and that is why he is here. They begin to eat the catfish soup he prepared. Aliya’s kitchen is much smaller than any kitchen he has experienced in Lagos, and the faded walls of her house say that she is struggling, but simply keeping up appearances. They do not discuss her work. Instead, they talk about his woman, her high school friend. She corrects him when he uses the word, friend.

“She is no more than an acquaintance to me,” Aliya says. “But I understand her obsession.”

“It’s nothing serious between us. I’m only an intermediate to something better,” he chips in.

“That why you came for me?”

“What?”

Aliya chuckles, like a girl unrestrained. They do not say much more. The sex is rough, like an instrument devised to unscrew the ruthlessness he buried when he was with her friend. Her body is peeling with artistic beauty, but his lips cannot find words for her. He is a mute snail, riding hard. Maybe, he is still thinking of her. The woman he should be loving right now. He hates her now because she kept talking about this Aliya, bringing her to life in their own lives, as if pointing a grasscutter in the direction of the hunter’s bloodied trap. He hates himself because greed does not look away, swelling until it is razing down a beautiful thing to ash. He grabs Aliya’s long braids, reining her head this way and that, till they collide, releasing rapid tensions into one another, and then starting all over. They shower at different times in the small, musty bathroom. He does not answer when she tells him, dripping wet, how she wants a photograph of herself, with his Nixon. When the silence waxes into a bridge with each of them on its opposite ends, he asks if they can smoke a blunt together. She declines. She wants to remember everything they just shared.

BIO: Iruoma Chukwuemeka is a creative writer from Eastern Nigeria. Her stories and essays appear in Afritondo, Isele, Lolwe, Midnight&Indigo, The Shallow Tales Review, and elsewhere. She is a finalist for the Inaugural Abebi Award in Afro-NonFiction.