There’s a way the men at the lounge stare at you that makes you come alive.
Your cousin, Salewa, took you there. It was on the island. She promised you good food and even better ambience. But she couldn’t have promised you would find something else, someone you didn’t go there searching for. You were always searching. Searching for something to fill those cracks in you. Searching for what crawled out of you and died somewhere you didn’t know. You always have been. You didn’t know it. You still don’t know. Sometimes, you get a glimpse of it, like a mirror catching an errant ray of sunshine – a flash, quickly gone. But you’re still trying to fill it.
In your gowns that were as short as sin, you came looking for the men. You preferred the heartbreakingly handsome ones with smiles as exaggerated as Lagos itself. It was a game to you. They made you feel valued, feel wanted. You knew they didn’t. Or maybe they did. Just for a night. Sometimes, a couple of nights. No matter. That was nothing new. But this night, you see Joe first before he sees you. Lean and wiry like a tensile wire, you watch him weave his way between the tables and to the bar with the fluid movement of a boxer – the walk of a man who has the world waiting for him. You convince yourself you need a fresh drink even though you still sip on your white wine. He’s at the bar, an air of toughness hanging around him like an invisible halo. Head cocked to the side, he looks at you. In his white trousers and black shirtsleeves, you know he’s the kind of guy you want to spend the night with. You think, here is a man who has had his fair share of troubles and has come out victorious, but hideously scarred. As Salewa will later tell you, it turns out you are right.
You’d never liked karaoke much. But you consider it when Salewa invites you for it the following week. When Joe seizes the mic in his hand, you feel it’s a tad too soft for a man like him. Nonetheless, you find yourself wondering just how strong those hands are. You go home with a different man. But Joe clouds your thoughts.
You have an idea of just how strong his arms are a week later when next you come by the lounge and a fight breaks out. You’ve attended enough Lagos parties to know that drunken fools set off stupidity whenever. You also know that when trouble erupts like lava from a volcano, it scalds everyone close by, not only the drunken nitwits who ignite it. For the love of you, you don’t know how Joe finds his way to you. He holds your shoulders, gently but firmly pulling you out of harm’s way. Up close, you look into his eyes. He’ll later tell you your eyes looked flat, like something in you was dry; bone-dry. But he didn’t mind. When he danced with you later that night, he moved as gracefully as the legendary, one-legged Long John Silver with a crutch.
Three dates later, he’ll do his best to enliven what needs vitality in you as a steady stream of your essence sprays out of you like a sprinkler as you both wiggle and wriggle in his bed. And when he places his hands on your waist, you know for sure just how power is coiled in his tensile wire of a body and how much strength lies in those hands.
# # #
Five weeks after the karaoke date, you’re up at night waiting to hear his voice even after spending hours chatting during the day. You’re surprised he wants to keep talking to you. You learn all his favourite songs so you can guess what he’s humming when he sits at his desk to make designs. Your laughter bounces off his kitchen walls when you smear his face with pancake batter after he holds your waist and kisses your shoulder. He swears he makes better designs when you sleep over. You roll your eyes at that syrup. It takes some cajoling, but he convinces you to begin staying over. The sleepovers become a norm, where you lie in his arms all sweaty, listening to his heart drumming beats in rhythm with P-Square singing on Cool FM’s late-night request segment.
When he follows you to the market, your favourite tomato seller tells him to take care of you. You smile as you clutch his arm. Those same arms wrap you in big hugs when he comes to your workplace in Marina after you’re done for the day. You tell him not to bother picking you up from work every now and then. You’re not worth the trouble, you tell him. He scoffs. It’s not a problem, he replies. You start to think maybe you’re not a problem after all. Maybe you never were. Your girls envy you. They envy you more when you run into his arms and he clutches you like a drowning man grabs at a raft.
Your sister says you look happy. You feel happy too. Your expression is as bright as the Lagos sun that sits in the sky. You like the light scruff that covers his cheeks. It’s perfect – just enough to graze you when you cradle his head in your arms, but not enough to scrape your tender skin. He likes the swing of your hips when you walk. You finally find some confidence to wear the crop top that exposes your midriff that could stand to lose a few pounds.
When you send him a picture of you in it, he replies with a word. Ultraviolet. You go to Salewa’s birthday together, where you sneak glances at him. When he catches your gaze from across the room, he draws it out like the last note of a Mozart symphony until it’s an unbroken chord between you both that leaves you all warm and mushy inside. When he hugs you later, you dare to let your hands hold him back and believe he’s not going anywhere.
His stews could be less peppery, but he makes up for it with the tender way he scoops ice-cream into your mouth later. You move some of your clothes into his wardrobe. Your fear of someday finding a camisole that doesn’t belong to you gradually reduces. When you run into Salewa at the mall, she just winks at you. You’re powerless to stop the smile that threatens to tear your face in two. And when you make him a salad of diced pineapples and pawpaws just the way he likes it, he pulls you close and lays the tenderest of kisses on your forehead. A murmuration of butterflies in your stomach threaten to lift you off your feet. “Idunnu mi”, he says, his smile a parachute that gently sways you on eddies of wind so high you never want to come down from. My joy.
It doesn’t fully sink in, but maybe those cracks that let something slip out have been bound up by Joe’s affection. Just maybe you’ll stay happy. Joe has ended Groundhog Day.
He’s a godsend.
# # #
Joe often calls your eyes a stranger’s gaze. You don’t really know what he means when he says that. It’s a blank look of something dying; needing watering.
Something cracked in you when Bade, your first boyfriend, left you. He was a big bear of a man, his face a slab of crudely-hacked meat and loud laughter that set off quakes in your insides. You were overanalysing, he’d told you, when you went out together and his eyes held those of other women for far too long. Or the times his hands lingered on their shoulders for longer than it should for mere acquaintances. Overthinking was killing you, he’d said. You were simply seeing things that weren’t there. But the dark blue panties flung on your traveling bag in his apartment was crystal clear when you went to his place on that Sunday evening.
Even clearer was the naked, voluptuous woman that snoozed merrily in his bed, the same bed you shared with him when you stayed over. He looked for larger breasts that would fit into his mouth – after all, he was a big man with a man’s appetites, eh? He’d roared with laughter.
Like blood seeping from a wound, something nameless slipped out of that crack. You sought to fill it with Frank. You worked together. With a character as polished as his accent, he was the kind of guy you wanted your mother to know. Your colleagues gave you looks of envy. You lapped it up. His tender words were first editions that banished Bade to the dark, musty shelves of your mind. Immaculate and debonair, he was a catch and you had snagged that fish. But you were seven years too late.
You found out in the worst possible way. His wife adorned his arm at the company’s Christmas party – grinning at everyone like a Freddy Krueger from your worst nightmares. You were a placeholder for the affections his wife refused, for the fantasies he had subdued when he got married. You felt dirty. You felt foolish. You felt used. Now you knew what those looks were. They were many things, but envy wasn’t among them.
The crack became a yawning, gaping chasm.
# # #
A picture, that’s all it is.
It’s a picture of a girl on Joe’s phone. Her head is flung back in glee and she clutches an ice-cream cone. A smidgen of it dots her nose. Glacier-white teeth gleam from her smile. Her tank top hugs her torso perfectly. Her legs are long – long enough to rival Rapunzel’s hair. Her skin is a flawless, brass-paved road and her slender waist looks tailor-made for flamenco dancing. She looks like the real Ultraviolet, not the second-rate version you are.
Her beautiful smile is a sneer that reminds you of everything you’re not. You wished you could reach into the picture and smear that ice-cream all over her pretty face. You imagine she doesn’t have to waste money on scrubs and creams like you do. She’s probably an accomplished professional, probably a medical doctor who doesn’t work from a cubicle like you do. My ex-girlfriend, Joe tells you.
You find it hard believing him. Who would leave such a girl? You don’t complete it. It hurts too deeply. Who would leave her to be with you? She’s dead, he tells you. His eyes are glazed over like those of a dopehead. She’s the kind of woman that has men pining over her even in death. Not you. Bade, Frank, and the hordes of nameless faces hadn’t even given you a second thought.
You pull away from Joe.
The haunted, broken things in you become gaping spaces between you and him. He’s dying for her, and all he has is you. He reaches out for a star and he’s comforted by nothingness. You’re a blank, black stretch of emptiness between stars–dark spaces; hollow, pitiful chasms that prevent them from coming together and blazing even brighter. A consolation.
You think of all the times you thought you could enliven the strange numbness in Joe. You wonder whether he lived out memories of her with you. Even from the grave, she still ignited him in ways, myriad ways you never could and you never would. You listen to Robbie Williams’ “Feel”, but when you begin feeling it, you try to drown yourself in as many bottles of Guinness you can gulp down. The chasms Joe stanched have collapsed. You’re unhinged. When different men, nameless faces blurred by Guinness bottles, crawl into those cracks, you’ll widen yourself to accommodate them.
You hit thirty. You don’t know what it is about that number that makes that it a young time to die and an old one to marry. It’s just dumb. But your mother and aunt don’t care for all your rationing. You never wanted the stupid party. You don’t turn thirty every day, Salewa convinces you. When your sisters urge you to cut the cake and make a wish, you look up to find your mother and aunt’s eyes on you like lasers, making silent wishes on your behalf that their sneering looks convey. Your feeling of inadequacy reaches greater heights.
Joe tries to call you. His messages never cease. You don’t respond. But that’s what spaces do. They swallow everything up in their merciless depths. You finally agree to meet him. In his eyes, you see that same gaze you’ve come to recognise in yours. The same gaze he talked about. A stranger’s gaze, he’d called it. It’s a haunting look that makes you think maybe, just maybe, you might have meant something to him. Beneath it is a realisation of being wanted – not in the manner of selfish satisfaction of the men you meet in the lounge, but in being wanted for longer than a few nights. But too many things have crawled out of you and left fractures. Too many fractures. That’s why you sneer at Joe’s love, why you can’t recognise its cooling rain when it stares you in the face. That’s why you ward it off like a dagger directed towards you instead of welcoming its tender drizzle on the parched corridors of your heart.
# # #
It’s been a year.
You’ve blocked Joe’s number and tucked him into the archives of your memory. But he doesn’t sit there like an ordinary record. He’s platinum, shining among the other unremarkable ones.
But tonight, just as the men who stare at you, you’ll put on a smile that mirrors their pretentious ones. It’s not the forever you want, but you’ll take it.
A waitress plops a glass in front of you. You look at her. She directs her gaze to a gentleman a few tables away. A five o’clock shadow covers his jaw, and his grin is wide. Smoke capable of putting a chimney to shame obscures his face. Perfect. Just the way you like it. You don’t want to remember him.
He’s wearing a black shirt. Just like Joe was the first day you met him.
He’ll do.
For tonight, at least.
Adédoyin Àjàyí is a young Nigerian writer. He writes from Lagos, the city that never sleeps. Nature is the biggest influence on his writing. His work has appeared in Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review, Afrocritik, Livina Press, Nantygreens, Literary Yard, Fiction Niche, Literally Stories, Maudlin House, African Writer, Ngiga Review, Spillwords Press, Arts Lounge, Figwort Literary Journal, Journal of African Youth Literature (JAY Lit), Everscribe Magazine, Akpata Magazine, and The Hooghly Review. His writing explores the complexities of human relationships. He was long-listed for the 2024 JAY Lit Prize for fiction. He’s addicted to cakes, books, and suits. He tweets @AjayiAdedoyin14.
Cover photo credit: Pixabay