Copyright Page

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2021 by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

eISBN: 9781542032728

Cover illustration by Natasha Cunningham

Cover design by Alex Merto

Published in coordination with Plympton Literary Studio

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The American president was wearing too much makeup: her chocolate face powdered a shade too light, mascara clumped on her lashes, the smudge of berry lipstick like a small wound on her lower lip. She looked hastily prepared—her weave lank and in need of tonging—and she blinked at the cameras as she spoke. Before, this press conference would have been background television noise for Obinna, and if he did listen at all, it would’ve been desultory and perfunctory. Now, he watched closely, volume turned on high. He had always found it silly how many of his friends here in Lagos proudly ignored Nigerian news stations and watched only CNN, knowing more about the American Congress than they did about the Nigerian Senate, but he, for once, was behaving like them. He began obsessively watching American news about a month ago, after his old friend Eze called to say he was coming back to visit. The Male Masturbatory Act was all they seemed to talk about on the news, the forty-year-old law being challenged, with quick-talking pundits speculating about what the Supreme Court’s decision would be. And today it had been announced: male masturbation would remain illegal, punishable by up to fifteen years in prison.

The American president’s face was in close-up as she said, “I applaud the court for this just and moral decision. We must never lose sight of what this is about—a waste of a potential child.”

She sounded too dramatic, but better that than the Nigerian president, she with her ill-fitting wigs and gaudy jewelry, who always read haltingly from speeches in a flat monotone as though she were seeing the sentences for the first time on camera. In the background on the TV screen were groups of men, Black and white and Asian and Hispanic, in suits, in hoodies, in T-shirts, holding placards. Respect the bodily autonomy of men. Government hands off my seed. Our Body Our Choice. Obinna didn’t understand why Americans always made a fuss over things that should be left unsaid. Male masturbation was technically illegal in Nigeria, too, but men did it all the time. Men had needs after all, he had done it many times himself, but everyone kept it quiet. The American who had challenged the law claimed he wanted to live in his truth and stop hiding the fact that he masturbated; it was his body, and he should be able to do whatever he wanted with it. Live in his truth sounded silly to Obinna, and why did Americans always have to make everything public? Still, he wanted to have a more sophisticated opinion about the decision, something that would impress Eze. He wondered if Eze still tinkered with old engines, old clocks, anything that had once worked and no longer did. Remembering how much Eze loved machines, and especially how he loved fixing and bringing them back to life, brought Obinna a poignant feeling of nostalgia, for a life that used to be.

They had kept in touch only haphazardly in the eleven years Eze had been away, but there were still things that made Obinna long for their time in university together, made him think, Only Eze will understand. Best friends in secondary school, they had become even closer in university, and people called them twins, not because they looked alike but because they were always together: Eze, the tall, handsome ball of fire, burning things in his path, and Obinna, inward, focused, always walking on the edges.

It was Eze who first made Obinna think he could actually be a poet. In secondary school, Obinna wrote poems in the back pages of his notebook and sometimes tore out the sheets and crumpled them. Once, Eze picked up a crumpled sheet, smoothed it out, and read it. “You wrote this?” he asked, and his expression was one Obinna would never forget—an admiring awe, an awed admiration.

“It’s nothing,” Obinna said, trying to sound dismissive.

“Guy! This is very good!” Eze said. He always spoke as though each sentence ended in an exclamation mark. Eze, who knew so much about everything, who could talk with adults about politics and history, was saying his poem was good. He began to leave pages of poetry on the table in Eze’s room when he visited, and Eze would return them later, sometimes with comments written carefully on the sidelines. This sounds forced. Wow. Beautiful. It was Eze who made him submit his poem to the campus literary magazine in their first year of university, and Eze who bought beers for their friends to celebrate the poem’s publication.

Eze, bold, interesting Eze. Even his family was bold and interesting. His mother was a doctor working somewhere in the Middle East and came home once every few months, a short, round woman who seemed mismatched next to her tall, slender husband. Eze’s father normally spoke like Eze, in bursts of words, full of proclamations, but whenever Eze’s mother was home, his exuberance was quelled. He became almost meek, asking Eze to please not play loud music so as not to disturb her, making different juice mixes and health concoctions with ginger and lemon and carrying tall glasses to her in her study. His mother emerged once in a while and would go out to the garden with a net to catch butterflies. She’d dry them and place them in a display case, which was strange but also exciting to Obinna. Obinna’s family was ordinary, his mother a headmistress, his father a barber, both of them unremarkable and dutiful. It thrilled him to be close to a family whose shelves were full of dead butterflies. He spent so much time at their house that their houseboy began to set a place for him at lunch and dinner, when Eze and his parents ate together, the father solicitous, asking if everyone was fine, if the food was okay, and the mother chewing slowly, reading a newspaper or a magazine and saying very little.

Once, after lunch, Obinna was out in the backyard with Eze, Eze on his knees fixing his bicycle tire, while Obinna ate a fresh cashew he had just plucked from the tree in their garden. The juices from the fruit ran stickily between his fingers, and he licked at them.

“Don’t be so uncivilized, Obinna!” It was Eze’s father. Obinna didn’t know when he had appeared at the back door to stand watching them. “Don’t lick your fingers like a bush boy. How will you find a wife with this kind of behavior?”

Obinna, taken aback, said, “Sorry, Uncle.” He didn’t know what else to say. He was used to Eze’s father’s harangues about finding a wife, but they were always directed at Eze and never at him, until now.

“Daddy, leave Obinna alone. Wife wife wife all the time. We’re in secondary school for goodness’ sake. You would think we were in our thirties and still single.”

“Thirties? You must be joking. A man still without a wife at the age of twenty-eight is like that deflated piece of rubber—useless,” Eze’s father said, pointing at the bicycle tube.

“I’m fixing it, it’s not useless,” Eze replied.

His father laughed. How easily emotions were heightened between Eze and his father, and how quickly they returned to normal.

“You have to learn to talk about emotions, Eze!” his father would blurt out suddenly. “Not machines and politics and gadgets all the time. Otherwise you won’t find a good wife. You think women care about all that?”

And then shortly afterward, he and Eze would laugh together about something Eze’s dog had done.

When his father went back inside, Eze said, “Do you know my father used to be a theater actor when he was in university in Ibadan? Then he married my mother, and she told him he had to quit acting because married men who were actors were considered promiscuous. That’s why he now spends all his time juicing ginger and oiling his beard and watering the flowers in the garden. He doesn’t have a life.” Eze paused. “I’m never going to get married.”

Obinna stared at Eze. His own father might not talk about it as often as Eze’s did, but it was understood, of course, that marriage was the ultimate prize for a man. Everyone knew that. So how could a man just choose not to marry? It felt to him sacrilegious, but in the weeks after, he thought of Eze’s words often. Until then, it had not occurred to Obinna that he, too, could choose a life different from what was expected of him: graduate from university, get married, have children. He began to think of another possibility. Of going to America with Eze after university, where he would find a job and spend all his free time writing poems. He already knew what he would call his first collection: Dead Butterflies.

“I’ll spend most of my time with my folks in the East, but I hope I can stay in Lagos for a couple days, with you and Amara, if it’s okay,” Eze had said when he called, and there was a new formality to it all, his asking if it was okay rather than just assuming that it was, the slur of his American accent, that strange expression a couple days.

“Of course you can stay with us,” Obinna had said, and later that day, he cut his hair and shaped his beard at the salon, renewed his gym membership, bought some new shirts, and changed his cologne to what the thin salesboy at Megaplaza told him was the “latest.” He was nervous. He did not entirely understand this nervousness. Maybe it was the normal competitiveness of friends who had not seen each other in a long time that made him determined that Eze not think his life provincial. Or maybe it was simply that America intimidated him. There was a savoir faire quality to people who lived in America for which he felt both admiration and resentment; they somehow managed to be familiar with all novelty, as if they were privy to the latest of everything and lacked the ability to be surprised. Things would be different, his nervousness less, if Eze were coming back from England. England was familiar. Ever since Obinna’s wife, Amara, was promoted to managing director years ago, she had taken them to London every summer and was considering buying a flat in Maida Vale. If Eze lived in England, Obinna would not worry that the glass table with gold accents in the living room looked too dated, that Eze would glance at the TV and say something about the most recent model that was flatter and sleeker.

On the morning of Eze’s arrival, Obinna woke up early, too early, panicked that he had forgotten the arrival time of the flight, and got up to go look at the piece of paper he had scribbled it on. Amara stirred in bed. She had come home late last night. Again. She had many more responsibilities now that she was managing director, but he still did not see why she had to personally entertain her new clients from Europe day after day. He opened the bedroom door quietly so as not to wake her. The living room was bathed in the gray of early dawn; the houseboy, Emmanuel, dusting the furniture, said, “Good morning, sah,” before Obinna realized that he was there.

“Put on the light. Why are you working in the dark?” Obinna said.

Emmanuel turned the switch on and looked sourly at Obinna before going back to his cleaning. There was something slothful about him, something mean-spirited. He had been with them only a month and already Obinna wished he could fire him, but it was so difficult to find good houseboys these days. The last two had been particularly bad: one confessed, after the children began having nightmares every night, that he was a witch and wanted to eat the children; the other stole half of Obinna’s wardrobe but was stopped by the gateman on his way out with a suitcase of crisply ironed shirts.

This one was disturbingly suggestive toward Amara—even if Amara said she didn’t notice that everything the boy wore clearly displayed the mound between his legs. He came too close when he greeted Amara, walked too slowly whenever Amara was in the room, as though to give her time to check him out.

“Make sure your madam’s breakfast is not late today,” Obinna said to Emmanuel, who, again, said nothing and walked away with his lachrymose demeanor and his cleaning rag. Obinna surveyed the living room, trying to see it through Eze’s Americanized eyes. He had replaced the curtains—the beige raw silk seemed more cosmopolitan than ornate jacquard. Was the gilt edge on the furniture a little tacky? At least the painting on the wall, a Bruce Onobrakpeya, would impress Eze. Obinna got the children dressed for school and sat at the table while they had breakfast, toast and fried eggs, the boy eating with his prompt good manners, the girl deliberately crumbling her bread and kicking her brother under the table.

“Stop it! Eat your food!” Obinna said to her.

Amara came out, dressed, earlier than usual. Her breakfast was not ready. Obinna hurried to the kitchen, mumbling, “Sorry, sorry” to Amara and then in the kitchen hissing, “Simple boiled yam and stew, why is it hard for you to do it quickly?”

Finally, Emmanuel served the food. A layer of oil floated on the surface of the stew, as Amara liked it.

“Honestly I am tired of this houseboy,” Obinna said.

“You shouldn’t let that boy stress you,” Amara said, genial, offhand, as though Obinna chose the stress. She settled down at the table, tugging at the frilly collar of her purple blouse, her clear skin the gorgeous color of baked clay.

“If I don’t stress, then nothing will get done in this house,” Obinna said.

“We should use one of those new employment agencies and find a real steward.”

“Mba. Those agencies that are for oil company people that pay crazy money to get chefs from Togo? No way.”

Amara laughed. “I keep telling you, darling, you don’t seem to realize that we have arrived! Ife adigo! We can more than afford it.”

She spoke with the new expansiveness that came after she was made managing director, as though everything was possible, everything could be handled, and as though, too, every appetite should be sated. She urged Obinna to spend more, buy more things for himself, for the house, for the children. Arrived. They had indeed arrived, with this new house in Parkview, an intimidating mirror in the hallway, and furniture imported from Italy.

The children had finished eating and Obinna went outside, deposited them in the car, and told the driver, Mary, to come back right after she dropped them off. “Yes, sir,” she said, with a sheepish smile. He suspected that the woman ran her own private errands after dropping off the children, and then came back hours late to say, “Terrible traffic, sir.”

Back inside, he smoothed the collar of Amara’s blouse—it stuck out at a slightly awkward angle, perhaps from the dry-cleaning. “You look very nice.”

Amara was distracted, scanning the news on her iPad. “You know the new oil minister will be announced today. The Guardian is saying that it will likely be a man. Mr. Akpan.”

“I hope you’ll be home before Eze arrives,” Obinna said, but Amara didn’t hear him.

“Progress is good, we all want progress, but a man should not be in charge of such a sensitive post, it’s too important,” she said.

“I agree,” Obinna said. “And how will it look when we go to OPEC meetings and it turns out that only Nigeria has a male minister? They won’t take us seriously.”

“Yes!” Amara said, and looked at him with a flash of approval. “Especially now that we have an opportunity to place Nigeria in a major position of influence, with all the problems in the Middle East.” Amara went back to the screen, eyes narrowed.

Obinna remembered, with a nostalgic pang, when he and Amara used to talk more like this, about the news and the world and their fears, when they mixed their powdered milk in water to make it last and Amara came home early from work and he knew details about the manager Amara hated. Now, Obinna hardly knew anything. With each new promotion, Amara had become more vague. Meetings materialized on weekends. Unnamed responsibilities were gestured to, like fleeting dust motes. All done in Amara’s careful, loving way: she apologized earnestly, she came home with cake, shawarma, ice cream, once even a watch, a handsome platinum watch, that made Obinna wonder if Amara had originally bought it for him. He didn’t particularly like watches, Amara knew that, and if he was partial to jewelry at all, then it was to cuff links. Obinna had never worn the watch, it was still in its black domed case, in a drawer, at the very back, away from view.

Obinna often read, in men’s magazines, that men knew about other men in their wives’ lives but chose not to know, as if knowing and not knowing were in fact real choices. He had not wanted to know, for example, about Amara’s secretary, but he knew, he just knew, from the new insouciance in that secretary’s manner: “You are welcome to our office, Mr. Ofoegbu,” he had said the last time Obinna dropped by Amara’s office, as if Obinna were somehow intruding on his territory, as if the secretary no longer felt he had to be deferential, that bush boy who had hardly passed through a polytechnic and had been hired only because he was from Amara’s hometown. The insouciance said: “I want you to know that I know something that you don’t know.”

Obinna poured himself a glass of orange juice and watched Amara eating and reading with pursed lips. He did not believe that the new clients from Europe had kept Amara out late the past week. He wanted to believe it, but he just could not, and it had nothing to do with “choice.” Was it a choice when your spirit awakened to something? If he had made a choice, then it was to do nothing, and ask nothing, of his knowledge.

The first time Amara had an affair, or rather the first affair that Obinna knew of, was with a man who owned a shop in the Palms mall. Obinna sensed something, at first, in Amara’s new eagerness, her brightness, but it was not until he saw the bite mark on Amara’s neck, like whorls drawn in faded red ink, that he asked. Amara said it was an insect sting. Obinna gave her an ointment for it, and the next day, he asked Amara’s driver, Catherine, whose loyalty he had constantly courted with food and money so as to always have information about Amara, where she took madam after work. Catherine told him. He had been stunned, both surprised and unsurprised. He hated now to think of how dramatic he had been, calling Amara’s cousin, the one who had paid her school fees after her parents died, and her brother, the one who was closest to her, to ask that they speak to Amara. He must have been hysterical; it was laughable to think of that now. Talk to your sister o! She wants to destroy this marriage! But both of them told him to not make a fuss, the important thing was that Amara came home to him every day, and Amara was a very good wife, and he had to consider how difficult it was for Amara in her position, with all those young boys throwing themselves at her.

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