When Mummy G.O. said that it would work, I did not argue. Even though I had wondered how that idea could grow in her head that was always denied sunlight by her large sanctimonious scarf. I did not bother to tell her about the many things I have tried that didn’t work. So, I held onto her words.
“Maria, this is not the type of battle you leave for the Lord. He’s too busy fighting sin in the world to fight for a beautiful woman like you that he fashioned her body into a weapon.”, she said, with her eyes bulging at the sheer incredulity of my coming to her instead of doing the needful.
I smiled at the thought of my body being a weapon. A weapon that has blood rather than bullets running through it.
Her words rang in my head that day when I walked into the shop. So, even when the elderly woman at the store smiled at me, a smile full of unspoken things, I did not fret. My hands did not quiver as they would have done on days when things were yet to get out of hand. I held onto the sheaf of red G-string panties that I picked up, inspecting them in the low-hanging dim light bulb.
For a moment, I wondered if their tiny linen won’t get lost in the huge lobes of my backside. I wondered about the intention of those who made them, whether they had women in mind while making them or the pleasure it would give men seeing their women wearing them. But then, it didn’t matter anymore. I had no option but to follow up with our Mummy’s words.
“Tease him with your body. That’s how it should be done. Prayer won’t solve this one. But you see this miracle of a body God has given you, that is what will solve it.”
If it’s G-sting panties that will get Bonaventure to perform his manly duties, I did not mind buying the shop. After I served him his food that night, after we both cuddled in the large sofa in the parlour and he carried me upstairs, after I took a minute and went into the bathroom to change so that I could surprise him, I found him snoring like an overfed child.
My blood stream flared up so much at the sight of him that I knew its temper could boil a tuber of yam. So, I knew I wouldn’t sleep beside him that night because the mere sight of him couched in the insouciance of sleep would give my ogbanje spirit ideas: like going into the kitchen to get a knife slice off his third leg that has refused to be a good errand boy. Instead, I grabbed a pillow from the bed, and dragged the blanket away from him as roughly as I could, in a way that would disturb his useless sleep. But he didn’t turn. He just lay quietly on the bed like a mortuary.
*
Bonaventure and I have been married for seven months. No. It’s actually seven months, two weeks, and four days since our wedding, and nothing has happened. On the night of our wedding, he had rushed off to bed immediately after we walked into our bedroom, with the unsettled eagerness of one who was running late on their first day of work and was desperate to catch the last train. The next day nothing happened. I was worried but I thought he was just exhausted from the rollercoaster of planning the wedding. After all, I was the one who wanted a big wedding. I should extend the grace.
But with each passing day, he carried excuses like a woman’s handbag that never dropped. On the days he tried to get down with me to escape the torture of my accusing eyes, once it was time to have inside me, he suddenly shrunk and recoiled into his shell with the swiftness of a turtle escaping danger. After these incidents, intimacy became potholes he expertly swerved away from. His excuses trickled in with the consistent relentlessness of the nozzle of a broken sink.
“I am so tired today, babe. Please, let’s do this tomorrow”
His tomorrow never came until the night I finally got him to do it. My ovulation had woken up with a ravenous appetite. I couldn’t bring myself to close my eyes, with him lying beside me. It was either he had sex with me, or I rape him. Yes. His mouth seemed to have exhausted the deposit of excuses his mind brewed, when my matchstick hands reached out to him on the bed, expecting a resistance, instead like a dried harmattan grass, he caught fire immediately.
Watching him wound up in my hand like a well-pumped tube sent fires across my body. The feel of his biceps glazing through bare skin and his firm hands cupping my breasts, made me hate him for the pleasure he had denied me since. His hand worked all over me like one who even though was in a new street, knew the exact house number he was looking for once he saw it.
As he propped himself over me, my body became flammable. I laid lithotomic, hungry to have him whole inside me. My eyes were shut, and my mouth split with pleasure in wild anticipation. With what my hand felt when it wrapped itself around him, I knew that something huge was coming. For a moment, I remembered the parable of Jesus that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. With what my hand felt, I knew the camel’s head would have to struggle too like the rich man. But I have been ready for this like since yesterday. I want this pleasurable pain. Then everything came crashing.
“Babe, I’m sorry. I can’t”, he said, abruptly in the low voice of one who knew what he said would summon an army of backlashes.
“Uhh?” I said, forcing my eyes open to see what he was on about
“You can’t what?”
Silence.
In seconds, I watched him recoil and grow limp as though there was a remote somewhere that controlled him. There was something in his eyes in the way he sat and set his eyes on the blankness of the room.
“Are you cheating on….”
“No! Why would you even think that? I’m not”
“Then why don’t want to have sex with me? Why do you always suddenly recoil and leave me hanging once we get to this point”, I said, my voice cracking and quaking in frustrated painful whimpers.
“I’m sorry”
“I don’t need your sorry. I need answers”
Silence.
I nearly ran mad that night. I have always believed him when he said he wasn’t cheating until that night. My suspicion that he was cheating was what led me to Mummy G.O. for counsel in the first place. But Bonaventure was not that kind of person. There was always a certain sincerity that played in his eyes, which had a way of playing its way into your soul. It first happened when we met in the most awkward way. It was in 2013, in church. I was in a queue going for the offertory collection. He was at my back. I didn’t notice him until it happened.
“I’m very sorry. You bent and.” he said, with his two hands raised in surrender.
His finger had unintentionally poked my backside. I didn’t get angry. There was a kind of sincerity in his eyes that unnerved me. Moreover, I had bent to dance, he was probably keeping his hands away when it made contact. After the mass, I saw him again. Or rather he searched for me.
“I’m very sorry about earlier. It wasn’t intentional” he said, his eyes ringing with the same sincerity I would later come to associate with him.
For the first time, I noticed how his sheen black beard gang ran through both sides of his face like strings carefully fitted to fasten the afro that sat on his head. I don’t like fair men but there was something about his fair skin that was alluring. It wasn’t the yellow painter Garri sort of fairness.
“It’s fine. These things happen”, I said, trying to sound as casual as possible while avoiding his eyes whose destiny it seemed was to melt the wax of my big girl composure. How can I be shamelessly tripping for a man in church?
“Please, what is the name?”
“Maria. No. Uchenwa”, I said and hated myself for almost stuttering, and the way I was shining my teeth.
“I’m Bonaventure”, he said, simultaneously politely holding out his hand for a handshake and baring his Oral B teeth in the avuncular and non-cocky way boys who were unconscious of their beauty did.
“Oh nice”
And that was it. Fast forward to three years after that meeting, I was on our matrimonial bed wearing my birthday suit; and he was sitting at the edge of the bed with the face of a child who had mistakenly poured away the family dinner. It didn’t make sense to me how we always started- hungry for each other, tearing our clothes away like fashioned against us, and then, boom! he leaves me hanging and scurries to the edge of the bed and apologizes.
So, that night when he said I’m sorry, I didn’t believe him. I have become convinced that there was somebody somewhere. My suspicion was right. It began with a text message from a number he simply saved as Debbie.
“I will see you tomorrow, dear. Be safe”, it said.
We had access to each other’s phone. I knew what came in and out of his phone. I knew everyone on his contact list. He was that transparent. I didn’t want to confront him. I didn’t know about any Debbie until then. But I wanted to be sure. As days went by, Debbie like a favourite meal that’s constant on a family menu, started becoming a regular name in his dialled numbers and missed calls.
“Are you seeing someone?” I asked again, the day he came in a few minutes past 9 p.m.
“Seeing someone? I don’t understand?”
“Are you cheating on me with another woman?” I said, my voice, loud and angry, ricocheting into our four-bedroom apartment.
Silence.
He walked into his room without breathing a word. This was his signature way of showing anger whenever he felt insulted. Silence. He was out in a few minutes to eat at the dining table. This was another interesting aspect of him. He was a faithful disciple of even if you are angry chop first. He always ate. I loved it about him. It didn’t matter the tension between us. He never showed anger by rejecting food like most traditional Nigerian husbands, who would reject your food in anger only to sneak into the kitchen in the middle of the night to help themselves. His appetite was a fish. Slippery. Anger has no grip on it. He would always find his way to the dining to eat.
But that day, I hated him for it. With each ball that escaped into his mouth while he left me hanging with no answers, I boiled with rage. I silently wished a ball would get stuck in his throat. It didn’t happen. So, I decided I take the bull by the horns.
“You can’t be eating my food and be seeing another woman at my back,” I said, snatching the bowl of soup and garri from the dining.
His eyes hovered over me. Rage wasn’t in it. It was the perplexed look of one who didn’t have words to capture exactly what he felt. A sigh escaped his lips; he turned to his fingers to leak the soup that smeared it.
The next morning when he came to the dining and met the empty stare of the dining, he did not ask me about his food. He left. I didn’t say a word. The person I had words for was Debbie. I already copied out her number the previous night while he was fast asleep. I needed to know why she wouldn’t leave my husband. She was the only thing on my To-do list.
*
“Hello, this is Dr. Deborah speaking, how may I help you”, a tiny female voice rang out. I wondered why Bona would of all the women in the world choose the one whose voice sounded like the breaking stretch of a network that could cut at any moment, or was it because she is a doctor?
“Hello, how can I help you? Dr Deborah speaking” she said again.
“Leave my husband alone!”
“Sorry, I didn’t get that”
“Leave my husband alone!” I screamed into the line
“Sorry, I think you called the wrong line”
“Well, next time I will call you, you’ll actually pay for already being in the wrong line by chasing my husband around”.
“Excuse you? Please, who is this” she asked. I heard the sound of the keys of Irritation locking up the voice of her professional.
“Someone you wouldn’t want to meet. Leave Bonaventure alone. By the time I call you again. I won’t be this nice”. I said and hung up.
My body was stiff and heavy with emotions. Anger rode through me like a car whose break failed on a bad road. I was angry at Bonaventure, for lying to me while looking me straight in the eye. Our marriage was barely seven months and I had to deal with cheating. I was also angry at myself for having to call the woman he was cheating with. That was totally out of character. I have always believed that cheating was a deliberate act. It is only the one who decides to cheat that will cheat.
I found it preposterous when people reached out to the person their partners were cheating with because their partner is not a child-they know what they are doing. I felt ashamed of myself. I knew it was time to call it quits. The all men were all the samemantra seems true now. They never won in any battle with their third leg.
While we were dating, I remember I had asked him what his deal breaker was.
“Cheating”, he said, almost immediately, as though he had waited to answer that question all his life.
“Wow. Cheating?”
“Yeah. Cheating is not just my partner sleeping with another man. For me, deliberately entertaining the attention of another man is cheating. So, if we have something, it’s either we are all in or out”. The strength of his voice showed it wasn’t something that came to his thought at the spur of the moment. It was something he had given enough thought to.
“But what if it’s not deliberate? You know sometimes these things just happen even when you don’t intend it. You are just caught up in a situation”.
He pulled in his upper lip and an amused smile played on it. His slender arm reached out to his wine glass. He sipped it with the relaxed dedication of one who wanted to rinse out fangs from the words he wanted to say before he said them.
“Uchenwa, cheating is not farting that can happen even when one doesn’t plan it. It is a deliberate act”, he said with a note of finality, that left a clear message.
His response made me love him the more. However, I guess over the years, I have become a sieve that took out water and held onto the chaff of lies men told me. I guess that’s a curse that comes with being a voluptuous woman. You don’t know if men came for you just for you or because of the burden of extra folds your body carried. I had believed Bona over the years. I believed him in the way he looked at me, not with the awe of one who was just lucky to have me, but that of a man who knew exactly what he wanted.
It was there in the way he kept his eyes on me in restaurants even when girls I considered way more beautiful stepped in. His eyes glued to my face as though it was his destiny. It held on with the firmness of one who had reached the end of the road and knew exactly that it was the end. But it seemed he found a new road lately.
When he came back that night after I made the call, he saw my bags stacked together in the sitting room. He did not say a word. I have decided I won’t confront him again. It was not in my place to tell a man to stop cheating, but I wouldn’t stick around waiting for him to change.
“Babe, can we talk”, he said, with hair still dripping with water.
“There is nothing to talk about. You already…”
“Can you just listen to me for a second, please”
“Listen to you, to tell me more lies?
He stepped back as though he had been pushed by an invisible force. Anger sprouted in his eyes but quickly faded away.
“I have never lied to you. Never”.
“You will make a good humorist”
Silence.
“Could you please sit”
Even as much as I wanted to stand. I still hoped he had some explanations to give that would somehow make the events of the past few weeks a nightmare.
“I am not cheating on you”
“hmm”, I scoffed.
“I have never cheated on you and I don’t intend to start”
“Debbie is my therapist”
“Thera what?” I asked, worry and surprise springing to my face.
“Uche I am dealing with a childhood trauma”
There was a huge pain in his eyes. The anguish that comes when one is forced against their wish to narrate a painful experience they were not yet prepared to share,I wished I never asked. But I needed to hear it too. I needed something to hold onto.
“My father died when I was twelve”, he began.
“He had an affair with another woman but never made it back home after the affair”
Tears were already choking up his voice. I have never seen him cry. My heart broke seeing him do so. Still, I had yet to connect his father’s cheating to hisrefusing to have sex with me as his wife and keeping me hanging whenever it was time to find his way inside me. I wanted to hear everything, even though my heart broke at the sight of him crying I needed to know.
When he finally picked on the elephant in the room, my heart grew limp. Speckles of goosebumps ran amok on my body. I imagined him as a twelve-year-old boy, curious to know why his dad had not come home in a while, standing eavesdropping on his mum and uncle’s conversations. It was here he picked up the burden he now carried.
“She said that he collapsed the moment he came into her”
It was this that fixed the puzzle. The trauma was a halo that hung on his head. Still, I was curious as to the reason he had to have an affair since it was the same path his father tread which got him dead.
“I’m not having an affair,” he said, curtly.
The look in my eyes was enough to tell him that the answer wasn’t enough.
“Debbie is my therapist. I didn’t know I had trauma until we got married and I couldn’t have sex with you”, he said, with his eyes distant and his face stretching in exhaustion breaking out sweats.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this? You never spoke of it”
Silence.
My eyes clung to the gold wall clock. It was a wedding gift a friend I had fallen out with gifted me on our wedding day. I noticed the Minute’s hand no longer moved. I made a mental note to get it fixed. I watched his dropping shoulders. It seemed he lost weight in minutes. I drew him closer, and like a badly done foundation, he caved in, crumpling into my arms. I knew he had had a lot to carry. It was now my turn to carry him.
EKENEDIRICHUKWU is a Nigerian who simply loves reading stories more than he enjoys writing them. A graduate of Philosophy from Bigard Memorial Seminary, Enugu. When he’s not freelancing, playing volleyball or the keyboard, he spends most of his time fantasizing on interesting characters he’d love to create, reading or listening to talks by his idol, Chimamanda Adichie. He only writes whenever his conscience guilt trips him into believing that he is wasting his life if he’s not writing. Now, he’s trying to take his writing a little more serious.
