His ass was robustly black.
He turned away from the mirror and strode off to the bathroom. Afterwards he got dressed in his blue T.M. Lewin shirt, his black trousers, his brown shoes, and after pocketing his wallet and his white handkerchief, he stuck his plastic folder under his arm. Picking up the phone that Syreeta had lent him, he switched it on and ignored the
beep-beep
of text messages tumbling in as he copied out Yuguda’s number, before deleting it from the phone along with every number he had saved. And then he walked out the front door with nothing, and left nothing behind except, in Syreeta’s bedroom, arranged on the bed, a phone, a house key, a ripped-up passport, a folded pile of clothes, and a note that ended with:
I’ll pay back what I owe.
‘Everything changes, nothing perishes.’
—Ovid,
Metamorphoses
Friday, 13 July, I got the call from Frank. (The first thing he said was, ‘It’s me. I’ve changed my name. I’m Frank.’) He was about to leave Lagos for ever, but he had two nights that he could spend with me, if I wanted to talk. I gave him directions to my house in Surulere and he arrived in the afternoon. At the knock, I opened my door, and there he was, dressed the same as the first time I saw him, the only difference being that he carried a new travelling bag instead of his old folder. As we exchanged greetings, there was some awkwardness about if we should shake hands or buss cheeks, but that was settled in favour of cheeks. He came in, I led him to the sitting room, and after we sat facing each other in the sofa, he said, ‘I still can’t get over how good you look.’
I found Frank attractive. He was slim, straight-backed, with a self-assured posture. The contrast between his soft red hair and his hard green eyes was striking. His nose seemed long when he was facing me, but with his face in profile, it fitted his features. His skin changed with his moods. When he was calm, it was porcelain smooth; when he was agitated, it grew patchy; and when he laughed, it became a healthy red. The first time we kissed, I thought it felt different because it was the first for me, but later I saw that his lips were thin, barely there, different from mine. Before kissing, we talked. He asked the usual questions men have about women’s bodies, and also those other questions, the same ones I had for him. How did it feel to be different from what I had always been? Did I have any regrets about my transformation? How did my family receive it? Whenever I batted his questions back at him, he found ways to evade them.
I’m asking you
, he said.
Before I answer that, I have another question.
And then, when I asked him if he ever thought of seeing his family again, he said:
‘Can I see your breasts?’
I felt no shame with Frank. Even more, I wanted him to see me for what I was, same as I needed to see through him. He was the hero of a story that had set me free, and knowing him felt no different from knowing me. Which was why I stood up and removed my blouse, then shed my bra, and when I sat back down, after he drew closer, he looked and touched, we kissed and told. I found out about Syreeta, Tosin, Arinze, Yuguda, Headstrong, Obata, all the lives that had shaped his own in the twenty-five days since I first saw him. He entrusted me with his story, and as his confessor, I made no judgements, I only listened to absolve. No one’s path is laid out from birth, we must all choose our own through life, and what greater gift is given a person than the chance to see the destinations where the roads not taken might have led you. I will admit that Frank had hurt some people. He had used them and moved on. Same way he was using me as a spittoon, a receptacle for all the emotions he had bottled up during an ordeal that few could understand as well as me, his fellow traveller down this path of self-awareness.
By this time we had moved to my bedroom and were side-by-side in bed. It was late at night, the city had gone to sleep, and the silence skulking outside the windows had forced our voices into intimacy. I had most of my story, but Frank wanted something else. His caresses had grown bolder over the course of our conversation, for hours I’d stopped his hands from reaching under my skirt, and with each peak of excited groping he had shed more of his clothing until all he wore were his boxer shorts. I wasn’t ready to let him go all the way, though he tried until sleep came.
At sunrise, I discovered his black ass. And when he awoke, after he called me back to bed and slipped his hand between my legs, he, too, found my secret.
It is easier to be than to become. Frank should have known that. His shocked reaction to my penis proved that he didn’t. Which was why, after he hurried into the bathroom, I phoned his sister. Yet I felt like a fraud, a woman playing God. Of all the flaws his story had exposed about his character, his most tragic was trusting in me. His lack of understanding for our shared fate, his black ass and my woman’s penis, and his unchanging selfishness towards me and everyone else, those weren’t enough reason to excuse my own meanness of spirit. I had got my story, and he, too, deserved to get what he wanted. For my own redemption as much as his, I had to give him the choice of ending his story as he wanted. And so, when he returned from the bathroom and began putting on his clothes with his buttocks turned away from me, I confessed:
‘I went to Egbeda.’
He lifted his head and saw the guilt in my face as clearly as I saw the fright in his.
‘I met your mother, your sister – everyone.’
As he stared at me with eyes darkened by comprehension, a small part of my mind couldn’t help noting that the expression on his face was just right for describing how Syreeta must have looked when she returned from the clinic to find an empty apartment.
‘I called them. They’re coming here.’
Frank had never answered me about seeing his family again. He didn’t need to, because the choice he made when given a second chance was more telling than anything he could have said. After I shared the news of his family’s coming, he finished dressing in silence, then picked up his travelling bag, walked to my front door, and stood beside it for one hour and six minutes until the knocking started and his mother called out, ‘Furo – are you there? Come and open the door.’
You spoil me, Femke van Zeijl.
Rae Barrett, Alero Barrett, Ejiro Barrett, Anwuli Ojogwu, Adewale Maja-Pearce, Parisa Ebrahimi, Fiona McCrae, Jacqueline Ko, and James Pullen:
imiete
, thank you well-well.
Who wouldn’t be grateful for a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in sunny California?
A. IGONI BARRETT
is the author of
Love Is Power, or Something Like That.
He is the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center residency. He lives in Nigeria.
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