Ike drove as if in a daze, then parked when he arrived at Saint Stephen’s Church, a few blocks from his home. He loved sneaking into that church during quiet times, when nobody else was around and he could sit in solitude and let the silence swirl around him. Stealing away, sneaking into the church, was often what he did after fights with Bernita. But today, with the lights dimmed, the stained glass seemed too dusky, more stained than lustrous, the series of saints’ images too sad and spectral. And then he wondered whether the sadness had sprung from his own heart, discoloring his eyes. He fixed on a large wooden crucifix that seemed to dangle from above the altar, surveying everything under. After a while, he felt himself the focus of its expressionless stare. He gazed back, disquieted.
Deep down, he knew it was unjust to blame Bernita Gorbea, aka Queen B, aka Queen Bee, for his recourse to Foreign Gods, Inc. Yet, he often wondered how his life might have turned out if he had not married her. Sometimes he bemoaned their marriage, holding himself out as a victim of a large, sinister plot by Fate herself. But he was also honest enough to admit that, in some respects, she had done him a marvelous turn. Without her, he might well have fared far worse.
They had met five years ago in Baltimore. The venue was a hall where a Mexican cabdriver, a mestizo, and his African American wife celebrated their wedding reception.
It was easy to notice Bernita. She was tall and light skinned, with shapely legs and large, firm breasts. In sheer physique, she reminded him of Penny Rose, a girlfriend from his college days—perhaps the only woman he ever fell in love with in America. But the differences were just as significant. Penny was dark toned, managed to convey an impression of eloquence even when she was silent, and dazzled with something deeper, more interior, than her body. By contrast, Bernita came across as reckless. And on their first meeting—and for the years they lived together—he remembered her as oozing sex. He would discover that she had two small roses tattooed on the skin underneath each breast’s tuck. On her right inner thigh, inches from the V of pubic hair, was tattooed the name DONNELLE, a mystery lover she never agreed to speak about.
At first sight, Ike had not cared for Bernita’s talent for self-display. Her gait comprised a jerking of the shoulders and an exaggerated swaying of her hips. Yet, despite his first impressions—or, perhaps, because of them—he and Bernita were married a couple of months after that first meeting. He moved from Baltimore, Maryland, where he eked out a living as a single cabdriver, to join her in Brooklyn, New York.
Two distinct, different dreams had driven them into marriage. Ike was desperate to obtain a green card. It seemed that Bernita wanted to acquire her own in-house sex service.
Had Ike not let pride deprive him of the woman he loved—and who loved him—in college, he might have ended up in blissful marriage, his green card long taken care of. But things changed after he’d stolen a peek into a letter Penny’s father, an Atlanta-based medical doctor, had written to her. The message was blunt. Penny needed to know, Dr. Earl Rose wrote, that he and his wife were terrified of one day learning that their only child “had run off with an African to some remote African village.” And then, in an exasperated tone, he’d added: “I don’t understand why you refuse to find a nice fellow African American man.” He underlined the word “refuse.”
Penny had done her best to assure Ike of her love. In his presence, she had even telephoned her father to say that she, and she alone, must decide whom she wanted to be with. Still, Ike had recoiled, wounded by words of rejection. Months later, unable to coax him out of a cold, whining resentment, Penny moved on. She began to date a Senegalese engineering student named Diallo Dieng. One day, two years after they all graduated, Ike received a letter from Jonathan Falla with the news that Penny and Diallo had married.
It was then that the finality of losing her dawned on him, leaving a bitterness that made him shiver. It was all the sadder when he considered all the trouble he’d been through for the sake of a green card.
HIS QUEST HAD STARTED in 1997, a few months before graduation. He had applied for a job at two banks, but when he phoned one bank’s human resources department, a female employee called back and left a terse message on his voice mail. “Sir,” the woman said, “BayBank does not interview aliens unless they produce evidence of authorization to work in the US.”
Later that day, Ike went to visit Harrison Amadu, a Nigerian acquaintance who lived in Springfield, Massachusetts. Harrison was a cabdriver, but also knew his way around immigration problems faced by Africans.
Through him, Ike contacted a Puerto Rican broker named Ricardo Otis who in turn produced a twenty-two-year-old woman named Yesenia Diaz to be Ike’s “green card” bride. The broker demanded a fee of five thousand dollars before Yesenia would pose as Ike’s bride. With Harrison’s help, Ike negotiated the fee down to thirty-five hundred dollars. And then he borrowed fifteen hundred dollars from Harrison to make the down payment.
Ike and Yesenia Diaz were to meet at the office of a justice of the peace to exchange marital vows. They held a rehearsal, Yesenia’s face bearing a sneer through it all. Came the appointed date, and Yesenia was nowhere in sight. Ricardo showed up alone with the news that Yesenia’s grandmother had taken ill in Puerto Rico, and the would-be bride had traveled to be at the matriarch’s bedside. “She coming back soon,” Ricardo assured, “and then the wedding, it gonna happen.”
For the next three months, there was no Yesenia. Yet, at the end of each month Ricardo appeared at Ike’s door and demanded the due installment of two hundred dollars. Ike, who combined his studies with a menial job—cleaning several movie theaters, restaurants, and offices at night—chafed at the unfair arrangement. Why did he have to scrape from his meager earnings to make monthly payments for a fugitive bride? Grudge notwithstanding, Ike had little or no negotiating room.
Then came the fourth month when, felled by the flu, he couldn’t work for close to two weeks. He had no cash to pay the installment. He dialed Harrison Amadu, hoping to be bailed out with a small loan.
“You should start driving a cab,” Harrison said in a tone drained of sympathy. “The job brings steady money.”
The next day Ike presented himself to Harrison who introduced him to the office manager of Triple E Taxi Company.
With his boosted income, he paid off the bride fee in three months. To his dismay, Yesenia remained missing. Even so, Ricardo showed up once or twice each week asking for various sums. “Is a loan,” he’d say. “Soon I pay you back.”
One day, Ike refused any longer to be duped. That night, just past midnight, he was jerked awake by the ring of his phone. He was in the middle of a terrible dream.
“My cousin, he say you playing stubborn,” said a woman’s voice.
Confused and agitated, he slurred, “You have the wrong number.”
“Oh yeah?” said the female voice in a fighting tone. “You gonna play the wrong number game now?”
“Who is this?” he asked, sitting up in bed, perplexed.
“Is me, Yese. Ricardo cousin. Yesenia.”
Recognition hit, accompanied by a flurry of confused, stuttering statements. “I have been … We need … Ricardo said you … I’ve been looking for you. We need to meet. We have to file a marriage petition.”
“Oh yeah? I not marrying you. My cousin say you proving difficult.”
“He kept asking to borrow money and he never paid back,” Ike said. “And he was supposed to bring you.”
“Bring me? I ain’t bringing unless you pay Ricardo.”
Ike sulked for a few weeks. Then he gathered himself up and relocated to Philadelphia where he continued to work as a cabdriver. From there, he moved to Atlanta, and then to Baltimore. Wherever he moved, he brought along that stubborn dream for a green card. The card was the open sesame to a corporate job befitting his education. Often, when he met a woman, he calibrated his interest to the likelihood that she would consent to marry him. Until he met Bernita, he had had a streak of failures.
At their first meeting, Ike sensed that Bernita was trouble on two legs. She walked up to him like an old acquaintance. Without saying a word, she gathered up the folds of his agbada made of white brocade and lavishly embroidered. She turned the fabric this way and that, trying to hold it to what light there was in the dully lit hall. Then, after close to a minute, she finally looked up at him. Her eyes, guileless and frolicsome, dissolved his half-puzzled, half-consternated expression.
“Where the brother from?” she asked, in a tone that was innocent and tactless. “You from the same town as the dude in Coming to America?”
He couldn’t help smiling. Then he said, “I’m from Nigeria. I don’t know the dude’s town.”
“Ni what?” she said. “Never heard of it.”
“N-I-G-E-R-I-A,” he spelled out.
“It’s where?”
“West Africa.”
“Neat.” She regarded him with blithe curiosity. “So you’s a king or what?”
He wanted to say, No, a plebeian, a cipher, and a certified member of the lumpen proletariat, just to fashion a language that would deter her. But he suspected that nothing would shake her. Instead, he laughed.
“I knew you was large,” she said, pulling at his outfit. “Your costume be swinging and shit.”
Her hair, cut low, dripped with oil. A cowl covered her bosom but sat on her like an incongruous item of modesty. Perhaps, Ike thought, the cowl was a necessary part of a calculated provocation—a way to guide the prying eye to her full, braless breasts. Her toothy smile and overeager eyes conveyed a beseeching air.
“Thank you,” he said, aware that she had stirred something within him, a lust he loathed.
“Nice to meet you, Bernita,” he said. An unbidden smile softened his formal stance. He didn’t say his name.
“Folks call me Queen Bernita.”
He nodded.
She swept an arm to indicate his outfit. “It’s what Jesse Jackson and Farrakhan and dem other folk supposed to be wearing. The shit is great.”
She saw a woman walking past in slow, gingerly steps, her glass filled to the brim with some colorless drink.
“Hey, galfriend,” she hailed, waving spiritedly. The woman halted. Bernita ran off to her without excusing herself.
She was too crass for his taste, yet his eyes followed her. She tippled glass after glass of iceless gin and tonic. She seemed to stay sober—or, as Ike saw it, to get drunk too slowly.
Soon, Ike struck up a conversation with a keen-eyed, dimple-faced Hispanic woman. Her name was Rosita Ramos, and she was a political science major at American University. She spoke in a low, lisping tone that resembled a whisper, her body inclined toward him, her floral perfume brushing his nostrils. Speaking or listening, she held a steady, eager smile. Overpowered by her presence, Ike lost track of Bernita.
“Do you know a writer called Ama Ata Aidoo?” Rosita asked.
Ike didn’t.
“You have to read her. She’s a powerful writer, from Ghana. I read one of her books, Our Sister Killjoy, in a class I took in African feminist politics.”
Ike leaned forward, wearing a wide smile. “You’ve taken a class in African politics?”
“Feminist African politics,” she corrected.
“Oh yes. So, what’s the Killjoy book about?”
That instant, Ike sensed a presence swooping in. He looked up. Bernita stood over them, right hand on her hip, head slightly thrown back, her eyes narrowed. Then a cold calm came over her face. She began to address Ike, as if there had never been any break since their last interaction. He wanted to protest that he was in the middle of another conversation but felt powerless. Rosita sat pat for a minute or two, as if intent on waiting out an impostor. Once she rose to leave, Ike wanted to tell Bernita the obvious: that he was in the middle of a conversation with somebody else. But he failed to speak.
Bernita took the vacated seat, then flashed a mischievous smile.
She stuck to him the rest of the evening. One moment, she described the bride as some sort of cousin; another moment, she called the woman a friend. Out of pique, Ike asked which it was. “Me and her are tight,” she said, and twined her fingers.
She made two or three more trips to the bar. The details of her life spooled out of her mouth in a jabbering, skipping fashion. She was born in Augusta, Georgia, but grew up, and still lived, in Brooklyn, New York. She had lots of family all over the city. Her mother had had seven children with three men, but she was one of two females. She loved her sister but didn’t care much for her brothers. She spoke with a mixture of pride and contempt about one particular brother. She described him as “kinda strange, kinda crazy.” A smart ass, he’d won a scholarship to Tulane. And then he “got another what-a-ma-call-it degree from Emory. MBA, I think it is.” This brother took a huge job and settled in Peoria, Georgia. “It’s some lily-white hood he’s living in. The burb’s so white, folks used to call the police some days when my brother be driving home in his nice BeMa. Of everywhere in the world, it’s that kinda place he see fit to get his pad. Far from folk who look and talk like him. Strange and crazy.”
Worse, the lost sheep of a brother was not married, but dated only white bitches.
The more she drank, the more her stories loped, spilled in all directions. Soon her voice was a drone in his ears: a strangely melodious sound that made him warm and droopy with sleep.
He didn’t remember whose idea it was, but she went home with him. After the sort of evening they had had, it seemed an inevitable culmination. Between rounds of frenzied, tossing lovemaking, she broached the idea of his moving to New York City.
At first, he found the idea ridiculous. She physically resembled Penny Rose, true. She had a quaint sort of charm as well—a gift for spinning stories, to say nothing of her vehement manner of making love that both gratified and flattered him. But all that would quickly lose their novelty—and then what would there be to build on? Besides, he’d been to New York once, years ago now, when he was still at Amherst College. He had found the city menacing. Some of the things that made the city vital—its horde of ceaseless, fast-moving pedestrians, its traffic, its litter of skyscrapers—unnerved him. He remembered looking up at the Empire State Building and being seized by a sensation that the building had shuddered ever so imperceptibly. It was going to topple, like a rotted iroko tree, and mash him into a flat crust. Cramped with cars, clogged with people, the streets of Manhattan had pronounced his own terrible smallness, his anonymity.
Bernita stayed with him for one-and-a half weeks. Ike had dated other women, all of them more educated, Africans and African Americans—even a smattering of Caucasians. He would gladly have married two or three of them, but it never ever came to that point before each woman, it seemed to him, fled. The experience had taught him one lesson: that a man chasing simultaneously after love and a green card had to contend with the elusiveness of the ideal spouse.
Marriage to Bernita struck him as a huge risk. All told, a risk worth taking. With a green card in his possession, he would be in line for a good corporate job. The day before she left for New York, he brought up the subject of marriage. They had just finished a long, tossing bout of sex, and lay in bed, wasted. Having decided he had nothing to lose, he spoke directly, offering to pay if she’d marry him.
“What?” she said, then sat up. Head cast back, the sides of her lips drawn down, she regarded him with an indignant expression. He was about to wave off the idea, but she spoke first. “Take cash to help a brother out? Why?” Her expression softened, as if encouraging him to fumble for an answer. Then she smiled. “I’m gonna help you out.”
By the time Bernita left, he had agreed to join her, in two months, in what she called Da City. At least initially, he did not regret the move. In short order, he received his work authorization and began to apply for jobs. It was then that frustration set in. He attended five interviews at banks and investment firms, but the expected job offer never came. And then he had an interview for a job at Frisch Investments, Inc. After just five or so minutes, the interviewer swept up a sheaf of papers on the desk that included Ike’s transcripts, letters of recommendation from two of his professors, and application form.
Eyes fixed on Ike, the man clasped his fingers together and leaned forward.
“Your credentials are excellent, but the accent is crappy.” He said the words with the blasé directness that Ike associated with the city.
There was a time when the word “accent” did not bring Ike pain, only a certain kind of pleasure. In his college days, before he met Penny and after their breakup, he’d scored with several women who confessed to adoring his accent. In fact, his accent was the spark for his relationship with Jill Goldstein, which lasted three semesters. They met in Professor Kevin Greene’s popular Intro to Econometrics course. One day, Professor Greene had called on Ike to read a paragraph from the textbook.
Jill caught up to Ike at the end of class. “I want you to know that I really, really, really love your accent,” she said, keeping pace with his stride.
But now he sat opposite a man telling him that if he wanted a job in the corporate world, he’d have to learn how to speak English. The man unclasped his fingers. He permitted a perverse gentleness to possess his face.
“I speak English,” Ike said. “I took English courses at Amherst—and made straight A’s. You can look at my transcript.”
“It is what it is. The accent isn’t right. I can’t hire you.”
Ike did not submit any job applications for the next six months. He settled into his cab business. Luckily, the city teemed with passengers. Some could be generous-enough tippers. A steady, low-grade anger burned inside him, but he often judged his life better than tolerable.
His hardest times came from Bernita. Sometimes he recalled the four years of their marriage as a period of persistent nagging. She demanded more and more money for her shopping sprees. To meet those demands, he stopped sending “food money” to his mother. When his neglected mother peppered him with remonstrances, he couldn’t point a finger at the culprit. He had not told his mother about his marriage. Nor had he confided in her about his long, anguished quest for a green card or his woes in searching for a job.
Bernita carped at him about sex. She was enraged when, fatigued after long hours behind the wheel, he made a quick job of it. If he ever said he wasn’t up to it, she became even more furious. She harangued him with charges of infidelity. “You’s chasing after bitches,” she’d rail each time he was tired. “ ’Cause I don’t holler don’t mean I don’t know. Some white bitch got you all crazy and lost.”
He had made the mistake of telling her about the executive who commented on his accent. Thereafter, whenever she had a grouse or bore a grudge, she drew out the word “accent” like a sword from its scabbard. She did merciless mimicries of his speech. He dreaded her flair for fashioning otherwise-innocent words into swords. One day, just after making love, they lay in bed watching a documentary on South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. The presenter said something about a Zulu chief. She suddenly hoisted herself on her elbow and scanned his face, her eyes twinkling with mischief.
“That’s who you are, a Zulu chief, right?” she asked. In her singsong accent, she made the word sound like Zoo-loo. “That costume you was wearing in Baltimore, it gotta be Zulu.”
“Zulus live in South Africa,” he said, hardly hiding his vexation.
He had inadvertently handed her another sword. Thenceforth, whenever she worked herself into a rage, she’d use that sword to slash him. Your Zulu dick be running around, looking for some white ho, she’d accuse. Fuck you and fuck your Zulu shit, she’d curse. Or she’d berate: Why you always speak English with that Zulu accent?
But it was her affair with Cadilla that delivered the deepest, most merciless cut of all. He had walked the seven blocks to Saint Stephen’s Church the day he’d found out and sat in a pew, helpless against the tears that rolled down his face.
It was the same pew that Ike was sitting in today, though he wasn’t crying now. He wasn’t sure how he felt. A part of him wondered where Bernita was but without figuring out how such knowledge would serve him. Staring at the crucifix, he wondered if Gruels and his crowd of collectors ever saw fit to poach a god from a church like Saint Stephen’s.
He thumbed to a random page of the missal. Then he began to read from Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, vanity of vanities! All things are vanity! What profit has man from all the labor which he toils at under the sun? One generation passes and another comes, but the world forever stays … All rivers go to the sea, yet never does the sea become full. To the place where they go, the rivers keep on going.”
IT WAS 6:27 P.M. when Ike pulled up outside 99 Flatbush Avenue. It was rather early for him. Since the marriage ended, he had taken to working until 11:00 P.M., often till midnight or even later. There was a parking spot right in front of Cadilla’s store. He exhaled through gritted teeth and cut off the ignition but remained in the car. His shattered nerves would need to be pepped up. Curry goat at Big Ed’s apartment would help. But he’d need a few bottles of Guinness before that.
He considered driving out to the package store on Avenue U, but he was in no mood to spend more time in traffic. And he was pressed for time.
Outside Cadilla’s was the usual rowdy scene. The store was directly underneath Ike’s second-floor one-bedroom space. Still, he rarely shopped there. In fact, once he sold Ngene, one of his first priorities would be to relocate.
It wasn’t just Bernita’s confession to two flings with the man she called Cad that made him hate the place, though that aggravation was there, a constant pain. He also detested the store owner’s brand of gregariousness. Cad’s idea of a handshake was to raise his hand high and then bring it smashing down with full force. And the man loved long, loud conversations.
Bernita had sworn that her trysts with Cad happened only twice, once before Ike moved to New York and once after. She had volunteered the confession, with no prodding. Even so, he suspected at the time that this was not the whole truth.
Ike walked past a haphazard circle of spectators gathered around two men who hunched over a game of chess. Both the players and many of their observers held bottles wrapped in small wrinkled brown bags. Beyond the circle of spectators, other men and a few women milled about. This hubbub had kept Ike awake through much of the night.
Six or seven youngsters, boys and girls, rollicked around the store’s swinging door.
“Excuse me,” he said.
They ignored him.
“I said, excuse me!” he said in a raised voice.
They snickered and then slowly parted.
He padded to a back aisle and grabbed a six-pack of Guinness. Then he took his place behind six customers.
Cadilla was as high-spirited as ever. A stodgy, middle-aged man stepped up to the counter. His red hair was dirty, tousled and gray, his hardy skin tanned a tarnished red. Ike recognized him. He was a fixture in the neighborhood. He often held court at street corners, an aficionado of baseball, movies, and international affairs. Ike had overheard snippets of neighborhood gossip—about the man’s roots in southern Virginia, his stint in the navy, and his arrival in the city on the trail of a capricious Creole woman named Lady Matilda, a woman who shattered his spirits when she took off with another man and left him, for some years, a yarn-spinning wreck.
Red Ray bought eighty-eight Mega Millions lottery tickets for the jackpot of $88 million. He said his pastor—a well-known former jailbird—had prayed over each dollar. He was sure of winning: heaven had decreed it, and he had claimed it. When he won, he said, he would get himself a Hollywood lady, buy a Cadillac with leather upholstery, purchase a grand mansion some place super nice—“and then leave town, fast as I can.”
Cadilla asked which Hollywood ladies he had his eyes on.
Red Ray said, “If I fancy, I take me Julia. Julia Roberts. Or Halle Berry. Depends on who I like better.”
Everybody laughed, except Ike. His irritation grew with each second.
“My man!” Cadilla exulted when Ike stood before the counter. He raised his hand for his usual hard slap. Ike plumped down the six-pack on the counter and extended a hand. “Haven’t seen you in like three months or something.”
“Two weeks.”
Cadilla grabbed Ike’s outstretched hand, tightened his grip, then pushed and pulled in a sawing motion. “What you been up to?”
“Nothing,” Ike said.
“I saw your former lady last week. Went to see my Mets rip the Marlins. Me and her ran into each other at Shea.”
“You and who?”
Cadilla frowned up a little. “You know who I’m talking about. Your old lady, Queen.”
Ike wished he had driven to Avenue U after all.
“Queen was looking good,” Cadilla said. A sly smile spread on his face. “She asked about you and all.”
“Good.” Ike put down a ten-dollar bill on the counter.
Cadilla ignored the cash. “She’s an amazing lady, Queen. She’s good people—real!” He stamped his feet to express enthusiasm.
“Good,” Ike said again.
“I thought y’all was gonna hit it off big time. But marriage is like that. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t.”
“I must go,” Ike said. “I have an important call to make.”
“A’right, man.” Cadilla raised his hand for another handshake. Ike grabbed the six-pack with two hands. For a moment, Cadilla seemed offended. Then he said, “You go on. The drink’s on the house.”
“I will pay,” Ike said agitatedly.
“No, Queen said to be nice to you. It’s on me.”
Ike slapped the ten-dollar bill on the counter, turned swiftly, and walked toward the exit. His path was blocked. A boy clasped a girl in an embrace, and she playfully clawed at him, threatening to bite his arm. Other youngsters egged them on, laughing.
“Make way!” Ike barked.
They maintained their wall.
“Heh!” he said, so angry he was stumped for words.
He felt Cadilla’s hand slip into the pocket of his pants. Then the storekeeper’s voice: “Man, you gotta let me treat. Me and you are supposed to be tight.”
Ike froze, filled with rage. He heard Cadilla’s footsteps retreating to the counter. Two customers asked why Cadilla never treated them to drinks.
“Can assure you I ain’t about to say no if you offer,” said a male voice.
“Me neither,” said the other, a woman. “Matter of fact, I ain’t got no nowhere on my lip.”
“You don’t, that’s for sure,” Cadilla retorted, laughing.
“You the only man I ever said no to. Don’t never forget that.” The woman took her turn laughing.
“That ‘no’ cost you. You both want beer, you paying for your damn selves.”
Without looking back, Ike pulled the money out of his pocket and flung it down.
As Ike pushed out the door, he heard Cadilla scream at the youngsters to get the hell out, or they’d get their behinds whopped by their sorry mamas. They streamed out past Ike, one of them slamming into him.
Ike cursed in Igbo.
“Zulu!” the young man riposted, without looking back.