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Chinedu said nothing. He took full mouthfuls; sometimes he used a finger as a wedge to nudge more rice onto his spoon.
“He knew I loved being here, but he was always telling me how Princeton was a boring school, and that it was out of touch. If he thought I was too happy about something that did not have to do with him, he always found a way to put it down. How can you love somebody and
yet want to manage the amount of happiness that person is allowed?”
Chinedu nodded; he both understood her and sided with her, she could tell. In the following days, days now cool enough for her knee-length leather boots, days in which she took the shuttle to campus, researched her dissertation at the library, met with her advisor, taught her undergraduate composition class, or met with students asking for permission to hand in assignments late, she would return to her apartment in the late evening and wait for Chinedu to visit so she could offer him rice or pizza or spaghetti. So she could talk about Udenna. She told Chinedu things she could not or did not want to tell Father Patrick. She liked that Chinedu said little, looking as if he was not only listening to her but also thinking about what she was saying. Once she thought idly of starting an affair with him, of indulging in the classic rebound, but there was a refreshingly asexual quality to him, something about him that made her feel that she did not have to pat some powder under her eyes to hide her dark circles.
Her apartment building was full of other foreigners. She and Udenna used to joke that it was the uncertainty of the foreigners’ new surroundings that had congealed into the indifference they showed to one another. They did not say hello in the hallways or elevators, nor did they meet one another’s eyes during the five-minute ride on the campus shuttle, these intellectual stars from Kenya and China and Russia, these graduate students and fellows who would go on to lead and heal and reinvent the world. And so it surprised her that as she and Chinedu walked to the parking lot, he would wave to somebody, say hi to another. He told her about the Japanese post-doc fellow who sometimes gave him a ride to the mall, the German doctoral student whose two-year-old daughter called him Chindle.
“Do you know them from your program?” she asked, and then added, “What program are you in?”
He had once said something about chemistry, and she assumed he was doing a doctorate in chemistry. It had to be why she never saw him on campus; the science labs were so far off and so alien.
“No. I met them when I came here.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Not long. Since spring.”
“When I first came to Princeton, I wasn’t sure I wanted to live in a house only for grad students and fellows, but I kind of like it now. The first time Udenna visited me, he said this square building was so ugly and charmless. Were you in graduate housing before?”
“No.” Chinedu paused and looked away. “I knew I had to make the effort to make friends in this building. How else will I get to the grocery store and to church? Thank God you have a car,” he said.
She liked that he had said “Thank God you have a car,” because it was a statement about friendship, about doing things together in the long term, about having somebody who would listen to her talk about Udenna.
On Sundays, she drove Chinedu to his Pentecostal church in Lawrenceville before going to the Catholic church on Nassau Street, and when she picked him up after service, they went grocery shopping at McCaffrey’s. She noticed how few groceries he bought and how carefully he scoured the sale flyers that Udenna had always ignored.
When she stopped at Wild Oats, where she and Udenna had bought organic vegetables, Chinedu shook his head in wonder because he did not understand why anybody would pay more money for the same vegetables just because they had been grown without chemicals. He was examining the grains displayed in large plastic dispensers while she selected broccoli and put it in a bag.
“Chemical-free this. Chemical-free that. People are wasting money for nothing. Aren’t the medicines they take to stay alive chemicals, too?”
“You know it’s not the same thing, Chinedu.”
“I don’t see the difference.”
Ukamaka laughed. “It doesn’t really matter to me either way, but Udenna always wanted us to buy organic fruits and vegetables. I think he had read somewhere that it was what somebody like him was supposed to buy.”
Chinedu looked at her with that unreadable closed expression again. Was he judging her? Trying to make up his mind about something he thought of her?
She said, as she opened the trunk to put in the grocery bag, “I’m starving. Should we get a sandwich somewhere?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“It’s my treat. Or do you prefer Chinese?”
“I’m fasting,” he said quietly.
“Oh.” As a teenager, she, too, had fasted, drinking only water from morning until evening for a whole week, asking God to help her get the best result in the Senior Secondary School exam. She got the third-best result.
“No wonder you didn’t eat any rice yesterday,” she said. “Will you sit with me while I eat then?”
“Sure.”
“Do you fast often, or is this a special prayer you are doing? Or is it too personal for me to ask?”
“It is too personal for you to ask,” Chinedu said with a mocking solemnity.
She took down the car windows as she backed out of Wild Oats, stopping to let two jacketless women walk past, their jeans tight, their blond hair blown sideways by the wind. It was a strangely warm day for late autumn.
