Escapades of Toun: Part II
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| Source: Immaculate Bites |
“Toun,
don’t even try to rationalize it,” Nike said, irritability dancing in her voice.
“Daddy will kill you.”
Toun
nodded. “I know. But I can’t help the way I feel.”
“Toun,
he’s older than mummy! Are you not seeing this?”
“It’s
not his fault mummy had us young.” Toun sighed, rested her head against the
back of the sofa. “Nike… I really love him.”
Nike
eyed her. “What do you know about love? You think it’s all that nonsense we
watch on Telemundo?”
Toun
smiled to herself, somewhat tired. Nike might never understand, with her inability to stay with a man
beyond the honeymoon phase of the relationship.
Nike
changed the television channel. “I just hope this is a thing. A very bad thing you’re going through. Maybe it’s his money or his accent or his bear bear
that is attracting you to him, but I hope you wake up soon and realise that you cannot be with a man twenty years your senior and expect to be
happy.”
---
On the day Marques asked Toun out on a second date, she had
been having a terrible day; a presentation Mrs. Yerima hadn’t mentioned (but
insisted she had mentioned) suddenly had to be put together before the close of
business and Toun was rushing around trying to gather data from company
archives.
During
lunch, she sat at the table in the kitchen, dazed, barely thinking about
anything but still managing to think about everything all at once. Her lunch
was growing cold when Marques walked in with his lunch and a newspaper. Her
heart lifted, albeit slightly.
“You
look tired,” he said, settling down opposite her.
“I am.”
“What’s
wrong?”
She
shrugged, dug a spoonful of rice into her mouth. “Yerima is working me like a
slave. I’m so sick of it. I’m so sick of this place, I swear.”
Marques
smiled. “You’ll get your head round it. You’re still
new, fairly.”
“It’s
been four months. Four miserable months.”
Marques
reached across the table and put a hand on hers. His skin was warm, soft. She
flushed. He withdrew it.
“Come
with me to dinner,” he said. “Friday night. There’s this great point and kill
spot near Bonny Cantonment. You’ll love it.”
Toun
couldn’t even think as far as Friday, but she nodded.
---
Toun met Marques a few minutes past seven on Friday night,
joining the queue leading up to the barbeque pit, where six or seven sweaty men
with watering eyes roasted and flipped fresh fish, grey pillars of smoke rising
into the night.
Toun and Marque stood in line for
nearly an hour, getting lost in conversation, and when they realised they had
barely moved an inch the whole time, Marques suggested they go to his;
he had basmati rice and goat meat in the freezer and could cook up some curry
goat.
---
Marques’
kitchen was brightly lit with florescent lights. The counter tops were black
marble and the drawers and cupboards were made of red Formica. It looked like
something out of the American home movies Toun and Nike watched, and she was now sitting
down at the island counter with a glass of soda water, watching Marques boil
the meat.
“You
have to marinate your proteins at least overnight to make sure you really get
the juices in there.” Marques turned the meat in the pot with a wooden spoon.
“But I season mine and throw them in the freezer till I’m ready.”
“Did you
use to cook at home when you were married?” Toun heard herself ask and she
wondered why she had brought up his marriage at such a moment as this.
A pause,
then a sigh, and then Marques said, “No. She’s a far better cook.”
Toun
tried to return to the topic of marinating goat meat, but her mind was fixated.
“Why did you get divorced?”
Marques
laughed. “Why do people get divorced? You fall out of love, you argue too much,
you argue about the kids, you argue about your families, you lose trust, you
can no longer be bothered to put in the work. There are so many reasons.”
“What
was yours?”
He tiled
his head. “Trust.” He looked into the pot and stirred. “I was away too much and
far too busy and, gradually, we lost the trust we had for each other.”
Nike’s
words ran through Toun’s mind now: …you
cannot be with a man twenty years your senior and expect to be happy.
“You
know, I had friends who had gotten divorced at the time but I didn’t know how painful it
was,” Marques was speaking again. “The tearing apart of yourself from somebody
you have spent decades with is such an ugly sight.” He chuckled. “You
know, I remember when, a few months after the divorce was finalized, she had
her mail forwarded to my house because she was taking the kids on vacation and
Mark, my son, was expecting some important mail from school. I remember seeing
her name written on a bill with her maiden name instead of mine, Michelle
Branson, and I felt this pain sear through my heart and I just could not explain it.
Given, the marriage was long over and I knew I no longer loved her… but I
hadn’t seen her name written like that in years and it just made me realise how
far we had fallen… And it’s always been those little things that get me, the
smell of her perfume, her birthday, our anniversary… those little things make
me remember I had a good thing going and let it slip away.”
Toun
watched him; he looked like he was in pain.
He
turned to her. “Anyway. Enough about that. How about you? Any divorces?”
They
laughed.
“Just
breakups,” Toun said.
“Tell me
about them.”
“My most
recent was my NYSC boyfriend.”
“Okay...”
“He was
a fool, just to frankly put it.”
“What
did he do?”
“He
cheated on me, like more than once, apparently, and I didn’t know until we
broke up. I mean, we were together for just a little over a year, but it felt
like it was a real thing and that it could last forever… if we wanted it to.” She
shrugged, took a sip out of her glass. “It’s whatever, I’m over him anyway.”
But
talking about Folarin made her heart feel heavy, all over again; something like
that pain Marques had spoken about. She remembered Folarin, the musician from Akure,
his guitar and his dreadlocks. She remembered his grand gestures on her
birthday – writing her poems, posting pictures of them during camp all over
Facebook, calling her aya mi, and all
the while he was nacking his ‘talent manager’ – that what’s he called Shayo,
the busty woman who obviously managed more than his talent.
She was
over it now, but during the heat of the moment – when he had sent her that ghastly
text message saying he needed a break – she had fleetingly contemplated
suicide. And what made it worse, he had refused to talk to her about why
exactly he needed this break. It had taken Ebuka, his friend, to sit Toun down
and narrate the gruesome details of this on-and-off affair he was having with
Shayo. With this knowledge in her quiver, Toun sent him a lengthy text message
about hoping he got run over by a truck, painfully deleted every picture of
them together on Facebook and deleted his number. Somewhere at the back of her
mind, she feared Folarin would become a celebrated soul singer and she feared
that Shayo and her big breasts would still be beside him.
Toun’s
mind reeled back to Marques’ kitchen and he was serving two plates of rice and
curry. They took their plates to the living room and watched CNN, mostly eating
silently. They finished their meals just as Richard Quest was rounding up a
segment on the booming Malaysian economy. Marques took their plates to the
kitchen and returned with more soda water. When he sat down beside her again, he felt closer, because she could smell his spicy cologne and could
almost feel the hairs on his arm on hers.
She kept
her eyes on the television.
Would he
ask for sex this time? She had eaten his food and was in his house, so
something had to give, right? She wanted to leave, only because she wasn’t
ready to have sex with this man – not because he wasn’t a nice man, or because she
hadn’t had a good time. She always had a good time with him, but she needed time to decide whether or not she was ready to delve in.
“You
should spend the night… one of these days,” Marques was saying.
She
turned to look at him. “Oh?” was all she said.
“Mainly
because it’s late,” he continued, “and you live on the Mainland and I just…
don’t think it’s too safe… to be going around Lagos at night.”
She
noticed that his eyes were dancing around her face now, settling on her lips
time and time again.
“You
know I live with my parents, right?” She asked.
“Oh… of
course.” He looked back at the television briefly, and then back at her. “What
are your parents like?”
She
shrugged. “Nice people. Boring sometimes. Annoying sometimes. The usual.”
He
nodded, and then looked at the television and though his body didn’t move
away from hers, she felt his attention shift. They both watched the television;
Anderson Cooper interviewing the first lady of America about free meals for
public school students and then, suddenly, as though they had planned it or it
was scripted like in Telemundo,
Marques and Toun moved towards each other in one swoop, at the same time, and
their lips met.
The
smell of his cologne infiltrated her senses and she felt like swallowing him.
She had always known older men were better kissers; they simply had to be – all those years of
practice. Toun and Marques breathed heavily, inhaling each other, his hands
roaming the curves and contours of her body, as though he had always wanted to
do just this; touch her.
Afterwards
they pulled away, panting and laughing childishly.
“I
should go,” Toun said, slightly embarrassed.
The
excitement left Marques’ eyes. “Why?”
“So my
parents don’t kill me.”
She
stood up and he reached out and held her hand. “Moses will drop you.”
“Okay, but please tell him to drop me at home this time, instead of dropping me at Anthony
like he did last time.”
Marques’
brows narrowed. “He did that?”
“Yes.”
“I’m
sorry.”
She
pulled away from his grip and gathered her things.
Downstairs,
Moses was asleep in the driver’s seat. Toun climbed in and Marques told him to
drop her at home, picking the words
of the instruction as though Moses had difficulty in understanding.
The
whole way home, Moses glared at her through the rear view mirror, but she could
care less; she had kissed Marques and she felt as though she was on top of the
world.
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