“Come let’s go for a walk.”
“A walk? To where?”
“Just for fresh air, oya, come now” She grabbed my arm and called out to her mother, “Ma, I’m taking Simi to get some fresh air,” and with that, Gloria bundled me outside the door. On the leafy Ikoyi driveway of the executive mansion, she squeezed my hand and said in her throaty whisper, “Look, we’re going to see Jack, he’s a friend of mine just round the corner!”
“Why the ‘corner-corner’?” [Pidgin for ducking and diving.]
“My mother mustn’t know, she doesn’t like him.”
Once out of sight of the house, Gloria hailed a taxi.
“I thought we were going for a walk?
“You self! When did you last see me walking in this Lagos? I don’t want my feet to get dirty!”
We were in the taxi for two minutes, Jacks' apartment was in a luxury block quite near to when Gloria’s parents resided in splendour , his was on the second floor of a small exclusive high-rise, gated and policed with dogs and guards. They obviously knew Gloria at the gate, they waved her right in.
“This is Jack!” Tall, six foot six,( my diminutive friend came up to his waist) he was a long skinny white American all coat hanger shoulders long head and narrow pointy nose. I admit, I was a bit surprised, I didn’t know anyone who admitted to dating white men, and she’d talked about him in the taxi but hadn’t mentioned his colour, just that he absolutely adored her and gave her very expensive gifts, “Look at this ring!” she enthused, holding out her hand right in front of my nose for me to examine more closely.
“Wow! Is it real?”
Her hands were pretty anyway, slender delicate fingers, nails lacquered the most exquisite coral colour, palms soft and smooth; she took a great deal of care of herself, did Gloria, always ‘perfecting on perfection’, as she used to call it.
She gurgled and giggled, “It’s real, it’s real, but don’t tell my mother, I told her it’s panda” I gave her a questioning look. “You know these old women, she said if I accept such an expensive gift, the man will think he owns me!”
“He must like you a lot,” The ring, sapphires surrounding a huge diamond, looked a lot like an engagement ring to me, but then what do I know. Nobody ever gave me a ring before, engagement, dress, panda or otherwise.
They hugged each other, the disparity in their heights even more apparent as he bent double to kiss her while she smilingly looked up at him. Their fervent hello ended, we were ushered into the apartment lounge, where another white man was sitting waiting, like Jack he had a newly showered look, damp hair and clean newly ironed clothes.
The second man was Robert, shorted than Jack, squatter though just as white, also smiling and smiling in a way you never saw white men smile on the street, but then the apartment was luxurious, really spacious with central air-conditioning, they had no problems cocooned here away from the hustle and bustle of Lagos just outside their window.
We sat, ostensibly for ‘drinks’, Gloria her usual brandy, I think I’ll have one too, said Jack; in those days I would affect a preference for gin and tonic, to be honest my mothers tipple not mine. I was and always will be a lager lout.
All four of us made pretence at conversation. Both men spoke Americanese, a difficult language to work out the nuances of condescension, though they both seemed to speak equally slowly to each other. Were they oil men? Some kind of Foreign Consultant? Definitely some big top feeders in the higher echelons of the financial pond. Memory fades those details, they were never important, what men did for a living evaporates straight into the ether as I would rather know what they do for leisure or for sport, you got a better picture of the man that way.
Ice rattled in the cut glass tumblers, the lights were dimmed and some jazzy syncopation lapped at our senses from the stereo.
“Have you been in the country long?”
“Oh, no, I’m a virgin…to your country,” Robert smiled at me as if I was an ice cream, eyes all shiny, lips moist.
I shot Gloria a look, help, but she was completely engrossed in Jack, they eyes locked together they spoke in low voices, and his smile grew wider and wider, he was holding her hands and looked as if he could swallow her all up with one bite. I didn’t blame him, she was fascinatingly alluring, with doll like proportions, Venus de Milo in miniature, tiny waisted, pert little boson, creamy skin and huge lustrous eyes, although her dimpled smile I thought was her best feature; so did Jack, as he tried to kiss her while she giggled and laughed her throaty laugh and pushed his big face away with her little hands.

Gloria and Jack found their way to the bedroom for some privacy, leaving Robert and me on the elegant geometric sofa together. I cannot blame him , he thought he had a duty to perform and sat quite close to me in order to exchange a kiss, but I thought other wise, although there was the added distraction of the other two in the bedroom whom we could here quite clearly, “No,” she said ,” not here, no, they can hear us, no, no,” meanwhile the bedsprings squeaked and groaned their merciless percussion, in counterpoint to her throaty whisper, “ no… no…Oh, Jack…no…”
Once Robert understood I was as much of a third wheel as he in this little tableau, (his attempted pass at me was so half hearted there was no point in going along with it) he picked up a metal object from the wide glass side table and placed it in my hands.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a puzzle, all jumbled up, you have to replace the pieces back into the shape of a cube and it’s solved. Look, I’ll show you, like, this…goes here…” and he slotted one of the pieces into the other. The puzzle was an interlocking series of connecting parts which slotted inside each other; by showing me how the puzzle worked , he now sat so close our thighs touched.. As the bedsprings gently squeaked next door, he went on, “It’s the most difficult puzzle in the world right now, invented by a Swiss-German engineer, a three dimensional example of mathematical genius…”
He rambled on with typical American hyperbole. Why does everything have to be bigger better grander? I wasn’t listening to him as I looked a bit harder at the puzzle, I squinted closely at it, “Fiendish, isn’t it, Uh-huh, I’ve been trying to solve it since I got here three weeks ago,” He seemed quite excited by the feel of my thigh against his, turned his flushed face towards me, as if by my being occupied with the puzzle I wouldn’t notice his hand resting on my thigh as the squeaking bed gained tempo next door.
The puzzle was a welcome distraction, and as Robert talked, the pieces clicked back into a cube in my hand. “I’ve solved it!”
“Huh?? Impossible!”
“Look!” I handed him the perfect cube. His face went even redder and his eyes glistened as if he were about to cry.
“No, that’s impossible!” he said fiercely, taking the cube and undoing it again, giving me an evil look. If he couldn’t solve it, then I couldn’t either. This time he jumbled up the pieces quite rigorously and gentle reader , I wish I could tell you I solved again the magic cube again but I did not
“That was just blind luck,” he said over and over.
“Why do you have difficulty believing I solved the puzzle? I’m a Biology student at university here, I must have some intelligence.”
He turned the corners of his mouth down contemptuously and mulishly asserted, “Blind luck, if it wasn’t, solve it again,” all the while looking daggers at my pliant form, my prettiness, my femininity. No way had I beaten him in that puzzle.
Gloria and Jack re-appeared from the bedroom, she was remonstrating, “No we have to go, my mother will be worried, I have to take Simi back, I said we were going for a walk.” Our goodbyes at the door were stilted, Jack perhaps not having gotten quite what he wanted, and as for Robert, he wouldn’t meet my eyes above our handshake, his eyes slid away from mine as if we’d shared a moment of great intimacy and he hadn’t liked it.
“You mustn’t tell my mother where we went,” she confided in her throaty whisper as we neared her door of her parents’ house. “Jack wants to marry me, and they have completely forbidden it, they say his relatives will treat me worse than a slave because I’m black. It’s such a pity because Jack is very kind, very nice. And very very rich!"
Then with a match makers smile , “What did you think of Robert?”