Chapter 39
Loving Nia was, among other things, an education in how to love a person who was equal to you not in every way, not in the ways that required sameness, but in the specific sense of someone who did not need you to be different than you were and who you did not need to be different than you were with. There was no management of himself required, the way he had managed himself in England in his early years: the careful calculation of how much space to take, what to say, what to hold back. With Nia he said what he meant and she said what she meant and when they disagreed which they did, often, because they were both people with strong views built from serious thinking they disagreed well.
She had opinions about everything: urban planning, of course, and Caribbean politics and Caribbean literature and food and the right way to cook jerk chicken, about which she was deeply specific and occasionally incorrect, and he told her so.
'You can't be wrong about jerk chicken,' she said.
'You absolutely can,' he said. 'You added pimento berries. That's a choice but it's a wrong choice.'
'It's traditional,' she said.
'Traditional isn't automatically correct,' he said. 'My mother puts scotch bonnet and scotch bonnet only. No one has ever argued with my mother.'
She narrowed her eyes. 'You can't invoke your mother's cooking as an authority.'
'I absolutely can.'
They argued about jerk chicken for forty minutes and it was one of the happiest conversations he had ever had.
They moved through Kingston together, which was its own pleasure two people who had both left and returned, looking at the same city from converging angles. She showed him things he had not seen: the way the informal housing adapted itself to the landscape with a kind of genius that official architecture ignored, the beauty of the improvised, the intelligence of people who built what they needed from what they had.
He showed her things she had not seen: the specific culture of certain yards, the way community organized itself in the gaps left by formal infrastructure, the school as a social anchor. He brought her to Pemberton Secondary one Saturday when the school was empty and she walked through the classrooms looking at the spatial arrangements and the displays on the walls and the students' work pinned up with care.
'You built something here,' she said.
'I'm part of what's being built,' he said.
She looked at him. 'That's what I said.'
He brought her to Sunday dinner six weeks after they had started seeing each other. His mother made everything.
Nia ate two plates and complimented the scotch bonnet and said she had heard it was the definitive version and his mother looked at him with an expression that was pure, triumphant satisfaction.
He looked at the table and smiled into his food.
After dinner, when Nia was in the bathroom, his mother leaned across the table.
'She's good,' she said.
'I know,' he said.
'Don't wait too long.'
'Mama.'
'I'm just saying.' She straightened up, entirely composed. 'More rice?'