The JRB presents an excerpt from a short fiction work in progress by Yewande Omotoso.
The Underwhelm of Bijou Benjamine
I can’t believe it’s so hard to find a decent man to fuck, Bijou says out loud sometimes when no one has asked her anything. Just out loud in the middle of an intimate dinner party. All present are her friends so no harm is done but still she says it out loud and although the comment is ribald she is not without sadness. There is Geoffrey who is very enthusiastic, he is big not from bench press but just born that way, born with the acorn of that kind of body inside him, waiting. He’d be the bouncer if one was required. He is from Ghana and not unhandsome. He told Bijou he has the money. I have the money to take care of you and however many children you think we ought to make. But Bijou has money of her own, too much of it, and so this truly not unappealing quality of Geoffrey’s (his wealth) is wasted on her. She likes, though, that he is enterprising and is unbothered that the money might be blood diamonds because her money—her ridiculous family money—is not untainted. She has a will; her lawyer understands that she will soon give it all away. Her lawyer knows but there’s no reason to tell anyone else. Geoffrey has assured her, in addition to his wealth, that he knows how to please her. He tells her this with the right kind of smile, without any teeth. He knows, he’s not trying to brag or anything but he knows because he’s been told—by women he has been with—that he can make a woman beg. Women who never knew orgasm, he says, found out about it while in bed with him. He knows the anatomy of a woman. Despite herself, despite thinking it distasteful to proposition in this way, to put the CV out so crudely, she marks his words. There are nights that Bijou is lying awake, and she thinks, just a call, she need not even say please, she need only suggest that she would give him an audience and he would be at her front door, with wine, roses and his abilities. She wants to be touched. She yearns for it but if he advertises so might it not amount to much. Before she moved to Camps Bay (the project took longer, the architect said it was the builder’s fault and the builder blamed the architect) she enjoyed a two-bedroom right on Sea Point Beach Road. An expensive view and the thinnest of walls. She heard her neighbours at it, him German, his face covered in hair, his arms in tats. She was a small woman of Indian descent, not Capetonian either, with long hair down her back, a gold tooth and an unbreakable habit of smoking. She smoked on the stairs which was forbidden. No one else used that stairwell except the three of them; Bijou chose to ignore the infraction despite her repulsion to tobacco smoke. They were new. She’d been there a while and they were new. Renters. Not unfriendly. But for the few months it took the architect to hurry up the builder (or the other way around) Bijou endured their lovemaking. They shared a wall between their living rooms. They seemed to only have sex in the living room, perhaps on the couch Bijou had seen navigated up the stairwell by a mover with a limp. The woman was loud and in rapture, he was a grunter. She still hears them now. When she thinks to phone Geoffrey she thinks of them. She thinks of rapture. But she’s also not all that sure about Geoffrey, he’s rather large so she wonders if his penis is enormous and she’s not a fan of enormous penises. So if they came to that point and he had it out and she thought, whoa, no way dude, would he back off? When she was younger and very easily into the beds of men she didn’t have this concern but now it’s here and she can’t ignore it. She’s never been forced before but there is something Geoffrey once said that made her wonder, made her doubt he fully grasped the whole intact meaning of ‘consent’. Would he back off? So she doesn’t call. From very young, when still in college—that was DC—she’d learnt to use her fingers to good ends and although sometimes you wanted an extra pair of hands, mostly she found comfort in pleasing herself. There is Tertius who visits occasionally but, unlike Geoffrey, doesn’t live in Cape Town, doesn’t live in South Africa. Tertius has an accent which is charming, he is from an island. He is a respectable academic, tall and lightly balding. After one casual night when she handled his manhood, he now hounds her, on his infrequent trips to conferences with the words ‘Global South’ in the title, with his longing for more. She likes him. He talks too much though, that’s not the part she likes. Needing little to no encouragement he talks for several hours about his work, the books he has edited, the anthologies, the journals he has both started and contributed an inordinate number of articles to. His work is interesting but this is not what appeals to her the most. She likes his ability to talk about his emotional states. As if he’s read up a bit on self-help or spent some time in a psychotherapist’s room. A capacity for self-examination that is sexy and rare. Or he’s read Eat, Pray, Love without heaving. Bijou’s pack of writer-friends found the book untenable, but she’d loved it. They, who are black, said ah, the white woman and her dilemmas. The white woman and her troubles, her need to go to India, how difficult it is to fight off all the world holds for you and your golden hair. Bijou’s writer-friends are particularly cruel and none of them have ever published a book, short story or newspaper article that Bijou has been able to read from beginning to end. She didn’t listen to their critique of the book. She loved the book. She didn’t see the protagonist as white, merely as human and wounded. Bijou is wounded. After her first meeting with Tertius—by accident at a bar where he and other conference-goers were having some beers—she learnt that he was raised by a mother and three older sisters. She could have guessed the mark of women on him. The courageous softness such an upbringing produced in him. When he looks at her, whether he’s talking or she’s talking, he looks directly at her, there is sexual longing in the look but also a keen interest, an openness that is alluring and frightens her. In between conversation he will compliment her, mention how attracted he is to her, remind her they could sleep together. Despite liking him she has never experienced, on his various trips and their scattered meetings, any particularly urgent need to have sex with him. She imagines it. And that’s the first sign of it not happening. If, once the possibility is breached, she has to imagine it, run it through in pictures, then she doesn’t really want it. The thought-words accompanying her imagining are something like: hmmm, now let me see whether this might be fun. Sex should not be put through the X-ray like that. Good sex that is. If so much imagining is required then she should just say no. Which she does, every time. But she thinks, what a lovely man though. Kind and thoughtful, a man with some facility regarding his emotional climate and the emotional climate of others. Sometimes he is seeing someone when they meet and then there is no propositioning. Tertius is nothing if not principled. But his relationships—when he has them—are riddled with trouble. The women feel hemmed in by his attentiveness, his eagerness. They are incredulous about his generosity, his openness. They suspect he is a secret pervert, closet jerk waiting to marry them and then unleash the masculine-macho bullshit to which they are more accustomed. Being ignored, being bullied. Bijou listens with kindness and a disguised perplexity. She is unsure who to side with. Dear Tertius whom she thinks must make an excellent boyfriend or the girlfriends who accuse him of things like being overbearing, too clingy, over-passionate (tautology?), all characteristics she too might run from. She goes home after nights out with Tertius with many sighs in her chest cavity. Bijou has been with women. Not many, four when she bothers to count. Three must simply be regarded as flings, nothing serious, no one called anyone afterwards and no one was the worse off for the not calling. No offences taken, no blood drawn. But the fourth was love, which was a problem for Bijou because she is not, has never been and has no desire to be, a lesbian. The softest love, the exact right moment to bite into a peach. Before she met Agnes, Bijou had not known that love could be just like so. And quite simple really. Quite everything. But it haunted her, the physiology, the missing penis. One night Agnes noticed it (the absent it) and suggested they invest in a strap-on. They broke up instead. They still speak occasionally on the phone or assent to share a pot of tea but it is a hopeless form of sharing, nothing can come of it but anguish. For a short while after Bijou got a burst of energy and went online. Everybody was meeting their soulmate online, this body at a party said they’d met their wife there, some other body said they were currently dating a guy they’d met online: ‘he’s so amazing, so gentle’. There is the infamous site lovetomeet where Bijou signed in as Billy_Jean but many people missed the reference to MJ and often, despite the clear tick against Female, women looking for men contacted her. Some women looking for women contacted her too. The first group thought she was a man looking for women, the second understood she was a woman and thought she was looking for other women. Bijou was neither of those two. She was a woman who wanted to be touched except not by Geoffrey and not by Tertius and not by Agnes. On lovetomeet, once she changed her handle to the inane but unmistakably female and straight Fun_Girl a few messages appeared. One man sent the inevitable dick-pic. Another white man wrote and asked her where she was from, she said the Congo, at which point he sent a long missive about her diet as a ‘young maiden’; no doubt, he asserted, a diet of mainly cassava. Did she know this is what made West African women so delicious to kiss. She blocked him but first she wrote back and suggested he work on his geography. Congo you perverted moron. Not Cameroon. Not Cote D’Ivoire. CONGO. She went back to her settings, unticked ‘Any’ for Race and specified that she wanted to meet someone of colour. That was all it took—two white pervs in a row to destroy her earnest ‘love is blind’ predilection. Of course, there were black pervs but apparently none on lovetomeet. In fact, there were almost no men of colour on lovetomeet that, in combination, knew how to spell, found Bijou attractive, and lived in Cape Town. There was one man, Tendai. Corporate type. He took her out to several dinners but seldom just the two of them. Always his married couple friends or his fellas. As if dating was a strictly group sport. He was nice, though. A bit effeminate in turn-out but this was not a problem for Bijou. He had delicate hands. He looked as if he had regular manicures. An aquiline face, beautiful brown skin, no doubt the result of a regimen of facials. Was he scared of her, afraid of being alone with her, perhaps he was shy. A friend suggested she tone down on her work in biomedical studies. Her friend’s exact words were, don’t discuss lab work, Bijou, don’t lead with your intellect for God’s sake, be the feminine. The feminine. What could be more feminine than mastering how the human body functioned? You know what I mean, the friend rolled her eyes. Don’t come with your feminism here. So, the feminine (still undefined) was invited to the table but leave feminism at the door. Bijou wore dresses to their team-sport dates, she listened and although she could seldom hold back her opinions which launched themselves out of her mouth with little effort on her part, she felt she did a decent job of not ‘leading with her intellect’ ridiculous as the whole pantomime seemed. No result though, she still attended chaperoned dates with him and no kisses had been exchanged. He hasn’t kissed you because you haven’t made it possible for him to, says the friend. But Bijou also realised she hadn’t kissed him yet either. And not because he hadn’t made it possible for her to (whatever the heck that was) but rather because she wasn’t sure she wanted to. He did not excite her. His business suits, his business talk. He was a contained man. Sitting with him she often found herself thinking of Tertius, wishing Tendai could disrupt his uprightness with a comment about his yearnings, his loss, his previous lovers, his desires in bed, his whatever, anything other than what the damn Dow Jones is doing and how it impacts the freaking JSE. Sometimes Bijou wanted to reach out and shake him. Not in any way that would harm him but just ruffle him a bit. Say ‘boo’. Shock him even. Maybe she should kiss him. Grab him and give a long snog. And then walk away because she’d started imagining sex with him and that was never a good sign. Bijou plunges into an experience she has never known. She forgets her name. Her neck feels tired so she keeps her head on a pillow instead of doing the work required to carry it around above her shoulders. That’s depression, her friend with the advice on The Feminine says; here call this number. Bijou calls. Depression is only the beginning of a description, the book cover of a much longer story. It is for Bijou to stop assessing the world surrounding her and look instead to herself. The woman to help her is Dr Fanta, late fifties, maybe sixties, but good skin care (very expensive face creams and foreign—probably Spanish—sunblock) means you can’t read her accurate age from looking at her face or her body. Hello, she says, when Bijou peeps through the door. You’re a little late, come in.
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- Yewande Omotoso trained as an architect and holds a masters in creative writing from the University of Cape Town. Her debut novel, Bom Boy, won the South African Literary Award for First-Time Published Author. She was shortlisted for the 2013 Etisalat Prize for Literature and was a 2015 Miles Morland Scholar. Omotoso’s second novel, The Woman Next Door, was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Literature Prize. It was a finalist in the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction and has been translated into Catalan, Dutch, French, German, Italian and Korean. Her third novel, An Unusual Grief, was published in 2021, longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize.
