The Motorcyclist

by George Elliott Clarke

  All too soon, the ride ends. Carl suggests a flick. Off they go.

  They take in Lonelyhearts, starring Montgomery Clift and Myrna Loy, playing a journalist and a newspaper editor’s wife. Afterward, they exit the Casino Theatre and nip over to the Ardmore Tea Room, where they sip peppermint tea “to ward off the chill of the breeze.”

  Carl wonders just where Laura has planned to bunk this night. He can’t help but feel sorry for—and protective of—her. After all, graceful as she is, she still rocks that only slightly disguised limp. Her suitcase looks flimsy. It also seems to cry out for shelter. Naturally, too, as he remembers their last meeting, last May, Carl feels Desire stirring.

  Carl leads her back to 1½ Belle Aire Terrace. But he’s bothered about that suitcase: If Laura hasn’t planned to stay with him, where had she planned to stay? He doesn’t ask, though, for fear that she will then want to go there (wherever there is), and he prefers her here, where he should like to have her—if she is so predisposed—again.

  For one thing, Carl guesses, Avril’s likely enmeshed, undulating under Erv. Now, he don’t wanna feel glum or despondent about the lost lover. At hand is no trivial Consolation. Laura’s delicate white skirt shimmers gold in the candlelight.

  Until two a.m., the pair sits up, sipping ginger ale and munching nuts, molasses cookies, dates, raisins, and figs (last-Christmas fare). Unflustered, they talk of old times and the last time they’d spent such a good time together—all night too. (Carl recalls that, the next morning, she’d given him pound cake, homemade, brought with her from Three Mile Plains. The frosting alone had made his eyes close in rapture. Serving him while wearing one of his shirts, her ivory legs had shimmered golden in the dawn.) Carl recognizes that Laura is as sweetly domestic as is Marina, who’d also brought him “bakes,” back in March.

  They kiss. First with lips, then their mouths, then their arms and hands.

  Some twelve blocks south, Avril is, as Carl imagines, embedding Erv. In light of that truth, Laura seems even more impertinently desirable.

  She breaks away from the tumultuous kissing. She wants to know how Carl feels about her.

  Suavely, Carl answers, “Amn’t I provin right now my eminent ardour?”

  He hopes this rhetoric mollifies Laura now. If she schemes on pillow talk later, well, his quick snoring should pre-empt the operatic—irritating—female demand for Reassurance (which is, Carl muses, the raison d’être for the entire Romance industry: flowers, chocolates, perfume, cards, lingerie, jewellery, plush toys, drives, tourist travels, etc.).

  Thus, Kissing displaces Discourse. The two break at least one Commandment, if not more. Carl is with “Blue Roses,” and he’s not at prayer. (Immorality takes by snippets what Morality seizes whole.)

  Soon, the pair baptize 1½ Belle Aire Terrace à la the Song of Solomon. They make it home.

  Carl is not so magnanimous that he can let Erv go unscathed in luring Avril to his Indian motorcycle. Carl’s Vengeance exploits a fine circumstance: Erv’s boss—and his own—is Grantley Beardsley, that regular companion of Mrs. Victoria Black’s sleeping-car sleepovers.

  Carl chooses to coax G.B. to cut Erv’s work hours so meanly, his ex-pal will need to subsist on a shitty brown bread, beans, and molasses diet—or sell off his glamorous Indian bike. To serve him right. Maintien le droit!

  Power is available to those willing to acquiesce to its damaging utilities, if not willing to seize it for themselves. (Beardsley has always said, “CN needs a Mussolini to force it to operate a strict schedule.”) Thus, Carl had his audience with unwholesome, unscrupulous, unlovely G.B., who did slash Erv’s hours from twenty per week down to twelve. Erv now works three days instead of five. Better still, Carl’s picked up one of Erv’s shifts. G.B. is magnanimous in this shuffling of schedules. He won’t pry into the reasons for Carl’s request. He knows it has something to do with rivalry over a woman: good enough. His reason for cutting Erv’s hours is, first, to remind all his Negro underlings of his power to better or ruin their lives; second to create a sense of obligation in Carl—above and beyond the never-spoken fact that Carl has his job, in the first place, due to Beardsley’s first place in Victoria’s bed.

  Thus, thanks to Carl’s Orwellian word in Beardsley’s Machiavellian ear, Erv’s soon thumbin rides to downtown Halifax from godforsaken, wind-whipped, rock-and-a-hard-place Preston. Carl exercises Beardsley’s influence in his own favour.

  (One reason why Carl motorcycles his dates about is, if he courts by train, taxi, or foot, he be subject to G.B.’s inquisitive—and acquisitive—eyes, sizing up Carl’s gals, trying to transform their sexual inscrutability into private availability. The motorcycle allows a quick getaway from nosy Beardsley, drooling Beardsley, eyes-bigger-than-his-stomach Beardsley, as well as from envious, vigorously ugly, Caucasian [im]potentates—like Messrs. Sparky and Studs.)

  When Erv discovers that his hours have been cut, he begins to beat Avril, to thrash the cash outta her. He rips open her blouse to steal whatever she might think to stash in a bra cup. It is not long before she decides to call Carl, sobbing quietly about Erv’s manhandling of her, her mollycoddling of him. Carl spits, “Good luck. Ciao.” And hangs up.

  Raised in a barn and set to work in a zoo (the white kennel and black lab-rat cage that is the railway), Carl could only view Avril, at first, as having committed the unpardonable Caucasian sin: not of confusing all Negroes as disagreeably, unanimously, the same, but of choosing to rank one as superior to the others. By electing Erv as her lover, on the gutter basis of brawn—or sexual ferocity, frequency, and vile depravity (coat-hanger whippings, Sadean buggery)—Avril had cast Carl in the unlovely position of having been bested, and in the domain in which his mirror and his yardstick said he should dominate. Little mattered now, the aubades and albas, the dawn songs of tender lovin as Buddy Sun came along, croonin, settin out the firm white breasts of milk bottles, then cloppin away. No, Avril was no longer April and spring and blossoms, but October and Halloween and dead leaves.

  But now Carl’s lost his first white female, the one whose sex first flared his nostrils and made him churn pepper twixt twin sugary flanks. Thus has ended this ghetto libretto, this historieta perversa.

  However, Carl doesn’t consider that he allowed Toe Joe and Freddy Dent to pester Muriel into coitus; nor has he gone after Leicester for his licentious urging of Marina to Vice. The reason for his stayed Vengeance is not his virtue; it’s his powerlessness to cripple sailors and castrate male students.

  Nor does Carl recognize that his sexual envy against Erv and Avril is just as atavistic as was that of the Italy Cross men who pursued Peter Paris, wanting to lynch him for having stuck his black dick in a white fishwife’s coral sex. Carl thought his anger rational, but it sprang from his wish to best Erv and bust Avril.

  Avril is astonished that Carl can be so callous; and she’s terrified that Erv can actually put his fist in her face and his foot in her ass. But she is so accustomed to Negro Servility, of the enforced Mississippi variety, that the disregard of one Coloured man and the degrading attention of the other has unnerved her, almost to the point of dementia. Given the cranky mores of the Coloured Baptists of Nova Scotia, she now sees a return to the landscape of banjo-serenaded lynchings as a progressive move.

  Carl is used to hardening his heart. Too bad for Avril? Impossible for her to worm back into his good graces? Well, if Remorse is eating her soul, Erv is still lapping at her crotch.

  Yet, Carl also knows that Avril was good to—and for—him, validating his art, intellect, and aesthetics, and even an ideal of racial egalitarianism. Thus, he can’t lastingly accept that his ex-lover should become prey to a domestic dictator. So, relaxing his Arrogance, Carl calls Avril to state mollifying, mellifluous words: “If Erv ever lays a finger on you again, I’ll sic the cops on the man.” She sobs, and Carl says, “Take care.” He hangs up. He hopes that Erv will stop using Avril as his punching bag, but not as his moneybag. For sure, if Carl ever dispatches the
cops to arrest Erv, the man’ll likely be shot—or beaten—to death: Racists’ Rules of Order.

  Back at home, Carl cracks open Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising (the preface to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451). Fog lays a vinegary musk smell over the city. The only relief is rain, coming in bursts and spurts.

  Soon, this September, the Kenyan “Old Man,” not dissimilar in looks to Nat King Kole, will land at the University of Hawaii. To crack open Econometrics and seed a bit of Kansas, mirror-image of Oz.

  DETERMINATIONS II

  Beauty cannot exist without revelation.

  —NORMAN MAILER, THE PRESIDENTIAL PAPERS

  Thursday, October 1

  Summer wanes inexorably into October, and Carl can number the freewheeling days (and nights) remaining this year, for motorcycles and black ice quarrel over who has right-of-way. The past season was good, all things considered: Carl had a slight spill but landed on his feet. (To survive—brain, bone, and blood intact—achieves the Triple Crown of motorcycling.)

  Liz II did not fail Carl all season; she’d performed admirably. But flesh-and-blood ladies were infuriatingly frustrating, for their crises were inexplicable, unpredictable, and, worst of all, contagious: a smash-up in one relationship seemed to damage others via chain reactions of gossip, disputes, and splits.

  Thus, Muriel’s serial dissatisfactions with guys—Fred Dent, Toe Joe, et al., including Carl (though he’d never admit it)—propelled her (Carl believes) to Lola and to the insular sorority of Lesbos. True: Muriel almost did become a mother. But Carl is relieved that he never had to face fatherhood—or husbandry—with the scullion: to watch Muriel exchange her apron for a nursing bra. But as soon as Carl thinks scullion, he retracts it: Muriel could have been the mother of his child.

  Marina just flits about, landing with Leicester for one date, then with Carl for another. Her once-only, out-of-character, pornographic act of May 20 does worry Carl, for he fears what Leicester may have made her do—perform—next, one-upping each “sexcapade” until Muriel was ready to lie down and spread em.

  Avril was excitement—and then disappointment. Sporting was it to gad about Halifax with an ivory, gorgeous Mississippi debutante, and to tip-tup-top-and-tap her. But Avril’s hots for Negroes matched Carl’s letch for white ladies. (The moral? Love is blind, but Sex discriminates.) Too, Carl can eschew wooing Laura “Blue Roses” States: his romance with Liz Publicover is flourishing. Her revelry in conversation and joy in coitus and delight in the motorbike upon the open road, her refined looks and her maternal warmth, all mark her as qualitatively a fine wife, if he should decide on—and she accept—engagement. Because she hails from the vicinity of Italy Cross, she understands Carl’s contradictory anger at White Supremacy and concomitant Lust for white females. Raised in a fisherman’s house, she won’t lord it over a railway worker. Besides, her McGill education has fit her to be a teacher or a secretary, the two occupations—besides the de facto nunnery of nursing—available to her this year (until she can complete her Library Science studies). So, to wed Carl would be Liz’s statement of intellectual and social independence, though she doubts that she could be the stay-at-home housewife he’d want her, out of (Coloured) male pride, to be.

  Carl should admit, My loving has hurt women. Too much narcissism, self-hatred, lust . . . No wonder I’m utterly out of luck with Mar—and Muriel and Avril . . . Snafus flummox him. He is abjectly unable to don Hugh Hefner’s—or Elijah Muhammad’s—silk pyjamas.

  Round midnight, Carl finishes Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising, the novel about the explosion of a munitions ship in Halifax Harbour on December 6, 1917, wherein Bedford Basin exists but Africville does not, and two thousand people are killed. In the novel, Neil Macrae clears his name and ploughs Miss Penelope Wain—again. Excellent. Carl thrills over MacLennan’s exposé of the explosion: a man running with a sliver of glass in his throat, blood spurting; a fish hook snagging a penis; a baby’s head replaced by a doll’s head. The worst images are the crippled dogs, half-burnt cats, and horses cut in half. When Carl puts the novel down and picks up Yeats’s edited Modern Poetry, it slithers him into sleep.

  Friday, October 9

  Because they’re “two peas in a pod,” Carl’s whimsy to drive to St. Andrews by-the-Sea, N.B., for a final motorcycle adventure this year (October 9 to 12), needs to include L.P. He dials her. Boy, she is keen to go. She needs but an hour to get ready.

  Carl picks up L.P. at ten a.m. She’s gorgeous—from her dark hair down to the toes of her suede, low-rise boots. She wears a wool sweater, a tweed jacket, plus slacks and gloves: in looks, she’s every inch the arch librarian. She even sports a tucked-in scarf. Carl kisses her fully, hotly, at her open mouth. He studies again her Ivory Snow–detergent-model blue eyes. Chrome-plated is his Desire. His heart races; his engine guns. Laura slides behind and grips Carl shamelessly—unselfconsciously. In fluent sunlight plus summer-killing cold, he realizes, So many others have failed me, but here’s a woman who doesn’t care that I’m Coloured, who sees me as a wonderful man, and a skilful lover.

  On this shadowless but shivering morn, the pair veers through frost-ready fields in spicy, gregarious light. They bike past pines—sullen green—as holy as minarets, but also pass rusty or stripped-clean orchards. (The vineyards are already in bottles.)

  Like Castro riding out of the Cuban hills to seize Power, Carl motors Laura into Loyalist New Brunswick. They stop in Sackville, just beyond Nova Scotia, on the Tantramar Marshes, all green-gold, tufted grass and red-brown mud flats. They eat frankfurters as big as logs; their teeth shatter cake. They kiss tea. A train draws its comma after a phrase of marsh.

  From Sackville, they bound north to Moncton, round Dorchester’s castle-plagiarizing penitentiary, then swing southwest to Saint John. From here, picking his way around potholes like sinkholes and caved-in highway slabs, Carl negotiates the bad roads—the bleak, medieval roads of the N.B. barons of newsprint and petrol—until he meets the livid Fundy, alive, vivid. The wind-nibbled, wind-bitten bay looks like whipped cream. Two hearts surge at sight of the Fundy’s undeniable energy, its fundamental force hurling fish and shipping before it.

  Next, the motorcyclists zoom past apple orchards of windfalls still unbelievably crimson. The road stays radiant—even when they see a buckshot deer sunning itself on the roof of a fall-coloured, dumpy car. (Liz turns her head askance, aghast at the blood.)

  Liz II works like a top. The bike hurtles along smoothly—like a pen nib pushing forward ink. The engine genie sounds cheerful—like a church choir abandoning gospel for doo-wop.

  Take to Highway 1 west: at Musquash Marsh, witness geese ascending, honking, “Winter’s nigh.” Autumn columns of birds, over a lake, darken its blue clarity.

  At Digdeguash, the bike banks left onto Highway 127. Now, the pair heads south, past Bocabec and Chamcook, to St. Andrews by-the-Sea, transient light directing.

  When Carl and Liz come down into town, they roll along Water Street, bordering a river harbour tinted to mirror champagne and ashes. St. Andrews by-the-Sea is a heartland of motorcycles: streets bristle with glistening, spidery chrome. Many East Coast bikers have had the same idea: Get thee to St. Andrews befo da frost thicken!

  At Passamaquoddy Bay, soprano seagulls screech. The beach, such as it is, fields red clay, red stone, and red sand. Still-blue water froths white and silver. The riders watch waves rattle and rustle among boulders. The dusk sparks a silvery, glassy blaze.

  Turning back, Carl reconnoitres Triq Pagan, then turns left onto Royal Princess utca, a stubby strip that, paved out into the river, is, at high tide, submerged. (A drunken motorist, if he times it right, can park easily underwater, thus foreshadowing a certain U.S. Senator’s navigation of his auto into waters at Chappaquiddick, Mass.)

  At Adolphus Strasse, Carl and Liz leave the harbour and soar uphill to reach the Algonquin Hotel, the railway-owned resort. Carl steers left onto rue Prince of Wales, left again, and pulls into the front entrance of the south-facing,
raspberry-pistachio-and-coconut (Italian gelato tints) painted, Tudor Revival, half-timbered lodge with its manorial facade. Like the oils of Edward M. Bannister (1828–1901), a Coloured man (and a Barbizon School painter Carl should know), the hotel redeems Bannister’s natal land.

  Check-in accomplished as easy as a fill-up, Carl snags a bay-view room: radiant with rosewood, warm with maple. The lovers look out over a slice of bay between fir-pine fringes. Carl remembers the Halifax hotel that he’d had to sneak about within to visit Avril. This rustic redoubt is better, partly because ingress is easier, and partly because his companion is better: that is, loving—not researching, quasi-anthropologically—Negroes. Or so Carl now defines Avril, forgetting they both delighted in a mutual discovery of Difference.

  The couple decides to stretch their legs a spell. They stroll, hand-in-hand, to the seashore, despite the October—repeat of April—chill. Carl delights in seeing the gleaming swish of Liz’s nylons when she hikes the tartan skirt she’s changed into, to perch on a red boulder overlooking the bay.

  Back at the hotel, sunlight is dwindling (chances are dwindling). Liz sprawls on the king bed and pulls Carl onto her for long, deep kisses. The twain merge like coffee and steamy dry ice.

  Requisite ablutions are performed, clothes re-ordered, and Liz and Carl descend to the dining room. Both order roast duck with pear and sparkling wine.

  Who struts in but Sandy MacKay. The millionaire machinist with his humming—no, hummable—Harley. His triangled beard makes him look sharp as a tack. He’s stunned to see Liz P. and Carl latched—like honeymooners. Carl grants a grimace of recognition that relaxes into a true grin of biker camaraderie. Handshakes snake about.

  Sandy’s in town because St. Andrews is the nearest day’s-drive destination from Halifax, and serves as this weekend’s likely last, decent, cycle opportunity until spring. He prays that nothing will break down: “Mechanics here can fix anything but have a bad reputation for rust.” He’d trust his own skill, anyway.