“Gimme some more Scotch in this drink, please, Boysie!” Bernice asked. It sounded like an order to him, but he gave her the Scotch anyhow. Dots was smoking a cigarette, so she couldn’t get up to do it. She gave one to Bernice who handled it, when she lit it, less clumsily than Boysie had ever seen her do before. Boysie could feel the change in her, too.
“I brought you something, Dots.” She got up and went to her coat, and when she didn’t find it, she went instead to the string bag in which she kept the shoes she wore indoors when it was snowing outdoors. She brought back a small parcel and gave it to Dots.
As Dots unwrapped the parcel, Boysie could see that Bernice was wearing both lipstick and eye shadow these days. “This old bitch, she must be pushing fifty!” He wanted her to be fifty years old, and therefore outside the pale of any sexual craving he might have for her; and he wanted his wife to hurry up and be old, be fifty too, for the same reason. He was getting tired. Dots was forty-two, pushing forty-three, but she looked (and sometimes behaved) younger than a woman in her late thirties.
“Thanks,” she said. Bernice had brought her some expensive lipstick and eye shadow. (“This bitch wants my wife to be like her, or what?” Boysie thought, jealous and envious and feeling left out. He thought of the woman in the brown winter coat, and he tried to see her face close up, but he could not because each time he saw her he was seven floors in the sky; and he wanted her to be younger than Dots, but he would have to wait to see whether she was in fact younger. Nobody could really look younger than Dots, he knew.) And he watched his wife very closely as she sat down talking with Bernice, and he saw the firmness in her legs, her forty-three-year-old legs, and her breasts which had not yet begun to sag and her behind which was firm and warm as a pear not quite ripe, and he wondered why she didn’t become pregnant, for he had tried every night for a very long time, a long time ago, and when he could not get her pregnant, he gave up; he stopped making love to her at all, and then he tried, only casually now, for the purpose and the fun of their lovemaking had addled so far as he was concerned. (“I wonder if this woman is on the pill?”) Dots never mentioned those things to him, and he never thought of asking her; so funny now, without provocation, but only through speculation, that he should bother to think about this. He went back in his mind to the contents of her drawer in the bedroom, which he would glance through, not really checking up on her, but trying to find something very personal that belonged to her; something which would draw him closer to her, he thought, which would also make him know something about her that she did not tell him, that she did not offer to disclose, that he had not asked about. All he found, one morning, when the woman in the brown coat was late arriving out of the subway station, was a tube. The tube is white. It is about six inches long. One end of it is larger than the other. And it looks like a “pop-gun,” which he used to make and shoot peas with, back in Barbados when he was a small mischievous boy killing lizards. This “pop-gun” thing did not take his interest long, for that was not what he wanted to find in her drawer. (“In her drawer! Heh-heh-hehhhh! In her drawer, in her drawers, in her … if Henry was still living, I could make a joke outta this and he might even know what this things is!” At times like this, he reverted back to Barbadian dialect, because he was close to himself; and because he had not really learned how to speak the new language which he felt would release him from some of his torment. He had to be satisfied with his dialect until the new language could express his innermost thoughts. Dots was the same way, too: she talked a formal, strained brand of English at work and when she had visitors — until she forgot — or if the superintendent of the building was talking to her; but when she was angry, or when she was really close to her husband, she talked in the only tongue she knew intimately. “In her drawers, yeah, heh-heh-heh. What a joke!”) He had put the tube into his pocket that morning, and had forgotten it there for two days while he thought of ways he could ask the young Canadian fellow if the new language he was learning had any philosophical explanation for it. But something told him it was personal, the kind of question he could not ask a young man, and a stranger at that. So he brought it back home and absentmindedly put it in his own drawer. He thought of it now, and went into the bedroom, and took it out, after making sure that Bernice and Dots were deep in their conversation; and he opened her drawer, tried to remember exactly where he had taken it from, and when he found the nightgown, the long white one which Dots never wore (she wore it once on their sixth wedding anniversary night), he lifted it, and found another one. “Jesus Christ!”
“Boysie, what are you doing in there!”
It was Bernice calling. Her voice was beginning to take on the effects of the straight Scotch. He had never given anybody an order in his life. Bernice was calling him to join them. “Man, they got a first-class calypso band down at the Mercury Club now, boy! You shouldda seen me last night, and the Saturday night before that! I dance the Watusi — is that what they calls it? I dance the Jamaican dance, and after I had in a few watered-down rums that they served down there, you shouldda seen Bernice on that floor with a young man, doing the Reggae! I Reggaed for so! Why don’t you take Dots down to the Mercury? That is where the action is!” The noise in her voice and the noise from the West Indians down there at the Mercury and the “pop-gun” thing in his hand, in his trousers pocket, and Dots in the kitchen trying on the eye-shadow makeup, and Bernice drinking and smoking, her eyes becoming red, her new dress in place and fitting her properly, and her hair now streaked with grey and in the Afro style and making her look dignified and very desirable.
“Are you seeing mens, now?” Dots was in a good mood, and her voice was loud and sharp and it had that Barbadian edge to it. “You stepping out with mens? At your age, gal? And young mens, to-boot!”
“I can’t tell you what a fool I was all these years! Working my arse off. Saving up money. And life passing me by.”
“You at the age now, gal.”
“When you miss it for so long, and you find it suddenly …”
“Oh, Christ!” Dots gave out her raucous sensual laugh. “I hope you are eating green bananas and drinking stout, gal. Young man does give old woman the belly!”
“Look, Dots, haul your …” And she held back, laughing, and Boysie got the chance to look down in her brassiere, and what he saw there did not belong to a woman who will soon be fifty years old. It made him very unhappy. It made him think of what he was doing to himself: he had deliberately tried to take the sensuality in his background out of his present life. His refusal to listen to calypso, his refusal to be happy in a West Indian way of wide mouths and winding backsides when dancing; his new desire to be quiet and intellectual, to listen to soft music which the Canadian young fellow called “civilized music,” and which he heard a man on the CBC television call classical music, his distant closeness with the woman in the winter coat, and his growing fondness for floes and floes of angel’s hair with ice cream castles … “Wait, Boysie, why you don’t go on a diet? Child,” she said turning to Dots, “Those people I works for, well I tell you, they have changed my life. You don’t know I stopped eating pork and things like that! Look how I look. You don’t see I tek offa a lotta weight. Granola. No milk in my tea …” (“But iron in your arse, though!” Boysie snickered, in his heart; and immediately got sick at his own raucousness and crudeness.) “… and I not puffing and puffing every time I climb a stairs.”
“I always telling Boysie that his belly looks like a manager-belly.”
“It big like that,” Bernice said. She patted him on his stomach. His trousers were almost hanging below his waistline. “You looking old before your time.”
“What I want a big-guts man for? They does get outta wind before I ready! Heh-heh-heh!” Boysie hated Dots for saying that. Once upon a time, she could say these things and they would not hurt him, in fact he would welcome them, because he was more sure of himself then; and when she said them and laughed at him, and he laughed with her, and her laughing beca
me less derisory because he had made it that, he still felt like a man; and even if they were said in the presence of others, it didn’t bother him. But recently, her casual remarks had more edge to them. The slightest comment she made was now taken as an accusation and even as a rejection.
He was secure in material ways. He could not understand why the mention of the size of his belly should upset him so. There must be a deeper reason.
“Child, the fellow I seeing nowadays, I told you about him, didn’t I?” Dots found herself caught in this confidence, which she had never mentioned to Boysie; and so she looked sheepish, before she could give Bernice her acknowledgement. Boysie became alert now. He had not been seeing clearly lately. He should train his mind to listen more. There were things he had seen for years and they had not registered. For instance, the “pop-gun” tube. And Dots had replaced the one he had taken from her drawer. “Well that man is a man. He is as flat in his middle as Mistress Burrmann is on her chest, that bubbies-less bitch! … pardon me, Boysie, boy …”
“When you bringing your young man to meet me … to meet me and Boysie?”
“Anytime, girl, anytime! But he is so busy. All the time he busy, busy, busy, reading one book after the next. He going through to be a lawyer. Got six more months, and then, I will be buying long white dress! How yuh like muh?”
“I saw two young boys tonight … was it tonight? … no, last week! Or last month? Anyhow, I saw two young boys last month going up in the elevator with we. They looked so strong, that if …”
“I am investing in that man.” Bernice said it quickly to avoid further embarrassment: Dots had made a slip. “I investing in he. I don’t want to burden him, and I don’t intend asking him for nothing. He don’t even have to be faithful to me. Faithful? What I want faithfulness for from a man? All I does want, child, is a little regular …”
“Did he tell you I saw him one evening coming home from work?”
“I watching him with Estelle, though! Like a blasted hawk, child. Estelle likes man. She likes more man than what John the Baptist read ’bout. But this time …”
“Look, gal, let me get up offa my arse and fix something for you to eat. I cook already whilst I was cleaning. I only have to make the gravy now, and dish. Help yourself to another drink. Boysie, don’t you see Bernice glass empty?”
“You ordering-’bout Boysie very much today, girl. I could get my own drink, man.” She laughed. She should not have laughed. Had she not laughed, Boysie would have taken it as a defence, as something in his favour; but she laughed, and made her words just another little game that they seemed to have been playing upon him. “You ordering Boysie …”
“What the hell you think he is there for? If I don’t order him, if I can’t order him, who you want to order him, then?”
And Bernice laughed very loudly, and got up, still laughing, plucked out that portion of her new dress that was stuck to her behind, looked Boysie full in his eye, and went into the kitchen still laughing.
It was ten o’clock and the woman had not appeared yet. Boysie had to get to the barbershop before noon, because he wanted to go to the bank and make his monthly deposit and then be back home in time for the one o’clock CBC news. They were going to have a special broadcast about the war in Vietnam. Richard Nixon the president of America was playing the arse, Boysie felt; and he was banking on the Vietnamese to throw some blows in Nixon’s clothes. This is how he put it to the Canadian young fellow the previous night when they both took a break and drank a coffee from their work. Nixon was going to start bombing the North again, and Boysie wondered what the North was going to do. He was trying to follow the war, and at times he had difficulty deciding whether the Vietnamese were all Communists, or whether it was just the Viet Cong, and he wasn’t sure if the Viet Cong were in the North; but he liked the name Viet Cong. “They sure sound like Giants to me! I like that name, Viet Cong. Sometimes, my wife make me feel like one of them, a Viet Cong!” He was anxious to hear what the radio was going to say about the Viet Cong. Waiting now for the woman to appear, he wondered if in the eyes of a real Viet Cong he would look small, be a fool to be waiting on a woman he didn’t even know, and whom he had not seen close up; but he felt that the Viet Cong were patient people, and so he felt better when he thought of that. Yes, he must start behaving like a Viet Cong, and in that way, Dots would respect him.
It didn’t matter that his stomach was bulging, he’d bet that there were some Viet Cong whose stomachs were bigger than his. “If Henry was here I would argue with him that a Viet Cong could have a big guts and still be a fucking gorilliphant!” He laughed aloud, as he used Henry’s favourite word — gorilliphant — a gorilla that was a giant. “Henry was a fucking gorilliphant!” He walked around the apartment trying to take his mind off the woman.
He was dressed. From the first time when he realized that his life was changing, he had decided to dress more tidily and properly, paying attention to appearances as much as to quality. He had the money to afford both. This morning, although he was just going to the barber’s, he was dressed in a three-piece suit of a dark grey material with a very conservative stripe in it. His tie was a darker grey, and he made sure that his socks were black as his shoes were. He had thought of changing to boots, as almost every man was wearing these days, but he had seen too many hippies and loud-mouthed West Indians wearing them, so he drew the line there. His topcoat was a fawn-coloured brownish material, cut in the military style. He remembered, whenever he wore this coat, that he had first seen it on Englishmen in movies during the war in Europe. His hair was cut short these days, and to look at him you won’t think that he was going to the barber’s today. But he had become so meticulous and so fastidious about dress that he decided he had to look trim always. The only thing on which he spent more time than shaving every morning was his newspapers. He looked very much like an undertaker this morning.
And he was impatient and nervous, walking from the window that looked out on the street, to the bathroom (where he passed water, even though he had done so just five minutes before) and back again. He went into the bedroom, in Dots’s drawer, and felt under the nightgown for the “pop-gun” thing; and it was there. He had thrown away the one he had long ago when he discovered that Dots had replaced it. The record player was still turned on, so he turned the switch and the red light went out. A record was on the turntable, and he took it off and dusted it (“This blasted woman thinks that I am made outta money!”) and put it back into its jacket.
Then he got the idea. It occurred to him in a very simple way, and he wasn’t sure that that was what he should do; but it was a good idea. He searched through his collection of fifty-odd records, and picked out all the calypsoes and the rhythm-and-blues and steel band songs. He put them tidily into a pile. He then searched the jackets of the remaining records to see that the records matched the jackets. He picked up the pile of records he had placed on the floor, opened the door, closed it but without locking it walked to the elevator, waited (“Good morning, Missis Thorne. Nice day, eh? Not too cold today …”), went down with Mrs. Thorne his neighbour across the hall, and walked straight to the incinerator. He threw the pile of records through the chute, wiped his hands as if he had just got rid of something filthy, and went back up in the elevator. He opened the door, closed it and locked it this time, went to the window and leaned over on his elbows to wait. There were four records remaining in his collection. (“Wait till that woman comes home! If she opens her mouth to say one word, well …”)
The woman was coming. She was coming, and he was getting very nervous as he saw the white floppy beretlike hat she always wore; and he wagered with himself that she would be wearing a coat of another colour, but she was in the same brown coat, and the same dark tall winter boots, and the same large tinted glasses so large that they made her face look like a timid animal’s, and in her hand was the same white shopping bag, made out of plastic. It looked like plastic because it was shiny. He wondered what she had in it. She
walked upright with no swagger, without incitement towards herself, without self-consciousness, without a swinging gait as Bernice did, and she walked out of his sight, and he remained at the window thinking that “I gotta see that woman close-up once of these days!” He was going down now in the elevator on his way to the garage underground where he parked his truck on the weekends. He had never given much thought to the safety or to the danger of these underground garages, probably because he had just seen his strange woman pass.
He got into the truck and revved up the engine. “This damn cold weather could kill an engine, to say nothing about a man, it is so damn cold … wonder why some places are so damn cold!”; and as he waited for the engine to warm up, he felt inside his coat pockets for his cigarettes and he pulled them out, and with them were the two clippings: women in underground garages where a 26-year-old single nurse was raped yesterday afternoon but it is morning now, in the underground garage of an apartment building in the Sherbourne-Bloor area, “Christ, what some men won’t do for a piece o’ pussy!” and a 36-year-old mother of four “A mother? Even a woman who is a mother isn’t safe in this blasted country!” who was beaten by a suspected pursesnatcher in the underground garage of her Scarborough apartment Monday night, died of her injuries last night in Scarborough Centenary Hospital “I wonder why Dots changed this second story to a different hospital when the paper says Scarborough. Did she really say Scarborough, when she read it out to me, or …”; the motor was ready now, and he drove out. Suppose he was parking his truck one morning early, about three, and he saw a woman in the underground garage, would he rape her, would he make a pass at her, would he make conversation with her? “Shit! what am I thinking?”
The Bigger Light Page 6
