This new awareness about “our people” had first been mentioned to him by Mrs. James. But Boysie was not disposed to giving her too much credence for her ideas, and he was not the person who had known the arguments and the language with which to contradict her; still he knew, through common sense, that people like Mrs. James, poor people, tended to want to stick together and scream and cry for help together more than people in his position.
“I really think that a man in your position, and with the kind heart you have, and which you have shown me and my family, ought to join some organization, Mr. Cumberbatch.”
What organization? He had lived happily just cleaning offices on a contract. He had enough to eat and drink. And the only problem he had was Dots. But he could fix Dots. He could either get drunk one of these nights and come home and kick in her arse; or he could throw her out of the house (“I paying the blasted rent for this apartment now, woman! You done supporting me. I am a man!”); or he could continue to ignore her, and hope that she eventually would become crazy and stop persecuting him in her silent warfare of the mind.
“There are a lot of people, our people (“And who the fuck is our people, tell me? You mean Barbadians? You are a Canadian-born, but I am a Barbadian?”) who could benefit from a man in your position. Even an old magazine. Lots of youngsters do not even have as much as a magazine to read, or a man to take them to a movie. I am lucky, but I always think of the more unluckier than me. A man in your position should think very serious about contributing your free time to a social organization.”
Boysie had kept very far from organizations. His life had been patterned on demand and supply, but more on demand. He always wanted things. For years, during his struggle in this country, he had heard nothing from an organization, and no organization ever heard about him. He had never thought that there were organizations existing for the purpose of helping people like he was, years ago. And because of this experience, he had said years ago to Henry that he was strictly a man who needed nothing but one break, “Just give me one kiss-me-arse break” (this he had said exactly five years ago to Henry) “and leave the fucking rest to me.” But nowadays he would tell people like the Canadian young fellow, and Dots, and he had occasion to tell the same thing to Mrs. James, “I am a laissez-faire type o’ man. I don’t believe in begging. I do not believe in asking nobody for nothing. I don’t even believe in credit cards and crediting. Cash. Cash on the line. And I do not believe in organizations, particularly black organizations.”
Mrs. James had not stopped there: she begged him and she bugged him to go with her, some night, to a place named the Home Service Association, to attend a meeting.
“What kind of meeting?”
“A meeting.”
“You have to tell me what kind. I am frightened for black people, yuh know.”
“Just a meeting. You will come.”
“We will see.”
It terrified Boysie very much that he was falling into the wrong company. Never in his life in this country had he thought about organizations. He knew, actually, only a small part of the city: from home to work, with stops along the way to visit some of the bars. But beyond that he knew very little of the physical outline of a country in which he had been living for so long. The idea of visiting the organization and attending a meeting fascinated him nevertheless, but at the same time it scared him, for he was letting himself in for all kinds of strange goings-on. Nobody was going to brand him as a Black Power advocate, or a Black Militant. He was a businessman. And he had to make a living, buy a house, and move away from this slum, to the suburbs, from this blasted place on Ontario Street which seemed to be the final resting place on earth for the aged, the prostitute and the wino. He had broadened his light of living by reading and by observing and by talking with such persons as Mr. MacIntosh and the Canadian young fellow and with Llewellyn. He had substantiated all this knowledge by writing letters to the editors of newspapers, and by watching television, particularly one American station from Buffalo and primarily the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Actually, he knew very little about the country of his adoption. The walk along Church Street had shown him that. But he knew that Church Street was there, in the same way that he knew that Dots was there, in bed after eleven o’clock every night during the week, and out of bed, like a grasshopper (“Dots, sometimes, you know what you remind me of? A goddamn grasshopper!”), each morning after seven o’clock, except on Saturdays and Sundays, when she got up from lying beside his snoring, aching and very sexually hungry body by nine (“As if she is going to work even on the fucking weekend!”); and even if she was not there, one of these nights, or mornings, even if she did not cook the meals and leave them in the oven or in the refrigerator, he knew she was there, in the spirit. For she was not a revolutionary. And she did not believe in women’s liberation. But suppose she was! Suppose every night when he was at work, Dots was out working on a different job, doing other work, doing other things? Suppose she had decided that he would no longer find her lying in the bed, on her right side! Suppose …
He is sitting in the living room, thinking of going downstairs to Apartment 101. But Mrs. James has gone for the welfare cheque which will feed her and her children for two good, stomach-filled days, or below the poverty-line for the week which the government says it will have to feed her.
He has just listened to the song about floes and floes and he gets tired of this, so he turns to Mendelssohn, and as he listens, he remembers what Llewellyn said about classical music. He thinks too of the day he sat in the cathedral and listened to the organist playing this same piece, and he tells himself that he understands it now. It means peace and tranquillity to him, and he listens to it as loudly as the machine will allow without vibrating.
The strange woman has not yet passed. And he is waiting for her head to appear, clothed in its usual white beret, and then see her body (he had forgotten that the first time he saw her, he had noticed that her chest was flat, as if she was not a woman), and then her entire brown coat, and the white boots or the brown boots, and always the white shopping bag from the exclusive shops along Bloor Street West. He was fully dressed: in his light brown double-breasted suit with the faintest of stripes; a suit that had a slight sheen to its conservative material; and he was wearing a silk tie of a matching brown. His feet felt comfortable and soft, and the bunions he had accumulated, and which had embarrassed him in years past because of the way they hurt when he walked, were now painless, and were relaxed in a pair of dark brown shoes, so brown that sometimes they looked red. And in his silk stockings. He was standing by the window which looked out on the other buildings, and which afforded him enough space and perspective through which to see her.
Mendelssohn was coming to his Wedding March; and he thought fleetingly of Mrs. James and of his boyish daydreams of being her husband; and just as quickly, Dots came through his mind, and as she paused in it, he recollected the nights and the days of making love to her, how her body was so soft and her behind was so firm for a woman her age; and Mrs. James came back, and with her, her image and the fat the fat the fat slobby tumbling of her behind, and he stopped thinking about her. The woman from the subway, not yet in sight, was in his mind. He felt himself falling asleep while standing. He was always tired; it was not really exhaustion from the expenditure of strength, if he could put words to it, not that, but a weakness of the body and the mind to go further towards seeing the light he yearned to see. And he knew, he could just feel that he was falling asleep, through the lack of activity. He sometimes wished that for some reason, perhaps a lingering flirtatiousness in his wife (he was always ready), that Dots would come home from the hospital at eleven o’clock in the morning, which hour was the most unhappiest of his days alone, and which contained the most impossible dreams, impossible to believe and to interpret, and would surprise him, and grab him and throw him in bed, and would say, if she would only talk to him, “Come let me screw you! You look as if you need some lovi
ng” (for he was now powerless to talk to her, except to criticize her, or to call her a bitch, in his mind, they had grown so far apart, through his being by himself: “That’s what it is! being by myself. I spend too much time by myself”), and would make love and then go back to work. But Dots’s mind was always on her work, and she was becoming very ambitious about being a registered nurse. She was grumbling recently about being not educated enough to become a registered nurse, for “if I was only a RN, Lord, what wonders I would perform! I would work miracles,” by which she meant that she would put more money into her bank account. He changed the record. He put on his other favourite tune, Milestones by Miles Davis. This was a tune, this Milestones, which had so much in it that he promised himself many times to have Llewellyn explain it to him. By chance, in his recent confused mental state, he had found himself once, making love to his wife while the tune was on the radio; and he had wished that he was the man to have been able to say, “Wait a minute, Dots, we have to screw to music. I know just the piece for you!” Not for him, too? He was leaving himself out of everything here of late; and leaving himself out of every criticism: this was the way he was seeing things; for he was the only inhabitant of the world he chose to live in. He could not find the real explanation for this attitude either; he knew it was not selfishness, he knew he was not just “miserable as shite!” which was Dots’s diagnosis; and he was sure it was not what Henry would have called “your fucking mini-pause, ’cause don’t forget, Boysie, and you’s my goddamn friend, but a man does go through a minipause, too!” No, it was not that, it was not either of them; he told himself so.
Milestones’, he promised himself to have Bernice’s young man, who knew everything about classical music and other kinds of music, explain it to him; the things about his moods, well, he could get that explained by the Canadian young fellow, in a “strictly philosophical way.” He could feel the music (“Man, I really have to get this piece explained. This is a serious piece of music, in truth”) doing something to his body, he could see how it quickened, and how his own pulse and heartbeat responded to it; he could see that Miles Davis was making the beat go faster, and although he could not understand that in terms of music (“Lew going have to explain that part to me, next time we talk”), yet he knew something was happening. He found himself being weakened by the music, as he had had a feeling of being soothed while in bed, and then falling off to sleep, and waking up with a start to find the radio still playing, and Dots snoring, and to discover that he had slept for only ten minutes and not for a lifetime. He had discovered this strange trick that time and his body were playing on him; if it was not always time by itself, then it was his body: he would be sitting reading the newspapers, and he would fall off into a doze, and from that moment when one reality ended he would be capsized into another reality, and this new world would take him and carry him miles all over the place, sometimes to Barbados, sometimes right into the subway steps seven flights down below from the very chair in which he had been sitting, and he would romp and play, look and see, talk (for only his dreams were the loci of conversations), and then when he re-emerged back into the chair, still dressed as he had been before that first death, when the dream became death and his loneliness, life, he would be out of sorts, like a drunken man, amazed that he lived two lives, and such long ones (one longer than the other, of course, but still two lives) in such a short time. It would be about the space of three or five minutes.
He is drifting off now, because the music is like a horse cantering, and he can feel himself being carried on the rollicking flesh through the up and down canefields back in Barbados, and then it is soft, as if the horse has fallen down, but he does not experience the fall of the horse, the horse just falls and he is still lying on the horse … in his mind, he is riding Dots (“Boy, you riding me like a bloody horse,” she said when he was bothering her about something, or when he was in the same difficult mood, as he seemed to be always in, these days), and Dots, though not a horse, though not his horse, or anybody’s horse, was underneath him (“Boysie, why don’t you drop your blasted horse-stylish manners when you are talking to me!” is what she would say when he was gruff); he thinks of when she is unpalatable, when he would prefer to be riding the strange, unknown woman, who herself walks like some kind of horse; and to satisfy himself with Dots, he imagines that it is the woman in the music of his cantering thighs; and he doesn’t tell this to anyone, because it would be like murder; just as he had not told anyone of having seen his wife with the man crossing the road, his wife crossing the road with the man holding her hand … and he sees her now, from his shielded car, from his car with the tinted windshield, and he sees her coming out of the same junky West Indian restaurant, with the orderly (he is dressed like an orderly, in white trousers and white shirt), and the man is more daring this time, because he has his arms round Dots’s waist, and there is not a car, nor a pedestrian, nor a streetcar in the road, so he could not be shielding her from any of them; Dots becomes tense, and he wants to drive the car over them, but he sits and waits and plans in his mind the attack he shall make on her as she comes through the door.
Tonight, as is his custom, he will not leave at five o’clock, because she comes home punctually at five o’clock, and because he wants to see her; tonight, this afternoon, he will be waiting for her to come through the door, and “I’m going to go up to her, and drop my fist in her blasted face, so hard that she won’t know what hit her, the bitch; a woman her age should be ashamed even to mention the name ‘man’ in front of anybody. I am going to sit down here, in the bedroom, with the lights turned off, that way she would think that I have left as usual, and when she walks into the bedroom, bram! my hand will be in her arse, in the dark, and then I am going to turn on the light and let her know what hit her, the bitch; a old woman like her, out with a man so young, horning me, a man like me! I am going to sit here peaceably, and when she comes in, we are going to talk, she will say, ‘Boysie’; and I will say, ‘Dots,’ and after this conversation, I am going to wait until she has food in her mouth and then I will say, ‘Look woman, you playing the arse! What the hell do you mean walking all over Toronto with a man?’ Or I will pretend I am sick and sleeping, and when she comes in, I will open my eyes and make her see the light …”
Boysie is in the bathroom, and it is night, very late at night, and there is no one at home but himself, and he feels lonely again, but with the same kind of tragic alienation from everything, and he is standing in front of Dots’s dresser, and he fumbles inside the drawer where she keeps her underwear, and he counts the number of pairs of panties (there were ten dirty pairs in the washbasin in the bathroom), and he sees there are six. The book of matches is still there, and the bar of soap with something written on it. He searches, expecting to find something: it is not anything about the young man who is the orderly, but it is about Dots. He does not know anything about Dots. She comes. She goes. She cooks. She cleans. He lies in bed, alive sometimes, dead most of the time. He comes out of the bedroom and pauses just before he enters the living room, for Dots has flashed through his mind, he sees her crossing a street and she is alone … and he sits back in his chair and listens to the music. The music is still Milestones, but before he makes himself comfortable in his brown double-breasted suit, he goes into the bedroom, for he can feel the sound that Dots makes, in the bedroom which he has just left. He goes in expecting to see her, in her aging pink quilted housecoat with the quilted appearance, in which she dresses and in which she lies, not more than five minutes after she has come home, even with her clothes under it; and in her bed, he sees the cat, barely to be seen, under the housecoat which it has somehow managed to wrap itself into.
Boysie opens his eyes and looks at his watch, and tries to understand where he is and in what state, for the music that is playing on the record player is Milestones, and the time is three minutes past that time at which he had first put the record on, for there are four or five other cuts on that same side; and he has gone
so far in life, and yet it is only three minutes past whatever it was. He looks at his watch; the woman has not come in spite of all the time it has taken him through his travels sitting in that chair, nodding and cantering with the music, and so he brushes his suit, makes it tidy, takes the record off, and decides to take a drive somewhere; perhaps he would see the woman coming up the steps of the subway, if he got around by that street in time …
The Bigger Light Page 17
