In this City

by Austin Clarke

  “Are you screwing me, nigger?” she asked. And then laughed. A breath of Jack Daniels came to my nostrils when she spoke. I could feel her weight. I had made a wrong step, and her weight fell upon me. I wondered what it would be like, if by accident, I went to make another wrong step, and she were to fall on top of me. “You want me?” She whispered this into my ear. I smelled her lipstick. “You’re screwing me, ain’t you?” Her mouth was at my ear. I smelled her perfume, and the cosmetics and the treatment in her processed hair. She tightened her grip on me. She tightened her grip more. My breathing became more difficult. And then she groaned, in a short spasm. “You like me, don’t you, small-island man?”

  Whatever Georgia was, whatever was the ruggedness of the landscape, whether of rocks or of stones, green fields of sugar cane or of cotton and corn, the concluding journey was before me. The singer was washed in perspiration, pouring out of her body with a sensual righteousness; the sequins in her dress moved as the breathed, from her ankles to her covered arms, like pistons on the very train that was pulling into George, long after midnight . “Oh, as I was young and easy in the mercy of her means, time held me green and dying though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

  “I want you, nigger. I have to have you.”

  I could feel it. I could feel the soft inside of her thighs. I was hard. The singer was coming home. Two sequined arms dropped at her side, in victory like that which concludes exhaustion of the flesh. And sudden so, the strong feeling thundered down. The rain had arrived.

  “You want me, don’t ya? I want you.”

  “No, I don’t want you,” I said.

  “Well, fuck it! Nigger, you’re mine.”

  “Clovis!” It was Calvin, like a referee forcing himself between two locked boxers. “Clovis! Take your motherfucking hands off the brother! The brother’s with me, motherfucker!” And Calvin ripped at Clovis’s head, as if he was delivering a jab to the face. And when Calvin’s hand returned from the face, in it was the wig which had contained such allure and fragrance of Duke Greaseless Hair Dressing for Women. His head was shaven bald, and was shining, and he was shaking with anger; and he said in a huskier voice, “Shit, Cal! I thought the nigger was mine!”

  “Motherfucker!” Calvin pushed him off.

  A few men and women danced close to us, looked at me and danced away. I stood looking at Clovis’s shining head.

  “Motherfucker, this is a Yale professor!”

  “I could’ve swear, Cal, honey, the nigger was mine. I am very sorry, sir, I am very sorry,” Clovis said, offering me his hands. I remember his hands were very soft. But by this time I was feeling the eruption in my stomach. And Calvin, sensing this, and intent upon freeing me from this assault, this offence, and knowing that I had lusted after the wrong person, was easing me with some force through the thick of the crowd, to the entrance. On my way out, I barely recognized Clovis’s voice, as he stood where he was, saying, “I knew the nigger looked strange, as if he didn’t belong here, weren’t one of us, weren’t from the South, so what the fuck was I supposed to think?”

  I could not wait until I was on the gravel patch in front of the entrance of the Stallion Club before the vomit spewed down on my white dashiki, onto my white cotton Levis, into my shoes, with the noise and the slime and the bad taste, and Calving talking and talking.

  “Shit, brother, couldn’t you tell?”

  “How?”

  “Didn’t you see the motherfucker didn’t have no breasts? Couldn’t you see?”

  “How? I was mesmerized by the woman singing ‘Midnight Train to Georgia.’”

  “That motherfucker was a man, too, brother!” The vomit punctuated whatever else he was about to say. It was coming out with pain and with violence, as if I was trying to rip something awful, something vile, some sin, some hurt, clean from my insides.

  “I was in love with the woman singing ‘Midnight Train.’”

  “The woman singing is also a man,” Calvin said. Pity and disappointment in me, registered in his explanation. “The woman is a motherfucking man, brother! This be the South. Birmingham. In the South, it be so fucked up you can’t tell one motherfucker from the next.”

  “I thought the man was a woman.”

  “It’s a motherfucking man, Jack! A man!”

  He lit a Salem. “Sure’s hell ain’t Toronto, Jack!”

  NAKED

  There was no resistance to the turn of the key when I put it into the lock at the front door that morning at about two o’clock, stomping from one foot to the next, my movement arrested by this encumbrance, my head spinning from a few drinks, on the point of exploding; and anxious to get into the house, along the short hallway which seemed longer now; and into the restroom, not to rest but to relieve myself of the pressure on my bladder after the full night’s drinking at Eglon’s restaurant with friends I had not seen in twenty-five years; and whom I had toasted in the wet, tear-stained, red welcome, with wine at the welcome party, each one of the five boyhood friends lost to my confidence in the hot sun for all those years in Barbados, four times each; and found out on this night, that after all that time, in the cold of this city that almost wrenched the life from out of our bodies; afterwards, after toasts and replies, and the late dinner at Eglon’s when we had to wrench Eglon from a waitress’s arms and legs and have him without her, re-light the gas burners; take the joint out of the freezer, and wait until it warmed up and his desire cooled off; again and wait some more; in all this waiting drinking time I had a presentiment gnawing at me, that someone was opening my front door, a fear like the naked feeling I once had when I felt that someone was opening my mail. I should have come home and foregone all their invitations to go back home to Barbados; “’cause it’s warmer there, man.” I should have restricted those toasts and come home and take out Tuesday’s garbage; wash the dishes left to rot in the sink three days now; put the heavy crystal stopper back into the brandy decanter; and number the pages of the paper I had been working on; or write the fourth page of a letter I had begun complaining to a woman in Miami four pages ago, in stating my position clearly, and without diplomacy: she was a married woman; and get some sleep after I had peed. I was freezing. Eglon did not turn the furnace back on.

  I made a note in my mind, as I pulled the key out and pulled the door shut behind me, already unzipping my trousers, to take a good look in the morning at the front lock. And I ran the short distance down the narrow hallway, and rushed into the small bathroom on the first floor, leaving the door open. And exhaled. And allowed the relief to pour itself noisily and with splatter crudely into the white porcelain bowl. And I listened to the drop of my water falling from the short resounding precipice, making two different noises in the hollow empty bowl and in the room and the house, rejoicing in my freedom that I could make all this noise in a house though joined to another on my east side, as if I were siamesed to the neighbour who I can hear break wind and breathe as she comes down the story-telling stairs; and independent because there is no cat no dog no pet and no animal. So, I could shake in a spasm that made my entire body shake with this freedom. It made me warm as if I were back in Barbados. I stared at the looking glass above the white wash basin – was there a sale of razors at Shoppers? – and in it, in addition to myself, was the picture on the wall. My back was facing it. I needed a shave. In the morning I shall use the new gold-painted razor the woman from Miami had sent the day before; and try on the silver ring from Mexico I had been give by the Miami woman when she was in Mexico learning to speak Castilliano from the Spanish boys on the beach, where the silver is real and cheap, and sold at prices tourists from American found “cheap.” And I would come back into this same small bathroom, with the life-size looking glass, and take a photograph of myself with my Canon camera, which I had bought at a yard sale in a mansion the Miami woman had taken me to, and send it back to her in Miami to let her see that it works. I could pick out the dot on my silk tie made from the sauce of the jerked pork I had eaten three hours before.
The button at my neck was undone. The smell of my breath was close to that smell rising from the swirling porcelain bowl. I flushed the toilet. No cat no dog no pet no animal called companion, only the breathing of the woman on the stairs next door. I was far from the nighttime inhabitants on Yonge Street, and from the skinheads and punks and punks in hairstyle, “kids” whose youth terrorizes me as they lean out of cars and greet me with names that should be bleeped or deleted from anyone’s lexicon; and from women of the night who stand at Church and Gerrard, and stare and model goods and flesh and kind in glimpses, and whose smiles do not tell me how much it shall cost, because the cops are vigilant and want their share. The water gurgled and swirled and disappeared and replaced itself in a different colour of blue. I looked into the looking glass. I ran my thumb and two fingers over the fine sandpaper of the skin around my mouth. Was there a sale at Shoppers Drug Mart? I flicked the switch and the breathing vent in the ceiling, and the sharp light died. I was now in total alarming darkness.

  Outside the small bathroom which smelled of Dial soap that was blue, the house was in darkness. I remembered years ago in another house, in similar palpable darkness when my mother would touch my hand, less terrified than her, and soft and trembling, trying to put the man back into my terror. But I know every corner, every article, every cup and broken saucer, every crystal glass, end of chair and counter, and tops of picture frames with dust, as if I see with a white cane; and can, with that vision, finger any one of them, in even the thicker darkness of that other house; retrieve the last tea bag from the cupboard above the stove, with my eyes closed. I know where each picture and painting on the walls hangs. In the few seconds that I am standing in the darkness outside the sweet-smelling bathroom, I am seeing the same tune with my surroundings tied to me like twine. I was safe in this darkness. Under the fluorescence in the kitchen that could pinpoint a rice grain against a damask tablecloth, I noticed the trim on the door that led to the back garden. It was leaning inwards. Towards me. At an angle. Torn away from the frame. And leaning inwards, so deliberately I was able to pause and think of Pythagoras and measure the angle of its collapse. And I said the words to myself, perhaps not to myself, but spoke the words, that it was leaning at an angle of forty-five degrees. I noticed this. I began to search for other disarrangements. I would see one large, black wood ant crawling, and would follow the journey it had made up to this point of my discovery, and discover the lurking, destructive soldiers six inches away, concealed under a piece of wood. So, sharpened by the shock, I noticed the inner door and the screen. The screen was punched out. All of a sudden I felt the cold wind of the cold morning. It undressed me and I stood bare in its disrobing power. The inside wooden door was open, too. I turned on the spotlight to the garden. Its weak light played over the backyard. In it the things I knew by heart, for years, the railroad ties, whitened tomato plants, shrivelled roses all white in the light and in the weak time of November, were undisturbed. The snow was clear. I became scared that someone was watching me, someone was closer to me than I knew, red-handed and light-fingered, someone in the same room with me; someone like Eglon caught with his pants down, and uncertain of his next move. I was back alone, along that road with no street lamps, narrow as a path the width of my feet, walking in the middle of its cool wind, afraid to touch the blades of sugar cane which could sever my eyeballs from my head. I was missing most of them because the torchlight in my hand shook through my fright and was weak, because the batteries did not respond to the two large brown pennies I had inserted between them to lengthen their natural short life. The spotlight showed me the untouched snow on the patio; and the same snow in the unblemished garden beds which did not give much last summer because the squirrels were loved and harboured by the woman on my other side who came from the Soo, where humans loved animals and kissed dogs and kissed cats and placed the plate and the saucer with leftover food on the floor for them to gurgle in and lap up, and which I tried to kill, since I could not murder my animal-loving neighbour; and none of whom I managed to maim, or kill, or disfigure. The unmarked whiteness of the walks round the lower square of bricks now buried beneath a coat of thin but concealing fresh snow. All my flowerbeds were blooming in their barren, cold whiteness. How did he enter? I turned the spotlight off. It had given me no greater vision than the darkness of a pointing white stick.

  Back inside the kitchen, the walls were unmolested. Pictures and paintings of landscapes of trees and grass and food, apples and pears, were untouched. Pots and pans, serving spoons and enamel saucepans, in which I had cooked sauces with red wine left back in glasses after parties and collected in one large decanter, were as I had left them, untouched; dead in the motionless of a photograph taken by my memory. I had a real photograph of them upstairs. But that was for milking the insurance company, in case of burglary. I opened the six doors of the cupboard, and without counting took another picture and inventory of their contents and arrangement, against the last memory of having seen them, hours before. How did he get in? Crystal glasses and silver cutlery, valued by their age and their use, were left sparkling. But someone had entered, light-fingered; and was caught with his pants down. Had Eglon thawed out the rage in his loins?

  The absence of tracks now buried under snow; the tools for entry used and undiscovered, made me think of the wind, invisible everywhere: like a mosquito at the ear at the lake. And then I remembered another photograph taken of my habit of leaving the light to the basement turned off. The light in the basement is burning now. It was never left burning. I hate my basement. I have all basements. I have no one living with me, cat or dog, pet and animals, perhaps a few unwelcome mice; but I do not need the basement; and I went down into it, two times a month, to drop my jockey shorts into the wheel-of-fortune washer; and before the washer made its first revolution, I would be out like a light.

  Fear struck me naked. I forgot to fill out the coupon for cheap lessons in karate. I do not know a trigger from a barrel from a pin. In Barbados, there are no machetes. Fear and my inability to track the progress through my home of the unknown, unseen, undetected light fingers, were joined together, like twins. Someone’s hands had touched the cup I used to drink my tea, ten times a day; had touched the crystal tumbler I raised to my lips with the two ice cubes and rum in it. St. James Rum from Martinique, a place I never visited but which could be imagined in a tour anywhere in Quebec where they spoke the same language; someone had rubbed his unwashed fingers over and had washed his lips on the lid I had put to my lips; and that this could have happened . . .

  It was yesterday, at the dining table, not ten inches from this very trim broken off at forty-five angles from the rest of the door frame, that I had opened the Globe and followed the path of its words along the road fifteen houses on the ease side of me, about a man down the street, found dead in his red bed with blood covering him like a comforter, with his throat cut from left ear to right ear, as he slept in his basement without a cat, dog or mouse to bark; and the Globe & Mail said the warmest bedroom in the house was his basement. There was a smaller column, on the same local page of news about this city, about a woman; and it was so sad and so brutal, and her pet, a black cat she had found half-dead on Yonge Street buried in the deep garbage of papers and pop bottles and French letters late into Tuesday night before, and had weaned back to health and to love her, was the only witness when he was found sleeping on the woman’s breast in her pool of warm milk that was red. And this city was becoming so unredeeming in its brutality against women that I could not finish my tea nor read to the end of the three frightening columns to see who had saved the poor cat from being taken back to Yonge Street, to be Scott-missioned like the beautiful white girl, twenty years into her life, sitting on a sleeping bag, to find another lover of cats or a bed at noon. Nobody was worried about the young white girl lying in her own fortune and kindness. Before I could step out of the house to go to court at College Park to give a verdict on a man caught stealing a box of crackers in a supermarket on Jarvi
s Street, I drank two strong brandies, and hoped to stay awake to hear the man’s plea of defence, and to steady my nerves more important than the man’s words, to give sober justice; and I prayed that the man who would be before me, it was a man, I think, but I prayed that he would not be before me for any kind of assault. If I had a woman living in this house with me, cat or dog, pet and animal . . .

  I moved through each room touching things, backs of chairs, shades of floor lamps, an ashtray, a frame of a framed photograph, straightening a pile of books so that they were the same limpid size, making sure they were there, that I owned them, that I had not imagined my possession of them, and as if I myself was the thief, evaluating the look I had in mind to make any easy fencing sale of; and barter for a bottle of wine, or for a package of cigarettes, or for a plastic container of stuff that looked like flour but tasted sweet as sugar and addiction. The first article in the Globe & Mail that morning explained the bartering of stolen property. You want a sewing machine, so you steal a vacuum cleaner, and run your finger down the column in the community paper, which was free, until you found a nice housewife with six children and an unemployed husband, whose parlour was piled high with dust and dirt because her husband had sold the vacuum cleaner to buy canned peas, instant mashed potatoes and minced meat, and afterwards was himself minced in her wounds. You didn’t have to linger on dark street corners around Jarvis or Sherbourne or Church or Parliament like women of the night to wait for the fence: those corners were now inhabited by prostitutes who dealt in a different kind of currency and wholesome property, cutting out policemen, pimps and middlemen. So I continued touching the backs of things and chairs, and books left on tables, remembering how each one had been placed; was that crystal ashtray left so close to the edge of the drum table? Did I, thinking of the sentence of this man charged with theft, strike three matches to light one Davidoff cigarette, whose stub is now sitting with the three burned matchsticks? And the radio; was the radio left playing rock and roll music when I myself always had it turned to CBC-FM? And then into the next room, the sitting room, which my mother told me twenty years ago, talking about other things, was the “one room in a house where you can tell if the person have class.” In this room I first saw it, the indication that he had walked over the Istanbul carpet, and had considered rolling it up, to barter it for a rolled cigarette in his fleeting light-fingered time; “it takes five minutes only to trash a house” with greater efficiency than any crew of Tippet Richardon’s of my possessions I like and were valuable and had not paid for yet. The door of the cabinet that contained valuable pipes, Meerschaums and Petersons, was left open. Was I on the front steps, fumbling with keys, while he was still fumbling with his decision and his choice? It was last Christmas that I had paid three hundred dollars for one of the Petersons; and the one that cost four hundred dollars was given to me by her. And at an auction at Waddington’s, imitating the wealthy and disregarding the breath and health of the previous owner, I had bid four hundred on the Meerschaum, and had got it, and had vowed never to put it in my mouth, but would put it on display in a cabinet; and the moment I got home, I had searched in my library and had found a rare book on Meerschaums and Sherlock Holmes, and a silver cigarette case, with initials that were not mine, that sent the price sky-high, bought at the same auction with the pipes. The cabinet had been looked into, and forsaken, and left askew; and the Meerschaum was left on the top of my antique desk, at the wrong angle. My cigarettes were not to the thief’s taste. He probably wanted cigarettes of a different strength. I searched the top of the desk for fingerprints, not knowing how to look for them, but knowing, even without the knowledge of Sherlock Holmes, that fingerprints are always searched for, and are always left. The desk needed dusting. If I had a woman, or a maid, cat, dog or companion animal . . . Weeks before, I had drawn lines with my forefinger across the thick film of neglected housekeeping, and had thought of animal companion, dog, cat, maid or woman; and wife, in the stifling allergy-giving dust. The three parallel lines I had drawn at that time lasted three weeks less three days. The thief had been in the house.