Under the Visible Life

by Kim Echlin

  I said, If you like literature so much, do you know the poetry of Aa isha?

  Why should I say yes to a dog when I am deaf to lions? There was something that had become strutting about him so I asked, Do you know who wrote, I am a lioness and I will never be a man’s woman?

  He shook his head but still smiled and answered in a mild voice, You tell me.

  I did not yet know that a man showing off means he likes you. I also was showing off and I recited a raga pahadi, I have not a moment of peace without you, not a moment of peace without you, my beloved, without you, my heart misses you, my heart misses you, there is no peace without you, my beloved.

  I had not thought about what the words meant until I was already saying them and when I finished I was embarrassed so I said, My mother taught me that when I was still small, I think it is religious, but my parents were not religious.

  Kamal was smiling in a way that was protecting and teasing, as if he were indulging a younger sister. It made me annoyed but he said, Your mother was very wise to give her beautiful daughter such poetry.

  Then I saw Aunt and I got up quickly and said, I have to go. I ran out to the front desk to her and she asked, Who was that?

  I answered, No one.

  KATHERINE

  T ’n me. Ba bap dap, touch god’s cheek. I am always going to be in the last place you look, babe, T said. Depths so deep. No light left. Sheets of sound. We could not settle until we found each other before the end of the night. He had played rhythm-and-blues bands, sax players honking and shrieking on their horns, overblowing, distorting. T loved to play Hawkins’ “Body and Soul” and I loved to hear it and to see the curve of his spine and how he posed like a man. Nights of chicory coffee and any bar with music and cheap beer were ours and we talked about playing and ourselves and we saw no peril anywhere.

  Sometimes when we played we caught the same feeling we had when we were having sex and after we would check in with each other, ask, Did you touch god’s cheek?

  Yes. You?

  I showed T my Hanon and he started practising arpeggios across the octave key which he had never thought about and for a while he played over and over Hanon No. 46 which is a workout in trills. We were listening to Vi Redd’s “Bird Call” and “Lady Soul” and of course we were always listening to Coltrane who was beginning to play around with Indian sounds. When you are young you want to get on with your life. There was an unease in T that I did not pursue. He said a woman changed the feeling of a band, and he said he did not like the sound of a woman’s voice so he was glad I did not sing. One night he handed me, as a joke, a pair of pink frilly gloves with the fingers cut out. I ignored it because most men more or less acted like that in those days, and women skittered across the surface of this humour that we had no name for. I wanted to play. I was unwavering about what I was doing and I was scared I would not get there.

  Our stories were slow-absorbing into each other. I told T about my Chinese father. He told me his father was murdered young. He wanted to know why Ma let me run around and I said, She can’t stop me. We’re more like roommates now, which was not true but I liked the sound of it.

  Where’s the rest of your family? What happened to your father?

  They say he was tied to a railway track.

  I did not know how to understand what he was saying to me. I asked, Why?

  That’s what they did, babe.

  But what happened?

  After that I left home.

  I did not know how to ask why because he was saying it as if I should know. I said to him, Where was your mother?

  When my daddy got killed things fell apart. They took us kids away. They said she couldn’t take care of us.

  Even though we were lying naked in bed together, close as two people could be, there were things that we could not explain or understand and were not capable of talking about. I knew the tone in a voice that meant no more questions.

  So what about your mother?

  Babe, she broke down when they took us kids away. They put her in an asylum.

  I wrote and gave my arrangements to Mo and he tried some of them out. T resisted playing what I wrote but I ignored that too. I was not drawn to thinking about his irritation and I was not going to slow myself down with anyone’s idea of me, even his. I had self-belief, so strong that I knew I would die if I did not do what I was supposed to do. I ignored T’s moods when I got offered a gig without him. I knew how to reach over and stroke his thigh. I knew how to say, Oh you sounded so good last night. Put him in the centre again. Make him want to make love which he always did. It was our favourite thing. Our bodies always wanted each other. I knew how to keep my own struggle burning away in the corner. When you’re young you do it all smooth as butter.

  Of course I got pregnant and I thought I had to marry T, and anyway, I wanted to. It was 1960 and I was not going to give my baby up and I had no idea about abortions. It seemed everyone was pregnant and hiding it in those days. Girls were travelling across the country, having their babies, giving them up, coming home again, pretending nothing happened, the Baby Scoop Era they called it. The magazines said we were outcasts and moral lawbreakers. Ma was right. Before I got pregnant I thought of myself as a teenager and a good piano player and a good student. After I got pregnant, I was unwed. No one ever called T unwed.

  We were stepping off the stand after a show at the Alexandra. The crowd dug us and we were going to get something to eat, then go over to the Cootes Paradise Motel. I said to T, I’m pregnant. I think we should get married.

  He was unhooking his sax. His fingers stopped a moment and then he took it off and held it in his right hand and I stepped under his left arm to feel his hand around my shoulders which was where I liked to be. I said, I been thinking it over. It’s not the end of the world.

  But we got no place to live.

  Well, I guess we better fix that.

  He pulled me in close to him and his sax clip was pressing against my skin and he kissed me and Mo said, You two lovebirds coming?

  T let his arm drop to take my hand, still holding his sax in the other, and he looked into my eyes deep like he was looking for something he lost in a moving river and he asked, You sure?

  I answered, I’m sure.

  And then T said, Hey, Mo, we want you to be the first to know. Katie and me are gettin’ married.

  Mo shook his head and said, I shoulda known better than let a chick in the band.

  But I knew he liked me and especially he liked how I played and he was joking and I said back, Don’t you worry. I’m gonna keep playing.

  We never thought anything through. It was night-star good when I think back, loving him like that. I had no money and no help in a world hostile to what I was doing. But that meant I didn’t need anyone’s approval either. I was opening up and swallowing life like a Leviathan and having a baby was part of it. I never imagined I wouldn’t. But I was not marrying the boy next door and I banged against new ideas, mixed marriage and miscegenation and illegitimate and bastard. I sometimes had the impression that I was waking into a bad dream, not out of one. There were places I could not go with T. I started to pay attention to the news because I had a stake in it. On television, Ma and I watched four students in Greensboro, North Carolina, who asked for coffee and doughnuts at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter. All day they wouldn’t move. The next day more students came. The sit-ins spread to other towns as if those four young men had been a bit of tinder in dry grass. We saw women wearing dirndl skirts and clean white blouses with faces hatred-twisted shouting outside the stores because they did not want to sit beside a few students. Ma said, Look at that, Katie. That’s what your baby’s got in store. There are things you can do.

  But North Carolina felt far away and foreign and I was thinking about me and making love and playing gigs. One young man who got pulled off the chrome-and-leatherette stool and beat up by police with clubs said, If it’s possible to know what it means to have your soul cleaned—I felt pr
etty clean at that moment.

  Did T feel he had a clean soul? My neighbours with their orderly lives on Mountain Brow shook their heads when they talked about the protests south of the border and said, Things are different up here. Ma said, Things aren’t so different, I’m just saying. I never wanted to be like Ma, but somehow I had become an engine barrelling down the same track and I wasn’t going to hide myself away in a basement the way she did.

  Ma said, Well, at least we don’t have separate schools for white kids here.

  If we did, where would I have gone?

  Oh, she said, you would have passed. I would have made sure of that. I never let anyone stop you from doing anything.

  T ’n me’s ceremony happened at five o’clock in the afternoon at city hall. Our band was booked to play Diamond Jim’s later and I wore my black cocktail dress and my hat with the net veil from the Sally Ann. I was already standing in front of the justice of the peace when I thought, Maybe I should have told Ma, but I didn’t want to hear any more of her opinions. I was doing exactly what I wanted to do and I was doing it the way I wanted to, and it felt right and exciting. We got married, played our show, and we tore it up that night. After the show we went to the White Grill at two in the morning for omelettes and home fries and ketchup. Mo brought bottles of champagne and the manager served it in coffee mugs. My wedding feast. Perfect, in my mind.

  His real name was Theodore Lincoln Jones, best soprano sax player on the southern Ontario–upper New York State border. Our first morning married we were lying in bed at the motel, and I asked, When did you leave home?

  Babe, I ran away from the foster people when I was fifteen and I never went back.

  Where did you go?

  Around.

  But where did you live?

  Friends. You know.

  No one came after you?

  T pulled himself up and lit a cigarette, said, I got arrested for theft. They put me in juvenile for a couple of years.

  I thought, I am married to this man now.

  There was an edge of something challenging in his voice. He said, I met a cat inside who asked me, Who taught you to hate yourself?

  He rolled over and slipped his arm under my shoulders. He said, To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace. Malcolm X said that. Him and playing sax saved me. After I got out I waited tables and then I started getting some gigs that paid. Going to prison was my education.

  I asked, Where’d you get your first sax?

  That’s what I stole.

  So you’re T X?

  He laughed and said, You’re a smartass.

  Then he stubbed out his cigarette and we turned to each other and slipped down on the bed again.

  Inside him was a blade of rage, alive as spring grass, spitshined and hidden. There were bound-up feelings like switchblades ready to snap open. He had dark, shining skies for eyes, and hands big as puddles and legs like iron and, oh, I loved to look at him standing sideways with his sax. His arms were open to me in room No. 9 at the Cootes Paradise Motel and it set the path of my life. T ’n me. I was having our baby and I wasn’t going to have an only, like I was. I wanted another, real quick, so they could take care of each other. I had no idea.

  MAHSA

  It was easy to keep Kamal a secret from Uncle. I met him at different places along the trolley routes, walked the beaches, went to Zelin’s Coffee House, the Paradise movie theatre. There was war with India. Ceasefire. Strife stirring in East Pakistan. I studied for my exams. Kamal had a small batteryrun cassette player that we took to the beach to listen to music. He would finish his studies at the university at the same time I was finishing at St. Joseph’s and he said that perhaps he would continue to study and teach there, that he wanted to make schools for every child in Pakistan, and I said I wanted to study at the university too but he could not be my teacher and he laughed at this and said, You will always be my teacher, which pleased me. Uncle would not approve of me being with a young man, and on my surfaces I was an obedient orphaned schoolgirl but with Kamal I was becoming someone with opinions and I had my own tastes in music and reading and he listened almost as Abbu used to listen. He had an idea for marriage that I did not want, but this we did not worry about. Everything we shared, and in this way, for three years, we grew up gently, and passionately, together.

  One day, Kamal invited me to the house of a friend but there was no friend. He prepared some tea and we sat at the table together, pretending we were waiting. Then Kamal said, He is not coming. He reached across and touched my hand. I waited for him to lead me where I wanted to go and that day I said, Yes, now.

  He said tenderly, It feels a bit strange, like I am kissing a friend.

  I am your friend.

  And then our lips searched for each other in a different way. We were young and strong and we gave and took generously, standing up and lying down. After that first time, we were always looking for a friend’s house and sometimes I came the first moment he touched me. I was afraid of getting pregnant and I think he said not to worry.

  When we parted, the pressure of his touch on my skin lingered. His young man’s love was demanding, devouring, irresistible. He was coiled and raw, and I did everything with Kamal and we learned everything from each other. My body was without reluctance. Men had different chances than girls. He had joined the National Students Federation and he described to me the struggle for democracy. At home with Aunt, I heard about Ayub Khan toppled because of student groups like Kamal’s. I wanted to be part of this outside world too but I felt young and I did not know how to fit into that part of his life.

  I said to him, The girl students in your group must be interesting.

  He said, They are. And then he added, But I love you.

  He wanted to protect me and perhaps was afraid of my uncle. I did not want to be protected. I wanted to do things I had not yet figured out, and I feared how much I loved him and how completely I could lose myself. In this way the ease of our first years together began to give way.

  One day we walked up the rough path to the ramshackle shrine of Shah Ghazi Mazar. We slipped off our shoes and I pulled my scarf over my hair and we walked past the rakhwallah who looked after the place. A small, wiry man near the tomb gave us roses for offerings. After pausing beside the marble tomb, we passed to a smaller second building and from the west windows we looked over the sea and watched the turbulent waves that come with the monsoons. We heard the muezzin’s call to prayer, Allahu Akbar, God is Great, woven into the cries of gulls, a man’s voice chanting into time and human distraction, Hayya alas Salah, hurry to prayer. These sounds of searching and the sea I had heard all my life, and I felt what is divine in the ordinary because I was listening now with the man I loved. Below us on the beach, faqirs rested companionably near fires, close to a small circle of European tourists who had wandered over from Hawkes Bay, stormcoming waves grey and black on the silver sand.

  That Saturday, Uncle returned to the hotel early from his field hockey and he saw Kamal walking with me back into the lobby.

  At home Uncle shouted at Aunt, Where were you? You do not watch her well enough! To me he said, That boy should not be around. He is not suitable. Do not pursue it.

  Aunt was upset. She too needed her Saturdays. She said to me, Be more discreet. Uncle has other ideas for you. About family. About business. He will not approve your choice. He is already making plans for you to study abroad.

  I did not want to go abroad. I wanted to go to university here and to live in the dormitories. I wanted to keep studying and seeing Kamal and I did not think far ahead at all. I did not imagine myself as someone who would marry and live behind walls. Women who married got murdered by their families.

  I met Kamal on the trolley the next day after school and we rode to the end of the line and back twice. He was like a madman and he said, We must leave. Your uncle will never let us be together. Please, Mahsa. I know how these things are.

  I wanted to mend
the torn veil. I felt we could protect our love from the world.

  Kamal said, I cannot hide how I feel about you. Love is like the sun and penetrates the clouds.

  Passing outside was one of the hippie buses that took the Westerners to sightsee around the city. It was painted with red and yellow hearts and words in English: Enjoy the Love. I saw the Western girls with their boyfriends travelling without parents or relatives, wearing jeans and their hair loose and headbands around their foreheads and sandals and bare shoulders. They looked so free.

  Where would we go? What about university? Always Abbu said that I must study. I had believed I could do what I wanted if no one saw. I had believed I could love Kamal if no one knew. I believed in a hidden life for women.

  Now that I had been caught with him, the danger for me was great. The trolley clattered along the tracks and I watched a camel carrying heavy furniture and I did not tell Kamal that things were much worse than he imagined, that Uncle seeing us together was a small thing, that I was pregnant and I had decided to take care of it alone.

  KATHERINE

  Our band played the roadhouses and lounges and clubs along the highway from London to Toronto. I’d never had motel rooms and meals out. I’d never been away from Ma or lived with people who only thought about music and sex. We performed up and down Yonge Street and at George’s Jazz Room and the Colonial and the Penny Farthing in Yorkville and the El Mocambo and the Bourbon Street Jazz Club. We played six nights a week. Mo was a hard-working band leader. Any night we finished early we went to see other musicians, and I heard Oscar Peterson and my old friend Ronnie who had a little place above the Coq d’Or they called the Hawk’s Nest. I liked pumping it out and I learned how to get the audience to come along with me. Mo said, You gettin’ it, Katie girl, and T sometimes walked right over on stage beside me, my strings and hammers talking and seducing and joking with his breath and reed. T ’n me were hot together, sax and piano, in and out of each other’s heads, and the more pregnant I got, the sexier things were on stage. I was unusual. You hardly used to see a pregnant woman on the street.