It was late. I did not know what time it was. I did not think it prudent to look at my watch, or ask her to look at hers. It was comfortable to know that it was late. It was the lateness of the hour that had made me comfortable. And that made her comfortable.
“So, what’re we gonna do?” she said, and closed her eyes, although she was alert, and with the glass to her lips.
“What do you want to do?”
“You asking me?”
And she gave off a laugh that scared me, it was so sudden and so loud. And then she got up. I thought she was going to leave. It frightened me. She took the leather belt from the chair and put it round her waist. Immediately her hips became large. She raised her arms over her head, straight to the ceiling, and then she bent over, and touched her toes. And then she walked the two paces separating us, and leaned over and touched me on my lips with her lips. Her lips were wet. And sticky from the smear of colour she had applied earlier. And her breath was fresh. And then she passed her fingers, just two of them, across my lips, in secrecy, in fondness, in affection. “More tea?”
And we did that. And drank wine until we started on the brandy.
I had not moved from my chair. Except to go to the bathroom, twice. I was living through a time longer than the hours we’d been sitting, spanning more geography and space than the time we were actually together.
“Did I tell you how I like to watch movies in French, with the sound off, sometimes?”
“You did.”
“I guess I did, too. And that I never read nothing, not even the comics? Did I tell you that, too? What time is it? My God!” She picked up her watch, and put it back down. “By the way, I’m Michelle. What’s yours?”
“Max.”
“Michelle’s my professional name. but my real name is Linda. Linda Pearl Mason. It used to be Maisoneuve. French. But my father didn’t like the way the Anglos treated him when we lived in Timmins, so he changed it to Mason. Didn’t make one damn difference, anyways! Son-of-a-bitch went to his grave hating the Anglos more than he hated fish and chips. You know what I mean? So, you’re Max. Max the full name? Or you shortened yours, too?
“Just Max.”
“Just Max. Max the Just. Max Justice. Or, Just plain Max?” She took a tortoiseshell case from her bag, opened it, skinned her teeth, closed her eyes and pressed her lips tight, and snapped the case shut. “So, what’re we doing, Mr. Just plain Max?”
“Well, I’m sorry, wasting your time. I am really sorry.”
“You didn’t waste my time. You wasted your time. It’s all the same to me, if you don’t mind me talking business, you know. Well, you know what I mean.”
I cowered at the thought of price.
“For Chrissakes, Just Max! You a faggot, or something?”
“I don’t think so.”
“So, why’re you doing this to me? Why me? I could’ve been in the goddamn restaurant playing the goddamn slot machines! You know what my dream is? My dream is to go to Las Vegas and play the goddamn slot machines for five days and six nights without sleeping! Anyways. What’re you gonna do? Should I tell you what you owe me? It’s your time, Just Max. It was your call. The ball’s in your court.”
She got up and sat in my lap. I placed my arms round her soft body, and she leaned over and raised her glass and sniffed the brandy, all the time making her fingers into little feet walking up and down my arm. Each step, though small as an insect’s, had the effect of a blow. I could smell her perfume. It was powerful. Somewhere, Over the Rainbow.
We remained like this, in the one chair, her walking fingers like a stroking of fresh branches of eucalyptus over my nakedness. I could feel the saltiness of the sea, and the breeze that was, at one moment cool, humid the next; and I could hear birds singing in the trees, and hear the impudent Mickey instructing me, years before the event, in the ways of women who picked fares. And I could feel the water becoming calm, calmer, like at dawn or at dusk, and then there was only surrender, and the abandoning of myself to the stroking of leaves from the eucalyptus branch, and then, as if time had stalled, as if a swell in the sea had risen with the wind, I was driven against the sand, and I opened my eyes.
“Now you owe me, motherfucker!”
Just a Little Problem
When he came, he was tense. And very courteous. I tried to remember whether he was always courteous. And when I saw his gallantry, which was not contrived, I remembered what a bright boy he used to be, at a time when he was three, and I was twenty-one; when I helped to warm his bottle, and tried to keep the bottle in his mouth and keep him from spitting the nipple out…as he used to spit the milk out; then I would run faster than my mother could, to get the cloth to plug his mouth before the white thick vomit splattered the walls and stained the damask tablecloth; when I used to put him to bed, and the number of times I fell asleep and left him giggling and gaggling, when he was such a darling little boy, the apple of my mother’s eye. She got him when she was more than forty-something. She never told us her exact age. “Now, I see him old and thin, and sick, sick, sick,” my mother told me on the telephone.
He was forty-one. And grown. And tense. And his hands were shaking. And he was very happy to be in Toronto. His hands were trembling. Not only because of the nervousness of meeting me after all these years. “The boy have a little problem,” my mother had said, with no sadness in her voice, but with her usual sprightliness; and in the long distance from New Jersey, her voice and her laughter were brought right up to my chair, as I sat drinking a gin and tonic. “Incidentally,” she said, “what is that you have there? You drinking?” She could hear the ice cubes, she said, with a tinge of sadness, but she laughed again and said, “The boy can’t drink. He can’t hold his liquor no more. So I sending him to you to look after. Look after him.” And she dropped the telephone. And that was that.
He arrived tense at the place I work. And happy to be in Toronto. “I like it here,” he said, five minutes after he arrived. “Man, I’m not going back there!” he said.
So, I introduced him to my secretary, and he bowed to her, and gave her a little pecking kiss, one on each cheek, and she turns colour, and says what a charmer my brother is, and, “I now know where you got it from!” The crow’s feet around her eyes disappeared and her countenance was without blemish; and I stood beside my brother, watching this transformation.
We left my place of work and he was saying over and over, what a beautiful place Toronto is, that he ain’t going back there; and I wondered if my mother had forgotten to tell me whether he had been in prison, for I could not understand his enthusiasm for Toronto. “I not going back there, not me!” he said he needed a drink. I remembered more of my mother’s call “Don’t let the blasted boy drink! Do not let him drink. The blasted boy can’t drink no more, you hear me? One sip o’ beer pass the blasted boy’s mouth, and he like he gone off!” I was laughing when she had said this, and that was when my hand shook, and she heard the ice in the glass. Now, I became tense.
How was I to tell him he couldn’t drink? How was I to tell him that I knew he couldn’t drink? In our way of doing things, to be able to drink is the sign of manhood. A man who can’t hold his liquors, is like a dog. Women despise him. Men call him a boy. And children pelt him with stones.
We walked the short distance to a bar. It was my favourite place in Toronto, dark and friendly, where the Chinese waiter calls me “Mr. Black,” and the Jamaican cook greets me, “Man, Blackie, man, wappining?”; and the owner, a man from Ireland, he calls me “Sport.” So, I am outstanding in this dark, friendly and colloquial joint. They sell wines and no spirits.
“If he must drink,” my mother had said, in the same long telephone call from Amurca, “and you could bet your bottom dollar that he going-fire one behind your back, or whilst you sleeping. But if he must drink, mek him drink beer. Or wine.”
I decided to order a glass of the most expensive wine, so I can tell him I have no more money, and that way, he will have only one glass. Or a b
eer.
“Hi Sport!” the owner said. “What’ll you have?”
“Meet my brother.”
“Christ!” he said. And I knew that my brother was welcome, and that he could run a tab. And this depressed me.
From the kitchen, came the booming voice, “Man, Blackie, man, wappining?” In this atmosphere of friendship I would sit for hours, see the change of staff behind the counter pouring wine, see the change of customers, and when I left, at eleven in the evening or on some nights at one in the morning, the man from Ireland and I would be drinking red wine and chasing it with Jamaica white rum from his private stock. All I could hear was my mother’s commanding voice.
“Don’t let the boy drink!”
“Let’s have some Chateau Margaux, man!”
I know Amurcans. They are brave. They are rich. They are bold. The man beside me, my brother, was not behaving like a Barbadian. He had lived too long in Amurca. “Let’s try a bottle, to begin with.”
“A glass!” I said, to the waitress, thinking of saving him money.
My mother said, in that call from New Jersey, “I don’t know when last the boy worked. If you ask me, I think he lost his job!”
We don’t sell Chateau Margaux by the glass.”
“I have money, man,” my brother said. And he pushed his hand into his pocket, and took out a fist of money. I could not count the balled up Yankee dollars: a five, a ten, twenty, fifty, hundred or thousand, they are all the same colour.
The waiter unlocked a door to the cellars, and went down amongst the cobwebs to find the bottle. In the meantime, a thought came into my head. I took up the wine list and searched for this bottle of wine which had sent the waiter into the catacombs of vintage selective prices. My eyes, which have never become accustomed to the darker corners of this bar, roamed amongst the names and I came to Chateau Margaux at the bottom of the column Vintage Wines. I had left my reading glasses at the office. There was no dollar sign before the price, three digits before a decimal point and two zeros. The price was, as I remember now, three hundred dollars and something cents.
I looked at the balled-up Amurcan bank notes in my brother’s hand, smoothed them out, counted them three times, asked him if he had more Amurcan smackeroos in his pockets, in his bags, in his attaché case made of crocodile skin, and told him that he had thirty-five dollars Amurcan in his hand. We could purchase two percent of this Chateau Margaux!
“I have bread, man,” he said.
Don’t mention a word of this. To anyone. Not one word. And I hope he don’t hear a word of what I telling you now. I feel foolish even to talk about it, but all I could think about was the telephone calls from Amurca, from my mother, from my four other brothers and a sister; ones from his wife, and dozens from his girl friend. And all were ominous.
“We want you to take him with you, in Toronto. Keep him far from New York City and Brooklyn. Brooklyn going-kill him!”
They told me he had no liver left. He had no spleen. He had too much sugar. He had no control over his body, and little over his drinking. They told me if he got a little scotch he’d bleed to death. “And the boy so bright!” they all said. He was three years into the writing of his PhD in Physical Anthropology, they said. He knew about deads and cadavers and limbs and pieces of a man’s head left back from some fatal traffic accident on the Brooklyn Bridge. “Do you know,” he told me once, when he was one year into the studying for his PhD, “that there’s really no difference between the way a leg o’pork looks and a piece of a man’s leg?”
He could use words I had never heard. He could use arguments I could hardly follow. And he was handsome. I became scared. My filial responsibility, my medical responsibility, and the other responsibilities which bound me to him, my brother, were mixed into one feeling of admitted inadequacy. And this was made worse by my acknowledged ignorance of anything medical that had to do with the human body. When I was at school in Barbados, we were not taught anatomy. Science was Greek to me.
And diabetes too, they added. I thought of needles and injections. The voices on the telephone became low and conspiratorial, hushed in whispers, as if people on the line between here and Amurca were listening. “A beer, maybe. Well, even a glass of wine. One. But nothing hard, hear? The boy had a sip of beer two days before he left Brooklyn, and bam! He start saying people following him to kill him, people behind every tree between here and where he lives, two doors down from where I talking to you. There are no trees on this avenue.”
I thought of my own delight in a martini, in a glass of scotch in a crystal glass. And I like to sit and watch my three decanters, half-full of rum, scotch and brandy; and see how the light of a candle plays on the craftsmanship of the crystal, and wish that I was living in those days when beauty and art and artisanship were common to every man.
And now, with the boy who cannot hold his liquor in the house with me, I had to decide what to do with these decanters, the bottles of wine, the half-full bottles of scotch in the cupboard, and some of the fancy bottles of Cockspur Old Gold Rum and Uisge Baugh Blended Irish Whiskey. I took these fancy bottles from the shelf where he could see them. I put them in the cupboard under the sink with the detergents. I felt a pang of guilt that I was so calculating. “The boy can’t handle hard liquor,” they had said from Amurca. “If he have to, offer him wine, or beer.”
Or let him drink himself to death, I was thinking, if he wants to. And then I was sorry I had said it. And into my mind crept all those pictures of men ruined by drink; of men who went to bed drunk holding a shaking cigarette in their hand, and set the place on fire, and burned themselves into charcoal; and some who carried their beloved to this charred fiery grave. And one such photograph stuck in my mind; and it was years ago that I had seen it in a book of drawings by an English painter, depicting the Victorians whom I had been taught at school in Barbados were upright and Bible-thumping models for us in the West Indies, but who hid and drank and hid and fooped, and in this photograph, or woodcut, here was the evidence. A man and his young wife, beautiful as Victorians said Victorians were beautiful, wan and with no blood in her face, with two small daughters hiding in the full skirts of the wife just as the officers of the law were seizing the bed and the centre table and the pieces of silver from the drawers, a family ruined by alcohol. The silver was the gift of his wife’s parents, providing hope and health and status to their daughter in holy matrimony.
I was sanctimonious and I was scared. Spleen and liver and diabetes and hardening of the veins, and blood that does not clot. And thinking of liver, I remembered that it was not the similarity of a leg of pork to the amputated leg from a corpse that he had told me about. It was the liver. “The liver we eat,” he had said, “is the same as the liver of a man. You can’t really tell the difference.”
When we were boys back in Barbados, our mother cooked cou-cou, corn meal turned with generous portions of boiled okras and she served this luscious steaming dish with liver, which we call “harslick.” There were onions and eschalots grown in our kitchen garden, and tomatoes and thyme and red peppers and butter from Australia. The liver was first fried in a batter of flour, and then steamed in the sauce, with the saucepan’s cover on, tight. We ate our bellies full. No, there was no chance that we had mistaken the liver we ate on Saturdays, for the livers he examined in his laboratory clinics. However, I stopped eating liver after that revelation.
I remained concerned with my brother’s liver. And yes, his kidneys. They had mentioned kidneys in those telephone conversations from Brooklyn and New Jersey. Spleen and liver and diabetes and veins and kidneys, and blood that did not clot, because of the alcohol.
Don’t mention a word of this. To anyone. But I would send him to the corner store where the unsmiling Vietnamese owner puzzled over Chinese crossword puzzles, and I would ask him to buy the most obscure items I could imagine in order to get him out of the house while I investigated to see what he was sneaking under my nose. And I felt like a thief doing it, like a stranger in
my own house. And I could imagine him investigating me investigating him, and discovering I was treating him like a thief. It was then that I realized that he had drunk the rum and the scotch from the fancy manufacturers’ bottles hidden under the sink. And unlike me, in a former time, he had not covered his tracks by replacing the rum and scotch with water. That was years ago. When I was a student, and was babysitting for my landlord and his wife. The landlord was a psychologist. And the wife taught languages at the University. She died, suddenly, with a reddened face and a burnt-out liver. And we were at my wedding, when the guilt which had not abated with the passing of all these years, gripped me, and in my state of drinking, the worse for wear, and with a loosened tongue, I told him, the only surviving witness to my predatory nature, “Do you remember when I used to baby sit, and you and your wife left with the food on the table, and I would put the things away, and wash the dishes and the crystal glasses, and everything would be spick and span when the two of you returned from the theatre or the ballet?”
“They’re indelible in my memory.”
He had a way with words that put me ill at ease always. And the fact that he was a psychologist, made me feel he could read my mind and my actions.
“I want to apologize to you. I used to take a slice from your roast, and….”
“And drink my scotch.”
“How did you know?”
“And put water back into the decanters. I could have killed you for that. It was only my wife, who….”
And he left it at that, saying, “For better, or for worse.”
And all the time he was here, I was dying for a drink. I love to have a bottle of gin in the freezer, chilled and getting thick like syrup, and then make myself a martini, with four of the biggest olives, like small avocado pears, and give the glass a smell of the vermouth. And I like to have a bottle of wine to pour one thick red glass full, strong as blood, to have with dinner; and I like to be able to ramble through the house at night, with the lights dimmed and find the bottle, whether of gin or red wine, or champagne, and pour a drink. And I need to know there is liquor in the house, at all times, just as our mother needed to know there was always Wincarnis Wine “for building up strength,” and castor oil, “for keeping the bowels clean.”
There Are No Elders Page 10
