Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (7 page)

Darkness fell fast, as it does in the tropics. On the way back to the car, Zain turned off onto the golf course road. Farther ahead, she stopped. She turned off the lights and the engine. We were engulfed in pitch-blackness. “What are you doing?” I asked, my concern about safety in such a remote area juggling in my mind against the remote possibility that she was creating an opportunity for something more between us. “I have something I want to tell you, Sid,” she said. And then she told me the news that would eventually haunt me, and it haunts me still—that she had come to know someone, someone who had come to mean a great deal to her, and whom she wanted me to meet.

Unaware that I had stopped breathing, she continued. She and this someone had met in the grocery, in the lineup at the cashier. They’d been seeing one another for some months now. Angus didn’t know, of course. And she’d told him, this new man, a great deal about me.

I knew I needed to say something, but all I could manage was an insipid “Well, that’s a bit of a shock.”

Zain repeated—as if I might not have understood—that this man meant a great deal to her and that she wanted
me to meet him. I couldn’t answer. After a moment’s strained silence, she apologized for asking me, and started up the car. On the way back to Cynthia’s bake and fish, Zain told me, as if trying to explain, all the usual sorts of things—he was handsome, smart, attentive and was living on a big beautiful boat that was permanently moored in the harbour near the yacht club; he was caring, he was lean and muscular, and his skin glowed red from the sun; he was gentle and rough at once, but his roughness was never to hurt her, only to weaken her with delight, and on and on. I had heard more than I cared to know. I responded only that I hadn’t realized she and Angus were having problems, to which she answered, “Well, that’s the thing. Angus and I have no problems. He loves me. And I love him. It’s just that there is no mystery for us anymore. I don’t think Angus could survive without me, and I can’t bear the thought of him being alone, but I can’t bear, either, the thought of not being with Eric. I hope you will agree to meet him.”

I didn’t respond, and Zain didn’t bother to ask me again—she simply arranged a meeting some days later on a trip she and I, just a little cool with each other now, took. It was not until we were a few minutes away from the Coal Pot Café in Salybia–Toco that she informed me Eric would meet us there.

There must have been something more to him than I was able to see, perhaps something only revealed in private. To
me that day he appeared less handsome, less grand, than she had reported. He was clearly uncomfortable and I guessed that he was meeting me only to please Zain. Still, I did not find him particularly attentive to Zain and, to my discomfort, she asked him several times if he was all right. Over lunch he asked me, “So, you are related to Dr. Mahale?” I said Dr. Mahale was my father. “Yes, I know that,” he replied. I could see Zain waiting for an expansion of the subject. I, too, waited, and when Eric said nothing more, I ventured, This is such a beautiful area of Trinidad; I haven’t been to the beaches up here in almost two decades, and I am so happy to be here.

It was a poor attempt to make small talk. I asked if he came here often. Eric said only, “No.” I asked where he lived. “Up by the yacht club,” he said.

Zain jumped in, reminding me that Eric lived on his boat.

I tried again. “So, do you call that home?”

“If home is where you rest your head at night, then I suppose so.”

I asked how he made a living.

“So you are her guardian, now?” he asked with barely veiled hostility.

Zain laughed, her embarrassment apparent, and playfully punched his arm. She said, “But why you being so coy, boy?”

He said, half laughing, “This can’t be for real, man: this is an interrogation.”

Eric offered me no more, and I gave up. He talked with Zain about the drive from the yacht club to Salybia–Toco, asked her if she had heard from someone whose name I didn’t catch. Later, at the beach, I sat on the sand and allowed myself to be mesmerized by the terrifying ragtag tumble of waves and currents from the Atlantic Sea while Zain and Eric walked hand in hand down the length of the dune. On returning Zain dropped to the sand beside me, but Eric stood facing the sea, arms crossed on his chest. I decided to try one last time, for Zain’s sake. I stood up and joined him and asked if he ever brought his boat here. He answered with one word: Never.

Zain got up and went to the water’s edge. Eric and I stood in silence for some minutes. Then he left in his car.

He is not always like that, Zain told me. She couldn’t understand what was going on with him. On the way back to her house she brooded, and I, peeved but intent on not revealing my disappointment in her choice of a person with whom she might cheat on dear Angus, intent, too, on not showing my own feeling of betrayal, or my fears about why Eric was so rude to me, laid my head back and dozed.

The second time I met Eric involved, to my dismay, similar deceptions. Zain had taken me to her gym, after which we were to go out for lunch. I hadn’t bothered to ask where we would go as I no longer knew restaurants on the island. But my heart fell when I saw that we were heading to the yacht club. Halfway through our lunch at High Tide Restaurant, Eric strolled in and joined us. He was well
known there, and obviously liked the attention the restaurant staff paid him. This time he was closely attentive to me. Perhaps Zain had taken him to task about the way he had acted before. I was not fooled, especially as the topic he chose to engage in with me was my personal workout at the gym. Just as such a topic between a man and a woman was less about the workout than a way of coming around to speaking about the other’s body, I was used to the subject being broached by a hostile kind of man so that he could entertain the inevitable, simple-minded supposition that I was pumping myself up so that I could appear masculine. Of course, my guard went up, and rightly so, for Eric soon admitted that I presented him with the rare opportunity to ask what it was that turned a person into someone “like me.” His questioning eventually went too far, and I was relieved, grateful—and impressed—when Zain brought it and the lunch to an end. She had, in a flash, seen Eric as he was: small and unlikeable.

A couple of days later, the next time I saw Zain, she told me that she had confronted him on his boat, where they had a row. Eric didn’t, he told Zain, like her being “thick” with me. She was pleased with herself that she’d stood up for me: she’d shouted, she said, that under no circumstances would she tolerate bigotry and insults towards any of her friends or herself, and furthermore no one, not her father, not her husband and certainly not he, had the right to be so parochial, so domineering and boorish as to tell her who she could and could not be friends with. But the matter didn’t, of course, end there. He grabbed her by her upper arms and
shook her, and then he pushed her. She was so shocked that she didn’t fight back. I thought that was a good thing, and told her so. This new side of him had frightened her, she said. She left him as quickly as she could, and later that same day, once she’d found the privacy, she telephoned him and ended the relationship.

Just before the end of that trip—about ten days after the incident with Eric—Zain and I spent our last day together. It was a Tuesday, the day on which, every week, Angus ate dinner and played poker after work with friends at a club in Port of Spain. When Angus returned—which would be, he said, about ten thirty, give or take a drink or two—they would drive me down to San Fernando to my parents’ house. Zain and I ate dinner, went to the guest room and propped ourselves on the bed next to each other. We had pushed in the door, but not fully closed it. Zain wanted to explain why she had been open to an affair. She reasoned that Angus was her first and only love, that they had been together now for so long that they were like siblings, that she wanted some mystery in her life, some excitement, to be seen again as a sexual being. I was flattered—and saddened—when she said that it was I who had sparked that desire in her to be loved again.

We lay back in the bed, like old times, her head on my shoulder and my arm around her. She wanted to be loved and seen as a sexual being, but I would never be, I saw, the
one to give her these gifts. She nodded off and I dozed and woke and dozed and woke, knowing this was the last time I would see her on that trip. As I held her, it came to me that I had never regarded Angus as a threat to my relationship with Zain—he was, instead, my aide—and I was relieved that Eric, the real threat, was no longer in the picture. I could hold Zain and, regardless of the truth, imagine that I was the only one giving her the attention she craved. I could pretend that out of this could well grow more. I convinced myself there was no harm in my imagining or pretending.

Then I heard a noise outside the door. I lifted my head. Someone was there. I pulled my arm out from under Zain’s neck. She awoke and we both sat up quickly. We heard footsteps running up the stairs, then the door at the back of the house shut. I whispered that we should call the police, call Angus. But Zain insisted we should first go and look outside. By the time we reached the gate we could hear a car driving away, although we couldn’t see it in the dark. Zain was silent. She didn’t appear to be frightened. She was, rather, seething, but offered me no explanation for her reaction. I asked her if Eric had a key to the house and, with some relief at being able to admit it, she said he did. It was my turn now to be enraged. I asked if she had gone mad, and she nodded. Although Angus travelled for work, she explained, she’d always refused his desire to hire security guards for the house while he was away. She felt that an alarm system was enough protection even though she seldom bothered to engage it. Eric worried about her for the
same reasons as Angus, and felt that Angus was “slack” in not hiring a security company regardless of what she wanted. A couple months ago he’d gone with her to a nearby hardware store, taken her house key from her and copied it, so that if there was any trouble at her house while Angus was away—or even if she was frightened, for any reason—he would be able to come over at once. It was a matter of trust between them that he would never enter the house without her prior knowledge and permission, and of course would only do so when she was there alone. Angus had always given in to her, and Eric’s protectiveness and insistence made her feel simultaneously vulnerable and taken care of. She found she liked the idea that someone would step in and do what needed to be done, not only without her having to ask, but against her wishes. So she let Eric make the copy.

I said nothing, but I was appalled. For a moment I felt that I didn’t know who Zain really was. She hadn’t yet had a chance, she concluded, to get the key back from Eric after their fight on his boat. She would deal with it the very next morning.

When Angus returned he sensed our unease and insisted on knowing what was bothering us. I said I was upset because I didn’t want to return to Canada; I no longer wanted to live in a place where I didn’t have family and where I wasn’t part of a community. Zain busied herself fixing him a plate of food. She and I were quiet, but Angus did not seem to notice. After he ate, we readied ourselves for the long drive south, back to my parents’ home.

Just before we left, Zain called me into her bedroom. She held my hands in hers and said in a low voice that what Eric had done that night was wrong, but that I wasn’t to worry. I made her promise that she would arrange to meet him only one more time, for the sole purpose of getting back her key, and that she would do so only in a public place, in the daytime. Then she went to her dresser, opened a drawer and pulled out a bulging white envelope, which she handed me. She told me that for years she’d been saving whatever U.S. currency she came across and that after our many conversations she knew what she wanted to do with that money.

In the envelope were two rubber band–bound bundles, each one holding thirty one-hundred-dollar bills. Six thousand dollars in all.

She would not accept my protests, insisting that I was to use it to do whatever would make me more comfortable in myself and in the world.

Angus and Zain drove me back to my parents’ house. And that was the last time I saw Zain.

I returned to Toronto, and over the course of the next few days she and I spoke on the phone a couple of times. In one of those calls she told me that the day after I left she’d gone to the trailer on the yacht club grounds and confronted Eric about the key and the intrusion. He had laughed with incredulity and ridicule, as if she were mad.

One week after I left Trinidad, one week and one day after she and I had lain on the bed in her guest room, I was awakened by a phone call early in the morning. When you live in another country, far from your aging parents, every call from them causes a lurch of fear. A call outside the usual schedule can stop one’s heart. My parents knew this, so they would begin each call by saying, “Hello, Sid, everything’s okay here. Are you well?” But this time my mother’s first words were, “Sid? It’s Mum.” I waited some seconds for the usual reassurance. None came, and so I braced myself for news about my father or my sister, Gita, Gita’s son, Devin, or husband, Jaan.

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” my mother said.

“What’s happened?” I responded.

“What are you doing?” answered my mother, and this made me sit up in fear. I repeated my question sharply. She answered, “We have some bad news. Something has happened.”

“Is Dad all right?” I asked, getting up out of the bed.

“Yes. It’s not our family. We’re all right.”

So, what could be that bad? I wondered. Her tone was not one that suggested her reason for calling was mere gossip.

“What are you doing right now?” she asked again.

“For Christ’s sake, Mum. Just tell me what happened.”

“Well, I’m worried that you’re alone. Are you alone?”

“What happened?” I shouted.

“It’s Zain.”

“Zain” was suddenly a name that seemed strange, unfamiliar. For a few seconds, I didn’t know who my mother was talking about. As realization dawned, my legs buckled and I sat back down.