The Bigger Light (11 page)

He took up the telephone and dialed a number. After many rings he put it down. He looked into his address book, and dialed another number, and when this one rang a few times, a recorded message came on: “
The number you have dialed is …
” He dropped the telephone. He would spend some mornings, sometimes the entire morning, ringing old numbers of persons he had met many years before. And they were all changed, or else moved away, disconnected, or the numbers of different persons. There was no one he knew. No one he knew whom he wanted to talk to. He remembered a man named Freeness, from years back, and he tried to track him down through about six telephone numbers which he had taken down over the years, and when he reached the last one, Freeness
was said to have moved to Montreal. And then one morning he thought of a Jamaican man he knew, with whom he and Henry and Freeness used to play poker and crap, and he called this man’s number, and there was no answer at the other end. He promised to call him in the evening, but he never remembered. The woman should be coming out of the subway any minute now. The cat was curling around his ankles and he did not stir, he did not move, so that the cat would continue to make his acquaintance, to make its acquaintance with him: he was as lonely as that. So, he must have a living person in this apartment with him. When he came in after working ten hours, Dots was in bed; and before he awoke, she would have left for work. He had been thinking for some time now of a young boy, the son of a friend of his, whose father had disappeared to America. He knew it would be a delicate situation, but after all he did not want to adopt the boy. He just wanted to take him places, like to the races: every boy liked going to the races, or to listen to jazz on Saturday afternoon at the matinees at the Colonial Tavern. But he would have to be careful. There were a lot of grown men taking out little boys nowadays in Toronto; and he did not want to be suspected as a homosexual. He was nervous about this. The boy’s mother might think it strange of him, all of a sudden, his coming round to take out her son. And he could see her feeling that he was after her. Either way, he had to be careful. It would be so much easier to have Dots make the arrangements; but there were many things he wanted to discuss with his wife, and could not, because of her attitude to discussion, his new language and conversation, or rather because when he really felt the need to talk she was at work, and he never wanted to call her at the hospital. There were many brilliant plans he had had: like the one about hiring a helper for his cleaning jobs,
and he had worked it out to the last detail, and when it came time to discuss it with Dots, she was at work. He did call Dots once, about the new car he had bought (for his guilt had had the better of him), and when he reached her after many switches to different extensions and floors in the hospital, Dots came on the telephone and her rage was so loud that he felt the whole building had heard. “Look, man, I am at work. What happened? You sick?” and when Boysie said he was not sick, she said, “Is the cat sick, then?” and when he said the cat was not sick, she said in a bitter voice, “Well, wait till I come home.”

When she came home, he made sure he was out of the apartment. In all the other ways he was successful: at the bank with the bank manager; at the barber’s chatting and joking with Alfredo; at his job, entering into conversations with Mr. MacIntosh and with the Canadian young fellow, and exchanging ideas with them, on life; with the car salesman who didn’t worry to check his credit rating, simply because the salesman knew the bank manager — in all these things, Boysie was successful and had respect and some name; but with his wife, and trying to impress her, he was a very ordinary man, a man with great failure. And he wanted to change this too, for it took away from his success. As a matter of fact, he did not consider himself as successful as he really was.

These things were the gnawing thoughts in his head this morning, waiting for the woman, and feeling the futility of wasting so much energy on a prospect which he did not really believe could be developed into more than a prospect. The tune had come to an end. He got up to put the needle back at the beginning of “Both Sides Now” when the thought hit him that he should look at the other two records he had decided to keep out of the large collection he had had. At times, in his
weakest moments, when he doubted that he was wise to have thrown away all those records into the incinerator — all that “noise” as he called them — he would yearn to hear the happy beat of the West Indian calypso, or the funky rhythms of the black music of America; but he held steadfast in his determination not to listen again to that kind of music. He was beginning to regard the music he listened to as being part of the quality of the life he wanted to live. But he had to remind himself of the titles of the other two record albums. One was a jazz album by Miles Davis, named
Milestones
. He used to play all the tunes in this album years ago, but he grew tired of jazz and started listening to rhythm-and-blues; and after a while
Milestones
was the only one that he liked. He liked this album very much, but he had not played it lately. It had been given to him by his friend Brigitte, who had heard the Miles Davis Quartet in Germany, and when she met Boysie, seven years later, she was still raving about this album. She bought it for his Christmas present at the end of their affair’s first year. The other record, also a gift, was Mendelssohn’s
Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and this became his favourite record of the two until he discovered that part of the album which contained the Wedding March. He was surprised to find the Wedding March on a record. For he had felt all the time that it was just a special tune which somehow came about and which was chosen years ago to be played at weddings. He did not know that it was composed for an entirely different reason. Mr. MacIntosh gave him this record. He had heard Boysie whistling the Wedding March one night, to a calypso beat, and he thought he would surprise him. But it had taken about six months before Boysie realized the real significance of the gift. And when he found out, he felt that Mr. MacIntosh had tricked him.

One Sunday — and it was only on Sundays that he played
Mendelssohn, even when he had his full record collection — he played this record. He had not played it before. He was in a good mood. He was listening as he lay on the bed, deciding whether to get up and clean out the truck and the mops and the cleaners and detergents; or whether to remain in bed, and wait for Dots to bring him breakfast in bed. And between these two minds, all of a sudden, out came the Wedding March.

“What the hell is that, Boysie?”

“Heh-heh-heh!”, and he thought of Mr. MacIntosh. “That man is as smart as …”

“You mean to tell me that you still listening to that damn nonsense?”

But every Sunday after that, it was Dots who not only requested to hear Mendelssohn, but who actually put the record on herself. Adversity and her own depression were swept away by the full, heavy and powerful music which sent her back many years — “About how much, now?” — time passed in this country was beginning to wipe out the milestones of time passed back in Barbados, and she had found herself recently counting time in vague areas of time: “a few years ago,” or she might have been speaking about her marriage, or about her emigration from the West Indies. But this powerful music whose discovery was such a shock — “Never, never, never, Boysie, would I have expect to find this nice music in a ordinary grammaphone record! You know what I mean? This is something I had expect to find, originally when it was made, inside of a vault, or some stone inside that church where we got married, St. Matthias Church on St. Matthias Road, in St. Matthias Parish …”

“St. Michael’s, Dots.”

“Is a long time ago, Boysie! This music bringing it back now, fresh fresh as anything, as the Mayflower flowers and the
lignum vitae and the red roses and the white roses, and flowers of all kinds and denominations, the day when you married me, that was the day when first I really understand what this piece o’ music mean …”

“We got married in Canada, Dots!” And then they got into an argument, because they could not remember whether they were married in Barbados before they came up to Canada, or whether the wedding had taken place in Canada. “That is what I mean when I tell you that time does do some funny things to a person’s mind. Imagine that!”

Boysie would remember whole passages of conversations like this one, spoken many years ago, in different circumstances, and if the circumstances then had not held his interest, when the conversations came back he would be able to focus on the interest and the significance as they should have been comprehended at the first context. Conversations were like people. He encouraged them, and he exchanged words with them, and he twisted them to fit his moods, because he could not talk to a cat. He had never had a cat. The only cat he had ever had any relations with was one strayed cat which he found dead under his mother’s cellar: not that he had found it dead the moment it was dead, but he found it dead through its smell, on a hot day, in a far corner of the limestone cellar through cracks of which he first saw columns and battalions and mounds of dark brown stinging ants moving in some form of their own battle array: and the smell. The cats he knew used to kill mice and keep mongooses from eating the chickens, and sometimes if the cat was frightened before the chicken and the fowl-cock thief, its cat’s eyes might frighten the thief and scare him; but this cat which Dots had brought into the house, “this goddamn cat” was being fed on food from tin, Pampers, and Dots had even bought medicine for it.

“It is a very important cat, Boysie, boy. This cat have pettigree and breeding and class that neither you nor me could come close to having! This is a first class cat you see here, Boysie!”

“And who I is?” Boysie shouted, in his most belligerent Barbadian accent. “I’s a second class cat?”

“Boysie, boy, the truth does hurt sometimes, but when all is said and done, the truth is the truth. And neither you nor this cat here, eating outta this can, nor me, could put a hand ’gainst that truth …”

“Fuck the truth!”

But he was no easier in his mind about this cat. He would wait until Bernice came over later in the week. She had promised to bring over her young man to introduce him to Boysie (she did not say she was going to introduce him to Dots, and Boysie noticed this suspiciously, and wondered whether Dots knew him, whether Dots had chosen him from among the hospital orderlies at the Doctor’s Hospital, for it had come out in conversation that he worked there part-time), and Boysie was going to ask her about this goddamn cat. In the meantime, these were not really so important as the woman: he was thinking of confronting the woman this morning; but she had taken such a long time to appear, and he was not sure whether it was better to go down and wait for her in the truck, or whether he should first get his new car and try to impress her into accepting a drive … it was now four hours that he had been waiting for her, and she hadn’t come, and he didn’t know he had lived through all this time while waiting for her. And he had to find an envelope for the letter to the editor of
Chatelaine
which he had written to answer the misleading account of a black woman’s loneliness in Canada. What made him angry about the article was that the woman who wrote it didn’t know
anything about black women. He could tell that from the way she wrote the article; for she had spent so much time on this woman Olivia, and Boysie knew many Olivias, Olivias who would cry on your shoulders morning, noon and night, and when they had you sympathetic in their grasps, they would rip out your balls; Olivias who always had a sob story, and when you counted their earnings, they could pay down five thousand dollars on a townhouse on Belmont Street or any other exclusive street in the city; Olivias who told you they were single, never had a man, and when you arrived five minutes too early, or too late, there was, standing before you, the biggest Jamaican man you had ever seen, and did not wish to see in those circumstances; Olivias who said one thing and lived the next thing: he wanted to meet this Olivia and beat the living shit out of her for giving all West Indian and black Canadian women a bad name, talking a lot of shite about
“I’m not a happy woman when I am here and he is there. He is lonely and I am afraid they don’t care for him properly back home,”
to a reporter named Linda Diebel. Boysie wanted to meet Olivia and he wanted to meet this Linda Diebel — if she was a real person.

He unfolded the letter he had written to the editor Mrs. Doris McGibbon Anderson:
Dear Mrs. Doris McGibbon Anderson, the Editor of Chatelaine. Have you ever thought of writing a story on the poor black women who get raped every day in Toronto? Have you ever thought of writing an article on black women who work in the hospitals of this city? Have you ever thought of writing an article on one of them, who if they were not working so hard in the hospitals of this city, there would be an epidemic of grave proportions
(he remembered this phrase being spoken on the CBC radio during the earthquake in Latin America, someplace)
in this city? Have you ever thought of
writing an article on the thousands of black university students, professors and administrators at universities in this province?
(Boysie had never met a black university professor or a black university administrator, but he figured that if they had some in American universities, there had to be some, perhaps even more, here in Canadian universities, what with all the West Indians and Barbadians especially going to university for so many years. He knew there were hundreds of black university students all over the place.)
Why have you not thought before, of writing an article on the black woman who got elected into the Legislature out in British Columbia? Or the black woman who is a doctor at one of the biggest hospitals here in Toronto? Why do you always think you know more about black women and black men and black youths than anybody else, including black people? And who the fuck is Linda Diebel? And who is Olivia? Yours respectfully, Bertram Cumberbatch. Power to the People!
He did not know why he had put “Power to the People” after his name; for he was a man who had long stood outside the paling of that kind of verbal militancy. And he did not know why he had taken such a long time to write his real name, “Bertram,” instead of “Boysie.” He was beginning to be embarrassed when he was addressed as Boysie by persons who did not know him intimately. Bertram sounded good, he felt. And he was sorry that he did not have some kind of office, some kind of rank to put after his name. He thought about it, and hoped that by putting “Power to the People” behind his name, Mrs. Doris McGibbon Anderson would think he was a powerful man in the black community who had written the letter. Perhaps it might even scare her into doing something about the article, if not now, then in the future. But most of all he worried about not having some office or rank or organization to put after his name. He should try to join some organization for the purpose
of giving his letters to the editor more weight, not because he really had his heart in organizations. Power was what he was after now — not political power, for he was smart enough to know, even before this new awareness, that he could not have political power in a place like Canada unless some Canadian had given him that power, and even then, it would not be true power. But he needed some organization to put behind his name. He had been asked to join the Toronto Elks, and the Bathurst Lions, and some church organizations had asked him to join them; but he knew they were only interested in him because he was a successful businessman. He wanted an organization he could use when the time became fruitful, not an organization which could use him.