The Bigger Light (13 page)

“Can I help you?” The man had seen the fly too. He swiped at it, knowing he would miss it, but would chase it away for the time being. “Hey!” Boysie did not know what he wanted. He did not remember why he had come into this shop.

“You want something?”

He was watching the man, very young and very strong-looking, dressed like black Americans with long hair, and floppy hats pulled threateningly close to one eye, and looking so very strong and masculine and like criminals … criminals? “Criminals?”

“What you want, my man?”

And there were some women too, and some of them were dressed in white as if they were nurses, could be nurses, and carrying on with the young men, and laughing and talking while they were eating.

“Gimme, ahhh, please give me a pack of chewing gum, sugarless!”

“Ha-ha-ha-hah!” The man behind the counter started laughing. He had overheard something said down in the dark back of the eating shop, and he was giving his approval to the joke. His eyes were closed during his laugh. When he opened them, Boysie had placed a ten-dollar bill on the counter. He looked at it, he looked up at Boysie, and he exploded again, and he made change. “Hak-hak-hak-yak-yak …”

Sitting back in the car, Boysie was nervous. The doors were locked, and he was glad the windows were tinted. He could hear the laughing and the shouting and the noise and
he give the donkey first second and third! … he gie the donkey fuss secunt and tird … he gave the donkey first, second and third …

It became peaceful again inside the car. It was warm like a bath. He would take a very hot bath very often when he didn’t need to bathe; but he would take the hot bath, as hot as he just could bear it, and he would sit in the water, and try to think of nothing. He was thinking of nothing now. Just sitting in the warm womb of the new car, protected from discovery and disclosure and recognition behind the tinted glass. He wished he didn’t have to go to work tonight. If he didn’t have to, he could remain sitting here, just a few more minutes, and when he was rested drive all the way up to the Toronto International Airport, watch a few planes take off as he sat in the bar on the roof of the terminal building, drink a few slow Scotches, and then return home via the Don Valley Parkway, and he would try out the power of the engine on that highway. There was nothing wrong with the world at this moment. Olivia was a bore, and the woman who wore the brown winter coat, well, she could arrive in the morning or not: nothing was wrong with the world now. Those letters to the editor of the newspaper, and to
Chatelaine
magazine, if
he had them in his pocket now, he would tear them up, for nothing was wrong with the world as he sat in this new, black, shining Buick.

And then he saw the woman. He saw her first. The moment he saw her he was still thinking of how comfortable it was sitting there in the car. He did not expect to see her, certainly not in that frame of picture and reality and surprise; so that when his eyes first picked her out from the rest of the people, in his eyes and in his mind, who she was, was farthest from his mind. But he saw her. And after his eyes got accustomed to this reality, which was not in the first place reality, but just a dream, perhaps a desire or even a suspicion, he became alert. The woman was coming out of the Jamaican patty shop, and close behind her was a young man. And he would have looked off, just at that moment, had he not noticed that the man held the woman’s elbow helping her, like any gentleman would, through the door. And they came out into the bright winter sun, and they stood up for a while, and the man turned the woman in the direction he wanted her to go, and the woman succumbed to his directing, and they moved together along the sidewalk as if they had been accustomed to travelling over this same portion of cement many times in the past, in the heart, at all hours, and at all feelings of emotion. And when they drew near the part of the street where they crossed, day after day it seemed, the man held his hand near the woman’s waist, to protect her from the traffic coming along the street. Boysie saw the hand, and he saw the hand wander lower than the waist, and he imagined the hand being placed on other parts of the woman’s body: in the dark, in bed, in a movie, in the elevator when only the two of them were travelling up and down; and he wondered how long this had been going on. But most of all he felt very angry that he
was there, that he should be there to see it, for it was something which appeared to him to be unfortunate for him to have seen: it was not meant for him to see. The woman crossing the road, with the young man, was his wife, Dots.

He was fully dressed
. And he was listening to “Both Sides Now.” The weather was turning warmer, and he could not see the clouds in the snow falling, but he could see real clouds in the sky. The song no longer held the meaning of peace and comfort which he had got from it all throughout the winter; and his dispirited feeling, plus the regularity of the woman arriving every morning at the same time and disappearing out of his view a few seconds afterwards, nothing new taking place in his life, nothing strange in the apartment — all this made him feel hollow inside. He had spent a long time thinking of what to do with the discovery of his wife being handled by the young man. He would have been happier had he permitted his imagination to take its course to the natural conclusion of the man’s handling his wife, but he blocked his imagination from going along to that extremity. He had come to assume too much about his wife: that she was there when he wanted her; and he did not want her above the ordinary performances of her duties. She would cook. She would wash. She would iron. And she would occasionally lie close to him in bed at night, usually on weekends. And if the magnet of need got the better of her body, she would roll over and lie on him, and he would breathe slowly and then fast, and then he would breathe more heavily and that would be the end of that. He had grown
accustomed to her, as he was becoming accustomed to the cat. The cat “meeooowed,” he called the cat “You goddamn cat!” kicked it out of his way, and then fed it. The cat understood what relation it was living in with regard to Boysie, and it left Boysie alone. But he was so used to Dots, to her sound in the apartment, and to have to let his mind follow the picture of the young man holding her round the waist, and travel down the concluding road, with the man’s hands touching the naked body, was too frightening for him to face. And he had nobody with whom he could even lie a little, and give half the facts to, and from the person’s replies try to chart the correct action he should take; think the correct and manly thoughts he should harbour, or inflict manly violence on her.

The afternoon it had happened, when he did eventually get the car started, and had almost smashed the car behind him (he tried to move off in reverse gear), he moved out of the parked spot like a man moving out of a movie house, after an entire generation of life and death had come before him: moving out into the street as it had been before he went into the cinema, and returning to the street like a lifeless tableau, with all that action and vitality and life and death in the back of his mind. He had moved the car, more cautiously after his near collision, up College Street, up, up, going West, into the Italian district, through a stretch of road filled with West Indians and black Canadians, through the High Park area where there was a park and large beautiful houses one of which he wished he had owned, or was living in, until he found himself approaching the airport. It was only then that he realized how far he had driven. He had come far in this car, and this car was not to him like the vehicle which people called life: and he had come far in life too. He parked the car, and he walked through the terminal, and he found himself standing at a
ticket counter. “I wonder what the temperature would be like in Barbados?” He did not know. He had remembered very little about Barbados, and things like the names of streets and the shapes of things he had forgotten long ago. But he would not think of leaving right now. The man’s hands might be free to travel over further expanses of his wife’s body. And although the sight of the hands had not welled up inside him any feeling of vengeance, or even a feeling that Dots had betrayed him, he did not want to leave now. So he went up in the elevator, and got off at the level where the bar was, and he chose a seat near the large picture window where he could see the planes taking off and coming in.

After his first Scotch, he felt a little better. But then a large plane landed, and out of it came many West Indians. At the distance he was from the plane, and protected from the full blast of the engines, he thought he heard them laughing and talking as they went into the building and out of sight. He had seen hundreds of them down below, with their faces flattened even more than their noses were, stuck against the glass, peering into the Arrivals section, waiting for their friends and brothers and sisters and delayed husbands and wives. They were wearing clothes which seemed to shout at him; and whereas the Canadians were just as many, they seemed to be in the minority, due to the noise of the West Indians. He searched among them for the men in their midst, looking perhaps to see whether the young man with his hand round his wife’s body had followed him here to the airport, perhaps to see whether he could see a duplicate of that man’s body among these merry West Indians. But even to think about that had hurt him a little, and it was then that he went up into the elevator.

He thought of what he would do in Barbados, had he boarded a plane and left. Barbados had done very little to him,
even less for him. What job would he get should he decide to go back? Not only now, in the rush of this blood and feeling. But next year, or even in five years. To be a cleaner? He was a cleaner there, too, and a gardener, for many years; and he did not know it until Henry had told him so. “We is all cleaner-crabs, Boysie! Me, you, Bernice, Dots, all o’ we. Old Man Jonesy himself is a cleaner-crab!” Boysie remembered it: it was around the time when Old Man Jonesy had given him his first job, his first “ipso facto” job as he had called it, jokingly, at the Baptist Church House. Such a long time ago! But what could he do in Barbados should he go back? If he had to go back?

Floes and floes of angel’s hair, ice cream castles in the air …
and the clouds in Barbados would be blue, they were so white against the brilliance of the sun; and in all that sun there was bound to be a faster rotting of life. The fish on the beach, left there by the fishermen, rotted before Boysie could steal one. And life there had the habit of getting out of hand in quick time, too.

He put the other record on the player and listened to Mendelssohn. Music was the only thing which made him relax these days. He wondered what was really a midsummer night, and what was so peculiar about a midsummer night’s dream. Clouds were dreams, he knew, the song on the other record said that; but was a midsummer’s dream the same? He had dreamed quite a lot recently, and in his dreams he would be doing things which he felt he should be doing in real life. But the dreams were fulfilling, and after that kind of orgasm, he had no strength for the action, apart from the thought of the actions in his dreams. He had come home that first night, after he had seen his wife crossing the street hand in hand with the man, and had planned his words and his actions. Before he could say anything, he had, he thought, to
create an atmosphere of war. And he dropped his vacuum cleaner on the hard floor and prepared for her approach. He always brought this vacuum cleaner into the apartment, for it was very expensive, and it did the job well. He was ready to face her, at the disadvantage of being disturbed out of her sleep. He slammed the door, and stood like a boxer in the middle of the pugnacious living room, waiting on her to come blearily and sleepily out of the bedroom, in her woollen pyjamas (when she wore these, he knew instinctively, after many trials and errors, to keep away from her body), like an opponent not sure of her adversary. But there was no answer to his challenge of noise. He sat at the table and drank a Scotch, and dreamed of all the things he should have done to raise her from her sleep; of all the things he should have done, even before he went to work that afternoon; he thought that he should have called her on the telephone, from work, and throw the evidence into her face.

And as he thought of these alternatives, before he even realized it, she was standing behind him, in the woolen pyjamas. He could smell the breath of sleep on her, and he could feel the sound of her body ruffled in her tossing bed (“Be-Christ, I know you can’t sleep with a thing like that on your conscience!”). She was standing behind him, still breathing as if she was deep in sleep, and her body was bulging out of the legs of the pyjamas, and her breasts like two large bags of water were almost hidden in the bulge of the pyjama top.

“You making a lotta racket this time o’ night, boy!” she had said, in a sweet loving voice. “You not too tired even to make that kind o’ noise? Eh?” And she moved straight into the kitchen, into the routine of custom in which he always saw her: she was the accustomed sound in the apartment, she was the provider of things to eat and drink.