The Bigger Light (14 page)

And she said to him, “Lemme make you some hot chocolate, and bring up some of the gas in your stomach. Man, you working so damn hard these days, sometimes I feel sorry for you.”

She moved from behind him, and he glanced at her, terrified by his own thoughts, that here she was, a secure woman in the sense of not knowing the thoughts he held for her and against her, a woman past that mark in life when she is prey to an avaricious man’s lust, a woman almost at the peak of her desire for men and love and loving, a woman well seasoned in the years of her having all these sensual satisfactions, a woman about to merge into the woodwork of assumed middle-aged menopause, and here he was, sitting at his own table in his own apartment, looking at his own wife, and not knowing before this moment, as he looked at her body, that other men, and younger men too, would have eaten up that body and eaten it without preparation, would have swallowed it whole and attempted to digest it after the devouring. He remembered how he lay beside her, not daring to go to sleep, although his body ached with the work he had done in order to forget what he had seen, how he lay there, not sleeping, and heard her breathe, and heard the different rhythms of her breathing, and how she put her heavy woolen leg on his thighs, as if it was a natural gesture of closeness to him, and how eventually he drifted off to sleep, with the evil taste of her action and of his own inaction in response to that action, in his mouth.

“I should have put my hand in her arse, the moment I came through that door!” But it was too late now, for he had been overcome by the youth and the vigour in her body, and he had been conquered by his own lust, made more hectic now through the thought, and the fear, that somebody else had used her body. For it was using, he decided. It could not be
love. And that was what really cooled his anger. He did not see it as fornication, he did not see it as infidelity, he did not see it as immorality. He saw it as a using of the body. She had permitted this young man to use her body, because she was not capable of having the young man as her lover. It would have destroyed him: not the fact that she had, or might have had, a lover. But the fact that she had gone into the act, with love for the act. She had not made love to him with love, or with the instinct of the lover, since the time, long ago on a beach in Barbados.

Then sleep came to him, and rescued him from his inaction, and from the violence in the planned actions which gave him a severe headache. The dream that night. The first of two recurring dreams which he had been trying to understand for a long time.
He was parking his new black Buick in the underground garage of his apartment building, and he was a younger man, and Dots was the same age as she is now. And he had just locked his car door, and all of a sudden he heard a noise somewhere in the darkness of the grey cement pillars and parked cars. He had been alone. But the dream had altered that and for no reason that the dream could explain, Dots got out of the car just after he got out, and after he had locked the doors. And Dots was wearing her quilted pink housecoat, and underneath it she was wearing just panties. He walked in the direction of the elevator, ignoring the noise, since the noise was not suspicious to him, and out of the darkness, and like an apparition, so close to him and so unreal, that he was almost about to walk over them, was Dots sitting on a stool with the young man he had seen her with that afternoon on College Street. The young man was sitting in a blue upholstered chair with a high back and comfortable cushions. The stool on which Dots was sitting was a bright patterned one. And they were looking at a large book that had pictures in it. They were
photographs, Boysie could see that as he drew closer to them. And the man was turning the pages in the picture book, and at the same time he was turning the coat hem of Dot’s housecoat, and Boysie could see right up her legs. One of the pictures on the page which Dots held with her hand with her wedding ring was a picture of a man making love to a man. And the picture of the man was the picture of the young man with whom she was sitting so close. He was wearing a very tight-fitting trousers of greyish blue, and a reddish-brown round-necked sweater, with long sleeves, so that his shirt collar, which was really a sweater, was shown just above the neck of the long-sleeved sweater. And all of a sudden, Boysie was no longer a spectator in the dream, but had been sitting with them in a room somewhere, all the time. But he had fallen asleep. They had been drinking, all three of them, and Boysie had drunk too much and had fallen off into a doze in the room with them, and it was when he opened his eyes that Dots had moved the stool from beside the wall of the living room where it always stood under a wall hanging of an African print, and had moved it closer to the young man’s blue upholstered chair, and their knees were touching and he could see inside their hearts and their hearts were beating fast. And he noticed that the young man’s grey trousers had a bulge where his
 … And then he woke up. He had cursed himself for waking up at that moment. But he was glad he had seen no more. And it was this same double-minded feeling about the waking up so soon from the dream that haunted him whenever he thought of Dots and the young man: he wanted to know more; he wanted to follow them further along the street back to the hospital where she worked, and he wanted to follow them further along the paths of their relationship, but he did not want to see what was at the end of that path.

The music is peaceful. It is putting him to sleep. He does
not want to fall asleep again, and certainly not in the morning before he has seen the strange woman emerge from the subway station. Many times, since this thing happened, he would dress in his three-piece suit and sit and wait for her to appear and then arrive and then disappear, and he would be listening to his music and he would fall asleep and live in that sleep for years, and travel places, sometimes back to Barbados, and when he awoke, miserable and dislocated from the moment of what he knew to be fact and reality just before sleep came, he would find that he had been sleeping for three minutes, or five minutes, and that it was not yet time for the woman to appear.

He got up from the chair (after the dream, the first dream, he never sat in the blue upholstered chair in the living room, and he never sat on the reddish-brown stool: for they were the same as in the dream) and tidied his clothes. This morning he was wearing a dark grey suit with a pin stripe, black shoes, black socks, a dark grey shirt and a deep blue tie. He went into the bathroom to wash the rheum from his face and eyes, and he brushed his teeth. Dots brushed her teeth once a day at the same time: just before going to bed. He ran the comb through his hair, and cleaned out his ears. He looked at himself in the mirror for a long time, not really seeing his reflection but seeing somebody who represented him. “I look like a blasted undertaker, you know!” But his suit, which was custom-tailored, fitted him well. He searched in his drawer and chose another tie. This tie was striped, with red and navy blue against a red background. He put it on, and his spirits lighted up. But he did not think that his shirt was the correct one, so he changed that for a blue and white striped shirt. He did not like his appearance any better now, but he was too tired to change again. Back outside he went, feeling more blood pouring through his body, feeling as if the morning and
the afternoon held something lively for him. But it was only eleven o’clock, and the woman could still be on her way.

“Meeeooooooooooooowwwwwwwwww!”

“The goddamn cat!” he said, and he went into the kitchen, and opened a can of something and dropped the can (“I wish that one of these days, cat, you will cut off your goddamn tongue on this goddamn can!”), and went through the door of the apartment. He locked the door. He looked down one side and then the other side of the long, quiet, scented broad-loomed corridor, listened to hear if anybody was alive in the building along with himself (“What is so goddamn strange about this country is that you could be living in a goddamn apartment and not know if anybody else besides you is living too! You know what I mean?”); and then opened the apartment door again and went in. He left the door ajar.

He went into the kitchen and stood over the cat. He thought of killing the cat. What explanation would he give his wife? Dots had been sleeping with the cat. Dots had been sleeping lately with the cat. Heh-heh-heh! my wife sleeps with a cat, a goddamn cat, a cat, a real four-legged cat, not a
cat
, not that kind of a cat! He thought of the misrepresentation:
my wife is sleeping with a cat
. He could not use this kind of language in the Paramount Tavern to express Dots’s peculiarity, or to Henry. “Man, you mean your old lady’s horning you?” He would have to use his language carefully. “Man, is you a man or what? Your old lady turning tricks on you, and shit like that? And you didn’t beat her ass?” Dots had been sleeping with the cat in the bed with her lately. He had to put some order into the thoughts of his language. The morning was running away from him. The cat was eating, like a cat. He should kill this cat. That would give some order and logic to the quarrel he wanted to have with Dots. He had tried dropping the
vacuum cleaner and that didn’t work. He had to find something to ease him quietly but deliberately into the quarrel. And he had thought of waking her up one night, and slapping her. But she might be too deep in a sleep, and she would only quarrel and curse him for waking her up. He wanted her, not to quarrel about being waken up, but rather about something else, so he could get into the quarrel he had in mind to make with her.

Boysie opened the refrigerator next, and took out all the pork chops and pork roasts and spare ribs from the freezing compartment. He searched some more for the bacon and the ham, and he dropped them into a large paper bag with a handle. The bag had DOMINION’S printed on it. He took the bag, went through the door, and locked the door. Outside the apartment door he thought he heard classical music. The Wedding March was being played. But he was not sure he was hearing The Wedding March; he was not feeling as if he had ever been married. He never counted wedding anniversaries, and he did not remember birthdays. And Dots never told him, nor held his forgetfulness against him.

Going down in the elevator, he tried to remember what his life in Barbados had been, but he was having a difficult time these days remembering things from that part of his past. He would remember pieces of conversation he had had with Dots, or with Bernice and Estelle, or with Henry, with all of them in one room, and he would gasp almost to see how that snippet of conversation, spoken in that context, suddenly came back to make such sense in this time of perusal. He was perusing everything these days. He could even remember what Dots wore to work last week, on Monday. And he knew what she wore every day of the past two weeks. And she did not know that he was paying this attention to her because he was
doing it with a third eye, so it seemed. It was like a kind of inner light from somewhere inside him which showed him these things. So that to remember these pieces of conversation, which in themselves meant nothing, and to tell someone about them, to bring them up again to Dots, would make him look to her, or to anyone else, like a fool, like a person going slowly but surely mad, like a shingle in a pond drifting somewhere. He was perusing things these days. He had gone back into her drawer and he had seen the “pop-gun” thing, and he had seen it when it was recently used, and he tried to remember which night it was that she had used it, with him, but he could not remember. And he could not remember because he really did not want to remember, since he was sure that it was not used with him, in mind or in body, for him. He went through the underwear in her drawer (“Heh-heh-heh! In her drawer, in her drawers”; this Canadian sense of humour and twists in language! Would he ever master them? “Oh Lord, what a funny thing,
‘in her drawers’
 … it always makes me laugh when I even think of this!”), through the unworn nightgowns, through the underclothes, searching for something close to her body which he knew he would know to be the thing he was searching for when he hit upon it. And he was surprised that Dots had nothing more personal than clothes in her drawer … “in her drawers! haiiiiiiii!” Not even a bunch of old letters which he would have been glad to have come upon, and read, of course. Not even a faded photograph, not a letter from him. But he did not write letters. The only thing Dots had in her drawer, “apart of course from what you would expect, naturally, a woman to have in her a-hem!” was a book of matches, on which was printed the name Mary Jane Restaurant, and the address of the restaurant, somewhere on Elm Street. He had made a note to look into this book of matches, but he
soon forgot, through the pressure of reminders he was carrying around in his mind.

He was standing now at the door of Apartment 101. He had walked past this apartment door many times before, almost once a day, on his way up from the underground garage, when he did not take the elevator from the basement. He had heard children’s voices bursting through this apartment. “Eating all this damn pork and pork products isn’t doing me any good. I really have to agree with that Canadian young fellow.” He knew the woman inside the shoe of the apartment lived with her five children who had no father living with them, or with her; and he knew she was not a rich woman. Her clothes did not tell him that. And her unkempt hair and her badly kept light-complexioned skin did not tell him that. And the snot running from some of her children’s noses, and the noise they made when, normally, children ought to be chewing food noisily, told him that they were hungry. Perhaps not often. Perhaps not hungry in a starving sense, but without the milk and cookies, the candy, the chewing gum which all children liked to eat, and steal from the refrigerator. “I wonder what it would be like living with a woman like this?” But the number of children scared him, and the woman’s appearance bothered him, and the chance that her body smelled bothered him, and not knowing how often she brushed her teeth, and cleaned between her toes, and in her other various creases — all this bothered him. And it pained him deeply because he knew he didn’t have to live with her, would never live with her, but could not even imagine living with her because she was so obviously repulsive. But perhaps, he thought (“Somebody is coming!”) she was clean on the inside.