Mr. Loverman

by Bernardine Evaristo

  at Antigua Girls’ High you was top girl in your class for Latin and French, second for English and history, fourth in classical civilizations, fifth in Ancient Greek language, until you met Barry and realized he was clever enough for both of you

  everybody knows you can’t be too clever or you won’t catch man

  Mommy barely said a word to you for ages when you stopped goin’ school

  Papi didn’t mind, all he cares about are his two Early Bird stores both ends of Scotch Row, set up by his father’s family, the Millers of Antigua

  whose large portraits look out from the wood-paneled walls in the hallway behind you, strangled by high buttons and tight collars, bushy hair tamed into center partings, mustaches slicked down with grease and twisted up at the ends, haughty busts constrained by brassieres, waists strapped in by corsets

  once you got engaged, Barry got promoted from junior shop hand to assistant manager, but Merty said that’s why he wanted to marry you, to get his hands on your family’s money, but the problem with her theory is he can’t stand his father-in-law because he beats Mommy

  besides, you both running off to England soon

  studio photographs of Mommy’s side, the Gordons, are tagged at the end of the corridor

  Papi calls them “the little people”—fisher-folk, seamstresses, coal-makers, rum-smugglers, staring awkwardly into the black box immortalizing them

  Mommy tells you these your family too, yuh know?

  she calls them the ancestors, thereby affording them a gravitas they only get because they dead

  seems to you the longer people dead-dead, the more status they get-get

  but it should be the other way round, longer they dead, the less they count, so why on earth do Mommy and Papi go on about these dead people like they matter?

  all you care about is getting the catch of the century

  you one lucky girl, eh?

  plenty girls acted like floozies around Barry, most of the Young Ladies’ Society of Antigua (membership = 4) did too

  Candaisy wanted him, Drusilla as well, and she’s officially the prettiest, Asseleitha’s too weird to want anybody, Merty was always hitching up her skirt whenever he was in the vicinity

  you never said nothing, because nobody tells Miss Merty what to do and doesn’t get an ear-bashing for their effort, best friend or no best friend

  at the wedding reception Drusilla told you the reason Merty caught your bridal posy was because she leapfrogged onto the girls in front of her to get it and they ended up with torn stockings and scratched knees as a result

  you wondered why they was scrambling all unladylike on the dusty ground when you spun back round

  don’t worry yourself, Miss Merty, you’ll find someone, like that Clement, who’s got his eye on you and seems like a nice boy and one day you’ll come to England too

  you all drew blood and pressed thumbs and swore that you’d never be separated for long

  so here you are

  swinging and kicking your bare legs out and getting a little breeze to them in the sticky heat, your nightie sticking to your underside

  the moon throws a shadowy glow onto the sweet meal and rubber trees, the bougainvillea and jacaranda, the date palms

  you starting to feel a bit dozy, but you still got a hubble-bubble of new and old feelings that won’t settle down and

  everybody on the whole island sleeping ’cept you, and those noisy crickets and tree frogs that never shut up at night

  you look up at the diamanté sky, stretching yonder into infinity

  you wonder if you goin’ miss it when you travel and then you correct yourself: you taking the sky with you to England, Sweet Girl, sky’s not goin’ nowhere you’re not

  you never left the island before except for trips to Barbuda next door, and that don’t count, and you’ve rarely ever left St. John’s, all you know is a few miles’ circumference around it, your little island in the middle of the Caribbean Sea

  it frightening because the world suddenly seems so huge, with all of its billions of people out there

  and you leaving without Mommy too, who won’t leave Papi, no matter how much you and Barry beg her come with you

  you start to swing slower, softer, a rhythmical lull, like the lullabies Mommy used to sing you when you was little

  soon you will float back to your husband, who will stretch out his long, strong arms, all sleepy, and pull you into him—warm and safe

  Mrs. Barrington Walker, you not only a respectably married woman but you can’t believe that just now you almost lost it

  but he didn’t put it in, just rubbed himself on top of you

  asking if you was all right, then he shuddered, rolled off, and turned away, curling into himself, his broad, strong, manly back glistening against the white cotton sheet

  you wanted to trace the ridges of his backbone with your finger

  lick off the moisture at the nape of his neck and taste him, slip yourself around his chest and see if your fingers met the other side

  make him put it inside instead of being so considerate and not forcing himself, because you ready for it

  but really, Mrs. Walker, the question you got to ask is

  is it allowed for a wife to touch her husband spontaneously or does she have to wait for him to touch her before duly responding?

  you goin’ ask the Young Ladies’ Society about it—Merty will know

  one thing is obvious: Barry’s a real gentleman, unlike some of the boys round these parts, who can’t keep their things in their pants and their hands away from girls’ privates

  Merty first did it years ago with an American diplomat who approached her outside the cathedral after church, gave her a real American dollar

  and she earned several dollars that way since, swore you to secrecy, Drusilla’s done it with Maxie, her older boyfriend, Candaisy has almost done it but not quite

  Barry was always play-punching and teasing, and when you danced you was all over each other physically, but he never pestered that way, not once, not even French kissing

  Hubert had a proper feel-up once you’d been courting seven months, and he was a swot who wore spectacles and stuttered

  poor Hubert, crying on the beach in full view of everybody when you finished with him, but it also annoyed and embarrassed you so much you dropped the American ice cream he’d just bought you onto the sand and walked off without saying goodbye

  you agree with Barry, who says Hubert is James Stewart, but he is Rock Hudson

  no contest, right?

  the swing stops and you glide, yes, glide, like a swan in a pond across the wooden floor in your bare feet

  you pass through the corridor and ascend the wooden staircase, your bare feet avoiding the squeaky bits

  there he is, asleep facing the door, you creep in and sit cross-legged on the hard wooden floor in your new, grown-up nightie, short and frilly and flirty to show off your married woman’s cleavage

  you cup your breasts in your hands, all high and nicely heavy, like two buoyant bags of water, and you wonder when he will touch them

  you want him to feel how bouncy they is, because at sixteen they’ve not yet begun to deflate, although Mommy (the doom monger) has promised you it will happen soon, because you got too much weight in them and before you know it they be drooping and swaying instead of bouncing

  she said it might even happen tomorrow or next week

  what will it feel like to have him hold them up from behind?

  he better hurry up, that’s all

  his mouth is slightly open

  you want to close it, because insects might get in

  you almost stroke his cheek, but what if he wakes up and asks you what you doing?

  his left eye twitches, which shows he dreaming about what must be uppermost in his mind now he a newly married man

  yes, he dreaming about you, lady

  you tiptoe around the bed and slide up beside him, careful not to touch him


  you close your eyes and transmit into the back of his head what you plan to be dreaming about this night

  you goin’ all telepathic on him, you goin’ make him dream what you dreaming

  you have magic powers

  . . . a real thatched cottage in the “Dales” with fat cows mooing around the green hills, not the scrawny cattle you get round here

  your husband wearing a shirt, tie, braces, and smoking a pipe in the garden sunshine, sitting on a stripy deck chair doing the Times crossword

  your children playing hide-and-seek in the apple and pear orchard with Lassie the dog

  running around barking happily and

  you in the kitchen prettying up your face with fresh lipstick and a clean red-and-white-stripe pinafore over your tight-tight black pencil skirt

  and on your feet, high-high heels that give you the sexy walk of Marilyn Monroe, even though you baking scones ready for a spread of real Devonshire cream with the jam you just made from fresh damson and

  you goin’ serve it up with real English tea in bone china all laid out on the garden table on the crazy-paving patio just in front of the lawn

  and you got a rockery and an herbaceous border and robins, yes, robin redbreasts chirruping in the trees

  and somewhere over the dales and hills and far . . . far . . . away . . . the mangrove cuckoo and the lovely yellow oriole land just now on your windowsill

  the fork-tailed flycatcher hovers around the roses

  the hummingbird is hovering around the orange tulips, and there, there over there, flies a brown ibis into the very English sky

  you see an iguana scurry across the lawn, and a gecko darts up your rosy kitchen wallpaper, and a crocodile pokes its head into the kitchen from the garden and

  you look over by the pond with water lilies and see a red-foot tortoise and a leather-back turtle emerge wearing top hats and singing you goin’ rock, rock, rock around the clock

  and you sit down to tea with a family of purple flamingos, and oh, oh, oh, fire, fire burning bright in the cream teas of the night

  just when you think you not slept a wink with all of this activity goin’ on, you wake up and feel the full blast of morning sunshine coming through the wide-open windows and onto your face

  and that witch Loreene is banging on the door like she goin’ break it down, calling you to breakfast

  and when you open your thick, heavy, sticky eyes and turn over, you see Barry must-a got up already, because he gone

  yes, Carmel, he gone already, down to breakfast without waking you up and waiting for you so you can go down to your first breakfast together as husband and wife

  3

  The Art of Being Normal

  Sunday, May 2, 2010

  While sleep is the Great Vanquisher of an Embattled Mind, Guinness is the Great Tranquilizer of a Damaged Soul . . . and Lord knows I need it for breakfast this morning, after another round in the ring with Carmel last night.

  Me and Morris are at my spacious dining table, which can comfortably seat eight people, in my capacious kitchen with its high Victorian ceiling and stately churchlike window that looks out on to my amplitudinous, tree-adorned garden that stretches back over seventy flower-bedecked feet.

  I am enthroned at the head of the table on my carved antique chair with tapestry upholstery that my younger girl, Maxine, bought for my fiftieth birthday from that furniture restorer on Bradbury Street in 1986. Looks like something Henry VIII might’ve parked his right royal arse on.

  Morris usually pops in about an hour before Sunday lunch. Not that he’s ever invited. Don’t need to be.

  “Y’all right, boss?” he said when I opened the door.

  “Y’all right, boss?” I replied, heading back into the kitchen.

  Carmel’s already gone to the Church of the Living Saints by the time I deslumber myself. She’s usually got the good sense not to start bombing Pearl Harbor the day after the night before, because she knows full well what it will lead to—the atomic fallout from my tongue.

  She and me has got to sit down and talk like two grown-ups without setting off each other’s trip wires.

  The problem is—we reached a dead end decades ago.

  The solution to that problem is a dissolution of my marriage.

  I decided as soon as I got up that there comes a time when the botheration and fabrication is too much, even for a man of my considerable fortitude.

  I want to spend my remaining years with Morris.

  Years ago I wasn’t prepared to abandon my girls, except the one time Morris’s world came crumbling down over Odette . . . his wife.

  He met her in England before I came over. Said he didn’t think I was goin’ make it over here, and he couldn’t be a West Indian and not start a family—Man haf fe do wha man haf fe do. Truth is, both of us was desperate to be anything other than what we was.

  Then he had the cheek to get upset when I turned up in England with a wife of my own.

  But soon after my arrival we resumed where we’d left off back home. Didn’t take long. First time we got half an hour alone in his flat while Odette was out, we was back on track.

  Until 1989, when the shit hit the fan. Odette had gone on one of her church retreats to Wales. As usual we took a certain advantage, same advantage we been taking since we was fourteen. Except this one time she traveled back to London a day early, let herself into the house quietly that night, not wanting to disturb her sleeping husband, crept upstairs, and caught me and Morris trying out a Kama Sutra position.

  Thereafter followed the Mother of All Palavers.

  Morris couldn’t let Odette loose in her hysterical state, so he had to bribe her. First with the house, and then, when that wouldn’t shut her up, the car, and finally all of their savings.

  It was touch and go a few months while the divorce was being settled. What if Odette took the ultimate revenge and ran off her mouth at everybody, including Carmel? Me and Morris was on tenterhooks, expecting to be excommunicated from everyone we knew, including our children.

  But Odette was a better woman than that. I think she was still in love with Morris. She said he was the only man she’d ever slept with. Same with Carmel: the only man she’s ever slept with is me.

  Odette returned to Antigua and built a spa hotel, became a rich woman over there. Kept her word too, because Morris’s sons, Clarence and Laurence, never treated their father no different.

  Once Morris started to recover from the drama of his divorce, he got ideas too big for the tiny rented studio flat he’d moved into after Odette had taken him to the cleaners.

  It was late afternoon.

  Smoke billowed outside the open attic window and dissolved into the sky.

  The ceiling was stained from thousands of cigarettes, the wardrobe’s door had a mottled mirror that made a man’s face look pockmarked, the carpet was bejeweled with a galaxy of filthy gold stars.

  “We middle-aged now, Barry,” Morris said, as he lay in my arms smoking a Marlboro Light.

  “Youthful middle-aged,” I replied.

  “What I want to suggest is,” Morris continued, suddenly unnaturally still, “why don’t we share a midlife crisis and move in together?”

  I said nothing, deftly removed the cigarette from his two fingers, and took a deep drag.

  “We could head out to the other side of London, maybe? Get our own place. Somewhere anonymous, like Shepherd’s Bush or even Hammersmith.”

  Morris’s tone was casual, like he didn’t want to scare me, like what he was suggesting was très ordinaire.

  “This is some doodlebug you dropping, Morris.”

  He turned his head to me.

  I extended my hand.

  He passed over the fag.

  “Your children grown up. You got no reason to stay. Not so?”

  “Move in with you?”

  “Your hearing is correct, Barry.”

  “Now?”

  “Not in the next five minutes but maybe in the next five months.�
��

  We lay there.

  I inhaled long and slow, funneling the fire-smoke through my nostrils. Looked across at the open window. The autumn trees shedding their leaves.

  “Morris,” I replied slowly, “I don’t know if I can jump into the great abyss of social alienation with you.”

  I’d been under such pressure back home. A young man showing no interest in girls, when he could have any one of them? I was twenty-four when I married Carmel, and I’d almost left it too late for some. They was talking, and I was afraid I’d be up before a judge on some trumped-up charge of indecent exposure; or end up lying on an operating table with a bar of wood between my teeth and electric volts destroying parts of my brain forever; or in the crazy house pumped full of drugs that would eventually drive a sane man mad.

  Carmel was perfect: young, fun, naïve, love-struck.

  “You forgotten what happened to Horace Johnson?” I said to Morris, stubbing out the cigarette in the big glass ashtray on my lap. “Most popular teacher in our school, lived alone, didn’t have a girl, didn’t mix, and was accused of touching up some fella in the market. Remember the day he hanged himself in the crazy house?”

  We all thought England was goin’ be utopia.

  This country has over fifty million citizens, whereas we didn’t even have fifty thousand in the whole of Antigua and Barbuda. Folk could get lost here, be anonymous, lead they own quiet lives. In this city you can live on the same street as your neighbors for eighty years and not even say good morning unless there’s a war on and you forced to share a bomb shelter. Back home everybody kept their eye on everything and everyone.

  I lit another cigarette.

  “This is 1980s London, Barry,” Morris said, sitting up and facing me. “Not 1950s St. John’s. Why we acting so backward? It is legal. We are legal. Nobody goin’ arrest us. ’Tis we own blasted business what we do, and everybody else can keep their small-minded noses out of it.” He put his hand on my wrist. I didn’t realize it was shaking.

  “This is some heavy crap we dealing with, Morris. You asking me to turn my life upside down. I don’t know if I can take the upheaval.”