Mr. Loverman

by Bernardine Evaristo

  To be honest, I didn’t know what to say or think. I was a man of words for all occasions, except this one.

  “Don’t let me down. I depending on you.”

  And with that, he leapt off the bed in one movement, like the dancer he could’ve been with that coiled, sprung body.

  He started to get dressed while I watched.

  * * *

  I talked myself into it. Why shouldn’t I live with Morris instead of sneaking around like a thief? I could do it. I could be brave. The whole point of a midlife crisis is to start living the life you want instead of tolerating the life you have.

  It was a Sunday afternoon, early 1990, and me and Carmel was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking rose hip tea from those brown glass mugs we still got today. It was odd, because after a few years of skipping church, dressing up, and socializing with her work friends, Carmel had reverted to type and started to treat church like a second home. Consequently she’d been in a bad mood for months, but this one afternoon she was filled with the postchurch holiness of the Good Lord, humming a hymn, tapping the table as she read the Bible, dunking chocolate digestive biscuits into her mug, a sure sign she was getting sugar-rush happiness vibes.

  I began to speak, tentatively, carefully sprinkling my softly spoken words with “possibly,” “maybe,” “perhaps,” “trial separation,” and “It’s not been right between us for a long time now, dear.”

  I should-a just come right out with it and not bothered pussyfooting, because Carmel leapt out of her seat, flew over to the cutlery drawer, drew out a steak knife, and wielded it.

  “Yuh forget what yuh promised, ehn? You goin’ take back your word, ehn? Yuh think I been putting up with you all of these years to have you dump me now? Marriage is for life, you bastard, better or worse, thick or thin, sickness or health, life or death.”

  The wife’s subtle powers of persuasion did the trick. It was her first display of domestic violence. Yesterday was her second.

  When I declined Morris’s offer, he went into a major hump that lasted months. Wouldn’t return my calls, wouldn’t answer the door, and one time he walked straight past me in the street. When he did come round, it took about a year for him to really warm to me again.

  Eventually he moved out of the studio flat he’d been renting and into a poky one-bedroom Ujima Housing Association flat in Stamford Hill—with the traffic thundering past day and night. We did it up. None of this flowery wallpaper, flowery carpets, fake flowers, and flying-ducks decor both Carmel and Odette thought the height of sophistication, but white walls, green plants, wooden floors, pine furniture.

  Number of times I offered to buy him someplace bigger for himself, hand over the deeds and everything.

  But that man is stubborn, ta-rah-tid.

  “No, thank you, Mr. Walker. I am perfectly capable of standing on my own two feet.”

  * * *

  I look over at Morris now, over two decades later in this The Year of Our Lord 2010, sitting at the table drinking hot chocolate and reading that rubbish redtop newspaper he pores over so closely you’d think it was the Times Literary Supplement.

  We fit each other.

  Always have. I goin’ make him an offer of a lifetime, and then I goin’ tell the wife.

  “Morris, you know . . . Why don’t you occupy your gray matter with something more substantial? Here, read some Shakespeare, like you said you was goin’ to.”

  I swipe my copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets over at him. He swipes it right back without looking up from his redtop. “Not now, Barry.”

  He starts drinking his hot chocolate in that slurpy-slurpy way of his, putting his head down in the mug and suctioning it up, like a horse in a trough. Morris been living alone too long. Needs someone to remind him every now and again how to behave in company. His personal hygiene is still good, though. Thank God he never gets that skanky smell of ole men who live alone. Every Christmas I buy him Acqua Di Parma’s Colonia Eau de Cologne. Keeps him smelling sweet the whole year.

  “Morris, yuh slurping again. What happened to your brought-upsy?”

  “And you breathing too often and too heavily.”

  “Morris, it’s bad manners, not civilized, and, quite frankly, irritating.”

  “Don’t get me started on what is irritating about you, because I go be here all day. You too critical for a start. When’s Carmel coming back? I starving.”

  “Yuh see how much you listen to me? The respect I get?”

  “Why do I have to respect you? Is more than respect I have for you. Yuh getting greedy now?”

  “I have always had an insatiable appetite, as well you know . . .”

  “Don’t kid yourself, ole boy. Your virility is usually dependent on Viagra these days.”

  He looks up from his rubbish redtop and gives me one of his charming-disarming smiles. The fool can still work his magic.

  Me and him could rub along together under the same roof. Same as we always done. Wind each other up, then wind each other down again.

  I want to broach my plan with him but, just as I’ve worked myself up to it, he returns to reading and I bottle out. I start thinking how this house has been my home since 1963. My feet are cemented to its foundations. Problem is, so are Carmel’s. Lady-Wife won’t give it up, and by rights I should relinquish it to the aggrieved party. But to leave here will be like dismantling and remantling myself in some strange, cold place. Houses don’t turn into homes straightaway. They need years of a life lived to feel comfortable.

  We got three floors: one attic, three bedrooms, two large reception rooms (front room and sitting room in the back), bathrooms, toilets—all freshly cleaned, aired, and anointed with sweet-smelling potpourri. As well as a garage extension large enough to house my 1993 Ford Mustang, 1984 Jaguar Sovereign, and 1970 Buick coupe convertible, which spent years rusting in the forecourt under a cover until Carmel’s moaning got to me and I cleared the garage to make space for it.

  Carmel goes over the house from top to bottom on Saturday afternoons after she does the shopping. She is the Leader of the Clean World, waging her own personal war on the terror of dirt. She even empties out the bathroom and kitchen cupboards weekly, and bleaches them, as if she’s back in Antigua, where deterring tropical creepy crawlies was a necessity. That woman is a lunatic with the Hoover too. I have to move fast or she will ram the damned thing into my legs. Soon as I hear its unmistakable battle roar, I know better than to stay around. I go pass the afternoon with Faruk and Morris and whoever else pops into Bodrum’s, the Turkish café round the corner.

  The street is nice and quiet these days too. Two months ago a whole heap of rabble-rousers moved into the house opposite, started holding parties Saturday nights and charging an entrance fee, like a ’70s blues club. Wembley Stadium–sized sound systems was blaring hip-hop into the early Sunday hours. Boy, we did a-suffer under their bass-thumping, tin-pot dictatorship. Every time I tried to sleep it was like I was vibrating on one those reclining massage chairs me and Morris try out for free on the fourth floor of Selfridges.

  Lo and behold, someone firebombed the place while they was out one evening a fortnight ago. The boys in blue did their investigations but came with up with nothing. I reckon it was ole Giap next door. His house is stuffed with military paraphernalia, and he talks like he still planting booby traps in the jungles of Vietnam. Good luck to him. I ain’t snitching.

  Since then, weekends are back to what they should be, silent and cozy, except for the whirring rumble of a distant lawn mower or the squeals of young children playing in the back gardens.

  It is what I used to.

  It is what I know.

  It makes me feel safe.

  Yet I go leave it?

  Yes, I go be brave enough to do that, right?

  The smell of goat curry and rice and peas in coconut milk slow-cooking on the stove is making me salivate. A big pot that will last the week. No one can beat Carmel’s culinary skills. I will miss them for sure.

&
nbsp; One time when we was peaceably eating, I said, “This food, my dear, is sublime. Cooking is what you was put on earth to do. Why not open up a restaurant?”

  Wifey was reading the Bible. She peered over the top of her headmistressy bifocals and shot me a look that showed my disembodied head being impaled on top of a lamppost at Dalston Junction.

  Touchy . . .

  She’s already baked the macaroni cheese that just needs to be warmed up. Coleslaw is chilling in the fridge, all crunchy with apples and carrots to temper the spices of the curry. And when she comes back from church, she will probably fry some plantain just the way I like it: browned, crisp, slightly burnt at the edges, but soft and succulent inside.

  I watch Morris. He can tell I’m watching him.

  Go on, Morris, ask me what’s up, man.

  “What’s on your mind?” he says, not even bothering to look up from his redtop, activating powers of telepathy honed by sixty years of close contact with his significant other.

  “Me and Carmel.”

  “She give you a hard time last night . . . or rather this morning?”

  “She always give me a hard time. That woman is a froward tongue-lasher, for sure.”

  “You give her a hard time too, don’t forget.”

  “Yes, but she give me a harder time than I give her.”

  “Try telling her that.”

  I can’t tell him Carmel slapped me and got away with it. You can’t tell another man that you’ve been the victim of domestic violence or that you afraid you goin’ wake up one of these days tied to the bed with your foot chopped like in that film Misery.

  “Whose side you on, Morris?”

  “My side. It the only side that don’t let me down. So wha-go-wan, Barry?” He stops reading, sits up, and finally pays proper attention.

  Yuh wan fe know?

  “Morris, mi can’t deal with all of this marital craptitude no more. There comes a point when the mask has to drop and the charade has to stop.”

  Speak plain, Barry, you eedyat.

  “You chose the life you have, remember? So don’t go complaining now and expecting sympathy,” he says, a bit gloatified.

  “I can’t take no more, Morris. Look, I’ve decided to leave Carmel. Seriously. I decided this morning, and you’ll be happy to hear that I’ve finally come round to your idea that we shack up together.”

  I realize I’m getting a taste of how he felt all those years ago. I am not given to jitteriness, but it’s jitteriness I feeling, and vulnerable, like one of those annoying emotionalists.

  But instead of joy and gratitude spreading over Morris’s face at the news that I have finally come around to his way of thinking, exasperation and annoyance cloud it.

  He goes into one. “My idea? You referring back to the last time we had this conversation, which was on September 14, 1989, at about four o’clock in the afternoon to be exact? I was in a bad way after me and Odette had divorced, and you was a coward, Barry. I waited years for you to change your mind while I been . . .” Morris strokes the invisible goatee that used to grow on his chin.

  “You been what?”

  “All on my own.”

  “You been lonely? I see you practically every day.”

  Morris winces. “I prefer the word independent. Who cares? I used to it by now.”

  He puts on his glass-half-empty face.

  This is not the response I expected. What is wrong with him? Just because I been living with Carmel don’t mean I’ve not been lonely as hell too.

  “You should-a talked to me.”

  “No point in talking if it can’t change the situation.”

  “Well, this time I’ve had enough of Carmel, really and truly. I don’t want to live my life with this daily fretment no more. I made the wrong decision all those years ago. Now I go make the right one.”

  “You’re admitting it, finally?” His face goes from half empty to a quarter empty and therefore, mathematically speaking, three-quarters full.

  I keep up the pressure. “We seventy-five years ole next year, Morris. Can you believe it? Wha’ d’ya say we spend the fourth quarter of our cycle together—discreetly? Just like those couples you always telling me about in that rubbish redtop you reading. Those ole widowed folk who meet at bingo and get married. Or that Irish fella you told me about who rediscovered the childhood sweetheart he hadn’t seen since 1935. He was ninety-two, she was ninety-one, and they finally tied the knot last year.”

  C’mon, Morris. Rise up thyself, look pleased, man.

  “You reckon we got another twenty-five years on this earth?” Morris says, wrinkling up his forehead. “Is this your positive-thinking nonsense again? We are two feet away from the knackers’ yard, my friend.”

  “I goin’ be around at least another twenty years, so stop your negativity. What I keep telling you? Glass half full, my man.”

  “Which means it half empty too, right? Or do I not understand the laws of chemistry and physics? Age might be relative, but relative to anybody under the age of seventy, we nearer to death than to life.”

  He’s right: the inescapable truth is that it’s not easy approaching your ninth decade. You look back with nostalgia on the time when the force of your piss could dislodge bricks in a wall, from two whole yards away.

  You remember the time when your body moved as fast as your mind, and it didn’t feel like your legs was filled with concrete when you tried to run.

  You remember the time when you had hair on your head.

  These days you have a little heartburn, you think you having a heart attack.

  The finishing line got that much closer.

  Unless you one of the lucky ones, marathon soon be done.

  But I’m not telling Morris any of this. It will just make him more negative than before. Far as he’s concerned, I am the greatest exponent of the Pollyanna Principle.

  “As for discretion,” he continues, “there’ll be no gossip, Barry. You think folk be whispering, Oh, look at those two horny studs goin’ at it behind closed doors? No, man. They be saying, Oh, look at those two sweet OAP gentlemen keeping each other company and changing each other’s bedpans.”

  Maybe this is Morris’s way of saying yes.

  “Which pretty much sums it up these days, not so, Morris? The whole point of leaving Carmel is to move in with you. I’d rather put up with your bickering and snickering than Carmel’s sniping any day.”

  “How . . . delightful.”

  “And we can get in staff: a cook, housekeeper, gardener; otherwise everything will go to pot.”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, my home is spotless. You see, Barry, one of us is the original domestic goddess and the other one is the original domestic slut.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” I say, waving my hand at him, warming to the possibility of freedom. “Imagine it. We can live anywhere we so-to-choose. How about Miami? I hear that place is full of pooftahs. Maybe we can live in a luxurious bungalow in Florida with sprinklers on the lawn and half-naked butlers serving up our evening aperitif.”

  Morris, who’s been rocking back in his chair, slams it down with such force he should be careful he don’t damage his coccyx.

  “This is no joke, Barry,” he says, his voice hardening. “I’m not having you mess me around. I’m used to living on my own. Is not like I been privately suffering all these years because I was so cruelly spurned by my paramour twenty years ago, same one now making promises he can’t keep.”

  “Morris, I serious,” I protest, reaching out for his arm.

  Except he has gone into lockdown. Some damage limitation is due, and, just when I’ve thought of what to say to unlock him again, he bangs the table like his fist is a gavel. “No, I’d rather things stay as they are at this late stage. You are not goin’ mess me around, Barry. I can’t take that. No, no, no, no, no.”

  Damnation and botheration. I will show him, yes, I will show him that I am not capricious, nor fickle, cowardly, or weakly. I will show him by example. Soo
n as Sunday lunch done, I goin’ have a word with Carmel and tell her I divorcing her . . . before I chicken out.

  Yes, I goin’ do it.

  Like the phoenix rising from the ashes of my marriage, I go spread my wings and be born anew.

  4

  The Art of Sunday Lunch

  Sunday, May 2, 2010

  I hear voices at the door. Carmel is not alone.

  How many times I told her not to bring back the five thousand after church?

  I see the cronies piling in, because we have a multicolored 1970s bead curtain wrapped around the frame where a kitchen door should be. Carmel is of the belief that everything you acquire should last for life—clothes, shoes, bedding, carpet, towels, furniture, husband.

  The cronies are exalted after a three-hour church service, where they’ve been talking in tongues. Many moons ago, when Carmel finally managed to cajole her husband into goin’ to the Pentecostal church she’d joined after she left the Baptist one we both went to in the ’60s (before I realized I didn’t need to go into no church to have a word in God’s ear), I listened closely to this tongue-talking. Was they praying to end suffering, poverty, and wars? To help the lame to walk, the deaf to hear, the blind to see? Not a bit of it. They was praying for a “new car,” “cruise holiday,” “double-fronted fridge-freezer with water dispenser,” and . . . “Just one last thing, dear God, a new loft conversion.”

  Within seconds it is the Charge of the Fright Brigade down my hallway, and they have colonized my kitchen: Miss Merty, Miss Drusilla, Miss Asseleitha, Miss Candaisy.

  I known them all since they was young, seeing as we all lived neck and neck in the Ovals in St. John’s, where everybody knew everybody else’s business.

  Merty and Carmel been partners in crime over sixty years, ever since Merty and her aunt moved next door to Carmel’s house on Tanner Street after Merty’s mother, Eunette, migrated to America and settled in the Bronx, where she raised a second family. She sent money back but never sent for Merty, as promised.

  Drusilla’s mother, Miss Ella, was a higgler who used to sail off to St. Croix and St. Thomas to buy underwear and costume jewelry to sell back in Antigua. Her father, Mr. O’Neal, picked cotton on the Hermitage Estate, where he lived. One step up from slavery, and where you’ll end up for sure was what my father used to threaten me with anytime I tried to shirk my homework.