Mr. Loverman

by Bernardine Evaristo

  and you building up your nice collection of ornaments too

  and then the Ladies’ Army of Antigua marched into your house a week ago and straight into the sitting room and sat lined up on the settee: Merty wearing her gray gabardine and blue hat; Drusilla wearing her beige mac with matching rain hat; Asseleitha wearing her black coat and new green beret; and Candaisy wearing the secondhand fox-fur coat Robert bought her when he won the pools

  and you faced the ladies in your armchair, sitting upright in your blue button-up maternity dressing gown with food stains down the front, trying to appear normal

  and they said

  Carmel, dear, you got to deal with it, same way we always had to deal with it, life goes on no matter what you feeling, no matter that you crying and feel

  like dying

  shape up, Carmel, shape up and look after your family and come back to church to get some holy healing from the Good Lord

  but you can’t, can you, because you is a pitiful blob

  you even forgot Donna’s birthday yesterday, didn’t you?

  when it’s your job to remember, not Barry’s, but when he found her crying into her pillow in the bedroom he’d painted all pink for her with rose stencils

  he got on the blower to Merty, who came straight over to look after Maxine

  while Barry took Donna out for a birthday meal of fish and chips and a bottle of Coke and strawberry ice cream for afters at Fruit of the Sea on Kingsland High Street

  and when she came home so happy and ran up to you, what you do?

  you pushed her away, bitch

  and Barry hugged her up and just looked at you all sad-eyed, because you messing up your family home so bad and he said

  he goin’ make an emergency call to the doctor to take you in before you really harm someone, but you shut him up with

  over my dead body

  and he could see you meant it, because last time was ten years ago, when Donna was one month old, and he found you crying in the bath with a knife, but you was so pathetic you didn’t even leave no scars on your wrists

  the tablets worked that time, but they made you feel like a zombie

  a zombie housewife who couldn’t use the brains she was born with

  and why did you leave school so young, you bloody fooooool?

  but what work can you get with no qualifications?

  you twenty-six now, Carmel

  practically OAP already

  ten years has passed so fast

  you ruined, girl

  y o u r u i n e d

  no way are you going to allow a doctor to prod around inside your mind

  because whatever is going on in there, nothing can make it right

  ever

  6

  The Art of Relationships

  Monday, May 3, 2010

  It is the day after what I call the Sunday Horror Show and what Morris calls the Nightmare on Cazenove Road, and the wife is at this very moment shooting across the planet in a metal contraption shaped like a condor en route to Antigua. I dutifully drove her to Heathrow Airport in my 1984 Jaguar Sovereign at five o’clock this morning.

  We had a very reasonable conversation in my head as we wended our way across London in the misty hour. I found the perfect words to persuade her we divorcing, and she had no choice but to accept my fait accomplished.

  Except, in the sober light of morning, I realized my timing was completely off. How could I ask for a divorce when she was about to board a plane to be with her dying father after a thirty-year estrangement?

  We barely spoke.

  “Which terminal you flying from?”

  “Three.”

  Which airline you flying with?”

  “Virgin.”

  “How long you gone for?”

  No answer. Great. So how long will I have to wait?

  Then, at check-in, Carmel turned, looked up at me, and asked, “What happened to us, Barry?” as if we was in one of those romantic comedies she likes to watch and which, upon occasion, I am forced to sit through.

  I wanted to tell her we should never-a got married.

  “Life happened, Carmel.”

  I watched her shuffle through the departure gate wearing one of those shapeless cardigans that reaches the knees, limping with that bad hip or back or whichever one it is, her feet in those orthopedic-looking shoes women wear when they’re not interested in trying to impress men no more. Big Mistake. Is trying to impress us that keeps them on their toes. She’s getting a stoop too, because she never took the advice I doled out to our daughters to sit straight and walk tall.

  I can’t believe this is the sweet girl I knew back home in Antigua. What happened to her? I think England ruined her, changed her for the worse. She used to be a happy person, yes, happy-go-lucky as we used to say, and pretty too. Now look at her, the embodiment of misery.

  Yet this was the girl who used to quickstep everywhere in her clickety-clicks, glancing about her like a ballerina striking a calculated pose to catch everybody with her loveliness, always beautifully attired in those flowery dresses splashed with bright colors women wore in the ’50s, her hourglass figure cinched with a wide purple belt.

  Women have that brief period between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one when they are naturally fresh-faced and attractive, if you like that sort of thing. After that, it’s downhill all the way to the grave.

  Men, on the other hand, mature nicely.

  Samuel L. Jackson, Sean Connery, George Clooney, Morgan Freeman, BJW.

  But oh my, Carmel was a lovely young lady. I was proud to take her to dances after Morris left. She was a brilliant dancer. We’d practice for hours in my mother’s yard.

  I see her now—twirling her favorite purple satin skirt like a whirling dervish, wriggling her hips fluid as water, kicking those shapely little legs out sharply, pointing her balletic toes in those white bobby socks girls used to love to wear, letting me scoop her up, fling her taut little body into the air, and then catch her, and somehow she’d get her legs around my neck and lift herself up to do a somersault over my head and then backflip on to the floor like she made of rubber, and I’d spin around and she’d stoop down and I’d roll over her back and she’d leap onto me all aerodynamically, as fast and smooth as a swallow in flight, and all the while our legs and arms was jumping and jerking and jiving in time to the beat of “Rock Around the Clock,” and she’d be showing off her frilly, polka-dot, American knickers to all of the young fellas in St. John’s.

  Of course we never did nothing in that department. Carmel might-a danced like a goer, but she was pure, even past her wedding night.

  As for me, I was always trying to banish thoughts of Morris, who had abandoned me for England. Before he left we used to go to dances together, standing coolly in our short-sleeved white shirts and black ties, leaning against the bar that was usually a rickety trestle table—surrounded. The girls might have loved Morris, the Junior Boxing Champ of Antigua, but they was in thrall to the Prince of Antigua, exaggerating the roll of their hips when they saw me. Me and Morris secretly amused ourselves with the knowledge that we was both taken.

  Or we’d sit in the dark on the rocks at the quay, enjoying the music away from the dance deck and the whirly-gigging teenagers pounding the floorboards, sharing a cigar we’d saved up the whole week to buy.

  Couldn’t sit out there the whole night, though. We’d have to join in or folk would wonder what was up.

  Later, me and him would trek miles to Fort James Beach and find our hidden spot, always alert to sounds, just in case somebody chanced upon us and wrecked our lives.

  We’d take a plastic bottle of homemade hooch and lie on the sand, working out the constellations, listening to the wash and crash of waves, drinking in the night.

  I knew Carmel from young, used to see her and the cronies-in-waiting sitting on the steps of her father’s veranda in their big house on Tanner Street, eating peanut-butter snaps, peppermint sticks, black pineapple slices. As they
got older and bolder, Merty used to run into the road and offer me a taste of her cane syrup poured over a lump of ice.

  She was the ringleader even then.

  “We nah sweet enough for you?” she’d holler, pushing up her budding titties and running down the road after me.

  When I worked for Carmel’s father, Miss Carmel was always around, flirting.

  Evenings, Mr. Francis Miller, famous scion of the Early Bird stores, sat on his veranda filling out his big wicker chair in a pinstripe “city-gent” suit, waistcoat, gold watch chain dangling from a pocket, tie done up tight, collar buttoned down either side, and sweat running down his patchy-brown bald head.

  A copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare usually open on his lap.

  “Live loathed, and long, / Most smiling, smooth, detested parasites, / Courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears, / You fools of fortune, trencher-friends, time’s flies, / Cap and knee slaves, vapours, and minute-jacks! Where this come from, Barry? Tell me its provenance.”

  What the blasted ’eck did provenance mean?

  I acted as if I was on the verge of replying.

  “Timon of Athens, of course,” he said through his nose.

  Mr. Miller loved throwing Shakespeare quotes at every man around him, including me, which was like a ball we had to catch without dropping, knowing we all had butter fingers.

  That man was a buffoon as well as a brute, but he was also my boss.

  These days I know my Shakespeare, but I don’t use it to inflate myself.

  When I asked for his daughter’s hand, he was delighted, because, like most buffoons, he had no idea what I really thought of him.

  Soon as we got married, we migrated to England, Carmel fell pregnant with Donna and lost her mind that first time.

  Watching her disappear into departures this morning, I wished she’d let me go all those years ago. If someone asks for their freedom, you got to give it to them; otherwise you become their jailer.

  Soon as she’s back here on dry land, I goin’ serve up her papers, although how long I’ll have to wait I don’t yet know.

  Second I fetched back home from the airport, Maxine was on the blower.

  “Dad, you and I are going to talk—this afternoon.”

  Silence.

  “Alone.”

  This is the problem with having a wife and two daughters.

  I called Morris soon as I put the phone down and later we took the bus and tube to Piccadilly Circus.

  “Morris,” I said, before he could get in first, “I couldn’t tell her, given her current predicament, her daddy dying and everything. How can I heap trouble upon woe?”

  “You’re right, Barry, I was thinking the same thing myself last night. We both got caught up with your change of heart and wasn’t thinking straight. This just means you got to keep up your resolve, right? Soon as she back, you got to do the doings.”

  “Without a doubt. Fear not, Morris, I ready for the showdown.”

  “Don’t mess me around, Barry, or you might lose me.”

  “Come nah, man, you don’t mean that.”

  “Don’t I?”

  In the packed tube nearly all the passengers was fiddling with their mobile phones. As me and him was still a bit awkward, I decided to embark on a mutually harmless topic of conversation.

  “Look at them. All patients showing signs of mobile-phone madness . . .”

  Morris didn’t reply.

  “Playing childish computer games probably,” I added.

  “Or listening to mobile music,” he finally responded, scanning the carriage end to end. I did a quick check too, and half the patients was wearing earphones, their eyes glazed.

  “Zombies,” I said, feeling we was getting back on track.

  “And they get withdrawal symptoms, Barry, if they don’t get their fix. I read about it.”

  “It is the beginning of the end of proper communication for the human race. Remember how back home we used to sing group songs in the evening?”

  “Everybody was a singer back then, Barry. When did you last hear me sing?”

  “Can’t remember and, to be honest, can’t say I miss your dulcet tones, dearie.”

  “Uh, shut up, man.”

  “I was so shocked when I came here and realized English people watched television every evening for hours without talking to each other.”

  “This new generation are worse, though, Barry. All locked up inside themselves. It’s like we’re in a science fiction movie and they’re the robots we’ve just cloned.”

  “O brave new world, what’s got such people in it,” I proclaimed, emoting and eyerolling like that hammy Laurence Olivier they all rated so much.

  Morris started chuckling, which was a relief. I feel so bad when he’s off with me.

  I been entertaining him ever since I sat behind his goody-two-shoes self in Mr. Torrington’s algebra class when we was eleven. Squirted water down the back of his neck and told him it was my piss. The whole back row cracked up. He almost cried like a girl until I admitted I was kidding. He got the joke and followed me around after that.

  Couldn’t get rid of him.

  Still can’t . . .

  “That novel wasn’t half bad, Barry. Remember you gave it to me to read? Although I am of the opinion that Nineteen Eighty-Four is better.”

  “One of my small victories, Mr. de la Roux. Getting you reading fiction. Remember the days when people sat on the tube reading good books?”

  “Not everyone’s a book reader like you. A newspaper will do.”

  “Not that rubbish redtop you read, Morris. Full of tittle-tattle, sensationalism, soundbitism, and nakedism.”

  “Why you always pontificating? I do read books, history books and those fat biographies my sons get me for Christmas.”

  “Biographies are just glorified gossip too. Novels, poetry, and plays are the great investigators of the human psyche. Nothing can beat ’em. And as a real literature aficionado, I’m in the top 10 percent of the Great British Public. Did I tell you about my love affair with Mr. Shakespeare?”

  “A thousand times a-ready.”

  “Remember I told you about Dr. Fleur Goldsmith in my Taming of the Shrew class at Birkbeck last year? First time I walked into that classroom she give me such a welcoming beam, while the rest of them looked at me a bit quizzical, like maybe I should be redirected to carnival studies or something.”

  “No . . . really? I wonder why.”

  I ignore him.

  “I know that play, though, Barry. Elizabeth Taylor film in the ’60s. Wonder what happened to her.”

  “Dr. Goldsmith is an intellectual firecracker of the highest order, kind too, because she never patronized nobody, but I soon discovered that as the only man in a class full of bra-burners who thought Petruchio was a male chauvinist pig, I had to speak up for my gender. He’d just been given an ill-tempered vixen to handle, that’s all. I empathized with him, actually.”

  “You don’t say . . .”

  “The ladies took to me soon enough, especially Sally and Margaret, two retired lady-doctors who definitely had a crush. I wasn’t surprised, especially after we went on a class trip to see Taming of the Shrew at the National Theatre. I met their husbands.”

  Morris sniggered and put his hand to his mouth like a mischievous kid.

  “Morris, I carrying my age better than most, not so?”

  “Oh yes, you a real heartthrob like George Clooney or Brad Pitt.”

  “A dashing and fully paid-up member of the Alpha class. A reasoner and a thinker of note? These people down here fast becoming Epsilons, self-selecting.”

  “I am Alpha too, so you can get off of your high horse.”

  “Yes, but there is Alpha and Alpha plus.”

  “You know what I like about you, Barry? You are consistent. I surprised you don’t need a neck brace to hold up your head.”

  “Neck brace won’t do it, my man. My brain’s so big my head needs special scaffolding.�
��

  “Timber scaffold won’t be strong enough, then.”

  “Of course not—steel.”

  “Reinforced.”

  “Actually, solid adamantine, as described by Virgil in the Aeneid, Book 6. A generic term for a superhard substance. Adamantine. Nice word. I looked it up, as behoves a man of my insatiable intellectual curiosity.”

  “Barry?”

  “What?”

  “You gonna get a fat lip if you don’t shut up.”

  At this juncture, the train slowed into Piccadilly Circus Station, and we two retired gentlemen of the Caribbean disembarked.

  * * *

  As we make our way along Bond Street we draw curious, even, dare I say it, admiring glances. Me and Morris wearing the classic ’50s suits Levinsky runs up for us and the quintessentially English brogues I get handmade from Foster & Son on Jermyn Street. Me and my spar can’t walk up Bond Street looking like a pair of dossers.

  As the sun hots up, I take off my jacket and fling it over my shoulder. Summer is in the air, and I feel myself longing for the dark days of winter to disappear.

  We enter Café Zanza: dark wood panels, parquet floor, muted lighting, small round tables, flowers, and, accentuating the mellow ambience, the mellifluous voice of Ella Fitzgerald effortlessly caressing the notes of “I’ve Got You under My Skin.”

  That woman didn’t need no autotune to sing live.

  We approach a counter with so many sugarific cakes on display a person could get diabetes just looking at them. Morris smiles at the washed-out barista with greasy, scraped-back hair and a slash for a mouth. “Hello, my dear.”

  She can’t be bothered to smile back, let alone greet him, as if we don’t belong here.

  Gargoyle.

  I dash her one bad look, except she don’t notice and I can’t keep scowling forever. Morris, on the other hand, is too much of a gentleman and tries again, speaking with the soft, compassionate tone he uses with the aggressive, the ancient, the mentally unstable, and, frequently, his lover.

  Sometimes I think Morris is really too nice for his own good.

  “How are you today? Feeling good? Feeling so-so? Feeling life could be a little better?”