Mr. Loverman

by Bernardine Evaristo

  And since when does she carry shoulder bags? Carmel’s bags have always been modeled on the Queen’s.

  I don’t stop Morris as he takes his leave, silently, diplomatically, scooping up the two novels (wisely) in the process.

  Me and her face each other.

  Me standing by the window, hearing rain splatter against it, wondering if she goin’ send me through it.

  She watching me watching her, enjoying my astonishment as I absorb her newly renovated self.

  She don’t appear angry, don’t appear hurt. She appears . . . confident . . . magnificent.

  I been rehearsing my speech so long but the thought of delivering it . . .

  This is not the person I thought I’d be divorcing. Who is this person?

  Donna, dressed in a smart black work trouser suit, has taken up position as sentinel and is blocking the kitchen doorway. She should get lost, because I really need to have an entre nous with her mother.

  As if Carmel can read my mind, she says, “Thank you for your help, but you can leave us alone now, Donna. I can handle this one.”

  What? I goin’ be handled?

  “Okay,” her guard dog mutters reluctantly, like she don’t want to miss the histrionics. “I’ll see you later.” She goes over to her mother, gives her a peck on the cheek.

  As she leaves, she flashes me a smirk that insinuates she’ll be returning to help her mother pack my body parts into black rubbish bags and bury me in the garden under cover of darkness.

  At this point I realize I am trapped, because if Carmel decides to pull a knife on me there’s a massive kitchen table blocking my exit.

  Except this too is strange. Carmel don’t look like she ready to serve up my intestines.

  “Sit down, Barry.”

  I do as she says, and she takes her position at the opposite end of the table, not slouching.

  “Yuh looking good, Carmel.”

  “That’s an understatement, yuh no think?”

  “Uh, yes . . . You looking absolutely splen—”

  “I know what I look like, Barry. I don’t need you to tell me anything. Now, this is what I goin’ tell you . . .” She eyeballs me, but I used to that, except it ain’t resentment coming off her, it something else. Pity? Is pity she feeling?

  “Carmel,” I say, realizing I’d better get my speech in before hers, “I’m aware you not been happy for some time now. We’ve both been lonely in this—”

  “Barry, shut up.” She waits for me to appear suitably chastised. “Now, contrary to your assumptions, I am quite contented, as per the unusually.”

  She takes her time, fiddles with the bangles on her wrists. Her turquoise nails are long, shapely, manicured.

  What has she been up to?

  The rain is now thrashing against the window, signaling summer’s left us and winter ain’t far behind.

  “After the funeral, I stayed on to sort out Papi’s business. He left everything to me, his only child. Don’t worry, my lawyer is seeing off those scavengers.” She tchupses and skins up her nose, ruining her new image. “Talking of lawyers, I’ve returned to wrap up my life here and start a new one over there. Yes, you wasn’t expecting that, was you? First thing I got to do is lawyer up, as Donna puts it, because I starting divorce proceedings and you not getting off lightly.”

  She removes her wedding ring, which, seeing as she’s thinner, comes off easily. She flicks it so it rolls like a wheel across the table, dying a death right in front of me, where I leave it.

  “I caught up with Odette over there and, like you always saying, when women get together they natter. She told me I got to forgive, same way she did. Unforgiveness is the poison you drink every day, hoping the other person will die, she kept reminding me. Well, I working on it. Yes, I working on it, because you got the sickness in you and therefore can’t help yourself. But it hard, Barry. It so hard because, way I see it, I spent fifty years of my life betrayed by your lie. Missing all the clues that was staring me in the face. I been through some bad times over there, Barry, realizing my whole adult life been wasted. Odette says you gave me two daughters, so it’s not wasted, but she wrong.

  “Here’s another thing I found out: you was being talked about even from when you was at school. It just as well you married me when you did, but that was the whole point, wasn’t it? Fifty years with a man who used me as his cover story to protect his disgusting business, making a mockery of me. How yuh think that make me feel?”

  She arises without her customary huffing and puffing, fetches a glass of water to drink. Carmel? Water?

  “Yuh see, Barry, I’m not lonely no more. So don’t you start telling me I am. Remember Hubert from school? Of course you do, because you stole me from him. Well, he back in my life and we getting on just fine. More than fine. You shock again, eh? He got a PhD at Howard University in Washington, where he became a maths professor. He’s not a skinny sixteen-year-old neither. He taller than you, slimmer than you, more hunky, and not bald neither.”

  She registers everything that flickers over the face that I am now convinced shows everything.

  “I goin’ back to him. My life here is done. Don’t worry, I ain’t in the business to dish the dirt. What good that do me, eh? Let everybody know what a fool I been?

  “Donna’s taking a fortnight off work to help me with everything. I’ll be here every day from ten a.m. to start sorting through stuff, and you better not be here, neither sight nor sound. I sending in the packers next week, and I don’t want you here then either. Don’t worry, I’m not stripping a house that represents half a century of misery.

  “As for that Jim Reeves record you scorn so much? Ditto. I can’t wait to take a hammer to it. You lucky I ain’t taking a hammer to you, but you’re not worth a life sentence. I done my time already.

  “I don’t want to see or speak to you again, unless you contest the divorce, which you won’t.”

  “Carmel, Carmel, dear, I—”

  “Shut up. You a sick man, Barry, and the only person who can help you now is God.”

  17

  Song of Freeness

  2010

  returning home after thirty years, landing at V.C. Bird International, blasted

  by the sticky heat you not used to no more and feeling out of place with all of the English tourists pouring off the plane in their shorts and sun hats, because your little Antigua has become a number one islan’ in de sun destination since you was last here and when

  the ole straw-hatted Calypsonian strumming his guitar on the tarmac nodded at you

  like maybe he knew you, like maybe you went to Miss Davis Primary together, or he was a childhood neighbor perhaps, or even a half-brother, because although you’d concede it to nobody, least of all Barry and not even Donna, given Papi’s track record with Loreene and all the other whores Mommy told you about, you wouldn’t be surprised if you was related to half of St. John’s

  and you nodded curtly back as you piled into the tiny arrivals room and joined the queue for foreigners, rummaging in your bag for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland passport that you was once so desperate to get hold of

  except it felt both right and wrong because

  after so long away you don’t really belong here no more, do you, Carmel?

  but how can you not belong where you born, girl?

  and Cousin Augusta drove you straight off to Holberton Hospital, where you felt such rage when you saw Papi so comatose and pathetic, unable to register you’d come back

  for him

  to forgive him, but now

  seeing him there

  tucked up in white sheets in his own private room

  dying comfortably in his sleep, all shriveled and innocent-looking after he’d caused Mommy so much pain her whole married life . . .

  last time you saw him was thirty-two years ago, when she was being lowered into the grave and

  all of those feelings came rushing back and you had to squash them down, use all of
your self-control not to release a torrent of abuse at a man who’d lived longer than he deserved

  because Barry was right: you despised him, so why was you playacting the dutiful daughter?

  and Cousin Augusta said you must stay at hers until Donna arrived, but you needed to see your childhood home, his home, immediately, urgently, otherwise you’d be floundering without an anchor

  but you was so shock at how everything had remained the same but changed

  same grandfather clock in the hallway—one hand missing, no longer ticking

  same parade of family photographs—darkened under a patina of dust (the Millers, Gordons)

  same mahogany tallboy at the end of the corridor—one drawer hanging off

  same wicker chairs in the sitting room—unraveling

  same round teak dining table—water marks disguising the inlay, and damp corrupting the wood

  Papi’s prized Viennese armoire—cornice and carvings chipped

  Papi’s prized French Directoire desk—its rolltop stuck halfway up

  Mami’s “Parisian” sofa suite in her bedroom—sunken, stained, dirty stuffing sticking out

  your childhood brass bed—without a mattress and its full complement of springs (upon which you finally lost your virginity two weeks after your marriage and the day before you traveled to England)

  everything stale and silent, moldy and molting, smelly and musty, cobwebs and dust, ashes to ashes, just like Papi, barely holding on

  Papi, who was still everywhere and nowhere

  and before him the long-ago forebear who squatted this uncultivated plot of land that became Tanner Street in the days when your people wasn’t allowed to buy a little bit of your own island

  and you and Augusta talked on the veranda, you on the rusty Hollywood swing still there (unbelievably), the floor creaking and sagging with age (like you)

  the garden overgrown beyond recognition, wild bush and bramble, soggy date-palm leaves heaped on the ground, weeds pushing up through the paved pathway already cracked by tree roots intent on returning the island to forest

  like Papi’s mind, she said, all gnarled up, all tangled up

  he wouldn’t have nobody helping him, even though his hands shook so much he could barely hold his breakfast mug of rum, and he could hardly walk even with crutches, and he could-a got a houseboy or a housegirl, but no, it was as if he was punishing himself because

  your daddy changed, Carmel, ole age softened him like his flesh

  Augusta recalled sitting on this very veranda three years earlier—for seven years she’d pop by weekly with his shopping—and he sat there, Carmel, and wept over his younger self who’d done unspeakable things to his wife because of the uncontrollable monster inside of him, just like his father, and even his grandfather—a long line of angry Miller men goin’ back to slavery days—who took it out on their wives

  O my offense is rank, he said, it smells to heaven . . .

  which is why, when your mother died, he never remarried

  just had a few women comin’ and goin’, and the last one was some ghetto guttersnipe who let her pickney tear up the place until he kicked them out

  then he was alone these past nine years, upset at how he’d been abandoned by his daughter, by the granddaughters who barely knew him, the great-grandson he’d never even met, all of his brothers and sisters long dead—Eudora and Beth, Alvin and Aldwyn

  everybody gone, Augusta, everybody gone . . .

  and you felt so bad, so guilty, so regretful you hadn’t come back earlier and reconciled with him

  and when his spirit finally passed it was like Mommy dying all over again but worse

  and you was so relieved when Donna arrived to help you manage your feelings and his estate, which wasn’t much, because he’d outlived the demise of the Early Bird stores

  a mobile-phone shop and cheap clothes shop was where his stores used to be, which made him such a big-big man in this small-small town

  that was smaller than both you and Donna remembered

  but you marveled at Redcliffe Quay and Heritage Quay and what a shock—English Harbour redeveloped beyond belief, with expensive properties and gated communities for the expats, returnees, and holiday-makers, and the international yachts, the regattas, the cruise ships stopping off on their round-Caribbean trip

  which gave you an idea it might be a nice thing to do—a cruise

  you, Donna, and Maxine seeing the other islands, but Donna said Maxine would be too much of a handful, and you tried to stand up for your younger girl because you know Donna has always been green-eyed about Maxine

  who you actually feel sorry for these days because you her mother and she ain’t happy

  and Donna backed down and said okay, Maxine can come too

  and then she had to go back to work in London and you was left alone

  sorting through Papi’s finances you bumped into Odette in town, just outside the First Caribbean International Bank, looking nothing like the poor, distressed creature who left England twenty-one years earlier

  wearing this orange kaftan with big sunflowers all over it and bald, yes, she bald, just like that Madeline Bell from the ’60s, with big white hoop earrings, but not because she got alopecia but because she’d decided to go from high-maintenance to no-maintenance hair on principle

  liberating herself from the billion-dollar fortune the hair moguls extract every year out of we colored ladies

  over lunch at Rum Baba at English Harbour she took hold of your hands across the table

  I hope you don’t mind my saying this, Carmel, but you look so tired, so down-in-the-dumps, dear, like you not been looking after yourself. I know you must be grieving for your daddy, but to be blunt, you’ve really let yourself go. Years of marriage to that man has taken their toll on you, what you need is some TLC

  which was such a relief, because you’d been waiting for someone to reach out and pull you up, and who better than Odette, who was always such a great girl, always dancing and making joke, and you hated it when Barry used to slag her off all the time

  and felt sorry to see her crushed to pieces over the years of being married to Morris too, not realizing the same thing was happening to you

  a destroyed woman who needed rebuilding, you both agreed, after you’d spent hours discussing what your respective husbands been getting up to with each other behind your backs

  How could I have not noticed, Odette? What’s wrong with me, Odette?

  you was so devastated at what she told you that she drove you back to Miss Odette’s Boutique Hotel and Spa and stayed praying with you all night long and ordered you to stay as long as you wanted, as her guest, until you stopped feeling either suicidal or homicidal

  so you stayed there in a bungalow on the hillside along with all the rich African American ladies of a certain age who paid plenty for some TLC yoga retreats at Odette’s

  and you met Marcus, Odette’s retired architect boyfriend of six years, which was the biggest surprise, and he treated her so nicely and

  you started using the cross-trainer in her gym for ten minutes every morning to get your metabolism goin’, as the trainer instructed, even though every muscle in your body hurt, because you’d never done any proper exercise in your life except for housework, walking to the shops, or church

  started doing some gentle yoga too and water aerobics in Odette’s lovely infinity pool, started taking Alexander technique classes to get your posture corrected, and finally you had a massage

  which you’d resisted for ages, because you don’t trust people who choose a job that involves groping naked people all day, and in any case

  nobody has seen you undressed since Reuben in 1990 and you wasn’t about to strip for a stranger, not even down to your bra and undies

  and at first you couldn’t relax in case the young woman tried anything funny, but in the end you gave in and was sobbing so much she had to stop and she said

  she’d never come across such rock-hard
knots in all her years as a masseuse

  There’s a lot of pain trapped in your body, Mrs. Walker, and you’ve got to let it out as part of your healing process, which you did, three times a week, until the knots started to melt away

  like your rheumatoid arthritis, which virtually disappeared in the heat, like you was being reborn again and starting to enjoy yourself, enjoying

  breakfast one morning, eating a big plate of fresh fruit salad per Odette’s instructions

  which you’d never done before, preferring instead your usual home breakfast fry-up of eggs, sausages, ackee, yam, and, lately, even when you’re stuffed, adding a couple of pancakes with syrup, which Odette said was because you was overeating to avoid dealing with the difficult issues in your life and that food is for nourishment and not for numbing the emotions, Carmel

  and you was enjoying the clear, sunny morning of your island, as if you was a regular tourist like the ones you’d been watching getting onto a catamaran to spend the day cruising the coast

  when, from behind the breakfast deck, by the steps that led to the paths that led to the bungalows spread out on the hillside, you heard

  Is that my Carmelita? Carmelita! Carmelita! What a pretty name that is. What a pretty girl she is . . .

  and the longer you stared at this somehow familiar stranger, the more you realized it was Hubert, but not the skinny, stuttering Hubert of before, but an older, handsomer, manly version with a gorgeous head of white hair

  looking at you adoringly, and you thanked the Lord he hadn’t seen the wreck you was when you first arrived, especially

  when he told you he was a widower, goes church every day, only listens to Bible radio, reads the scriptures one hour every morning and one hour every evening, and moved back to Antigua permanently after forty-four years in America, where he’d been a professor at Howard University

  Always carried a torch for you, Carmel . . .

  which he didn’t mind anybody knowing about, even on that first day when you went walking round English Harbour holding hands like you was childhood sweethearts again, like he was proud to be seen with you, like you was already his woman