Mr. Loverman

by Bernardine Evaristo

  you telling him all about your BA in business administration and your career in housing management, responsible for two thousand properties

  (not speaking much about your evil antiman husband, except the divorce you planning)

  until it got dark, but you didn’t want to let go your hands, so you asked God to forgive you for being a bit premature and spent the night at his very nice house overlooking English Harbour (on land his grandfather squatted a hundred years ago, which was now real estate worth millions)

  and it felt so natural, so normal—to be with him

  as was the way he brought you peppermint tea and toast in the morning without asking, both of you sitting outside his bedroom veranda watching the pelicans glide by like little spaceships

  and that evening you danced to Barry Manilow, Harry Belafonte, Michael Bublé, Barry White, on the deck outside his living room, because this is a man who says not a week goes by that he don’t dance

  your bodies smooth and in sync, the gentle way he led, moving his very supple hips, which eventually freed up the fluidity in yours, and you got a little shimmy thing goin’ on which you know he appreciated

  you tried to remember when you last danced and came to the conclusion it was probably in the 1970s

  but never mind, because you determined to look to the future now and not waste any more time regretting the Big Bad Decision that changed the course of your life

  because everything about Hubert feels right

  God has brought him to you and you thanks God and God is Love and Love is Healing

  and you get to thinking about how you could build a Christian retreat on the island (once you’ve taken Barry to the cleaner’s) with its own church, put all of your housing-management experience to good use

  Merty as head housekeeper, putting the fear of God into the staff, Asseleitha as head chef with all of her international cuisine experience from Bush House, seeing as those two been dreaming about coming home for so long

  and Odette keeps saying it’s better to stay active as you age or else you vegetate

  maybe something for Drusilla and Candaisy if they want to come over too, or maybe they just goin’ come over anyway, because they all got English pensions that go a long way in Antigua

  so you can all be together on home soil after fifty years away

  from where you first started out

  the Ole Ladies’ Society of Antigua, O Lord

  to rest our weary souls, O Lord

  cleanse our hearts and minds, O Lord

  bring us closer to God

  to walk in Jesus’ name, O Lord

  give thanks, O Lord! Give thanks!

  18

  The Art of Travel

  Sunday, May 1, 2011

  Me and Morris are in the drive, circumnavigating my cream-colored 1970 Buick Coupe convertible, which is gleaming sleekly and purring gently in the afternoon sun.

  “Dis-a one helluva sexy beast,” I say, stoking its warm, hard, polished bonnet. “Man, I could do indecent things to this animal.”

  “That’s known as motorphilia,” Morris replies. “And if it isn’t, I just coined a term. Mind you, I wouldn’t put it past some folk, though, Barry. You see these sickos out there who are into necrophilia? Well, I read the other day in my very informative redtop about dendrophilia. You know what that means? People turned on by trees.”

  “I say we get turned on by taking this baby for a ride, and the only philia I interested in is Morrisphilia. A-wha’ d’ya say, pardner?”

  The car ain’t been for a spin since 1975, when it broke down on Clapton Road and we pushed it back here with the kind of manpower that could substitute for horsepower in those days.

  Now it’s restored to its former spiffing glory, an idea hatched after what became our First Christmas Together Major Barney.

  * * *

  Morris had roasted a turkey courtesy of Delia’s Complete Cookery Course, which had all of the lashings and trimmings, smashings and swimmings, including some fancy, five-fruit stuffing. Didn’t do a bad job either. I told him if he kept it up I really would civil partner him. He said I was sexist and hadn’t I heard of the women’s liberation movement? I replied that unless he’d had a sex change, he was a fella last time I looked.

  “Yes, Barry, but your problem is that you got a very gendered attitude that’s stuck in the dark ages.”

  Morris should stick to reading gossipy biographies instead of those PC-socio-illogical-smear-campaign books he’s been burying his head in since Lola gave him his own personalized reading list.

  Later that Christmas afternoon I persuaded Morris to come up to Park Lane with me so I could show him a little surprise. We cruised there in my Jag, voyeurizing the Christmas lights and yuletide spirit of late-afternoon celebrators and strollerators. I parked in the underground lot at Marble Arch, and we walked down Park Lane. We was wrapped up good in our new navy Crombies, our new cashmere scarves (his gray, mine red), and a muskrat fur hat (with external earflaps) for me, a sheepskin steppe hat (without external earflaps) for him, all of which I’d bought us for Christmas on Conduit Street.

  As we caught sight of ourselves in a passing window, I said, “Nobody can accuse us of being two ole Caribbean queens in this getup, ehn? More like two retired ambassadors from the Caribbean, or maybe two retired African dictators. Or, rather, I am the erstwhile dictator, while you are my erstwhile chief of staff.” He didn’t respond, so I teased him, “Or maybe you look like my well-dressed manservant.”

  “Barry,” he said, rising to my bait, “anyone ever tell you your mouth bigger than your brains?”

  “All right, then, we look like two equally prosperous Nigerian oil millionaires.”

  “You mean those fat cats who get rich on the profits of oil drilling in the Niger delta while the locals starve?”

  Why does Morris always have to get so serious just when we having fun?

  “Morris, ole dear, ease up. I merely want to walk into any toity-hoity shop in the land and not be refused entry.”

  We arrived at the car showroom that, unfortunately, was closed.

  “Anyways, you think these purveyors of exorbitant commodities for the superrich worry about where Mr. Moneybags gets his money from? Corrupt petrodollar or no corrupt petrodollar, the only thing that talks in this world is filthy lucre, and I still got plenty of it, even after Carmel procured half of it. Who da boss?”

  “Barry, you an eedyat, you know that?”

  That didn’t stop his jaw hitting the pavement when he saw the streamlined red Lamborghini in the beautifully lit window, veritably palpitating with dewy, succulent gorgeousness.

  “Morris,” I said, taking hold of his arm, “I brought you here for a reason.”

  He turned and looked up at me, eyes widening, then narrowing, like he already knew what I goin’ say.

  “I go purchase one of these ve-hi-cals. Yes, my good fella. A Lambo-mi-getti!”

  A late-life crisis couldn’t pass by without my getting the kind of car that would make other men so sick with jealousy they’d want to throw themselves under a speeding train.

  Morris rotated his head slowly from car to me, from me to car, before uttering his most damning verdict: “You see that ve-hi-cal over there? That Lambo-you-getti? Is a work of art a-true, but how can you even contemplate such a vulgar display of wealth when there’s a recession on, and in some parts of this country you could buy several houses for the price of that car? How long you think it goin’ last in your piddling garage in Hackney, of all places, before it’s a case of Lambo-theft?

  “You know what everybody thinks about the Lambo-gits who hare around town in these ve-hi-cals, blasting exhaust pipes so loud it’s like bombs dropping and giving everybody shell shock? They saying, There goes a man with a big ego and a small dick. Yes, boss, everybody laughing at the Lambo-pricks. Yuh sure you want one?”

  Needless to say, Christmas Day ended badly and I didn’t bother speak to the Great Defender of the Downtrodden until the
end of Boxing Day. I ain’t normally the kind of person given to childish sulks (I leave that to everybody else around here), but Morris took it too far and had to enact a grovel of a certain nature to win me round.

  Whereupon, after my mind had been lightened along with my load, I decided he right, yes, he right, as usual. I goin’ Lambo-for-getti.

  At which point I got the brainwave to do up my ole Buick instead.

  We started stripping it down on the second of January, 2011, the day the builders moved in to obliterate all traces of my former life, wife, and strife. They knocked through the front room and back room to create one large living room with wooden floors (plantation-style furniture), French windows, and a patio out into the garden that Magic Fingers Morris (all of a sudden) was intent on redesigning into a zen peace garden with ponds, miniwaterfalls, gravel, rocks, oriental hedges, a pagoda, bamboo screens, and even a little bridge, I ask you.

  We had the kitchen gutted, its back wall replaced with a (parlor-palmed) conservatory. Upstairs the marital bedroom joined forces with the marital bathroom to become one massive bathroom with a bath, commode, and a new power shower with a built-in seat. The two remaining bedrooms became one large master bedroom, and the attic became Morris’s “studio flat,” but only for the purposes of his sons, whom Odette still hadn’t told, and other nosy-parker bigots should they inquire or visit.

  At the same time, we dismantled and remantled the Buick, chased all over London getting parts; ordered from the States whatever we couldn’t find.

  We rebuilt the engine, put in a new body, installed a new ignition box, and had a spare distributor built, replaced the radiator, installed a complete set of 15" by 7" Buick factory chrome wheels, refitted the inside with a tilt steering column with sport steering wheel, had a new Sony AM/FM/CD receiver mounted out of sight under the driver’s seat, and rear speakers, tinted glass, new carpet, and reconditioned secondhand bucket seats to boot.

  We finished it off by sandblasting and spray-painting it from rusty beige to metallic blue, and then finally . . . May Day . . . and our baby was a-ready-a-go vroom . . . vroom . . . vroom.

  * * *

  So there we was, prowling around our handiwork, about to spend a charming spring afternoon hitting the high road, when one-a those shabby rattle-trucks favored by rag-and-bone men pulls up right outside the drive and toots the horn. I don’t recognize the driver—some scruffy middle-aged fella with a gray beard who waves and nods at me like I should know him—or the light-skinned lad in the seat in the middle.

  But I do recognize Daniel when he jumps out and stands on the curb like he don’t know what to do. Neither do I, because I ain’t seen the boy in practically a year.

  I stand there while he looks all shamefaced and embarrassed. Thankfully Morris beckons the boy forward, and he walks hesitantly up the drive, shoulders hunched as if bracing a wind, dragging his feet, trainers scraping the gravel, hands in his pockets, appearing very sheepish.

  What happened to the aspiring Master of the Universe, ehn?

  He grown an inch, at least, and he’s got the beginnings of a mustache. It don’t suit him, but teenage boys don’t care, soon as they start to sprout fluff they want to show it off.

  Daniel stands there fixated by the ground. I am fixated by him. Morris, typically, is fixated on breaking the ice.

  “Right, I’ll just pop in and put the kettle on,” he says chirpily, clapping his hands and rubbing them together like he’s Hilda Ogden in Coronation Street circa 1964.

  “Morris, stay, you don’t have to go nowhere.”

  “Yes, don’t go,” Daniel says with a tentative, hopeful grin. Everybody knows Morris is a soft touch. “Granddad, I just wanted to—”

  Apologize?

  “—apologize about what happened.” I notice his voice ain’t so high and mighty. He can’t style it out when he’s on the back foot, ehn?

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t have anything to do with those boys anymore. They’re history: ancient. All they care about is drink, drugs, sex, and screwing their parents for money to pay for at least two of those categories. Benedict is the one who wanted to take you on. How egregious was that? Disrespecting my elderly grandfather? I barely knew him before that night and . . . you see . . . I was out of it . . . asleep.” He studies me to assess whether he’s said enough to be forgiven, his eyes goin’ all slippery-slidery.

  “I take it you’re absolving yourself of all responsibility, then?”

  “I was drunk.”

  “You chose to get drunk, not so?”

  “That’s debatable. On the one hand, yes, I was paralytic, completely waved, but on the other I didn’t actually know my limit, which is why I exceeded it? Therefore we can say that my drunkenness was accidental rather than intentional.”

  He goin’ make a good politician.

  “I see, so it wasn’t your fault, is that what you saying? You are in no way to blame?”

  He starts to squirm. “I was younger back then, Granddad, just a child, really, and easily led, and you know what it’s like, you get into a mess sometimes and mix with the wrong crowd, but I’m a man now, and I don’t even drink anymore. Getting drunk is for losers. Winners stay sober and rule the world, hey.”

  Another revisionist in the family.

  I stand my ground, hard-faced but aware, for the first time, that it must-a been tough for the lad to deal with his grandfather coming out to his friends like that.

  “Look, these things happen, Granddad.”

  “Not to me they don’t.”

  “Put it this way,” he says, his upper-crust swagger returning relative to the realization Grandy ain’t goin’ back down so easily. “If drunkenness is taken into consideration as a mitigating factor in a court of law, as I do believe it is, then why can’t you accept it?” He raises a grandstanding eyebrow.

  I wanna give him a grandstanding slap. This boy’s humble-pie act lasted less than two minutes. Either this will end in a verbal head-butting, or we have to make up. Problem is, just as I was getting to know him, I thought I’d lost him. I liked being involved in my grandson’s life. I liked being around a member of the so-called younger generation, full of plans and dreams, instead of looking at plans for funeral plots, metaphorically speaking.

  Truth is, I missed the cocky little sod.

  I was a journeyman to grief . . .

  O ye.

  “How yuh mother?” I ask, detouring from this stand-off.

  His eyes lose their defensive battlements position and become animated. “Mad as hell, as to be expected. But happier too. She’s found herself a (hush hush) special male friend that she met at a conference, which keeps her out of my hair, at least. He’s fifty-seven, white, and a high-court judge, which, as she explained to me, more than makes up for his first two failings. (Like, if that’s not racist and ageist, then what is?) I have my suspicions he could be a secret feeder. Cooks her these three-course meals most nights, and it’s showing. I’ve got my eye on him because I’ve got to watch out for Mum. I mean, someone has to, given her mental state.”

  “Maxine never mentioned him to me.”

  “Auntie Maxine doesn’t know. Mum’s keeping him hidden away for now. Guess what, though? She told me everything about . . . you two.” He gestures at us, awkwardly. “But swore me to secrecy, because she’d promised Gran not to tell anyone. Then, and this is what she’s like, she spent the whole weekend going through her phone book and telling all her thousands of female friends that her father’s a closet gay with his best friend. I heard her walking around the house dishing the ins and outs. She dined out on you, Grandy, for months . . .”

  “And what do you think of your granddad?”

  “I think Mum’s conservative with a small c when it comes to certain issues.” He shakes his head. “Whereas I’m actually an all-round Progressive with a capital P. You’ve always been good to me. I won’t ever forget that, and I am sorry. About what went down. Believe.”

  “Here,” I say, e
xtending my arms to give him a man-hug.

  He reciprocates, which suggests he really might be okay with having a Barrysexual—correction, homosexual (la-di-dah)­—grandfather.

  “I can’t stay, Grandy,” he says as we part. I grip him firmly by the shoulders before letting him go. “I dropped by because I wanted you to hear something really important. Listen to this: I applied to Harvard and I’ve not only been accepted—I knew that back in March and forced Mum to keep her big mouth shut upon pain of death—but I’ve just heard this morning that I’ve been awarded a full scholarship.”

  Harvard? My grandson? Oh my days. Pass the smelling salts!

  “Guess who’s going to Harvard!” he shouts at full pelt while doing one of those hip-hop-style dances that look like he’s got both hands wrapped around a giant wooden spoon and he’s stirring a glutinous stew clockwise in a giant cauldron.

  Me and Morris start slapping his back and each other’s backs and doing a fancy jig-a we own.

  “I couldn’t wait to tell you,” he says, relishing the moment. “When I graduate, I’ll apply to Harvard Law School, of course.”

  We all gone soppy.

  “Don’t forget us when you’re a hotshot lawyer charging us £500 per hour for saying Hello or Happy Christmas on the telephone,” Morris says. “Don’t forget the little-little people.”

  “Speak for yourself, I ain’t no little-little person.”

  Daniel laughs. “Good Lord, I’m not actually going into law, Uncle Morris. A law degree is my route into politics, and where better than Obama’s alma mater? I’ll probably do a DPhil in politics at Oxford afterward, as I’ll need access to this country’s elite networks in order to start ascending the slippery slope of a political career. I’m going to form my own party: UK Progressives.”

  Just then the truck behind hoots its horn. Daniel turns around, gesticulates he’s coming.

  “I’ve got to go now. I’m on my way to my friend’s dad’s farm in Epping, and we’re already late. He’s one of my new mates, Nelson, after Nelson Mandela? We met on a Leaders of the Future weekend. As soon as we stopped here, his dad said he used to go out with a girl who lived on this road, then he recognized the house and you. I assumed it was Maxine, but he said, No, Donna. Can you believe it? My friend’s dad used to go out with my mum? That’s crazy. He said it didn’t work out with her, which is probably a polite way of saying she was showing early signs of insanity even then.”