by Shani Mootoo
Viveka let her head fall lightly against the turned-up window, aware that a thousand other heads had likely greased that same spot before her. She guessed — hoped — that head lice didn’t live on glass.
She liked thinking that the flood and the havoc it wreaked would not have made one iota of difference to the pace of travel along this route, whether she was in a private chauffeur-driven car or in this public taxi. But for the man standing in the doorway of his partially submerged house, having choices might have made a difference, she mused. He probably couldn’t afford, or didn’t have the technical knowledge, to build any higher. She ought to have said this to the driver, should have been less shy, Viveka thought. The classroom at the university seemed to be the only place where she was not shy or demure, or where she thought her plain looks were not a disadvantage. Here in the car, her plainness contributed to her reluctance to speak up. She wanted to bet that if she had spoken up, no one would have heard her or someone would have begun to speak over her voice, blocking out whatever she was saying. Or the correctness of her grammar and the pronunciation of her words — in short, her accent, though a Trinidadian one — would have pegged her as a local but not one of the usual taxi- travelling clientele and therefore her contribution would either have been ignored, rebuffed, or experienced as a silencing of the others. Suddenly she was wishing she had worn lipstick — even just a faint colour, nothing like the dark purple worn by the Indian woman up front — or even a push-up bra, something her sartori-ally savvy and more well-endowed sister had suggested more than once.
In her mind somersaulted partial phrases. “When the right man comes along.” “All men are bastards.” “Some people don’t learn, I tell you.” She glanced discreetly at the faces of the other passengers to see if there were any mind-readers in her midst. If she could change one thing about herself it would be how demure she became outside of her parents’ house.
SHE HADN’T ALWAYS FELT DEMURE. SHE USED TO THINK OF HERSELF as a blond-haired boy who was strong, powerful, peaceful, and could do anything and everything. He had a horse he could ride. He didn’t speak much. He was kind. His name was Vince, short for “invincible.” He was not in the least the bastard her father said all men were. Vince loved being outdoors. There was that time when she, or rather Vince, had been out in the yard. There was a butterfly net. He had been waving it at a butterfly.
But whenever this particular memory came to her, this last confused her: the boy she had imagined herself to be wasn’t the type who would capture any living thing for sport. Memory and imagination collided. Was she seven years old then, or was it five, or was she eleven? Was Anand alive then? If he was, she would have a clue with which to work out her age when this incident took place. She tried to remember something in school or something about how and why she had got the net — if there was, in fact, ever a net in their house. If there had been one, it had long ago been discarded. How she wished she could anchor the events in this particular memory, more than in any other, and separate out what had actually happened from her propensity to bridge the gaps in logic with invention. Asked about a net, her mother had one day vaguely remembered there being one once, but then on a different day long after had said, no, she didn’t remember any such net. In any case, the memory went like this.
Vince was barefoot. He skipped about the yard following a rather large morpho, the biggest he had ever seen, the size of a small child’s head, of Anand’s head. It was sapphire one minute like the tropical sky at night, as silver and turquoise as the waters of coral reefs the next, and the beauty of the thing lured her boy-self through the front gate of his parents’ house and up the road past several houses until he found himself standing at the gate of a neighbour’s yard. The low gate was unlatched, and slightly ajar. The butterfly alighted on a sign on the gate: Manetto Moretti, Painter and Contractor, Residential and Commercial. When it took off again, up the high wide red-painted concrete stairs of the Moretti’s shrub-and flower-surrounded bungalow, the boy followed it. There, on the terrazzo-tiled veranda, the blond and heroic boy was suddenly breathless. He perched on the railing of a wrought-iron balcony.
In her mind’s eye, sitting in the taxi, Viveka saw the house up the road from her own, and there was currently no stairway with a railing on it. Ah! That was the tear in her memory. The incident couldn’t have happened because there was no balcony and no railing on that house now. But the memory, like a piece of music, marched onward relentlessly.
Perched on that wrought-iron railing that surrounded the open balcony, Vince stretched out his arm, the net agape, and he reached even farther for the flying thing, such a perfect thing, bigger than a newborn baby’s head — impossible, Viveka thought, but the memory was compelling, persistent. The butterfly flew lithely over the railing and was caught in a swirling current of air. It flapped its wings, and gaining control, rose above the yard, above the clotheslines on which billowed colourful dresses belonging to Pia Moretti, and several pairs of Mani’s white-but-paint-flecked overalls. The morpho winged higher and higher until it was above the rooftops of the neighbourhood, and then it ceased to flap and merely glided.
No matter how often Viveka had replayed this mind-tape, when she came to this part her heart beat faster and she felt the excitement of the almost-ness of a moment, and she was pleased, even as she questioned the reliability of her mind, that she had the good sense not to try to follow the butterfly-bird over the railing.
About to head back down the stairs, Vince, her invincible boy-self, noticed that the wall-length sliding doors that led into the Morettis’ house were drawn invitingly wide apart, yet no one seemed to be about. “Mr. Moretti?” the boy whispered with neighbourly concern from the balcony. There was no answer, so the boy raised his voice and called again. “Hello, Mrs. Moretti? Mr. Moretti? Anyone here?” He, or anyone else so inclined, could have been a lucky thief that day. On tiptoe still— and now, in the taxi to the university, Viveka’s heart raced again, this time because she really wanted the scenes to miraculously change and to remember something entirely different — Vince entered the house. He could feel the coarse sponginess of the high-pile blue-redtaupe Afghan carpet — this is the detail that had always made her think there must be truth to the wretched memory, for it was not likely that her child-self would otherwise have seen an Afghan carpet, there being on the tropical island no need for such an item — and he stepped over a leather belt that had been dropped on the carpet along with a hammer, a pair of pliers, a wire clipper, a screwdriver, and a wrench, and then walked down a corridor that ended at a closed door through which low sounds wafted — Viveka pressed her ear to the glass of the taxi, but in the memory she pressed her ear to the door — and he heard a groan. Not an urgent or ugly groan, but still, a groan. The blond boy called again, “Hello?” The groaning persisted and he, if he could have been heard, was ignored. He turned the door’s handle, waited, and called again. Then, unnoticed, he stepped into the room and immediately bolted out again. He held his breath and pressed his face to the crack between the door and the wall to which it was hinged. Through the crack he studied his father, his cacao-coloured skin. The arc of his back. Vince watched Pia Moretti beneath his father. Her eyes were shut tight, a frown on her face. Pia stretched and arched her pelvis upward, and Viveka’s father’s pelvis flicked at her. Suddenly his father’s body collapsed in exhaustion on top of Pia. Viveka’s heart pounded, resounding in her ears.
She had no actual memory of what might have followed, but Viveka always imagined actions that would have made sense, would have knitted the memory, if that is what it was, into a logical, sensible whole. Doing so calmed her: she, or rather blond Vince, did not go straight home, but ran around and around the neighbourhood until, dripping with sweat, he limped, feet swollen, blistered, and bleeding, through the front gates of his parents’ house.
How could she have made any of it up, she wondered, when there were bits and pieces, like the heaving and the humping, that she would not otherwise, at that
age, have been enlightened about, and so could not have imagined them? And how else to explain the coldness that had followed between her parents?
IN THE LIMBO OF TAXI TRAVEL THE DREADED WORD CAME TO HER again. Mannish. An onomatopoeic word that sounded as disgusting as what it suggested. It occurred to Viveka that her father was mannish, and she meant that in the derogatory sense — hunting helpless creatures on weekends and almost flaunting those affairs he had with women. When he and her mother quarrelled about his affairs, it was as if they did so in private, yet it seemed as if her parents were in fact making sure that Vashti and Viveka overheard them. It confused and irritated Viveka that her parents were both simultaneously secret and public about the subject.
Viveka sat up suddenly with a little jolt that startled the passenger next to her. She, her boy-self Vince lingering inside of her, had a sudden, compelling desire to know where Pia Moretti was. She had a vague notion that Pia and her husband were no longer on the island, but she wasn’t sure if this was actually so. She looked at the cars crawling down the other side of the highway to see if anyone resembling an aged Pia Moretti might be in one of them. She was oddly compelled to know that Pia Moretti was safe. Safe from her own beauty, and certainly safe from men. Men like her father. She wanted to keep her mother safe, too. Safe from Pia Moretti. But if loyalties regarding her mother tugged at her one minute, in the next they repelled her. “Serves her right,” Viveka thought, “for putting up with all those affairs. How could any woman be so accepting? I can’t stand what Dad did and probably, for all I know, still does to her. Still, I’d rather be like him any day, than helpless and accepting as Mom is.”
Her taxi-musing now circled back to the altercation about volleyball. She would find a way to play volleyball, she decided, even if it caused an ungulfable rift between her parents and herself. Volleyball, after all, meant more than volleyball.
Travelling on dry roads much farther inland now, the taxi was to arrive at Viveka’s stop in front of the university library in less than five minutes. The sky had already set up. It wouldn’t be long before the rain began again. She would meet Helen there, and she and Helen would study for part of the day. She would meet Elliot, too. He would, no doubt, want to go to his apartment with her, and once there he would, again no doubt, want to lie on his bed with her. Today she was determined not to go near his apartment. She would, rather, suggest seeing an exhibition of paintings at the Cipriani-Butler Gallery on campus, and in the evening, if the rain had stopped early enough and the courts were dry, she and Helen would play volleyball in the park at the foot of Harris Promenade, exactly as she had done the previous week. And she would hope again that her parents did not find out about either Elliot or the volleyball.
Devika and Valmiki
THAT EVENING, DEVIKA AND VALMIKI SAT ON OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE patio, facing each other. The newspaper Valmiki was reading shielded him. As she fingered the ruby and diamond pendant Valmiki had arrived home with, Devika reflected: Whatever he had done to warrant buying these presents was Valmiki’s business; half of her good-sized collection of jewellery, selected from the best available on the island, had been given to her by him for no reason she knew of. What she did know was that he gave his gifts sheepishly, the red glow on his face suggesting some sort of guilt; if she were to try to sort him out as well as Viveka, she would go crazy.
It was time for her to do what she excelled at. She hadn’t thrown a party in almost a year. She was willing to bet that people had noticed and were wondering if something untoward had happened in her family — if finances were down, or an embarrassing and hush-hush illness was keeping them low key, or if Valmiki and herself were fighting, if he was running around again, or if something unseemly had happened to her daughters. For some time now she had wanted to send a flare up into the sky that all was well. And now that she and her daughters had been presented with this unexpected jewellery, she had better do something fast. She would host a party, tell the world that the Krishnu family was just fine.
In the past she had been able to handle throwing big parties — not just handle them: she excelled at them. But in the last year or so, she had felt an exhaustion that made no sense to her. After all, she did nothing that required great physical energy. What she wanted was not so much to throw a big party as to host a small one that would bring her the same kind of glory and admiration as the big ones did. She reasoned that basically the same work was required for any number of guests from twelve to forty. It was marginally more work to adjust from forty to sixty-five or so. It was only when you started hitting seventy and above that you required the kind of stamina that at her age — no, not at her age, just these last few months — she no longer had. She had been told enough times that she looked a good decade younger than she was. She simply wasn’t feeling happy-happy. A party would brighten her up, unite them all in a common purpose. Well, maybe not Viveka; Viveka always found a way to sabotage their happiness. A party was a good medium. But she wouldn’t let Viveka run their lives or ruin hers. So, how many people should she have?
She looked around. The rain served the garden well. It was lush. The ferns and philodendrons had firmed up. They looked ripe. Bougainvillea didn’t flower in the rain, but its foliage, which formed a backdrop to the swimming pool, was at least rampant. She’d get Sheriff the gardener to snip off the old dry leaves, the gold filigreed skeletons interrupting running clumps of bright light green. She had the good taste, he the green thumb — although their friends always complimented her on having the green thumb. Sheriff would freshen up everything. If anyone could, it was Sheriff. The Antigua Heat spread like a red rash along one section of the fence. The flowers of the halyconia in a corner hung like the characters of a foreign language, and the baliser punctuated it like eternal flambeaux. Most of the work of the garden was done by nature itself. The lawn, as green as if it had been fertilized, was all that would really need looking after. It grew overnight in weather like this. Devika could imagine people standing on the thick carpet of grass. It was not necessary for them to actually notice every detail of the garden, but her tending to these details, or rather having Sheriff tend to them, would aid in relaxing her guests, give them the sensation of being in a paradise without knowing why. She liked that. Indeed, she preferred that her guests not know what it was, exactly, that made her parties what they were. She imagined the guests. Heard the sounds of their glasses tinkling with ice, felt their fingertips wet and cold from the glasses they held, the beading from the cold wine inside meeting the warmth of the Gulf air. Oh yes, cocktail napkins. Well, that would fall under the list of things she’d have to get. She wouldn’t have them monogrammed. Everyone was doing it, and it had become quite tasteless. The gullies that divided lawn from beds would have to be lined with fresh manure. She’d order that right away. And the food. It would be out of this world. Appetizers, a full meal, courses served one at a time. Or perhaps a buffet, with several choices of meat. Followed by desserts.
Then there was the choosing and renting of cutlery, and chairs, tables, ashtrays, vases for every table, napkins and tablecloths. The ordering of flowers and candleholders. Hiring a deejay, or a solo musician for the entire evening, or perhaps a lone pan player or a classical guitarist for the cocktails, and a small band for the rest of the evening. After-dinner drinks. Well, she’d leave the drinks to Val. All of this made her feel tender toward him.
Valmiki turned into a different creature when there were parties at their house. She felt unusually close to him then, more so than at any other time. She enjoyed his surprise and delight when, not having paid attention to the goings-on around him, on the afternoon of the party he would arrive home earlier than usual and see that she had pulled so much together seamlessly. This never failed to have the same effect. When he had seen how much she had done, how marvellous the house looked, the lighting and decorations just right, the tables set and only the candles left to be lit and the food served, he would invariably put an arm around her shoulders and say, “W
hen did you arrange for all of this?” And she would suck her teeth, smile with triumph, and say, “All of this has been happening right here in front of you for the last several days, but you, you never notice anything.” He would ignore her comments because he would be thinking of how awed their guests would be, of how good she makes him look. He would take her hand in his and lead her to the bedroom. She would ask, laughing, “What are you doing? I’ve got things to do.” But she would follow him.
He would shut the bedroom door and she will face him, grinning yet protesting in a whisper, “But what are you doing? I am needed out there.” He will close his eyes, lick her lips, the inside of his mouth tasting sourly of instant coffee, and her words will rise hesitant, and hoarse, and muffled in her throat, “Valmiki, Valmiki, don’t. I’ll have to shower all over again. We can’t be long, Valmiki.” He will hold her tight to him, and with his body pressed against hers he will guide her backwards into the bathroom and he will shut that door behind them, too. She will lean her back against the door as she mumbles, “People will be here in a couple of hours, Valmiki,” and holding the collar of his shirt she will draw his face to her, but he will push her back, pull his face away from her, and staring intensely into her eyes, he will grab the cloth of her dress about her thighs and slide it up against her legs until his hands are at her panties.
She will feel triumphant, for in that moment he would be — he is — a man, taking her like that. That other thing that happened on weekends, that odd friendship with Saul, whatever it was, that nameless thing, was an aberration that she could not understand, especially in someone who took her like that. Aberrations were not to be encouraged, but very smart, busy people with heavy responsibilities should be allowed an aberration once in a while, and all that should be asked of them is that they do not flaunt it. In any case, perhaps she had incorrectly imagined what Valmiki and Saul got up to.