What We All Long For
Page 15
There was a violent petulance in his voice.
“What shit did you get?” Tuyen rose to challenge him. “Please tell me. It looked pretty good to me. And who cares? You’re grown up. If they’re on your case, why do you live there?”
“Forget it.” He stuffed his hand into his pocket and pulled out a wad of money. “Here, for taking care of the shop. Hue said you really helped her.”
“That’s too much.” Tuyen wondered why Hue had exaggerated.
“No. Take it—I know you don’t have money.”
She didn’t refuse, and an awkward moment followed. They had nothing more to say to each other, but she sensed some hesitation in Binh. He must be a lonely person, she thought. Perhaps in their family it was he and she who were the closest, if not in affections then in all other ways; in the geography of their experiences.
She watched Binh go down to the alleyway, get into his silver Beamer, and drive away. She should have given him something, she knew, some show of recognition, if not affection or support. She’d done what she could.
Poised in this reflection, her inky hands pulling the hair at her left temple, Tuyen didn’t hear Carla come in.
“Hey, I just saw your brother. God, he’s gorgeous.” Carla was standing at the door, and Tuyen felt a minute pang of childish jealousy.
“You just don’t know how to say that I’m gorgeous.”
“Probably, you’re so alike.”
“We are? How do you know?” She said this, half questioningly, half certain. “Alike”—the word revolted her; it gave her some other unwanted feeling of possession. To be possessed, she thought, not by Binh only but by family, Bo and Mama, Ai and Lam, yes them, and time, the acts that passed in it, the bow, the course of events.
“Did you say you probably think I’m gorgeous?”
“Wow, that’s gorgeous!” Carla was looking in awe at the large hanging Tuyen had been working on. “That’s beautiful.”
“Not yet”—Tuyen came to stand beside her—“it’s not finished.”
The longings seemed to race down the drape of cloth on the wall.
“I have to make some translations too, I want to put different languages. I’m going to fill it with every longing in the city.”
“The hideous ones too?” Carla’s voice sounded shivery.
“I’ll have to, won’t I? Otherwise it would be a fake.”
“Ah.” Carla made to leave.
“Hey, where you going?” She touched Carla’s face.
“Nowhere.”
“Then stay with me.” Her fingers stroking Carla’s cheek. She always felt like covering Carla’s mouth with her own. Especially now. “Help me write them? Anywhere you like.”
“Okay, but not the perverse ones.” She took her face away from Tuyen’s fingers. “What about the lubiao? What’re you doing with that?”
“I haven’t decided. This new idea came to me and I’m trying to make it fit but.… Maybe the lubiao is a relic, maybe I’ll use it as a contrast. We’ll see. Here’s the book—choose the ones you like and tick them off when you’re done.”
The hideous ones. Those were the longings about bodies hurt or torn apart or bludgeoned. No one had actually confided details to Tuyen. She had intuited these, perceived them from a stride, a dangling broken bracelet—a rapist’s treasure, each time he rubbed the jagged piece he remembered his ferocity—a muttering, a woman off her head sitting on a sidewalk—her longing for that particular summer in Beausejour when she was between leaving that life and coming to this sidewalk.
Some Tuyen had got from newspaper articles—one about twin brothers dying at a karaoke bar: Phu Hoa Le and Lo Dai Le. The four men in bandannas came into the bar and started shooting. What were their longings—the ones dying and the ones shooting? Or, on the same page, the owners of a puppy farm with a hundred puppies mistreated in a filthy barn. Their longings would certainly surprise—she knew how people lived two lives, one most times the antithesis of the other. And the previous week she’d scoured the newspapers to find that Janakan Sivalingam was dead too; he was slashed in his belly with a machete in front of a school. She’d written down his longing for almonds and his attackers’, which were for the sight of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. And looking at the whole page of the daily newspaper—several deaths, a kidnapping, a pathologist’s report, a man charged with having an “up skirt” video—all surrounding a photograph of the Stanley Cup with adoring boys decked out in hockey gear. The longings of the page designer, the editor, what were those? For relief? From killings, from misery? Or was it from multiplicity? Vass, Kwan, Hyunh, Sivalingam, Shevchenko—those were the names on the page of the dead or the vicious—the editor’s relief from the cumbersome, the unknown, the encroaching. They might all be encroaching on the city, encroaching in the editor’s mind, on the pure innocent ideal, violating the heroic Stanley Cup, the cherubic faces around it, pushed to the borders tenuously. Perhaps she could put that page itself there, somewhere, among the longings.
They worked in silence for an hour.
“Tuyen … Tuyen …” Carla had been repeating her name for several seconds.
“Yeah!”
“You can really disappear, can’t you?”
Tuyen grinned. “I guess. Break?”
“I’m gonna leave you.”
“No, stay. Want to go for dinner? My treat.”
She wanted to be in Carla’s company; she always felt a deep pleasure in her presence even though she knew Carla’s quiet was not quiet at all. But it would be good to drink some wine and maybe find herself later in Carla’s bed, her arm around her middle, her lips on her neck.
“Since that’s a rare thing, I’ll take it.”
Did Carla feel as attracted to her? Sometimes, like now, she sensed that was true.
“It’s gonna be good, huh?” Carla was looking at the wall of cloth they’d been working on.
“Yes, I think it’s gonna be.”
She was looking at Carla, not at the wall. It was going to be good, she thought. She wrapped herself in her oilskin and followed Carla down the stairs. It was balmy outside. She really didn’t need a coat; she let it fall open. Binh had been mollified by his trip in search of nothing, Carla was yielding in some way, the installation was coming together fabulously since she’d set on the idea of the longings of the city. She felt a bliss.
THIRTEEN
IT SEEMED AS IF JACKIE had avoided him deliberately. He’d gone to Tuyen’s and Carla’s frequently over the last two weeks. He even spent a few nights, but she hadn’t appeared, and when he asked Carla or Tuyen, they said she hadn’t called. Why didn’t he simply call her, they asked, or go by the store on Queen Street?
He should be able to do those things, after all, what about the Lula Lounge? Why couldn’t he simply leave it at that, though? One night—a shared high. And fucking. People did that every day, casually. Jackie felt nothing for him. Nothing or simply amusement. Coming on to her two weeks ago had apparently annoyed her to the point that she didn’t want to see him, even as a friend. But maybe all of it was only in his mind and Jackie was going about her business being Jackie, who appeared and disappeared as she liked, and could have sex with him at the Lula with three hundred people dancing two feet away and forget it the next day. So he would make an ass of himself calling her. He felt like a child with her, not the man he wanted to show her; the man who would be devoted to her, who would love her. Christ, just thinking this made him cringe at her response. Jackie could be so cool, so off-centring, so distant.
The phone rang early. He grabbed it before his father could reach it upstairs. It was one of his “boys” from Eglinton. Kwesi.
“Hey, what’s up, man? You awake?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m cool.”
“So we’re down for next Wednesday. You know, like, at Syreta’s.”
“Yeah, man, I know. I’ll be there. Why you calling me so early?”
“Just checking, man. You know. What you up to later?”
Oku usually laughed at this flattery, saying, “Yeah, man, but I’m not into that shit. It’s too time-consuming.”
But Kwesi persisted nevertheless, as if he thought that one day he would wear Oku down or one day Oku would face the inevitable. Kwesi and most men he knew lived by their wits.
Kwesi’s business was a mobile store held at his girlfriend, Syreta’s, or at her friends. The latest Nike, Reebok, leather coats, bags, designer dresses, anything you wanted, could be had. Racks of dresses, blouses, stands of shoes would be moved in just like at a department store and discreet invitations would be put out, though invariably too many people would be lined up outside a house or apartment on the appointed day. Oku helped with the traffic. Everything was marked down to thirty per cent of the original price. There was a slight sense of danger for Oku, but it was understood that he’d go no further—despite Kwesi hassling him about how he didn’t need a university degree to make money. Oku called it capitalist bullshit and Babylon, and they both laughed, but Kwesi’s logic sat uneasily with him. Kwesi was driving around in a Lincoln Navigator, had a leather coat for every season, a nice apartment. Oku couldn’t help but be envious sometimes. Envious not only of the money but of the balls, the certainty. He had a dilettante’s curiosity about Kwesi’s life, though he was much more tempted lately and found his objections wearing thin. If he continued his friendship with Kwesi, he would have to commit to going the whole way.
“Listen, you wanna help me pick up the stuff today?” There was the usual hesitation from Oku’s side. “You know, I’ll give you—what?—three per cent?” Kwesi was talking about pick-ups. He had other guys who helped him do this, but Oku knew that he wanted to draw him in deeper. “No sweat. No hassle. It’s inside stuff.” Three per cent would certainly get rid of his anxiety about his dwindling student loan. “Come on. You down with this or not?”
“Got things to do today, man.” Oku wimped out, and he felt like it. There was a disturbing feeling in his stomach. His voice couldn’t take on the aloof quality it usually did with Kwesi. “I’ll check you at Syreta’s Wednesday, all right?”
“Cool, bro. But you know what I’m saying, right?”
“Yeah, yeah. Peace, man.” Oku rang off.
His own logic was falling apart. He could get busted at one of the sales just as much as on the other side of the deal Kwesi was offering him. He had convinced himself that being caught actually and undeniably stealing stuff was worse than being caught selling it. He knew he was splitting hairs and Kwesi was testing him and would punk him out soon.
Oku had stayed good friends with Carla and Tuyen because he’d found hanging with the guys exhausting. Yes, he could become the bad public hard-ass kind of black man everyone appreciated. Everybody knew it was bullshit. The leather coats, the dark glasses, the don’t-give-a-shit attitude. Life was all about getting the car, the bling-bling, the honey. All that television talk had made it to the street, or was it the other way around? You slapped a few bitches in the mall and faced down a few dickheads in the alleyways. Underneath it all you loved babies, played video games, and loved your mother’s cooking and loved nobody like your mother. So much energy put out just fronting. And you sometimes forgot you were only fronting. You were dangerous. There was a kind of romance about that dangerousness, and Oku teetered at times in that alluring space. Which man wouldn’t want to be thought of as dangerous? Yet who wanted to have that mantle drawn around his shoulders all the time? Some, but you couldn’t crack into the full register of yourself.
One night when Oku was eighteen, he was walking up Beverley Street. It was about 2 A.M. and he’d just left a blind pig on Baldwin, and he was thinking how quiet it was and how he loved the city. He was thinking that he was all out of money and had to walk home, and he was thinking that it wouldn’t be so bad because it was balmy, and anyway, the quietness of the city would help him write a poem as he walked. He was high. He’d had two beers, but mostly he’d smoked ganja and danced by himself. He was at Baldwin and Beverley. A car sped south, leaving a silence behind it, then another car came north behind him. This one slowed; he saw the flashing turning light as it swerved into him. He stopped. Two cops came out of the car. He can’t remember if they called him, if they told him to stop. His arms rose easily as if reaching for an embrace. One cop reached for him. He can’t remember what they said or what they wanted. He only remembered that it was like an accustomed embrace. He yielded his body as if to a lover, and the cop slid into his arms. That was the fucked-up thing about being dangerous. It was a surrender to violence, to some bruising, brutal lover. He remembered how instinctively his arms opened, how gently, as gently as they would have opened to embrace Jackie. But this was another kind of impeachment. A perverse fondling. Another car sped by, slowed to look and then sped on again. The cops didn’t find anything on him, and he said nothing to them, just smiled and shook his head. They asked him his name, he smiled again. Their fondling became rougher. Oku let his body go limp. The cops folded him into their car with a few more shoves. He laughed. He was still high. They took him to fifty-two Division. They couldn’t find anything to charge him with and let him go around 6 A.M.
He had come to expect this passion play acted out on his body any time he encountered authority, and it was played out at its most ecstatic with the cops. Whenever he encountered them, he simply lifted his arms in a crucifix, gave up his will and surrendered to the stigmata. Some of his friends didn’t. They resisted, they talked, they asserted their rights. That only caused more trouble. They ended up in the system fighting to get out. They ended up hating everyone around them. Homicidal.
Perhaps it was his father’s tenacity that took him the other way. His father was so voracious, yet so bitter—and that was the part that Oku hated—that in the middle of loving, or eating, everything seemed bitter.
Jackie, he thought, Jackie was somehow the solution to it. If he could one day find the precise words, she would come around. There was some specific thing he had to say, and then the two of them would fall into place. It was like a series of locks: when particular words were said, each lock fell open. Which is why he’d been silent with the cops. There were no words for the doorway they emerged from, no word that would send them back or pacify them. The words to Jackie, on the other hand, were only hidden. He knew, too, that Jackie was only half of it.
Twenty-five years old, living with his mother and father, and heading nowhere. The university was such a straitjacket, it all made him hunger for another world. Maybe he was fooling himself that he could think his way out of this box. Did Jackie want a man like that? A man who was stable? And what did the Nazi boyfriend have that he didn’t? His white skin, for one. Oku laughed at himself. Not fair. Okay, a mother with a lot of rundown properties across the city. Okay both, white skin and a mother who was a slum landlord. This cynicism aside, wasn’t he, Oku, depending on the dark tenor of his own skin to woo Jackie? So why couldn’t the Nazi boy use what he had?
Oku would spend hours going over the arguments he would put to Jackie. When he did see her, it came out in intolerant bursts, like the last time he’d seen her at Tuyen’s. He didn’t yet have the words to make that lock fall open.
And what about the lock for himself? His father said he lived too much in his head. The truth was living in his head was what kept him safe. Living in his head meant he didn’t react reflexively to the stimuli of the city heading toward him with all the velocity of a split atom. That’s why he kept pretty much to himself. That’s why he risked being called a “flake” and a “faggot” by the guys in the jungle. That’s why he cultivated the persona of the cool poet—so that he wouldn’t have to get involved in the ordinary and
brutal shit waiting for men like him in the city. They were in prison, although the bars were invisible.
“Don’t be a faggot, man. You never, never let people fuck with you,” Kwesi had lectured him.
“You bide your time and you take your opportunity,” his father had lectured him.
Christ, he was scared sometimes, scared of something lurking in himself, in his body—some idea threatening to overpower him. It took all his power to shut down the crazy person inside of him who wanted to tear things up. He avoided the guys from the jungle more and more. And soon he would have to move out because his father’s alchemy was just as potent.
He had nightmares of putting his fist through his father’s face; of lifting the breakfast table and smothering him with it. He was afraid that one morning he would wake up and do those things. He would actually wake at times in fear out of a dream thinking he had done just that. He would lock his bedroom door to prevent himself from sleepwalking into these acts.
Oku stayed in his room in the basement until his father left. He didn’t want to talk to his mother. His mother could get things out of him. She probably already knew that he had dropped out. He heard her come back to the kitchen. He let himself out the basement door, yelling to her, “Bye, Ma!” He heard her faint calling but pretended he didn’t.
Exams were supposed to be happening now. It was the end of May. His father, making him feel like a child, insisted on seeing grades. “Let me see what I’m paying for, boy.” He would have to move out.
Instead of the university, he would go to Kensington Market. It was his every day except Wednesdays, when his mother went there. He’d always checked with her each week in case she varied her movements—he’d make a pretence of asking her to get something for him, like guineppes or gizadas. There he would sit at a coffee shop, watching people go by and reading Amiri Baraka or Jayne Cortez. He’d found them while trying to put some life into a class in American poetry at the university, though he hadn’t been able to last out the class even with Baraka and Cortez. So what if he knew the classics, if he understood figures of thought? He himself was a figure of thought in those classrooms—an image and not a being, not a solid presence. So what the fuck, he thought, what the fuck was he doing there? Better to read Baraka and Cortez and Neruda and Lorca and Yevtushenko and Brecht on his own. The classes were a waste of time—holding him back as a poet. So fuck that.