What We All Long For

by Dionne Brand

  Jackie’s father stopped. “I know you, man?” he asked. Oku felt as if his answer had better be correct. In that “I know you, man?” was a challenge for respect. Oku recognized it. It was couched in another generation, but the machismo was recognizable. It was a question about dominance, and territory, it said, Don’t be trifling, and what the fuck do you want?

  “No, sir,” Oku said with the required deference. “I’m a friend of Jackie’s, and I saw you and I just knew you had to be her father.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s my girl, how you know her?”

  He hadn’t said the right thing. The interrogation would get deeper now, the stakes were higher. “We went to high school together, sir.” He dropped the second “sir” in to reassure Jackie’s father of his total respect.

  “She ain’t around today. Haven’t seen her in a week or so, you know. She down at that store …” Jackie’s father trailed off as if he’d found something disturbing in what he’d said.

  “Oh, I was just passing by. You tell her I said hi, eh?” Jackie’s father looked at him quizzically. “Oku’s my name, sir.” Oku reached his hand out, and Jackie’s father took it.

  “All right, young brother, all right. See you on the tip.” He limped on, going toward Queen Street.

  Oku watched him go, then regretted not asking him to go for a beer or something. Maybe he’d lost an opportunity, but he didn’t want Jackie feeling he was prying, he didn’t want to repeat that incident years ago when her mother’s attention got him the cold shoulder. So he watched Jackie’s father go. There was the old player in her father; the hand clasping his had been cool yet brotherly. The face was slightly twisted in the way that older black men’s faces invariably were. Something wry seemed to be constantly slipping across their lips; some knowing tale, as if to say, “Yes, I know that bullshit. Took me a life to figure it out and I still ain’t got it. Beat that.” One day his own face would register that truth, but he hoped not.

  As Jackie’s father disappeared west along Queen, Oku felt wistful for him. He felt the concentration of the man, the insecurities that had to be gathered up, the opportunities that were imagined but never came, the vanity that his body allowed him, all gathered in that limp like some bird feigning weakness to protect what was valuable. He looked around at the perilous stuff of Alexandra Park.

  What must have scared Jackie was Vanauley Way. The scarred brown buildings. The dry hot walkway in the summer, the dry cold walkway in the winter. Her coats with the polyester stuffing coming out, the nylon tearing so easily. Why couldn’t they have planted a good tree anywhere here, why couldn’t they have laid out beds of plants and flowers, a forsythia bush or two, a grove of hostas, some forget-me-nots, some phlox, smoke trees now and then, mint bushes and rosemary, why had it been so hard for the city to come up with a bit of beauty?

  The narrow winding walkway, virtually empty in the daytime, scarred-looking, teemed with a ghostly, sometimes scary life at night. With one thought they could have made it beautiful, but perhaps they didn’t think that poor people deserved beauty. Lavender, for instance, could grow anywhere. No reason at all that the walkways, which were not built for cars, could not have been made into an oasis of flowers, grasses, bushes, with perhaps a cobbled walk. But at least lavender. Then at night it wouldn’t be that shadowy, that dim. And in the daytime people would have come out to front yards and puttered around, had a coffee, said “hello” and “how you doing?” to children, and “careful there, careful now.” In the nighttime the gloom would have been lit by people sitting in their gardens with lanterns, a little laughter would have passed in the air—not the kind of laughter that was derision and self-mockery or smirking at someone else’s folly or misfortune but real laughter from the small joy of life. There would have been wine and music, and not the kind of wine that you drank eventually to numb the inconsequential-to-anyone-else disaster of your life, and not the music that makes you remember a perfectly lovely time at the Paramount bitterly, but the music that makes you remember that time self-indulgently.

  A rose bush in the front of 113½ Vanauley Way would have tasted the rains of fifteen, twenty years in Toronto and thickened and twisted its wood over that doorway like loveliness. Yes, why not a plantation of rose bushes all along Vanauley Way, millions of petals growing and falling, giving off a little velvet. It’s amazing what a garden can do. And Jackie could have sure done with a place like that. They themselves tried a few perennials in window boxes; they tried to make the best, but then had it been a garden instead of that dry narrow roadway, Jackie’s childhood might have been less hazardous.

  People defended that park, saying to the city, in so many words, Don’t drop all your negative vibes on us, we’re trying to live the same as everybody, but if you couldn’t see it in your heart to put a garden in here, if you tarred over every piece of earth, then don’t blame us. Would it have killed them to splash a little colour on the buildings? Yes, it may have cost a little more in the first place to make the ceilings a little higher, the hallways a little less narrow, but in the last place think of the perspective: the general outlook might have been worth it. The sense of space might have triggered lighter emotions, less depressing thoughts, a sense of well-being. God, hope! The park wouldn’t have driven Jackie’s father and mother to drink like it had. And the dream of going back down east for good wouldn’t have faded and died right there on the narrow asphalt paths of Vanauley Way.

  Even the dream of staying in this city would have survived. A barbershop of his own, maybe, for Jackie’s father instead of the penitentiary in Guelph for two years less a day—which turned out to be eight months that time—for receiving stolen goods. Another stint for B and E at a computer factory when he sold IBMs for ten points on the street. And why did he have to come back to Jackie’s mother hanging out at Wilson’s on Bloor, some asshole following her around and calling her up and hanging up in his ear? So she said to him that she couldn’t be waiting around for him forever, and he said, “fair enough,” but she knew that he was doing time for them, doing time wasn’t recreational, what did she think, he was up in jail partying? And why’d she have to rub it in his face, bring it in his house, and what about Jackie, did Jackie have to see all this shit going on, what kind of woman was she going to turn out to be if her mother was a whore?

  “Whore, whore,” she said. Now he’d gone too far, now he’d gone just too far; did he want her to leave his ass this minute, this very minute, ’cause if she was a whore, she wouldn’t be with him, he should be glad she wasn’t no whore, a whore wouldn’t have time with his sorry ass, and look, look here, he had promised her a good life down here, and there it was, he was in jail half the time and they were starving or ducking the police half the time, and the nasty words he saved for her, and where was the sweet life when he could not even hold down a chair at Golden’s Barbershop for one half second and he was running the streets and had her tailing behind him and they had a mouth to feed, and where did he think she got the money to feed herself and Jackie while he was gone? Think some government cheque was enough to cover their ass, and time, doing time for them, yeah, all right, true enough, but do some time outside, do some time here with her and Jackie. Had she, she, not stayed as long as she could in that godawful job in the comb factory? Packing one green comb, one yellow comb, one pink comb, and one red comb in a box all day long for four dollars and twenty-five cents an hour. She’d packed combs until she was dizzy; she’d given combs to friends, sold extra combs at the hairdresser’s, until the novelty of working in a comb factory had worn off and she was sick of packing one green, one yellow, one pink, and one red comb into a box the whole livelong day. And love, love was about finished, where was her joystick, where was her man, she was a young woman still, where was her loving?

  Jackie’s father said that he could feel his “boy,” meaning his dick, growing deader year after year. He could feel it beginning with the tip. Each year another centimetre would go. Which is why Jackie’s mother began to get
terrible bruises on her face and arms, raccoon eyes, and just a low-down feeling in her gut the whole time.

  They weren’t the same people who had taken that train to Toronto fifteen years ago. Well, no one ever is, but they weren’t those two people much more so than they’d imagined. They weren’t the people they were going to be or had set out to be, the people they had envisioned. Look, okay, they hadn’t envisioned. Who does, except rich people? You simply throw yourself at life, and the narcissism of being young and beautiful and handsome and strong and eager and ready is supposed to see you through. So when Jackie’s father asked Jackie’s mother to marry him and they had a big wedding at the Cornwallis Baptist Church in Halifax and everybody turned out and Jackie’s mother got pregnant that very night when they rolled around on satin sheets at the Four Seasons Hotel for that one night for which Jackie’s father had cut hair and shaved chins like a demon, they were young and in love with each other and themselves and the world. And when Jackie’s father’s uncle phoned up and said, “Come on out here, boy. It’s a happening town,” they got on the train in their psychedelic pants and cocked hat and Indian blouses and came just like that because they were still young and still in love with each other and themselves and the world. What’s wrong with that kind of narcissism? So they didn’t envision, no, they thought that they were young and beautiful, and it wasn’t a lie, and it ought to have been enough. It’s enough for a lot of people, why not them?

  Jackie heard all this when her mother and father were trying to keep their arguing low and when they were so mad they didn’t care to spare her. Between her parents and Vanauley Way, she wondered what she was going to do. She did them all a favour by making a plan. If the city didn’t have the good grace to plant a shrub or two, she would cultivate it with her own trees and flowers. And so she did. In her mind.

  Every day she walked down paths of magnolia trees and lilac bushes; wisteria hung over the arbour and doorway of 113½. In the spring she walked around complimenting the tulips: the parrots, the Rembrandts, the triumphs, the double early, the viridiflora, the double late, the hummingbird, the clusiana. She loved lobelia at her feet and just the names helianthemum and habranthus. All these and more she found in a book called The Expert’s Flowers by Dr. N. T. Humphreys. She walked from Vanualey Way to Harbord Collegiate in tumbling, arching cream shrub roses. And if her mother and father couldn’t love one another or could only love one another in this reckless, undefined, unreliable way, she would love them with a passion but with a discipline.

  It was riding the tip of his tongue; it was hovering in his brain. He knew it wasn’t simple. Jackie hadn’t left Alexandra Park. She owed a loyalty to her mother and father. That faithfulness didn’t mean that she wanted to have it burn her as it had them. Hence, the white boy. Oku knew this logic. He knew that to Jackie he probably looked like so many burned-out guys in Vanauley Way. Young, but burned out, so much wreckage. How could he tell her that he wasn’t wreckage? How could he, when he was depending on her to tell him that? What could he tell her then? Number one, that he wasn’t a player. He would have to shed any ambivalence about that. Number two, he wasn’t her father. He would never allow that look to come into his eyes, the wry look, the defeated look, the bitter look. He was going to work the rest of the summer, the rest of the year, then go back and finish the master’s. Why? Because he loved that, and what he loved he wasn’t going to have taken from him or give up. Next, he had held her, he had felt her, he was certain, he simply had to be there. Jesus, who was he promising all this to? All right then, himself. He was promising this to himself.

  TWENTY-ONE

  TUYEN HAD GONE to the market with Oku, and she had joked around with him in their way, teasing him about Jackie, discussing John Coltrane’s “Venus,” but her brain felt lit. She was frightened of the face in the photograph she had taken. Could it be him? After all, the only photographs of Quy she’d seen were of him as a baby. His face would have changed. And she had never ever seen his real face. Perhaps she was hallucinating. He was a ghost in her childhood, the unseen, the un-understood, yet here he was, insinuating himself in a simple meeting with her brother that she had foolishly photographed like a spy. Throughout her childhood Quy had looked at her from every mantel, every surface, and now she thought she had looked at him. And there at the end of the roll of film was her own face too, wet, her hair clinging to her cheek, the flash of the camera making her seem startled. She was so frightened she’d ended up in the doorway of Pope Joan, longing to be seduced.

  She’d thought briefly of talking to her sisters, but that idea came and went quickly with the memory of her last encounter with Lam when she was home. She had little contact with either of them, and besides she didn’t care what they thought. They were older, it seemed, by millennia and simply didn’t see the world the same way as she did. Yet she was always surprised by the venomous passion that jumped out at her from her sisters each time she was in some kind of trouble with her mother and father. When she was little, they always suggested to her parents some much harsher punishment than her parents had settled on. Far from enhancing their power over her, it diminished them, but the intensity of their hatred always surprised her. Even when she tried to be helpful to one of them, whoever it was would spin around and attack her.

  Like a year ago, when Ai wanted to go to Montreal to live and their parents objected, swearing to cut her off, screaming that she was breaking up the family. Ai seemed determined to go despite this, she seemed to blossom in the drama all around her. Until, in a moment of sisterly conspiracy, Tuyen had said to her, “Ai, it’s gonna be great for you.”

  “You little whore!” Ai had spat at her. “Who asked you? You would like me to go, wouldn’t you? Then Binh would have no one to support him.”

  Tuyen was stupefied. What intrigues had she missed, and how did her family really see her? That last, she thought, she didn’t care about, but obviously she was not immune to their opinions. Recovering herself, she had said to Ai, “Oh, do whatever the fuck you like, then, I was just trying to help you.”

  Ai ended up staying in Toronto, and Tuyen suspected that it was all an attempt to be the centre of things, and if she really thought about it, Ai didn’t have the backbone to go off on her own. She had been tied to Tuan and Cam ever since that night in the bay.

  None of them could see themselves without the others set in that particular tableau. There was an invisible string between them beyond the pull of family as Tuyen knew it. Something had slipped out of their hands; they would always feel absence. It was this overwhelming sense of regret that Tuyen had fled. It would descend on her if she spent any length of time at the house in Richmond Hill or in the too-long presence of any of the family, even Binh.

  There were moments, then, when Tuyen had to go somewhere to be seduced. Openly seduced. And seduced in no way imaginable within the confines of that family story.

  Pope Joan was a bar on Parliament Street. A bar that stood as the last eastern outpost of gay life in downtown Toronto. It had had several reincarnations, the previous one being the Rose, where they played Patsy Cline singing “Crazy” at the end of each night. It was primarily a lesbian bar, though a few gay men and a few voyeuristic straight couples could be picked out on any given night. There were several pool tables on the lower floor where butches expressed their angular prowess and their sartorial charm. They drank strictly, and voluminously, beer. And they hogged the pool tables, treating any women who didn’t measure up with cold dismissal. Their dates were usually upstairs dancing or slumping on the leather sofas, smoking and eyeing each other pointedly bored.

  Generations and variations of butches had occupied the lower floor and the pool tables in the relatively short life of the club on Parliament Street. So quick, so incandescent was the life of the women who came to the club, it could only be measured in months. There was an urgency to the place and a packed force. All that couldn’t be lived outside was lived in here, in the six or seven hours between when the doors op
ened and when they closed. The meetings, the courtships, the marriages, the break-ups could be done in the small public space of the Rose, or Pope Joan as Tuyen knew it. The butterfly lives lived here, the sweet-winged existences—the telephone operator, a real-estate broker, a welfare mother, a girl from North Bay, or the woman from Timmins who knew the place as the Rose, a woman from Regent Park, any woman—anyone could become invisible, whole and erotic, on this dance floor. Any woman could drop her necessary defences to the city, put her legs up on a stool, and drift.

  It was from Pope Joan’s that Tuyen brought women home. Women who smoked too much, drank too much, did too much dope. Women, therefore, whom she didn’t have to keep. Or women who were professionals at something—lawyers or real-estate brokers who were fascinated that Tuyen was an artist until they saw that she really was an artist when they woke up in the mornings in Tuyen’s dishevelled bed. Or women who thought of Tuyen as the Asian girl who could share certain bizarre erotic secrets with them. Once she laughingly told Carla that those women didn’t know that she was so much not what they imagined.

  “Why would you sleep with them?” Carla asked.

  “We’re not sleeping, all right? We’re fucking. Jealous?”

  “No, but why?”

  “Because they’re interesting.”

  “How?”

  “They’re just people, Carla. It’s fantasy. You learn things about yourself.”

  “Like?”

  “Like … like, Carla … like having sex is just human, you know, experiencing your physical self, your flesh, like I feel like I’m in life. My skin is alive, all my senses are open. You feel it right here,” she said, tracing her hand up Carla’s abdomen to between her small breasts.