by Shani Mootoo
A strand of grey cobweb hanging from the ceiling billowed in time to the pulsing air-conditioning unit.
I suddenly wondered why I had bothered to return for Zain’s funeral. Hardly anyone in Trinidad knew the true closeness I had with Zain. It occurred to me that in all the years I had visited her I had spent time at her house and eaten meals with her and Angus and sometimes the two children, but she and I would never meet up with friends of hers or of mine. Save for this last time. Save for Eric. Granted, I myself had never initiated getting together with other friends, but the fact that neither had she hit me now like a revelation. Could she have felt some small reserve about being seen to be friends with someone like me?
In the eyes of all who would attend the funeral, who was I to her? No one there would know the depth of my grief, the primacy of my presence. Who would know how she had touched me and let me hold her in the privacy of her guest room? If I were asked if we had ever kissed, or been sexual with each other, I would truthfully say we hadn’t, but my answer would elide the intensity of our bond and the intimacy that at times had blinded me, and that she had felt too. Zain had secrets, and Eric and I were among them. What did it say about me, I wondered, that I knew about Eric and that he knew about me?
If a suspicion had ignited in the recesses of my mind when I learned from my mother’s terrible telephone call that Zain’s murder had taken place on a Tuesday night, it now, suddenly, flared: because of what Eric knew, because of how he felt about me and people like me, because of how violently hateful he’d been about Zain’s closeness with me, because the murder had happened on a Tuesday night and not any other night, because I no longer felt I knew Zain as well as I had thought and therefore wasn’t certain that she’d actually broken off the relationship with Eric as she’d told me she’d done, or that she’d got the house key back from him—because of all this, I knew beyond doubt that it could only have been Eric who had ransacked the house and taken Zain’s life. Perhaps he hadn’t meant for it to end the way it did. Perhaps he didn’t even do it himself, but I was convinced he was behind it. I hated Eric. No, I didn’t simply hate him; thoughts of him turned into images of his body parts rotting, flies buzzing around his intestines as maggots twisted and turned and evolved into more flies that laid more eggs in his entrails.
A worrisome thought intruded on these ghastly ones: might he actually show himself at the funeral?
There was a knock on the door. Mum came in carrying her own glass and sat on the edge of the bed. She immediately noticed the billowing cobweb and sucked her teeth in irritation. “But I told Joan to clean out this room properly. Joan doesn’t look up, and she doesn’t look down. I bet she didn’t sweep under the beds either.” She inspected Joan’s work in the room as she spoke. “Why don’t you go down and lie in the billiard room with the sliding doors open all the way? It’s the coolest part of the house. That would be better than being cooped up on your first day home in this room with the air conditioner on, wouldn’t it?”
Now Joan entered with a glass of lime juice for me and a plate with a slice of fruitcake. “Joan,” Mum said crossly, “but I thought I asked you to give this room a thorough cleaning. You didn’t bother to cobweb? You’ll have to do it, eh.”
Mum finally turned to me. “You’re pale. Are you all right?”
I contemplated telling Mum what I’d been thinking: that I thought I knew who Zain’s murderer was. But I immediately saw that if I were to do so, I would have to explain, and in doing so I would divulge Zain’s secret affair with Eric. I would also have to reveal to my mother that Eric had expressed his disgust for me, for people like me. I would have to tell Mum that I had been lying on the bed in Zain’s guest room—that Zain had been lying there with me, and that she had rested her head on my shoulder as she slept, that my arm was around her—when someone—it could only have been Eric—entered the house and saw us like that. I imagined Mum translating the word seen into caught. I felt shame as I thought of all this, shame that I was the subject of Eric’s scorn and hatred. I would surely cause my mother to feel shame, too, I thought. In any case, such a serious allegation would likely lead Mum to call my father at his office right away, and my father would only insist that we go immediately to the police. I saw in an instant the suspicion I would bring on Zain and her family, on myself and my family. In the end, it would likely be said that it was my behaviour, that it was I who had caused Zain’s murder.
My mother had correctly surmised that I was consumed by thoughts of Zain, and responded to my silence by rubbing my leg to comfort me. We sat like that for some minutes, in silence. Then she said, “Imagine how Angus and the children are. They must be so mashed up.”
I did not answer. She turned to being her pragmatic self again, and asked, “Did you bring something appropriate to wear to the funeral?”
I muttered that I had.
“You’re not wearing pants to it, are you?”
I decided not to argue with her so soon after arriving and merely said that I had made sure to bring something suitable.
She told me to give my clothing to Joan to take into the laundry room, as it was Fatty the ironer’s day to work. She continued, “If you go down into the billiard room, keep the glass sliding doors open all the way, but don’t unlock the wrought-iron gate. You’ll get the sea breeze there. And you’ll see what I’ve been doing with the garden without having to go outside. Whatever you do, don’t unlock that gate. It’s safer that way. Or why don’t you go into the pool? The sun has gone off it now.”
I questioned the logic, knowing full well that the rules applied to the goings-on in this house were always determined by my mother. “So, it’s not safe to open the door, but it’s safe to go out there to the pool?”
“Well, Bhoodoosingh is out there. No one will bother to come where there is someone working.”
Mum was uneasy. I could see that her mind was busy. Her hand was still resting on my leg. She tapped my leg, suddenly, as if it were a door, and looked at me searchingly. “Sid, I was wondering, whatever happened to that little boy? Jonathan. I don’t hear you talking about him at all.”
She never ceased to surprise me. “I haven’t seen him in years,” I said. “I last saw him when I left his mother. What makes you ask?”
“I sometimes think of him. He was such a nice little child. He liked you a lot. You were with him for, what? Ten years? Why don’t you see him?”
“I would like to, but it’s not so simple.”
“You see, this is what I don’t understand. That child must have suffered when you just disappeared on him like that.”
I realized, in an instant, that by honing in on Jonathan, my mother was expressing, as best as she could, her worry about me in this time of my loss. Still, I sat up sharply. “I didn’t just disappear, Mum.” But before I could defend myself, she carried on.
“That is the problem with those kinds of relationships. I don’t understand how you could bring up a child like that and then just move on.”
“But straight couples do it all the time.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. They don’t do it all the time. In any case, that is what marriage is for.”
Aware that we were now locked in our usual dance of push and pull, and grateful to her for this backhanded caring, I lightened up and teased. “Oh, so you’re advocating on behalf of lesbians for the right to marry, now?”
My mother sucked her teeth and got up. At the door she turned, the compassion that was being so indirectly conveyed by her words evident in her drawn features. She said, “If you had stayed in that relationship, you would have had a child of, what? Sixteen years, now? You wouldn’t be going into your older years on your own. You would have someone in your old age.” No doubt embarrassed by this display of emotion, my mother couldn’t leave it at that. She had to add, “You’re not getting younger, you know. And you’re clearly not looking after yourself. Look at you. You’ve seen how slim Gita is keeping herself, and she has a son! I don’t understand all
of this instability, this kind of life you people live.”
Like a child, I yelled, “Mu-um,” ready again to engage with her, but she walked out and closed the door behind her.
It was unlikely that Mum would follow me out into the sun, so I decided to camp out by the pool. On that day, the light seemed brighter than I had ever known it to be. I found myself having contradictory and mawkish thoughts: how dare a day without Zain be so radiant, and could such brilliance be the result of Zain looking down, beaming on our little island? The lawn was an even dark green in colour, and each fat blade of grass lay against the next in a haphazard yet perfect pattern carpeting the earth beneath. The garden had grown thicker and older, more lush. A new planting here or there was a pleasant surprise and I made a mental note of each: they could be a neutral topic of conversation between my mother and me. The bougainvillea I remembered as a small shrub growing out of a pot now trailed over the pool’s back fence and was covered along the top with indigo flowers. Hibiscus, datura, ferns, ornamental grasses, dracaenas, and heliconias known as sexy pink, were all perfect, like specimens from a botanical garden. They were Mum’s pride, and I felt my own swell remembering the name of each. A grey-green lizard about six inches long ran along the midrib of a low-hanging branch of one of the dwarf coconut trees, the toes of its feet splayed. It lifted its upper body, pushed itself up on its front legs and turned its head to watch me. We stared at each other. It blinked first. Clouds so thin they were almost invisible passed in front of the sun, and the brilliant light dimmed ever so slightly for a second or two before becoming blindingly bright again. When we were children we were often warned not to look directly at the sun. We’d go blind, we were told. But such light compelled one to turn in the direction of its source. I did so, and reflected on how Zain and I had gotten away with so much when we were together. She was my foil, my alibi, the screen behind which I could be myself. Now what?
The lizard dropped its elbows, lowered its body back onto the leaf’s spine and stared straight down its skeletal nose. The skin under its neck, lighter in colour than its back, was fleshy. I thought of Jonathan, sixteen then, probably too old to care about lizards.
More than once, even as I reflected on Zain’s death, painfully aware of her absence, I made the move to rush back inside the house to telephone her and announce that I’d arrived home, to ask her to come and fetch me and take me for a drive around the country. I was in my parents’ house, in my childhood home, but I was lost. What was I here in Trinidad, without my dearest Zain?
Everything within the gates of this property, I reflected, is mine to share with Gita. The pool, the ample wrought-iron chairs and tables, the bird baths, the avocado tree, the lime tree, the mango trees, the anthurium lilies, the orchids, the philodendron as large as a living room in a downtown Toronto apartment, the dracaena reaching up as high as a billboard, even that lizard, the butterflies, roaches, spiders, mosquitoes, beetles, bees and birds. These are all more mine, I thought, than not. They are more mine than all the birds in Toronto, than the snakes and turtles at Leslie Street Spit, the orange-and-black butterflies bobbing about my second-floor balcony in early fall will ever, can ever be. More mine than the yellow-jacket wasps that tap their antennae on the screen door of the balcony of my apartment on Bergamot Avenue in Toronto’s East End.
The pool was the first built in our neighbourhood. Now it seemed so much smaller than it had when I was a child and swimming its length had been a test of strength, courage and worth. Half a dozen strokes and I would conquer it now. The water was crystal clear that day and the sun ignited the ripples caused by the breeze. Everything sparkled.
I sat on its steps, taking in the warm sun and reflecting that I had been living “abroad,” away from my parents, for about twenty years by this time. Mum and Dad had been very young when they had Gita and me, and I was now older than they had been when I immigrated to Canada. Yet I was their child when I left, and so many years later, with so much distance between them and me, I continued to be their child, an obvious fact that seemed almost incomprehensible and miraculous, for I was in many ways a stranger to them, and they to me. I reflected that no walls had been torn down or built up in our house, the flooring remained the same, the parameters of the yard were unchanged. But the trees I remembered as saplings now had trunks I could barely wrap my arms around. The house had been painted numerous times since it had been built some thirty years before, but always in the same off-white colour. Some pieces of furniture had changed, but the living room was the same as the day I first left for Toronto, and so was my bedroom, and my parents’ bedroom, and the library in which Gita and I had studied and where Dad still kept a desk—except that it now held a computer. The physical aspect of the place had not changed. And neither had our relationship to one another. Yes, I was still their child, and my parents were still my parents, regardless of all that we did not witness of each other’s lives when we were apart.
What might I have become had I not left? Was remaining in Canada an act of courage or was it timidity? I certainly didn’t feel like a returning champ in front of my parents. I slid into the warm water. Keeping my eyes open, I dived under and splayed my hands on the concrete at the bottom. I thrust my feet up, pointing my toes to the sky. I stayed like this for several long seconds. When I stood again, my eyes stung, and cool air hit my body, and an acute awareness of my present washed over me: there on the pool’s ledge was a sweating glass of lime juice made by my family’s housekeeper, there just beyond was the yellow-green of the dwarf coconut trees waving up to the transparent blue of the sky, and there, farther off, was a variety of birds, carrying on like competing vendors in a market. In Toronto, no one save India and Jonathan, neither of whom I was in touch with, could have accurately pictured me in those surroundings. My sense of belonging was as profound as my feeling of aloneness. I dreaded attending the funeral I had come for.
I arrived at the church twenty minutes early, and yet all the pews in the church were full. People stood at the back, along the sides, and clogged the main entrance and the two side doorways. I took my place at the back, hidden. I scoped out every corner, and moved a bit this way or that so that I could glimpse from behind pillars. I carefully scanned the face of every man in the church, my heart thumping in fear, and in my distraction I missed most of what was being said throughout the service and the eulogies. But Eric was nowhere to be seen. I even stepped out of the church partway through, and circled the building looking for him, before squeezing back inside. When I was sure he wasn’t present I joined the queue and paid my respects. I rested my hand on the blond, highly polished wood casket. It was smooth and slippery, and unyielding, and I had to tell myself that if I began to cry, I would surely fall apart and I would be unable to put myself back together again. I would bring unwanted notice to myself. I imagined myself being watched instead, and was able to walk past her casket knowing that that was as close as I’d ever be to Zain again.
I went to Angus, who sat in the front pew with Zain’s parents and the children, Aliya and Peter. He had not known that I had come back and when I approached he stood and wrapped his arms around me. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t speak. He pressed me to his chest and kissed the top of my head. I remained in his tight embrace for what seemed like minutes. Neither he nor I spoke. Aliya asked in a barely audible voice if I was coming to the cemetery. I hesitated, and she asked me if I would instead stop by their house that night.
When I left the funeral, I asked Tank to drive past the yacht club. I knew where Eric kept his boat, and that it could be seen from the road. His boat was not visible, though, and this further confirmed my suspicion. Just to be certain, I had Tank drive in to the yacht club. I had him stop at High Tide restaurant where Zain and I and Eric had eaten a short time before, and where Eric was known. As if I were a regular, I asked the waiter who met me at the door what had happened to Eric’s boat. She told me that he had come in two days ago to let them know that he was taking off on a trip u
p the islands; by the end of the day he’d pulled up and out. “Just like that?” I said, and she answered, “Yeah, that’s how all these boating people are.”
That evening I did visit Zain’s house, as Aliya had requested, but I could not bear to stay long. The passageway that led to the guest room both called out to me and repelled me. It gnawed on me that I had failed to do something, something that might have prevented Zain’s murder, something that might have led to an arrest. Weakened by remorse and guilt, I did not have it in me to be more polite, or to consider that Angus, Aliya and Peter had little choice but to carry on living in that very house. I left without eating or drinking any of the offerings. Within days, I returned to Toronto.
All this, I hope, will count as some sort of answer for you, Jonathan. But there is, of course, more to tell. There is the walk.
The very week I was back in Toronto, I went and saw a doctor and began the process of counselling. I had my body measured and my mind assessed. I knew that I would not do anything to myself while Mum and Dad were alive, and that perhaps they would live for such a long time it would mean I’d never reach my goal. I am somewhat ashamed to say I waited for that freedom. In the meantime, I was encouraged to join a peer group who were at various stages of the process that some of them called transitioning. In such a way, I became part of a community where I met people whom one did not usually, in those days, see in the streets. I met men whose gender, height and sturdy limbs were ill-disguised behind long hair, hair that was coiffed into exaggerated women’s styles. They wore makeup, nail polish, dresses and women’s shoes with heels. They went by women’s names and were referred to, with remarkable ease, as “she” and “her.” I was quite drawn to one person in the group, a Chinese woman who had chosen to be female. At first, I would stare at her, in vain, to try to see traces of the man she once was. She was the only person in the group whose voice and demeanour did not betray the fact that she had started out as a man. She had not, I saw, merely changed her physical body; it was as if she had studied and taken on the thoughtfulness and graciousness traditionally expected of her new gender. I was moved by her, and yet there were moments when, regarding her, I felt sadness, and saw that whatever she had gained by this change must certainly have come at a cost. The people in this group often talked about the price they had paid—the loss, that is, of family, friends, employment—but they always concluded with testimonials about having achieved a rare inner peace.