She arrived just as the sun was sinking. The sky was a fiery red. Wallace dropped her off near the bus stop. And she walked. She had a gun. A Tomcat Beretta, semiautomatic, Wallace wouldn’t let up until she’d taken it. It was a nice gun, as guns go, small, light, easy to handle. She’d owned one before when she lived with Errol and they had the used car business. It gave her a little boost, though, the gun. She could feel it in her girth, the way she moved down the road, as if this earth belonged to her. She waved to the men playing dominoes under the tree. She stopped in a shop to buy tamarind balls and the Star.
She saw Errol before he could see her and she watched him for a long time. He was in the front garden, about ten paces from the fence. His brown face was wrapped in white gauze and he was there pruning a wild rosebush. As she got up closer, she could actually hear him. He was singing under his breath.
He jerked up suddenly, perhaps sensing her, and a vein as big as a pipe throbbed in his neck.
I know you know I didn’t shoot Mr. Sams or take your money, she said, her voice low. I know you put me away because of what happened with Carlton. What had happened to our marriage. I know you wanted to punish me. You wanted me gone. You wanted somebody to pay. And I paid, Errol, six years of prison time. Longer than anybody should have to pay for a little fuck. And maybe it’s my time to see her now, to raise her now. Maybe it’s my time now.
He’d been listening and studying her, but now he sucked his teeth, now he muttered something caustic underneath his breath and turned away from her, now he went back to his pruning, and he gave her his back.
She thought to pull out the gun and whack him hard across his face. Whack him until it was mush. She was talking to him. She was fucking talking to him. She at least deserved his attention.
But as she reached into her purse, she noticed the glistening lines on his cheeks. She noticed his slow-moving lips. How you could shame me like that? he muttered. How you could bring me so low?
Look, I had no business doing what I did with Carlton. It was wrong. Damn wrong, she said. And I know it cut you up. But prison, Wallace. Prison? You think I deserved to go to prison for that? Now you tell me. Six whole years I sat up in that hellhole. Because you feel shame. Because I bring you down low. Because of your pride. Your manhood. What if right now I should punish you for what you did to me? Cause I could very well do that to you right now. I could crush you right now, Errol. But I am not going to do that. I just want to be with Moira. That’s all. I just want to feel her close again. And so everything is up to you now. Everything is up to you. And I would advise you to make the right choice this time. I would advise you to act right.
She watched his shoulders heaving. She glanced at her watch. Ten minutes had passed. Wallace would be driving by soon. He would do so only once, he’d said. If she missed him she’d be on her own.
Errol still had not turned to face her, still had not said anything, but she knew him. He was listening; he was turning things over. His shoulders had grown slack.
She took her hand from her purse, backed away from the gate, and began walking in reverse. As she stepped away, she thought she caught the movement of a curtain. She stopped. Looked.
Errol threw down the shears and hurried inside. Should she wait? She continued her slow retreat, hoping to hear Errol or Moira’s voice, continuing to hope when it made no sense to think she’d be able to hear them from so far.
When she got to the main road she continued walking backward, stumbling at times, but her hand still in her purse, holding the gun.
Wallace was sitting in his Mercedes SUV at the bus stop.
Half an hour of driving elapsed before she spoke. She didn’t even recognize her own voice. You know what, Wallace? Turn round this damn vehicle right now. I can’t go home. I have to get my girl. I have to get her now.
A GRAVE UNDERTAKING
BY IAN THOMSON
Downtown Kingston
How my father came to die in Kingston, the unfortunate circumstances of his death there, remains unclear. Was it an accident? Nothing is known for sure. But this much I do know: my parents had gone to Jamaica for a winter vacation, which ended in a mortuary. Air-freighting my father’s body home to New York was an ordeal: few of us expect to die while abroad.
What can I tell you about him?
As a child I had been in awe of my father; daughters often are. His complexion was smooth and pink, his small, near-sighted eyes shone beadily behind horn-rimmed glasses. There was nothing tangible to dislike him for; Jimmy Ruff was my dad. He reviewed books for a living, and I guess he was doing fairly well at it, well enough, at any rate, to make a discreet name for himself at the New York Times. His forte was the savage put-down; any author he considered overrated (or who had simply won a literary prize) was tossed and gored. It took me awhile to work out that my father was not a writer after all, but a hack, though you might make it sound more important by calling him a literary critic.
My mother is the well-known food writer Fanny L’Estrange. By the time she met my father in 1984, she was the most infamously successful purveyor in New York of gaudy cookbook writing. “I want to bring out the beast in shy carnivores, and spur tenderloin-holics to tattoo Fanny L’Estrange on their rump roasts.”
I honestly believe that the worst writing in the entire world is to be found in my mother’s cookbooks. She, of course, does not know this (nor, one hopes, do her readers). But that was the first reason for her marvelous success as a food writer—her dismal taste. Mom had married young and she was even younger (sixteen, maybe seventeen) when she hung out with the Warhol crowd at The Factory in midtown. For all her outward propriety, she belonged to the age of New York punk and Patti Smith. This, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that she had grown up on a pig farm in Ohio.
In my teens, distressingly for me, I had been handed a diagnosis of anxiety disorder. The diagnosis gave my mother the shock of her life. “Why can’t you be like other people?” The diagnosis was unmistakably accurate. I am prone to attacks of panic-fear and made easily depressed. At my high school in Brooklyn the feelings of social isolation—of mental discomposure—intensified. I was in a minority of white kids anyway, but my anxiety made me feel like a Martian in the classroom. Even now, at the age of twenty-seven, I have few close friends. I am unmarried, and am likely to remain that way.
I am not wealthy (I have no private means), yet I manage to sublet a studio apartment off Sackett Street in Brooklyn, between Hoyt and Bond. For years I have struggled to survive there as an artist. Awhile back I conceived and executed a mural on a wall in downtown Brooklyn, which won plaudits locally in the press (How observant she is. She seems to notice everything). The mural was followed by Born Free, a study of lions and other animals in the Prospect Park zoo; then, in close succession, by Hereafters and Through the Void, paintings on the theme of death and dying in general.
The recession has knocked the bottom out of the art market; I scrape by on a pittance. Sometimes I feel an itch of regret at not having tried my hand at accounting (I am good with numbers). But who would have had me? The smallest things distress me. The physical and mental effort it has cost me to write this story alone has been considerable.
Like I say, all my mother wanted was to ignore my diagnosis; she would not even discuss it with my father. If she was unhappy in her marriage, my father’s drinking did not help. It began tentatively, I believe, like going to a forbidden cookie jar; then it got worse. Bottle after bottle of bourbon. As their disenchantment deepened, my parents began to lose all affection in each other’s company; they became a mystery to each other. To my shame, Mom started to behave wildly, taking up with anyone who would have her. Her affairs came mostly in serial form. All that she required of her men was that they be young, good-looking, and less drunk than Dad.
One night I turned up unexpectedly (I forget exactly why) at my parents’ place three or four neighborhoods away in Williamsburg. I unlocked the door, stepped inside, shut it. It was way after eleve
n; a dim light came from the ceiling lamp in the hall. Everything looked neat and tidy; the cleaner must have been in that day. I glanced at the walls hung with the familiar Hollywood film posters—The Big Steal, Where the Sidewalk Ends—and the Warhol silk screen of my mother aged about seventeen. The Siamese cat, Decca, lay on the chaise longue, her fur matted and eyes unseeing (Decca had been blind these past five years). I picked her up gently in my arms and tickled under her chin. She began to purr. At that moment I thought I heard a murmur of voices down the hall. I soft-footed down the trail of sound. What I found shocked me.
Mom was on the kitchen floor with another man.
“You!” she shrieked. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Her face was twisted and red with shame. I had never seen her in such a rage. The man looked at me and it seemed his eyes stayed on me an instant too long. I clenched my fists; a terrible anguish took hold. I fled the apartment in tears and contemplated throwing myself in the East River. For weeks afterward Mom behaved in my presence with a painful naturalness, as if nothing had happened. I was furious with her. Fortunately (for her), she had a holy belief in the restorative power of religion, and in her despair she turned to the spiritualist credence of her Ohio farmer ancestors. Spiritualism made her feel less alone, she said; her own dear departed could get in touch through mediums and rapping noises. (“Knock twice if you can hear me, Mother.”) She was deadly serious about it.
My father, meanwhile, did the same as any man does whose wife walks out on him: he started to eat more, drink more, and chase after women. In just under a month, he put on fifteen pounds. The added weight made him look ungainly; his face took on a tumid, pouchy look; to conceal his swelling jowls (or maybe offset his creeping baldness) he grew a goatee, which I disliked.
Before long, his doctor recommended that he take a vacation. It was important to find somewhere to get away from it all. Had he ever thought of the Caribbean? Jamaica, maybe? The visit to the doctor proved to be an unexpected success; afterward, as occasionally happened, Dad had a good idea: he determined to cut back on the alcohol.
With his drinking diminished and my mother’s affairs now less numerous, my parents resolved to make up their differences and together booked a round-trip flight to Jamaica. It seemed like a good idea. Travel abroad in search of new foodstuffs had been my mother’s passion; my father used to join her whenever he could. This time, however, they were going to a place whose laws and culture they did not know. My own knowledge of Jamaica was limited to the island’s music and a couple of travel books. Jamaican deejay styles of “toasting” (scatting and talking over records) had influenced hip-hop. And Jamaican dub reggae, with its slowed-down, marijuana-heavy beat, offers me a kind of solace in times of anxiety.
To help finance the trip, Dad persuaded National Geographic to commission him to write an article on Afro-Caribbean funerary customs. Pleased, he began to read all he could on Jamaican countryside burial cults and Revival-inspired wakes. Mom’s own interest in spiritualism (an insidious form of necromancy, if you ask me) complemented the subject. “And it really is fascinating,” Dad told me on the phone the day before he left. In Jamaica, he explained, relatives may gather at a dead person’s house for a wake that can last as long as nine days. “And get this,” he went on, unstoppably, “the house becomes known for the duration as the dead yard. What a name! These dead yard funerals, they’re often ecstatic, like they’re a reggae version of a New Orleans jazz funeral. People dance! As if possessed by ghosts.” Right. What did he know about reggae or jazz funerals? He was talking through his hat—again.
A week later, my parents flew Air Jamaica to Kingston. It was snowing in New York when they left and in the snow everything looked curiously still and quiet. At first it seems the vacation was a success. No sexual infidelity. No heavy drinking. My father phoned to say that he was busy reading about Caribbean mortuary customs at the Institute of Jamaica library. It seems he had become an object of interest on the streets of downtown Kingston, probably because he walked everywhere. A white man without a car in Jamaica has either lost his mind or his place in society. (I read that in a book.) Mom, predictably, enthused to me about the hotel breakfasts of callaloo and salt fish. They had booked themselves into the four-star Jamaica Pegasus on Knutsford Boulevard.
All this, what I’ve been telling you, happened last winter, a couple of weeks before Christmas. I was staying at my parents’ place at the time: they thought it would make a change from the “gloom” (as they called it) of my Sackett Street studio. In reality, the studio represented everything that was comprehensible and reassuring to me. Nevertheless, I thought I could relax in Williamsburg. The apartment walls had big red geometric designs painted on them, which I found oddly soothing. All I had to do, apart from take the garbage out on Tuesdays, was feed the cat.
It was a chill December weekend, I remember, and the windows were wide open to the late afternoon. Decca stirred slightly and purred. I went to the kitchen to fetch her a tin of Happy Heart chopped liver. Duke Ellington’s “Jump for Joy” was playing on the kitchen radio when the phone rang.
“Baby?” It was my mother. “Oh my God—baby—hi … I almost lost you—Jesus—listen.” Her voice sounded drawly, inebriated, maybe.
“Mom?”
“Are you alone?” she asked.
“Yes. Why?”
“Something has happened. Your father—he’s had a heart attack.”
“Heart? Attack how? He’s not dead?” I stared at the redcolored designs on the wall.
“Not dead. But—”
“Was it bad?” I asked.
“Pretty bad. He’s had a bypass. The doctors say he may not live until Wednesday.”
My stomach turned over.
“But today’s Saturday. This is serious!”
“Serious? I don’t know about serious. It’s certainly Saturday.” My mother sounded angry: something about another woman.
“Calm down,” I said, more to myself. (I could feel a familiar anxiety creeping in.) “So when was the last time you saw Dad, actually? To talk to. Please. As much detail as you can remember.”
Mom took a moment to reply. “We were in a restaurant in Kingston for lunch and we’d ordered this stunning, peony pink wine—”
“Okay, spare me the particulars.”
“Okay. Suddenly we had a row—the worst ever.” According to Mom, the wine bottle had gone over first; then the plates had slid toward her as Dad yanked at the tablecloth and buried the lower part of her body in a confusion of china, rosé wine, glassware, and warm food.
“He stormed out of the restaurant, your father did, leaving me to pick up the check. Can you believe it?”
(I could: it was part of his insecurity.)
“And then?”
“And then I did something crazy. I took a taxi to the airport and flew—to Montego Bay!”
“Are you joking?”
“Joking? No.”
“You must be. Or you must be crazy. Montego Bay? That’s on the other side of Jamaica.”
“I’m not crazy, and I’m not joking.”
“Where are you? Where are you?”
“I’m in Montego Bay.”
“Jesus Kee-rist!” The vehemence of my voice surprised me; I was feeling really quite tense.
Mom mumbled something to herself—I was unable to make out what—before she continued in a shaky voice. “How could he?”
How could he what?
But I was no longer thinking. I looked out the kitchen window; a light snow was falling against the darkness.
If I understood, my father had gone back to the Pegasus Hotel and started to drink. By midnight the liquor must have gotten him well and truly licked; early the next morning they found him seminaked on the bedroom floor in a cold sweat and deathly pale. A girl in a “gold ankle chain and blond wig” (according to one witness) was seen running off after alerting the desk downstairs to what had happened. It seems the girl had gone earlier to my parents’ room—508—after re
ceiving a call. So that was it. In a moment of impetuosity fueled by alcohol, my father had phoned for a hooker. What happened next is not so hard to imagine. His heart had stopped beating during intercourse. Or maybe the girl had tried to rob him? Filled with horror, she had run off, and with her disappearance, with my father’s cardiac arrest, with my parents’ marriage now in tatters, it seemed there was nothing left.
“I don’t hate your father,” my mother was saying. “I hate that bitch. She got to sleep with him, instead of me.”
“Mom!” I felt a rush of resentment against her. She had neglected me shamelessly as a mother. What was she doing in Montego Bay?
She went on talking, but I did not hear her. “You still there?” she said after a moment.
“Yes.”
The hotel had dialed for an ambulance, apparently, which arrived promptly at the address on Knutsford Boulevard. A paramedic injected my father with insulin as he lay incoherent on the carpet. Within the hour, a surgeon had phoned my mother in Montego Bay; the surgeon informed her that her husband was a very sick man but there was a chance of saving his life if he went under the knife. Mom had told the surgeon to go ahead and operate.
To me she said: “Drop everything, baby—book a flight to Jamaica. Now.”
“I’m so sorry, Mom,” I said. “This is awful.”
I hung up and began to pace from one end of the kitchen to the other. Then I tried to shut my eyes to let the darkness in, but when I opened them everything was as frightening and unpredictable as before. My father’s heart attack was going to force me to confront long-buried feelings of resentment and anger. I felt an undefined need to examine all the suppressed fears and anxieties I had ever entertained. Of course I slept fitfully that night; my mind felt weighted down with a nameless dread and the sense of my own life as a dead weight.
Next day as I left for the airport, a chill wind was blowing up in gusts from the East River. The bright tropic warmth of Jamaica seemed light years away; but it was appropriate weather, I thought, for an unplanned farewell, should Dad die now. And I was sure he would die. Why else had I begun to see the world divided into those who have fathers and those who do not?
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