He’d had no date for the Queen Elizabeth High School Symphony Swing, but chose to go anyway. Yep, might as well. Come seven p.m., hell or high water, then, Carl joined two-hundred-plus souls crowding the bleachers in the steamy gymnasium. Situated in the north end, the orchestra left lots of southern space for swingers to jump and jitterbug. The musicians tuned up, then gyred into gear. One guy hammered drums; others fingered horns or plucked strings. A Royal Canuck Navy pianist tried his hand at Ellington, but it was as if he were wearing handcuffs. Still, music swooped and looped.
Carl ogled les danseuses. Was happy to spy Lola Brown and Muriel Dixon, both dateless, both lookin supoib. Made him forget the railway all the way. True: Lola holds a diploma in all branches of Beauty culture, including hair design. She’s chunky, funky, and spunky. Her red dress twirled and swirled; Carl glimpsed two smooth—yes, stout—legs. But Muriel was a one-woman debutante ball in V-neck white dress and red pumps.
Limber steps loosened all, so good spirits prevailed as of nine p.m. Porgy and Bess started to sound like Bessie Smith; Billy Eckstine started to sound like Billie Holiday.
Then, fisticuffs spread contagious among the musicians: the trombonist brained a violinist with his slide, and the pianist kicked the drummer in the crotch, and the latter stabbed the conductor with his sticks. Memorable mayhem. The swing concert degenerated into wildly swinging fists. A trumpet swallowed a drumstick; the pianist got pied in the face with a cymbal; the second fiddle had a clarinet chip a front tooth; another violinist gave the trombonist a black eye. The ruckus made for raucous, discordant sounds, as if the musicians were just beginning to play, instead of ending up bruised and battered and their instruments splintered and bashed or dented and smashed.
Carl invited Lola and Muriel to vamoose from the Chaos and grab some real spirits—not the bubbly emptiness of soda pop. Agreeably, he escorted the young ladies back to 1½ Belle Aire Terrace, where snacks and honest-to-God booze awaited. Six feet tramped past six-foot-high snowdrifts; their black-comic laughter stamped the air; their white breaths swamped the stars.
By nine-thirty p.m., the women’s feet—lithe, plump—slipped easily out of boots. Coats hung up, the gals ensconced on his couch, Carl incarnated Goodness Gracious. He brought the fireplace to roaring, warming life; he lit candles to bless the room with light as soft as heat. He set out red wine for sipping.
Lola: “I still feel a bit cold. Warm us up, Carl.”
Muriel chimed in: “I like dark rum.” She stretched out, leaning herself against Lola.
Carl “broke the ice” by breaking open ice cubes and a bottle of Mount Gay Barbadian rum. (He didn’t recognize this accidental salute to his long-vanished naval father, Mr. Locksley Black.)
He fixed up solid drinks—so dark, they were black. Carl set Johnny Mathis’s Warm to work on the hi-fi: Percy Faith’s strings quivered, kissing. Three mouths sucked dark rum.
The drinks equalled aphrodisiacs. Rum tasted kinky after the red wine. Both gals joked, teased: Time for three to waltz. They do.
Cuddled up on the sofa, two houris—black-eyed nymphs—looked two candies. Carl sat near them in his big-ass, Mao-style armchair. Buttery candlelight suited this troika, waxing and buffing copper, iron, and golden skin. Carl just observed, noting it would be awfully equitable to kiss two moist mouths, feel four dark-fudge-sweet arms. Two cigarettes fired smoke incandescently. Carl’s talk was jokes, gossip, movies, LPs, everything easy and mellow.
Then, Lola said, “I dare ya to kiss Muriel, Carl.” Titters. Giggles. Both looked damn delectable. Carl rose and kissed Muriel.
Lola laughed softly, not nervously. “Don’t ya both look sweet. Oh, look at Muriel blush. Kiss her again, Carl—and me too.”
Lips smacked three faces. Six lips: a sextet if there ever was.
Carl relished each lavish labial. Lola, the bigger gal, granted largesse. Carl took it. Well-matched mouths met everywhere. Raw heat wafted musk.
Various mountings and configurations seemed nigh. You could count (on) em: a folie à deux, a ménage à trois, a soixante-neuf, etc. The New Math minus nothing; or the French Nouvelle Vague translated into bossa nova.
Lola and Muriel were kissing and fondling each other: no scruples or qualms or inhibitions. Tongues gobbled sloppily; rum was gulped down. Six hands undid belts, buttons, snaps, zippers. Belts slithered and clasps jangled; buttons, peeling from slits, subtly squeaked; snaps popped; zippers zinged down. This discordant music was an overture to no-doubt harmony. Candlelight was yellow with fire, not caution.
Soon, Lola’s panties, once as wide as her hips but cut low, were off, and, snapped back, shrunk down to brand new size. An irresistible circumstance. Carl was set to shut his eyes and pretend Lola was Marina.
Before matters could escalate to low-down lovin, came several bitter, gloved thuds—interfering, disturbing—upon Carl’s front door. Clothes hastily reassembled, as if for a full-dress review.
But Lola’s panties ended up in her hat; Muriel’s scarf became her panties; Carl’s sweater clothed Lola; her blouse ballooned over Muriel’s chest. No time to coordinate the dressing. The trio had to mix and match as best the three dishevelled could.
Then Carl cracked his door to Muriel’s paramour, Frederickson Dent, off The Sunflower, a boat from Bridgetown, Barbados, ferrying sugar to Nova Scotia and bearing gypsum back. (Dent always looks like sugar-frosted or sugar-dusted chocolate cake. He be that sweet.) His hands, clenched at his sides, were ready sledgehammers. The man was a smokestack: the sorta guy to tear off your testicles if ya try to reason—or tussle—with the taut-muscled hominid.
“Muriel!” Fred’s voice hissed like a scythe.
Carl said, “Take it easy, fella. Want a drink?”
“I want Muriel!”
Behind Carl, Lola and Muriel hustled into their coats and boots. Above Fred’s head, oily clouds scudded across the charcoal sky. Two coal-black eyes stared out from a smoky face. Again, Carl asked the smouldering man indoors.
Fred retorted, “Ain’t steppin in your stinkin shit.” He shouted, “Muriel, you Carlyle bitch? You fuckin him?”
Carl shushed the man sharply: “You want the cops here? Shut up!”
Muriel shied through the door. She swished by Carl and took Fred’s gorilla-size hand. “Thanks, Carl.” As she and her fella left, he threw Carl a look that was merely a substitute for a knife through his jugular. Gay frost cackled under four stepping feet.
Now, Lola murmured, “Thanks,” as she went too. Her eyes were dark meteors. She pressed Carl’s hand meaningfully, as if she were reluctant to leave.
Outside, the dark night flew up like a cape from the back of a black horse. Carl had turned back to his dark quarters to brood: He’d had two women primed for whatever he desired, one supine, one on all fours. But he’d let a Tar interrupt. In fact, the night was an ironic revisiting of his first night with Muriel. Chagrined, irritated, peeved, and pissed off: his mood.
As for Freddy Dent, Carl classed him as a typical Bajan: taking a Scotian woman as a dockside doxy, while his real, Bajan fiancée or spouse rotted at home, sucking in rum and coconut milk while suckling babes, at both teats, on alcoholized mama’s milk. A double damnation!
But Fred viewed Carl as a local yokel; a displaced Canuck Negro, lacking the original black culture of the Caribbean and the strong Negro culture of the U.S. He got nothin to give a Scotianer lady. Sheeeeit! To Fred, the incipient independence of Barbados, becoming more effectively independent than be Anglo-Saxon-ass-kissing Canada, is a godsend for Coloured ladies marooned in the backward, backslid, back-o-God province that be Nova Scotia: too close to the U.S. for its own good, too far from the B.W.I. to be improved. Day-o! Day-o!
Carl deposits Muriel at her digs. He expects a kiss, but not the very long kiss that it becomes. (But the gas tank, between her legs, felt as thick and hot as a bull—as Carl, Taurus, had embodied, thrusting, Muriel remembers, last December.)
Carl hankers to ask the gal back to his rooms; instead, h
e says, “Ciao,” and revels in the pleasure (as in James Bond tales) of a chap’s being able to coolly kiss off a chippy. He vrooms away, relishing the thought that Muriel is watching him leave her, his “Ciao” disintegrating in the breeze as much as her dreams of wedding bells.
Fine, Carl thinks. Since November ’58 (when he last rode Liz II) until today, May 9, 1959, his life has been circumscribed. He’s had to tramp about the same sixteen square miles of terra firma, from the South Street and Hollis Street–situated train station to North Street and Belle Aire Terrace. Until today, for the last six months, his best adventures (save for a few wham-bam-ma’am trysts) have been siphoned from cinema or imagined from books. Life as a pedestrian is, well, damnably pedestrian. Today, his purviews widen and his perquisites increase. Instead of whistling to Sinatra, he can howl with Ginsberg. The motorcycle casts him in On the Road; or, he’s a swashbuckler like The Wild One. Liz II—gleam and smoke—is a moving picture. Carl can pretend he’s T.E. Lawrence and Joe Louis, all in one dapper package. He wants to be able always to kick-start his machine, zoom to the horizon, and find there a woman—ideally with an open mind, an open bottle, and open legs.
Back in his bachelor rooms, Carl tosses back rum to toast this year’s debut rides. He thinks about Muriel, how he could’ve bedded her again this evening. He don’t think he’s soulless or callous to regard Muriel—or any woman—as a conduit to Pleasure. She leaves him panting, gasping, as if on the verge of death when, well, this is when he’s most defiantly alive.
He’s had a brilliant day, and now a cascade of potential lady conquests (or re-conquests), traipses through his skull as the syrupy rum summons sleep. He dreams, and, as he later thinks, It is awful (prophetic): a friend of mine looked quite ill with child. In this dream, he is standing in an apple orchard with a woman whose face he cannot see. Her abdomen is swollen. He plucks an apple to hand to her, but she will not turn to accept it. Next, his motorcycle becomes a bull; its hooves kick and stamp.
Carl awakes. Must he become a piskijker—a piss-watcher—to tell who is pregnant, and by whom?
If he watch his p’s and q’s—is stealthy—there’s no reason why Carl—he thinks—can’t go “stepping in, step-stepping in, his shoes kicked off, step-stepping in.” To bend recalcitrant Marina White to his will, to take her from back of his motorbike and take her backside to bed. Mmmmmmm. Define BMW as Beautiful Marina White. Muriel is fine, but Marina is finesse.
Regard her waist—willowy—see her bust—as pillowy as that of Carmen Jones (Miss Dorothy Dandridge herself). Lawd, have mercy! Mar’s Beauty just don’t quit. Her eyes scorch; her lips rear a rosebud; her skin is coffee. Her perfume arrives like good news, lingers like salvation.
Her kisses prove satisfying, but unsatisfying; promising, but uncompromising: she won’t let Carl “take advantage.”
Mar gotta favour Chastity. Her mom was—well—too open to men. Mar’s siblings share her mama, but none her papa. Too, she’s grown up hungry; cash could bring home fire, enough for crusts and crumbs, but not enough to always stay warm or to stave off sickness.
So, Mar figures an open-legs policy mandates a closed-door future. She won’t succumb to some sweet-talker, some haberdashery-fine, dashing fellow. As Carl fronts.
It’s 1959; prophylactics come crude and flimsy; condoms slip off; they split open. The Pill will only be approved for sale in the United States—and then for wives only—in December: too late to allow Mar a nothin-to-it, no-fuss deflowering.
In grade school, if a boy smiled at her, Marina’d dig her fingernails in his arm. Later, to ward off any Don Juan, she donned glasses that masked her as a severe librarian. Now, her glasses distinguish her from the bobby soxer, hula-hoop-hipped gals, too many of whom view seventeen as a perfect age to don maternity wear.
Bespectacled in visage, respectable in demeanour, Marina got ignored at dances. Most of the greasy, bad-teeth cowboys in Three Mile Plains only had Grade Three—just nuff schoolin to know they’d never amount to anything but gypsum-quarryin, black-phlegm-spittin drunks and kitchen-table tyrants. So, they chase dumb “broads”; they plan to boss their shacks, get shit-faced, and thrash the ol lady. Problem: a schooled wife won’t let hubby mistake baby formula pennies for beer money.
So, Mar’s teen solitude suited her fine. She favoured suicidal Sylvia Plath and slutty Colette over smarmy rags like Confidential. She chose to analyze Jane Austen’s acerbic studies of courtship, not gloat over Jayne Mansfield’s marital woes and weight gains.
In sum, Marina believes she’ll slip outta Peonage and into the middle class if she keeps Matthew-Mark-Luke-John in mind, and models herself on The Virgin Mary, spurning Mary Magdalene. Leathered-down charmers like Carl are fun, but not guys to fall for, unless a gal wanna be left in the lurch, a papa-less bambino at her breast.
Nor does Mar forget how her once-upon-a-time best friend (in grade school) perished ignobly, up Panuke Road, in winter 1958: May Croxen had gone drivin with Joe Jackson in his patchwork jalopy. They’d parked up the lake in frigid Fahrenheit, so tried to get warmth by joinin amiable organs together while keepin th’engine puffin. However, their every gasp of Delight saw them ingest—ignorantly—much carbon monoxide. Clutchin madly at each other, they climaxed in an atmosphere of poison gas, and died, stuck together by conjunctive spasms. For decent burial, the coroner had to slice the bodies apart. Still, young Mr. Jackson’s proudest appendage must remain engorged in Miss Croxen’s friendliest cavity—until dust do they part.
To avoid such louche fatalism, Mar intends to don a nurse’s habit and then—and only maybe—a bridal gown. A B.Sc. first, please, then a “Mrs.”
She must symbolize Negress Rectitude. She must be the schoolmarm lady with cinnamon in her complexion, peppermints in her purse, and good grammar in her lungs, plus straight-back posture, and lavender toiletries and a lemon-juice diet.
Carl don’t understand Marina’s discriminations. He’s graceful in style; she’s gracious in personality. Ain’t it natural that she, a student nurse at Dalhousie University, who loves straddling his BMW, should want to straddle him? Yet, he ain’t blunt in his Lust. He’s intricate, delicate, sly: Br’er Rabbit out to “Tar Baby” Elizabeth Bennet.
So, Carl plots to ply churchgoing Marina into his sheets. Strategically, then, he’s accepted the presidency of the Baptist Youth Fellowship, just so he can appear a right dapper chaplain-in-training to Marina’s Bible-readin eyes.
That he has booze in his fridge and girly mags under his pillow just proves that he takes Temptation seriously. That’s what he’d tell Marina: he’s like Christ in the desert, accepting to be tempted because he can (smartly) resist . . .
Once, the two were kissing at a trolley stop, pretty chastely. Then a trolley arrived, and a girl in a swishin pleated skirt got off, smiled at Carl. Still kissing Mar, he waved back. Marina broke off the kiss: “You know her?”
Carl say he was just bein sociable. But Mar knows her beau is a Romeo, that his eyes will roam if, or when, ever hers are shut.
For Carl, then, Liz II is a godsend: while dating Mar in Halifax, Carl can fuck a gal in another town. He believes his deceptive practice is not uncommon, merely instrumentalized, somewhat unusually, via the motorcycle.
Carl knows other Coloured men—like porters (if enterprisingly lustful)—hold a wife and kids in Halifax and a mirror family in Montreal. They’re fanatical, then, about never letting one wife holiday in the city of the other. A prudential puritanism preserves bigamy. Nor do they ever booze enough to confuse one wife or child with another of the sister family. (Their fear of discovery even wards off dementia.) They also strive to prevent inadvertent incest. These men can tell stories about diverting a son by one wife from courting the daughter by another. They strive to secure a Dominion Atlantic Railway—or Canadian National Railway—Harem, while swearing they love only one woman, whom they’d like to be buried beside, to share the warm tears of the bereaved and the cool worms of their grave. They hold on to parallel wives beca
use they have—and need—a lot of love, or because they are heavy-natured, thus negating the European artifice—farce—of Monogamy, the household version of Monopoly.
But the dilemma for Carl and Marina is not only his impenitent Lust or her impenetrable sex, it is also the reality of Coloured Halifax this year. The unmarried young must practise a Russian roulette: they sleep about, trying on—thus—as many genial, unwed genitals as Health and Chance allow. The communal morality is: Have sex frequently with likeable partners, but marry the one with whom a child is conceived. Fuck and pray is the folk theology on Procreation, with babies born miraculously—prematurely—within the nine-month purview of gestation, but also within nine months of the discovery of the pregnancy and the swift arrangement of a wedding. African Baptist marriages often get paired with newborns’ christenings. And no one protests. Everyone smiles. For the camera.
Being a student nurse, Marina is cognizant of these traditions and expectations. She approves: a fixed-up marriage eliminates Disgrace and Bastardy.
Marina also knows—if Carl does not—that local Negroes feel threatened by a black woman who has more education than they, and will resort to Rape—to force motherhood upon their victim—to shame her into “keeping her place.” Bluenose whites also perpetrate such assaults, again to teach a “molasses lassie” that she’s fit to be a scullion, not a scholar.
Knowing these atrocious truths, Mar resents Carl’s irresponsible gallivanting. He should understand, thinks Mar, that her delay of Coitus serves to advance The Race. He should champion her becoming a nurse; he should palliate her loneliness as a black woman from a poor family, now competing against well-off white girls for decent marks and a chance at a respectable salary.
The Motorcyclist Page 3