The Meeting Point

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by Austin Clarke


  Dear Mammy, How are you? I hope the reaches of this letter will find you in a perfect state of good health, as it leaves me feeling fairly well, at present. Estelle here. But things are not working out as I did figure they would work out. But I putting everything in God hands, and all I can do now, is wait. I am making up a parcel with a few odds and ends, to send to you, including a dress and a pair of shoes … She tore up that letter, in her mind, and considered writing one to Lonnie, who had been resting heavily on her conscience since Estelle arrived; and since she saw the folly of having sent for her. But before she thought more of Lonnie, she began again to think of Estelle, in the apartment alone: “ … wonder what she is up to, now? That girl make me so vexed this morning, and I, a Christian-minded person had to tell her such hard things, my own flesh-and-blood, Christ! I haven’t left nothing now for anybody to say to her. Bernice, you have treated that girl, your sister, worse than a slut, wishing that a man (her thoughts ran over Mr. Burrmann like a spotlight, travelling from his head to his toes: and she winced the thoughts out of her mind) would breed Estelle, and give her an unwanted child, Lord God!” … Dear Lonnie. Sometimes you make me so blasted vexed with all your asking and begging, that I sometimes have to consider myself a woman who must be a damn fool, or mad. Imagine me up here, in this cold climate, working for next to peanuts and supporting a blasted hardback man like you! Lonnie, you think I borned yesterday? You think you is such a Valentino that I am hard-up and crazy over you? Blind you, Lonnie! when I begged you and beseeched you and practically kissed your behind to put a ring on my finger, and make me the lady any decent man would want to make of his woman in childbirth, be-Christ, Lonnie, you know what you did? You turn and run, and run, Lonnie, ’cause you was a coward ’gainst responsibilities. And now you have the gall writing me a letter to ask for a suit to wear to church. Christmas morning? Well, Lonnie, I think so much of you and what you stand for, that I advise you to wear the one you was borned in, if you was ever borned. Go and face the Bishop in that, heh-heh-ha-hah! and here her letter ran out, because the power of her bitterness against Lonnie and against men, was so strong it burned up her imagination. She addressed herself directly to Lonnie now (she felt she was actually speaking to him, in the flesh) “Lonnie, listen to me! if, if I give you a second chance, if we could fix up things and put our two heads together, you think you could behave like a man, even half a man?” (Bernice herself answered for Lonnie, “Perhaps!” She answered so emphatically, she thought Dots had heard.) “I am going to send a plane ticket for you, because this country wasn’t discovered for a woman who do not have a man as a companion. But I am going to watch you with both my eyes. You not playing no games with me, like this Boysie here, worthless Boysie who is always two-timing Dots, you hear? Or be-Christ, I kill you, Lonnie! I am a woman pushing forty years now, and no man hasn’t come yet telling me I beautiful, and that I sweet …”

  “But Bernice, how you think the finance people track-down Clotelle?” Dots was thinking about her over-due payments on the old Chevrolet, and about the sewing machine she had bought from a salesman. “Millions and millions o’ people in this city!”

  “White people, Dots,” Bernice said, tidying her mind to answer. “They have invented every device and contraption for tracking down people and things. You ain’t see they even tracking down the moon these days, child?”

  “You know something?” Boysie said. “A German fellar, a immigrant like me, or you, tell me they have a big book with all the names and addresses and jobs of people, living in this city. That book is lock up, always under lock and key in the Parliament Buildings, below there on Queen’s Park. This German fellar say, that any man at all, once that man living here — even if he moved in the city for half day! — all you got to do, is consult with that book, and that man is found!”

  “But Boysie, where do you get these stories from?”

  “I is a man who associates with people in the know,” he said proudly. “I looks at my position in this country this way. I come into this country, gorblummuh! to stay. And I figures that my stay here could only be better if I mix-in with the people in command here, not with West Indians.” Not a man with much finesse and modesty, Boysie was always conscious of his inferiority to Dots (he did not think of Bernice in this way) and when he had a chance to make a point, he always overstated it. It was this way with other things too. Like the way he parked the car now: spinning the steering wheel, when he knew it couldn’t turn any more; and then allowing the wheel to unwind itself and spin through his hands. He always wanted to impress whoever was present. He was now impressing Bernice and Dots, but particularly Bernice. Bernice and Dots shrugged their winter coats into place; adjusted their hats, and looked prepared. Boysie turned off the engine before applying the brakes, and the car jerked and then stopped. He opened his door, slammed it hard and said, “I think I going wait here, in the car, till you and …”

  “You coming with we! Church don’t bite.”

  “But Dots …”

  “If you got it in your head to dodge back up there and crawl behind Brigitte, and you think you leaving me in this hot, stuffy church, listening to that damn fool talk ’bout God, looka Boysie! don’t make Satan get in my behind today.…” Boysie slammed the door again, and dragged his winter boots through the snow and went into the church. “That bastard!”

  “He better be careful that the policeman Brigitte got don’t bathe his behind in licks one o’ these days!” Bernice said, joking. But deep down she was not joking. Dots made a note of it, too. Bernice saw this; but after all, the damage was already done. They did things to their faces in small pocket compacts; they applied a fresh layer of white powder so that when they were finished, the colour and the texture on their faces were noticeably different from that of their necks. Bernice smacked her lipstick into place.

  “Getting out of a car in the winter time is hell, eh, gal?” It was difficult for her to keep her legs closed. A white man, standing opposite and drinking out of a paper bag, was looking at her. “Looka that bitch!” Bernice hadn’t noticed. “There! He spying up under me, you can’t see that?” Bernice saw him. In a lower voice, Dots said to the man, so that he couldn’t hear, “Spy! Spy, you bitch! ’cause you never see nothing so pretty, so get a good eyeful!” Bernice almost choked with laughter. The man did not hear; and he did not stop looking and he did not stop drinking. Perhaps he was frozen stiff, frozen dead. Just before entering the church, Bernice told Dots that Estelle wasn’t working out at all. Dots commiserated with her.

  “I want you to help me look for a room tomorrow. Perhaps you could get Agaffa to see if she know a place, ’cause she would have a better chance getting a better place.…”

  “Yes, gal.”

  Mr. Burrmann had been reading The New Class by Milovan Djilas, for the past two hours. He would find himself following the argument on page 131, and becoming engrossed in what Djilas was saying; and he would shake his head, and realize he had read the passage already. It had taken him about forty-five minutes to finish page 130. He was worried this morning, a dull Sunday morning; and he was lonely. Mrs. Burrmann had taken Putzi and the children to the neighbourhood skating rink. He had seen Bernice leave for church.

  On these mornings, when he was alone, he would read in his study, or listen to very progressive jazz which his wife called “vulgar and certainly not the kind of music a man in your position should waste time listening to, why don’t you ever try to improve your mind, you’re so damn vulgar for a lawyer!” But jazz and not Beethoven was what Mr. Burrmann grew up with, on Palmerston Boulevard. He used to spend all the time he could, and his money too, listening to black musicians from America, who came to play at the Silver Dollar, and at an inconspicuous establishment, euphemistically named The TNT. With the jazz and black women and whiskey and the crap games, he had had his share of Negro culture. He had thrown dice with the Harlem-like men, and have even consciously imitated their mannerisms, and a few of their diversions, such as smoking marij
uana, because he had found his own orthodox life dull and boring. But he had emerged “clean” from all this, because he had his university degree and was ambitious; and he wanted to be a lawyer. One aspect of his Spadina days never left him: it was the complete satisfaction he had known, while in the thighs of a large vulgar-laughing black woman named A-Train, who roared in and out of the El Mocombo Tavern, like an express train, singing rhythm-and-blues. It was A-Train who had done that thing to him, with such vulgarity and completeness, that it never left his mind or body. And he would think of it, as he was thinking about it this morning, and cold shivers would run down his spine like an ecstatic paralysis. When she was finished with him, she held him like a baby in her arms (she was two hundred pounds and had muscles like Mohammad Ali, the heavyweight champion of the world) and put her face close to his, and shouted in his ears, “Sammy baby, you ain’t nothing but a child, a little teeny child.” And she dropped him out of her arms, and he fell on the broken, many-tongued springs of the rented bed. And he started to cry. “Get to hell out, Sammy. And don’t you ever come back till you’s a man!”

  Throughout his married life, the terror of responsibility in bed, plus the fact that he was conscious he was marrying Rachel Gladys Heinne, heiress to a million dollars in slum-house real estate (he had lived in one of those very slum houses owned by Miss Heinne’s father, who came to Canada broke, in 1909, from Poland), had instilled a certain resentment for the woman who became his wife; and it accounted (so his psychiatrist told him) for a certain drying up of his energies and his love, whenever he made love to her. He always thought he was going to have a child whenever he made love to his wife; and he was terrified that he would have to marry her: although at the time, he was already married to her. His hate for A-Train and the truth she had done to him and had told him; and also Mrs. Burrmann’s attitude to sex, did nothing to help untangle the mesh of emotions and deep fears which took him in their arms whenever he wanted a woman. After some time, Mrs. Burrmann herself went to a fashionable psychiatrist in the Bloor Street Colonnade; and she sent Sammy to one in the Medical Arts Building, several blocks away, on the same street. (He was thinking this morning, that he never did satisfy his own curiosity about this action of his wife’s: and he, a man, had allowed her to tell him what to do, and which expert to consult about his problems. He resented her more for that: she was being superior again; laughing at him for making the problems and then helping him to solve them.) After the first meeting, his psychiatrist told him, “Sammy, leave, man!” and go home and try “it” in as many attitudes and states of mind until Mrs. Burrmann understood “her natural role.” It was all very confusing, and not a little ridiculous. But Mr. Burrmann never tried “it.” It had already become repulsive to him. And he never did find out what her psychiatrist told her.

  The complete destruction of pride brought upon his sensibilities by A-Train, in those loud, whorling-whirlpool Spadina days, would sometimes cause him to search for his lost manhood, among the European coffee shops on Bloor Street West; and later, in Yorkville Village. In his law firm where he was a brilliant corporation lawyer (this was another variation of his earlier ambition to be the best Jewish criminal lawyer in the Upper Canada Law Society’s history, which happened midway through the University of Toronto Law School, because he had succeeded in putting Jeffrey and Jeffrey’s burden out of his mind; and he had decided he wanted nothing to do with civil rights and people who have those problems: he wanted a fresh, clean un-sordid law practice) he kept to himself, whenever that was possible. But he was always searching: in the evenings he would visit the coffee houses in the Village, where the candlelight was only bright enough for him to read Playboy and Foreign Affairs; and weak enough for his austere business suit with subtle pinstripe to appear like badly cut, off-the-rack Hipster’s threads. His search would take him into daydreams over the red-and-white checkered tablecloths, between the soot and the flickering hopes of the candles and the “free” women, young and maidened, upright as virgins in common-law packages: and always he would think of bizarre experiences with these women, especially one who was tall and willowy and daring in her walk, and shabby and thin, even for a model, and who wore her hair long and stringy and uncombed like the tail of a horse. There must be a variation; there must be love; there must be women to try IT in as many attitudes and states of mind until they understood their natural role: but all the women he had loved, before and after his marriage, always left — they left town; or left life; or left fornication; or left love. But they left; they all left; but before leaving him they told him they had to leave “in order to be fair, because I want you to know before I do anything, since it is the least bit of decency I can do.” Many times, in coffee houses, the Penny Farthing, the Act One Scene One, the Half Beat, he tried “it” within the free regions of his mind, in as many attitudes and states of mind as time would allow, as it took the horse-hair woman to drink her expresso coffee: but the thought of his wife, in her attitudes, intervened. His wife’s attitudes to it, when all the things essential to the after-cleanliness of the performance, were brought into the bedroom; and were placed on the marble-topped dressing table. There were clean, fresh, fleshy towels: one for him, inscribed HIS; and one for her, significantly christened, HERS, and “by-God, one of these days, or nights, I’m gonna use the wrong towel, HERS! and then I’ll see if I contract syphilis, or some damn incurable disease … ”; and scented by Chanel. The vaseline was there too; not in a cheap jar as bought from Woolworth’s or Kresge’s; and marked VASELINE, which was really what it was, but in an apothecary’s jar which Mrs. Burrmann had bought at an art shop on Cumberland Street. The jar was inscribed OINTMENT, written on skin-colour Band-Aid, in red ink! The most recent passions of sex to come to his mind, were twice within the last three months, when on her insistence, they did “it” twice — on her birthday; and on their tenth wedding anniversary. Mrs. Burrmann was brought up in an orthodox Jewish home with Christian dispositions, and was taught that it was more proper to use phrases instead of the medical terms, which were synonymous with those phrases. She would wear the thin red silk nightgown, bought from Macy’s in New York; and silk negligées which did not hide her body, and which were not meant to. And this bothered Mr. Burrmann: this temptation. On those nights of sex, she would come into her bedroom which had a large circular double bed, and which was separated from the other room by a short hallway and a door. Rachel Gladys Heinne-Burrmann (this is how her name appeared on her personal stationery of blue paper; but he called her, when he called her, Glad) … Glad would lie there, God, on her back, like a cloud fallen to the ground (he was talking to the woman of his dreams, as she drank her expresso, but she could not hear him, because he did not intend it to be that kind of conversation. He was talking to her spirit, which he knew could hear his words; he was complaining to her, like a child searching faces of adult unconcern for a welcomed ear) … and she would lie there, still as the dead body of Mary, not Jesus’s mother, but Mary who went to call the cattle home and call the cattle home across the Sands of Dee, and whose body was found later, in the moss and sunset beds of floating death, in the River Dee; waiting waiting and preparing as if for a goddamn operation in a hospital, permitting the ether of desire to work itself through her body, and for the Benedictine and Brandy to take the feel of his hands and body, from her body; and with the Vaseline, oh God, no, the OINTMENT, the towels, the wash basin and ewer which she picked up at a bargain in Yorkville Village on Yorkville Street at a shop which sold toilet bowls and other ointmentations.… Christ! that’s a good word! must remember that one — ointmentations for bowls and bowels … Sam you’re going crazy as hell, loony nutty stark-lark-goddamn crazy! … and Glad’ll bring in glasses, two glasses, crystal, the only two of a wedding present; and the tall decanter of B and B. And you, like a goddamn fool, would come in, see her, your wife, and your goddamn head’ll start to spin just like the time when A-Train did that awful thing to you, you goddamn little teeny boy (what A-Train did to Samm
y Burrmann, was so tantalizingly ticklishly spine-tingling-gee-gee-gigglish, that he never once clothed the thought of it in words, when he thought of it) you weren’t even a man enough to admit to yourself that you wanted to go to bed with Bernice, your maid.… Goddamn, Sam, you’re slipping, baby! going to bed, and you can’t even call it by its real name, you goddamn … “Miss? Miss? Would you like to work for me? I’m a lawyer, you know; and I can give you a job in my law firm. Bay Street, right in the financial, fine-arsial centre of Toronto.” He was feeling tired; and he got up, stretched and rubbed his eyes, and continued to read. For the first time, he saw the words on page 130. “What?” he said, almost shouting. He rubbed his eyes and read the passage aloud: “While announcing that he was freeing man’s spiritual personality, he degraded man’s civil personality to the blackest slavery.” He could not believe it; he read it, studied it, read it over again. “Blackest slavery? Could Djilas be thinking, even remotely, of Bernice? Or Estelle?” And further down, he read: “ … Stendhal observed how young men and young women carried on conversations only about ‘the pastor.’ ”… So many things were troubling him, in his searches; so many things. He got up from his desk, put on some progressive jazz, and went into the kitchen to pour himself a double bourbon, straight, and without ice cubes.…

 

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