But the excitement was tiring. She was losing her stamina in the heat. She was losing it because now there was no denying that her physiological condition had changed. The dry vomiting changed to real vomiting. She would come in late at night, and pretend to fall asleep fast, so she wouldn’t have to talk to Bernice. She had to do this, because Bernice got tired of sleeping on the two chairs, and she began to make the chesterfield into a bed. She would put Estelle’s pillow at her feet. She herself wasn’t too keen on talking, either. But she had been thinking. Estelle’s symptoms were now clear; and she planned how best to tell Sam she was pregnant. It was going to be difficult, since Sam himself suspected; and he had become edged with an over-sensitivity, capable of cutting both ways.
Bernice never stopped questioning herself about Estelle’s long absences. Similarly, she never let up on her schemes of sabotaging Mrs. Burrmann’s groceries. In these two respects, summer had done nothing to seep her destructive resourcefulness. But she didn’t make the same fuss with Estelle, as she had made during winter and spring. One Thursday afternoon, drinking iced Coca-Cola with Dots, Bernice mentioned Estelle; and Dots gave the same explanation for Estelle’s absences. “You don’t have to take down Estelle’s pants and inspect them to know she is taking man, eh, gal?” Dots’s straightforwardness wounded Bernice. “You grieving too much over that gal.”
“Well, I hope she don’t get herself in trouble, though.” Sometimes, this was a dishonest wish. “The more I think ’bout it, the more I feel sure that my sister may get herself in the family-way, sometime.…”
“You get a room for Estelle, yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Same thing happened, eh, gal?”
“Same blasted excuse.”
“Only this afternoon I been reading in the Star, where it say there is thousands o’ white men and white women living together in sin, in apartments, and even in Rosedale!”
“Yuh lie, Dots! Well, I never would guess!”
“And the man who write this story … yuh know something? I think he had a Jew-name, too! … anyhow, he says that once a woman who wasn’t married, went up to this real exclusive place in Rosedale, and asked for an apartment. She had the honesty to say she wasn’t married to the man she was going to live with. And guess what the superintendent told that lady?”
“I don’t read the Star, Dots.”
“That’s true. But he said, It is all right, madam. Most of the people who live here together, as man and woman, isn’t married, neither.”
“To err is mankind, Dots.”
“You just spoke a mouthful! But you have no idea of the amount o’ sinning, fornicating and adultering that takes place in this Toronto. But when it happens in the white man’s corner o’ the world, I think they calls it by another name. Take it from me, gal, whilst you are up here reading Muhammad Speaks and a lot o’ race books, I am down in Rosedale reading history. I reads Flash and Hush. Them is two history books which tell me the facts and truths of life.” Bernice was very impressed: she promised to get herself these two weeklies. She never expected that everything about this world wasn’t contained in Muhammad Speaks, after all. “Gal, take it from me. Rosedale is too good for black people.” She remembered seeing a West Indian family in Rosedale, recently; to be honest, she added, “Now and then, you find a white man with a heart. Now and then. Take that from me, too.”
“Mr. Burrmann, my employer, is one o’ them few.”
“Why this place so damn hot?” She fanned herself with the tail of her dress and laughed. “Too much black people living in it, these days, gal! It is we who bring this damn heat, you never heard that?” Dots fanned herself some more. “Hey, Bernice! You remember that nurse-gal who was here at the party for Estelle? Priscilla? Well, she engaged to a Canadian man.”
“Yuh lie!”
“Gal, you are the only woman we waiting on still,” Dots teased; and she laughed her sensuous and suggestive laugh. “Hurry up and get a man. This nurse-gal engaged to married a orderly from the same hospital, the General.”
“He is a white man?”
“I said a Canadian man.”
“And I ask you if he is a white man.”
“He is still a man, gal!”
And swiftly, the heat took possession of them; and they paid more attention to the people passing. Almost everybody was in shorts. Some men in front gardens had already taken refuge in Bermuda shorts. Bernice said she was going to wear her shorts on the streets. “Oh Christ, no, gal! What you think you are doing? Wearing shorts? Not in Toronto! I have never seen a black person in the many years I been here, who was man enough or woman enough, to wear shorts, in public. And I not talking ’bout the shape o’ your legs, neither. I am concern with the colour!” Bernice said she was talking foolishness, but really she had never seen one either. And she had brought a pair of shorts from Barbados more than three years ago, and never once had she put them on, outside her apartment. “And yuh know something, else? The swimming pools! I don’t see black people in them, neither. But I promised one of these good days. I am going to drink a good rum, go up there by the big pool on Eglinton, take off all my clothes, every damn stitch, and when them white men see my beautiful body, and I dive-off from that diving board, be-Jesus Christ, you will read about my debut in the three papers. I might even make television on the CBC!” When they stopped laughing, they saw a white woman passing, wearing shorts. Neither of them said anything for a while.
“That is Irene Gasstein, the woman that Brigitte works for,” Bernice said, as the woman was going out of sight.
“She look too bad in them shorts! Eh?”
“She look bad all right, but I am not questioning that. I questioning how she could twirl her little stiff backside at me, as if she owns the street, the city and the whole o’ Canada.”
Dots got up from the window, and began stepping around the apartment, in a parody of Mrs. Gasstein, in shorts. “Looka me! oh Christ, heh-heh-heeee! Mrs. Dotstein!” Then she realized she had exhausted the performance, and she had to face an audience of reality. “This country could never be home, gal. All the black people here, living in this place, called Canada, be we foreign-born black people, or local-born Canadian black people, we are only abiding through the tender mercies o’ God and the white man, and …”
“Both o’ them is white, to boot!”
“… the landlord,” Dots concluded. “The tender mercies o’ God, the white man and the landlord. Any time gal, any time, these three gods feel like it, bram! they kick-in our behinds just like they do down in Mississippi. Don’t ever forget that.”
“But wait! Dots, have you become a Black Muslim, too?” It pleased Bernice to hear Dots talking like this.
“Commonsense, gal!” And she laughed. She got up from the window, and sat on the chesterfield. “You know what I would like right now?”
“A nice long cool drink of mauby from back home?”
“I mean a real wish, something I would really like.”
“To be back home, right now!”
“That ain’t no damn wish, gal.”
“A better job, then?”
“A man!” She got up and patted herself between her thighs, slapping it and looking at Bernice, who held down her head in shame. Then she walked over to Bernice, and patted Bernice high up between her thighs, and said, laughing, “Who looking after that for you? Take care cobwebs don’t get in there, eh?” When the laugh faded and she could see Bernice once more for the film of joyous tears in her eyes, she saw that Bernice was fanning herself with a copy of Awake. “I have to give it to Estelle. She really knows how to look after herself.…”
“Never mind me, darling,” Bernice said, taking the conversation off Estelle. “Never mind me. But I could tell you something interesting, in case you want to hear. Henry been coming after me, darling. Yes, Henry crawling back.…”
“Jesus Christ, no!”
“Yes.”
“No! that ain’t true, gal! What happen to Agaffa?�
�
Bernice insisted it was so. When Dots realized she was serious, she rushed to her, and held Bernice in her arms, close; and kissed her on her face, and swung her around playfully in a dance. “Here comes the bride, here comes the bride, da da da-daaa, da-da da da dee-da.…” And after that, Bernice went downstairs and cooked the two largest porterhouse steaks she could find for herself and Dots; and between them, they drank a whole bottle of wine that belonged to Mrs. Burrmann. They were so happy, and so talkative and so drunk, that the moment they finished eating, they fell asleep. Bernice didn’t know where the Burrmann’s were, and she didn’t care.
For the past few weeks, Henry had been experiencing greater insecurity in his affair with Agatha. She did not point her finger of censure at him, and blame him for all her difficulties, with apartment superintendents. But she made him suffer in other ways: she would leave her telephone off the hook, and this would arouse his jealousy, even though she was always faithful to him from the time they had met; she would refuse to accompany him to the Paramount and the Pilot, having suddenly become aware that both places were beneath her respectability. She did continue seeing him (only on weekends because of the pressure of essays and seminars in her graduate course in Zoology) but each meeting contained some tension carried over from the last one. He wanted to see her more often; and he imagined that her studies were only a pretence: that when the phone was off the hook, there was really a man with her. He could not bear this, because their love had been a full, rich, turbulent combustion of love, strength and sex. There was pain too; and sorrow and sympathy: like the two nights and one day he sat beside her on the bed, holding her hand to extract the pain that crawled through her body like a meandering centipede, as the warm poultices he placed on her infected leg whizzed through her body and brought her, many times, on the brink of a death-like fainting. And that night, rushing her to the Emergency Ward of the Toronto General Hospital; and waiting like a prospective father, smoking and walking and hoping. When he took her back to her Prince Arthur Avenue apartment, and had settled her in bed, in the bed he had himself made up with the linen he had washed at the coin laundry on Asquith Avenue, he went round the block to Palmers Drug Store, to fill the prescription. And there he met the first real challenge of his strength in love, and (as he tried not to tell himself) the real repudiation by a white woman, for his love for a white woman.…“Because, this prescription, sir, is a narcotic. Do you understand that?” He did not know that, because he had never been to school very much, and the school he attended never remembered to teach him how to read prescriptions. “This is a narcotic drug you want me to fill. Do you have the name of the doctor? His number? I have to call the doctor to see if he really prescribed this.” “Look, woman,” Henry said, not really getting the implication in this cross-examination, “this thing belongs to a woman, a friend o’ mine, and I only come to get it fixed, because she is in a blasted lot o’ pain, and …” And the white-faced, white-laced, white-smocked, white-thinking-right-is-white white woman interrupted him, and said, “I can’t just fill out this prescription because you say so. This contains narcotics, and …” Henry has forgotten now what he told that white woman; but he still can remember how he screamed and shouted and asked the entire drug store to bear him witness, and say whether he was on narcotics, because he was black. While the woman-pharmacist herself called the Emergency Ward of the hospital to check, and to get the doctor (“Jesus God, I wonder if my woman is dying … all this time this bitch calling, and my woman might be dying from pain!”) a well-dressed white man came to the counter and whispered a purchase of condoms in the pharmacist’s ears; and he saw Henry and shouted, “Shit baby! what’s happening, Henry?”; and the pharmacist-woman, hearing the white-referee’s testimonial, dropped the telephone and filled the prescription. You goddamn motherfucker, was all that Henry could think of saying to her. And what else did he do? — nothing, nothing. Goddamn, here am I, a black son-of-a-bitch, trying for once, to be nice to a woman, and this broad is trying to kill the woman, my woman! Goddamn! But he soon forgot the scene in Palmers (he never told it to Agatha, because he didn’t think their love was strong enough to endure these malicious interruptions).
Once, when he could stand her withdrawal no longer, he rushed over to her apartment, and banged on the door. There was no one at home. He planned and he plotted what he would say to her: the slaps he would give her; and he rehearsed them over and over, to give him courage. And then she returned, with her hands laden with large books, three hours later. He was shivering in the draughty lounge; and all he had courage to do, was to open the door for her, and say, “Goodbye, I see you’re busy as hell.”
He never got over the feeling of intellectual inferiority to her; especially when they were in the company of her university friends. She would use words, some of them technical and zoological, which she knew he could not have heard about; and she would ask him, “Have you read this absolutely great novel?”, most of which were written by Chinese and Japanese novelists. All he could say, was “Goddamn! how do you know all these things?”; promise to get the novels from the Main Public Library, as she suggested (but the Library was so badly stocked with these “great novels”!); forget about them as soon as he was outside her literary influence; and he would hate her immensely and secretly, for making him out to be a fool. With time and with hatred, he forgot completely about these “great novels,” and their authors; and he drank more draught beer at the Paramount; and with the beer, he washed down the servings of his favourite Southern-fried chicken wings. One night, alone and sad (she had kept her promise of never returning to the LADIES AND ESCORTS of the Paramount) he commiserated with a Polish neighbour, sitting at his shiny, circular drinking table. The dust on the floor and the smoke in the noisy, many-tongued room, was irritating him. Perhaps this was why Agatha refused to return here. “Hey, man,” he asked the Polish drunkard, “you ever heard of a great Chinese cat who wrote a novel?”
“Chinese?” The neighbour knew only one Chinese: the man behind the fish-and-chips and fried-chicken counter. There must be some terrible mistake, his manner suggested.
“There’s some great novels written in Chinese, my man. Great works of art those cats produced.”
The neighbour looked back at the man behind the counter. The man was frying chips and Southern-fried chicken wings. “You mean that man wrote one of them, sir?”
Henry looked too: at the Chinese man, half-hidden in the smoke screen of cooking smoke and cooking oil. There was also a black man at their table; and he looked too; and he said, “Shit, man! I only got time for hustling a piece o’ pussy and a quick buck from the Man, man. I gotta teach these cats how to love. I ain’t got time for too much education and shit like that, baby. So, I won’t know how to dig that Chinese cat, unless he cooks me some swinging Southern-fried. Education? Man, that’s the white folks’ scene. I’m loving, baby.”
“There’s some good works of art written by the Chinese. Great works. Goddamn!” For the rest of the night, between his dribbling beer-words, Henry would mention the Chinese and their novels to whoever joined the Polish immigrant and himself, at the salted, salt-sprinkled table. When the waiter shouted, “Last call! Drink up!”, Henry stumbled home with a blonde woman on his arm; and throughout the turbulence of a night of hatred in bed with her, his literary inadequacy returned to him. Early next morning, when he turned over and saw who she was too close to him, he asked her, “You ever read a great Chinese novel, baby?” The blonde winked and blinked her eyes scarred by rheum and mascara, and said, “Are you crazy?” “Damn!” he said, and hustled her out, right away.
Shortly afterwards, sitting in his room he and Boysie were chatting about what Boysie termed, “life in this kiss-me-arse country.” Boysie had brought along a half bottle of rum with a Barbados label on it, but bottled in Canada, by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. This made him mad, to begin with; but they were drinking it, anyhow.
“How’s the woman situation, man?” Boy
sie asked.
“Goddamn!”
“Man, I didn’t think a woman could love me so bad, be-Jesus Christ! I talking ’bout Brigitte.”
“You have now begin to see life, Boysie,” said Henry, lapsing into his favourite Harlem American slang. “Dig! Those white cats hate our guts for it, baby. But their women love us, baby. You dig?”
“That is true.” Boysie smacked his lips noisily, and closed his eyes against the punch of the rum. He was drinking his from a tea cup with a chipped rim. Henry was drinking his with ice and water, because he was “no goddamn native like you, Boysie, but a Canadian.” He was wearing a tie and a seersucker jacket, while Boysie was dressed casually, in a short-sleeved calypso shirt. “What you just say is true, yuh. I wish I had a woman like Agatha. How she looks after you, man! gorblummuh, all Dots does do is read Hush and Flash. But Agaffa, does take you to the O’Keefe and to concerts. Man, I can’t understand why the black women in this place refuse to take a leaf outta the white women’s book. You understand what I mean?”
“White woman was invented for black man. That is what I know. Goddamn, man, I been through so much white pants in my time in this town, Boysie, baby, that I don’t even remember there’s a colour problem here. Shit, man, as far as this cat is concerned, there ain’t no colour problem. Because, dig! when you come down to the level o’ undressing a woman, that thing is all the same colour and formation, baby. You dig?”
“Heh-heh-heh!” Nothing tickled Boysie more than woman-talk.
The Meeting Point Page 25