On the Way Back

by Montague Kobbé

  Sheila Rawlingson was afraid. Despite the warm evening, her left hand trembled throughout the entire drive home. Once there, she sat on her bed, sleepless, restless. She nursed a lone tear inside her right eye as long as she could hold it, forcing herself not to blink. She played back in her mind the two days she had spent with Nathaniel and loathed the thought of having wronged him. Then she went through her emotions earlier that night on the dance floor: she had felt horny, yes, but much more than that. She’d felt secure, comfortable . . . lost. I shouda just fuck him on de beach an’ go. Dat way he stay dreamin’ of me forever. No sir. I shouda never have a drink wit’ him at all, at all. But to end up like this: embezzled, bedazzled, disarmed. Vulnerable to the trickery of a man, a foreign man, an old foreign man, a man who most likely only wanted to use her and discard her like an old tissue, no matter what he said, no matter what she did. A man who would sweeten her up with empty promises only to let her fall back down. Or worse still, a man who would see her out of his door before she lost the orgasmic blush on her face. Sheila Rawlingson almost succeeded in turning the liquid gathered inside her right eye into ice cubes, but just before reaching freezing point she was forced to draw her lids over her bloodshot eyes, bursting the thin coat of ice that had kept the tear from running. It was just an instinctive blink, but the unsuccessful effort to keep her feelings at bay had drained her strengths to the point where she couldn’t even open her eyelids one more time. Sheila slept peacefully, sitting fully clothed on her bed, until the morning after.

  (Sheila Rawlingson)

  Before finding herself rediscovering the spaces of her not-so-distant past, Sheila Rawlingson spent seven years at college in America, building up a résumé and a reputation that would open the doors she had willfully left behind—not fully shut, just partly ajar—when she decided to go in search of a yet uncertain but promising future. During those seven years Sheila learned a lot more than could be surmised by the acronyms that accompanied her name on the diplomas she was awarded for her bachelor’s degree in international relations and her master’s in business administration. Not that her progress had not been monitored by her family during her occasional homecomings. But most of what Sheila had learned was hard to notice in a place like Anguilla: she had left her safe provincial home in South Hill to join a distant portion of her family in a modernized ghetto in the USA, where African Americans lived the sort of privileged life normally associated exclusively with Caucasian Americans. It took Sheila Rawlingson a long time to venture out of the safe quarters of racial brotherhood. Indeed it took years, until one day she felt the need to make the transition. It was not like Sheila had not been in any sort of touch with white people. In fact, most of the people majoring in international relations with her were white. But she had willfully—albeit perhaps unconsciously—excluded this vast majority from her life, mirroring exactly the attitude they adopted toward her: all of Sheila’s friends were black; her favorite actor: Jamie Foxx; favorite TV presenter: Tyra Banks; favorite singer: Rihanna. Sheila did not watch MTV, she watched BET. And never, ever did she go to a club where the music was not a selection of R&B, soul, or hip-hop. In short, Sheila’s first and long-lasting impression of the States was a dark one.

  But it did not take all that long for Sheila to realize that people in the States were not the same as people in Anguilla. The first thing she had to learn, before any politics, before any calculus, was that city talk is a lot more intricate than the words that compose it. Sarcasm, irony, and malice were things with which Sheila had seldom been acquainted. Even hypocrisy was normally restricted to the higher echelons of political life in Anguilla, and the one common feature she had found between the society in which she had grown up and the one she now faced was that you never believed what politicians said in the first place. Disguised side glances, funny smiles, awkward intonations all went by unnoticed by a gullible young woman who not only couldn’t understand why anyone would say something they did not mean but who could really not come to terms with the reasons why anyone would not say what was in their minds anyway. While Sheila Rawlingson adapted to the weather, got to know the city, got over her homesickness, and tried to work out how to read the lines that were neither written nor spoken but carefully hinted at by the way the lines that actually were spoken were spoken, she realized that the reality, the concerns, the issues that shape the psyche of African Americans are very different to those encountered by a contemporary Anguillan.

  So it was that Sheila Rawlingson looked at racial issues in America with the same attention, the same interest, with which she had faced the challenge of city talk before: that is, with the criterion of a foreign observer. Grandpa had lived a life of struggle and privation not because he was the descendent of slaves but because everyone else’s life in Anguilla had always been punctuated by poverty. That was not a social but a political problem. No one had ever cared about Anguilla, not because Anguillans were black but because for the English the island was worthless. St. Helenians were not black. Neither were Faulklanders. Yes, African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans shared one (roughly) common origin: one cruel—more than cruel—one unimaginably inhuman passage. The troubled heritage that Sheila could see still affected African Americans was a particular result of the way in which one nation had dealt with a crime that was not exclusively theirs. But there had been no segregation in Anguilla, mainly because there had been nothing to segregate from. And there had been no civil rights movement, because in Anguilla everyone had always had a right to the little there had been. And then, when Anguillans demanded a bit more than that little, when Anguillans demanded their human, not civil, rights, and were denied, they rebelled, and won the war. The American war was still being waged but Sheila did not think she really belonged to either of the sides concerned. There were sympathies, of course. There were more than enough elements to which she could relate on the one hand, despise on the other, so she knew whom she wanted to succeed. But she did not feel like an integral part of the fight.

  Thus, when Sheila experienced firsthand the whiteness of America, she already knew there were black as well as white bullies, liars, and reprobates, she already knew she would find the worst of mankind in a white guise, and she knew that ignorance would lurk behind every corner ready to pounce on her at the first chance. But what Sheila was really curious about, what guided her initiative and fueled her adventure, was a persistent wish to discover the extent and nature of white goodness. Sheila was lucky: within a maze of religious fervor and conservative fanaticism, she just happened to fall into the generous hands of one Aristide Day.

  Aristide Day was the best American society had to offer. Crisp, lively, and beautiful, he was a philosophy student with a perpetually tilted black beret who at separate times had embraced with equal commitment the substance of fascist and communist ideologies and had insisted on defending their virtues so vociferously that there was virtually no one in campus who did not know who he was. Despite his notoriety, Aristide was a popular fellow. He had managed to shrug aside the recurrent injuries (mostly verbal) caused by his extravagant attire and his uncompromising, though often contradictory, talk by means of a self-mocking confidence and prodigious wit. Over the years, the general fondness for Aristide had grown to such extent that whenever anybody bumped into him they would greet him with an insult just to hear what sort of clever turn of phrase he would pull out of his magic box. Even his friends greeted him with an affront. In fact, no one had ever heard anyone speak a kind word to Aristide. Many good things were said of him behind his back, but no one was foolish enough to speak these words to Aristide’s face. It was rumored that ever since the first minute of his existence—after he had been held by his feet and slapped on the butt—when his father took him from the doctor’s hands and bit his cheek brutally, telling him off for being so ugly, Aristide had never experienced the comfort of a loving sentence.

  Aristide embraced this general attitude quite happily and though it would be unfair to say he actively encour
aged it, he was fully aware of the reaction his overly long magenta scarf would produce on campus, or the purple and apple-green woolen mittens his grandmother had allegedly knit for him, or the dark green jester’s shoes with the wooden sole and the curling tip, or his eulogy for Ezra Pound’s artistry in his Italian radio broadcasts, or the deeper meaning of Stalinist constructivism, or the unacknowledged virtues of extreme utilitarianism—virtues, incidentally, completely ignored by Bentham and Mill. Not only was he fully aware of the reaction all of these would produce but, in fact, he deliberately prepared even more outrageous responses to go with the original postulates, with the disjointed outfits, to counteract what he guessed (almost always correctly) would be the popular reception of his persona. Because neither was Aristide’s wit as prodigious nor his outward impression as spontaneous as it seemed. The fact was that Aristide was a naturally gifted artist, actor, writer, who had chosen to live the role he had carved out for himself while majoring in the one subject he might manage to fail.

  But there was a lot more to Aristide than just his academic stereotype. Talented at almost everything, he was an accomplished musician who could play the piano, the violin, and the saxophone to semiprofessional standards and who claimed he could play the guitar equally well with either hand, although the one time he had been seen strumming with his right hand—admittedly high, or drunk, or both at some party—it had made so little sense that nobody had been able to tell what it was he was supposed to be playing. He later claimed it had been an obscure piece by César Cui, which nobody would have known in the first place. As it turned out, though, César Cui never composed anything for the guitar. And yet, this, like most other arguments, did not faze him.

  When Sheila saw the broken lines that marked the boundaries of Aristide’s silhouette the day after such party, she filled herself with courage and took a step outside of her cocoon. Are you alright? Although far from alright, Aristide was ready to explain what sort of animal had excreted him from its guts that morning; he was prepared to face the disgust his bodily odor might have produced on Sheila Rawlingson; he would have been delighted to answer why he had not saved the rest of the world from the misery of having to deal with the aesthetic calamity that he was that day. However, Aristide Day was not highly versed in the art of denotative conversation—especially not when it concerned his general disposition—and among the myriad comments he thought his appearance might induce that morning, “Are you alright?” was certainly not in the top hundred. Sheila, vulnerable outside her protected environment, interpreted his blank stare and his impenetrable silence as a sign of disdain. She did not apologize for her impertinence but she did turn around and walk away—question unanswered—without hesitation. It took Aristide three days to come up with the appropriate answer, but by the time he was ready to utter it, it was no longer appropriate. Sheila sat under a leafless tree on a sunny autumn day reading a paper by John Rawls when the long, shabby shadow of the guy in the perpetually tilted black beret hid the sun from the white photocopies she held in her hands. Yes. A tap on her shoulder accompanied the incongruous greeting. She understood immediately, let him know with a sublime sample of her sweetest smile. Sheila folded the paper she was reading, got up, and headed toward the building, all in one swift, delicate motion. Before leaving Aristide behind, she turned her head in his direction, almost whispering, You’re weird. Aristide, feeling much more at home with this sort of observation, would have replied had she not cut in with a final, I’ve got class.

  The box of chocolates Sheila found in her locker after class opened a door for her into a world of underground creatures who defined themselves according to values and standards that easily transcended the color of their skins. In a subculture where minorities were the norm and the unconventional was to be expected, more was invented than inherited but nobody knew for certain what was true and what was not. So, for example, the only trace of French in Aristide’s life was his name and his perpetually tilted black beret, which led to the growing suspicion that it was all an act he had based on the Parisian cabaret artist Aristide Bruant, who had been immortalized in the advertising posters designed by his friend and companion of absinthe escapades, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. But neither Benny “Young” Agbyiiong, the Samoan wrestler who spent his nights creating electronic music to enhance the power of his Jamaican dubbing, nor Roger “Moose” Goose, Aristide’s doppelgänger, equally quick, equally bright, but simply less off the chart, really cared about the origins of any of their acquired personae. So, when Aristide introduced Sheila to the group of friends he referred to as “the bad seeds,” no one asked her where she was from, no one asked her about her parents, no one questioned her accent. All they asked was what she did. I’m a photographer. Sheila Rawlingson, halfway through her international relations major, with minors in politics and economics, suddenly became a photographer, because in the subversive scene of Aristide and Co., nobody was what they were but what they wanted to be, and Sheila had developed a passion for photography—particularly aerial—which she wished more than anything (more than business, more than politics) to guide her in her way through adult life.

  The magic spell that filled the inside of the liqueur bonbons Aristide had given Sheila as a conciliatory token fed a romantic liaison which turned out to be as intense as it was short-lived. Sheila, however, could not distance herself from “the bad seeds” as easily as she could part with Aristide. Her voyage through the undertow of normality had liberated her from the oppressions of convention and she was not prepared to make such liberation dependent on a particular person. Thus, once Sheila-the-photographer began collaborating in several projects with a number of the seeds, her status in the group was upgraded from a member’s companion to that of sympathetic visitor. None of the other of Aristide’s friends had ever made the leap. Only Margarita Peña, a Mexican artist who had been brought into the scene by Roger “Moose” Goose while they were dating, had managed successfully to juggle the pressures involved in the development of a character extricated from the links of its sentimental attachments to be part of the world of her ex. When the seeds spoke of Margarita, they did not speak of Moose’s girl: they spoke of Margarita. So, while Sheila Rawlingson’s circle of friends became more and more reduced because of the large amount of time she spent with the seeds, her relationship with Margarita Peña grew from a mutual interest in the visual realities of life (Margarita’s obsession with photo-realism interestingly overlapped with certain aspects of Sheila’s otherwise conflicting theory on photographic impressionism) to an intimacy that saw them share the most vivid secrets of the sexual proclivities of the double-headed eagle that silently ruled over the bad seeds: Aristide Day and Moose.

  Sheila Rawlingson spent the last three years of her time at the university exploring every little alley of the world that had been opened to her by a box of chocolates. She dealt with the seeds for so long, in the end her kernel turned sour. She saw Aristide’s Persian, New Guinean, Alaskan friends come, and offered them the same curious detachment she had gallantly received when she had first met the seeds. She saw them leave, shocked, amused, or scared, and then she tried to disguise the tiny grin of satisfaction she smiled to herself, knowing she might have done the same sometime before, but luckily had not. Luckily, she had stayed a little while longer, and luckily, she had been able to discern beyond the façade of social inadequacy the merits of a bunch of people who had taught her more than any degree ever could.

  Sheila Rawlingson spent the last three years of her time at the university absorbing every bit of wisdom the bad seeds could infuse in her, through a journey that saw her touch the sheets of just about every member, permanent or provisional, of her clique. Then, when she thought she knew everything they did, she decided to close the most enlightening chapter of her adult life by sharing her lust with Moose. He proposed a threesome with Margarita. Sheila refused: she wanted him for herself. But one night was not enough for Sheila to learn what Moose had to teach, and one night certainly did
not seem enough for him to enjoy the willfulness of someone seemingly fully versed in the mischief of his preference. So Moose and Sheila-the-photographer entertained each other senseless for a season before she decided to part. Sheila wore her cloak, joined her hands for the dean to clasp, signed the record, and reached the little island of her childhood with an MBA to prove that she had turned into a woman.

  Part II

  Continued

  V

  . . . After we got married, we spent months and months doing nothing. I could just tell what the world was thinking, I could just hear the gossip running from mouth to mouth, from house to house, talking up the size of my sin, of Nathaniel’s corruption, of my family’s shame. At first, I didn’t care. I was so happy, I honestly didn’t care. Nathaniel’s son seemed to be arranging his business in Europe, money wasn’t no problem, and we were just too busy with each other to worry about nothing else.