The manager was coming towards him. He had learned from Mr. MacIntosh that he should always be smiling when he faced a person like a bank manager. He had seldom had occasion to smile before. “Smile, boy! Smile, Boysie, boy, whenever you facing one o’ these white people and you want to get something outta them. They like to see we smiling. They love to see we happy, so smile, boy, like you ain’ got no blasted sense.” Strange how all these unconnected thoughts were coming at once into his head. Like Olivia. He should be thinking about the loan he wanted to get from the bank manager right now, and instead he is thinking about a woman named Olivia, who talked to some damn woman in an empty room at the YWCA on McGill Street. The manager was showing Boysie to his office, while Boysie promised to get a copy of Chatelaine and find out the name of the editor and the name of the woman who wrote the piece on Olivia so that he could curse both of them. “What the hell do they know about we, ’bout us?”
“Well, well-well-well!” the manager said. Boysie could not distinguish exactly what all these “wells” meant. The manager was a smart Scotsman; he told Boysie which county he was born in, but Boysie couldn’t remember. “You certainly look like a very prosperous businessman and very happy this afternoon, Mr. Cumberbatch.” (“You know something, Dots? That son of a bitch at the bank, the manager, is the only man in this place who calls me Mr. Cumberbatch!” But Dots was not impressed. “You know why? Because,” Dots said, “he feel you got money, that’s why.” Boysie wasn’t impressed. “Not because,” Dots added, “you don’t look like the rest to him!”)
“I came to talk about what I asked you about on the telephone.”
“No problem at all.” The manager was searching through some files on his desk. He lit a cigarette and offered one to Boysie, who took it. The manager smoked Gauloises. They smelled awful the first time Boysie took one, but he was impressed because it was the first time he had smoked a French cigarette, and he felt there was class in smoking French cigarettes in Canada; so he bought a package himself to try them out; and between driving all over Toronto and inhaling the first one, as he would have inhaled his own Rothmans (which he began to smoke after Henry died and in spite of South Africa), and trying to pronounce the name “Gauloises,” not knowing it was a French word, calling it “Galoshes,” and having the salesgirl look funny at him … “Would there be any problem about the loan?”
“None at all, Mr. Cumberbatch …”
Well then, why should I worry my blasted self concerning Olivia, whoever the hell she is … “Six thousand dollars we are prepared to lend you, Mr. Cumberbatch …” she probably come into this country illegal anyway, and now trying to mash-up things for people who come in legal, like me. Be-Christ, I could walk into the biggest bank in Toronto and walk-back-out with a cheque for six thousand dollars … “I would like to spend piece o’ this ’pon the same Olivia if she would give me a little piece o’ ” … The important thing, Boysie surmised, was not to let Olivia submerge him into a feeling of depression … He was thinking of the letter to the editor which he had outlined in his head while he was driving to the bank. He tried to think of the name of the editor and the name of the writer of the article. He had memorized them while sitting in Alfredo’s barbershop, but “goddamn, this head o’ mine only have in water, not brains, yuh! Why I finding it so hard these days to remember things?” He drove his truck slowly along the street, and his face was relaxed and was at peace with himself. “Wonder how badly-off Olivia’s little boy back home is?” He had been thinking of children so much recently because the stillness of the apartment in the morning was driving him crazy; and if it wasn’t for the strange woman and writing letters to the editor, he didn’t know what he would do.
“Dots, have you ever thought of children?” They had just eaten supper, as Dots called dinner.
“Thrildren, boy? I see too much o’ them when the days come not to be thinking ’bout them, boy!”
“I don’t mean so.”
“Well, how you mean, then?”
“Like having … well, for instance.” He had picked up this deliberative, halting way of speaking from the Canadians on the CBC television and radio. “To put the point to you” (at which Dots raised her eyebrows), “you know I am here all morning by myself, while you are at work …”
“Boysie!” Dots slapped her heavy hand on the tabletop. She beamed. “Only today! This very afternoon whilst I was turning-over a patient in her bed, the same thought run through my mind! Imagine that, eh. Ain’t that what that man on the television call ESP?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, Dots …”
“At last! Lord look down! At last, me and my husband thinking alike!” She was happy now; she was a woman of great resiliency, and of substantial stubbornness; and it was not her nature to allow anything to defeat her. She had looked at the relationship in her own marriage in this way; and although she would chide him, and at times abuse him, for the strange ways in which he was acting lately, still deep down, in the pit of her guts, in her deepest in-guts, as she liked to say to prove her conviction about a matter, she knew she had Boysie still within her control. “I got that bastard by his balls!” she told Bernice only yesterday. “He freaking-out ’pon me? ’Pon Dots? An old whore like me? And you telling me ’bout seeing a marriage counsellor or a head-shrinker? Me? Dots Cumberbatch? Me, soul?” She poured herself more wine. Boysie had discovered Mommessin. “Yuh know something? It ain’t right, and it ain’t healthy as far as I concerned, for a man in your position to be here by your lonesome, with not even something with you that breathes …”
“I was thinking the same thing!” Boysie too was hopeful. “That is why I asked you if you ever considered children …”
“Yes, boy! Yesss! I even talked to Bernice ’bout that, and asked her to bring over one o’ them cats that her missy want to throw away!”
Boysie was listening to “Both Sides Now.” Was the song really a dead song, did it really denote death, as Dots had said? When every fairy tale comes real so many things I would have done but clouds got in my way; and he could write about the things he wanted to do in his life. This tune was the only one in the whole album to which he listened; it was, simply, the one he liked, and he never worried about not playing the other tunes and he never wondered what they had to say.
He is listening to it now, not very attentively, because he knows all the words by heart, and also because the woman in the winter coat is late coming out of the subway. She had been late often, recently. He made a note to himself that she had been late two mornings already this week, and it is only Wednesday. The song peoples the lonely apartment, and prevents him from becoming even lonelier; and it helps him to do things in his mind and promise to carry them out, in action, later on. One of these things is to decide which colour and which styling he wants on the new Buick which he picked out yesterday, and on which he had to pay down only two hundred dollars. His credit was so good. The salesman didn’t even bother to ask him if he wanted to make his panel truck a trade-in. Boysie could not believe the treatment he was getting; and the fact that he got it helped to buoy his spirits higher, made him more secure, and therefore more unbearable to live with. He was successful. “How many other West Indians living in this city could get this kind o’ treatment?” he asked himself, as he left the luxurious showrooms of Hogan Pontiac downtown? How many other West Indians could talk, man-to-man, with a salesman of this rich-looking place, and not have to fill out a lot of forms, answer a million questions and put up collateral before they could be taken seriously by a salesman? He was successful. He was a businessman talking to another businessman.
The moment the deal was signed, waiting only for him to make up his mind about the colour of the car, and whether he wanted a telephone installed in the car, the moment he had finished walking slowly around the car in the showroom, Boysie felt depressed. Perhaps he should have bought a cheaper car. “You know what they say about black people driving big cars? Pimps!” But hell, nobody, nofuckingbody in this who
le town could look at a man like him and mistake him for a pimp! He didn’t even know what a pimp did. He didn’t even look like a pimp. Or did he? But what did a pimp look like? He knew one man who used to be a pimp, years ago out in a western part of Canada; and this man had come east and was now settled and living comfortably, after serving his time as a pimp in jail for being a pimp, and still people said good morning to him and called him Mister, and some even called him Brother. So, what is this thing about being a pimp? “Isn’t you suppose to be living as a man, and not as a black man? Eh?” He should have repaid the money he got from the bank the next week, to establish his credit even further than it had been already established. Mr. MacIntosh had told him that; and he had in fact done precisely that the first time he borrowed money from the bank. So his credit was already established.
But he should not have bought a car at all. What was he going to do with a new car? Drive it out on Sundays, polished like a dog’s stones, with Dots dressed off and sitting in the front seat, like a black queen? He did not even think of giving Dots a lift in his new car. This car was going to be his. He would keep it in the underground garage, and she won’t even know it belonged to him. He knew what he would do with it! He would drive it out every morning just when the strange woman was coming out of the subway, that’s what he would do! But he should have put the money down on a house, Dots would have liked that. Or he should have taken a vacation in Barbados. He hadn’t been back to Barbados in all the time he was in Canada, and sometimes he yearned to go back; but at times like this, when he could go into a dealer’s and bring out a new car, knowing that in Barbados there was no possibility of his ever doing that — he had never known anybody in his village who was able to do that in the thirty-seven years he lived there — well, Boysie was not ready to see Barbados so soon. “Perhaps, when I ready to dead, I would go back and get buried in Westbury Cemetery!”
He made up his mind he would tell the salesman he wanted a black Buick. It looked more conservative; and he was not going to paint tongues of flame and fire on it, as some West Indians did, and he would not put cushions and blinds in the rear window, and he would not paint his initials on the bumper, and he would not, “Jesus Christ, not for hell! I ain’t sticking no blasted Black Power flag on my new automobile!” The car would remain, like its owner, very conservative. And it would remain most of the week in the underground garage. Satisfied that he had made the correct decisions about this matter, a matter which had taken him three days to deal with, he was less tortured now, and he could listen more closely to his favourite song and at the same time watch out for the woman.
“Meoooooooowww!”
“Jesus Christ!”
“Meow!”
It was the cat.
Dots had got the cat. Dots had brought home a cat. The cat was to be Boysie’s companion. And Boysie had to feed the cat, and empty its box, because when these things needed doing, Dots was not at home.
The cat was not trained. It was not a very big cat, else Boysie would have kicked it many times when it crawled into bed with him, when he was relaxing in the last troughs of his morning sleep. And the cat had a habit of messing under the bed, for which at the beginning Boysie was grateful, until he began to smell this strange odour, and thought it was Dots’s and then grew ashamed of himself for thinking this about his wife, and then realized whose smell it was, and then dared once to throw the cat from the living room into the bedroom, but the cat liked it, and landed on all fours, because “godblummuh, this blasted cat like it have nine fucking lives, yes!” But Boysie intended killing one of these lives soon. The cat. The cat would climb on the table, and smell the food and Boysie’s stomach would be turned, and he would pretend he wanted to vomit, and Dots would be disgusted too, but since it was her cat, she would pretend that it did not matter, because “cats is the cleanest things living!” and would hold the cat in her hands and say, “Cat, catty-catty, cat?” and try to laugh.
Boysie was glad because of the cat: for one reason. He had become sensitive to the size of his stomach, and secretly, in the morning, when he was alone, he would try to do some calisthenics and read articles about diet, and try hard to cut down on the starches in his food. But the first time he refused to eat, Dots lost her temper and accused him of eating at another woman’s place.
“Wait, at your blasted age, you are eating at some woman?” This was another thing he disliked about her. She was not delicate with her words nor with her accusations. She could have worded it more delicately.
“I don’t have any appetite, Dots. It must be the work.”
“You don’t like my food?” And before he could say any more, she had taken his food and had scraped it into the garbage pail. Part of it she put on the kitchen floor for the cat. “Be-Christ, as I standing up here this Sundee afternoon,” she said, lifting her eyes and her hands to the kitchen ceiling, “I wish that that whore will poison you!”
She went on and on, cursing him, swearing at him, threatening to leave him, and accusing him of being too good for her. And right there in the midst of her talk, her words as fierce as a warrior’s, Boysie understood why all of a sudden he had begun to hate the noise of the West Indian clubs and the noise of West Indians. It was his wife. This raucous way she had, which injured his ears. And he understood it and still it frightened him, because it brought home to him the extent to which he was himself changing: he was a man who could quarrel about a small insignificant point most of Sunday, which in the past two years seemed to be the day he and his wife had set aside for quarrelling. But now, in his new peace of understanding, of a broader vision of things to do with his life and with his work, he was insulted. He was never insulted in the past. Why was he insulted now? He could not answer that question. The song was coming to an end, and he must get up, cross in front of the window, perhaps glance subconsciously out the window to check on the woman, even have to put down his newspaper, and put the needle back to the beginning of the record. Floes and floes of angel’s hair … Dots had brought the cat to keep him company, but he was still lonely, and he had not abandoned his own thoughts about children. Not that he felt he could have children from her; and not that he was thinking of adopting any. But he was thinking of a living being in the apartment with him. Not all the time, like this cat. “This fucking cat! One o’ these mornings, I am going to strangle your arse, cat!” Dots called the cat, “Cat-come-catty-catty-cat!” and he called it “you-goddamn-cat!” and he did not even smile nor see the irony in his christening of the cat, even although he always remembered it, the thing that should have made him laugh, each time he called the cat “you goddamn cat!”; for if the cat was not on his nerves so relentlessly, he would have been able to laugh at what came into his mind each time the cat crossed his path like a curse. It was what a Canadian girl had told him one night when he was out drinking with Henry; she had said to him, to fend off his drunken advances, “Buster, I live with two cats, one white, the other black. And I’m sure I won’t like to see the black one kick in your ass, so git! Git lost!” He could not laugh now when he called the cat “you goddamn cat!” because those were the exact words which Henry had used when the Canadian woman warned him about her cats. “You shouldda been one o’ them goddamn cats, you goddamn cat!” Boysie was still thinking of having a living person in the apartment with him.
He took up the telephone and dialed a number. After many rings he put it down. He looked into his address book, and dialed another number, and when this one rang a few times, a recorded message came on: “The number you have dialed is …” He dropped the telephone. He would spend some mornings, sometimes the entire morning, ringing old numbers of persons he had met many years before. And they were all changed, or else moved away, disconnected, or the numbers of different persons. There was no one he knew. No one he knew whom he wanted to talk to. He remembered a man named Freeness, from years back, and he tried to track him down through about six telephone numbers which he had taken down over the years, and when he reached
the last one, Freeness was said to have moved to Montreal. And then one morning he thought of a Jamaican man he knew, with whom he and Henry and Freeness used to play poker and crap, and he called this man’s number, and there was no answer at the other end. He promised to call him in the evening, but he never remembered. The woman should be coming out of the subway any minute now. The cat was curling around his ankles and he did not stir, he did not move, so that the cat would continue to make his acquaintance, to make its acquaintance with him: he was as lonely as that. So, he must have a living person in this apartment with him. When he came in after working ten hours, Dots was in bed; and before he awoke, she would have left for work. He had been thinking for some time now of a young boy, the son of a friend of his, whose father had disappeared to America. He knew it would be a delicate situation, but after all he did not want to adopt the boy. He just wanted to take him places, like to the races: every boy liked going to the races, or to listen to jazz on Saturday afternoon at the matinees at the Colonial Tavern. But he would have to be careful. There were a lot of grown men taking out little boys nowadays in Toronto; and he did not want to be suspected as a homosexual. He was nervous about this. The boy’s mother might think it strange of him, all of a sudden, his coming round to take out her son. And he could see her feeling that he was after her. Either way, he had to be careful. It would be so much easier to have Dots make the arrangements; but there were many things he wanted to discuss with his wife, and could not, because of her attitude to discussion, his new language and conversation, or rather because when he really felt the need to talk she was at work, and he never wanted to call her at the hospital. There were many brilliant plans he had had: like the one about hiring a helper for his cleaning jobs, and he had worked it out to the last detail, and when it came time to discuss it with Dots, she was at work. He did call Dots once, about the new car he had bought (for his guilt had had the better of him), and when he reached her after many switches to different extensions and floors in the hospital, Dots came on the telephone and her rage was so loud that he felt the whole building had heard. “Look, man, I am at work. What happened? You sick?” and when Boysie said he was not sick, she said, “Is the cat sick, then?” and when he said the cat was not sick, she said in a bitter voice, “Well, wait till I come home.”
The Bigger Light Page 8