He took down a towel from the ring and dried himself. He still thought he should be man enough to have Dots undress in front of him; but that again carried with it certain responsibilities. He would have to admire her body, silently only; he would get an erection, and that would disclose his motive, even if his motives were just of the flesh (and he did not want to do that), for it was too great an exposure, too great an example of weakness. He could handle Dots and communicate with her better if he did not say a word to her. He felt stronger ignoring her. “A strong man is a silent man.” Who said that? Mr. MacIntosh, or the Canadian young fellow, or Mrs. James, for it sounded very much like something to do with their philosophy; it also sounded like philosophy, which was what the Canadian young fellow always talked about.
If Dots was not home now, he could walk out of this bathroom, naked as a bird, and play his favourite record, which at this time was Miles Davis’s Milestones, and he could even dance in the way he had seen some Americans dancing once at the Coq d’Or, and he could imagine that he was a great singer, and sing, or a great dancer, and dance, or something great, and be great. He could not even seduce the feeling to want to dance when Dots was around. He had built up a completely total existence in her absence, and she knew nothing about it. And this was not the time to expose himself to her.
Get out, get out, get out, a voice was telling him. He did not know whether the message meant get out of the apartment, from this seventh-floor boredom, or get out of the bathroom, or even get out of the country. But he knew he had to get out. It was dead inside the apartment. Here he was, a man in his position, and with a woman, a wife, in the apartment for almost fifteen minutes now, and this woman was so secure that she didn’t feel she had to say one word to him, and had, in fact, not even opened her mouth to tell him, “You dog!” or “You cat!” Dots was now only a sound in his life. Perhaps, then, the message his brain was telling him was important.
Something on the floor of the bathroom, beside the toilet bowl, attracted his attention. He noticed it because Dots was a tidy woman: nothing was ever left on the floor in the entire apartment. He picked it up. Perhaps it had fallen from his own pockets. It was a piece of newspaper, folded into four. He carried newspaper clippings of his letters to the editor with him, just in case he had to show someone. He picked up this piece of clipping and put it into the pocket of his bathrobe. He would not have been able to look at this piece of paper once before, but now with his new strength he opened it expecting something, something which was unknown (it was this fear of things unknown, things that did not belong to him, things such as the letters he expected to find in his wife’s drawers). He opened the folded newspaper clipping and read: If the TTC is going to issue one dollar family fun passes, why not lower the fare for people who have to work on Sundays and holidays, especially nurses …
Dots was sitting in the living room reading the newspaper. She was reading the Today’s Child column. Boysie glanced over her head, and saw her looking at the photograph of a black child who was up for adoption. He moved away immediately, and wondered if his wife was going really mad. He thought of the children asleep in the upstairs rooms at the Home Service place, and he remembered the dirty blankets and the green army camping cots. He wanted to tell her about the children he had seen sleeping there, but he felt the inertia again in his body, battling with the new-found energy and strength which he had found inside the warm bathtub of water. He wanted to go back into the bathroom and draw another hot bath, and he wanted to be able to do this immediately, without moving from this spot behind Dots, without changing his position. He wanted it just to happen. And he knew it could not happen, that he could not make it happen in the same way that he knew that he could not make his mouth open by itself and talk to his wife. He wondered if he was dying too; or if he was already dead, as she was. So he moved away and dressed for work.
3
THE BIGGER LIGHT
Boysie sat waiting in his pyjamas and plaid housecoat for the strange woman to emerge from the subway station. He sat with the newspaper open at the stock market pages, resting on his lap, as the cat had become accustomed to resting there. He was just waiting, and not wanting her to appear, for that would cause him to have to get up and do something else. He had never before waited for her in his pyjamas. He wondered why this morning, at the same time as other mornings, he was still in pyjamas. There were other strange things he had begun to do. There was nothing strange in them when he first did them, but when he thought of them, and reflected on this previous behaviour, on the things he liked doing, on the things he liked listening to, he saw them as strange.
He was now a man of quite substantial means, a man who had reached what in Canada would be regarded as a grade four education: but one could not really make such a rough comparison between his knowledge of language in Barbados and that in Canada; and one surely could not conclude that because he had dropped out of school back there in Standard Three, when simple arithmetic was just included in the curriculum, that he was on the same educational level as a Canadian who had reached only grade four. One could not make those assumptions. For he was a man of some substance, respectable in his apartment building, well known by the most important stockbroker in the whole of Toronto, Mr. MacIntosh, one of his cleaning clientele; his bank manager called him often to ask him how he was getting along in his business, and whether he could do anything for him, “May I interest you in a demand loan, Mr. Cumberbatch?”; everybody who knew him, who met him coming and going, addressed him as Mr. Cumberbatch (even Mrs. James, whom he had stopped seeing on the terms that regulated their abortive relationship; she, too, started calling him Mr. Cumberbatch, as she had done when first he appeared at her door, Apartment 101, to give her the bag of pork chops and other pork products, because he was in those days obsessed by diets, like everybody in Toronto), and said behind his back, “A man in his position …”
He had everything he wanted in life in this country. He was solvent, his business showed a profit, his clothes were new and expensive, and he had the car of his dreams. He had recently installed a new stereo tape recorder, and he had the technician put in four speakers. The car was a small explosion of noise. When he wanted to he could listen to two speakers, or he could listen to all four. He had AM and FM and he had thought of installing a telephone, but he did not like telephones too much; in fact, he seldom answered the telephone in his apartment. But it pleased him very much that he could have these things installed in his car without thinking of the cost. He thought of installing a bar, and a television set (as he has seen once in a Cadillac parked in front of the Coq d’Or Tavern on Yonge Street, with New York licence plates), but he felt that that was too much show. Besides, he never allowed anybody to go near his car, and he never drove anybody in it. Mrs. James and her children were the only ones whom he could remember as having driven in the car. Yes, and Lew! But that was a short trip around the block to buy cigarettes and Chinese food. Boysie had not told Dots yet that he owned a car. It was something which he did not consider to be disloyalty; it was not that he did not love her, it was not that he did not trust her, that he was not aware of the principle of sharing in marriage; but he felt, quite bluntly, that it was none of her business. He could see himself having to tell her if he was still struggling, if she was still subsidizing him. In that case he would have to tell her, because he could see then that he owed it to her pride and to her feeling of superiority over him that he should be grateful, and tell her, and perhaps take her for a drive. His car was his car. To buy it she did not have to wear her nylons a day longer than normal; and she did not have to eat five months’ dinners of hamburger meat, nor walk to work to the hospital. Life with her, and for her, went on normally, so his buying the new car did not touch her sense of material security.
“It is none of her fucking business,” he said to the cat and to the newspaper. He was deeper in the habit of talking to himself, simply because he could not really talk to a cat. There was never anybody in the
apartment with him when he wanted to talk, and he was not the kind of man to keep topics of conversation, things for discussion, on his mind, waiting for his wife to come home and join him in them. Dots was not that kind of a woman. She was leading her own life at the hospital, and in the telephone conversations, nightly, with her friend Bernice. And Boysie was glad that he at least had the sense to see that she had no intention of changing, so that he would come home (on those few nights when she was not in bed, with the cat asleep between her sprawled-out legs, both of them snoring), and she would make him a cup of coffee or hot chocolate, and say, “Well, darling, how did it go tonight? You must be tired as a dog. Let me rub you down.” No, Dots was not that kind of a woman. And although he had hoped that she would turn out to be a woman of that thoughtful disposition, he eventually gave up hoping. Too much water was now under the bridge, and the bridge itself was crumbling. Henry had explained it to him once (“When a man meet a woman in the wrong kind of circumstance, frinstance, if the woman is the one bringing in the fucking bacon, and even if the man should become a millionaire, that woman, because she is a fucking woman, that woman will always say that she make that man into the millionaire he is today. That without her, he couldn’t be a kiss-me-arse millionaire. And in the ten or fifteen years, that woman who might be working as a domestic for something like two hundred dollars a rass-hole month would argue strong-strong that without her money supporting that man, he couldn’t be no fucking millionaire at all! Now, tell me, how in the name o’ Jesus Christ, could you add-up two hundred dollars a month, multiply by twelve, and then by ten, or even fifteen, and come out with a fucking millionaire?”), and Boysie had refused to see it in his wife, because in those days he had had to love her, not in the way a lover loves a lover, not in that way, but with more feeling of obligation. He loved her in the same way that a thirsty man loves the hand that offers a glass of iced water.
Boysie had everything. But he was not happy. Perhaps, he sometimes told himself, as he sat on these mornings, listening to his music (he was back on “Both Sides Now”), and reading his newspaper, and waiting for the woman to appear, he had spent too much time making money. He was not a millionaire, certainly not; but he was well off. Money in the bank, so much that he never counted or checked his bank balance in his savings account; and his personal chequing account which was for bills and expenses in his home and his business was never overdrawn. He bought Canada Savings Bonds every month, and he had bought four houses within the space of four or five months; and these were now rented out. He never visited the houses, he never saw the tenants; his lawyer did all that for him.
He had been spending much time recently with his car: driving it to the same garage with which he had been dealing for years, having the mechanic check it over, tune it up, and look at the tires. He kept it always full of gas. It was washed and waxed every two days, although he was going nowhere, to no wedding, on no trip, never taking anybody anywhere in it (Dots trudged through the snow and blustery winds, and he kept the car in the underground garage); but sometimes he would get nightmares about the car, and regardless of the hour, he would get up quietly, put on his winter coat, or his raincoat, or remain in his housecoat (he had started sleeping in his housecoat, because there was no reason to be more naked than that in a bed with a woman who did not need the feel of his body beside her) and with torchlight in hand would check on his car. Once or twice, he heard some activity in the underground garage at that late hour, but he was never inquisitive. And all the newspaper reports and other apartment gossip about rapings and beatings and thefts in the garage never bothered him. He was not interested. He had closed his mind a long time ago against these things. He had closed his mind against the sleeping children in the Home Service Association place; he had closed his mind against the reports of young West Indians stealing purses from old women in the subway stations; he had refused to get involved; he had refused to listen to Mrs. James pleading with him to devote some of his free time in the morning on community work in the black community.
“I didn’t know we had one o’ them!”
“You are always joking, Mr. Cumberbatch.”
“No, really. In truth!”
“Mr. Cumberbatch, where you been all these years you living in this place?”
“I have been in my apartment.”
“Oh, go ’long!”
West Indians were coming and going; some of them were getting into trouble with the police, most of them were working, making money, making progress, gambling, running back to the Caribbean on holidays, some of them three times a year, and life was going on. He had thought of going back to Barbados once, for a vacation, but that idea soon went from his head. He had not even considered the reason for not wanting to return to Barbados. He began, however, to hate Barbados; not really hate it as he was beginning to hate Dots, not even for the same reasons. But he hated it, because you could say that he did not like it. And that is how he put it to anyone who asked him, “Why, a man in your position, with all the money you have, remembering that in Barbados, a Canadian dollar is worth two o’ we-own, why you don’t go back there and put up some beach houses and make some easy money offa the tourists?” And Boysie would just look the person in the eye without even changing the expression in his own eyes. But he knew that he was never going back. Not even to be buried in the warm soil of the land that had brought him forth. He did not consider it in these terms; he did not think in terms of land and birth, and culture and warm soil. He knew nothing about soil. He was born in Barbados because he was not born in Canada. He was in Canada now. He had come here, he had suffered, and he had taken his licks, he had given a few (recently, to his wife), and he was content to spend the rest of his life here. He had applied for Canadian citizenship, at first as insurance against having to return to Barbados, or to go someplace else, and knowing that he could always return here in case things there got rough. But when he got it, when he touched the flimsy book with the Canadian coat of arms on it, he felt strong as he usually did when he got into the bathtub with the water hot, when he was in the apartment alone, and he could walk out naked, right through his apartment, and listen to his music without distraction. When he received his Canadian passport with the citizenship that went along with it, he felt this kind of strength.
All these things he had done without a plan. But as he would sit down on these early mornings, thinking. (“What you are really doing, Mr. Cumberbatch,” the Canadian young fellow said, when Boysie, most uncharacteristically, told the young man what he sometimes did, “is not really thinking. Thinking is not sufficiently philosophical for what you are going through. You are meditating, Mr. Cumberbatch, and meditating is the most spiritual enterprise a man can get involved in, especially in a country as culturally barren as this one.”) Boysie liked the idea about meditating. But he did not like the remarks about Canada being a barren country. Not his country. Nobody should say these things about his country. And he would have told the Canadian young fellow just as much, but his conservatism warned him to permit the young fellow to express his views without molestation. Boysie’s conservatism was being shown in other ways, more significant ways these days: his conservatism and the feeling of influence and ungrounded arrogance that went along with it. He had lived through many radicalisms: first Henry, then Dots, then Bernice and her young man (“A woman her blasted age should be looking for God, not man!”), the thousands of West Indians he was seeing on the streets everywhere in Toronto, walking around the place with all kinds of women on their arms, and not even ashamed or embarrassed to be seen in such exposure; and those at the airport, whenever he dropped in there to have his Scotch and watch the planes taking off for places around the world; yes, he had grown accustomed to radicalism, and it had not bothered him. He could stomach it, because he was a man “in his position.”
His meditations, or his thinking sessions with himself, were not fitting into any kind of pattern or into any plan, at least not when he first thought out certain things he
should do. The buying of the four houses was one plan. It was an investment plan. What else could he do with his money? He didn’t have any children. He was still a young man. He was living well: buying new suits and shoes (“I won’t be seen dead wearing those boots you want me to buy, young man. Shoes were made for gentlemen. Boots for old women and queers.” The young man, who was very fastidious and very polite, lost a little colour and placed the five pairs of boots back into their boxes. Boysie bought the three pairs of shoes he had seen in the window, as he passed), drinking the best of Scotch, and wines with his dinner, which was usually alone, late at night, early in the morning, except on the weekends, when he had Bernice and her young man over to share his boredom. But if he could see the future when it began in the present, he would have known that his thinking sessions about life, about his life and about his wife’s life, were bound to devolve into some plan. And the observer, Dots, and in some cases Bernice, would have sworn that he had been involved in devices. Devices. He had devised his plans to some peculiar conclusion.
He wondered how, sitting in his pyjamas, he had been spending all these months waiting to see a woman he had never seen close up. He wondered if he was not going mad, wasting his time in this diversion. And it was really a diversion. He hadn’t known of any other man who sat every morning to see a woman pass. Now if the man had met the woman in a bar one night, and even if she had refused him, even if she had snubbed him, then he could understand himself waiting to see what colour of disposition her walk, the day after, would have: but this sitting all this time waiting for a woman … Perhaps the Canadian young fellow could understand this, and find some explanation in terms of philosophy! Henry was a man who could give a reason for this kind of behaviour too. Since it was not the kind of thinking about the strange woman that aroused his passion for her, since he was not in love with her, since he did not want to go to bed with her, he should have been able to talk about it to his wife. But would his wife understand? He felt she would not. But he had not asked her. It was his assumption, based on his knowledge of her, and her knowledge of the world, which told him that Dots would find something in the situation to laugh at, and then she would call Bernice on the telephone and laugh some more about it, and some more about “this blasted man going crazy, you hear me, gal. Going crazy as anything.” No, Dots was not the person to entrust this sensitive thing to: and that was it, it was his sensitiveness, and the sensitiveness of the situation, and the entire sensitive embryo in which he found himself living.
The Bigger Light Page 21