And after he had died, the whiteness of his mouth, the redness of his lips, the unusual blackness of his skin, his very suffering itself began to seem sometimes as if I had made them up, though not his death itself, for everyone could remember it readily and would refer to it readily (“I’m so sorry about your brother”), and my mother was sorry about his absence (“Me miss he, you know, me miss he”).
* * *
Not really more than a week after he was buried in the warm and yellow clay of the graveyard in Antigua, I resumed the life that his death had interrupted, the life with my own family, and the life of having written a book and persuading people to simply go out and buy it. I was in Chicago, a place for which I have only random memories: when I was nineteen, four girls were in my charge (I was a servant in this family) and I spent a summer looking after them in a place not far from Chicago, and I had a boyfriend whose name was Ed and he and I went to see someone famous play a guitar and sing a song in Chicago; my daughter and I once went by train to visit her father’s relatives in Chicago, and while there we went to the planetarium and saw an extraordinary film about the forming of the universe, and after that we could not find a taxi to take us to the train station (the reason being no taxis appeared; the patrons of the planetarium seemed to have arrived in their own cars) and I became so afraid that we would miss our overnight train to Albany, New York, that I burst into tears, and my daughter, seeing me cry, started to cry, too, but then all of a sudden a taxi appeared and we got to the train on time and had dinner on the train and slept all through the night and then had breakfast in the morning on the train and got off and came home safely, and I want to go to Chicago on a train again but only when I am young; it is far too late for that now; and in Chicago again, I change airplanes as I go from the Eastern part of the United States to the West. This is how Chicago used to appear in my mind when I would think of it, but that changed after my brother died.
I was in Chicago and it was so cold I should have been complaining, but I was so cheerful and agreeable that even when a man, just before he sat me down in front of him to ask me questions about the book I had written, hugged me and pressed my chest into his and ran his hands down my spine to my bottom and then up again, I did not object, I only noted it and wondered about the ups and downs of his life and what he had been like as a boy and what he had been like as a man, before he became this old man running his hands up and down my spine and bottom in a room with a few people and many bright lights; and I sat and talked to him, and then I went off and sat and talked to other people, men and women, some of them to their face, some of them through telephones, and I never told them that my brother had just died, that I was in a state of pain, a state of pain I had no real words for, a state of pain I did not know how to explain; such a thing had never happened to me before, this loss happens to other people all the time, their hair turns gray from it, loses all its natural, beautiful pigmentation: brown, black, yellow, or some combination of these, and they become gray, the color of things dying, or certainly the color of things that will know dying. But I had never been like that until my brother died; in spite of all the people I had been close to who had died, I never believed in it, the very fact that they had died; I now know that I thought of them as being somewhere else, someplace that I now no longer visited, or had never visited and would never visit, for they were there and I was here and had chosen to be here and not to join them at all; they had not died, they were only someplace else. And this made sense, for much of my life had been spent away from people who meant much to me and who were among the first people to make sense to me; I once did not see my mother for twenty years, even though I thought of her first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and almost all my thoughts of her were full of intense hatred, but she was alive and not in my sight and I could so well remember her hatred toward me—I will not add a qualifier to that, her hatred toward me, or modify it, this was just so: my mother hates her children. But that my mother might become dead, I had never imagined this.
Chicago again: how cold it was that time, so cold that I could see the lake, Lake Michigan, from my bed in the room of my extremely nice hotel, my bed so comfortable and made up twice a day, once in the morning and then again in the early evening when I was out having my dinner or talking to some of all those people in person or by telephone, and the lake was frozen, all the water in it tightly squeezed together, all bound up into ice, and the ice was blue, not an inviting blue, like the sky sometimes, or the sea sometimes, but a blue that is the color of a dress that might cost so much only two or three people in the world can afford to buy it, or like a blue of something that is far away in another part of the universe, such a blue was the frozen water in the lake that time; and it was so cold everybody talked about it. It’s so cold, they said, at first as if it were a surprise and then as if it were a punishment: “It’s so cold!” It was cold, just the opposite of the earth and the atmosphere where my brother had just been buried, and this cold allowed me to think of him without mentioning him to anyone or telling them of my predicament, that at the moment I seemed to be having such a triumph, a book I had written interested people who knew nothing at all about me (for is that not a desire of people who on writing books allow them to be published and exposed to a public: that people who do not know them, absolute strangers, will buy the book and read it and then like it). They did not know that I had suffered a great loss: someone I did not know I loved had died, someone I did not want to love had died, and that dying had a closed-door quality to it, a falling-off-the-horizon quality to it, the end, an end, nothing … and yet, what to do? For it is the end and yet so many things linger.
But. I was reading from the book I had written to an audience in a bookstore (and my reading was not complicated by my feelings of sympathy for the owner of this small bookstore, who had her own worries about the ruthlessness of capitalism and the ruthlessness of the marketplace—the two things synonymous and making her ability to earn a living in the way she chose difficult—and the ruthlessness of life itself, and though she never did say this, I gathered, I felt, she meant her own worthiness made her exempt from all this, marketplace, capitalism, life itself; I was sympathetic, since I feel exactly that way about my own self), and the audience was very kind and I was grateful that there were so many people, for it was so cold, and I saw some of my husband’s relatives in the audience and that made me happy, for it is so easy to love people you do not really know and only have the strong feeling that you should love them because they perhaps remind you of the people you love best in the world, the people you have chosen, and so I was happy, in a way, or almost happy, in a way. And then, just as the room was emptying out, I saw a face that I recognized from somewhere else. I didn’t know where, except I knew it wasn’t a dream I had had, or someone who was a part of my intimate life in the past (my intimate past being my youth, which was full of curiosity and conviction and courage, and since I have survived it, my intimate past, I simply shall never repeat it); it was just the face of a woman with thin skin (it was empty of pigment and so thin in color) and short hair, like a boy who has been bad and a part of his punishment is to have his head shorn of hair: a humiliation. And to this face I said, “Hello,” tentatively, unsure, for so many times I have greeted a familiar face with enthusiasm only to have the person say they don’t know me at all and have never seen me before, and I never get the impression that they want to know me more or see me again. And so I said, “Hello,” and this person said, “Hello,” and when I said that she looked familiar, she told me that yes, we had been in an AIDS support group in Antigua three years before. I said, Oh yes, and I remembered that whole afternoon of the AIDS support group listening to Dr. Ramsey and viewing his display of slides depicting all sorts of stages of sexually transmitted diseases with the sexual organs looking so decayed the viewer could almost smell the decay just by looking at them. And I remembered this woman, superior and slightly contemptuous of her general surroundings (but I did
not fault her for that, I had felt the same way, only more so) and casting blame and making denunciations (and I did not fault her for that, I had futilely gone so far as to write a small book in which I did nothing but cast blame and make denunciations), and just in general making everyone present at the meeting wish a little that she was not there, not at the meeting but somewhere in the world where she would do good beyond imagining, but at this meeting, who was she? She was far more disturbing than the woman with thick skin who had opinions about the evil of white people and the goodness of black people—her words—and though I shall never be surprised by the aversion human beings can feel toward each other, for even I found her ways of arriving at her opinions offensive (but that is only a polite way of my now saying that at the time she said these things, if there had been an acceptable rubbish heap for human beings who said rubbishy things, I would have placed her on it. But how would I have achieved such an ability?). All these thoughts overwhelmed me, though they did not cripple me, but I was overwhelmed all the same, trying to place her in those new moments when I had just discovered that my brother was dying, would die, and that I did not love him, or did not recognize my feelings for him as being love, but felt such a responsibility, an obligation, to help him in some way. And just seeing her face made me say the thing I had not been saying at all, only thinking as a separate person, not the person in the room reading; I had been thinking, My brother has just died, my brother has died, but to her I said, as simply as this, “My brother died,” and she said as simply as this, “I know.”
When she said this, “I know,” a whole world rolled out in front of me, not falling off a desk and crashing like the miniature water-filled glass domes which my children collect and always ask me to be on the lookout for when I go somewhere new, and these water-filled domes, with a little make-believe scene stuck to their bottom, a scene with a symbol of some city or figure associated with the pleasures of childhood, are always falling off my children’s desks or dressers, just falling from a high place and crashing, and water and scene of city or scene associated with childhood pleasures scatter all over the floor, and then all of it soon becomes invisible to the naked eye, but the bare sole of a foot feels its invisible remains and the shattered dome then registers as something dangerous and sinister because it can be felt but never seen. And so it was not like a shattered miniature water-filled dome with a scene of any kind that this woman whose face I had seen before, whose voice I had heard before but now in Chicago was saying “I know,” seemed to me; it was not like that at all; it was like something unrolling, a carpet, a sheet of paper, and I knew it would hold a surprise, but this did not frighten me, I was indifferent to fear right then, but only right then; ordinarily I am not indifferent to fear at all; ordinarily I am quite afraid of the consequences of the thing I am about to do, but I do it anyway. But that “I know.” Her voice surely would have been sympathetic, she must have lowered her head, I always lower my head when I feel sympathy or something tender for people who need sympathy. She only said, “I know.” And I said, “How did you know?” and I said, “Did you know my brother?” And she said yes. And then she said that she had been a lesbian woman living in Antigua and how deeply sad it made her to see the scorn and derision heaped on the homosexual man; homosexual men had no place to go in Antigua, she said, no place to simply meet and be with each other and not be afraid; and so she had opened up her home and made it known that every Sunday men who loved other men could come to her house in the afternoon and enjoy each other’s company. My brother, she said, was a frequent visitor to her house. She only said all that. On Sundays men who were homosexuals came to her house, a safe place to be with each other, and my brother who had just died was often at her house, not as a spectator of homosexual life but as a participant in homosexual life.
A great sadness overcame me, and the source of the sadness was the deep feeling I had always had about him: that he had died without ever understanding or knowing, or being able to let the world in which he lived know, who he was; that who he really was—not a single sense of identity but all the complexities of who he was—he could not express fully: his fear of being laughed at, his fear of meeting with the scorn of the people he knew best were overwhelming and he could not live with all of it openly. His homosexuality is one thing, and my becoming a writer is another altogether, but this truth is not lost to me: I could not have become a writer while living among the people I knew best, I could not have become myself while living among the people I knew best—and I only knew them best because I was from them, of them, and so often felt I was them—and they were—are—the people who ought to have loved me best in the whole world, the people who should have made me feel that the love of people other than them was suspect. And his life unfolded before me not like a map just found, or a piece of old paper just found, his life unfolded and there was everything to see and there was nothing to see; in his life there had been no flowering, his life was the opposite of that, a flowering, his life was like the bud that sets but, instead of opening into a flower, turns brown and falls off at your feet.
And in the unfolding were many things, all contained in memory (but without memory what would be left? Nothing? I do not know): the girl from Guiana with whom he had been having unprotected sex after he knew he was infected with the HIV virus; the girl (another one altogether) who saw him sunning himself on the veranda of the hospital that first time when he had been seriously ill and the doctors thought he would be dead in three days—she had known him very well, she had been used to being seduced by him in one way or another, but when she saw him so thin in the hospital, so weak, my brother could tell that she had heard the rumors about him (they were true, but he could not admit it to himself then, and she was not really sure), and the way she distanced herself from him caused him great pain (he was dying and should have been beyond that, but dying was very new to him then); and the flirting with the nurses in Dr. Ramsey’s office who knew of his situation, and he knew that they knew of his situation, and so their scorn (they did not hide it) must have been especially painful, but I did not know, he could not (I now see) let me know; and then again their scorn was painful to him because in it his secret of not really wanting to seduce them, really wanting to seduce someone who was not at all like them, a man, became clear to him, was made plain to him, and so the doubleness of his life, which was something he could manage ordinarily, in a day-in, day-out situation, must have been erased in those moments, and perhaps he despaired that the walls separating the parts of his life had broken down, and that might have caused him much anxiety, and such a thing, the anxiety when it appeared on his face, would have seemed to me, who knew nothing about his internal reality, as another kind of suffering, a suffering I might be able to relieve with medicine I had brought from the prosperous North; but I did not know then, I only know now. And in this Now, I can understand why a man, a teacher, though not an old teacher, would want to take him on a journey to Trinidad, just the two of them together, and my brother not being able to pay his own way was no hindrance to this plan; but this whole incident of the teacher—a man—who wanted to take him on a trip, a holiday, the why of it, is clear to me now, the why part of it; I only asked this question at the time he was dying, and again after he was dead.
And then again, when thinking of that woman in the bookstore in Chicago, her white hair cropped short and lying close to her scalp (though not in a forced way, it lay on her head quite naturally), the way she emerged from the damp and blue cold and the dark night, with her tale of regular secret meetings on Sunday afternoons in a climate the direct opposite of the one we were in, I, even I, with all my New World sophistication (this New World in which I now live began in 1492 and for very convenient reasons it insists on this status, “New World,” people from everywhere else, for myriad reasons, need it to be a “New World”), wondered, and then doubted, and went back and forth, whether she was telling me something true or just something she wished to say: Your brother came to my hou
se because my house offered him a setting to be himself, his real self, a self which loved the deep intimacy and companionship of other men, a self of which he was ashamed and afraid to show to anyone other than the people who were sympathetic to and shared his secret. And I returned to my room in the hotel, a room from which I could see the water of Lake Michigan stilled, frozen, blue in color, but the frozen waters of Lake Michigan were a blue not like a blue my brother had ever seen, it was not like the blue of the Atlantic Ocean in the West Indies (the Atlantic Ocean in Nova Scotia or Martha’s Vineyard is not blue at all, it is a gray, a gray that signals the beginning of the end of things); nor was it like the blue of the Caribbean Sea, another body of water my brother might have been familiar with; oh, but he was familiar with it, I have seen him swimming in it, and later when he was dying he gave me his school textbook, A History of the West Indies. No, it was a captive blue, this blue of Lake Michigan, a blue that held in it restraint and at the same time destruction; it was not permanent, this frozen water and color of the lake which I could see from my hotel, and each room of this hotel cost a great deal of money, money that my brother might have wanted and even imagined, but by that time he was dead, I had buried him a week or so ago, and I could only go back to that room that cost so much and imagine my brother, his life, and my own, which was in direct contrast to his. I was alive, I was in danger of not being so only in the usual way, the airplane on which I flew from place to place might fall out of the sky, a vessel in my brain might suddenly burst, my heart might be stilled as if someone had reached in and stopped it, like a clock on a wall, like the mechanical toy my son winds up and makes go and then, for a reason that pleases solely him, places in the palm of his hand, squeezing all its mechanism until it just stops; my life could end in the manner of all those things. Just then it had not, just yet, just now, at this moment that I am sitting and contemplating (though I am not sure that I am capable of contemplation), I am remembering the life of my brother, I am remembering my own life, or at least a part of my own life, for my own life is still ongoing, I hope, and each moment of its present shapes its past and each moment of its present will shape its future and even so influence the way I see its future; and the knowledge of all this leaves me with the feeling: And what now, and so, yes, what now. What now!
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