I took pictures of Brianna and carried them home for Sasha to admire. Hundreds of them. She was as fascinated as me by the woman’s strange condition. Sometimes I caught her bending over them in my darkroom and workspace, thoughtful. She came over to me for a hug. “Oh, I understand her so much, y’know? She must feel so out of control, like her body just does things and she can’t change it. I know how she feels.” I held her close and tried to remember which shirt I’d left at Brianna’s house.
I transformed Brianna’s apartment into a studio and worked furiously, my new lover stepping around the equipment, anxious that she not damage anything. I slid my lens across her gleaming skin. I shot her bald head from the depths of a coconut tree. I cross-referenced her pores with her eyes and caught her as whizzing demigoddess; a wanton tease; a child; running across the parking lot; naked, rolled in dirt and sand like a zebra; tiptoed, capturing the sweet arch of her back; rough and ready as a ragamuffin; as dance hall queen; as prostitute; as maid. She was the most adaptable model I’d ever had. And water, yes, water everywhere. I poured food coloring into her palms and together we watched, enthralled, as she made a mauve waterfall in her back garden, the liquid pouring from her, spraying into the air in lovely droplets, in sumptuous curves, simmering in the heat of our country. I made her lift her hands above her head and clicked my shutter as she rained on herself, and it was amazing to watch her laugh. To watch my wife laugh, delighted that I had found a muse, happy in the smoky pretense of her husband’s growing ability. I never thought she would find out. Truly. If she couldn’t see it in the glow of Brianna’s eyes, I guessed that I’d done all I could do.
“Jerry, I need some money.”
“What for?” I rolled over and tweaked her nipple, then brought one of her fingers up and watched liquid mount her aureole.
“The operation,” she said. I looked at her, startled. “I’ve decided to do it anyway. My voice is what’s most important, and Warners is just going to have to take that.”
“Ah…” I was shocked now. “You still want the operation?”
She frowned. “I always told you that.”
“Yes, but…” I was suddenly embarrassed. I thought that my old magic had transformed her, that the pictures were enough. Hadn’t I excised my mother’s pain with a single photograph?
She looked at me, suddenly comprehending. She laughed, splashing my cheek. “You actually think pretty pictures make it all okay?”
“No, no, I mean, this has been a problem all your life…” I lied. I fixed my face into sympathy.
She laughed again. “You are so arrogant, baby. So sweet with the arrogance.” She got off the bed, her body twisting into parenthesis. “There’s another reason why I need money.”
“Yes?”
“I’m pregnant.”
A New York Times critic once damned me to hell, in the days before my computer was crammed with kiss-kiss E-mails from my agent: “The way that Jeremy Butler brings his models to the frame suggests coercion of the lowest kind. Underneath the smiles are screaming women, if you can only bend close enough to hear them.” I crumpled the review and dismissed him. But after Brianna I’ve often wondered whether I cured any of the women I captured. I wonder if I truly did cure my mother, or whether I just wanted to believe that I had. I realized that I imagined all of them changed, confident, careless in the knowledge of their beauty forever, a swath behind me, all made up of whole and hearty ladies, purring in the knowledge of the wondrousness that Jerry Butler showed them. Now I wonder if I made it worse; whether the magic faded and left them emptier than before. I used them. I may not have touched any of them except Brianna, but I look at my old work and see how I masturbated with their souls.
“Sasha will just have to hold her corner and chill,” said Lillian. We sat in her living room. She was a dread by then, her fake locks twisted and alien down her back, wrapped in scarlet, amber, and jade, her skirt long and wide, hiding her feet. I knew she was the wrong person to talk to as soon as I said it, but I needed someone to tell me it wasn’t a big deal, and Lillian’s carelessness was stunning in its consistency.
“Shit,” I said, out loud.
Lillian sucked her teeth, waved the air. “How many men you know in Jamaica that have children out of doors? Nearly all of them. C’mon, Jerry. And anyway, what does Sasha expect?”
“I’m not that kind of man,” I said.
“Of course you are, my dear.”
I didn’t tell Sasha. Denial is such a convenient thing. I just kept on going. But I watched my wife, paying our bills, giving the maid daily instructions, cutting her toenails, reading me manuscripts in bed. I listened to her whisper into my ear at night: I can’t take it, God, I can’t take it. I once read a survey of what Caribbean women said at the point of orgasm. Jamaican women say that a lot, apparently: I can’t take it. Bajan women say, Do me so, oh Lord. Grenadian women say, Ram me, Jesus Christ, ram me, boy. I wonder if God looks down and asks what the hell He has to do with it.
I watched Brianna swell and sweat. I gave her money. As the baby grew inside her, she grew obsessed. She wanted, she said, to hold this baby in dry arms, and sing to it. It was the sum of all her thoughts: holding her child, moistened only by the blood of the birth, introducing herself with the sound of her voice. She’d told the record company that she was having the operation, and, reluctantly, they agreed that they would sign the deal without it. But after the baby, they said. When she shaped up, they’d start recording. I was proud of her determination.
We booked her in for the operation six weeks before her due date. It was a simple procedure, but it was expensive. I crept off to New York for my latest exhibition. I walked around the exhibiting hall, discussing mounting, lighting, which shots would be made available to the public as three-hundred-dollar prints, which ones would make two-dollar postcards. The curator fluttered around me, lip-glossed, his vocabulary studded with “darlings.” “Brianna is just the best of your work, hon,” he said. “You just get better and better. Who is she, anyway?”
I looked at the pictures and thought about my lover, my mistress. She was nervous the morning I’d left, and I’d only been able to steal a little while with her. Sasha couldn’t understand where I had to go just hours before she drove me to the airport.
“You can’t be here? You can’t cancel?”
“B, I have to make some money. Come on, now.”
She was propped up in bed, bulbous, like a big, naked moon. She had me pile her houseplants around her on the sheets, and began to water them, dipping her busy fingers into their pots and feeding them with herself, roots up. I’d seen her do it countless times, and wasn’t amused anymore. Recently, each time she did something bizarre with her hands, I loved Sasha more. I had begun to think of ways of extricating myself.
She looked up. “They’re going to collapse my lungs.” She was near tears.
Groaning, contrite, I pushed a plant out of the way and stroked her face. I could give her comfort—it wasn’t so much to ask for. The operation was keyhole surgery. The specialist would work through each armpit, cauterizing the nerve that induced sweating. To get to the nerve he would deflate her lungs, left side, right side. I thought of Sasha and her breasts. Her nipples always hardened alternately, as if they were playing hide and seek with my mouth.
“Think of holding the baby, sweetheart.” Wincing, I checked my watch. Sasha would be raising her eyebrows at me by the time I got back.
“All right,” Brianna said. She sighed. She let the tears dry. She never wiped her face. It was silly to do so. She was lucky that she didn’t need makeup. “Yes. It’s going to be a girl, y’know. That’s what the doctor said.”
“I know.” I refused to think of my child coming into the world in a month. Perhaps if Brianna had been the kind of woman who threatened taking the kid into Sasha’s face, I would have fallen out of denial. But she wasn’t. So I didn’t.
A week later, I unlocked the burglar bars around our veranda. Our maid, Michelle, st
ood waiting for me, her face impassive. She’d been picking the parasitic love bush off the hedges in the garden. Her hands were stained orange.
“Hello, Mr. Jerry,” she said.
“Hello, Michelle. Where’s Mrs. Butler?”
“She not here. She gone down to the office, say she comin’ back late.”
Something in her tone made me look up from the padlock I was twisting into place. She was pushing her lips out in that kissing gesture that Jamaicans do when they want to point at something, but don’t want to use their hands.
“S’maddy here to see you, Mr. Jerry,” she said.
Brianna was sitting on our bed. She wore a red T-shirt with a rip under one arm, and close-fitting jeans. I stared at her flat stomach, uncomprehending. Part of me was poised to snatch her from my marital bed the minute liquid threatened. Another part was utterly aroused by her in that marital bed, those miles of perfect skin, remembering how each time I touched her it felt new. Yet another part was outraged at her audacity. How could she come to my home? Dimly, I realized that she’d started weeping when I stepped into the room. The outrage died. Curiosity and lust and pity took over. I held her.
“Did you lose the baby?”
“No. The baby’s at home. I had it early. You weren’t here.”
I looked down at her hands, reached to touch them, but she pulled away, was down on her knees before I could stop her, dragging arid palms across the electric sockets, across the carpet.
“So you’re dry! Great! So what—”
“Look at what I can do.” She began to slap herself. Big, open-handed, full-palmed slaps, cracking across her face, faster and faster. I could feel Michelle listening at the door as I stumbled to Brianna’s side, nearly tearful myself. I grabbed her hands and forced them down. The skin of her fingers was cracking. It was eerie to touch them.
Her skin was bone-dry, like my throat.
She told me that she went into labor half an hour afer her surgery. In fifteen hours she held her baby boy, exhausted, wanting me, but looking down at this little person, neat and dry and safe in her arms. “Boy, we musta missed that penis,” the nurse chuckled at her. Brianna watched the Jamaican dawn playing with the windows of her room, and she thought how nice it was that I’d gotten her a private room, away from the labor ward screams. She opened her mouth and waited for the taste of her song. What came out was less than a bark. The surgeons said they couldn’t do anything. An unfortunate side effect, they said. Never seen anything like it.
She climbed into my arms and I forgot about Michelle as Brianna scratched and wailed and pulled me inside her, thrusting her hips at me, our wet cheeks sliding against each other as I cried, too, telling her I was sorry, so sorry that she was sad, between whining and groans and acres of curious dryness and the sound of her coming over and over, like she’d never stop, and in all of it I don’t know how I heard that tiny gasp behind me, my wife standing at the bedroom door, her eyes so big that they suddenly saw all the world. I turned, I tell you, from my lover, God knows how I heard that small, hurt sound in between Brianna’s orgasmic sorrow, but I did. I can hear it now.
I’m glad that I’ve written it all down. I’ll ask Sasha whether she thinks I should keep it for Jake. I’ll trust her feelings on the matter. Perhaps she won’t want to change his dreams. Perhaps they would be twisted, like my own. I dream of Brianna, not smooth, or burnished, or wet, but surrounded by options: was it a knife, a rope, a razor blade, drugs, did she vomit, did she hate me, did she bleed, did it hurt? Lillian got the news on the wind and came up to the house, dragged me into the yard to tell me. It made page five of the Daily Gleaner: SINGER SUICIDE AFTER BOTCHED OPERATION. The Gleaner was never subtle, and they spread my lover’s face all over their pages, frozen in a death mask. I know something. I know she wouldn’t have killed herself if I had followed her that day. But I chose. I chose my wife’s disbelieving eyes, and that small sound of hurt. I chose to heal the only thing I could heal.
My wife always wanted a son. When we came to the new house, Jake in my arms, she finally threw out her off-white underwear, saved for heavy periods, the ones she hadn’t worn for years. I remember her words: Number Three, Jerry: Let this be enough. Will it be enough? It has to be enough. I said yes, that my son was enough. That I’d never touch another woman.
Jake is coming home tomorrow. He’s grown to be a fine man. Bright, responsible, not at all interested in photography. He has Sasha’s feeling for words, and he’s studying linguistics and sociology. He’s had the same girl since he was sixteen. They cuddle and wind love bush in each other’s hair when they’re here. Sometimes, when she thinks we’re not looking, his girl sucks salt water off his fingers and teases him about another one of her shirts ruined. But she doesn’t mind the sweat. Neither does Jake. He waters the plants at the front of the yard with his hands, and Sasha smiles.
CAN YOU WEAR MY EYES
Kalamu ya Salaam
(2000)
At first Reggie wearing my eyes after I expired was beautiful; a sensitive romantic gesture and an exhilarating experience. For him there was the awe of seeing the familiar world turned new when viewed through my gaze, and through observing him, I vicariously experienced the rich sweetness of visualizing and savoring the significance of the recent past.
I’m a newcomer to the spirit world, so occasionally I miss the experience of earth feelings, the sensations that came through my body when I had a body. I can’t describe the all-encompassing intricate interweave of spirit reality—“reality” is such a funny word to use in talking about what many people believe is so unreal. I can’t really convey to you the richness of the spirit world or what missing human feelings is like. I’m told eventually we permanently forget earth ways, sort of like when we were born and forgot all those prebirth months we spent gestating in our mother’s womb; in fact, most of us even forget what it feels like to be a baby. Well, the spirit world is something like always being a baby, constant wonder and exploration.
Reggie must have had an inkling of the immensity of the fourth dimension—which is as good a name as any for the spirit world—or maybe Reggie guessed that there was a meta-reality, or intuited that there was more to eyes than simply seeing in the physical sense. But then again, he probably didn’t intuit that this realm exists because, like most men, centering on his intuition was difficult for Reggie, as difficult as lighting a match in a storm or imagining being a woman. In fact, his inability to adapt to and cope with woman-sight is why he’s blind now.
I was in his head, and I don’t mean his memories. I mean literally checking his thoughts, each one existing with the briefness of a mayfly as Reg weighed the rationality of switching eyes. This was immediately following those four and a half anesthetized days I hung on while in the hospital after getting blindsided by a drunk driver a few blocks beyond Chinese Kitchen, where I had stopped to get some of their sweet-and-sour shrimp for our dinner. Through the whole ordeal Reggie never wavered. Two days after my death and one day before the operation, Reginald woke up that Monday morning confident as a tree planted by the water. Reggie felt that if he took on my eyes, then he would be able to have at least a part of me back in his life.
He assumed that with my eyes maybe he could stop seeing me when he brushed, combed, and plaited Aiesha’s thick hair or sat for over an hour daydreaming at her bedside while she slept, looking at our daughter but thinking of me. Or maybe he thought once my chestnut-colored pupils were in his head, my demise wouldn’t upset him so much that he’d have to bow his head like he was reverently praying, the way Sister Carol had done in church before she’d jump up to testify the day before.
Reginald was so eager to make good as a husband and father, to redeem whatever he thought was lost because of the way he came up. I am convinced he didn’t really know me. He had this image, this ideal, and he wanted that in the worst way. Wanted a family, a home. And I was the first woman he ever loved and who ever loved him. All the rest had been girls still discovering themselves
. We married. I had his child. And for him everything was just the way it was supposed to be. For me, well, let us just say, some of us want more out of life without ever really identifying what that more is and certainly without ever attaining that more. So, in a sense, I settled—that’s the woman Reginald married. And in another sense, there was a part of me that remained restless. I hid that part from Reginald, but I always knew. I always, always knew me and, yes, that was what really disoriented Reginald. He loved me and I could live with his love, but until he wore my eyes he never got a glimpse of the other me.
I used to think there was something wrong with me. I should have been totally happy. Of course, I loved our daughter. I loved my husband. I could live with the life we had, but… But this is not about me. This is about the man whom I married. I married Reginald more because he loved me so much than because I loved him back like that—I mean, I loved him and all, but would never have put his eyes into my head if he had been killed and I had been the one still alive, on the other side.
After we went through all the organ donation legal rigamarole, we actually celebrated with a late-night seafood dinner; that was about eight and a half months before Aiesha was born. Just like getting married, the celebration was his idea, an idea I went along with because I had no good reason not to, even though I had a vague distaste, a sort of uneasiness about the seriousness that Reginald invested into his blind allegiance to me. You know the discomfort you experience when you have two or three forkfuls left on your plate and you don’t feel like eating anymore, but you have always been taught not to waste food so you eat that little bit more? Eating a few more morsels is no big thing, but nonetheless forcing yourself leaves you feeling uneasy the rest of the evening. I can see how I was, how I hid some major parts of myself from Reginald, and how difficult I must have been to live with precisely because he didn’t really know the whole person he was living with. He so sincerely worshiped the part of me that he envisioned as his wife, while inside I cringed, and he never knew—despite my smiles—how sad I sometimes felt, because I knew he didn’t know and I knew I was concealing myself from him. Besides, what right did I have not to eat two little pieces of chicken or not to go celebrate my husband’s decision to dedicate his life to me?
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