He led me to a bar across the street. He ordered whiskey for himself.
“Top shelf,” he said. Nothing less would do for the occasion. Sipping my beer, I tried to seem as enthusiastic about our meeting as he was. In England, I had stopped answering the letters he had written me from Aruba where he had gone to work in the oil refineries. I had not heard from him in years! Nor had I expected ever to see him again. Now, sitting at the table opposite to him, I was surprised and confused by the elegant reproduction of the mediocre student, powerful weigh-lifter and excellent athlete who had saved my life.
“Boy,” he said. “You could’ve knocked me down with a feather.” He laughed. “You think you ever going back?”
“Perhaps,” I said.
But returning to live on the island was the last thing I wanted to do.
“At least you’re honest,” he said. “You not like Paul. You don’t say home, home, home all the time and still continue to live here. He doesn’t really live here. He says he does, but he’s always out of the country, always somewhere else, on tour somewhere in Australia, Japan, South America – you name it. He own property all over the place but not an inch on the island. But he’s always talking about home, home, home.” He paused. “You know about the sheep farm in New Zealand?”
I knew.
“And you know where he is now?”
“In Brazil,” I said, “he’ll be performing a series of concerts in South America.”
“Right. That’s how he does live. He doesn’t live here, in America. He living everywhere. The whole world is his home. As for me,” Selwyn tapped the table top decisively with his finger, “my home is right here. Nobody making me go back.”
He chuckled. “Cockroaches, centipedes. Chicken backs and necks. And DDT! But nobody going to dump on me again. I’ll do the dumping now.”
He pulled out his wallet and showed me a card. He said proudly, “I’m an American citizen. I’m making a very good living.”
He worked in a chemical factory, spoke casually of accidental near-releases of lethal gases, and of pressure locks, valves and fail-safe devices. The work sounded dangerous, but he was obviously very satisfied with his life. He spoke proudly of Pat, his wife from another Caribbean island, and of Cheryll and Helen, his teenage daughters, both in college.
“I couldn’t do that if I didn’t come here,” he said. “Thank God for America! Look, finish your drink. I want to show you something.”
He had hardly touched his. As we stood up to leave, I asked, “Still working out?”
He chuckled and didn’t answer. But he seemed to push his chest out and to hold himself more erect.
He drove past the city’s Cultural Center. It was full of tourists and sightseers.
“Cheryll, my daughter, works there. She’s a tour guide. She can give you a free tour anytime you like. Paul got her the job.” He chuckled. “After all, isn’t that what friends are for?”
Later, he double-parked in front of an apartment building a few blocks away. He pointed with his chin to the uniformed doorman standing just within the revolving glass door and to the uniformed, armed man next to him.
“You see how they watching us? Heh, heh. Just try to get in there! The place like a damn fortress. They want to know what your grandfather’s brother’s concubine name is. Then, when you tell them, they have to call upstairs. And while you waiting to hear what they does have to say, they watching you like a hawk. That’s where Paul does stay when he’s in town. That’s why he’ll never marry. With all this, who needs a wife to take care of him, eh? Look, look! You see how they watching us? They getting nervous. He getting ready to shoot.”
The two men were paying no attention to us. Selwyn drove off. He said, “Now, I’ll take you to another place. Tell me if you recognize it.”
Ten minutes later, he asked me, “You know where you are?”
I knew! The people I looked at on the street were like people I had grown up with and lived almost half of my life among. I should have felt at home here. But the university’s foreign- student advisor had told us how dangerous the area behind the university was. She called it a neighbourhood. She had not used the word ghetto. I felt that I was in alien, dangerous territory.
“Red’s Kingdom!” Selwyn said, laughing.
We were stopped at a red light. He tapped the steering wheel with his fingers. Then he became uncharacteristically silent and looked straight ahead.
“You better lock your door. Just in case. You never know.”
I did.
Selwyn said, “Look out!” and ducked.
I ducked. Selwyn came up chuckling. I sat up. After all those years, I had allowed him to play another trick on me! I smiled sheepishly. The light turned green. He moved the car smoothly forward.
I asked, “Do you come here often?”
He laughed. “No man. I only wanted to show you Red’s territory.”
He never offered to take me into the ghetto again. He wanted, he said, to introduce me to the real city, to take me, in his words, “on the town”, to show me the nightclubs where the men were required to wear suits and where he entertained his “not-yet-Americanized women from Europe”. I became accustomed to his telephone calls, but often, citing work, I would find reasons not to accept his invitations to go out with him.
Determined to be careful and circumspect, envious of his confident ease and assumption of freedom in an America that I distrusted and feared, but had allowed myself to be lured to, I made Selwyn my surrogate, a modern knight errant in black face and a three-piece suit, happily coursing his way in his automobile through America’s streets, to and from its motels with his women, the popular music coming in a steady stream from the car’s four speakers, its windows up, in all seasons, no matter how cold or hot it was outside, and he enclosed comfortably within it, as if in a bubble that would never burst. His phallus was his lance, and I his fearful, repressed and not always believing – yet not wholly unadmiring – squire.
And it was, in part, because of him, that I took the first step of the journey that would lead me to the cafeteria in the park, and, from there, out into the rain to Carol, the American woman who would become my wife.
CHAPTER THREE
I had not gone to the cafeteria to meet Carol. I went to meet Janice whom I had spoken to on the telephone when I was looking for a bank to deposit some money in. I had chosen one closer to the university than the one where she worked, but I called every now and then to exchange a word or two with her. That first time she complimented me on my accent. “So English,” she said, “so cultured.”
She was not the only one in America who made me aware of how I spoke. I had begun to notice a peculiar look of recognition, which I found insolent in its familiarity, directed at me by people who I was sure had never before seen me. Once these strangers heard me speak, they seemed surprised. They remarked on my accent. They asked where I had come from and what I had come to America to do. They became curious and almost friendly. But no matter how friendly these strangers became, I never ceased to feel that my accent had, in some way, enabled me to escape from them.
On the telephone with Janice, it was otherwise. She was neither surprised by the way I spoke nor curious about who I was or where I had come from. I never felt that I had escaped from her. My conversations with her became more comfortable than my ever more infrequent telephone conversations with Selwyn. Janice, in time, became like an old friend. We had never met, but not even with my study group colleagues had I been as comfortable with an American as I was speaking to her.
And yet, my study group colleagues were very friendly. Their frequent social invitations – when I wanted only to be left alone – made me feel I was the foreign guest to whom each was determined to play gracious American host. I was flattered that Porter constantly invited me to his family’s estate home in the hills, a day’s drive from the city; that Jonathan should take me to a service in his Reform temple and, afterwards, to his parents’ apartment where he produced
his unpublished novel manuscripts and asked me to say nothing about them to the others; and that Reginald should invite me to his mother’s home in the ghetto, the place Selwyn called Red’s kingdom, and ask me, again and again, until he grew tired of my refusals and stopped, to go there once a week to teach in his old high school with him.
These invitations were distractions. In America, unlike in England, I wanted only to be left alone. But Jonathan, Porter and Reginald were excellent colleagues whom it was most advantageous to have as working partners, and I did not want to seem rude or unsociable to them. I was also finding it more and more difficult to suppress the friendliness and camaraderie that I felt developing naturally between my colleagues and myself. Increasingly, I felt guilty for wanting to be no more than a colleague to each of them. I discovered, though, that Porter had never invited Jonathan or Reginald to his estate home, and that it was I alone, and never Jonathan or Porter, whom Reginald invited to go into the ghetto. But even when I began to feel naive and duped because of what I discovered about the asocial and segmented relationships my colleagues maintained with each other (such as, I have to admit, I wished to maintain with them), I found it difficult not to feel flattered by their attention and their repeated demonstrations of friendship. I told myself that it was natural for each of them to want to introduce and initiate me, the ignorant foreigner, into his personal experience as an American. I allowed each flattering invitation from them, each friendly telephone conversation with Janice, each more-and-more-unwilling excursion into the city with Selwyn, to lead me, a little farther each time, away from the fearful America that its history and recent events had created in my imagination.
Each offered journey became another tentative, exploratory reaching out beyond the restricting frontiers of my imagined America, taking me a little farther into its wilderness. Whether the next call from Janice, the next excursion with Selwyn into the not-anymore-so-alien city, the next flattering invitation from my study group colleagues, they prepared and made possible – as into territory reconnoitred, cleared and presumed safe – my subsequent, careful advance into the actual America in which I was living so circumspectly.
My invitation to Janice to have lunch with me in the park, made on an impulse one day, because I had begun to wonder what she looked like, was an act born of this new confidence. I had begun to feel that the America I distrusted and feared, but had allowed myself to be lured to, might yet be safe.
Janice responded enthusiastically to my invitation.
“I was beginning to think we would never meet,” she said. She would be dressed in a taupe pant-suit. I asked her what colour taupe was. She laughed. “Don’t you know?” Then, “I’ll make it even easier for you. I’ll wear a flower in my hair. An anemone.” There was the usual laughter and something, which I took to be excitement, in her voice. I did not tell her I did not know what an anemone was. I looked it up.
When I entered the cafeteria, I made her out at once, sitting at a table with another woman and expectantly facing the entrance. I thought, “So that’s what taupe is!” smiled and waved. Janice’s eyes flitted over me. She seemed not to recognize the brown suit, the brown-and-white striped tie and the tan raincoat I had described to her. But I knew what an anemone was. I walked towards it confidently, the smile still on my face. Janice, the flower in her hair, the tip of her brownish-grey pant-suit showing above the table, continued to look expectantly at the entrance, speaking all the while to her friend, as if the man I had carefully described had not just entered the room. I walked past her and her expectant smile, and sat at a table behind her. I recalled her voice as intimately as if I were still listening to it on the telephone.
“It feels strange to have to describe myself to you after all this time. I feel I have known you forever,” she had said.
And, after I had described myself: “I’m sure not to miss you, now.”
A waitress, red-haired and smiling, pencil and pad ready, came to take my order. I asked for coffee and a tuna sandwich. I wanted to disguise my accent so as not to reveal myself to Janice, but, when I spoke, my voice was raised, not pleasantly. I had tried in vain to control it. The waitress stepped backwards. Her smile disappeared. I wished to reassure her. I heard myself begin to say in the accent Janice said she admired, “Excuse me…” and stopped speaking. The waitress was looking at me curiously.
I smiled at her. I said, in an accent I intended to be American, “Excuse me. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
The waitress laughed good-naturedly. She came closer and patted my shoulder. She said, “You’ll soon get the hang of it, sir. Did you say a cup of coffee and a tuna sandwich?”
I nodded. She left.
Through the glass wall of the cafeteria I could see people walking in bright sunshine in the park. I was embarrassed that the waitress had laughed at my attempt to sound like an American and had felt it necessary to comfort me. In London, Sarah had not allowed me to try my new English accent in public until she was sure I spoke it like one who had always used it. The effect had been startling. It was as if I had been instantaneously transformed into an Englishman of the class to which she belonged.
Now I heard Janice say, “Do you think he’ll come?”
She was still waiting for the Englishman who had described himself to her.
The waitress appeared with my coffee and sandwich, and my bill. I smiled at her as warmly as I could. I wanted to let her know that I had not meant to frighten her, but I did not trust thyself to speak. She said, “I hope that makes you feel better, sir.”
I nodded. She smiled once more and walked away. I heard Janice say, “I wonder why he isn’t here. It’s nearly one.”
I looked at the anemone in her hair and at the pant-suit whose colour I learned was taupe and sipped my coffee and ate my tuna fish sandwich – I had learned to enjoy tuna fish sandwiches – and watched the people walking in the park.
Then, abruptly, as had been happening during the last few days of November, the weather changed. The sky darkened. The wind began to blow violently. The cafeteria, lit up a moment before by the light of the bright sunshine coming through its glass walls, darkened, too. Almost immediately, it began to rain. The room filled rapidly with people.
I heard Janice say, “He’s not going to come now, for sure. I wonder what could have happened.”
She sounded disappointed.
Lit only dimly now by discreet electric lights, the cafeteria hummed with the low murmur of many people speaking pleasantly to one another. The tables, mine included, were all soon occupied, the aisles full of people. The air, as in the pubs Sarah and I had frequented, was beginning to be tinged with the smell of cigarette smoke. I had learned to like that smell. I had thought of it as socially reassuring – all those people, of the same class, surrounded by cigarette smoke, talking and laughing and having a good time.
I could no longer hear Janice’s voice. I got up from the table at which three members of a group of four had joined me, offered my seat to the fourth who was standing nearby and made my way to the nearest glass wall to watch the rain, which I heard falling heavily now on the roof. But the glass wall was rapidly filming over, and, soon, I could only hear it.
One summer, while Sarah was on the continent with her parents, Ekua and I had gone to spend a few hours in the countryside outside London. But the day, splendid when we started out, soon turned to a persistent drizzly rain that caught us in open fields just outside the village, and we returned wet and uncomfortable in a grey afternoon to the empty train station. We waited a long time for our train. Once, turning from the far end of the platform to which I had walked, I saw Ekua standing where I had left her, her back to me, her hands in her coat pockets, looking at the tracks along which our train should come. Her shoulders were hunched the way shoulders are hunched when pockets are not deep enough for the hands we push into them. She had already lost her job. But she was happy. We were going to be married. We would be going back together to Africa. Paul’s letter from S
trasbourg was in my pocket. He could not attend Sarah’s and my wedding. He asked me what would happen to Ekua and her unborn child and wondered what I would say to Sarah’s children about their maternal grandparents. I had told him of their objections to their daughter’s marriage to me.
When I came up to Ekua, I placed a hand gently on her shoulder. She put her hand on mine and turned to smile at me, as though the rain had not turned a promising day into a disaster, and she and I were merely waiting to return from an enjoyable picnic.
The train we waited for never came. There had been an accident. It would be a long time before the next train. Ekua and I walked from the station in a heavy drizzle to a pub in the village. The air inside the pub, as it had become now in the cafeteria, was blue with cigarette smoke. Ekua’s eyes began to water. She seemed, as she actually had been when I last saw her, to be crying.
The glass wall of the cafeteria was white now with vapour. Behind me, the room was full of the comforting sound of human beings talking pleasantly to one another. Idly, I wiped off some of the moisture from the wall with a paper napkin. In the rain and wind, I saw a woman, her uncovered hair high in an Afro above her head, playing with an obviously delighted child. The sight of the woman and child in the pouring rain was so unexpected that I turned and looked behind me, as if I feared there might be someone to ask me why they were out in the rain by themselves.
But no one else had seen them. No one in the cafeteria had seen me spring back, startled, from the wall. I went up to the wall again and, with my napkin, wiped away some more of the steam on it. Water was streaming down its outer side, and the images of the woman and her child wavered, were indistinct and sometimes disappeared completely behind a sudden, more heavy flow of water. I strained to cling visually to them. And when the woman straightened up and put her hands in the pockets of her coat and hunched her shoulders, as though the pockets were not deep enough to contain her hands, I turned abruptly from the wall and walked out of the cafeteria and into the rain towards the woman whom I would later know as Carol, who would become my wife.
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