It was, after all, what I had led her to believe about Sarah. But Sarah – her “white bitch” – had always made me feel I was the most important person in the world. She had fought with her parents, and some of her friends, because of me, married me against their strong objections, of her father especially. She chaperoned me carefully among her set and taught me to speak, dress and behave like them.
I said now to Carol, “Whatever else she might have done, she never withheld secrets from me.”
“A good thing, too! How else would you have known she was having sexual intercourse with… was fucking others?”
I had not seen her so angry.
“I don’t have to tell you anything about my life with Jason. You’re not my confessor.” She paused. “I loved Jason. I tried to make him happy. And he left! I understand why he did. I don’t hold anything against him. But I won’t ever be dependent on a man again for my happiness. I am your wife now. Not Jason’s.”
I said, “Then let’s do what husbands and wives do.”
I could hear the sounds of Carol’s angry and frightened breathing. It seemed to me that I had just lost, irrecoverably, something valuable that I had possessed. It was because of this feeling of irrecoverable loss, and my fear that she now knew the power that she had over me, that I left the room, only to return to it on my way out of the apartment.
Carol was again talking on the telephone.
Neither of us acknowledged the other.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Outside, the sun was like a hammer on my head. I was in no mood to read. The library and my studio apartment were out of the question. I headed to a cinema and joined a line of people waiting to see a popular comic film. I would sit and be cool in the air-conditioned cinema for an hour or so. In the line ahead of me a young man and his female companion were reading the newspapers. I thought of the South Africans who would soon be coming in large numbers to America, of Carol’s anger, and of Sarah, her white bitch, who had been my friend, teacher, lover and benefactor.
I should have learned loyalty from Sarah. By the time we were married, I had ceased to be jealous of the several partners she spoke openly to me about, with whom she had perfected the techniques she passed on to me. I was convinced that, from those lovers from her past, I had nothing to fear. Her honesty about them, the dramatic change between the promiscuous woman she told me about and the apparently protective and decidedly monogamous woman I was preparing to marry, left me in no doubt that Sarah had selected me as much, if not more, than I had selected her. When she spat in my face, I understood perfectly. That was why I had not made an excuse or sought a reconciliation.
It might have been different if I had betrayed her with another European, some barmaid in a pub, for instance, or an au-pair from across the channel. But Ekua, for Sarah, was far more dangerous. Ekua could only have represented an ancestral relationship from my past that I had deliberately excluded her from and lied about – a past to which, it would have seemed to her, I secretly clung and did not intend to abandon. I knew I could not hope to make her forgive me.
Someone touched me on the arm and said, “Excuse me, would you like some tickets?”
A blonde woman, accompanied by two little girls, was holding three tickets out to me, “My children are tired,” she said. “They want to go home. We have no use for these.”
I was delighted to be able to get out so quickly from the sun. I pulled out my wallet to pay her. Confidently, but gently, she put a hand on my arm.
“You don’t have to pay me for them,” she said. And, as I was about to accept the tickets, she added, “They were a gift. I can’t accept money for them. Especially from you.”
Her children were looking intently at me.
“I only need one ticket, ma’am, and I’d like to pay for it.”
She said, “Don’t be silly. You could always sell the other two.”
I forced myself to speak slowly. But I had spoken and it was now too late to play deaf-mute.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She said, “How could you not want them? I’d never forgive myself if I gave them to someone who needed them less than you do.”
People had begun to look at us. I was beginning to feel that the woman and I were on display. I was tempted to take the tickets just to end our absurd confrontation. I heard snickers. I decided not to take the tickets. I turned abruptly from the woman and began to walk away.
I felt her hand on my arm. I turned. She said, “Please take them,” and there was such defeat and hurt on her now unsmiling face that I held out my hand and accepted the tickets. I heard clapping and whooping, saw her face relax, her children looking at me, and heard her say, beaming now, “Good. I’m so glad you’re sensible.”
I watched her walk away from me, triumphantly.
The young man with the newspaper said, “I’ll buy those tickets from you if you don’t want them.”
I gave him the tickets. There was a small explosion of applause. I said, “You don’t have to pay me.”
I left. He held up the third ticket and said it was up for auction. I heard laughter and the shouts of those who were bidding for it. I turned the corner and saw a bus-stop. I was not ready to return to Carol’s apartment. I joined a fat man and two teen-age boys who were waiting for the bus. They were laughing and seemed to be having a good time. The man was wearing a grey and white seersucker suit and a tie, and the boys wore T-shirts and tinted shoulder-length hair and carried skateboards. I picked up a newspaper from the empty bench and began to read it.
The man said, “Ready to camp out, mate?”
This time, I played the deaf-mute.
I heard him sing out, “You better be ready. ’Cause it’s Sunday. And on Sundays buses become tortoises. Right, boys?”
He burst out laughing. The skateboarders laughed too. I felt a nudge and looked up from the paper. He had come close. His red face was moist with perspiration but otherwise he looked, dressed as he was, quite comfortable in the heat. He smiled and said, “Hot enough for you?”
I smiled blankly at him. He mouthed exaggeratedly, “Hot, hot,” and removed a kerchief from his pocket, dabbed his face, fanned himself, pushed out his cheeks and blew air strongly from his mouth. I pretended I now understood him and nodded rapidly several times, then went back to my paper. I heard him tell another silly joke. He and the skateboarders laughed. He told another. And another. He seemed to be enjoying his jokes every bit as much as the skateboarders. He told a joke, nudged me and, when I looked up from my newspaper, pointed to the laughing skateboarders and exploded in a fit of laughter. I laughed.
Soon he was nudging me constantly. It was as if, deaf and mute though he perceived me to be, I had displaced the skateboarders as his primary audience; as if I were an old friend, accustomed to laughing at his jokes, whom, after a long time, he was delighted to see again.
The next time he nudged me, he pointed down the road. A man was making his way slowly towards us, stopping every now and then and swaying when he stopped. My jovial companion began to make jokes about him. Tall, thin, his hair hanging in one plait behind him, his face dirty and unshaven, the stranger stopped in front of the bus-stop and looked appraisingly at us. He stank.
I knew him well. As young boys, when no responsible adults were about, we would sneak up on drunks like him and yank them from behind and run off laughing as they fell. My jovial companion said something about the sweet smell of success, winked at and nudged me, and burst out laughing. I laughed, too, forgetting I was deaf and dumb, because I was thoroughly familiar with and disdained what I was laughing at. When my new friend made another derisive remark at the derelict’s expense, and each of the skateboarders put a hand over his mouth and giggled self-consciously, as if embarrassed, I burst out laughing again.
The derelict pretended not to have heard what my friend had said about him. In a slurred voice, he asked for money to buy a cup of coffee. My fat friend threw his head back, roaring with laughter, poked me in
the ribs to get my attention and asked the beggar whether he was sure that it was coffee he wanted money for. This time I waited for my cue and laughed only when the others did and signed to the beggar, like my fat friend, with arms opened wide, palms upturned, that I had no money to give him. I saw him hawk and spit, saw his spit fall on the pavement and on the tips of my shoes, and heard him utter, distinctively, the insult that could be addressed only to me. I lifted my head again and saw the enormous contempt on that broken, derelict face. I raised a hand angrily to slap it, but my upraised hand was held tightly. My jovial companion was smiling, but his eyes were stern and his grip was firm. Holding on to my hand firmly, even though my arm was down at my side again, he made a dismissive gesture with his other hand and said to the derelict, “Go on. Get away from here. You’re only causing trouble.”
There was a note of authority in his voice. But the derelict did not heed it. Swaying, looking at me steadily, he stood his ground and muttered, “Sure, take the nigger’s side. Be a nigger-lover.”
He had not finished when the fat man said, “Here,” and let go of my hand. He reached into his pocket and gave some coins to the derelict.
“That’s enough, you’re only causing trouble. Now go. Go get your cup of coffee.”’
As the derelict took the coins and shuffled away, muttering to himself, my jovial friend laughed and put a friendly arm across my shoulder and said aloud, though obviously not to me since he believed I couldn’t hear what he said, that he sure as hell didn’t know what this country was coming to. I noticed that the skateboarders were whispering to each other and looking from out of the corners of their eyes at me. I felt ashamed, as if they were my sons. I said that the bus was taking too long to arrive and walked away from the bus-stop. I heard the fat man say, “Damn. We were having such a good time too, before he came and spoiled it.”
A little later I heard a burst of his laughter and knew he had just told another joke. At whose expense, mine or the derelict’s, I shall never be sure.
CHAPTER NINE
I was now, less than ever, ready to return to Carol. I was not ready to be reproached silently nor angrily confronted by her. I decided to head for my studio.
I was perspiring when I reached the apartment building. I saw Porter, my former study group colleague waiting in the lobby for the elevator. He was whistling a popular aria from Aida. He stopped when he saw me, obviously surprised. It had been a while since we had seen each other. He asked whether I had been for a walk.
I said, “Yes.”
“In this heat?”
I said, “Yes.”
“Must remind you of home.”
I told him it did.
He said, “Like a drink? It’s been a long time. We’ll listen to some opera. Aida. You know it, don’t you?” He had just come from seeing it.
I knew Aida well. It was Sarah’s favourite opera. It was after a performance of Aida that I had impregnated her. I could have spent a long time discussing Aida with Porter. I told him I didn’t know it. I declined his invitation. I said I had work to do. It was an excuse he could understand. We were no longer classmates. He and Jonathan and Reginald had outpaced me. I had fallen nearly two years behind them.
Porter said, “It’s great. A good opera to start with. You’d like it.” He had not the slightest idea – and I was surprised, standing next to him – how deeply at that moment I resented him.
I resented his comfort and security. I resented his lack of the anger and resentment that the woman with the tickets and the derelict’s jovial protector had generated in me. I resented his ease, his confident assumption (which, when I first came to America, I had paid no attention to) that he could uninhibitedly invite me to his room to sip coffee and enjoy a recording of his favourite opera. I told myself that Porter, former colleague and future psychiatrist like myself, and I had nothing in common.
And yet, of my study-group colleagues, he was the one I had felt closest to. Jonathan’s secret conversations with me about racism and anti-semitism (he always stopped and changed the subject when the others arrived), and Reginald’s insistent invitations to teach with him in the ghetto seemed too much to want to implicate me in their sense of themselves as victims or victim-missionaries. Their preoccupation with fear and rehabilitation, linked to an extreme awareness of the group to which each of them belonged, seemed too restraining a grip on my reach for unrestricted personal fulfilment
I had not been taught to think of myself as victim. I had learned, late, as I climbed the path that my father had been laying down for me to follow, that my antecedents had been slaves. I understood the significance – for them – of their condition. But the fact of their slavery was, for me, irrelevant. I was not, and had never been, a slave. I was, perhaps, lucky. The society I had grown up in, made up, too, of people from Africa and Asia and Europe, had not reminded me that I was the dispossessed descendant of slaves. I had been allowed to forget.
I had grown up with the idea that I was, and was perceived by others to be, important and valuable. I had always been made to feel whole, and so I resented and felt diminished by the implicit assumptions of Reginald and Jonathan that I belonged naturally in association with them as victims. That was why I discouraged Jonathan’s clandestine conversations about anti-semitism and racism, and why I always declined Reginald’s invitations to teach in the ghetto.
At Thanksgiving in my first year in America, standing with Porter on the lawn of his father’s estate home in the hills, watching the wide sweep of his arm as he indicated the property he was going to inherit, I had imagined, painfully, that Porter was myself and that I, with a sweep of my hand, had just indicated to him the property I stood to inherit with Sarah as my wife. Her parents took care never to be at the estate home when she and I visited. We always had it and its servants to ourselves. I had taught myself to feel very proprietary towards it.
The elevator arrived. Porter and I entered it. When we came to our floor, he said, “You’re sure you won’t come over for a drink?”
I said, “Yes.”
“That’s too bad. It would have been much more fun to listen to Aida with you than by myself. Some other time, perhaps?”
I nodded. He headed towards his apartment, whistling the aria. I headed for mine. Inside I closed the door behind me. In the dark and the sudden silence, I felt ashamed again that I had not broken away from the grip of my fat friend and slapped the face of the derelict whose open contempt for me, like the hidden contempt of his jovial protector, was greater than my contempt for all of them. I had wanted those wide-eyed skateboarders to see this, even though they were not my sons.
I heard a knock on the door. When I opened it, Porter seemed embarrassed. He said, “I hope you don’t mind. I don’t mean to pry. Is anything wrong?”
I was surprised, had no idea how much I had communicated to him of the thoughts that bothered me. I told him I was tired after my walk. And it was true that I was tired, though the heat and my walking had nothing to do with my tiredness. I thanked Porter for his concern.
“If I can help in any way…” he said, as he turned to leave.
I nodded.
Late that night, when I returned to Carol’s apartment, she was speaking on the telephone. She was now wearing, unusually in the hot apartment, a T-shirt and a skirt. I waited for her to end her conversation. When she put down the telephone and began to walk away as if I had not just entered the room, I said, “I’m sorry.”
She stopped, turned and looked at me. There was no anger on her face. Only a neutral seriousness. She said, “I feel suddenly that I can’t trust you. That I no longer know you. Is that what you want?”
“No,” I said.
“I want this marriage to succeed. I haven’t left. In spite of everything. But if you try what you tried this morning I won’t hesitate to leave you.”
I said, “I can’t live in America without you, Carol.” When she didn’t respond, I added, “I’ve loved only one woman as much as I love you.�
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She said, “I was angry when I called her a white bitch. She may be a bitch, but she’s not a white bitch. She married you, after all. But I don’t want you ever to compare me to her again.”
I didn’t correct her. After all, Carol knew nothing about Beatrice. I promised not to mention Sarah again.
But two days later, as I stood before the mirror in the bathroom of my studio apartment, I thought of Sarah. She was sitting naked on the edge of the bed, her legs opened wide, her head down, her fingers working. She raised her head with a look of utter absorption on her face. She laughed and said that I looked like a priest, disapproving.
Now, as I stood before the mirror, my hand pumping energetically, I felt as if I was still the young man from the Caribbean, fascinated by, but still wary of this aristocratic young Englishwoman, and I heard her say, in that voice that had seemed so cultured and full of breeding, that I was lowering my standards and was settling for a substitute that was far from adequate. And I heard Ekua laughing, asking in her delightful West African accent, why I was doing such a thing when there were so many other women in the world.
I had no answer for them. I knew only that I did not want to lose Carol, and had found an arrangement, unsatisfactory as it was, to enable me to continue my union with her. I paid no attention to the criticisms from Sarah and Ekua, those ghosts from my past, nor to the even more distant echoes of disapproval from the Caribbean.
But gradually my actions in the bathroom, from being an inadequate substitute for making love to Carol, became a substitute that was acceptable, then a habit. And one day, standing as usual before the mirror, with Carol’s moan ringing in my mind, I felt I had finally achieved my liberation from her.
We continued to sleep in the same bed. We were now always civil to each other. Every day we had at least one meal together. We made love whenever she wished, during those monthly periods when she seemed willing to risk my outbursts afterwards. They did not now materialize. It was no longer important to me to make love to Carol. I was no longer jealous of the South African. I no longer thought of him as my rival. Real and tangible as Carol was, she had become as insubstantial as the man whom I had never seen, except in my jealous imagination, but who had existed so vividly for me. That was why, when I decided that she was no longer necessary to me, it was easy one night to rape her and rid myself of her and her South African ex-husband once and for all.
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