Waiting in Vain

by Colin Channer

  “This is really good,” she said, with the first bite. “I never thought of feta cheese with codfish before. But it works. Who taught you to cook?”

  “My mother,” he said. “I’d say she, mostly, and then there were other people that showed me little things. A lot of it too is just using your mind and trying new things all the time. Then you start creating like a music composer.”

  “Right,” she said. “You can project how certain things will work together and adjust before you commit.”

  “Yeah … exactly.”

  “So,” she asked, smiling, “do you cook all the time or just when you want to impress people you don’t really need to impress because they’ve already fallen into you?”

  “Well, for people like that,” he said, eyes radiating humor, “I extend myself beyond food.”

  “Yeah? To where?”

  “To drink.”

  He took a lime from his pocket. “Now, in the hands of an ordinary man this would be a simple green ball,” he said with a straight face. “But watch magic happen.”

  He wiped his knife on a napkin and sliced the lime. He pointed to her glass. “Now I want you to take a sip.”

  She did.

  He squeezed some juice in her glass and stirred it with his finger. “Now taste it.”

  She giggled as she lifted the glass to her lips.

  “Taste different, don’t it?”

  “Yeah,” she said, playing along. “Wow, that magic ball was really impressive.”

  “But it wasn’t the lime,” he said, reaching out and stroking her face. “It was the magic finger.”

  Out on the street now, she in a red summer dress and he in a khaki shirt and pants, they walked along dreamily, holding hands and hugging like they were no longer humans with choice and free will but puppets—marionettes moved by wires to the keyboard of a grand puppeteer.

  On the cobblestoned Promenade above the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway they sat on a bench and looked out over New York harbor at the concrete forest of Wall Street. The sun was pinned to the creaseless sky—a medal on a soldier’s chest—and the East River was as alive with boats as it used to be with fish, big boats that seemed tiny as they sailed beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, whose cables from this distance were a giant spider’s web. In the foreground, right below them, old warehouses were stretched out on the water’s edge, basking, like caimans on a jungle embankment.

  “Have you read Brazil?” she asked, taking his hand.

  He had.

  “And did you like it?”

  He understood this for what it was: her way of saying that he shouldn’t think low of her for being here, because she’d been pushed to this … for the man—he wouldn’t use his name anymore—didn’t make her feel like being natural was enough.

  “I like Updike’s work a lot,” he said, being careful not to claim him as an influence. That would’ve modulated the discussion. Changed its key. Made it about him. Which he didn’t want. Not that he was ashamed of being a writer. He just didn’t want to be defined by it. For he was many things, with many dimensions—all of which he wanted her to eventually see and know.

  “In Brazil,” he continued, “you really see the things that make Updike great. Imagery and metaphor, and the keenness of detail. One of the things that make the book brilliant is the setting. In a Latin American literary context, baroquely ornate language doesn’t feel overwrought. Imagine if Brazil were set in the contemporary American west, and Isabel were the daughter of a white municipal banker, and Tristao a homeboy named Tyrone, from Harlem. I mean, Updike got so deep into the esthetic of writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Amado that the book almost reads like it was translated from Portuguese or Spanish—those eighteen-clause sentences and all that. No, man, that book is sheer brilliance, man.” He thought for a bit. “And then there’s the whole weaving in of Brazilian history and politics. And the masterful control of the time sense—”

  “I guess I know who you’re casting your Nobel vote for,” she said, feeling weak now, as though she’d been standing beneath a cataract of words. Literary passions were so seductive. “Who else do you stalk at readings?”

  “Fiction or poetry?”

  “Both.”

  “Well, Updike, as I said. Naipaul. Henry Miller. Márquez. Carpentier—”

  “Who’s Carpentier? I don’t know him.”

  “A Cuban writer. He’s kinda considered the father of magic realism. He wrote Explosion in a Cathedral and The Kingdom of This World.”

  She laughed inside, wanting to hug him for reading good books, for being able to share this passion with her.

  “Wow, there are so many,” he said, faced now with an embarrassment of riches. “It’s hard for me to think—but I’d have to add Toni Morrison and D. H. Lawrence. In poetry, now, there’s Walcott, Neruda, Guillén, Yeats, Rita Dove, Philip Larkin … Kwame Dawes down in South Carolina … different people for different moods.”

  “Do you write a lot of poetry?”

  “Not anymore. Only when I get the inspiration.” She leaned against him. “Only when I feel the vibes. And you?” he asked, placing his arm behind her, on the back of the bench, where it perched in waiting—a jaguar in a tree. “Who do you like?”

  “In fiction … Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and of course Updike—I’ll never forget reading Couples the first time—and Margaret Walker. And in poetry, I’d say Maya Angelou, and Margaret Atwood from Canada, and Langston Hughes and Rita Dove and of course Walcott. The funny thing about Rita Dove, though, is that I love her almost as much as a novelist.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know she wrote novels.”

  “She wrote only one, Through the Ivory Gate. It was published in the early nineties. It’s about this black woman who grows up very poor in a small town in Ohio. Her parents are migrant workers from the South in this mostly white place. So this woman grows up having her own identity struggles—y’know, northern versus southern, black versus white—and then she goes off to college in Wisconsin where she studies music and theater in this almost completely white environment. She becomes a puppeteer and ends up being the only black person in a traveling puppet troupe, and this group becomes her whole world for a while, so all her relationships are with people in the troupe—which means with white men. Anyway, she ends up leaving the troupe and going back to her hometown, where she takes up an artist’s residency at a school. So the whole going home then becomes this process of exploration … y’know … coming to terms with her past … separation … identity … reconnecting.”

  “Wow … I’ll put that on my list of things to read. Through the Ivory Gate. That’s what it’s called, right?” He was circling her with words, suspecting that she saw some of herself in that narrative. He was thinking now of her album … the missing pictures of childhood … the absence of her parents. And her voice—something he’d noticed the first time they met—it was suspiciously neutral.

  “Where’s Rita Dove from?” he asked, approaching the subject obliquely.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Somewhere midwestern, nuh?”

  “That sounds right.”

  “Have you ever been there? To the Midwest?”

  “Yeah … on business.”

  “Do you think you could live there?”

  “No,” she replied. “I don’t think so. It’s too cold.”

  If she were midwestern, he thought, she would’ve added something like “although I spent the first x years of my life there.” He had to maneuver some more now. Asking people where they’re from, he knew, was sometimes uncomfortable. People carry so much baggage from home.

  “What about the West Coast or the South?”

  “I like the West Coast a lot. California especially, for the ocean and the sunshine. The south … I’m not so sure about. I like a lot of it … like New Orleans and Atlanta … and the Gulf Coast beaches. But I don’t know about living there so much. In many ways I’m a spoilt New Yorker.”

&n
bsp; “And in other ways?”

  “In other ways … I don’t feel like I belong here.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Most of my life.”

  “From where?”

  “Guess.”

  “I have no idea.”

  In his mind he was walking through her house, looking for clues. On looks alone she could be many things. Latina. North African. Native American. But none of these were right. He knew that. He could feel it.

  But as he pictured her at the phone booth rocking back on one leg and considered her name and her familiarity with the selections at the concert, he began to suspect she was Caribbean, and further, from one of the English-speaking territories.

  But from where? It was hard to say on looks alone. The Caribbean islands are flakes of three continents—Asia, Africa, and Europe—ground up and dropped in the ocean like codfish cakes in hot oil, becoming in the process something new and exciting that is often hard to define.

  “Trinidad?” he asked. She might be part East Indian.

  “No,” she said. “Let’s put it this way, I could’ve been your next-door neighbor.”

  “You’re Jamaican?”

  “Yeah, man.”

  Her shoulders relaxed, and she smiled.

  “From where?” he asked, drawn even closer now.

  “Kingston, I think. But I was only eight when I left and haven’t been back.”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t even talk to you then.”

  “Oh, stop,” she said, laughing with him.

  “Y’is not me frien again,” he said, speaking patois now. “You lef de rock at eight and y’is hummuch now?”—thirty-four, she said—“An you doan touch back de rock? Shame o’ you.”

  “Oh, stop, it’s a long story.”

  “Okay, tell me, lemme seef ah fogive yuh.”

  She wanted him to know, wanted him to connect with her, wanted him to know she was one of his, hoping this would make a difference. To whom? And in what way? She wasn’t sure.

  “When my mother died my father sent me to live with a relative in the States, and while I was here, we lost touch. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive. I’m an only child, so I never felt there was anything to return to, really.”

  “Oh no.” He stroked her brow. “Oh, I really didn’t mean to make a joke about it.”

  “Oh, don’t be sorry,” she said. “If anything, I should be sorry for bringing this up now … for imposing this on you.”

  His arm, which had been waiting behind her, slipped around her shoulders now. She leaned over and wiped her face with the tail of her dress and leaned against him, shifting her weight to create her own space between his chest and arm.

  “You remind me so much of that place, Fire,” she said, her face turned toward the sky. “You make me think about it in a way that had never been as important to me. I feel like that woman in Secrets and Lies felt when the child she’d given away as a baby comes back into her life as an adult. God, man. It’s all the luggage that comes with that kind of rediscovery. Fire … for the longest time … before I met you, I thought all that luggage was at the bottom of the sea, man. And then you—you come along flopping like a frogman in your scuba gear, going, ‘Hey, this grip has your name on it.’

  “I remember thinking one day, ‘God, why do I feel this way about this man?’ And I guess the answer has something to do with the fact that, along with all the really wonderful things about you, you remind me of that place. Yeah, I know—Through the Ivory Gate.”

  “So go home, then,” he said. “Go home and see what you might find.”

  “I think if I knew people there it would be easier. But to go there as a tourist, I think, would make me feel even more alienated. Fire, I don’t even know the name of the place I’m from. I know it’s in Kingston and fairly close to water, and the people were shit poor, but that’s it.”

  “What about the relative you used to live with? He might be able to tell—”

  “He’s dead, the fucking bastard. Excuse my French.”

  “If the people in your area were rich,” he asked, “would that make it any easier?”

  She thought for a bit.

  “I think so. Going home is one thing. Going home to bad news is another. The way I feel is the way a lot of African Americans used to feel about Africa. Before they knew of Africa’s greatness they were afraid to embrace it. Now they go there with joy. They sing and dance on the plane. It would be easier for me to go back if I knew I would find something I could be proud of. I know it sounds trifling, but it’s true.”

  “Poverty for most people is an inherited condition, Sylvia. There is nothing to be ashamed of. Ignoring or taking advantage of poverty—now that’s a sin. We can’t choose our histories. When we come into this life the greater part of our history is already in place—race, class, gender, religion, sexual preference, wealth, access … the things that remain pretty much constant throughout our lives. It’s not like the opposite of poor is happy. So why kill up yourself? Come home, sweet girl … even for a day … to sit by a river and eat a mango and say that God is good.”

  “I should, shouldn’t I?”

  “And if you need a family, I can always rent you some o’ mine. Some o’ them I’d give you free. I’d even pay the shipping.”

  “Oh, you are so cheesy.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Cheese is fat. Fat is comfort food.”

  She kissed his nose, trailing a mist of moistness as she pulled away.

  “So you know a lot about me, and I know nothing about you,” she said, standing in front of him, leaning against the metal railing, which was a few feet away from the bench.

  Her life to this point had been a matter of avoiding history; she didn’t ask people about their lives because she didn’t want them to ask about hers in turn. So most of her involvements, both romantic and platonic, had been rooted in shallow earth. But with Fire she was feeling wet ground beneath her, layers of silt brought down from the hills of her fore-parents and laid down over thousands of years in a cycle of flooding and retreat, a pulling away that had left behind a treasure of minerals to nourish her like a tree. Her body was feeling damp now, from sweat, humidity, and the sap on the tip of her bud.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked.

  “Let’s start with your family.”

  “Well, I’m an only child—”

  “Like me.”

  “Okay … and I grew up in Portland, in a little district outside Port Antonio, until high school, then I moved to Kingston. After high school I came to the States to go to college.”

  “And your parents, what are they like?”

  “Nice people,” he answered, thinking now of what he should say, wondering how much he wanted to reveal. She was insecure, and he didn’t want his background to be an issue. It wouldn’t be fair to tell her the whole truth. Not now. Not when she was feeling this way. He wouldn’t lie, but he would reduce the facts to their most passably general.

  “Oh, come on, now,” she said, kicking him playfully. “Where are they from? Where do they live? What do they do for a living? What’s your relationship like?”

  “My mother’s name was Elizabeth. A really nice woman who liked to enjoy life. Could do many things. Was a tomboy, actually. Tall woman. I get my height from her. She was about five-eleven, and slender, and loved the arts and political debate yet was also good with her hands. Could fix cars and cut steel and clean and oil her gun. A very confident woman. She was decidedly left-wing in her politics—a democratic socialist—and really funny. Loved life, man. Smoked two packs a day and could knock back a six-pack and drive home on those dark, winding country roads with one hand on the steering wheel and the other one around my shoulders. She liked the excitement of cities but she always lived on a farm. She liked the idea of nurturing things, plants and animals and all that. People too … she was always getting a job for this one or writing a letter of recommendation for that one, or running down
to the police station to get another one out on bail. Liz was nice, man. She was a real progressive in a place where she could’ve just gone with the flow and accepted the fact of privilege.”

  “You say ‘was.’ Has she passed away?”

  He nodded.

  “Yes … a while ago. When I was fourteen.”

  He saw restraint in her eyes. It was clear that she wanted to say something—sorry, perhaps—but didn’t want to seem maudlin.

  “You said she was privileged. In what way?”

  “Well, to be educated in any third world country is to be privileged. To have a piece o’ land to call your own makes you more so,” he said, thinking of his mother’s considerable acreage. “In all honesty, she came from a well-off family. But her father wanted to marry her off at twenty, and she said no and went to the bank and forged his signature and withdrew the money he’d been setting aside to give her at twenty-one, and bought some land out east. I grew up on that property until I was ten and ready for high school. Then I went to Kingston to live with my father. My parents got divorced when I was three.”

  “What did your mother do besides farm?”

  “Worked for Air Jamaica.”

  “And what’s your dad like?”

  “Humphrey is a nice guy in an ole-time kinda way. Calls himself a socialist. And he’s really progressive in some ways and really conservative in others. Thinks free college tuition is a basic human right, but can’t wait for them to bring back hanging.”

  She cocked her head and spread her arms, grabbing the railing. Leaning forward now, her arms trailing like wings, she stopped her face inches from his and asked: “Okay, where’d you get the name Fire?”

  “My father gave me that name when I was eight. I was playing with one of his welding torches and almost burned down the house.”

  “Is he a welder?”

  “No … he’s a teacher,” he told her—guiltily, veering toward a lie. “He teaches at the school of art in Kingston.”

  True, his father had taught there for years. But he’d also been a professor of art history and painting at Cooper Union in New York and the National School of Fine Art in Mexico City, and his work was well placed in the best galleries in Europe. So to call him an art teacher was like saying Colin Powell had done some time in the service. Seeing doubt in her face—as if she were comparing what he’d told her to something that she’d heard—he thought, Fuck, she might know him. She collects art. But maybe not. He added, “And he paints and sculpts as well.”