“All now ah doan read it,” Ian replied. “Wha dem say? Dat ah fuck up a pussyhole who disrespek me? If is dat dem say then is true.”
“Is wha dem do you?” another man asked.
“De bwai start diss up Fire bout a washing machine dat him done pay for long time,” Ian said. “And you know how Fire stay—is a man wi make people step pon him—so me haffe jump in and defen it.” To Fire he said: “Me and you is like blood, y’understand, so me couldn’t stan up and watch a man pussy you up.” To the others he said: “So me a-try work out this thing fe Fire now and the man come call me ‘coolie,’ star, and me just haffe gi it two small kick and mash it down.”
“Bwai, you cold nuh bloodclaat,” Teego replied through a chuckle. “You really beat up de man fe dat? Dat is just words, man. Me glad say a bwai like dat get a beaten, still, cause dem man-deh support the Babylon system dat hold I down … but if you shoulda beat every man inna Jamaica dat use de word ‘coolie’ then, you would tired out yuh hand and foot. Is just a word, man.”
“If is so you feel then done the conversation,” Ian answered, glancing at Fire’s reaction. He had never heard him use the word, but he’d never heard him denounce it. Fire looked away and sucked his teeth.
When the game was over, Fire got the fish from Teego’s hut and walked down the beach to sit in the shade of a gnarled and ancient sea grape tree. Sweeping his feet across the cool, wet sand, he cleared a space in the mess of sour grapes and set down his basin. He unwrapped the fish, which were packed in dry ice and burlap, and began to clean the snappers, ripping their gills and guts with his fingers and scaling them with a wire brush.
At first he did not know that he was angry. He could feel a tightness in his face, drawn lips and narrowed eyes—but he thought that this was due to concentration. But as he worked in the spray of blood and scales, there began to appear on the edge of his mind a column of swirling thoughts. Slowly, like the advance of a horse across dry ground, the cloud produced a form, and Fire saw the outline of an old resentment: Ian had always thought that he was soft because he didn’t like to fight. There was a pettiness in the idea that annoyed him, a certain small-mindedness. When they were boys it was understandable, even tolerable, but they were in their thirties now. He’d tried to explain to Ian years ago that fighting didn’t solve many problems, and that as a means of causing pain it wasn’t very effective, for a black eye would heal in a week, and a broken arm in four, but the right words, sharpened with the right inflection, could damage someone for life.
What irked him most was that he was allowing himself to be bothered. So what if Ian portrayed him as some damsel in distress? He knew he wasn’t soft. From I-nelik he’d learned some martial arts, and from Zachy, who used to be a ranger on his mother’s farm, he’d learned to use a gun. And while researching The Rudies he’d met and befriended many gunmen and posse leaders.
Why was he so bothered? The answer came quickly—disappointment.
He’d begun to hope they’d regained the place of comfort they had lost. But as he thought some more he changed his mind. They had never really found that place. They had simply grown to love each other while they continued their search.
It was clear now as he gazed into the eyes of the gutted fish, that their search for a comfort zone in their friendship had been abandoned many years ago. Exactly when, he didn’t know … but certainly by the time he lived in Cuba. As he pondered this he asked himself, Do I love Ian less? No, I don’t, the answer came. I just love him differently … like a parent loves a young child … with few expectations. Children always break your heart.
He found himself tracing patterns in the sand with his toes, and began to think of the sketch pad again. He had to talk to Ian.
Returning home to the Lighthouse, burdened by the weight of love and disappointment, the two men went their separate ways without explanation—Ian upstairs to read and look at old photo albums, and Fire to the kitchen to season the fish, which he left to soak in a marinade of onions, garlic, scallions, and thyme.
Later, in the living room, Fire took off his shoes and lay on the couch and thought about his letter to Sylvia. Had he said too much? Had he said too little? Had he said the right thing in the right kind of way? Should he mail it?
There was a part of him that thought the letter was self-indulgent, less a way to speak to her than a means of addressing his deepest self. As he lay there considering this, a breeze blew some blossoms from the poui tree through an open window. A few fell on his chest and he imagined that the light red pedals were kisses from her … his darling girl, his lover and his love, whose absence he was feeling as a presence in his belly, an incandescent burning. Tired from not sleeping the night before, he didn’t resist the entreaties of the soft chenille beneath him.
He awoke an hour later to the sound of Ian’s snoring and went to the kitchen, where he fried the fish in coconut oil, then stewed them with tomatoes and allspice while boiling rice and making a salad of avocados, cucumbers, carrots, and watercress. He placed the food on the table beneath the poui tree.
They ate quietly with the polite but restrained conversation of strangers on a plane. Ian, chewing slowly as he continued to go through albums, would look up from time to time and smile a bit and nod his head. It was strange, Fire reflected as he guessed at Ian’s thoughts, how fragile our moods are, how quickly they change or die.
It was in this mood that they finished the meal and went to sleep, Ian upstairs and Fire outside in a hammock that was strung between two almond trees; so it was with great surprise that Fire woke up at sundown to see Ian standing over him, his head held low, his shoulders hunched, his hands concealed in his pockets.
“Y’awright?” Fire asked, searching his eyes.
“Yes,” he said, scuffing his feet in the grass. “I just need to talk to you.”
The sketch pad, Fire concluded. “Where do you want to talk?” he asked, extending his arms to communicate his expansive desire to make the conversation easy. “Inside? Out here? In the kitchen?”
Ian bit his lip, then spat as if he’d drawn blood by accident.
“Somewhere where we can sit … but not inside though …”
“So whappen?” Fire asked as they returned to the poui tree. In the distance the sea was turning orange as it slowly ate the sun.
Ian drummed his fingers on the table. “There’s something I need to tell you but I don’t know where to begin.”
Fire began to wonder if he was ready. How should I act when he tells me? he asked himself. Should I let him know that I have seen it? Maybe I should act surprised. To Ian he said, “Take your time and get it out. Do you want me to get you some water?”
Ian shook his head and continued to drum his fingers. “You don’t understand what I am going through,” he mumbled. “You don’t know how bad I’m hurting inside.”
He’s speaking standard English, Fire noted. He only speaks that way at the gravest moments.
“This isn’t easy,” Ian said. “It won’t be easy at all. But I have to unload. This thing is just eating me inside.”
Each word contained a bent blue note of melancholy that reverberated in Fire’s head. “Give it a try, Ian,” he said. The words felt like a guitar pick on his vocal cords. “Just take a deep breath and take your time.”
“Okay, then. As I was going through those old albums today it really dawned on me how much you and I have been through … You are my brother, Fire. And your father is the only father I know.”
As Ian began to sniffle Fire looked away. Being perceived as hard was important to Ian; Fire knew better than to try and comfort him. He just sat there waiting, hoping he’d have something to say when Ian opened up.
“Your opinion matters a lot to me,” Ian continued. “And I hope that what I say won’t change that—but I know it will.”
Feeling especially close to him now, Fire said, “Nothing can break us apart, Ian. We’ve been through too much already. If it didn’t happen before it won’t happe
n now.”
“You mean that?” Ian said, wiping his eyes.
“Yeah, man.”
“Okay then,” he said, lowering his eyes to the table. “Don’t stop me until I’m through.”
“I won’t.”
“There is so much that I owe to you and your family, man. Cause you’ve done so much for me. I’ve been feeling like shit since the Donovan business, man, cause I brought a lotta trouble on your head. And on top of being embarrassed, I was so damn fraida going to jail. And without my even asking you came to my rescue, like always. So last night, I came downstairs to talk to you, to just say to you, for what it’s worth, ‘Man, I don’t know how to thank you for helping me out … this time and all the other times before.’ But you wouldn’t even gimme a chance to say it. As soon as I opened my mouth you just snapped at me. You just shut me out, man … just lock yourself off. And that really fucked me up because I’m sitting there thinking, Is it all over now after all these years? Have I crossed that line?
“We’re driving down here this morning and you’re not speaking to me, really. You’re all quiet … quiet that is, until we see Buju. Then suddenly you become yourself again. And I am sitting there dying, saying to you with my eyes, ‘Fire, you really don’t check for me the way you used to,’ and I began to feel so low … so angry … like everything we had was nothing. So I was feeling all this now, when you went to bathe today. And while I was in your room something happened—I accidentally knocked over your knapsack, some things fell out, and I saw the paper you were writing on last night … the one you didn’t want me to see. And it was like I started hearing this voice in my head. This voice telling me all kinda fuckery, and I started to get really paranoid … started to think you were writing things about me that you wanted to hide. Fire, I was carrying so much feelings that I couldn’t help myself, and before I knew it, I read it. And now I know about you and Sylvia. That was a fucked-up thing to do … I know. And I thought that I could live with it. But I can’t. Not after looking through those albums and seeing us as boys. I had to tell you, star. As I said, me and you are like blood. Fire, I know how you feel.”
“No you don’t,” Fire said, closing his eyes. “You don’t know how I feel.” There was no one word to describe what he was feeling—anger, sadness, shame, confusion.
“You must be really angry, now,” Ian said quietly.
What right do I have to anger? Fire thought. Haven’t I committed the same crime? I’m just as guilty as you.
“I know how you feel,” Ian said, reaching out to pat his hand.
Fire believed he didn’t deserve this, so he pulled his hand away. “No, you don’t.”
“I do,” Ian said, as he closed his eyes to fix Margaret’s face in his mind. “Believe me, dread. I do.”
Fire wanted to walk away and was asking his legs to try, but his thoughts were blocked by his swollen heart.
“Cry if you want,” Ian said to him. “Go ahead and cry.”
“It’s okay,” Fire said, unable to overcome for the moment the perception that he was soft. He sat with his head in his hands till his mind began to clear, then he walked away across the grass. And as he flashed his arms and legs to energize himself he found himself doing a silly dance. The sequence of events, he began to see, had turned comic. The cosmic joke was on him. Why did he think that he could look in Ian’s sketch pad without the same thing happening to him? What gave him the right?
From behind, he heard Ian crossing the distance between them.
“So we’re still friends then?”
“I guess we are,” Fire said. As he turned around he saw in Ian the boy who became his closest friend.
“Fuck it,” Ian said, as they hugged. “Who is this Sylvia to ruin what we have between us? Let’s light a fire and roast some corn and talk. Then later on we can go down to Battery and listen to Stereotone tonight.”
“It’s nice to know I can depend on you,” Fire said.
“It’s good to feel so useful,” Ian said, squeezing him tight.
Tented by a starry sky, Fire opened himself and told Ian about the love affair, from the meeting on Spring Street to the falling out in Brooklyn Heights, sparing only the details of sex, which he thought should still be private.
Ian was surprised to learn that Fire and Sylvia were like that. Now he understood the whole story … about how they met, about Fire’s visiting from London, about how the two of them became lovers, about how she made Fire feel small when Lewis unexpectedly appeared, about how Fire hurt for months after he left …
The flames pitched shadows on their faces. In the forest around them, the coos and shrieks of the lizards and bugs were locked in an ancient groove, a groove so old as to be modern, like Hendrix meeting Fela Kuti.
“So why you love her so?” Ian asked, his thinness and black T-shirt making him almost one with the darkness around them. “I am trying to understand that love thing. As a pussy man is not easy.”
Fire looked up at the stars to buy some time to order his thoughts, then answered. “It’s a weird thing,” he said. “I don’t really know why I love her … in the sense that people very often don’t know why it is they love someone.”
“Not a good answer.” Ian turned some cobs with a stick.
“It’s not the most eloquent thing I’ve ever said,” Fire defended. “But off the top of my head it’s the best I can do.”
“Well, think about it.”
“Ask me a more precise question.”
“Okay, do you love her … are you in love with her?” Ian asked.
“Yes on both counts.”
“How do you know that it’s love and not just infatuation?”
“Love is infatuation.”
“What you mean?” Ian asked as a challenge, thinking that Fire was trying to blow him off.
Fire asked Ian for a cigarette, his first in almost a decade. “I am infatuated,” he said as the smoke filled him up. “She inspires me to do fatuous things. I used to feel this way a lot when I was younger. The difference is she still makes me giddy when I’m old enough to know better. I like the dizziness that comes with it. It’s a very nice high.” He paused to smile with Ian, who was looking at him, beaming. He liked to hear Fire philosophize.
“I think infatuation has gotten a bad rap,” Fire continued. “That’s why a lot of relationships break down. Love without infatuation is not enough. Cause it’s infatuation that brings playfulness, indulgence, romance. Love, on the other hand, is about patience and loyalty and, very importantly, nurturing—that impulse to take care of someone and see to their needs. So when you hear people saying, ‘I love you but I’m not in love with you,’ what they’re really saying is that the infatuation is gone. So yeah, they’d die for you; but they wouldn’t go with you at two in the morning to find a pint of Häagen-Dazs anymore.”
“So you’re infatuated?” Ian asked, thinking about his feelings for Margaret. The word “infatuation” seemed too sweet. His feelings required a more clinical name, one that would include the image that was in his mind now. Margaret was lying down, smiling, in a coffin.
“So what about people who are infatuated and then fall out?” Ian asked, trying to gauge the odds of Margaret and Phil breaking up.
“Sometimes it wasn’t infatuation in the first place,” Fire said, “but another kind of attraction … money … sex … a whole heapa things.”
“And how you tell the difference?”
Fire shifted around on his haunches as he felt the urge to gloat. Ian seemed so denatured now. So who was the pussy after all?
Blowing the smoke through the side of his mouth, Fire leaned toward him, watching his eyebrows rising with anticipation, and said, with a raspiness brought on by the cigarette, “You feel infatuation all the time, while you feel other kinds of attraction only in certain contexts. If your attraction to someone is sexual, you don’t feel connected unless you’re fucking. If it’s money, you don’t feel connected unless you’re buying. But infatuation doesn’
t need a context. Because when you’re infatuated you feel connected to that person in countless ways. And that’s why society is terrified of it. Infatuation doesn’t respect the rules. So why not take the day off and lay up in bed with your woman? So why not max out a credit card to go watch the sunset in Negril with a two-hour advance purchase?”
“Or why not get involved with a woman who already has a man?” This was said with a flourish, Ian’s voice beginning low then rising to a sarcastic climax.
“That’s why it’s dangerous,” Fire said, the rawness of his nerves suddenly revealed. “It can make you do some crazy things.”
“So what you going to do with the letter, then?”
Fire puffed his cheeks. “I don’t know. The situation is kinda no-win, isn’t it? I mean, what would it say about her if she left him for me?” He paused, more to gather himself than to think. “Plus I know from experience that that kinda mix-up is usually not worth it. If she really wants to leave him she’ll leave him … on her own … and if we happen to meet again when she’s single, then … who knows? Fate makes all these choices, man. What is for me can’t be un-for me.”
“But you knew she had a man when you met her though?”
“Yeah … but it started as a kind of joke, y’know. After Blanche I didn’t think that that kinda thing coulda happened to me again. So when I met her on Spring Street then met her again at Claire’s and she kissed me, I was taking it as one of those humorous things that I could just maybe write about. But we flirted with each other that night and I lost my balance and fell over the edge.”
Ian crossed his arms and turned one of Fire’s favorite questions back at him: “So what are you going to do about all this?”
“Nothing,” Fire replied, slightly chafed by the irony.
“Just nothing?”
“That’s right. Sylvia doesn’t want to be hot or cold, man. She wants to be lukewarm. And I can’t deal with that. Trust me, I won’t be waiting in vain. But if she becomes single again and she makes the move … well … you never know.”
Waiting in Vain Page 28