Kingston Noir (11 page)

One night I turned up unexpectedly (I forget exactly why) at my parents’ place three or four neighborhoods away in Williamsburg. I unlocked the door, stepped inside, shut it. It was way after eleven; a dim light came from the ceiling lamp in the hall. Everything looked neat and tidy; the cleaner must have been in that day. I glanced at the walls hung with the familiar Hollywood film posters—
The Big Steal, Where the Sidewalk Ends—
and the Warhol silk screen of my mother aged about seventeen. The Siamese cat, Decca, lay on the chaise longue, her fur matted and eyes unseeing (Decca had been blind these past five years). I picked her up gently in my arms and tickled under her chin. She began to purr. At that moment I thought I heard a murmur of voices down the hall. I soft-footed down the trail of sound. What I found shocked me.

Mom was on the kitchen floor with another man.

“You!” she shrieked. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Her face was twisted and red with shame. I had never seen her in such a rage. The man looked at me and it seemed his eyes stayed on me an instant too long. I clenched my fists; a terrible anguish took hold. I fled the apartment in tears and contemplated throwing myself in the East River. For weeks afterward Mom behaved in my presence with a painful naturalness, as if nothing had happened. I was furious with her. Fortunately (for her), she had a holy belief in the restorative power of religion, and in her despair she turned to the spiritualist credence of her Ohio farmer ancestors. Spiritualism made her feel less alone, she said; her own dear departed could get in touch through mediums and rapping noises. (“Knock twice if you can hear me, Mother.”) She was deadly serious about it.

My father, meanwhile, did the same as any man does whose wife walks out on him: he started to eat more, drink more, and chase after women. In just under a month, he put on fifteen pounds. The added weight made him look ungainly; his face took on a tumid, pouchy look; to conceal his swelling jowls (or maybe offset his creeping baldness) he grew a goatee, which I disliked.

Before long, his doctor recommended that he take a vacation. It was important to find somewhere to get away from it all. Had he ever thought of the Caribbean? Jamaica, maybe? The visit to the doctor proved to be an unexpected success; afterward, as occasionally happened, Dad had a good idea: he determined to cut back on the alcohol.

With his drinking diminished and my mother’s affairs now less numerous, my parents resolved to make up their differences and together booked a round-trip flight to Jamaica. It seemed like a good idea. Travel abroad in search of new foodstuffs had been my mother’s passion; my father used to join her whenever he could. This time, however, they were going to a place whose laws and culture they did not know. My own knowledge of Jamaica was limited to the island’s music and a couple of travel books. Jamaican deejay styles of “toasting” (scatting and talking over records) had influenced hip-hop. And Jamaican dub reggae, with its slowed-down, marijuana-heavy beat, offers me a kind of solace in times of anxiety.

To help finance the trip, Dad persuaded
National Geographic
to commission him to write an article on Afro-Caribbean funerary customs. Pleased, he began to read all he could on Jamaican countryside burial cults and Revival-inspired wakes. Mom’s own interest in spiritualism (an insidious form of necromancy, if you ask me) complemented the subject. “And it really is fascinating,” Dad told me on the phone the day before he left. In Jamaica, he explained, relatives may gather at a dead person’s house for a wake that can last as long as nine days. “And get this,” he went on, unstoppably, “the house becomes known for the duration as
the dead yard
. What a name! These dead yard funerals, they’re often ecstatic, like they’re a reggae version of a New Orleans jazz funeral. People dance! As if possessed by ghosts.” Right. What did he know about reggae or jazz funerals? He was talking through his hat—again.

A week later, my parents flew Air Jamaica to Kingston. It was snowing in New York when they left and in the snow everything looked curiously still and quiet. At first it seems the vacation was a success. No sexual infidelity. No heavy drinking. My father phoned to say that he was busy reading about Caribbean mortuary customs at the Institute of Jamaica library. It seems he had become an object of interest on the streets of downtown Kingston, probably because he walked everywhere. A white man without a car in Jamaica has either lost his mind or his place in society. (I read that in a book.) Mom, predictably, enthused to me about the hotel breakfasts of callaloo and salt fish. They had booked themselves into the four-star Jamaica Pegasus on Knutsford Boulevard.

All this, what I’ve been telling you, happened last winter, a couple of weeks before Christmas. I was staying at my parents’ place at the time: they thought it would make a change from the “gloom” (as they called it) of my Sackett Street studio. In reality, the studio represented everything that was comprehensible and reassuring to me. Nevertheless, I thought I could relax in Williamsburg. The apartment walls had big red geometric designs painted on them, which I found oddly soothing. All I had to do, apart from take the garbage out on Tuesdays, was feed the cat.

It was a chill December weekend, I remember, and the windows were wide open to the late afternoon. Decca stirred slightly and purred. I went to the kitchen to fetch her a tin of Happy Heart chopped liver. Duke Ellington’s “Jump for Joy” was playing on the kitchen radio when the phone rang.

“Baby?” It was my mother. “Oh my
God—
baby—hi … I almost lost you—
Jesus—
listen.” Her voice sounded drawly, inebriated, maybe.

“Mom?”

“Are you alone?” she asked.

“Yes. Why?”

“Something has happened. Your father—he’s had a heart attack.”

“Heart? Attack how? He’s not
dead
?” I stared at the redcolored designs on the wall.

“Not dead. But—”

“Was it bad?” I asked.

“Pretty bad. He’s had a bypass. The doctors say he may not live until Wednesday.”

My stomach turned over.

“But today’s Saturday. This is serious!”

“Serious? I don’t know about
serious
. It’s certainly Saturday.” My mother sounded angry: something about another woman.

“Calm down,” I said, more to myself. (I could feel a familiar anxiety creeping in.) “So when was the last time you saw Dad, actually? To talk to. Please. As much detail as you can remember.”

Mom took a moment to reply. “We were in a restaurant in Kingston for lunch and we’d ordered this stunning, peony pink wine—”

“Okay, spare me the particulars.”

“
Okay.
Suddenly we had a row—the worst ever.” According to Mom, the wine bottle had gone over first; then the plates had slid toward her as Dad yanked at the tablecloth and buried the lower part of her body in a confusion of china, rosé wine, glassware, and warm food.

“He stormed out of the restaurant, your father did, leaving
me
to pick up the check. Can you believe it?”

(I could: it was part of his insecurity.)

“And then?”

“And then I did something crazy. I took a taxi to the airport and flew—to Montego Bay!”

“Are you joking?”

“Joking? No.”

“You must be. Or you must be crazy. Montego Bay? That’s on the other side of Jamaica.”

“I’m not crazy, and I’m not joking.”

“Where are you?
Where are you
?”

“I’m in Montego Bay.”

“Jesus Kee-rist!” The vehemence of my voice surprised me; I was feeling really quite tense.

Mom mumbled something to herself—I was unable to make out what—before she continued in a shaky voice. “How
could
he?”

How could he
what
?

But I was no longer thinking. I looked out the kitchen window; a light snow was falling against the darkness.

If I understood, my father had gone back to the Pegasus Hotel and started to drink. By midnight the liquor must have gotten him well and truly licked; early the next morning they found him seminaked on the bedroom floor in a cold sweat and deathly pale. A girl in a “gold ankle chain and blond wig” (according to one witness) was seen running off after alerting the desk downstairs to what had happened. It seems the girl had gone earlier to my parents’ room—508—after receiving a call. So that was it. In a moment of impetuosity fueled by alcohol, my father had phoned for a hooker. What happened next is not so hard to imagine. His heart had stopped beating during intercourse. Or maybe the girl had tried to rob him? Filled with horror, she had run off, and with her disappearance, with my father’s cardiac arrest, with my parents’ marriage now in tatters, it seemed there was nothing left.

“I don’t hate your father,” my mother was saying. “I hate that bitch. She got to sleep with him, instead of me.”

“
Mom
!” I felt a rush of resentment against her. She had neglected me shamelessly as a mother. What was she doing in Montego Bay?

She went on talking, but I did not hear her. “You still there?” she said after a moment.

“Yes.”

The hotel had dialed for an ambulance, apparently, which arrived promptly at the address on Knutsford Boulevard. A paramedic injected my father with insulin as he lay incoherent on the carpet. Within the hour, a surgeon had phoned my mother in Montego Bay; the surgeon informed her that her husband was a very sick man but there was a chance of saving his life if he went under the knife. Mom had told the surgeon to go ahead and operate.

To me she said: “Drop everything, baby—book a flight to Jamaica. Now.”

“I’m so sorry, Mom,” I said. “This is awful.”

I hung up and began to pace from one end of the kitchen to the other. Then I tried to shut my eyes to let the darkness in, but when I opened them everything was as frightening and unpredictable as before. My father’s heart attack was going to force me to confront long-buried feelings of resentment and anger. I felt an undefined need to examine all the suppressed fears and anxieties I had ever entertained. Of course I slept fitfully that night; my mind felt weighted down with a nameless dread and the sense of my own life as a dead weight.

Next day as I left for the airport, a chill wind was blowing up in gusts from the East River. The bright tropic warmth of Jamaica seemed light years away; but it was appropriate weather, I thought, for an unplanned farewell, should Dad die now. And I was sure he would die. Why else had I begun to see the world divided into those who have fathers and those who do not?

I saw very little from the plane, but the journey went on for such a long time that I grew anxious. We did not seem to be moving, but standing still. My anxiety dissolved as the plane banked down toward a landscape of alien lushness. Way below me I could make out the thin brown ribbon of a river winding through a valley. In the Taino Indian language, Jamaica—
Xamaica—
had meant a country abounding in springs and emerald uplands. What could I expect to find there? I got off the plane with only one thought in mind—to see my father alive for maybe the last time. It was December 8, a Sunday.

The Pegasus, a high-rise hotel in the heart of Kingston’s financial district, had a gelid, marble-floored vestibule with piped Marley reggae, a polo lounge, and a pool bar. I walked on past the lobby to the elevator and rode up to the fifth floor. I got out of the elevator. A Christmas tree with winking lights stood at one end of the corridor. I approached room 508 with a rapidly increasing sense of dread (though a moment before I had not been conscious of any at all). I knocked, waited, knocked again. Mom opened the door: she looked haggard, depleted. “I feel funny inside,” she told me, and made as if to hug me.

“Here, hold on to me. Are you okay?” (Me—asking Mom if she was okay!)

“I think so. It comes over you, and then it goes.” Her voice sounded blurred and throaty; she had been crying. She said she had flown in from Montego Bay that morning. Room 508, when she got there, showed evidence of the previous night’s turmoil: spent insulin ampoules, the bedsheets rumpled. A book on Jamaica,
The Dead Yard
, lay open on the floor by the bed.

I stared at Mom, then dropped into a chair. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning and most of the blinds were still down. She was wearing a bathrobe over her clothes and, as usual, a mass of jangly jewelry. In her black-frame glasses she looked like Velma Dinkley in
Scooby-Doo
. Her long, black plastic earrings made a really irritating clacking noise (and her bathrobe was an unbecoming shade of purple).

Dabbing her eyes, she said: “Tomorrow morning, what we do is visit your father in the hospital. It’s been arranged.”

For a moment I felt an intense loneliness.

“Drink, Mom?”

“That would be nice.”

Over glasses of scotch—neat for me, soda for Mom—I tried to lighten the mood with talk of Jamaican cuisine. Jerk chicken. Salt fish. But, try as I might, the conversation kept coming back to funerals.

Thoughtlessly I asked out loud: “Who was it that said the living are the dead on vacation?”

“How should I know?” Mom made an irritated motion with her glass. “All I know is, Kingston could well be your father’s
last
vacation.” She gave me a look. “No matter how hard you try to prepare for these tragic moments, you never know when they’re going to happen.”

“But Dad isn’t dead yet,” I said, crossing the carpeted room to get some ice from the minibar. “We have to hope. Like they say in Jamaica:
No call man dead till you bury him
” (the expression came from the Jamaican phrase book I had been reading on the plane).

Mom looked doubtful. Had I misinterpreted something she said? Slowly, painfully, she got to her feet, went to the minibar, and poured herself another drink.

“You know, sometimes I’m sorry I ever met your father. I don’t like to say a thing like that, but it’s true.”

“True?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, sitting down again. “Things
could
have been different. He could have been a proper writer, your father could.” Dad’s newspaper reviews had an occasionally effective belligerent tone, all right, Mom conceded, but probably that was sour grapes. In all his years as a critic he had produced just one book,
Lick Me
, a collection of “vintage” icecream and lollipop ads which had impressed him as a boy growing up in North Carolina. Whatever his standing as a critic, as a writer Dad had some way to go. He was one of those people who had failed to find life attractive or interesting, and so took it out on others. Why else did he domineer so unpleasantly on the books pages of the
New York Times
? Why else did he glut himself daily on causing injury to others?