The Bigger Light (2 page)

He was always interested to see these old ladies, with their slow patient walk on the treacherous sidewalks which were not kept too clean in this poor district of the city, moving in pain and in leisure, assured through practised lack of speed that the Liquor Store would be there, no matter how long it took them to walk the distance of a half block. And from his height above them, he could see the winter wind striking them like uncertain sailboats with black sails; perhaps a black hat would fall off the head and expose the whitened hair, or the wind would flap the shopping bag against their defenceless bodies, like a sail let loose. But they would always walk on, and always would they come back, holding the small brown-wrapped bottle in
their hand like a child trying to steady a breathing slippery fish. And if this view of mornings of boredom did not satisfy him, he would come down in the elevator and watch them from their own level of their movements, and see and feel the wind ruffle their enthusiasm and their determination. He could see their reddened cheeks, coloured by clotted circulation, or by rouge, and their thin legs that looked as if they had a layer of grey scales covering them, to make them bigger in a strange way, so that it looked to him as if the bigness was transparent white silk fat, and the leg itself just bone. He saw their condition from their own level, and he thought more deeply about his own boredom, seven floors above their heads.

And back up into his quiet apartment, seven floors above the “smallened” old ladies, as he called them, Boysie would stand at one of the four large windows and look out into the falling snow, or the rain sprinkling down like steel common-pins, and think of what to do, and where to go. He particularly liked to look out at the window which showed him the people coming up out of the subway at Sherbourne Street, and who seemed determined about some time and certain of some place.

It was at this window one morning that he first saw the woman. She was dressed in a long brown winter coat that was down to about six inches from her ankles, and she was wearing a white beret which was drooped at the back of her head. From that distance he could not tell whether her boots were black or brown. But one morning he spotted her coming out of the subway, and he ran out of the apartment, up the short street and onto the main road, in time to meet her at the corner. Her boots were brown. He did not see her face, because he did not look into her face, and he did not wish to confront her with any suggestion of his interest. It was enough for him to match his morning tea with the colour and arrival of her
boots at the head of the subway steps, and follow her through traffic and people, transparently through trees and trucks and houses, until she emerged again, walking like a brown saint upright, alone as he was alone, and disappear eventually among the untrimmed trees that had come through the summer like long hair, filled now with falling snow. He saw this woman from this distance and from this height, and he grew to know her. And as she came and went, with the mornings of idleness except for the writing of letters to the editor, Boysie grew to like her.

He measured her arrival at the head of the subway steps with the drinking of his tea; and when he measured time and coincidence more, he got to know that she reached that point between five and fifteen minutes to eleven. His day revolved around the sight of this woman, whose face he had dared not to look into; and he would do nothing significant, could in fact do nothing significant, as it turned out, until he had seen her, for that day. She became what morning tea is to some people: the motivation to begin the day. She came into his day and became many different persons, men and women; and he lived among them, among
her
; and sometimes, when he was thinking about Henry, and the thoughts became too heavy for him with their burden of saddened reminiscences, he would populate his quiet apartment with her presence. And in his mind see many versions of her. And soon, he began to talk to her. He promised that one morning he would go out and really talk to her, ask her her name, where she was going, where she had to go each morning, Monday right through Sunday, at that same time.

Once he mentioned her to Dots, and Dots went on cooking breakfast (as Boysie talked and watched the woman walking along the street), and when he was finished talking, Dots said,
“She’s probably a whore, reaching back home, Boysie, boy. Don’t worry yourself about her.” And right there, Boysie began to look at Dots with a certain disapproval: for she had not even tried to understand what he was talking about, to be sensitive enough to be concerned. It was left to him, in his creative confusion, to puzzle about the woman and to be frustrated by the mystery of the woman’s punctuality. It hurt Boysie very much and he wondered how his wife could be so cruel to the creation of his observations. How then did she really regard the letters he was writing to the editor? How would she regard any other venture he should suggest? Boysie looked at his wife and in his heart he crossed her out, erased her from his mind, and in her place, he put the woman with the brown coat and the white sloppy hat. And it was only then, only when his imagination had filled in all the details of this transposition, could he sit down and eat his breakfast that morning with Dots. He promised never again to mention the woman to his wife.

Boysie began to see things that he hated in his wife. Or so he told himself. He had lived with them for six years, as he had lived with her; and they had never been so important; he had never been very trusting nor confiding in her, nor she in him; and they had lived in their pragmatic cocoon of marriage, while at the same time going their own ways, and thinking their own thoughts. For six years it seemed, for him, she did not really exist. He had not even bothered to find out the colour of her underwear, had not even been concerned that she may be unfaithful to him, “horning him”: he had not given her this amount of feminine individuality. But now, the neglect of not having thought about these things became serious, and like an electric shock of sudden comprehension of an obvious fact, he faced his wife and tried to understand her. He was wise
enough to feel, at least, that he might be too late. And this realization rendered him almost numb. He accused her for her infertility: every West Indian woman he knew had at least two children. He had the money now for bringing up his children, but his wife could have none. “This woman can’t even breed,” he said to himself, “and she doesn’t even
come!
I must be cursed now, for my past, or something. Christ! All she is interested in is her bank account and a down payment for a house in the suburbs. What the hell do I have for my old age when I can’t screw anymore? A house?” He wondered how he would live in a childless house, with a wrinkled sterile woman?

He would look back over his life with her, from the very beginning when she supported him in every essential and material way, from buying his cigarettes to the prophylactics they used. He saw her in those years and he tried to know her now, in the frame of the picture window that looked northwards to the subway station. The perspective gave him the possibility of travel, of arrival and of departure. It showed him nothing about his wife. Perhaps he should disappear.… He saw a woman who was dull, perhaps had always been dull; a woman getting old through fat, and quarrelsome through wanting to own a large four-bedroom house in a Toronto suburb. And the only thing he could do to quell the upsurge of hatred that his thoughts forced upon him was to replace her with the woman in the brown winter coat. He knew, however, that wanting to replace her was the same as wanting to disappear.

Boysie watched the woman walking morning after morning. And he filled his life with her. It was painful and it was joyful. Once, when he looked out, he saw her walking with a small child. He became disappointed. Part of his fascination with the woman was that he imagined her to be childless just as Dots was childless. He wanted her to be alone, just as he was
alone. In that way could he cope with his fantasy. But his disappointment faded that very morning, and all of a sudden the woman was Dots, and the child walked in the opposite direction. And never again did he see her with the child at her side. It was then that he speculated that Dots could be a good mother if she ever had the chance. The presence of the child by her side that morning became a child inside her womb, put there by him. He looked around his apartment, around his home, around his life, and there was no child. Not even a pet. Nothing was with him now, except Dots; and she was slipping away gradually by her own silence, by his own preoccupation with new things, with dreams, and with isolation and with letters to the editor, which she stopped reading now; and by his inability to focus on both the woman below in the street and the woman in his apartment, in the heavily breathing half of the bed beside him at night. He thought again of where he could run to and when.

He thought at first that it was her work. He thought it was her fatigue. He thought it was her snoring. And he found out, quite by chance, that all those nights when he lay beside her, when her body remained stiff beside him, when her body did not move even when he lay on top of her, when her body accepted him as a glass accepts water, he realized that in all this time, Dots was not sleeping. She was just lying beside him, like a dying patient would lie on top of a bed in a hospital ward.

“Dots?”

“Yeah?” Her heavy breathing stopped, as if he had wakened her.

“You sleeping?”

“Yeah.”

And she started to breathe heavily again, in a kind of beginning snore.

“You really sleeping, in truth?”

She turned over heavily, drew up her legs, extended them again, drew them up again, as if she was disturbed from a deep peaceful sleep, and said nothing.

Boysie remained quiet, lying on his side, facing her, with his eyes opened in slits. He too began to breathe heavily, and then he started to snore. Then he lay very still. He was looking for something. He was hoping that what he was looking for would not be there, that it would not be. Half an hour later, with the help of the glimmer of the electric clock, with its face like the eyes of a cat in the dark, Dots muttered, “This blasted man! I ain’ got time for that!”, scratched herself between the thighs, and turned over. When he got accustomed to the dark, he realized that her eyes were wide open.

But he became frightened still, for she might have been sleeping with her eyes open. All these years. And he could not ask her; at least not then. He did not sleep at all that night. And the same thing happened many nights after that.

“Dots?”

“Yeah, Boysie?”

“You sleeping, already?”

“Ah? Eh?”

Her body moves in the quiet bed, and she shuffles her legs, touching his as if by error, then she draws them up, and puts them safely out of his reach; and she holds over randomly and drops her hand, her heavy hand, and just as randomly it lands on his neck, and he can’t say anything in protest because he is supposed to be asleep and because he is not sure, and then she rolls over and rests eventually far away from him.

“You sleeping?”

“Ah? …”

The punctuality of the woman arriving each morning, and the uniformity of her dress, bothered Boysie so much that it interrupted his concentration on the morning newspapers. He would find himself reading the words of the world news reports without understanding their meaning; and a part of his attention would be on the tip of the roof which touched in perspective the pavement of the subway exit; and he would wait to see whether she would appear in the same winter coat, or whether his concentration upon her arrival would change her appearance, and make her late. He was becoming miserable on these mornings. Dots was drifting away from him, and even though they went out each Saturday night, he did not enjoy himself, did not care whether she enjoyed herself, and he did not like the music. Sometimes he thought of changing his drink. “I wonder if I should change my brand?”

For years he had taken Dots to the Mercury Club downtown, where they listened and danced to calypso music, and mixed with each new batch of arriving immigrants. Now Boysie began to dislike their raucous behaviour and the bright colours they wore and the noise they made, even when the music was playing. He became withdrawn from them, and all the time he wondered why. He would sit in a darkened corner with Dots, far from the press of people, and watch them, and wonder why they did not change their ways when they came to a new country. And as he watched them, his Scotch became tasteless water. He was becoming tense in the company of these young immigrants. Watching them dance and throw their bodies and their backsides in such abandon to the music made him so uncomfortable and envious, like a man thinking of the loss of his virility, that the new rhythm of moving the body alarmed him, and made him hope that he was never like them. He was never like that. Boysie would sit, silently, in a
dark corner and sip his drink without making too much noise with the ice cubes, and think that perhaps his presence in that bar, where he was the only black person, was a favour. But these young people, they were always laughing and talking aloud and dancing in the wildest manner, and even when he saw them on the street they were laughing like that and making it obvious by their laughter and their speech that they were newcomers, and the new owners of the country. Boysie detested their conspicuousness. And when he began to hear and then read in the newspapers that youths were snatching purses from old women in the subway, he wished he was a policeman sent to arrest all of them. “They are spoiling my image,” he told Dots, during one of their infrequent conversations. That was all he said to her. Even this was too personal to talk too much about to her. And he added these “thieves” to his other griefs. And every youth that he had met in the calypso clubs and in the streets became a thief. When he happened to be passing them on the sidewalk his body was overtaken with spasms, and he clutched his wallet. He carried a lot of cash wherever he went. “There was a time when I could walk the whole of Yonge Street without meeting-up one o’ them!”