The Bigger Light (25 page)

“This is a nice drink, indeed,” Mrs. James said. He considered her stupid for her answer.

“Did you
see
anything?” she asked him later on.

“But why did you think I should see it?”

“A man in your position should know everything, and should see everything.”

“You mean those children sleeping?”

“That’s only part.”

He put his glass on the table. And he looked at her. On her face was not the answer he was looking for, so he looked instead at the scantily dressed waitress. She was more of a woman, for at least he could see the dimensions of her body and her mind perhaps, her intention. Mrs. James was too intelligent. She was too sneaky, too. Taking him to a place like that, like … “What they call that place?”

“That’s a very important place, Mr. Cumberbatch.” Why did she call him this now, after just having called him “brother”? “It was started in 1920. Served the whole community then. And still serving the community now.” He did not understand this thing about the community either. Everybody nowadays was calling something a community, or a community project, or community aspirations. “Shit, when I was catching my royal arse in this place, there wasn’t anything called a community. Community must be a recent word. What do you know about this community thing?”

“A man should be proud of his community, as a man should be proud of his African heritage.”

“Wait a minute, just wait a goddamn minute, Mrs. James!” He even held up his hand to tell her to wait. He swallowed his drink off, and motioned her to do the same. She was taken aback at this. But she finished her beer anyhow. “I am taking you back to Apartment 101.”

In the car, Mrs. James tried to make conversation, tried to find out what was the matter, but Boysie remained silent. He emptied his mind completely of Mrs. James, and of the visit to the old and sacred strange-smelling black organization building.

“Would you come in for a minute? I would like to talk to you.”

Boysie nodded his head. He drove the car into the underground garage and parked it. As he was walking back to the elevator to take him back to Mrs. James’s apartment, he saw a man dash behind a stone pillar. Boysie walked straight to the elevator. As he was about to enter, he glanced behind to see the man dart behind another pillar. He got into the elevator and tried to forget the man and the probable consequences of the man and the underground garage, and Mrs. James and black organizations; and he went instead straight up to his apartment.

The cat greeted him at the door.

“You goddamn cat!”

“Meeeeoooooooowwww!”

“God!” Boysie felt it would have been better if this animal were not in the apartment with him. It made him lonelier than he really was, being only a cat, when he wanted a person, a human being, anybody to talk to, and help him explain some of the thoughts which were worrying him. He did not understand this “brother” thing that Mrs. James and the young man
from the Home Service Association were talking about. He had lived his life, quietly and with a certain amount of success, and nobody had come to him before to talk to him about being a brother. He never had a brother; and there was no chance now that his mother would ever have a son for him to call “brother.” “God!” He had tried to live quietly and he was becoming successful, and in the earlier days when he and Henry roamed the city like two dogs looking for carrion, when he broke his back cleaning out all those offices in the Baptist Church House on St. George Street (“These people could really pull down and put up big-big buildings fast, eh?”), when the only person who ever helped him was Brigitte, his old girlfriend from Germany, herself once a servant for some rich Jews in Forest Hill (“Dots, my own wife, never as much as went down there to lift a blasted broom!”); not even Henry his friend had come to help him lift a garbage pail; he didn’t see any black people in those days willing to help him with that work; but he had struggled, and had had to stomach a lot of insults from his wife when she thought he was a failure; and he felt in those days that she had helped him in the way she did in order to make him feel that he really needed help, that he was a chronically unemployed person, fit only to be helped; none of the West Indians with whom he used to play poker and throw dice had ever helped him. “God! I don’t even want to be known as a West Indian. Being a Barbadian is good enough for me!” There was nobody with whom he could talk; and the things he had to talk about were simple things, things like “How’s work, man? How’s your car running these days? Do you like Scotch with water, or straight? What about the wife? She giving you trouble? Again? And how are your women, are they behaving themselves? And the children, are they learning good at school?” Such simple questions which a
man needs to have answered by someone, preferably another man, but it could be a woman, too. But a cat! A cat? A goddamn cat? What could he talk to a cat, with a cat?

He went into the bathroom to pee. When he was finished he went into the bedroom. The bedroom was clean and tidy and bare and very much like a coffin. Dots did not even burn incense in the bedroom. And he felt that if he did not know the bedroom as the place where he slept, and slept very badly too, he would never know that a woman also used it. There were no perfume bottles, no lipstick, no shampoo bottles, nothing to tell him that he had a wife. And sometimes, if he were to be honest, he forgot that he did have one: Dots was now almost completely wiped out of the creative part of his life, and he saw her only as an assumed extra. She did not even make him get annoyed with her, she was so dull. He did not even have the anger in him to find another woman, and make her angry, or jealous. Jealousy was not what he felt any action of his would make her feel. She was just there, and he hoped that soon she would fade away. Or leave. “God, she is not even a goddamn pest!”

He looked at himself in the mirror, and he wished that it was a full-length one, so that he could see exactly how he looked. He had never seen himself from head to foot. Not when he was dressed, as he was now, in his three-piece suit. “How do I look to people? I wonder how I look to people?” He had never seen how he looked to people, and he wanted to know exactly how, now. He thought Mrs. James would be the only person to tell him, but she had come with this “brother” thing, and that had upset him. Who could he turn to for this knowledge? The strange woman who came out of the subway, he was hoping, could tell him; but he had grown tired of waiting for her, morning after morning, and he had nothing to go
on which would tell him whether she was suitable. He saw her only from a distance, for a very short time, and from a height which had its disadvantages of perspective, perhaps, even, of seeing. “Cat!” He didn’t even have the guts to strangle the cat as he had threatened to do. And looking at the cat now, and really seeing Dots, since the cat reminded him so much of Dots, an object in his house, no conversation, just an object with life in it, eating, drinking, sleeping and going to the bathroom; this cat, he could not even kill and get rid of from his thoughts. He had thought of talking to Dots. Many nights when he came home, after an interesting conversation with the Canadian young fellow, or with Mr. MacIntosh, who would have been working late and making money as he bent over the books in his office, or the night when he went to the Coq d’Or Tavern downtown, where many West Indians and black Americans and black Canadians always drank and danced, that night when he looked up for five minutes straight and saw for the first time how beautiful a black man who sang rhythm and blues could be, how the man moved like a tiger, how he twisted his face as if he was feeling the pain which were in the words of the song, how he snapped his fingers when he wanted the music to stop, or to grow louder as it backed his movements and his voice, and this man having the power to give orders, he wanted to share a little of this with his wife. But she was lying on her stomach, as if she was guarding her private parts from a rape during her pretended sleep.

He had entered the coffin-bedroom, dark and smelling of Dots’s sleeping, a faint odour of the cat in the room, and the blanket wrapped tightly around her secured body, he wanted to be able to rip the covers off, and see, exposed before his eyes (and his eyes had not yet made up their minds how to react to her nakedness), he wanted to rip that blanket, sheet, pink
quilted nightgown or housecoat off her body, and see what was beneath. And see what she would say. But he was too tired to do even that. She was like a very unattractive mannequin in his bed, except that there was something about the mannequin, its size and its smallness and its delicacy, which he did not associate with Dots. Dots was a large, silent, sulking, black mannequin who talked only to the goddamn cat. “How do people see me, a man in my position?” He wished there was a full-length mirror in his apartment. He must remember to buy one soon.

He had been spending all this time, all these long hours, working in order to make a better man of himself; he wanted to be independent, to buy a house, to prove to himself that he could start from the bottom and reach the top. And it was all for nothing; it was all as if he had done nothing. His wife was not impressed; and those who were impressed were not the ones he wanted to impress with his success. Certainly he did not wish to impress the people over at the Home Service Association. And he had no intention of ever working in that organization as a volunteer. He could not work in such poverty. And the place was too close to those West Indians wearing the fliers’ hats. He wondered what a man in his position could do. They, the West Indians, did not see him as a hero for writing those letters to the editor. Things like writing letters did not impress them so much as making speeches. His photograph was not one of the many hanging on the walls at the Home Service place, or in the Jamaican patty shop; and nobody thought seriously of him. He wished he could see himself as he was, even as others saw him.

He took off his clothes, intending to take a very hot bath. He liked hot baths. Every time he was upset, when he was disappointed in the strange woman, even after she had passed for
that morning, when things were not going well for him, he would fill the bathtub and pour in bath oil, and soak and sink in the hot water, and he would feel very protected, as if he was inside something that loved him, something that was conscious of his success, something that protected him. He turned on the hot water tap, as he did always, and when there was enough, he would then run the cold water, because he thought he was better able to regulate the temperature of the bath he wished to take. He would spend up to thirty minutes in these hot baths, with a cigarette in his mouth, trying to empty his mind of everything, as he had been trying to do recently. Sometimes, when he took these hot baths, he wished he could fall asleep for a very long time, and never wake up. Never did he think of drowning himself, but more than once he wished he could just fall asleep, and that when he awoke, he would be somewhere else.

This afternoon, with his time for leaving the apartment already passed two hours ago, he was content to lie in the hot water, with his cigarette in his mouth, one eye closed against the biting smoke. He wished they would invent a cigarette that did not give off this biting smoke, when a man who wanted to relax in hot water could just dream, and perhaps fade away.

The apartment door opened. It was closed very quietly. Boysie lay still in the hot water, imagining he was already fast asleep. The cat ran out of the bathroom when he smelled the person.

“Cat-catty-catty-cat!”

It was Dots. She put down whatever it was in her hands, and Boysie could hear her going into the closet that kept the coats and the overshoes. Then he heard a chair being pulled out, and he figured that she was in the kitchen. Soon, dishes and cooking utensils were put on tables; the oven door was
opened, then the refrigerator door, and suddenly there was only the scratching of the cat. Dots was as quiet as a ghost in her own house. He wondered why she would remain so quiet in her own house. But he had nothing to compare her behaviour this afternoon with that of any previous afternoon. For it was seldom indeed that he was ever home when she came from the hospital. Still, something about how quiet she was bothered him. He wished he was the kind of man, now, to be able to fling the bathroom door open, and shout for her, and rip off her clothes and throw her into the tub. With him. But he was past that: he could not see Dots in the same bathtub of hot water with him. She was, after all, just a living object in his life now. And one did not do such personable, close things with an object, in spite of the fact that it was living. He wanted to be able to call her, and say even such a simple thing as “Dots, I’m still here.” But it was past that, too.

He heard her go into the bedroom, and she closed the door behind her. After a brief period she was back outside. In the interim, he had heard the closet in the bedroom open. She’s putting on her pink quilted housecoat now. She’s already taken off her work dress. And she has taken off her shoes, and is wearing the old beaten-up furlike slippers which Bernice gave her for Christmas, three Christmases ago.

He decides to ignore her, for she is, after all, only an object in his house, and to go back to concentrating on his hot bath. He had become accustomed in that short time to her sound, and there was nothing he could do to make her come alive. For her to come alive, now, would be to destroy all the peace of mind, all the privacy, all the inward feelings he had about himself, and about his life. He would ignore her. He sank further into the water, and put the edge of the cigarette on the surface of the oily water, and then threw it into the plastic wastepaper
basket under the sink. He closed his eyes and wished he was somewhere else.

The bathroom door was opened, and for a moment he wished it was not. He kept his eyes closed. When he opened them, Dots was standing at the sink, looking down at him, as if he had come into the bathroom after her. She
was
wearing the pink quilted housecoat, with the furlike slippers, and in her hand was her toothbrush.