The Bigger Light (26 page)

He wished he was not there in the bathtub. He also wished she would take off her housecoat, and all her clothes, and come into the tub with him. But he knew she would rather die first. And in fact he wished, at that moment, that she was dead. Just dead. Dead dead dead dead …

For she had made him dead, had killed the spark in his ambitiousness, had molested all his dreams about becoming successful, and even his pleasure of listening to
floes and floes of angel’s hair;
she had already killed him, for she had killed the way he saw himself. A man in his position.

She went out of the bathroom. The cat came in looking for her, and when she was not there, apparently knowing the hostility in the bathroom, the cat went out too. The cat went out as silently as Dots did.

Boysie sank himself further into the water, now becoming warm, and wished he was miles away. He wished he was in his car driving at a very fast speed, on a highway going across the border to Niagara Falls, into America, the States. He had never been to America, and he had promised himself for many years to go there, to see for himself. There were many things he had heard about America; but most important of the things he had heard, and had seen in the newspapers and on television, was the racial problem there. It was in America that he had first heard of this “brother” thing, and Power to the People and
Black Is Beautiful. He had also heard about all the rich black people living in America, Sammy Davis, Jr., Harry Belafonte, and another man who owned the biggest magazine in the world, a man named Mr. Ebony; or was the magazine named
Ebony
and the man was the colour of ebony. If Henry was here, he would know for sure. Henry had never been to America, had never crossed the bridge that separated Canada from America, but all of Henry’s friends before Boysie were Americans. Americans talked big and smoked cigars and had lots of money, in big fifty-dollar bills, in their pockets. He remembered that about the Americans he knew. The biggest car he had ever seen parked in front of the Paramount Tavern years ago had a New York licence plate on it. And it was driven by a black American, who had a shiny head, and lots of rings on his fingers, and who laughed as if he was the happiest man in the world, and who was very kind. Perhaps, he should go to America, the fountainhead of the “brother” thing, and find out some answers there. Just get into his car, which was not as pretty as the big black American’s car, nor as expensive, and just drive, just drive, man, until he came to America, to New York City and to Harlem. All the best singers came from America, and all of the best ones he had ever seen or heard sing were black and were from America: and the way they talked,
Hey baby, that’s heavy, heav-vee, ain’t that a heavy motherfucker, baby, sheee-yit! like my man here is copping out, can you dig it?
Henry could do it better, because he knew America.

Hey, man, ammo gonna split from my old lady, just split, and slide on down to good ole New York — New York the big apple, my man! and ammo not gonna come back into this jive crib with this bitch, this bitch is killing me, man; like man, this chick I am hitched- to is something else, something else, you dig?
Henry was an expert at this. He was still in the tub, with the water
turning lukewarm like the tea Dots made and left on the kitchen counter for him, getting cold, with the top layers of the tea warmer than the bottom, just like in the sea back home in the early afternoon: you walked in the sea and your legs were colder than your hips; and once a fellow explained it to him this way: “Man, you don’t know no geography? The sun hots up the top and it tekking a more longer time to reach the bottom than at the top,
hence!
Also, because the earth spins around ‘pon its axle at a angle of twenty-three degrees, which make the sun do these blasted geographical things with we sea-water even down here in the fucking tropicks!
Understand’?
”; but he preferred to compare it to Dots’s tea and how she left it until it became cold, like a dead man’s blood. And another thing about Dots: he should kick in her arse, just like the Americans would do it.
Man, this cat here, you see the motherfucker, well, this here be my man, my motherfucking man. He is a baaaaad-ass nigger! Always kicking ass. Kicked in his old lady’s ass just yesterday, you dig? The bitch been uppity with my ace-boon coon here. And my man can’t dig no house-niggers!

Boysie began to experience strength coming into his body. The water was lukewarm. He was relaxed, and his dreams of America and American black men had given him strength. He felt like an American black man when he stepped out of the tub. Purposely, he left the tub unwashed. He was talking in his mind like an American: let the bitch wash the tub, you dig? But he did not feel so good about this. He was a tidy man. And, moreover, he did not wish to be so brutal with language. To be brutal with his language was worse than being brutal with his fists. He was not that kind of a man, and he felt in some strange way that, to be like those men, he would also be carrying a heavy responsibility, although the word “responsibility” did not come into his mind. He did not call it
responsibility. He knew it by another name; but the name was not clear. He knew it better by a phrase, a feeling, that to be bad and black carried with it something which that badness and that blackness would take out of him, and he was too tired for that.

He took down a towel from the ring and dried himself. He still thought he should be man enough to have Dots undress in front of him; but that again carried with it certain responsibilities. He would have to admire her body, silently only; he would get an erection, and that would disclose his motive, even if his motives were just of the flesh (and he did not want to do that), for it was too great an exposure, too great an example of weakness. He could handle Dots and communicate with her better if he did not say a word to her. He felt stronger ignoring her. “A strong man is a silent man.” Who said that? Mr. MacIntosh, or the Canadian young fellow, or Mrs. James, for it sounded very much like something to do with their philosophy; it also sounded like philosophy, which was what the Canadian young fellow always talked about.

If Dots was not home now, he could walk out of this bathroom, naked as a bird, and play his favourite record, which at this time was Miles Davis’s
Milestones
, and he could even dance in the way he had seen some Americans dancing once at the Coq d’Or, and he could imagine that he was a great singer, and sing, or a great dancer, and dance, or something great, and be great. He could not even seduce the feeling to want to dance when Dots was around. He had built up a completely total existence in her absence, and she knew nothing about it. And this was not the time to expose himself to her.

Get out, get out, get out, a voice was telling him. He did not know whether the message meant get out of the apartment, from this seventh-floor boredom, or get out of the bathroom,
or even get out of the country. But he knew he had to get out. It was dead inside the apartment. Here he was, a man in his position, and with a woman, a wife, in the apartment for almost fifteen minutes now, and this woman was so secure that she didn’t feel she had to say one word to him, and had, in fact, not even opened her mouth to tell him, “You dog!” or “You cat!” Dots was now only a sound in his life. Perhaps, then, the message his brain was telling him was important.

Something on the floor of the bathroom, beside the toilet bowl, attracted his attention. He noticed it because Dots was a tidy woman: nothing was ever left on the floor in the entire apartment. He picked it up. Perhaps it had fallen from his own pockets. It was a piece of newspaper, folded into four. He carried newspaper clippings of his letters to the editor with him, just in case he had to show someone. He picked up this piece of clipping and put it into the pocket of his bathrobe. He would not have been able to look at this piece of paper once before, but now with his new strength he opened it expecting something, something which was unknown (it was this fear of things unknown, things that did not belong to him, things such as the letters he expected to find in his wife’s drawers). He opened the folded newspaper clipping and read:
If the TTC is going to issue one dollar family fun passes, why not lower the fare for people who have to work on Sundays and holidays, especially nurses …

Dots was sitting in the living room reading the newspaper. She was reading the Today’s Child column. Boysie glanced over her head, and saw her looking at the photograph of a black child who was up for adoption. He moved away immediately, and wondered if his wife was going really mad. He thought of the children asleep in the upstairs rooms at the Home Service place, and he remembered the dirty blankets
and the green army camping cots. He wanted to tell her about the children he had seen sleeping there, but he felt the inertia again in his body, battling with the new-found energy and strength which he had found inside the warm bathtub of water. He wanted to go back into the bathroom and draw another hot bath, and he wanted to be able to do this immediately, without moving from this spot behind Dots, without changing his position. He wanted it just to happen. And he knew it could not happen, that he could not make it happen in the same way that he knew that he could not make his mouth open by itself and talk to his wife. He wondered if he was dying too; or if he was already dead, as she was. So he moved away and dressed for work.

Boysie sat waiting in his pyjamas
and plaid housecoat for the strange woman to emerge from the subway station. He sat with the newspaper open at the stock market pages, resting on his lap, as the cat had become accustomed to resting there. He was just waiting, and not wanting her to appear, for that would cause him to have to get up and do something else. He had never before waited for her in his pyjamas. He wondered why this morning, at the same time as other mornings, he was still in pyjamas. There were other strange things he had begun to do. There was nothing strange in them when he first did them, but when he thought of them, and reflected on this previous behaviour, on the things he liked doing, on the things he liked listening to, he saw them as strange.

He was now a man of quite substantial means, a man who had reached what in Canada would be regarded as a grade four education: but one could not really make such a rough comparison between his knowledge of language in Barbados and that in Canada; and one surely could not conclude that because he had dropped out of school back there in Standard Three, when simple arithmetic was just included in the curriculum, that he was on the same educational level as a Canadian who had reached only grade four. One could not make those assumptions. For he was a man of some substance,
respectable in his apartment building, well known by the most important stockbroker in the whole of Toronto, Mr. MacIntosh, one of his cleaning clientele; his bank manager called him often to ask him how he was getting along in his business, and whether he could do anything for him, “May I interest you in a demand loan, Mr. Cumberbatch?”; everybody who knew him, who met him coming and going, addressed him as Mr. Cumberbatch (even Mrs. James, whom he had stopped seeing on the terms that regulated their abortive relationship; she, too, started calling him Mr. Cumberbatch, as she had done when first he appeared at her door, Apartment 101, to give her the bag of pork chops and other pork products, because he was in those days obsessed by diets, like everybody in Toronto), and said behind his back, “A man in his position …”

He had everything he wanted in life in this country. He was solvent, his business showed a profit, his clothes were new and expensive, and he had the car of his dreams. He had recently installed a new stereo tape recorder, and he had the technician put in four speakers. The car was a small explosion of noise. When he wanted to he could listen to two speakers, or he could listen to all four. He had AM and FM and he had thought of installing a telephone, but he did not like telephones too much; in fact, he seldom answered the telephone in his apartment. But it pleased him very much that he could have these things installed in his car without thinking of the cost. He thought of installing a bar, and a television set (as he has seen once in a Cadillac parked in front of the Coq d’Or Tavern on Yonge Street, with New York licence plates), but he felt that that was too much show. Besides, he never allowed anybody to go near his car, and he never drove anybody in it. Mrs. James and her children were the only ones whom he could remember as having driven in the car. Yes, and Lew!
But that was a short trip around the block to buy cigarettes and Chinese food. Boysie had not told Dots yet that he owned a car. It was something which he did not consider to be disloyalty; it was not that he did not love her, it was not that he did not trust her, that he was not aware of the principle of sharing in marriage; but he felt, quite bluntly, that it was none of her business. He could see himself having to tell her if he was still struggling, if she was still subsidizing him. In that case he would have to tell her, because he could see then that he owed it to her pride and to her feeling of superiority over him that he should be grateful, and tell her, and perhaps take her for a drive. His car was his car. To buy it she did not have to wear her nylons a day longer than normal; and she did not have to eat five months’ dinners of hamburger meat, nor walk to work to the hospital. Life with her, and for her, went on normally, so his buying the new car did not touch her sense of material security.