The Bigger Light (31 page)

The mother of two testified yesterday that a short man with a silk sock over his head forced her at knife-point last December to have intercourse in the underground garage of her apartment building
. Boysie held the afternoon paper closer to his eyes as
he tried to remember a story of similar details which he had read months before. He was fully dressed, it was now one in the afternoon, and the strange woman had not come out of the subway yet. He was finding it difficult to concentrate on the story and on the subway entrance-exit at the same time. He had left his car parked in the driveway of the apartment building, the first time he had ever done that, and he was waiting. The cat was fed, and it was somewhere out of sight. He had been doing things which when taken individually would have suggested a rather disorganized mind and attitude, but when taken collectively could easily be seen as a carefully thought-out plan. But he did not worry about this. He just wanted to finish reading the story, and if possible, at the same time or during his reading, see the woman, and then leave in his car on the long drive he had thought of taking. He forgot which part he had already read; the story wasn’t making much sense to him, so he began at the beginning.
The mother of two testified yesterday that a short man with a silk sock over his head forced her at knife-point to have intercourse in the underground garage of her apartment building. She identified her attacker as Caufield. The woman testified that she saw Caufield two weeks after the attack. He was entering a car at a shopping plaza near her apartment. She gave police the licence number. She told the jury that a man attacked her in the garage near the apartment. She gave the police the licence number
. “Did I read that already?”
She told the jury that a man attacked her in the garage after she returned from doing errands. She said he sliced her finger and threatened to kill her. She ran screaming up the stairway from the garage, she testified. Her husband said she collapsed in his arms at the apartment with blood on her hand and face
. It was Friday, and he didn’t have to clean offices tonight, unless he wanted to. Sometimes, in order to have a longer weekend,
he would do his cleaning on Fridays, so that he wouldn’t have to go to work until Monday night. But today, he thought he would remain at home, not all day … perhaps he shouldn’t remain at home, he should leave as he always did, and just drive around the city, and leave for his trip on Saturday. But he couldn’t do that because he had agreed to have a party tonight, just for the hell of it. He had not informed any of the clients he cleaned for that he was taking a trip, and he didn’t worry about it.

Dots had agreed to the party. It was such a long time since they had had friends in to a party; and she thought it would do him good. It would cheer him up (although she did not tell him this,) and make the weekend seem shorter and more bearable. He thought of the shopping he had to do: liquor, food from the Jewish market, candles and incense (which, strangely, Dots asked him to buy) from the Cargo Canada store; and he had to call Bernice and Estelle, Llewellyn and Freeness (he had heard that Freeness was living on Jamieson Avenue), and Agatha. Inviting Agatha was Dots’s idea; but soon he warmed to it, for with Agatha present, well, after all, she was Henry’s wife, and if Henry couldn’t be present, then … and it was the first real party they had had since Henry’s death. Boysie tried not to think of Henry, and he made an effort to concentrate on the story in the newspaper.
Her husband said she collapsed in his arms at their apartment
. “I read that already, didn’t I?” He was losing his concentration.
blood on her hand and face. The 37-year-old woman identified her attacker as being 5 feet 5 inches tall, of stocky build, and wearing a … and having a Scottish accent, and wearing a red plaid short-sleeved shirt and jeans. She said he also wore a mask, was in his early 20’s and had well-tanned arms
.

He was losing his concentration, and thereby losing his
strength, and his power over his patience was slipping away from him. He used to feel so strong when he was in the bathtub with the hot bath, when he would come out, and walk naked; he felt strong then. But this afternoon he could hardly read a short story about a woman who was raped, and rape was such an interesting subject with him before; he had discussed it with the Canadian young fellow who had given all the philosophical reasons why men raped women; and had reminded Boysie that during the Vietnam war, thousands of American GIs had raped millions of Vietnamese women; “It is just the way of life, philosophically speaking,” the Canadian young fellow said. “Just as the American way of life, all their violence and all their wealth and all their power have become their philosophy of life.” Boysie was intrigued. And he tried to look at his own life in a philosophical way, and try to see what interpretation, in strict terms of this philosophical way of seeing things, was his waiting for the woman, his distribution of all his money to his wife, to a woman he did not love, and did no longer like, was not this also a philosophical way of doing things? But not to be able to read a short story about a raped woman, was this too such an important weakness, if it was a weakness at all, that he could clothe it in this heavy interpretation?

From the last time when he saw her with her mauve dress exposed, he had realized that a very basic mistake had been made, and he had been searching for this mistake ever since. It could have been in the manner of his life, its style, its substance, its quality; it could have been in the way he treated Dots, and it could have been manifested (had he the eyes to see it) in all the parameters of their life together, in each smile (which was not very often) in each grimace, in each sneer and each harsh word and look; he had done very little, so he told
himself now, to get to know her, but she was really like a deity, set there before him so that he would never really get to know her, just her presence and her sound and the noise she made; he was not meant to know her, and because he did not, it still grieved him and caused him to think that if he ever were to be happy another day with her, he would have to lift each brick in the structure of their relationship apart, each brick, brick by brick, from the very beginning of the foundation of mistrust, of jealousy, of inferiority on his part, and arrogance on hers, before he could ever be happy, and free. It was his happiness and his freedom, freedom like that of the black American singer who oozed freedom through voice and vapour, perspiration and smile, when he sang “A Rainy Night in Georgia.” It was his happiness … his happiness.

That was it.

That is it.

His happiness, or rather his unhappiness.

He had not been happy since he knew Dots. He had not been happy, and he did not know until he had seen the woman the previous time, with her winter coat unbuttoned exposing the mauve colour of her dress, that he was not happy, for the colour of her dress was mauve. That was it! It was like peeling off a skin from a fruit, and the woman was the fruit. It was like his eyes which in sleep, in dream, would be clogged up by pus and cold and other secretions which would prevent them from opening; it was like in that dream he had when his wife was with the young man and the young man was doing something to her, and he was tied to his position, to his posture, helpless and observing, and the more helpless because he was a witness; it was like being unable to move from one spot to help someone like Dots, a wife, a woman, a woman raped just as the woman in the newspaper story must have felt when
the man with the nylon sock over his head terrorized her movements and rendered them like the pillars of concrete in the underground garage, and the woman had to witness her own undoing.

Happiness.

He knew now how to be happy. He would be happy if he did not feel that he had to go to the Home Service Association place to breathe in the same spoiled air as those sleeping children in the army cots and with the grey blankets covering parts of their bodies (he should have sent some of his money to them: if he remembered, he would tell Llewellyn later tonight to do that); he would be happy if nothing, not even his being a “man in his position,” for he did not have to be a man in his position: he could be a man, just a man; but it was Mrs. James who had decided for him, just as Dots and Bernice and Estelle and Llewellyn had decided for him, without having to utter a word of their intended dominance over him, “a man in that position,” that he would go up to the same Home Service Association and be a volunteer worker. He did not have to dress as a man who cleaned offices, he could dress like a barrister; Alfredo his barber had seen that, and had said it; he did not have to live in a mould that people expected; he could wear his suits even in the morning when he was waiting for
her
: the woman, who has not arrived yet for the day, but he is not looking for her anymore. She means nothing now, for her purpose has been understood. And he should take the lesson from her appearance that morning, in spite of what she is, in spite of the fact that he has never seen her from any close and safe distance to judge character from the redness of her eyes, or from the clearness in her eyes, or from the movements of her lips.

He does not have to know her in this everyman’s way of
knowing, for she is not an ordinary woman; she is like a morning dream which he had, she is like his imagination, the object of his thinking sessions which bothered him until he was going out of his mind, living through a day of his life in the waiting seconds for her; perhaps she never existed, and he never did see her, for there is no one else alive who has seen her, and he could have imagined her. Only if Henry was here: Henry used to have so much wisdom about these things!

Boysie got up and went into the bathroom, and stood up and looked at the clipping of Henry’s poem which he had framed and which he would watch while he shaved, or even at odd moments when he was not shaving. Dots had quarrelled about its appearance, but he had insisted upon leaving it there. Henry had such a love for roses, Boysie remembered. He wrote about roses as if roses were women. He wondered, should he give the strange woman a name, whether he should call her Rose. Perhaps her name was Rose. Rose and mauve. Have you ever seen a mauve rose? A rose could be mauve or blue, or a rose could even be a pickle, anything you loved could be a rose. Henry should have written a poem about happiness. “But this one about a rose is a nice poem and he has happiness inside it.”

He was losing his concentration: he should get up right now and do the shopping for the party, perhaps call in on Mrs. James and see how she is, see whether she wants anything bought from the Jewish market (she has no money, but she likes pigs’ feet and black-eyed peas and salt fish, a true Maritimer, Mrs. James!); but he shouldn’t stop in, because he knows her needs, and he could easily just as easily buy them for her and drop them off at her door, at Apartment 101.

What happiness had he in his life after forty-nine years? A man forty-nine years old should have had some happiness. It
was not the country; the country was good to him. It was all those noisy West Indians whom he had learned to tolerate but who were not good for the country, his country (“I must remember to take my Canadian passport with me, wherever I go, from now on”); it was the people like Llewellyn who thought they could purchase happiness by screwing post-middle-aged women, and borrowing their bodies and their money, Llewellyn in whom he had had so much hope. It was people like Mrs. James’s son Michael who knew what happiness was because he had never experienced it. (“I wonder which page that little bastard is at now, in that book I bought him? How long ago did I buy that little brute that book?”)

He should get up right now and leave to do the shopping. He should feed this goddamn cat before he left.

“Meeeeeoowww!”

He got up, and just as he was about to go into the kitchen, he saw the letter beneath the door. Somebody had pushed it there. Usually his mail, whatever it was, was in the mailbox just off the lobby. Perhaps this letter had been delivered at the wrong place, or a neighbour had taken it out of his box; after all, he was living in a low-rental district.

It was a special delivery letter. He picked it up, and for the first time since he had written the letter to his wife did he remember that Dots had said nothing about that letter in which he had asked for a time to be set aside to talk. She had said nothing. He didn’t even know if she had seen the letter; or had read it. He saw this letter was addressed to him. And he recognized the Barbados stamps. “Strange!” No return address with name was on the envelope. It was addressed to him. He would have to read part of it at least (and his concentration was so bad this afternoon: what time is it now? He had forgotten to keep with the time) to find out.