The Bigger Light (4 page)

Dots appeared at the door.

She looked in his direction, not at him, not into his eyes as she would have done in happier days, but
on
him.

“I trying to sleep!”

“I trying to listen.”

“What’s wrong with you, eh, man?” she asked him.

Judy Collins was singing about clouds. There were clouds. Clouds were up in the sky, and Boysie was thinking of aeroplanes and the kinds of clouds he had seen from the plane coming at him with force, as if the clouds were about to change into a cloud with body and more force and destroy the plane. He saw these clouds years ago. Now there were clouds of snow falling down in front of his picture window. And he was thinking of incorporating, and of how very peaceful it would be, very peaceful indeed, he thought, to live in a cloud, while Dots remained standing in front of him.

“How could you sit down there on your arse like that, on a Saturday night, and listen to all this blasted
dead
music. I
dont know, Boysie, but I swear … I see you ackking-up here of late, in a funny way. I can’t tell what happening to you, ’cause you don’t even talk to me, you always in some trance.”

She talked in her Barbadian dialect with its inflections whenever she was really angry, or whenever she felt she was speaking from her heart. Sometimes, too, she did it to embarrass him: to tell him that she was through and through a real woman. She did it also to be superior. And it always affected Boysie the wrong way, and made him want to choke her. He tried never to speak in his Barbadian accent. On occasions when emotion got the better of him, then it spilled forth. Judy Collins was singing about “
floes and floes of angel’s hair, ice cream castles in the air …
” Dots was standing over him. Boysie was not quite sure he understood what “floes” meant; he had never heard the word before. Still, it gave him an airy feeling, a sensation of relaxation, and one of great peace within himself. But Dots was standing over him, and he was uneasy. The woman at the piano, in the bar, had sung the same song; and on that occasion, he had heard Dots’s reaction to it. Why did she think it was dead music, when it was giving him so much peace?

“Turn the damn music off, please!” She had come round now, and was facing him, although she was not looking into his eyes.
“Feathered canyons everywhere.”
“What the arse you listening to, man? You uses to be a strong black man. At least when I first met you, you uses to be a strong black man. And you mean to say, that you could now sit down in my presence and listen to a song like this …” “… 
they rain and snow on everyone
 …” Dots sucked on her teeth in a rasping exasperated way to show him how great was her displeasure.

Boysie got up because he wanted to avoid a fight. He did not know how to tell her she was oppressing him, and turning
him away from the new life and the new light of peace he found himself exposed to; and she was replacing it with nothing, nothing at all, just criticising it; and for him to have opened his mouth to reason with her would have been like opening the restraining gates which had held back, for so many months now, the explosion of words and anger and water and tears which they both knew would have torn the skin off their marriage, and perhaps also off their bodies.

Dots used to be such a simple woman. This woman used to be such a simple, sweet, and very pleasant woman. He fixed himself another drink before he changed the record; and when he did, he turned it up very loud. Then he went into the bedroom. But there was no reason for going there. He slammed the door behind him, thinking he had slammed it on her, and that he was locked away from having to see her, or to listen to the full disturbing noise of her voice which was now unrhythmical and very reminiscent of the calypso.

Once inside the bedroom, he regretted that he had locked himself inside. He had not actually locked himself inside, he could always go back out, but to do that without having some motive in his steps and in his appearance, even to do that without some clearly understood reason (and Dots would have to understand reason and motive as clearly and as loudly as if it was written up on her shopping list above the sink in the kitchen before she would accept him), would be to surrender. And he could not surrender. His life now was on such terms of silent but very clearly defined warfare. He was the kind of man who could not go back outside into his own living room because his wife was there. She had, therefore, by her presence in the other room, turned his bedroom into a prison. And had she been in the bedroom, and he in the living room, that room which once was so full of life and noise, so cheerful with the
anecdotes which their friend Bernice used to regale them with, had now become like an anteroom to some deep-seated dramatic moment.

The air is heavy. And there is a smell in the bedroom. He could never understand why Dots would never buy a cheap tin of air freshener and squeeze it all around the room. Her hairpins are always on the dressing table. There used to be just one dressing table, when they were poorer. He was carefree in those days. But now he is obsessed about appearances, like a man getting old, and fearing the stain and the untidiness by the zipper of his trousers. He would watch that spot every time he went into the bathroom, and particularly in public washrooms. Dots’s hairpins are lying like killed stiff insects on the face powder she dusts onto her face; and her other pins she uses to put her hair up with are stationary now, like small road-building rollers. Bottles for making her face attractive are on the dresser, which Boysie calls “Yours”; and she has many bits of paper with telephone numbers on them, and newspapers and a Bible and another book which she began to read enthusiastically two weeks ago, and has only reached page 5 in it; and this book lies with its back broken now, at the place of paused concentration, dead to her interest like one of the hairpins, with its spine broken into two, like a hairpin.

There is a smell in the room. Boysie tries to imagine what kind it is. He breathes in deeply, and tries to locate the origin of the smell. It could be the smell of Dots’s lingering body odour. It could be the smell of unwashed, accumulated underwear, and petticoats; it could be, “Boy, I don’t know what kind o’ deodorant they selling these days! The more o’ this blasted thing I rub under my armpits, when the mornings come, the more I sweating like a horse! Every day! And at work, too!”; just the smell of two bodies that are not quite dead yet. But he
prefers to think it the smell of one body, her body. Her body odour is so close to other smells that he does not like.

He sits on the bed and turns on the television. He remembers to keep it low, because he is accustomed to keeping it low, because Dots would lie in bed and all of a sudden start snoring, and soon after would call out to him, “Boysie, turn down that damn thing! I sleeping.” He would want to throw the television into the bed with her, and let it take his place beside her, but was always prevented from doing this. And he would continue to sit on the edge of the bed, and lean over to listen to the lowered volume, and after a few minutes, disgusted and frustrated that on a weekend he could not listen to his television after eleven o’clock at night, because his wife is sleeping, he would turn the set off, and fall noisily into bed, not beside her, although he was in the same bed with her. And he would lie awake most of the night, thinking how best to open a conversation with her.

He needs to talk to somebody. He wants to talk to somebody, soon. He feels himself becoming too silent, too ingrown, too philosophical, talking to himself too much: not only in the mornings when he waits with his unread newspapers for the strange woman to emerge from the subway; not only then, when one could understand that kind of muttering to take away the tension; but even at work, when there are other persons around, in his panel truck on the crowded streets, and in the Italian barber’s chair.

One Saturday night he lay on his bed for two hours, waiting for Dots to come in. He wishes she would come into his bedroom now, and sit on the bed, and say something about the television he is watching. But the same hostility which keeps his mouth closed hinges her teeth upon teeth, only the eyes in the head conveying the hard feelings that should be
expressed, this same hostility which keeps her from uttering a word.

He is in his bedroom, and he feels he is in a coffin. His coffin. Perhaps her coffin, since she spends so much time in it.

Once, he wanted to kiss her, but something stopped his hand from caressing her. She was in the bedroom with him, and she was very uncomfortable with him in there, sitting with a drink in his hand, watching the world news and leaning close to the volume so that she wouldn’t be disturbed; and when she found that he was not going to leave the room, she got up and undressed in front of him, and the blood surged through his body, and he wanted to pull her to him, and rub his hands over her thighs, and perhaps in between her legs, even to kiss her
there
, to feel the toughness of her hairs there; and this powerful cruel feeling welled up in his heart, and then it took hold of his stomach and became like a tightening muscle, and he could do nothing but sit, and pretend that he was really engrossed in the plight of the Vietnamese, while the jungle and the water, the cataract and the waterfall, the bushes and the hedgerows stood there within the power and the brutality of his grip, and he was powerless to hold out his finger, even by accident, and touch the tip of her breast; even if he had to say afterwards, “Pardon me, Dots.”

He wanted to wash his mouth out with warm water, and brush his teeth, but the sink was full of underwear. He was frustrated again. He was the more frustrated because he had made the attempt many times to tell Dots that he did not like to see her underwear; and he had made the attempt to touch her where the underwear covered: “
floes and floes of angel’s hair and ice cream castles in the air …
” The bedroom door was opened. Dots was standing in the bedroom.

“You ever listened to those words? You know something?
When I hear this song I can’t help thinking of dead people, of somebody deading, dying …”

“Maybe.” He did not think she should say this to him. He had seen something under her bed, under their bed.

“… the strange thing is, that when I look through the window in the living room, I only see hell down there. Come and let me show you what I mean. Come.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t mean that you should come right now, but sometime. Make a point o’ looking through that window while that song playing. Maybe a next person, you or maybe through this window. Maybe a next person, you or maybe Bernice, or somebody, would see a next thing altogether completely different.”

“Maybe.”

“I never knew that this would happen to me. I never expect this. I lived and lived in this place, and I see many things happen. Things that could change the most strongest man. But if anybody had tell me that this very thing would happen inside my very own house. Well, I wouldda have to tell that person, ‘You lie like shite!’ — pardon my language.”

“What do you mean?” He was not sure she was saying what she meant to say.

“That woman that they find in the underground garage. That’s what I am talking about! The woman in the underground garage of this very apartment building we live in. And you cocking-up your backside, listening to some damn fool talking about clouds and ice-cream and feathered crayons …”

“Canyons, Dots.
Canyons
. A canyon is a place where …”

“You don’t have to instruct me! You don’t! Nor be blasted
rude
to me! Just because you write two or three damn letters to some newspaper and they pity you, and print them, it still don’t mean that you can
instruct
me! You don’t have to treat me
as if I didn’t went to school!” The waters were bursting now. “And look at you! A good-for-nothing bastard like you. You, a man who I sponsored into this country. Worked for. Slaved for. And now, good Jesus Christ, you have the gall! I stomached insult upon insult in your behalfs. And now, you come telling me what a canyon is. Boysie, let me tell you something. Let me axe you something, now. What in the name o’ bloody-hell is the worth of a canyon to me? What do I want to know the meaning of a canyon for?” She was holding the newspaper in her hand, all this time she was talking. She dropped it on the bed, and shouted. “
That
is a canyon! That, that underground garage with that twenty-six-year-old woman, is a canyon! And you want to hear what makes that more of a canyon to me? Because that woman in the newspaper is a West Indian woman. Just like me. But the papers didn’t mention that, though …” For a while she had nothing more to say, for she had oversaid, in the first place, what was on her mind. What she had wanted to say to him when he entered the bedroom was, simply, “Boysie, why do you lissen to that song, when there is more serious things happening every day?” And she had prepared herself for the argument he would put up, and perhaps outwit her into seeing his point; for she was tired, she was getting tired and just as frustrated as he. She knew he was tired and frustrated with her. But when she saw him lying on the bed (she actually thought, “On my blasted bed”), she found herself uncontrollable.

The newspaper spread itself on the bedspread.
A 26-year-old single nurse was raped yesterday afternoon in the underground garage of an apartment building in the Sherbourne-Bloor district. Police said a man who was hiding in the building’s laundry room stuck a gun in the woman’s back, forced her into a dark corner of the adjoining underground garage, ordered her to strip and raped
her. He then scattered her clothing through the garage as he escaped. Deputy Police Chief Jack Ackrab today called for stiffer penalties for persons caught with weapons. He said it is difficult to advise women on what they should do in underground garages. There were 181 rapes in the city last year, an increase of 17.5 per cent over 1970. Seventeen women have been raped this year … when every fairy tale comes real, so many things I would have done but clouds got in my way … Ackrab said police are patrolling garages as much as possible. He said people can get in easily because garage doors remain open for quite a while after vehicles have passed through … I looked at clouds from both sides now, I don’t know clouds at all … Detectives Harold Lambton and John Wells who took yesterday’s victim to the Wellesley Hospital said a man wearing a stolen maintenance worker’s coat grabbed the purse of Elvi …
Boysie couldn’t read any more. The record had come to an end. The story had shaken him. He thought of the woman in the brown winter coat. He had seen her many times while he was in the heat of want and sexual need, and he had never thought of luring her into the underground garage of his apartment building; and since he had never thought of doing that, he wondered what it would be like should he do it; but the moment he thought of it, he became nauseated, and for a moment he almost fell out of love with the woman because the
nasty
taste of the imagined act almost brought vomit to his lips. But still he wanted to know how it would feel. The story was intriguing.