The Bigger Light (7 page)

“Child, the music was so good! They played Aretha Franklin and calypsoes the whole night! I danced every dance. And with every man I could find.” The noise again, Boysie observed. The noise and the parties and the drinking and the dancing. He wanted to change himself out of that suit of clothes. “The three o’ we used to have those very nice times right in this very apartment.”

“The same thing I was telling Boysie. He been tekking me lately to some place where all they do is drink and sit down and listen to a woman singing about
clouds
!” Dots laughed sensuously and sneeringly. Bernice knew it was directed at Boysie. “Blasted clouds!”

“Clouds? You making sport!” And then Bernice laughed too.

“Clouds, I tell you.”

“Them things up in the sky?” She exploded now, and slapped Boysie on his legs. “Boy, you going crazy? I don’t even remember ever seeing a cloud in the whole sky in Toronto. You, Dots?”

“My husband’s head up in the clouds.”

“That’s the song you was telling me about?” The song was now playing. Bernice listened to the words, and smiled. “
Floes and floes of angel’s hair …
” She sang along with the music. “I listen to this every day. My lady plays it almost every day. It must be her favourite, too.” She hummed along with the
music when she didn’t know the lyrics. “I still don’t like the kind o’ music they call rock, though.”

“What rock got to do with it?”

“I just telling you that I do not like rock music. I wonder if by rock, they mean like a rock-stone or rock, like in a rocking-chair? I don’t see neither of the two o’ them things in this rock music.”

“I am talking about clouds, Bernice. And you telling me about rock music.”

“Anything that is not jazz music, or blues, or calypsoes, child, is rock to me! My lady that I works for holds the same opinion. She is a very nice person, and I agree with everything that she says. She’s very nice that way.” Bernice considered the matter settled, that Dots didn’t have an opinion to combat her knowledge, and she settled herself in the chair, and said, “I went shopping yesterday. You should see the things I bought on my charge card! I bought a nice maxi-nightgown such as I see in a fashion book. Mauve.”

“What about a drink, Bernice?” Boysie was making one for himself. Bernice nodded.

“Yuh telling me ’bout the nightgown, gal.”

“Scotch, please Boysie. On the rocks. I drinks strictly on the rocks. I got myself some shoes, too. You know the new ones, with the thick soles, well, them. As I was in the store, I decided to spend a few dollars on myself, and before I left that place, my charge plate was heavy to the tune o’ three hundred dollars. Thanks, Boysie. I almost buy-out the whole blasted store. Got myself some new dresses for the fall, too.” She was wearing a new dress now. It was new in style. Dots thought she herself was the one who set the styles and fashions between them; but now Bernice was taking over; and Dots watched her and looked at the dress, and complimented her, but she did
not feel happy about it. Bernice moved about in the chair, fixing things on the dress to attract attention. “Child, guess what I bought yesterday, too. A hair dryer. You must come and see my place. I changed it right around …” (Boysie was thinking of his bed, and what he found underneath it yesterday; and he was looking around as Bernice talked to see whether his own living quarters were just as well furnished as Bernice’s. Dots had not yet thrown out the plastic flowers which she kept in a shiny gold-looking vase on the coffee table; and there was one in the bedroom too; and another one on the dining area table. Boysie hated plastic flowers. He had never seen plastic flowers in any of the offices he cleaned, and they were merely offices, and not even homes. Once he bought a pot of flowers — he did not know the name of the flowers, but he liked them, liked their full strong colour of red — and brought it home, and in two days it died because Dots did not water it, was not accustomed to watering the plastic flowers; and she seemed to be glad that it had died, that it was no longer competing with her plastic flowers, which she cleaned and shone and rubbed down like an athlete getting his muscles polished after a very hard race; and when she threw it out, with the flower pot, the three vases of plastic flowers became uglier in his mind.) “There’s a lovely florist near where I living and I got him to fix me a lovely bunch of red roses, and child, you should see how one simple thing like fresh and real flowers could light up a person’s life! I watch Estelle sit down and look at that bunch o’ roses for almost half day last Friday. As if she was remembering something. You know what I mean? It wasn’t no simple thing like watching a movie, which you know is here today and gone tomorrow. Not that. Estelle was watching those red roses on my glass-top Italian modern coffee table as if she was looking into a mirror or a crystal ball that contained her fortune. And
I got to tell you something, Dots. I was stanning up in the kitchen watching the steaks we had for supper, and I got a glimpse o’ her face, and so help me God, I have never see my sister’s face light up so pretty, and contain so much meaning, just by watching a simple thing like roses …” (Boysie liked roses too; and he first came to like them when Henry wrote a poem that talked about roses. Estelle had asked him to read that poem, the day Henry’s death was reported in the newspaper. The poem was printed beside his photograph, too. Boysie remembered that he used to be a gardener back in Barbados, working from seven in the morning till six at night, at the Marine Hotel; and it was his job to keep the roses red and blooming; and in all that time he never thought he could pick one rose and give it to his mother, or to his woman; and he never liked roses then, for that reason. He hated roses, then. But it was Henry who brought him back to roses. Henry’s poem went something like,
But was it really time that killed the rose of our love, was it time, and was it time to die, is it time, this rose? Time has no power over roses or something-or-the-other …
He was trying to remember it well, this poem about the roses; and he remembered clearly that it was Estelle who had asked him that Saturday morning when they looked into the newspaper and saw Henry’s photograph, it was …)

“Estelle remembered the poem, then.”

“What you say, Boysie?”

“Time has no power over roses …”

“Bernice, I ask you. What the hell is this man saying? Do you know? ’cause I can’t mek head nor tail …”

“You haven’t make the drink for me yet, Boysie?”

And that was another thing. Orders. Orders orders and more orders. He had never given anybody an order in his life. In the large rose gardens of the Marine Hotel back in
Barbados, there was no gardener below him, and he could not give orders to the roses. He was the head gardener. But there was no assistant gardener. And for weeks he wondered why that was the arrangement. Once he tried to give orders to the roses: one flower bed had refused to grow and blossom, and he yelled at it, and said, “Kiss my arse, then, if you don’t want to grow! Water won’t mek you grow, well tek this, then!”, and it was his foot, trampling the rose garden; and the night watchman who lingered about the premises during the day because he was in love with the head cook, a woman, saw him and reported him to the day manager who fired Boysie on the spot, right in the middle of the rose garden. “I order you to leave this premises, and never come back. That is an order!” Boysie got another job at the Hastings Hotel, in the tourist district of the island; and although he was hired as Chief Gardener, there still was no one for him to give orders to, because he was the only gardener employed by the hotel. So he gave orders to himself, and this time he did not step into the garden beds, he merely stopped watering them as often as he used to water them at the Marine Hotel. It was a step downwards.

“Gimme some more Scotch in this drink, please, Boysie!” Bernice asked. It sounded like an order to him, but he gave her the Scotch anyhow. Dots was smoking a cigarette, so she couldn’t get up to do it. She gave one to Bernice who handled it, when she lit it, less clumsily than Boysie had ever seen her do before. Boysie could feel the change in her, too.

“I brought you something, Dots.” She got up and went to her coat, and when she didn’t find it, she went instead to the string bag in which she kept the shoes she wore indoors when it was snowing outdoors. She brought back a small parcel and gave it to Dots.

As Dots unwrapped the parcel, Boysie could see that
Bernice was wearing both lipstick and eye shadow these days. “This old bitch, she must be pushing fifty!” He wanted her to be fifty years old, and therefore outside the pale of any sexual craving he might have for her; and he wanted his wife to hurry up and be old, be fifty too, for the same reason. He was getting tired. Dots was forty-two, pushing forty-three, but she looked (and sometimes behaved) younger than a woman in her late thirties.

“Thanks,” she said. Bernice had brought her some expensive lipstick and eye shadow. (“This bitch wants my wife to be like her, or what?” Boysie thought, jealous and envious and feeling left out. He thought of the woman in the brown winter coat, and he tried to see her face close up, but he could not because each time he saw her he was seven floors in the sky; and he wanted her to be younger than Dots, but he would have to wait to see whether she was in fact younger. Nobody could really look younger than Dots, he knew.) And he watched his wife very closely as she sat down talking with Bernice, and he saw the firmness in her legs, her forty-three-year-old legs, and her breasts which had not yet begun to sag and her behind which was firm and warm as a pear not quite ripe, and he wondered why she didn’t become pregnant, for he had tried every night for a very long time, a long time ago, and when he could not get her pregnant, he gave up; he stopped making love to her at all, and then he tried, only casually now, for the purpose and the fun of their lovemaking had addled so far as he was concerned. (“I wonder if this woman is on the pill?”) Dots never mentioned those things to him, and he never thought of asking her; so funny now, without provocation, but only through speculation, that he should bother to think about this. He went back in his mind to the contents of her drawer in the bedroom, which he would glance through,
not really checking up on her, but trying to find something very personal that belonged to her; something which would draw him closer to her, he thought, which would also make him know something about her that she did not tell him, that she did not offer to disclose, that he had not asked about. All he found, one morning, when the woman in the brown coat was late arriving out of the subway station, was a tube. The tube is white. It is about six inches long. One end of it is larger than the other. And it looks like a “pop-gun,” which he used to make and shoot peas with, back in Barbados when he was a small mischievous boy killing lizards. This “pop-gun” thing did not take his interest long, for that was not what he wanted to find in her drawer. (“In her drawer! Heh-heh-hehhhh! In her drawer, in her drawers, in her … if Henry was still living, I could make a joke outta this and he might even know what this things is!” At times like this, he reverted back to Barbadian dialect, because he was close to himself; and because he had not really learned how to speak the new language which he felt would release him from some of his torment. He had to be satisfied with his dialect until the new language could express his innermost thoughts. Dots was the same way, too: she talked a formal, strained brand of English at work and when she had visitors — until she forgot — or if the superintendent of the building was talking to her; but when she was angry, or when she was really close to her husband, she talked in the only tongue she knew intimately. “In her drawers, yeah, heh-heh-heh. What a joke!”) He had put the tube into his pocket that morning, and had forgotten it there for two days while he thought of ways he could ask the young Canadian fellow if the new language he was learning had any philosophical explanation for it. But something told him it was personal, the kind of question he could not ask a young man, and a stranger at
that. So he brought it back home and absentmindedly put it in his own drawer. He thought of it now, and went into the bedroom, and took it out, after making sure that Bernice and Dots were deep in their conversation; and he opened her drawer, tried to remember exactly where he had taken it from, and when he found the nightgown, the long white one which Dots never wore (she wore it once on their sixth wedding anniversary night), he lifted it, and found another one. “Jesus Christ!”

“Boysie, what are you doing in there!”

It was Bernice calling. Her voice was beginning to take on the effects of the straight Scotch. He had never given anybody an order in his life. Bernice was calling him to join them. “Man, they got a first-class calypso band down at the Mercury Club now, boy! You shouldda seen me last night, and the Saturday night before that! I dance the Watusi — is that what they calls it? I dance the Jamaican dance, and after I had in a few watered-down rums that they served down there, you shouldda seen Bernice on that floor with a young man, doing the Reggae! I Reggaed for so! Why don’t you take Dots down to the Mercury? That is where the action is!” The noise in her voice and the noise from the West Indians down there at the Mercury and the “pop-gun” thing in his hand, in his trousers pocket, and Dots in the kitchen trying on the eye-shadow makeup, and Bernice drinking and smoking, her eyes becoming red, her new dress in place and fitting her properly, and her hair now streaked with grey and in the Afro style and making her look dignified and very desirable.

“Are you seeing mens, now?” Dots was in a good mood, and her voice was loud and sharp and it had that Barbadian edge to it. “You stepping out with mens? At your age, gal? And young mens, to-boot!”

“I can’t tell you what a fool I was all these years! Working my arse off. Saving up money. And life passing me by.”

“You at the age now, gal.”

“When you miss it for so long, and you find it suddenly …”

“Oh, Christ!” Dots gave out her raucous sensual laugh. “I hope you are eating green bananas and drinking stout, gal. Young man does give old woman the belly!”