The Bigger Light (8 page)

“Look, Dots, haul your …” And she held back, laughing, and Boysie got the chance to look down in her brassiere, and what he saw there did not belong to a woman who will soon be fifty years old. It made him very unhappy. It made him think of what he was doing to himself: he had deliberately tried to take the sensuality in his background out of his present life. His refusal to listen to calypso, his refusal to be happy in a West Indian way of wide mouths and winding backsides when dancing; his new desire to be quiet and intellectual, to listen to soft music which the Canadian young fellow called “civilized music,” and which he heard a man on the CBC television call classical music, his distant closeness with the woman in the winter coat, and his growing fondness for
floes and floes of angel’s hair with ice cream castles …
“Wait, Boysie, why you don’t go on a diet? Child,” she said turning to Dots, “Those people I works for, well I tell you, they have changed my life. You don’t know I stopped eating pork and things like that! Look how I look. You don’t see I tek offa a lotta weight. Granola. No milk in my tea …” (“But iron in your arse, though!” Boysie snickered, in his heart; and immediately got sick at his own raucousness and crudeness.) “… and I not puffing and puffing every time I climb a stairs.”

“I always telling Boysie that his belly looks like a manager-belly.”

“It big like that,” Bernice said. She patted him on his stomach. His trousers were almost hanging below his waistline. “You looking old before your time.”

“What I want a big-guts man for? They does get outta wind before I ready! Heh-heh-heh!” Boysie hated Dots for saying that. Once upon a time, she could say these things and they would not hurt him, in fact he would welcome them, because he was more sure of himself then; and when she said them and laughed at him, and he laughed with her, and her laughing became less derisory because he had made it that, he still felt like a man; and even if they were said in the presence of others, it didn’t bother him. But recently, her casual remarks had more edge to them. The slightest comment she made was now taken as an accusation and even as a rejection.

He was secure in material ways. He could not understand why the mention of the size of his belly should upset him so. There must be a deeper reason.

“Child, the fellow I seeing nowadays, I told you about him, didn’t I?” Dots found herself caught in this confidence, which she had never mentioned to Boysie; and so she looked sheepish, before she could give Bernice her acknowledgement. Boysie became alert now. He had not been seeing clearly lately. He should train his mind to listen more. There were things he had seen for years and they had not registered. For instance, the “pop-gun” tube. And Dots had replaced the one he had taken from her drawer. “Well that man is a man. He is as flat in his middle as Mistress Burrmann is on her chest, that bubbies-less bitch! … pardon me, Boysie, boy …”

“When you bringing your young man to meet me … to meet me and Boysie?”

“Anytime, girl, anytime! But he is so busy. All the time he
busy, busy, busy, reading one book after the next. He going through to be a lawyer. Got six more months, and then, I will be buying long white dress! How yuh like muh?”

“I saw two young boys tonight … was it tonight? … no, last week! Or last month? Anyhow, I saw two young boys last month going up in the elevator with we. They looked so strong, that if …”

“I am investing in that man.” Bernice said it quickly to avoid further embarrassment: Dots had made a slip. “I investing in he. I don’t want to burden him, and I don’t intend asking him for nothing. He don’t even have to be faithful to me. Faithful? What I want faithfulness for from a man? All I does want, child, is a little regular …”

“Did he tell you I saw him one evening coming home from work?”

“I watching him with Estelle, though! Like a blasted hawk, child. Estelle
likes
man. She likes more man than what John the Baptist read ’bout. But this time …”

“Look, gal, let me get up offa my arse and fix something for you to eat. I cook already whilst I was cleaning. I only have to make the gravy now, and dish. Help yourself to another drink. Boysie, don’t you see Bernice glass empty?”

“You ordering-’bout Boysie very much today, girl. I could get my own drink, man.” She laughed. She should not have laughed. Had she not laughed, Boysie would have taken it as a defence, as something in his favour; but she laughed, and made her words just another little game that they seemed to have been playing upon him. “You ordering Boysie …”

“What the hell you think he is there for? If I don’t order him, if I can’t order him, who you want to order him, then?”

And Bernice laughed very loudly, and got up, still laughing, plucked out that portion of her new dress that was stuck
to her behind, looked Boysie full in his eye, and went into the kitchen still laughing.

It was ten o’clock and the woman had not appeared yet. Boysie had to get to the barbershop before noon, because he wanted to go to the bank and make his monthly deposit and then be back home in time for the one o’clock CBC news. They were going to have a special broadcast about the war in Vietnam. Richard Nixon the president of America was playing the arse, Boysie felt; and he was banking on the Vietnamese to throw some blows in Nixon’s clothes. This is how he put it to the Canadian young fellow the previous night when they both took a break and drank a coffee from their work. Nixon was going to start bombing the North again, and Boysie wondered what the North was going to do. He was trying to follow the war, and at times he had difficulty deciding whether the Vietnamese were all Communists, or whether it was just the Viet Cong, and he wasn’t sure if the Viet Cong were in the North; but he liked the name Viet Cong. “They sure sound like Giants to me! I like that name, Viet Cong. Sometimes, my wife make me feel like one of them, a Viet Cong!” He was anxious to hear what the radio was going to say about the Viet Cong. Waiting now for the woman to appear, he wondered if in the eyes of a real Viet Cong he would look small, be a fool to be waiting on a woman he didn’t even know, and whom he had not seen close up; but he felt that the Viet Cong were patient people, and so he felt better when he thought of that. Yes, he must start behaving like a Viet Cong, and in that way, Dots would respect him.

It didn’t matter that his stomach was bulging, he’d bet that there were some Viet Cong whose stomachs were bigger than his. “If Henry was here I would argue with him that a Viet
Cong could have a big guts and still be a fucking gorilliphant!” He laughed aloud, as he used Henry’s favourite word —
gorilliphant
— a gorilla that was a giant. “Henry was a fucking gorilliphant!” He walked around the apartment trying to take his mind off the woman.

He was dressed. From the first time when he realized that his life was changing, he had decided to dress more tidily and properly, paying attention to appearances as much as to quality. He had the money to afford both. This morning, although he was just going to the barber’s, he was dressed in a three-piece suit of a dark grey material with a very conservative stripe in it. His tie was a darker grey, and he made sure that his socks were black as his shoes were. He had thought of changing to boots, as almost every man was wearing these days, but he had seen too many hippies and loud-mouthed West Indians wearing them, so he drew the line there. His topcoat was a fawn-coloured brownish material, cut in the military style. He remembered, whenever he wore this coat, that he had first seen it on Englishmen in movies during the war in Europe. His hair was cut short these days, and to look at him you won’t think that he was going to the barber’s today. But he had become so meticulous and so fastidious about dress that he decided he had to look trim always. The only thing on which he spent more time than shaving every morning was his newspapers. He looked very much like an undertaker this morning.

And he was impatient and nervous, walking from the window that looked out on the street, to the bathroom (where he passed water, even though he had done so just five minutes before) and back again. He went into the bedroom, in Dots’s drawer, and felt under the nightgown for the “pop-gun” thing; and it was there. He had thrown away the one he had long ago when he discovered that Dots had replaced it. The record
player was still turned on, so he turned the switch and the red light went out. A record was on the turntable, and he took it off and dusted it (“This blasted woman thinks that I am made outta money!”) and put it back into its jacket.

Then he got the idea. It occurred to him in a very simple way, and he wasn’t sure that that was what he should do; but it was a good idea. He searched through his collection of fifty-odd records, and picked out all the calypsoes and the rhythm-and-blues and steel band songs. He put them tidily into a pile. He then searched the jackets of the remaining records to see that the records matched the jackets. He picked up the pile of records he had placed on the floor, opened the door, closed it but without locking it walked to the elevator, waited (“Good morning, Missis Thorne. Nice day, eh? Not too cold today …”), went down with Mrs. Thorne his neighbour across the hall, and walked straight to the incinerator. He threw the pile of records through the chute, wiped his hands as if he had just got rid of something filthy, and went back up in the elevator. He opened the door, closed it and locked it this time, went to the window and leaned over on his elbows to wait. There were four records remaining in his collection. (“Wait till that woman comes home! If she opens her mouth to say one word, well …”)

The woman was coming. She was coming, and he was getting very nervous as he saw the white floppy beretlike hat she always wore; and he wagered with himself that she would be wearing a coat of another colour, but she was in the same brown coat, and the same dark tall winter boots, and the same large tinted glasses so large that they made her face look like a timid animal’s, and in her hand was the same white shopping bag, made out of plastic. It looked like plastic because it was shiny. He wondered what she had in it. She walked upright with no swagger, without incitement towards herself, without
self-consciousness, without a swinging gait as Bernice did, and she walked out of his sight, and he remained at the window thinking that “I gotta see that woman close-up once of these days!” He was going down now in the elevator on his way to the garage underground where he parked his truck on the weekends. He had never given much thought to the safety or to the danger of these underground garages, probably because he had just seen his strange woman pass.

He got into the truck and revved up the engine. “This damn cold weather could kill an engine, to say nothing about a man, it is so damn cold … wonder why some places are so damn cold!”; and as he waited for the engine to warm up, he felt inside his coat pockets for his cigarettes and he pulled them out, and with them were the two clippings: women in underground garages where a
26-year-old single nurse was raped yesterday afternoon
but it is morning now,
in the underground garage of an apartment building in the Sherbourne-Bloor area
, “Christ, what some men won’t do for a piece o’ pussy!”
and a 36-year-old mother of four
“A mother? Even a woman who is a mother isn’t safe in this blasted country!”
who was beaten by a suspected pursesnatcher in the underground garage of her Scarborough apartment Monday night, died of her injuries last night in Scarborough Centenary Hospital
“I wonder why Dots changed this second story to a different hospital when the paper says Scarborough. Did she really say Scarborough, when she read it out to me, or …”; the motor was ready now, and he drove out. Suppose he was parking his truck one morning early, about three, and he saw a woman in the underground garage, would he rape her, would he make a pass at her, would he make conversation with her? “Shit! what am I thinking?”

These thoughts disappeared as he emerged from the garage to meet the sun, and it was a bright day and very cold,
and he remembered asking Henry many years ago how it could be cold with the sun still shining, but he couldn’t remember what answer Henry gave him. “That bastard had an answer for every question.” It was probably a philosophical answer, too. But he was by himself this morning and he had things to do. As he waited for the light, he saw the old ladies with their shopping bags coming from the Liquor Store, dressed in the same faces and winter coats as they wore to church every Sunday morning; and he wondered what exactly was in those bags. He was walking between an alley one night not too long ago, to clean one of his contract offices, just a laneway, and he stumbled upon three men, their faces red around the cheeks and their necks white like parts of a dead chicken, or like paste or flour dough, in black coats shabby around the elbows, (“Why do bums always wear black?”), drinking from the mouth of a bottle. As he passed, one of them hailed him, “Hey, buddy! Sir, just a minute, sir,” and he halted in his pace, for he was no longer afraid or scornful of confronting drunks either in elevators or in laneways; and the man came up to him, with the bottle of wine in his hand, it was something named “67” or “76” or it could have been “1776,” it was so dark in the laneway; and he knew what “1776” meant, the independence of America, it should have been, could have been 1776; but this man said to him, “Could you spare a dime or a quarter?” Boysie stopped, put his hand in his overalls, fumbled a little and took out a thick wad of bills. “You buying coffee or you are buying wine with this?” The man’s teeth showed and he was missing some in the front and some at the back, and the whiskers on his face bristled and he said, “Take a swig, sir. You’re a goddamn gentleman.” Boysie put the bottle to his lips, and when he took it away, almost half was gone. He gave the man a five-dollar bill.
“You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re from Jamaica, right? You’re goddamn okay, mister!”

These old ladies were hurrying to cross the street with the light changing now from amber before he moved off. One of them, — there were only three crossing together, but not in the same company, not as friends, — wore a crucifix around her neck. He moved off, turning right onto Wellesley Street East, and he looked about him and saw all the derelict men and women, most of them past fifty and, certainly older than thirty (“The Eskimos live to be thirty years old, ain’t that a bitch, Mr. Cumberbatch? In my country, in
their
country really, ’cause it is theirs, but they live to be thirty and when I am thirty I will just be beginning to hit my highest earning power! What do you think about that, Mr. Cumberbatch? I am a Canadian, but they’re the
real
Canadians!”), bulging in their bodies in places where you won’t expect them to bulge, the women beyond the child-bearing age and child-bearing interest, walking heavy as if a barrel of water is suspended just below what used to be their waists; and the men, some of them thin and emaciated, some fat in a way that a woman is usually fat low around the hips, and their complexion like, like like what, Boysie? “Like what, Boysie? Goddamn, you never see one o’ them bastards down by you on Parliament Street with their skin the colour o’ putty?” Yes, their skin is like putty, and they always seem to be in a small hurry if they are not too slowed down with wine. He thought he must soon leave this area: for this was not the place to live when he was striving so hard for appearances, and grappling with a new language. (“If a king was living in a fucking pig-sty, what would you call him? A king, or a pig?” He and Henry were drinking one Saturday afternoon in their favourite bar, the Paramount Tavern, when Henry asked him this question; for Boysie had
just described the area in which Dots had signed the lease for the apartment. Boysie did not know the city in those days; and to be living in the Parliament Street area or the Ontario Street area did not mean anything significant to him, except that “the rent is blasted reasonable. You are talking a lotta shite ’bout pigpens and kings, but I’s a fucking unemployed man!”)