The Origin of Waves (13 page)

“Goddamn!” John says. “This is the first time I have heard you talk like this! Goddamn! Normally, not even in my profession, do I hear a man bear his soul like this.”

“It wasn’t
me
I was talking about.”

“Bullshit! You were a sprinter!”

“This story is not my story.”

“Getouttahere! You came second in the hundred-yard sprint at school!”

“It isn’t. If it was, I would-have told it in the first person.”

“Are you for real? Come on! You’re talking to me, your ace-boon, remember? The fellow who grew up with you, who went with you to the Public Library every Saturday. Look. Lemme tell you something. Women can face the truth easier than men, and are the only people who can face the truth the way you just faced it, though you’re trying to bullshit me that this isn’t you. Your language, man. Your language gave-you-way. The emotion in your story, even the details of the story, the hundred-yard dash reference; and even if the details of the story don’t all apply to you, the language in the narrative is yours, brother. The language. Plus, there is certain details that only the perpetrator, or the participant, or a man who experienced that experience could know. But who the fuck cares? Who cares? There ain’t one man, not one motherfucker who hasn’t been fucked-over by a woman, whether he deserve it or not. And most men, lemme tell ya, fellow, most men deserve to be fucked! So, you were
horned
. Fuck it! You was had, baby,
you was had!
I told you so, hours ago, before we had this last martini. I told you the meaning of the dream about falling outta bed and about the bull with the horns and the three men. Surprising, maybe for you, but not really surprising to me. You went over the
same
things in your dream as in your
story. You was
had
. But you can’t face it, even though you know,
ipso-factually
speaking, you was had. Horned. Cuckold. Cudgelled. Call it what the fuck you like,
you was fucked
, baby! Join the club.”

He is looking at me, like a brother, a big brother who cannot feel the actual pain but whose compassion is meant to ease it. And although I do not have a brother, John is always like one to me, a big brother. So, here he is now, sitting in this crowded bar, in this foreign city, Toronto, so far from Durham, North Carolina, in the South where he now lives, giving me the feeling that he has been coming to this bar for years, every afternoon, with me, and listening to my stories, and understanding them. As if the cord that first joined us from those days on the beach at Paynes Bay, with the sand the same colour as the conch-shell, has never been severed.

“Enter the brotherhood, baby. Another?”

“Sure!”

“Change the gin, this time.”

“Bombay gin,” I suggest.

“You-got-it!”

“I never told this to anyone,” I say.

“You think you had me fooled, eh?” he says. “Open your heart, man.”

“You know something? Do you know that I have never in my life made a choice? A choice that was my own choice. Beginning with the place I went to school, Trinity College here. Do you know I have never made a
choice, I mean, never did anything I
knew
was what I wanted to do, by my own decision, and not what either somebody-else, or the system, made me do. Am I making sense? I have never had the opportunity to talk about this. Forty, forty-five, fifty years I held this inside myself. But when I think about it, I know in my mind that this is the meaning of the experience of living in a place you are not born in. And you know something else? Women. I have never made a personal choice, meaning I never found myself in the position to pick out the woman who is a woman I want and love,
my choice
. What I mean by this is that it is either the situation, the circumstance, like standing at a bus stop, or in an art gallery looking at pictures which I don’t understand, and a person, a woman comes behind me and she then stands beside me, and begins to say something, and we talk, and then I would invite her for a coffee or a drink, purely out of boredom, and one thing would lead to another. And before you hear the shout, something is started. But it is not my choice to have something started. Only the coffee or the drink. Am I making sense to you? Am I the only man with this vacantness, this vacuum of making choices? This makes any sense to you? For instance, living here in this city. Toronto. You’re surrounded with a majority of women who come from a different culture and background than you. Women you meet but do not know. Even with the rise in immigration and multiculturalism, still you are surrounded by strangers. In your job.
On the street. In classes. In bed. At a concert. At an art gallery. And at a bus stop. Everywhere. But deep down in your heart, you’re fighting it and fighting it. And you know something? It’s a losing battle. Looking for that special woman you really want to know, or that
other
woman. In your social group, in your work, in your mind. As things, as these things work on your mind, you’re still walking around like a zombie, with your body telling you one thing, and your heart telling you something else. And I find myself painting women black. In colour. And in culture. Not jet-black, but black when they are not, and I am colouring them black. You know what I mean? The loveliest white woman, bright, decent, intelligent, with a good body and character. Just saying these things, I hope nobody is hearing me say them, because I am telling you things that I tell myself, in the privacy of my house, sitting down alone, with the goddamn jumbo can of Black Flag in my hand. And for somebody-else but you to hear these thoughts, they would certainly certify me as mad.
Worse!
A racist. Am I a racist?”

“Cobblers are black. The ants you kill with your Black Flag are black.”

“Am I a racist?”

“You’re goddamn, a goddamn lonely man.”

“Am I?”

“Cobblers and wood-ants are black.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing. It don’t mean shit!”

“Cobblers are black and ants are black? It must mean something in your profession.”

“Women are more honest than men in relationships.”

“Women are more honest in relationships?”

“Not that I am a sex therapist. I won’t touch that with a ten-foot pole. But I happen to know a few things. I see it in them, all the time. Honesty. I’m not talking about fidelity, although you may have a point there. Women are more honest in relationships. It sounds like one of the Ten Commandments, doesn’t it?”

“I remember once-upon-a-time, that …”

“Not again! Goddamn!”

“It was me. I was the person.”

“Who was you?”

“The man in the lobby. The man in the story. The man going-up in the elevator, and ringing the apartment bell. The man going-down in the elevator. The man is me.”

“Who was the Indian?”

“I remember, once-upon-a-time, when I was at the apartment, she was cooking cow-heel with curry, red kidney beans and rice, and it was strange because I had never seen anybody cook a cow-heel. And an Indian fellow was there. Her mother called him ‘Cousin Cyril,’ and then
she
called him ‘Cousin Cyril.’ And then the little boy, who was just learning to talk, called him ‘Douzen Cyllil.’ ”

“There you go again, with the same cow-thing. Cow? Cow-heel? Cow-horn? Horn?
Horning?
Follow
your instincts, man. Always try not to disbelieve your instincts because you happen to live in a so-called sophisticated society that is civilize. We are instincts-men. We live by our instincts. Cow-heel and cow-horns.
Horning
!”

“Sitting down here this afternoon, or this evening, whichever it is now, reminds me when we used to sit-down on the beach after school, after elementary school, and after Combermere, and then later on, after Harrison College, and talk, in our cut-down trousers with the sandflies coming into our mouths and biting us, and we couldn’t even see them. Or watching the crabs crawling over the sand making noise and scratching little trails back into the sea, and how the sea would take them up and swallow them, and erase the trails. And in all that time, in all those times sitting on the beach, I never knew if those crabs could swim.”

“I know you can’t. But crabs can swim.”

“Once-upon-a-time, I was going to learn to swim. After I came here. It was a Canadian woman who was at Trinity with me who threatened to teach me to swim, in a swimming pool, in a public swimming pool, not in the sea. Or the Lake. But that was back in 1959 or 1960, when swimming pools in this city were restricted to white people, and black people couldn’t get a dip in them. Matter of fact, there is a lotta things I never had the urge to do, in this place and in this country. The man serving us, the barman, for instance. For years and years you would never see a black man as a waiter in a
bar in this city, farthermore a barman, a bartender in a bar that was …”

“The son of a bitch still don’t know Keats or Wordsworth! But he sure knows his Grecian urns!”

“As if the colour of our skin was going to rub-off in the water and turn the water blackish. In 1959, I could not enter a public swimming pool and take a dip. A public swimming pool! They didn’t have signs saying
‘No Blacks Allowed nor Dogs’
when the woman was trying to get me to learn to swim. They were already taken down. But they used to have them. The restriction was written in actions and attitudes. In people’s minds. Once, though, a fellow from Grenada jumped in a pool, and the moment the splash settled, everybody was outta that pool. He wondered what happened. Nobody told him what happened. Not a thing. The only person who remained in the pool was his friend who had taken him to the pool in the first place, Max Goldstein. Max Goldstein didn’t tell him nothing, for years; but years later when the two of them were lawyers practising on Bay Street, which in Toronto is the same as Wall Street in the States, Max and him were having a drink in a bar much like this one, and Max said, ‘Fuck it! Something I had to tell you years ago when the two of us were in final year. Remember the pool I took you to on Eglinton Avenue West? It was the summer. In July. Fucking hot that afternoon. Remember? And you did a back-flip in the fucking pool? The next day, my father got a fucking letter from the fucking
superintendent. Friend, you don’t know the time it took me to say this. You muddied their fucking pool with that back-flip! Fuck it! How many years since we were called to the bar? Five? Five and one spent in fucking Articling, two in Law School. Five and five’re ten. Plus one. Eleven. Plus two is thirteen. Thirteen fucking years it’s taken me to tell you this. To admit this fuckery! And here you are today, with your own fucking swimming pool in your backyard fucking bigger than that fucking community pool. Ain’t life a fucker?’ With me, it’s the same thing with golf and tennis. Tennis and golf, two things I distinguish a man from the West Indies by. Meaning that if they come to Trinity College, and start a lotta talk about going on the golf-links or the tennis courts, I know they’re full o’ shit! That they weren’t really black back in the West Indies! It used to be like that. Now, there is a change.”

I sit and remember those early days and I try to forget the worst of them.

He sits and sips his drink.

“Your mother was a riot,” he says at last. “Your mother was something else! You ran through my gate once, in the backyard one Friday evening after school, with your legs marked-up and your shirt tear-up, after your mother had-dropped some of the stiffest licks in your ass! Remember? You wanted to be like one o’ those boys who were lay-by early from school, at two in the afternoon instead of three when school normally lay-by, so they could go down to the Garrison Savannah
Tennis Club and
feel
tennis balls. Remember? Perhaps
that
is why you don’t like tennis. And after you left the island, and was here studying, it took a man like the Great Dipper Barrow, Errol Walton Barrow, when he became the first Prime Minister, that the first official thing he did was to check some musty files in the old Colonial Secretary’s office, the Col-Sec office, and find out that the Garrison Savannah Tennis Club was a public facility, just like the public swimming pool you was talking about. The Savannah was renting the premises from the Guvvament for one dollar a year.
One dollar!
Goddamn! And your mother, just like my Old Lady, was a woman uneducated in a formal sense, but really educated better than us, in the real sense. My Old Lady …” He takes a large white handkerchief, folded into quarters, from the top pocket in his jacket, lets it fall to its full size, and wipes his eyes. When he takes the handkerchief opened with a slight fling of his hand, from his face, I can see that his eyes are filled with tears. “I didn’t see her being lowered in the goddamn grave. I did not get the message in time to lift her goddamn head. My goddamn Old Lady, a
queen
!”

I keep my martini glass in my hand, without tasting the powerful, clear liquid in it, while he allows the tears to come into his eyes and fall into his glass and fall on his expensive custom-made suit. Some men close to us watch, and hold their heads down, sensing the moment of passion, knowing of some powerful emotion in their own lives, which was so full and uncontrollable that
they themselves had done this same thing in public. But shedding tears in a bar? And a man doing it? And not even sitting beside a woman, to make this expression more understandable, or rationalizing? Or as a camouflage?

“Only once before this, only once, have I done this in public. Cried like a goddamn baby. Couldn’t help myself. Years ago. At a funeral. At Gloria’s funeral. Gloria was a woman from Barbados who for some reason found herself in France when I was still married to Hyacinthe, my
parlez-vous
wife, and was a gradual-student. Met her at a Wessindian club where they played calypsos that were bad and old by the time they reached Paris-France. Looked good, too! Gloria was a big woman, with big eyes, with big legs, with big hips, with big bubbies, with a goddamn big heart. Had a man. Not a very good man. Would invite me and some other students to her apartment for real down-home cooking. Her favourite was cou-cou and tin-salmon, canned salmon. And coconut bread. You know, I would go to her apartment by bus and train, all hours of the night and in all kinds o’ weather, and sometimes there would be the two of us. Just Gloria and me. And as I said, this woman with big hips and big bubbies and big eyes and lips was looking so good! And it never crossed my mind to axe her for a piece, although I
knew
that she woulda give me a piece, if I had-just axed, in the right way. With me and Gloria it was just a matter of companionship …”