In the Slammer With Carol Smith (24 page)

I take a crossblock, down which there is one of those dust-riddled parks the city has ordained for new high-risers, as vents meant to keep the buildings from pressing workers permanently in. There are no sleepers there yet. They’ll be at the small carousings but will arrive later. When weather is clement the under-population rises to take possession.

I sit down. A bench is always halfway. When I press the stems of the flower bunches between its slats they look as if grown there—the kind of papery bloom a bench in a city would have. On which I myself might spend the night in my version of the ‘public shelter’ guaranteed me—but only if the authorities care to provide me with a phone on which I could call emergency 911.

The front page of the Help Wanted is all Temps, every agency ad yodeling like a band of alpinists. MANPOWER** Reap the Benefits, THE HOTTEST, ‘Your Options Are Wide Open, TIGER**’ is Excellence, STOP HOPING Dial A JOB.… If I can’t handle Wordperfect or Windows systems they’ll train me. To operate a Macintosh I see that 50 wpm is a must. Some promise medical and services, and paid vacations. None supply housing, but with a GLAMOUR JOB in GLAMOUR CO’s, or even HI FRIDAY PAY I could perhaps get in at the Y?

There’s no place to pee near this park. The office patronage doesn’t need one. Neither do I at the moment, but I am remembering how hard it is for women on the outside. To scrounge about, and find nothing, even the coffee-shop denying it has a ‘facility,’ because it’s seen you before. To have a place of your own—is that copping out? Or the place where all the compromises begin? Let them. I unhitch my flowerbed, and walk off.

The corner I’m nearing belongs to the anti-fur activist. She’s still there. She knows me, but she has no nodding acquaintances. She can’t change focus. Her anger has to stay pure.

‘Excuse me—’ I say. ‘I pass you so often—I’m staying nearby. And you keep such long hours. Where do you relieve yourself?’

‘Don’t worry about me. Take this.’ When I take the petition I’m to sign she says: ‘The super in the building on the corner lets me, the basement toilet. He’s a sympathizer. He loves dogs, cats, all animals. He says where he comes from they ate cat. And dog.’ When she shudders her mass of frizzy hair ripples in the breeze.

‘Why go just for anti-fur?’ I say. I honestly wonder. ‘Why not for people who live on the edge? Or babies with AIDS.’

‘You’re one of those, eh?’ The voice is hoarse, the eyes narrow. ‘Maybe when they skin people so they can wear the pelt in winter, I will. Or breed them, like for fox and mink.’ She slaps at the petition. ‘So will you take this home and sign it, or won’t you?’ Her bare arm is no hairier than mine, but her teeth are pointy—could argument have focused them also?

‘Oh of course,’ I say. ‘I too am an animal.’

And pass on quickly, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. ‘Whew, Martyn,’ I would say if he were here, ‘it’s no slouch is it, being an activist?’ And we would laugh together. We would certainly not cry.

I stop in my tracks. He is here. He has entered my monologue. Correction. He has been in it all this time—and all the while listening—as plainly as if actually perched on the edge of the desk in the glass office, casually swinging a leg in its paddle-shaped shoe. I can hear that voice, lazy in cadence, swift in reply, see that face by turns broad and hawk-thin, somber as a bust of Caesar speaking, or stretching to tell a joke—an actor’s face, taking you into its mood, but never insincere. I can even reproduce, in fair facsimile, the gist of what he might say.

Whatever his counsel, will his presence haunt my meditation wherever I go? And even my acts?

‘And where are you going, Carol?’ the voice says, not so casual after all.

Halfway down the block, at Martyn’s building, the lamppost at the curb is lit, its pear-shaped iron finial veiled by smog. In this city-on-the-sea, which no longer smells of the sea, the empty avenues yawn like the jaws of barracudas swimming in the rubble left to them. Yet its street lamps glow with operetta romance. As if no masses for neglected souls are to be sung here, only the lacy choruses out of
La Bohème.
My musical aunt used to allow no one to touch that Red Seal record, murmuring as the faded scratching ended: ‘Poignant, to a degree.’

At this hour, maybe past 10 pm, any loners walking would loom like Jonahs spat out of those shark-jaws, but tonight there’s no one. At the top of Martyn’s building my borrowed window is the sole one lit. Standing up there, one sees the solitary lamp below, its iron stanchion glistening. If there were someone leaning there—I say again to Martyn—it could be a painting.

As I near it, there is someone. A man loafs there, one palm and elbow against the post, head cocked toward it. But this is not a painting.

He doesn’t yet see me. A vision would not.

I keep walking. He sees me.

Am I seeing double? An image in my head, and a man waiting?

‘Carol. Carol.’

I have never had visions. Nor seen double.

This is sanity, a deep wave of it stretching me top to toe.

The flowers rustle, crushed against him. ‘Wall.’

Blending, almost the same wood-mushroom color, except for the pink around the bandage on his shoulder, we have exchanged limbs, tongues. Our bodies fit. Nuzzling, we have mingled our animal scents. We are lying side-by-side now, but separate. It has amused him to take down the other Shelter-Pak from its hook in the hall.

‘We had no room for beds here. Six men, sometimes eight. As well as me.’

And now—one woman. I have a sense of his usually crowded life. Of how he seemed when we met. Easy with friends. Ensconced in them. And then—to plump for a life with me? ‘It’s been a fine shakedown for me,’ I say, choosing the word carefully.

Above us is that woman’s snapshot of her offspring. All born since she left, but how long were she and Martyn together before? I feel again the intensity of her call.

‘They won’t be coming back,’ he’s saying. ‘That troupe. Or any other. They adored the theater—it lifted them out of the ruck. But now, they want to be back in.’

And him?

We’re pussyfooting, walking on eggs, and mutually aware of that. Still heavy with the physical, happy with it. But one emerges, if not sad, still oneself.

‘I won’t be going back there—not for a long time. If ever.’ But the ‘ever’ sounds shaky. The only part of him that does.

‘You’re no expatriate. I can tell.’

He takes my hand across the spread-out packs we’re lying on. ‘That word, I can hear it preach from my own youth.… When now—we can step across countries like they’re mudpuddles. Chat a man up from another continent like he’s standing next to you at the urinal.… No one’s going to be able to keep one nation stamped on the heart.’

I have my eyes closed. ‘I love listening to you. You’re so literate.’

Hearing him chuckle, I open my eyes. I see he knows when I tease. ‘Pot calls kettle—’ he says.

‘Know what a “temp” is, Martyn? … Over there on your table. The Help Wanted columns.’

‘My table again, is it? So quick?’ He flicks the newspaper with a toe. ‘Who wouldn’t know what a “temp” is? Half my friends have worked that way, in their time. Some still are.’

‘For me, it’s a start. People like me—we are the expatriates.’

‘Not to me.’

But I am staring at the floor. At the largest roach I ever saw, scuttling past. My hand has forgotten its reflex. Left it at the barrio. But the creature—inch-and-a-half surely—has stopped in its track.

‘You’re right—’ I say again.… If I stay, will I be saying that constantly? ‘Clean up your corner, and the roaches just go downstairs, or up.… But it’s the first I’ve seen here.’

‘Not a roach. A waterbug. Come through the pipes now and then. Ate the binding on one of my mother’s books—they like paste and glue. What can it be after? … Ah.’

The flowers, in a jar on the floor.

The bug is still immobile. ‘They freeze when you notice them. But watch.’ He bends toward it.

Gone. Over the door-sill and down the hall. Martyn laughs. ‘Back to the bathroom pipes. Well, every creature deserves its lair.’ He’s not looking at me. We fall quiet, picking at the stuff of our Shelter-Paks. ‘But fancy, poor thing. Not knowing your flowers were real.’ His face is so droll I have to stroke it. Not a mythic face. You have to learn it each time. Yet steadfast. Like a lesson I should already know.

‘That photo in the bathroom, Martyn. Who are they?’

‘The household in which my real father grew up. His grandmother served there. The family she was in service to were jewelers, come to Africa from Bombay. Somebody snapped the whole lot, family and servants, at an outing. My great-grandmother is the tall girl at the left. Toting the basket. She died in that household. How she got the photo is anybody’s guess. Maybe so that when her grandson, my father-to-be, went off to school she could give it to him. Her husband, my great-grandfather, was far away, in service as major-domo to a British family, the one into which my mother married—young, and what would later be called “socially intemperate”.… When his grandson—my father—was shot, that photo was found in his effects.’

He sounds brusque, with reason. ‘Your family story, Martyn. More of a tangle even than mine.’

‘You forget. I don’t know beans about your beginnings.’

‘Well—let’s say we’ve both had a brush with the aristocrats.’

And suddenly that seems hilarious. When we’re done, he says: ‘That we met at all. Oughtn’t we send Alphonse a bouquet?’

Strange, to hold hands after sex, instead of before.

‘Carol. You’re not thinking of being—just temporary—here?’

The glass enclosure is all sunshine. If I were in there, at my volunteer work, it would be time for a noon break.

‘I’ve been dreaming the past. And avoiding the future.’

‘Time to reverse. My brother and I—at mother’s deathbed we agreed to reconcile. Or to try.’

‘She sounded—great. I’ve been reading her notices.’

‘She had some of the qualities of greatness, yes. But all of its attitudes.’

‘That dowager head-dress. La.’

‘She had a foot in both camps. Calling me her white sheep, and my blondie sib her black one. Me her love-child, and him her misbegotten. And enjoying all of it.’

Lying back, we seek each other’s warmth. But I am smelling him on me—and me on me. I jump up. ‘Dibs on the shower.’

‘All yours.’ But as I linger, rueful, he can tell what I’m remembering. ‘Mean of me. To decamp like that. But I had to catch a plane.’ He jumps up. ‘On second thought, that shower will do for the two of us.’

It does. Even though we must keep his bandaged shoulder well away.

Afterwards, enfolded as best we can in the one towel, he bows to the photograph. ‘Hope you approved what you saw.’

Then we shout in one voice: ‘I’m starving!’

For a minute he cradles me, murmuring happily, ‘Going to have to learn how to talk separately. Lucky we’re not in a play.’

And whoosh—stiffening in his arms, I am separate.

A second ago, I was as proudly naked as he. Now, am I wanting to huddle again into the worn, smeared shoes and bundled-up garb of—martyrdom? … Don’t admit that word, Carol.… But my skin, clean as candlewax from the double shower, and heavy with stand-up sex—does it hunger sneakily for singleness? Scorning his hotplate, on which I’ve had a month’s savory coffee and in-from-the-afternoon tea, do I yearn again for the breezy sleazy arcades where one can crouch into sleep—unscheduled, unordered? Except by the lock-step pace I called my own? Where I walk in allegiance with other untouchables. In mute sympathy with the smells that never signify. In the play that has no audience.

While Dr. Cee, a specialist in those, wrings his hands?

‘There’s only the one deli, Martyn, not too far from here. You’ve been hours en route—how many hours is it from South Africa? Put on some warm clothes. Then go snooze.’ Shivering, in forethought I pull my crumpled ones from the bathroom hook that holds his pants and shirt, and mine. I close the bathroom door on him.

Sliding into my T-shirt, I target the backpacks lying in the bright sun-pocket at the room end of the hall. I must be careful to take the one packed. With all my unworldly goods.

‘Just where do you think you’re off to?’

It’s no bright errand, I know that. ‘Just going for sandwiches.’

Splayed against the open bathroom door, Martyn’s whole body has turned as red as his face. That snarl—who would expect the hushed sweet burr issuing from it. ‘No, Carol. Very neat. But not worthy of you. Not needed. Nobody’s sending you out, love, ever again.’

The games fly up.

We are sitting at the table. In our snatched-up crew necks and tan pants we could be any couple sitting on a sand dune.

He had caught me just as I was bending to hoist my load. It was easy; I too was in shock. He had jammed my two lives together. How he knew what I had been sent away for so long ago, I couldn’t fathom. Martyn could play the part of spy with aplomb, I was sure, should he have wished to bother. Yet I trusted him. That was the trouble.

Forcing me back to the bathroom, making me dress, putting on his own clothes, he had growled at the backpack: ‘If I could burn that piece of fancy double-think, I would.’ But he knew he would be burning me.

I am facing the glass office. The line of drums is on my left. We are eating from the same box of crackers he fed me when I first came to tea. ‘How did you know? About the sandwiches.’

He slouches in the straight chair.

‘I grew up with politicals. There’s always a buried something else. At the bottom of their best convictions. When we met at the play, you and I, I had half a mind to leave you be. But I couldn’t. Nor when I left. Instead—I took the ticket, like those in Ahmed’s shop do, and hoped for the best. Because I knew better than them, I had more than a tinker’s chance. And more to gain.’

‘So the stationer’s name is Ahmed,’ I say. And it’s he who’s surprised.

‘I’m learning, that’s all. I’ve been learning since you left. Go on.’

All the time I was in Africa, in my head things went badly for you, Carol. It’s called perspective. And as anybody who draws from the figure only will tell you, it’s a trick. She’s like a stunning
idée fixe,
I told myself. But with a flaw in it you can put your fist through.’ He swings a leg. ‘And so you can. And come through with a fistful.’ He eats the cracker. Gets himself a glass of water. Sits up straight. ‘The bullet in my arm put me right. If I’d died without seeing you again. So I hopped a plane. And on the plane, saw the London newspapers. With a recap of that story.’