Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab

FICTION
Out on Main Street
Cereus Blooms at Night
He Drown She in the Sea
Valmilki’s Daughter

POETRY
The Predicament of Or

“If you run away from a thing just because you don’t like it,
you don’t like what you find either. Now, running
to
a thing, that’s a different matter …”

—Uncle Axel to David,
The Chrysalids
, John Wyndham

FROM SYDNEY’S NOTEBOOK

Surely it is a failure of our human design that it takes not an hour, not a day, but much, much longer to relay what flashes through the mind with the speed of a hummingbird’s wing.

There is so little time left now, and what Jonathan wants to know and I to say are not the same.

I realize Jonathan is a grown man and can surely take whatever words I offer him, but what good would come of it if I were to tell him how, ten years into my relationship with his mother, India, she informed me that I was a disappointment? I would not want to encourage him to consider this, lest in doing so he concur.

Nor does he need to know that there was a time after his mother and I first met, in those months before he was born, when India would ask after our lovemaking, “How did you know to do that?” Does he need to know that she gripped my shoulders and trembled?

Or, should he know? I wonder if he would believe it.

He certainly doesn’t need to know that after his
birth, India and I grew cool with each other. And yet, nearly ten years later when we broke apart, I hadn’t stopped loving her. Should he know that? He would likely scoff at this pathetic admission. It might even appall him.

After India and I first met, in the months before I moved into her house I saw my physical upkeep as part of a daily drama between her and me, and I made a job of keeping my body trim and groomed, my clothing and sheets washed and pressed, my shoes polished, my kitchen and bathroom clean and tidy, wine in the fridge and chocolate on my bedside table.

Ten years later, the list of what, it turned out, I was inept at doing included: putting up shelving in her office; organizing and cleaning the parts of the house where Jonathan and I spent time; enjoying myself—or at least, giving the appearance of such—at parties thrown by her publisher and by various literary festivals. I didn’t make well enough of myself as an artist to be recognized by her peers. I failed to take Jonathan away often enough or long enough that she could have time to write. I indulged Jonathan too much.

My rendition of our rupture is, of course, one-sided, perhaps a little flippant, the rewriting of cold facts encouraged by time and distance. I once asked her, “And you and me?” To which her response was a gesture of her hand towards and down the length
of my body, a delicate non-verbalization of waning desire. After this, the relationship could not be sustained. It was India who spoke the words first, and a short time later, declaring the obvious was as good as insisting upon it. Over the course of a few months we became territorial, keeping our belongings, our agendas, our thoughts to ourselves.

Then one day, I came home to find Charlie Bream standing in the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen. I couldn’t see India, but knew she was in the kitchen. Bream was almost as tall as the height of the doorway. He wore the whitest dress shirt I’d ever seen, long sleeves rolled just below his elbow, and grey wool trousers. He turned and, although I had never met him before, greeted me as if he and I were old buddies. I sat on the bench in the hallway taking much longer to remove my shoes than was necessary. Bream’s trousers were thick and heavy, and a black leather belt hugged him just below his waist. His black cap-toe oxfords with their blond inserts were neatly placed on the shoe mat. They were made in Italy. Size 44. One notices everything in such an instant. From where I sat I could smell Bream’s cologne. India, who in the ten years we had lived together would not boil an egg, was grilling croissants with ham and cheese. I was offered one, but declined and went upstairs to Jonathan’s room. There, I waited for Bream to leave.
I lay on Jonathan’s bed and looked down the length of my own body. I had indeed “let myself go.” I could hear Bream’s voice, and India’s. They spoke evenly and at a normal volume, which seemed as brazen as if they had been whispering.

Charlie Bream didn’t last, and he was not, it turned out, one of India’s more memorable encounters. But whenever I think of that time, I see in my mind an image of Charlie Bream in the doorway of the kitchen, and his shoes, made in Italy, size 44, on the mat in the entrance.

I could not bear to say goodbye to Jonathan and so I did not. India warned me not to try to fight her for any rights to Jonathan. As an immigrant, as a non-wage-earning person and, most importantly, as a person without her connections, I would, she assured me, lose in every way. Yet for some time I did fight her, not to match her callousness nor for the principle of the thing, but for the love of the boy I had raised. His needs were the structure around which my days had been built. But that was a time when someone in my position had no legal recourse. India was right; I was outmatched. The irony is that it was Jonathan himself who was at the heart of our tug-of-war, and soon I was no longer willing to put him through our struggle.

After I left, I discovered that it was not only Jonathan I missed. India used to rub herself, after
she’d showered, with rose oil. Its scent would waft into our bedroom. Even after I had returned to Trinidad I would be taken hostage by this scent rising up out of nowhere. Sometimes, I imagined I saw, in my peripheral vision, piles of folded laundry waiting to be put away: Jonathan’s little shirts and trousers, his underwear and T-shirts, India’s black V-neck Ts, her black skirts, her black underwear, her black jersey dresses, my blue jeans and black T-shirts, and the detergent scent of mountain air would fill my nostrils. I would turn my head quickly to find that I had been tricked by a pile of books, or simply by regret.

In the end, these are not the incidents and reflections I want to leave with Jonathan. And perhaps what he wants to know is something else, something more personal too.

I suppose I could explain to him that I came to realize that the imagining and dreaming, the wishing and the knowing that led bit by bit to the being I am today had actually started long before I left Trinidad and went to live in Canada. Long before I met his mother. Long before he came into my life. How I have tried in the past to tell him—to tell him about Zain, that is—but he can’t seem to take it in. Now I must explain it to him one more time—how on that particular day in my childhood when I was in the classroom at the new
secondary school to which I had transferred, a student I had just met, this Muslim girl named Zain, pinched my arm. How I grabbed her wrist and told her to stop. But it was too late. I had already felt the strange mix of power and fear that would haunt me forever. Perhaps that was why, upon finishing high school, I left Trinidad and immigrated to Toronto.

Granted, I never told him that on one of my visits back to Trinidad not long after I had parted with India, Zain and I were sitting on the sill of her swimming pool, eating codfish balls and drinking lime juice—she by then an adult married woman and mother of two in a yellow-and-white two-piece bathing suit; I, the same age but feeling like some undecided, half-formed thing in my T-shirt and shorts; both our pairs of feet swinging beneath the surface of the water—and I told her in a rush about how one had to undergo psychiatric reviews to transform one’s self in the ways I’d just begun to think about, and that only if it were determined that one’s mental health was compromised would the insurance pay for what was needed. Zain was quiet for a while. Then, as she slid into the water, she said, “That’s a shame, because there isn’t anything crazy about you.” She swam off and dipped under the water. Up came her feet, toes pointed at the sky. She stayed like that for a good minute.

I could tell Jonathan how a couple years later, during another visit, Zain pressed into my hand an envelope bulging with American hundred-dollar bills that, ever since that conversation beside the pool, she had been saving.

And some time after that gesture, I could say, I arrived one cold and snowy morning at a building in Toronto, entered a room at an appointed time with a bag full of cash and changed my life forever. And I could leave it at that. Perhaps these are the stories that would satisfy Jonathan. But they are only a fraction of the truth, and I need to tell him the rest. I need to tell him how I have battled with the belief that had I only been a different person, Zain would be alive today.
Had I been a different person
. This, more than anything, is what needs to be said. Still, that would be only a fraction of the story.

In the end, I hope that Jonathan will understand why, after coming to Canada in search of some sort of authenticity, after living in Toronto for more than three decades, I returned home—I returned, that is, to live again in Trinidad. But how do I explain it so that he doesn’t think I ran away, gave up, failed?

One more chance is all I ask for. But time is against me, and there is so much to tell.

MOVING FORWARD SIDEWAYS LIKE A CRAB

A Memoir

By Jonathan Lewis-Adey

It amuses me how the instant the fasten-seatbelts sign is turned off during the flight from Toronto to Port of Spain, Trinidadians get up and strut about. They seem to know one another; they congregate in the aisles unabashedly airing their business, telling jokes, heckling each other or reminiscing. Their anticipation is palpable. Some begin the journey as strangers, but through conversations struck up in the interminable lineups at the airport or during the five-hour flight itself, they inevitably learn that they know someone in common, or are even related. I have always envied their ease and willing camaraderie, and having been to their island numerous times over the past decade, have often wanted to contribute my penny’s worth; but discretion—on account of being just a visitor to the island—has prevailed.