Ode to Lata (17 page)

Before I left for America, she dug into the same drawer to extract a small, specific picture that had been taken during their courtship.  She wanted me to have it.  At first glance, the picture didn’t look like anything special.  It was blurry and had been taken from a distance, obscuring their features.  Its focus was on a cheery young lady in sixties glasses and beehive hairdo holding a bottle of Fanta soda.  Next to her in the grass was a portable gramophone player, the once-spinning vinyl now trapped in a paralyzed lapse of time.  Sitting a few feet away from the picnic were my parents looking as I had never seen them.  They cut a handsome pair.  My mother sat on a crate and my father on bent knees, holding a white cup of tea and smiling at her.

“We look beautiful, don’t we?” she said, stealing the words from my mouth.  “You can have that.  It’s from when we were in love.”

“You know what, Mummy?” I remembered, “I’d like to see that card again.  You know, the one he wrote you in blood?”

Nodding, she got it and let me hold it again, years after I had first held it.  “You know, he gave me this one after one of those…those horrible times,” she said with a shudder.  She was referring to one of the many times he had brutalized her.  “Your father, he really put me through hell.”

I handed the card back to her and she inspected it, almost as if making sure the writing hadn’t faded.  “He may have written this in blood, but it wasn’t until after he had shed some of mine.”

For some months, my parents, struggling to make ends meet during the early part of their marriage, had lodged at a guesthouse in Nairobi.  My paternal grandmother had refused to look after her newly born grandson or give them shelter unless paid handsomely for her services.  So they chose to distance themselves from her and I was consigned to my mother’s family, who were ecstatic to have me, in Mombasa.  My father was extremely suspicious of my mother around other people, a malaise she claimed was a projection of his own infidelity, so he often locked her in their room for the evening when he went out with his buddies.  Upon returning earlier than expected one night, he’d discovered she’d gone out with one of her cousins.  He searched and failed to find her, and waited up for her with a belt wound in his hands.  When she came home, he beat her until he tired of beating.  He took her to bed, and placing the cold metal edge of his switchblade against the throbbing vein of her neck, fucked her.  He said, “If you ever do this again, if you ever try to leave me, I swear it, I will hunt you down and kill you.” 

Tears filmed the kohl-lined orbs of my mother’s large, beautiful eyes when she relived this incident, and her body stiffened as if the wounds were still fresh and the bruises merely hidden from view.  With that same pained emotion conflicting with the discomfiture in her face, my mother had gone on to admit without any embarrassment that it had been some of the most memorable sex they’d had.

The strange thing was that although these memories of irascible jealousy filled her with dread and she was thankful to have relegated them to the past, they also offered her indisputable proof of his all-consuming love for her.  Her feelings about these episodes were as dichotomous as her feelings for him.

At that moment I had wanted to kiss her, to feel her tongue in my mouth as I had wanted the time she instructed me on the intrigues of sex, as my father never had.  To fuse back into her.  To be her.  To know that these feelings that she felt were firsthand.

And then she bundled the letters back up and I went to finish packing, the memory of their courtship in my hands and her clucking in my ears.

WAITING FOR ME

Every once in a while, Nelson and I would run into Richard at a nightclub.  The first time I introduced them, they cautiously evaluated each other over a brief handshake, then each made a point to ignore the other after that.  Sometimes, having drank a little too much (Richard’s presence inspired me to drink more than usual), I would excuse myself from Nelson and hunt Richard down instead of going to the bathroom. By consuming large quantities of alcohol, I thought I might still be able to swim back into that space where he would be waiting for me.  Into the familiar swamp of pain that had agonized and espoused me just the same.  But no sooner had I opened my mouth than Richard would pronounce, “You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?”  The caution and pity in his eyes would anger me and then, regaining my steely composure, I would throw a venomous look at his companion, some white worked-out blonde in a skintight shirt, and tell him that I had to run back to Nelson.  He was
waiting
for me.

Even when I stood next to Nelson, his arm possessively around my waist as we leaned against an unoccupied pool table in the bar area, my eyes studied Richard fluttering around the room, trying hard to impress someone with his hip-hop moves on the edge of the dance floor or coveting someone he hoped to go home with.  I felt sorry for him.  I had been right to suspect that nothing would change with him even after his illness, that he would continue to sleep around relentlessly with other men.  Except that this time he would not have me, his devoted confidant, to climb into bed with at the end of an unfulfilled night, to pour his sorrows out to as he climbed upon me and clasped his arms around me, to seek advice about someone that had let him down as he buried his face within my neck, his hair tumbling across my chin.

And as I stood there, next to Nelson, his arm drawing me closer to his side and his eyes perceptively shifting between me and a seemingly oblivious Richard, I felt comforted, blessed almost for his nurturing, and found that I was gradually letting him into a place where only Richard had been permitted to go.

NO SHOW

The rain came down in sheets.  I stood outside of Oasis nightclub, where I first met you, cowering from the pelting rain, thinking wryly, there couldn’t be a better setting for a letdown.  Behind me, dance music blared, competing with the clamor of the rain, its vibration in the glass doors against my back.  Inside the club the rites of mating had begun: drink specials spilling over from glasses on the counter, deftly penciled phone numbers on paper napkins being bartered like promissory notes, predatory treks around the bar periphery to encounter suitable prey.  I could’ve been in there with the rest of the emotionally anesthetized regulars, with only fucking on my mind (the size of his arm, the measure of his cock, the firmness of his butt), but had been convinced into treading out of those waters, to be revived from emotional sedation into taking a chance with you, and this is where it’s landed me.  On the outside.  Waiting for you in this unceasing rain with a Miles Davis CD clutched in my frozen hands, a modest offering for your birthday, now three days late.  You’d been unable to see me.  You claimed to have been under the weather.

While standing there for over an hour, avoiding the eyes of everyone that went hurriedly past, huddling together for warmth and shelter under umbrellas, I prayed that I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew.  I hated being alone, for people to think that I had no one.  Winter was the most romantic time of the year.  And the most tragic.  In the cold, our bodies nestled together for warmth; we clustered in little groups even without realizing it.  Only when sweltering in the summer heat did we start to repel one another, to stand further apart, to demand that compass of space around us, the space without which another body might smother us.

I craved a cup of coffee, or better yet a stiff cocktail, but didn’t dare move lest I might miss you.  I called home from the pay phone outside the entrance to the club to see if you had left any messages.  Once, my mother answered the phone and furiously I ordered her never to answer the phone again unless the caller had identified himself to her on the machine.  There was nothing from you; the series of beeps indicating this to me felt like a death sentence.  I sifted through the possibilities of an impeding traffic problem, your miscalculation of time, and even plain forgetfulness, although I knew that you, Nelson, had never been the forgetful kind.   But I sank with the only explanation that made any sense in light of your recent behavior.  That you’d planned on not showing up, on putting me through this.  Quite in synch with your failure to return any of my calls or commit to any dates.  I was being sent the message that after vying unremittingly for my affections, after stripping me down, you’d seen how vulnerable I could be and were now rejecting me.

Our last real conversation went through my mind as I pulled the overcoat, one that Mummy had insisted I take with me, tighter around myself. 
I care so much about you, I think we should take more time to get to know each other.  We went about this the wrong way, you know what I mean?  Sleeping with each other before getting to really know one another?
  I remember studying the young, white-trash girl seated across from us as she sucked on her fingers and released each one with an audible sound for the benefit of her much older male companion.  I remember watching the electric train chug its way along the trek of the ceiling at this restaurant in Costa Mesa, my fork toying with the scrambled eggs on my plate, my ears listening to your new slant on our twelve-week relationship as we kept getting interrupted by the overzealous waitress you’d made it a point to be exceptionally nice to.  “They work so hard,” you always reasoned at every restaurant we’d been to, “and they deal with such assholes that I think people should be extra nice to them.”  How incredibly patronizing, I had thought.  Why don’t you demonstrate your compassion with a bigger tip? I’m sure she’d appreciate that a lot more.  I attempted to appear unscathed by your assessment of our relationship, then recalled how you had girdled me and forced yourself into my mouth on the mattress on the floor of your new apartment only hours before.  I could still remember how you tasted in my mouth.

I complied with your proposal to just being friends, to changing the nature of our relationship, to save face; as you had put it, I reminded you so much of your younger, feisty sister now.  All I had wanted to do was mangle your face and scream,
How dare you!  How dare you make this decision after maneuvering me into opening up to you! 
Did this mean I would never have you in that way again?  That I would never be able to bite into the hunks of your flesh or rest my naked face against your chest after being caulked by your penis?

 
My loss felt more debilitating because I knew that both Richard and you had one thing in common:  Neither one of you could ever be without someone in your lives.  Who had become my replacement? Who were you denuding now that I had lain myself bare to you and started to yearn for your intimations?  I wanted to hurl everything off the table, the plates of scrambled eggs and the orange juice and the apple pancakes you were gorging on, so that they would make a clangor over your carefully rehearsed words.  I wanted to reach over and tear your T-shirt off, to search for any telltale marks on your dark body – crescents from fingernails on your back that didn’t belong to me, purple bite marks where I hadn’t gnawed on you.  But I sat there slowly forking the overly salty eggs into my mouth, watching your mouth move, but having lost any cognizance of the words after the first few minutes; the girl across from us now drawing more attention from the other patrons; the waitress intruding on the periphery of my vision, preparing to refill your glass of freshly squeezed orange juice for the third time.

That was a week ago.  Outside the club, shuddering from the bite of the wind, from the grave acceptance of your abandonment, I dreaded returning home because Mummy would be waiting on the sofa, expecting a dialogue, my pain evident to her from the sound of my breath.

Where could you be now? I wondered.  I hoped you were mangled in some car accident, your limbs torn from side to side, your neck cleaved off by sharp metal.  But I knew that you were probably resting at home, the heater turned on to high, maybe even watching the rain pour down from that bare window in your room, which you had blanketed to keep the sun from rousing me – had you found matching blinds for that bare window?  Maybe you had someone there with you and your bodies were jousting in passion, your every thrust increasing in vigor as you thought of me here, waiting for you.  Yes, I admitted to myself, begrudging the tears that welled up in my eyes, you must have someone there with you now.

Someone who hadn’t hesitated to express how he felt about you, someone who hadn’t needed all that time like me.  Someone who might have blinked doe-eyed as you opened the door for him instead of scowling at the gesture as an infringement on his independence.  Someone who had, by taking you away from me, sentenced me back into this infernal world of clubs and bars.

MOTHER KNOWS BEST

She was nursing a glass of Scotch, glassy-eyed on the sofa, when I let myself in.  The television set was on and
Jerry Springer
was feeding her prodigious appetite for sensationalism with an episode on midget lesbian prostitutes.  Her hands turned the glass as if trying to summon courage from the movement, and the rocks of ice clanked loudly.  Although her mouth opened while I shed my soaked jacket in the corner behind the door, she knew better than to say anything just then. I avoided looking into her eyes because I could feel her pain as I suspected she felt mine.  I walked into my room where I started to undress.  Cautiously, she followed me and paused by the doorframe.  She held out a towel.

“Mum, I’m changing!”