The Bigger Light (18 page)

“Oh yes! So you see, Mr. Cumberbatch, it is nothing strange that a man plays one record all the time. I remember playing a song by Sarah Vaughan day after day until I had to buy three more albums just so I won’t wear out …”

“What song? What classical song did you play when you played only that one piece o’ music?”

“Something from Wagner.” Boysie was disappointed that it was not one of his favourites. The young man seemed so capable of calling all these strange names without making them seem strange. He was capable of talking in a powerful way, so it occurred to Boysie, without making much effort. This,
Boysie surmised, must then be the meaning of language. And education. The kind of education they give you in universities, he concluded, must be a rather strange thing, because it made you able to choose tit from tat, just as this young man was doing, with no effort at all. “And what is the piece you listen to, to which you listen, Mr. Cumberbatch?”

“Floes and floes and floes,”
Dots said. “Boysie does only listen to floes and floes.”

“Better than that,” Boysie said. “I going put it on for you now.” Before he reached the record player, the cat which had been hiding all afternoon emerged from the bedroom and came to Dots and rubbed its body against her legs. You goddamn cat, Boysie said to himself.

“He still living, eh?”

“Yes, Bernice, girl. This is
all
I have to keep me company when the nights come.”

“You feeding it good? Giving it the Pampers cat food that I brought you from the place I works?”

“Meeeeoooooooowwwwwww!”

“Wha’ kind o’ breed o’ cat you say this cat is?”

“Sia-sia-something or other,” Bernice said.

“Meeeeeeese!” her young man told her. “Sia-mese.”

“It is a Siamese cat, Dots. You didn’t know that?”

“Child, without this Siamese cat, my nights would be lonely.”

Floes and floes of angel’s hair, and ice cream castles in the air, feathered canyons everywhere, I look at clouds that way …
The young man was engrossed in the song. When it was over, he took a sip of his drink and beamed.

“I know now what you mean, Mr. Cumberbatch. This song is by a white singer, right? Now, I never heard it before, but I know by her voice, I don’t mean the way her voice is, but
by the timbre in her voice that she is white, and there is a sadness in the song …”

“That’s what I tell Boysie!”

“… so that if you were listening to songs by Aretha Franklin or Nina Simone, well … you know what I mean?”

“Is that what it is, boy? Be-Christ, gimme the black singers, any day!” Dots continued.

“I do not mean that she is a bad singer because she is white, she is a very good singer, and her rendition is brilliant, but you are talking about the aspect of culture and background and social context, which are all mixed up in the song, and it is a different perspective from that of a man who lives in a ghetto, if you see what I mean?”

“Man, don’t say no more!” Boysie felt he had an ally. He did not understand exactly what the young man had said, but he understood enough of the language and its sound to give him confidence in playing the song again, alone. “Man, look, don’t talk no blasted more, man! Man, you don’t have to tell me no more. You hit the nail on the fucking head!” He felt he could afford to be expansive in his own house, and with his new friend.

“Good!” said the young man, as Boysie selected now a calypso by the Mighty Sparrow. This was one of the records the young man had brought with him. This changed the atmosphere in the room to one of ease and a little joy. Dots eventually got up and went into the kitchen. Bernice followed her.

“Let me treat you this time.”

“Treat me? To what?”

“Don’t worry yourself to cook.”

“Well, what we going eat, then? I know my duty is to cook and to wash and to clean. You don’t want me to look after my duty? Tha’s all I am worth. You don’t know that? And I don’t
have no young man to make me feel young and as if I am somebody.” Bernice wondered whether she could be heard in the other room. “You all right, girl. I’s a married woman,” Dots continued; and it sounded very bitter to Bernice. “I past the young-men’s stage!” She passed her hand to her cheek, and when she took it away, Bernice saw the tears. Her eyes were red, too. “I have every convenience. The rent gets paid every month on time. Food, as you see,” she said, opening the refrigerator, “is always in this house. Drinks. A job. Everything. But what the fuck do I have, after all?”

“Dots, you don’t mean to tell me, you don’t mean to tell me that you are really unhappy, or jealous …”

“Who, me? Of
you
? Looka, don’t make me laugh!”

“Let we send out for something to eat. Let the men go out and bring in something to eat.” Dots nodded, as she wiped her eyes. “Lew, darling, here’s twenty dollars. Go and buy some chicken or Chinese food, or.”

“Chicken?”

“What about Chinese food?” Boysie suggested.

“Chinese
or
chicken!”

 … he gi’e the donkey first, second and third, and then tell Lion flat, if you was the king o’ the beasts, you’d be toting that!

The young man got up a bit groggily, put down his glass after he had drained it, and prepared to go with Boysie. Boysie went into the bedroom, made sure he had the small leather case with the keys for the new car, and came out to leave. The moment they were through the door, Dots began to talk to Bernice
 … Who tell them to let Monkey judge? Monkey have an old personal grudge, since the days they make him bring water …
“Sometimes, Bernice, I wish I was right back in the domestic system.”

“What would make you wish such a judgement on yourself?”

Dots turned on the tap, and as the water filled the sink with the breakfast dishes, she held her hand in the water, testing its heat and the amount of detergent in it. She held her hands in the sink for a long time, as she was talking, and she did not look at Bernice. “When I was in the domestic scheme, you know, things were a lot better. I had Boysie under control then. I uses to worry about him running after the Canadian girls, and spending my money on gambling with Henry … may he rest in peace!” She made the sign of the cross on her chest, all the while the suds dropping down on her dress front. She allowed them to remain there, and eventually they burst. “I uses to be so jealous. And so
vexed
. You know what I talking ’bout? Me, making the little money which I thought was the end of the world. And Boysie spending it on women. I was jealous, but I was in control. And in a strange way, I had some love for him.” She began to wash the dishes. “But now, with Boysie making all this money. And feeling free … you want to know something? Boysie doesn’t even ask me now for a dollar for cigarettes! Not even for that. I mean, Bernice, a man could be working for the most money in the world, and his wife could be working too, and there must come a time when one or the other o’ them must be broke and don’t have a dime to save their soul. And one would have to ask the next one for a loan. You see what I mean? You must. You uses to ask me for streetcar fare, when you worked for the Burrmanns and I for the Hunters. Or I would ask you for taxi fare. It seems we was always broke. But there was money. And we thought that money could buy everything under this sun. Including happiness. And a man! Now Boysie is so independent! So independent, Bernice. I do not even have the power over him to tell him that the rent ain’ paid, that there ain’ no groceries in the house. And he has never ask me for a dollar since he start that
cleaning business. I don’t even have that chance to get vex as hell with Boysie, and refuse to lend him that dollar bill, so that maybe he might be forced to treat me different, or behave different from the way he might be behaving, or …” The cat was rubbing itself against her leg. “This cat. Did I feed this cat since you come? Cat-catty-catty-cat!” Bernice nodded. “Child, I am getting so absent-minded and forgetful! And at my age?”

“Well, yuh know, Dots, women our age have to make the most outta life. You see Llewellyn there? He is my present insurance ’gainst going stark raving mad in this place. The older you get, the more lonely you get.”

“He’s a good boy.”

“I think so. You really think so?”

“Gal, I just say so. I watched him as he come in here this afternoon, and at first he did look a bit nervous and cocky, as if he think we wasn’t going to approve o’ him and you. And all that talking ’bout listening to only one record, and calling me Mistress Cumberbatch. I hope he don’t think that I am out to get him in bed with me?”

“God, Dots!”

“ ’cause they is thousands o’ orderlies and intern-doctors at the hospital where I works! I only have to turn round to see how they does be looking at my backside when I pass. The lust in their eyes! And horny as hell. It seems that they only have to see my backside shaking before they don’t have a hard-on, Christ, child, heh-heh-heh.” She took her hands out of the detergent water. And she shook them into the sink. “There’s one. A orderly. From Trinidad. I think he say he come from there. He is after me, a woman my age. Like he is in heat.
Half my age
, you hear! Every blasted day I go to work, he have something to give me. A chocolate. A flower. A bouquet that he thief from some patient’s bedside. Some damn thing. He
must
greet me every morning with some gift. And the first two or three times that this bastard pushed that flower-bouquet in my face, and started grinning, I nearly spit in his blasted upstart face!
I am a married woman
. But after all a flower is a flower. And when a man gives a woman a flower, it takes a very hard-hearted woman not to notice. So, talking ’bout this thing ’bout being a woman of my age, I decide one afternoon to test this little force-ripe bastard. Child, he would have spend
all his
wages on me that afternoon. Good thing that the place he took me to, to have lunch, was only a half-dirty place where they sell patties.”

“What happened, what happened? Dots, what happened?”

“Nothing! Not one damn thing!” But she could feel that she did not fool Bernice. And so she had to add, “Nothing at all.”

“Something happened,
something
happened.”

“Meeeoooooowwwwwwww!”

“Cat-catty-catty-cat!” She took up the cat, and patted it, and put it down almost immediately. “I wish that this cat was a child. Bernice, I wish this blasted cat was a child. I need something to tie-down Boysie with. Having another man isn’ going to do it. And it isn’t going to prove nothing. I would just lose him by doing that. He might even kill me first! He just might!”

“What is this you talking?” They were now like the two close friends of years ago: Bernice comforting Dots, and Dots comforting Bernice. In their earlier years of friendship, they had come together in such moments of confusion, and they had tried to talk the problem right into the open of greater understanding and humility. And now they were again close. “
Some
thing happened that afternoon when you went for lunch with orderly.”

“How you know that?”

“Because I am a woman.”

“While crossing-over the street back to the hospital, and we was only in that dingy place for fifteen minutes at the most! … and the flies in that place, and in the middle o’ winter, too! … I don’t know. But I had to come straight home and look into Boysie’s clothes cupboard to make sure that the person I see wearing …”

“Oh my God!”

“… a grey three-piece suit …”

“Boysie saw you?”

“That is what I don’t know. I am not sure. Bernice, this isn’ a thing you could come right out and ask a man about. If he saw me in a place where I wasn’t suppose to be … I am not talking about unfaithfulness, in me, or in any other woman. I talking ’bout the disappointment. Well, even if it was a decent place, like the Park Plaza where my husband takes me, or the, the …”

“Was it he? Or wasn’t it? Was it Boysie that you see? Did he see you?”

“I don’t know. All this could be in my mind. And do you know how I happened to see him? A man had just dropped something, a plate or a bottle or a cup, and I wasn’t paying much attention, ’cause I wasn’t feeling too comfortable with this orderly-fellow. A woman in my place … but the moment I looked up, the person was gone!”

“My God!”

“What had me really nervous, more nervous than when I went in that place, was that, Bernice … I couldn’t get that man’s hands from all over me … whilst crossing the back-over, that man’s hand was all over my behind. And this car. A new car. Black and with windows that you could barely see a person through. In this damn car, and I swear … no, it couldn’t be! We
only have the panel truck. And unless I am a blind woman, a panel truck isn’t no motto-car, but I would swear that …”

“Don’t worry yourself. It’s only your conscience. And conscience could ride a person like hell, like if that person was a racehorse. It’s probably only your conscience, Dots. And your conscience is clear.”

“I could have sworn
blind that …
”

 … animal beauty competition, listen ’bout confusion!

“And the moment Boysie stepped in this house that night after work, he put on that blasted record ’bout floes and floes and angel’s hair, and straightaway I was frightened, ’cause I thought he had seen me.”

“Conscience, child. You know you couldn’t do a thing like that unless he had driven you to do it.”

“Lemme look in here again, Bernice, and check to see if Boysie really have a suit like the one I think I see that man was wearing. Because, I could swear …”

“This is a nice car, man, a damn nice car,” the young man was saying, as he shifted his seat. “New too, eh?” Boysie was watching him closely. He wasn’t sure whether he should tell this man not to mention the car, or whether he should tell him and then bind him to silence. But he knew that he could not yet bind him to this moral silence, since he did not have anything on him. Perhaps, if he could get him to talk about Bernice, and about his intentions, perhaps if he could get him to admit to something. But this bastard is so bright, Boysie thought, it would take a great deal of cleverness and language to outwit him. However, Boysie’s common sense told him that he could have something over this young man. This man was bright. But he was hungry. He was hungry for money. And it looked as if he was hungry for woman, in the wrong way. And the way
he was dressed, so extravagantly for a student, told Boysie that Bernice must be spending quite a lot of money on him. “You are real cool, Boysie!”