The Meagre Tarmac (9 page)

I remember the great news from my father: his older brother had fallen ill, and wanted to settle. And so he and my mother and the family lawyer — our brilliant Suresh — were off to Bangalore to seal the deal. My parents were sixty years old and ready for retirement, not in a sterile new condo with all the conveniences, but in the dowdy/stately luxury of Nilingappa Bhavan. Toronto was nice, they said, but rather anti-Indian in a crude, working-class, British sort of way — although the absence of French was compensation. They'd given twenty-one years to Canada and left the country with three productive citizens. What more can be asked?

“How handsome you've become!” my mother exclaimed, at our going-away (or going-back) dinner. My father took new pictures and joked, “When I come back, I'll bring your bride with us.” “Are you sure you don't want to come?” my mother begged. “It's never too late,” my father said. I told him I had to get back to classes. A practicum, I remember saying. Something we were doing down in Seattle. Suresh, I could tell, wasn't fooled.

It was a cool June evening and my father was wearing his usual Scottish woolens. They'd all be off on Air-India next morning, big parting ceremony at the airport. Next morning, I watched them leave. They never arrived, and they never came back.

And by the time I relive the horror of losing my family, except for Rajah, I'm lost. I keep walking west, then north on Mountain, and west again on René Lévesque past Crescent, to Bishop, then up to de Maisonneuve — and the two giant Concordia University buildings are gone. The biggest educational building in the Commonwealth n'est plus. I know the area, I know I'm in the right place, but the forces of transformation have taken it away, and if I don't know where Concordia is, what in this world do I know at all? If Dorchester is now René-Lévesque, what is de Maisonneuve without my university? I'm standing at the ground zero of my life as a Canadian and as an immigrant, as a boy-turned-man trying to imitate the ways of manhood, and the ground has disappeared.

9. I remember reading a John Cheever story in a Concordia English class, about the demented man who thinks he can swim across his suburban county by swimming a lap in all its backyard pools. “An allegory,” the professor said, of life itself, starting young, frisky, revisiting the women he's known, taking a drink, crashing parties, then the pools grow scummy and untended and the women scorn him and he hears rumors of his bad behavior, some shameful rumors, and the day grows cooler, and the houses are boarded up and still he pursues his crazy dream until he's an old man standing on the side of a road. Maybe I forget part of it. I saw the movie, with Burt Lancaster, and something was lost. In today's Montréal it might be possible to link the city underground. You could have a drink in maybe eighty or a hundred bars along a single Métro line.

Father's younger brother, who never left his two rooms in Bangalore, inherited the entire estate. He's worth ten million, I hear.

I'm sitting at a “sidewalk” table of a coffee shop in the
CN
station underneath the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, looking up at the steady green lights of the departures board. Times and destinations bounce off the board like the cnn crawl: suburban trains, then the via Rails to New York, Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax.

I am now, truly, alone in the world, a middle-aged orphan.

When I was little, I used to come down here — when it was a vast, concrete hangar devoid of any décor, before the bistros, boulanges and charcuteries — to see my brothers off to their colleges, then, later, when I ventured down to New York or Toronto, allegedly for architectural research.

A young woman approaches. Very short skirt, fuzzy sweater, long, lank blondish hair, holding a legal pad to her breast. “
Vous permettez
?” she asks, and I pull out the second chair to accommodate her.

“
Français/anglais
?” she asks, and I commit the Rhodesian sin, at least the sin of twenty years ago, saying, “My English is much better.”

She holds out her hand. “Marie-Louise Tremblay.”

“Al Neeling,” I say.

“May I ask a personal question, Mr. Neeling? You have a very strong presence. Have you ever acted?”

I nod. “I have my
SAG
card.”

“Wow, that's impressive. I'm casting for Jean-Luc Carrier.” It's a name I'm familiar with. French-language, foreign films, art-house. Ten screens nationwide, max.

“He's casting for his first English-language film. He has Hollywood backing. It will be shot here. He's sitting just over there.” I follow her eyes, and a smallish man, gray hair, tight beard, leather jacket, nods. A very familiar look. “M'sieur Carrier said to me: that man is perfect. You can't take your eyes off him.” She giggles, and draws a little closer. “He said, ‘I'll rewrite the script to get him in. Beg him to audition.' So I'm doing the begging for him.” Marie- Louise, I notice, has absolutely no accent.

“Please don't beg on my account, Marie-Louise. And please convey my respects to m'sieur Carrier. I'm very flattered, really. But I'm here for family business and I have to get back to L.A.
tout de suite
,” which is a lie. “Rehearsals, you understand.”

She looks crushed, as though I'd reached across and slapped her. Her eyes say,
perhaps you didn't hear me: I said Jean-Luc Carrier
. She fishes around for a business card. “In case you change your mind, Mister Neeling?”

I tell her I might very well.

“You're very beautiful,” she says. “More than handsome.”

I tell her I wish I could stay. But I can't go back; obliteration is gaining on me. It's this journey I've started, it's the old women and their parasols, the meagre tarmac and the banana flowers, all the Nilingappa dead and those unmailed clippings in my drawer. I don't know where it will end, I just pick up identities, play them with all the passion I'm capable of, and then I throw them away. Tomorrow I'll be back in L.A.

A CONNIE DA CUNHA BOOK

CONNIE'S FATHER
had been a teacher, and general promoter of the Portuguese language and Luso-Indian culture in the seaside Goan village of Caranzalem. Portuguese, he believed, had protected Goa from the tragic fate of India. Their cottage functioned as a community library of French, Spanish and Portuguese texts and their back lawn, between monsoons, had been outfitted with a modest stage and commercial lighting. Connie and her brothers used to sit at their father's feet in the tropical, sea-breezy evenings, citronella candles sputtering, while he read passages from French and Spanish classics and asked his children to act out the same scenes in Portuguese. Despite her profession and current residence — book editor in New York — Portuguese remained her comfort language; it provides the music she plays, the wisdom she quotes and the pork and fish vindaloos that she cooks for private celebrations.

Back in her London years she'd known exiled Indonesian writers, some of whom had been imprisoned and tortured by the colonial regime, who still — in the evening, over tumblers of Scotch — reverted to Dutch among themselves. It is a tight, mysterious fraternity, those who grew up with unconsummated love or com plicated hate for their colonial masters. Understanding the dynamic had made her the person, and the editor she was.

When the Indian Army invaded the Portuguese colony in 1962, her father's life unraveled. Anyone closely identified with the Portuguese regime, those with Portuguese passports, was encouraged to leave. Many of her relatives did just that; even her father explored emigration to Macao. Her favorite uncle, Narciso Salgado, left his large congregation in Panjim and secured a position as an assistant priest in an Azorean diocese in Massachusetts.

For Connie, then six years of age and named Conceição, the loss of language and country was overcome in less than a month. She was shifted from second standard in a Portuguese school run by nuns to First Standard English and Hindi, taught by a retired ics officer named Govind Sharma, an exacting schoolmaster with Oxford experience. “I'm not your enemy,” he said on that first day, in a language she'd rarely heard but oddly, half-understood. “We're not identical, but we are part of each other. I will say that in Hindi, your new language, and you will understand me.
Hum aapney dushman nahii hai, lekin aapkey saha yogi hai.
I will not tolerate a single word of the former language, either in the classroom or on school property.” Two months later, she read her first English book,
We Are Six
.

Within a few weeks, Master Sharma promoted her to third standard. Her father, removed from teaching, opened a small Portuguese bar and restaurant, and eventually the family prospered. But a teacher's hours are not a bartender's, and the evening readings and staged events ended. One of her brothers won a scholarship to Portugal, she and another brother to Britain. Her baby brother, Ferdy, who'd been born after the Indian invasion, never left Goa. He was happily Indian and ran a construction company, putting up sea-facing condos for Europeans, Israelis, and rich Bombayites.

Connie knew she would be an editor, and she knew it at the age of eight or nine. There were no book editors in Goa. She simply knew that she had a calling. Whenever she started reading a book, she did not think of teaching it, writing it, or publishing it. Before she learned the word “editor” she sensed there must be an invisible hand guiding it, shaping it, giving it birth. It was her uncle Narciso, on his first visit home, who remarked, “Eight years old, and she's already correcting my English! She'll be an editor, for sure.” He would reward her by allowing a drag on his cigarette.

Connie was outside Café Alsacien finishing a second smoke when Cynthia Freeman, a debut author using the name Ramonah! pulled up in a chauffeur-driven Town Car. She was dressed in her self-proclaimed
haute dyke
battle gear: blacker-than-black, chewed-end hair, fishnet stockings, six-inch heels, spiky silver accessories and a glistening, bright red vinyl jacket with a matching miniskirt that crinkled as she walked. She looked and sounded like a piece of hard candy wrapped in red cellophane. Her nails were lacquered an arterial crimson, her lips a venous reddish-brown. Connie had never felt so dull and squat.

Before her
Ramonah!
incarnation — the exclamation point suggested by a chance-sighting of a
Utah!
license plate — Cynthia Freeman had been a Bronx-based paralegal with dreams of Africa. She'd gone to Kenya and Tanzania on a photo safari and fallen in love with a Masai herdswoman named Mbala. Mbala had pressed Cynthia's face to her bare breasts and through those mighty gourds intoned ancient tribal wisdom. She also proved to be a canny publicist and wardrobe consultant. She stretched Cynthia's neck with five steel rings — magically stoking her sluggish metabolism — and told her that she would soon be beautiful, rich and powerful by following a few simple rules. First: overcoming doubt and fear. Antelopes fear; lions do not. Second: getting in touch with her inner lion. Mbala gave her a name: “Dykalah”, and from that moment on, Cynthia Freeman began to roar. She returned to The Bronx and transcribed all nine hundred of Mbala's “breast words” into a fivepage proposal for which, after a spirited bidding war, she pocketed a million and a half dollars, movie rights and twenty translations to follow. A million and a half for a five-page, cockamamie proposal? Those were the days.

Connie da Cunha was assigned the editing. For
Ramonah!
the serious part of writing involved accumulating a new wardrobe, hiring publicists, make-up consultants and a personal trainer. Editing meant “fleshing out” the remaining seventy thousand words around the chapter titles.
Ramonah!'s
prowling inner lion lent viable terror to the concept of “fleshing out.” To Connie, it meant someone, probably her, having to induce a book to justify the advance.

Connie and
Ramonah!
fought through months of
Mbala would never say that! Show my readers how my awakening Dykalah-self frightened me in the beginning! Why was I chosen? I was like Mary at the Annunciation! Show my doubts, my vulnerability, despite my obvious beauty, talent, strength and confidence. Show me in the cage with Dykalah! Show how I fed my old Cynthia body and soul to her. Show the old Cynthia disappearing bite by bite and the new Ramonah! growing more and more human. Share my journey! Can't you just do that?
This, after all, is what editors were put on earth, or at least in Manhattan, to do.

Despite
Ramonah!'s
outrageousness, the narrow channel between provocative and irritating she navigated, the self-dramatization, the mismatch between her talent and its reward, Connie found herself halfway in thrall. At times, she thought of
Ramonah!
embodying some lost part of herself, her confident, sassy past. Though she could never assert it, and
Ramonah!
would shriek at the suggestion, they were sisters. There really was, out there in the savannahs of east Africa, a Mbala. Cynthia had taken her picture with her cellphone. She resembled Smokin' Joe Frazier, the one-time boxer, but with commanding breasts. As
Ramonah!
explained it, “Mbala feels that inside us there are mouse genes and a reptile brain, so why not an inner lion?”

Pretty sophisticated thinking, Connie had thought.

“Loved it!”
Ramonah!
said, squeezing Connie's hand and landing a sticky kiss in the centre of her cheek. (What part of writing does she love, Connie wondered — the book jacket? The full, back-cover color photo? The combined book-and-motivational-speaker's tour?) At least now, finally, there was a physical book and soon there would be reviews, a tour and interviews. Heads turned as the maitre d' led them to a corner table. “My goodness,” the author dropped her voice to a leonine rumble, “the Lesbians are out in force today.” Café Alsacien was a safe house for midtown's professional ladies: the agents, editors, lawyers and performers. No cheap-ticket matinee theatergoers, no mall-escapees, no tourists, very few men. A table of midtown ladies stared obliquely, then picked up their drinks in unison. “I think they're staring at you, dear,” Connie tried, thinking,
I know I would.
“Of course they are,”
Ramonah!
agreed. “And they're so deliciously jealous.”

Poppycock, she wanted to say. Then, modestly, “They don't have the slightest idea of who I am.”

“Of course not. But they know who you're with.” She raked the hand of her editor, drawing blood. Her inner lion was on the prowl. “I didn't think another dyke would object,” she said.

“Another what?” “Oh, get with it, Connie. Every halfway sensible woman's a Lesbian, but only a few can be dykes. Mbala's fourth rule. First, be a dyke and you can aspire to becoming a Queer.”

Mbala was a continuous surprise, Connie thought. “I'd forgotten,” she said.

Ramonah!
had been working with Connie for over a year without ever asking “da Cunha? What kind of name is that?” She never asked about the origins of Connie's slightly British accent. She never asked if there was a husband, children, or a partner of any sort. One day at Pão, in TriBeCa, Connie had said to the waiter, “
O pão é rei da mesa”
— bread is king of the table — and the waiter had responded, and she had said something further, and
Ramonah!
had whacked her dinner knife sharply on the table.
You will never upstage me in public again! I know they must have stuffed you full of languages wherever you came from, but I won't have you regurgitating them over lunch! Only if you knew Kiswahili might you be helpful. Otherwise, kindly hold your tongue.
The lone exception to the no-foreign-language rule was brief, semi-private messages exchanged between Connie and taxi drivers, in Hindi.
Ramonah!
assumed that one trip to Africa and one afternoon's quasi-intimate connection with an African woman marked her as more daring and more cosmopolitan than any other Manhattan woman, let alone a foreign-born editor. An editor's job was to offer suggestions in such a way that they could be immediately rejected but ultimately incorporated.

In her
Ramonah!
persona, Cynthia referred to every woman, except for beneath-contempt Lesbians, as dykes. She called their waitperson “a sturdy serving dyke,” and held her hand as she laid out an elaborate order. “And where do you work out, dear? I can get you into my gym anytime. My
PT
does Sandra Bernhard. The salad's okay, but tell the chef no lemon in the dressing. I'm sure the little faggot has an interesting fruity vinegar. No flour and definitely no cornstarch in any of the sauces. I have no problem with the fish — but why does he? Don't even try to serve me those ghastly preboiled potatoes. If I have to go back to the kitchen, it won't be pretty.”

Ramonah!
inserted a cigarette in her lips but didn't light it. Half the clientele flinched in their seats, ready to pounce. She took out a flashy silver lighter. The ladies at the nearest table began flapping their arms, “No smoking!” She set the unlit cigarette, imprinted in lipstick, balanced on the edge of the bread plate. She lifted it and studied the lipstick traces. “So-o-o Joan Crawford, don't you think?” Lipstick on a cigarette; Connie could respond to that, although she'd never worn make-up. “When I started going to movies that was the sexiest thing I ever saw.”

“We could go out for a smoke,” Connie suggested. Joan Crawford was not part of her childhood.

Hours later, back home, Connie still bore the scabs. Oh, she's a cat.

Breastwords
is not what the industry will recognize as a Connie da Cunha book, although Teddy Jenkins, the publisher, had insisted that only she could put it across. Connie's books were usually set among shadowy immigrant communities in London or New York. They featured potent memories of an ancestral homeland, twisted loyalties, religious and sexual and political schisms. Connie had introduced a London audience to the south Asians and Nigerians and Jamaicans in their midst, then Teddy had lured her to New York to do the same in America. Over the years, she'd edited six Nobel Prize winners.
Ramonah!
and her Masai were just another shadow society.

Connie didn't think of herself as a New Yorker, but she'd been there twelve years and she couldn't go back to London or Bombay or anywhere. She was effectively trapped in New York. No airline permitted smoking, and she could not endure an hour without a smoke.

Her above-tree-level view of Central Park from the east-facing living room and study was a sign of having arrived in the world of high-powered New York editing. Also the fact that there was an imprint,
A Connie da Cunha Book,
occupying one featured shelf in the living room. Apart from a half-wall of a mirror surrounded by plaques, awards and framed photographs, not another inch of wall space was given over to anything but books, the newer ones stashed horizontally on top of earlier acquisitions, like a second wave of destruction from a mass kill-off. Corners of the spare bedrooms and library had not been dusted in at least five years. She and Sam had no interesting furniture or decor. It's as though she'd been wooed from her London job with the promise of pay and power and grand professional advancement, but had failed to negotiate an entertainment, decorative or wardrobe budget. Or, that she'd never intended to stay. She lived like a renter, with rented furniture.

She looked up from a Jamaican novel she was editing and stared at herself in the ornate mirror over her desk and declared, I am over fifty years old and have lived these past fifteen years with a woman. When we sleep, I hold my hand over her breast and the dark outline of her downiness. Unlike the gazelle-slim, Lycra-clad, spiky-haired
Ramonah!
Connie was overweight, smoked too much and cared too little for her appearance. “Sam,” she called, “has the time come to think of us as dykes? To come out, as it were?”