The Meeting Point (23 page)

When she opened her eyes, the man was there. Not a word passed from his lips to her. She did not say anything, either. When she realized it was he, she raised herself from the chesterfield, clutching her slip to conceal the black tips of her breasts and to hide the transparent sweetness of her beautiful
body from his eyes. She was watching him: he was watching her. She sat back on the chesterfield (there was nothing else her terror permitted her to do: she didn’t wish to scream) and she held her head down. There were no words; there was no need for words. He came right inside, finally, through the door which, for the second time, Bernice had forgotten to lock. Estelle was frightened. Rape? She had thought of it happening. She had actually urged it on in her mind; but she had hoped it would never happen. Now it was about to happen. She lay back on the chesterfield (things were becoming difficult to think about, to do) her right hand running down the fresh, ready-to-cut fields of her right side, beside the mountains and valleys of her body. Her eyes were on the ceiling: and instead of God, or a prayer, they saw cobwebs; and she heard herself thinking, “Bernice isn’t such a clean housekeeper as she thinks she is!”; and her legs, outstretched, dead, not inviting, just there where he saw them as two plains swept by a wind to make them look sparse of vegetation. The man came to the chesterfield, standing over her like a landlord and not a lover; desire in his body and fear in his eyes; and with a nervous anxiety, because of the passion and the lust in his body, which turned his smile into a criminal’s grin. But she had made him suffer long enough; she would have to save him now — from his conscience and from the deceit of his white body. Never in his life, had he seen a naked body which did this paralysis to his mind … and so, rushed into the luscious valleys and caverns of her love, he felt himself going down down down into an inextricably unexplored nothingness. It sucked him up in its thighs and held him there, suspended; and it made him bawl in his heart for murder and joy. This was a new pleasure; his new ecstasy, so complete and so hurtful that it was unbearable
to continue, or to stop. And in the midst of this confusion, he did a very strange thing (though in his life, it could not, through its repetition, be now considered a strange thing)
he actually compared this woman with his wife, and with A-Train
: being careful to note the many attitudes and states of mind. Nothing, nothing before in his life, was like this. It was all driving, all searching, all exploring. Thoughts rushed into his brain: the vomit in A-Train’s room above the junk shop on Spadina; the B and B in the drugstore of his wife’s bedroom; the coffee-house girl; A-Train’s disgust, and his wife’s disgust at his incompetence … quarrels between his father and his mother, long ago in the dark, heavy, dog-smelling front room on Palmerston Boulevard; and he saw Dachau and Auschwitz; he saw torment of bodies emaciated, tortured, twisted out of all human form and dimensions; and he saw Jeffrey being beaten by the ugly red-faced white policeman who had recently left the immigrant boat from Ireland; and he saw the pain and the humanity in Jeffrey’s mother’s face, as she told him, thirty years ago, “You’s going to pay for your silence, one o’ these good days.” He was now like a man in a canefield, ploughing with the threat of rain behind him, and in the skies; a man having to complete his ploughing because of his commitment, because rain and wages are enemies. And a sensation like madness takes command of him: now he is a man in a sea, a rough turbulent foreign sea with the waves coming up to his shoulders and up to his neck and to his mouth and finally into his nostrils. He feels himself called to his grave, to his death, a soaking, wet death. He wants to die; but he struggles to keep off the death which he knows he cannot really keep off; and does not want to withhold. And now a child: the short, fat, well-fed child of Palmerston Boulevard, in the bosom of his
mother; naked as the child at night, surrounded by terror and grown people, shapeless as the monsters of shadows on the walls of the curtain-partition behind which he saw once, the movements of his mother, undressing; and everything coming down at once, clothes, thunder and rain, and his father’s foreign voice brought back sterner and louder and deeper from the Paramount Tavern; a child, complete even in its willingness to be scourged and loved, and in its willingness to be a child, because a child cannot be anything else.

This was the purity of the action as he writhed in the pain of love; thinking of that country, Poland, far away from his life where his history had begun and ended; thinking there was nothing beyond his semi-illiterate father and his silent mother, nothing further back than twenty years, to his life; of his failures in life and in love, and of his successes in his profession; and of his great insatiable desire for this black woman beneath him.

And she, the woman; the mother, opening herself to take him in, swallowing him, because she wanted to teach him a damn good lesson. For she could see he was a child, dressed in man’s thoughts. She was the land. She was the land through which he had to travel like a man exploring, cutting through a jungle of vines that obstructed his path and vision. He was the traveller through this land, searching for the end at the other side, for enlightenment. And she, like the land, possessing
the
power, did not insist on blocking his path; but allowed him the arrogance and the comfort of trampling his feet on the black soil of her body. She was the land. And he, the explorer. She was the land, with her hands cupped before him, like the hands of his rabbi with a crumb of everlasting joy in them, offering this little blessing which he saw as a bounty. She was
saying to the machette, Cut, cut, cut, there is willingness here to endure this blessing of the pain and the violence of your search.
Cut!
And he, not wanting to end, though tired, but still wanting to end, was now brushing back the last vines from his path, and from his eyes, using his hands like a madman struggling in a sea with breast strokes of panic. “A-Train! A-Train! Glad! Glad! Coffee-house-girl! look at me now,” he was saying. “This is love. Do not let it end!” His pleas shut out the exhaustion from his groans and groins, and he thought he was still listening to a surging voice of a jazz saxophone: the voice of John Coltrane, romping through
Chasing the Trane
alone, unaccompanied in glee and pain. He could see, not hear, the surges of the voice pushing on, straining on,
chasing
on in its turbulence; and a gigantic boulder came down a hill dragging everything in its way with it; the voice in the instrument became a human voice, not the cry of the reed, but the blood and the sweat of the man playing the instrument and of the man listening. They were all three of them searching: the voice, the man, the explorer. But the clearing was in sight. The voice of the man in the instrument was breaking. He could see it, and he could feel it and he could hear it. And she almost completely untouched, merely scratched as a branch in the wind would scratch the land; and conscious that he should not have the pleasure of knowing he had conquered her, she held the land in a death grip and
tightened
the valleys of her thighs until valleys became fjords which stifled him and drained every last drop of song from his body; and she said to him, in a manner he could not hear,
You’re going to pay for this, you bastard!
And then she released him from his prison. He saw the horizon coming, and he closed his eyes. He was powerless to see the end. But it had been a journey of love, and a journey of pain
and violence. She was laughing because she wanted him to see her laughing; but she was saying inside,
You’re going to pay for this rape, white man! Rape!
And the man, unable to face his abuse of beauty and ignorance, scrambled up his shame, and ran out of the room. A-Train was screaming in his ears, from wherever the hell she was, in that noise and jazz of Harlem,
Goo-goo, charlie-pony! goo-goo!

The man is back in his study. He has bathed. He could not stand the
thought
of the smell. He sits now before the bottle of bourbon (he had emptied half of its contents to give him the courage to climb those stairs to Bernice’s apartment) and drinks. The smell of the thought is what he wants to drown. The adventure is over. He is bathed. He smells like a bar of Lifebuoy soap. He has sprinkled a third of his Old Spice After-Shave lotion, and Men’s Deodorant, to kill the smell. His thoughts are still upstairs. He feels like a man who has come through two afternoons in one day. He smells her body on his body (even though he lathered thrice and washed it off thrice). He sang in his bath. Had Mrs. Burrmann been home, she would have known. Guilt will not let him feel easy. He feels like a robber. But the smell is on him; and in him. On his shirt (which is a clean, white shirt, laundered by Bernice); and on his hands (he is always putting them to his mouth — not his nostrils); on his mind. And he wonders why.

He opens
The New Class
, and looks at the page; but there is no text on it, only Estelle’s body. In the bourbon is the face. He cannot get rid of them. Finally, he decides he does not want to get rid of them. He has a new power and new glory now: his wife drifts into the background of impotence; he feels he is free of the inferiority of being unable to have a son. He
knows he can have a son now: from any woman. This man has entered a different zodiac of life. He is in love. With the woman upstairs. And this burden, finally settled and laid down, frees him enough to permit him to take up a book and see the print and read: “
Upon my release from prison, in January
1961 …” He looks at the cover, to find he’s taken up the wrong book,
Conversations With Stalin
and not
The New Class
. The mistake is not significant; but things like these, bother him very much. “
Upon my release from prison
”; he turns the words over and over, relishing them. He takes out his pocket diary. He writes down the quotation, on the appropriate date. He wonders whether that morning in January 1961 was also a Sunday morning.

Frequently nowadays, Bernice’s meditations and soliloquies took place on the toilet bowl, with the bathroom door locked. Before Estelle came, the door would remain open: and she could spend as much time as she chose in this meditative posture, reading her
Muhammad Speaks
. She could sing her Hymns Ancient and Modern in there; she could laugh at jokes she made up; she could laugh at Mrs. Burrmann and at Dots even — she could do everything, anything in there. Recently, it was becoming more difficult to enjoy this psychological siesta. She couldn’t think with Estelle in the room. Once, the weight of her bladder almost crippled her into immobility: Estelle was in the bathroom, running the water; and Bernice was almost overcome, and then she felt her own water starting to drip, drip, her pants were dripping, dripping until she managed to reach the children’s bathroom, and there the oppressiveness of both Estelle and her bladder exploded, and she said, “Ahhh!”; and after the comfort of relief, going back upstairs, to
find the water in her own bathroom still running and above the noise of the water, Estelle singing “
I Want To Hold Your Hand
.”

“In my own place, I can’t even go to the blasted toilet when I have to!” And to think that only the other day she was bragging to Dots about her good judgement in bringing up Estelle, in preference to Lonnie.

“You should have bring up Estelle in the summer, though,” Dots felt. “In the summer, the missy and the children and the master all gone their separate ways, and you rule this roost.”

“Yes. She gone to Nassau, he to the north, shooting and drinking and the kids at summer camp, Christ! this whole mansion could be mine! Estelle could have slept on my chesterfield, and I downstairs in the kiddies’ room.”

The apartment was becoming smaller every day; untidier, every hour. Bernice had kept the bathroom clean (even smelling clean) by various toilet washes and detergents. The chesterfield had been covered by a piece of Mexican blanket brought for her by Mrs. Burrmann. But when Estelle arrived, Bernice took it off, and replaced it with plastic cloth. Estelle was raucous. Bernice was shocked to see how her centre table was smeared. This table was her pride. She polished it every Saturday night until she saw her face smiling in it, until sometimes, she thought it was a crystal ball showing her the licentiousness of Dots and Boysie dancing and drinking rum-and-ginger down at the WIF club. She didn’t really grudge them their leisure: she had her apartment to clean. It was therefore heart-breaking to see the first smudges like paw-prints walking at random across her table, like the fingers of a cat. On the glass which covered the dressing table top, were the same finger-prints of paws which roamed through lipstick and pink powder. “Powder all
over my blasted table top! Clothes dropped behind the bath tub! Estelle’s pads staring wide open! Oh Jesus God, when are you going to deliver me from this rat?” (Bernice stopped buying the same brand of sanitary pads when she saw that Estelle’s brand was not covered in the green drugstore paper to hide its brand name, and the contents. “I lonely as hell here, and I send for a woman? Christ, am I in love with woman? Am I one o’ them?”) Estelle’s voice grew louder, in the melody of
Down Town
; and Bernice purposely dropped the lid of the toilet bowl; flushed the toilet noisily, and rattled things about. The small bathroom even had a different smell: an Estelle-smell. Bernice held her hands to her head to shut out the noise and the headache. She screamed, “
Estellllllll!
” And Estelle came to the door, opened it quietly and asked, “Bern, dear, are you all right?” All Bernice could do was to take the doorknob out of Estelle’s hand, close the door, and ask the turquoise-coloured ceiling, “When?”

Two subsequent events warned Bernice that it would take a long time to get rid of Estelle. The first was that Estelle managed to get her visitor’s visa extended (even before the first six months were expired) through the help of Agatha. Agatha had been seeing her fairly often. The second was that Agatha couldn’t get the two-room flat which she told Dots was for rent. It had been rented a week earlier. Agatha suggested a rooming house on Huron, or on Sussex, but Bernice said no. “I not sending Estelle so near to that bastard, Henry. Not me. She may be bad, but the bitch is still my sister, and I responsible for her.”