The Origin of Waves (12 page)

“For him?”

“What you mean?”

“Did she have the goddamn child for the Barbadian man you’re telling about?”

“No. Well, yes. No, and yes. She said the boy was his, but he didn’t think it was his, after he added up the days and the nights and the times, and when she became pregnant and told him she was carrying the child. But he liked the boy, and supported him. He always brought a gift for her and the boy, chocolates, a stuffed animal, a ladies’ nail-file case and a bottle of brandy for the grandmother. So, on this particular night, it was minus thirty-five, and he arrived with his bags, three bags, even though he was only spending two nights out of the weekend, a leather briefcase, a leather suit-bag, and a leather duffel-type …”

“He liked
leather
!”

“…  and he remembered putting the bags in the trunk of the taxi and when he took them out to carry them into the lobby of the apartment, they were so much heavier; but he remembered putting the bags down in the lobby of the apartment building, in the small lobby you come to just before you actually enter the building itself. He rang the buzzer on the panel just above a radiator, because they had radiators in those days, and he rings and rings and no answer, and he rings again, but the plane had-arrived at nine-thirty from La Guardia, earlier than it was due to arrive, and it took him a half-hour to come from the airport to
Scarborough in all that snow, to the apartment in the taxi, so he rang but he didn’t think anything of it. But he still rang the buzzer again, and all the time he is ringing the buzzer he is trying to remember if he is ringing the right number, because she had called him to say she was moving to a larger apartment in the same building, and he is wondering if the number he is ringing is the right number, not only to the apartment, but if he is at the right apartment building. So he takes up his three bags, getting heavier now through his disappointment and the cold in the outer lobby, and holding them and slipping on the ice and getting his trousers covered in the deep snow. He went to a pay-phone and checked the number and the address. He was ringing the right buzzer. So, he comes back to the lobby, and rang the number some more, but still there was no answer – this is after he had-tried the number on the telephone. All this time, in and out, are people coming and going. One time he sees the same three people. Two women and a man, who had come out and passed him hours ago, going back in, and he is still there ringing the buzzer, in the lobby, wearing a black winter coat, a three-piece suit, boots, and scarf, ringing the goddamn buzzer, as you would say. And then an idea strikes him. Supposing, he says to himself, she isn’t home? Supposing she has moved? People, especially West Indians, can pick themselves up and move suddenly, for no reason. Supposing she is in Guyana, and he has not remembered that she called
him and told him she was going to Guyana to visit her sisters and her aunt. ’Cause remember, her mother lives with her and her son, in the apartment. And she may need a vacation. And this fellow with the three heavy bags is supposing and supposing and supposing. But his mind would not let him start supposing the obvious thing. His mind is only coming so close to it, and then shying away from the real supposing. So he hit on an idea. Another idea. He studied the panel of buzzers, checking the names he does not know, even including hers. She never put her real name on the panel. He checks the panel of buzzers with the names beside them, looking for the number to the superintendent’s apartment. When he rings the buzzer to the superintendent’s apartment, a recording comes on.
‘The superintendent of this building is on duty between the hours of seven and ten on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. On Fridays, the superintendent is off-duty at eight. For emergencies, call the police.’
It is midnight, or later. The superintendent is off-duty, and the man is standing-up in the outer lobby where there is no heat, tired as a horse, with his ears plugged-up from the flying, and ringing the buzzer and the woman won’t answer …”

“The super is a mother!” John says.

“…  and another idea hits him. He realized in the heat of the moment, in the heat of the situation, like when you are angry or quarrelling with a woman and you want to say something in your defence, but you are
so vexed that you can’t remember the words you want to say, or should say, to end the quarrel and defend yourself. Or like when somebody calls you a nigger, and you know before he even calls you so that you have practised a response that is more hurtful, that has to be more hurtful than that, but when the name cuts into your heart, the wound is so deep and so sharp and there is so much blood pouring out of it, that you forget in the moment of the cut to say what you had practised you would say. Only after the quarrel or the assault of that word is over and fades away a little, or the fight is over,
bram!
that word, or the response to
that
other word comes back to you. He has an idea. He has this idea. Ring
any
buzzer. If it answers, it will release the lock on the outside entrance door. But this Barbadian fellow feels so stupid and humiliated that now, after twelve o’clock at night, on a Friday night in the suburbs, he is ringing a buzzer, ringing a buzzer, ringing a buzzer …”

“If the motherfucker had-ring that buzzer in Brooklyn,
on any street
in Brooklyn – Nostrand, Schenectady, Fulton – any of them, even in a black neighbourhood, from nine-something in the night till after twelve midnight, his ass woulda-been
shot
! Out goes you, Jack!”

“He has this next idea to ring the buzzer beside the name of any woman on the panel. And she answers, ‘Who is it?’, and the fellow says, ‘John,’ and the voice coming back at him through the panel and the intercom
says, ‘Come in, Johnnie!’ and the door flies open, and he plants his winter boot between the door, and
ease-in
the three bags, and immediately he feels the warmness in the main lobby. And his body is so tired and he remembers how long he was ringing the buzzer that he almost collapses in the fresh warmness. So he remains standing for a moment feeling the warmness of the lobby bathe his skin, and for a moment he forgets completely he is calling the woman on the thirty-third floor, the woman he has come to see. All he wants now is the warmness of the lobby, to sit down and rest, and get off his feet. Or just lie down on the couch in the main lobby, or in a bed, and go fast to sleep, and forget the woman. But just as he imagined how warm it would be in a bed, he remembered her again. And then, he has to place his winter boot in the elevator to prevent the door from closing and the elevator going back up without him. He eases his three bags in the elevator, and as he does so he forgets to press number 33 on the elevator panel. Not that he really forgot to press 33, it was more like he was scared, thinking what was going to happen when the elevator reached the thirty-third floor, and he had to get off, and walk along the hallway with its red carpet with red patterns like vases — you remember Roman vases, or urns,
Grecian urns
? There are Grecian urns in the pattern of the red carpet that runs all the way from one end of the hallway to the next, by the fire-escape door with a big red
EXIT
above it, a distance of about one hundred yards, a good hundred-yard dash.”

“ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’ By Keats.”

“Wordsworth.”

“Keats.”

“Wordsworth!”

“Keats! ‘
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, / Sylvan historian, who canst thus express / a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme
…’ You think Wordsworth could write poetry like
this?
Is Keats! Don’t you remember we did this poem in our School Certificate from Cambridge University?”

“I remember the poem, too, man! But I tell you it is Wordsworth. ‘
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy
?’
… ‘What wild ecstasy?’ …
Wordsworth!”

“Keats’s hand is written all-over that poem, man! You can smell Keats’s sweat and perspiration pouring-down from this poem!”

“Who in this bar would know? Let’s axe the barman.” And he beckons the barman over. “Buddy, right? I hear the patrons call you so. It’s Buddy?” John says.

“Buddy,” Buddy says. So John asks him, and the barman shrugs his shoulder, and says he has never heard of Keats or Wordsworth, but he knows a fellow who comes in here who says he writes poetry, a Canadian fellow. But he likes Grecian urns, he says.

“I worked for fifteen years for a Greek fellow who owns a Greek restaurant,” he tells us, “and on the
menu and on the interior design, like on the doors and the window panes and the matches, was all these things like urns. I asked the owner, my boss, one day what these things is, and he says to me, ‘Grecian urns, Buddy, Grecian urns. Arts from my country.’ I love those urns.”

“Well, never mind. Give us two more double martinis. The same as before.”

“Coming right up, gentlemen,” Buddy says, grinning and laughing. We have made a friend.

“One hundred yards of red carpet with red Grecian urns that he walks along, not making any noise although the three heavy bags seem as if they have dead bodies in them, not knowing what is going to happen when he knocks on the door of the woman’s apartment … and he is thinking of the time when he was a runner at elementary school and at the Combermere School for Boys, when this same distance travelled over by him so many times got longer and more painful with each sprint, longer than one hundred yards. More than this fear of the interminable nature of the hallway was the deeper fear that he would not reach the tape, and that he would not ever again reach the tape first. There is fear as he travels over one hundred yards of red Grecian urns that he knows so well, and that has brought him such victory and such pleasure of satisfaction. The Grecian urns in the pattern of the red carpet are like his own trophies of cheap silver, metal painted to look like silver. The urns
multiply with the distance and go out of focus, as he wonders what reception he is going to get when he reaches her apartment, just as he always wondered what reception he would get if he reached the tape, and was not the first to break it. He walks up to the door and stands outside it for a few minutes, listening to the noise inside, imagining what noise is inside, what is going to happen to that noise he imagines he hears when he presses the bell, what dream she is coming out of, what dream her son is in, and will he scream at the shrill ringing of the bell repeating its sound in the dark insides of the bedroom, and interrupt his nightmare? Will her mother be the one to come to the door, armed with a kitchen knife, as she does when she answers the door after dusk back home in Georgetown in Guyana where she says that ‘all those bastards want to do is choke-and-rob we.’ She was robbed on her last visit by a man who held a cutlass to her throat. He imagines the woman in her soft blue nightgown that is not real silk, not the pure silk she is accustomed to at cheaper prices in her native Guyana, but which fits her like a priceless outer skin of silk, and riding her body like kisses over her hips and breasts as she moves about the bedroom, rubbing the rheum out of her eyes and looking more seductive in her drowsiness. Her eyes are larger than in the daytime, and her lips, always large and now more luscious and quivering with desire in the night time. And he rang the bell. And froze. And waited for the door to be flung open
and for him to face the glistening blade of the seven-inch kitchen knife he had seen her mother use to snap the head off a red snapper, or make mince with a shoulder of pork for the making of garlic-pork, which he ate with them the three Christmas mornings, before the boy was born. The hallway becomes quiet, quiet. In the quietness he can hear the waves in the sea at Paynes Bay, and he can hear the first sound of the conch-shell announcing the arrival of the fishing boats, and he can hear the pop of the starter’s gun at the beginning of the hundred-yard dash, and he can hear the rattling of knives and forks in the drawer in the kitchen, and the rustling of the nightgowns worn to bed at night. The stillness is making him guilty, his deliberate breaking of the peace within the sweet-smelling apartment where she burns incense from India for the sake of its fragrance and its acridness which kills the smell of raw red snapper and curry. No one comes to the door. He rings the bell again. He can hear it from where he is standing. No one moves inside the apartment. But the stillness of the night makes the hallway become dark, although it is bathed in fluorescent light, for the entire one hundred yards of its distance. But he is standing in the dark and is becoming aware of things that come at you at night out of the darkness. A head of a woman peeped out of an apartment, and said nothing, and withdrew without expressing disgust. He cannot remember if he knows this neighbour from his previous visits. Perhaps, and knows that the neighbour’s lips are
sealed against disclosure of her personal knowledge of things. And on his other side, a body comes out into the middle of the hallway, and he can see the outline of her legs through the penetrating fluorescent light which rips the thin nightdress, the waist down to her feet. She says nothing and just stands and stares. He thinks he sees a smile on her face. Not a smile of recognition only, but also a smile that contains information she is not willing to divulge at this ungodly hour of the night. And fearing that more heads and bodies will come out in punctuation of his pressing the bell, he takes up his three leather bags, and moves the short distance to the elevator. He presses the buzzer for the carriage to come and carry him from these neighbourly eyes. Just before the elevator comes, he goes back one last trembling time to the apartment door and presses his right ear against the dark-stained plywood, and hears movement inside and a swishing of cloth, and a rattling of knives and forks in the drawer beside the refrigerator. But it is the noise from the elevator coming up to rest beside him, and open its mouth, and take him in. And down, down, down he goes in his retreat, wishing he was a braver man, wishing he was a man who didn’t care about scenes and neighbours in nightgowns looking out; wishing he was a strong man, brave enough to shout out the name of this sleeping woman, and have the sleeping neighbours open their doors to welcome him, or laugh at him; wishing that he was brave enough to kick the door
in, and bring scandal and attention to all of them; wishing that he didn’t care how brutal the Toronto cops are to men stalking and beating, assaulting and harassing women; wishing that he could face the cops and face his reputation put upon the front pages of the
Toronto Star
and the
Toronto Sun
, in the large, full proof of print. He would disregard the papers heralding the image and the stereotyping of his West Indian race and colour. But he is a coward. A stupid fucking goddamn Barbadian black coward! Down, down, down in the elevator, which is hot, hotter than the lobby after the cold, damp, small vestibule where the panel of buzzers and names are installed; down, down, down he goes, and gets out of the elevator and sits in the lobby, and watches the colour of the thick glass on the front door change, until he can see the outline of trees and cars and people moving, and buses driving by, and more people coming out of the four elevators behind him, on their way to work and on their way after a night of playing dominoes, and a night spent with women. ‘Morning,’ a woman greets him. ‘Cold again, today, eh?’ a woman says, as she pulls her scarf in a tighter fit, as she grabs the front of her winter coat. And her coat grabbed in this fashion makes her body warm, and makes her body look smaller. ‘Boy,
what we
doing in this damn place, eh? You have a good day, son.’ A man comes out, and looks at him and moves to the door; and before he places his hand on the horizontal metal bar to let himself out into the cold morning, he looks back a second
time, and says something with the movement of his body and his eyes; and the man sitting on the bracket of the radiator realizes that he has seen this same man three times in the hours he has spent tracking the woman down and ringing the bell, from the time he first stood in the small outer lobby, ringing the buzzer. The man is Indian. From the West Indies. Younger than he. In the new dawn of morning, a taxi drives up to the front door, and he rushes to the door, and beckons to the driver. A passenger gets out; the driver nods his head, and tells him to come. The man in the lobby helps him with the three leather bags, and before he closes the door behind him, the man says, ‘Rass! What a night, eh, bwoy!’ The tires of the taxi scratch the ice on the driveway, skid a little, and it moves out into the Saturday-morning traffic, going west. He thinks of crabs moving over the beach. ‘Where to this time?’ The airport, he tells the driver. ‘Had a good night?’ The radio receiver in the taxi is loud, barking names and addresses and warnings, not intended for this driver, and which he listens to nevertheless, but does not answer.”