The Origin of Waves (19 page)

“But
ten?
” I am thinking how safe I feel, and how safe John feels in this strange place, in this strange bar, with these men and women, none of whom we know, none of whom knows us, and yet their friendliness shines in their smiles each time our eyes meet theirs; and the safety and the comfort and the barman, Buddy from Nova Scotia, are almost like the boys and girls we grew up with, giving me this false sense of safety and comfort, provided by the light from the fake Tiffany lamps; and I continue to feel I am warm again, as if I am on that beach with the sand the colour of the silent pink conch-shell; and I think of the sea and how I measured its cruelty by the drifting in of parts of a fishing boat, and a broken mast and an oar, and I see again the sun turning yellow, or gold, and the green sea changing its roughness in the distance and becoming like an endless sheet of glass that takes in the colour of the sun
going down; and I see the broken oar and then a sail, and how it drifts out and out and out into the same waves which bring only death and fishermen’s rewards, bloated bodies and dead fish.
Swim-out! Swim-out, man, and get the tire!
“You remember what you told me that afternoon when …?”

“When I told you, swim-out, swim-out, it never had-occurred to me, although in a way I had to know it, that you couldn’t swim. How much do you have?”

“Have of what?”

“Thrildren.”

“None.”

“Even outside-thrildren?”

“None.”

“You have an empty life.”

“Sometimes, it hits me hard.”

“Every man should have
at least
two thrildren. A boy
and
a girl.”

“Or five boys and five girls.”

“Goddamn!”

“Sometimes, I think I would like to relive my life, and sometimes, I am satisfied; but not always.”

“I was an only child, like you was; but I always say I wanted a big family, after seeing all the fun that thrildren of big families in our village had, and even though I didn’t plan to have a big family with four women, I still sort-of wanted one, if you see what I’m saying. I sure’s hell never
imagine
I would have three wives who wasn’t from the Wessindies, and that they
would be pure Europeans! I’d be walking down a street and see a man with a black woman, or a black wife, and something would happen to me, something that I can’t explain or express in words, if you see what I’m saying; something that I know right here in my guts, but can’t put into words. And I feel I would like to place myself in that man’s shoes, and try to feel what it is like to be walking down the street beside a black woman, beside a black wife. But I’m destined with a white woman, for a wife. I am gonna tell you something. Where a man lives, so-too does he foop, and so-too does he have to goddamn sleep. If you see what I’m saying. I’ll be sixty-three or sixty-five goddamn years old this year, depending on how you look at it, give-or-take a year, and I just emerge from my third divorce. My third, or my fourth divorce? Sometimes, I can’t remember the number. Nor the right number o’ thrildren that I have. My
fourth
, man. You’re looking at a man who been dee-vorced four times. Goddamn! Emotionally, I am still reeling from those break-ups. You never get over a
dee
-vorce. Never. You lie about getting-over it, and pretend you are free. Free at last, free at last! Bullshit! One breaks you up, the second destroys you, and this third cuts you into two pieces. And to go through it four times, goddamn! You’re nothing but a quarter of the man you started out as. Your balls’re cut into four pieces. All my wives was kind women. Decent women. The fourth wife took me for all I had, or she took me for all she
thought
I had.
But she was still a kind woman. Before her came the Eye-talian opera singer.”

“What did she sing?”

“She was Eye-talian, but she wasn’t really an opera singer in the sense that she sang operas and arias, like that Southern woman, like Leontyne Price, who, incidentally, lives in the South. Or, Callas. If you see what I’m saying. She wasn’t … really … a singer in that sense. She sang around the house. She sang when she was in the shower. And she was big. You know me and women with weight! But to me. She was an opera singer. I just call her that. I call her the opera singer because of the avoirdupois. To
me
, she was a beautiful woman, like an opera singer. And after this
la-dolce-vita
lady, Dolly or Dolores, I am trying now to make a life with a lady from Durm-North Carolina, a lady by the name of Wilhelmina. Part German. Part Dutch. Part Austrian. Part French. And part Jewish. She tells me this whenever I watch Jesse Jackson and the question of black and white is raised, that her background is German-Dutch-Austrian-French and Jewish, when I tell her mine is black. Goddamn! All those parts! Life just got to be so many goddamn parts, and hyphens, when people can’t get together. Come closer. Hold over. Lemme let you in on a secret. Two hundred. And thirty pounds,” he whispers. “Two hundred and three-zero pounds …”

“Is she here with you? Where’s she now?”

“Durm. North Carolina.”

“Goddamn!” I say, and he laughs.

“You’re beginning to talk like an Amurcan, from the South. Where is she? Well, let’s say she’s here with me, and she’s not here, if you see what I’m saying. In her heart, in her heart of hearts, she’s here, but her spirit, her life-force, is back in Durm.”

“Her life-force?”

“Morally.”

“But, in other words, she’s here with you.”

“Goddamn! I wish I could say more.”

“I don’t need to know more.”

“How did we get-onto this? My asking you if you have a woman? Or thrildren?”

“Both,” I say. “How many children …?”

“From the woman from Durm-North Carolina, I have one child. A boy-child. Who turned out wrong. Named after an African. Rashid. I blame the Amurcan environment. Outta the ten thrildren born to me all over the whirl, to have the tenth turn out like this pisses me off, and saddens me. Make me saddened. But I am not blaming anybody. And I won’t blame God. But I axe myself. I axe myself if I have done something wrong. If I been a bad influence or something, having these thrildren and getting divorce, and leaving my thrildren in four parts, quarters. And at
this age
! To be now starting over, with a new slate? You think I been a bad influence? You think I’m begging for trouble? Look me in my goddamn face. And tell me. If, by having ten thrildren, nine straight thrildren from
three legal wives, and this tenth bastard from a’ outside-woman, am I the right role-model for this goddamn delinquent that I helped to born? Look me in my face!”

“You have nine-other good ones.”

“I have nine others, yes. I have nine others. But this one is special.” He drinks off the martini. He beckons Buddy over. His fingers are shaking. He takes out his cigar case, a huge crocodile-leather case, and extracts a cigar. The label round the cigar says
Monte Cristo
. He takes the label off, and wears it as if it is a ring, on his little finger. He takes out his cigar clipper. He clips off the end and he places the cigar into his mouth. He passes the match bearing the name of the bar in a slow circular motion at the tip of the cigar. He makes short, almost silent puffs on the cigar, and to me it is like the firing of a gun with a silencer attached to it. The tip is glaring red. And then, he takes a long draw on the cigar, holds the smoke in his lungs, savouring its taste and its power and strength as it goes through his system, and then he shoots it out. The smoke covers me and, for a moment, I cannot see the three women sitting close to our table. His eyes, for that moment, are hidden from me.

“Don’t axe,” he says. “I not gonna tell you as much about this one, the scion of my old age. Goddamn beautiful boy. But he came out wrong. Me and his mother aren’t married, as I say, but I’m thinking of it, for goddamn sure! I
love
weddings.”

“The fourth hanging.”

“For-goddamn-sure! The fourth henging, when I walk up the aisle with this one. Or the fifth? You ever walk-up the aisle? Other than as a choirboy? You say you haven’t been married-off, yet?”

“Nope.”

“Goddamn. You are a lucky son of a bitch, if you see what I’m saying. How come no Canadian woman haven’t hauled your ass up the aisle? How come?” He puffs his cigar, his jaw becomes swollen with smoke and he has the attitude of a man who holds a large cigar in his mouth, and he continues to hold the smoke, and then he jets it out straight into my face; and says, “Wouldn’t be
AIDS
or sickness of that sort, now, would it be?
Naw!
Not at your age! … If you see what I’m saying …”

“Too busy.”

“You don’t have confidence in holy matrimony, or what?”

“In money.”

“Root of all evil. Not only the root, but from my experiences, the square-root of all evil. The square-root,” he says. He is tired. His face becomes a face of thick hanging jowls under his chin. I become concerned that he is aging in front of my eyes. I think of his young wife and his young son. I want to ask him if he is here to get an operation for an old man’s disease. But I remember he said Sick Children’s Hospital, many times, in reference only. It’s the child.

“What is wrong with your son?” I ask him.

“One reason I’m glad I’m here,” he says, “apart from the Sick Kids Hospital, is to get me a cashmere topcoat, with the same cut as yours. Stannup. Just for a minute, and let me see how your coat hangs.” I stand up, feeling a little stupid. “I can’t find me a good tailor in the States. The fashion magazines are turning men into women, if you see what I’m saying.”

“Unisex,” I say. And I sit down.

“No difference,” he says. He is tired, and getting older from the drink.

“Why are you here?” I say. For a while, he does not answer. “For an operation? Prostate? Ulcers?”

“What did you do, when you worked? Were you fired? Injured? Are you in compensation?” he says. And then he says, “Major, something major. With the little one, my tenth child.”

I feel stupid, as I did when he asked me to try on my cashmere winter coat, to stand and model it for him. I bought the cashmere winter coat at the Goodwill store. But I will not tell him this. It is my secret, my front, my image of respectability. So, too, will I not tell him why I do not work.

“Doing well?” he asks me. I can feel the fatigue in his voice. “Car? House? Investments?” he says, as I nod my answer to each of his questions. This makes him ask, “Doing so well, and no goddamn wife nor thrildren?”

“Car. House. Few investments …”

“Amurcan or European car?”

“Benz. House in Rosedale,” I say. “What’s Rosedale? A housing-project? Community-housing?”

“You
could
call it that. Rosedale is sometimes like a community-housing project. I never thought of it that way, but it could be. It is …”

“What did you see, when me and you was sitting down, back-there on the beach, wearing our make-believe bathing trunks, some fifty years ago, and looking out into the goddamn sea? What did you see? When you looked out in the sea? What did you see in the sea? What did you really see?”

“Ships.”

“Ships? Nothing else?”

“And clouds.”

“Ships and clouds?” He says this as if it is the echo to my memory, as if it is an echo, time and place here in this bar going back to that time with no change in the time or in the place, as if there is no alteration, and the bar is the beach; and the way he says it tells me that he too is travelling back over all that time, perhaps not in a ship or in the clouds in a plane, but in something, in some frame of mind, medium, attitude, that has the same dependence upon the wind and the movements of water and waves. I look at him after he has echoed the word
ship
and the word
clouds
and I see him as he was then, and as I was then, as we are,
then
. And then he says, “
I saw three ships come sailing in …”

“Come sailing in, come sailing in,”
I continue. And we laugh aloud. The three women near to us, in this bar, now almost empty, laugh and smile with us, as strangers smile in exchange of happiness and relief, and safety, in a bar.

“Those two old geezers,” one says, loud enough for me to hear.

“What do you think they do?” another asks.

“Priests?”

“Lawyers,” the first one says.

“How old you think those two are?” the second one says.

“Not a day past forty-nine,” the first one says. She is the one wearing the silver pantyhose.

“Ship sail?”
John says.

“Sail fast,” I say.

“Hommany men on deck?”

“Nine!” I say.

“
One
more! One more than nine, leff-back,” he says, “and I’m not telling you much about this one, about him. But that’s why I’m here. I been at the Sick Thrildren’s Hospital.” And he says no more. But the grief, and the deep concern surrounding the hospital and the little boy is on his face. And I do not look into his eyes to stare at it.

The snow is still coming down, as if a white sheet has been drawn against the windows, like the snow falls and shades the figures in the showcases of stores outside along Yonge Street, figures of trees and angels and bells,
blocking our vision from the people passing outside, from looking outside, from seeing the whiter darkness. I think of the mock battles we used to play in John’s house, games sent to him by his father’s brother, who spent all his life in America working on a ship; and when he came off, when he got shore leave, he refused to come home, and jumped ship in America. But he sent toys and pens and shoes which were brogues and brown, and heavy, and which John was not permitted to wear to school as part of his uniform, because of the colour.

“No thrildren, eh?” he asks me. “But I axe you that, already.”

“No children. You asked me that three times.”

“Goddamn! You got me a little confuse, if you see what I’m saying. Thinking in one part of my mind that you may be bordering on the queer, or something, if you see … like I mean, on the homosexual … see what I’m saying? Some men, in later life, men your age, sometimes change their preference, if you see what I mean. Happens to women, too. Not that they’re really-and-truly switched-off from women, and turn on to men, but they prefer the companionship and the company of men to the company of women. Companionship takes over from sex in later life.”