The Origin of Waves (4 page)

“Jesus Christ!”

“If anybody had-tell me that you and me, who last see each other sitting-down that afternoon on the
beach by Paynes Bay! Look at this thing, though! God bless
my
eyesight! How long you in this place?”

“This is really you?”

“Is
me
, man!”

“But, Jesus Christ! Not calling the name of the Lord in vain, but this is a goddamn … Tell me something, though. I been thinking of this for donkey-years. Must be over forty years now, I been thinking of finding you, to axe you this question. You learn how to swim yet?”

And our laughter explodes. Out of the white mist come shapes which pause to look, to understand, to wonder why this loud tropical laughter and equatorial joy must take place in this deadening cold, to break the quiet peace of this cold, clean afternoon. What could cause this joy? And cause these two old black men to embrace each other, laughing and slipping on the ice, and pummelling each other on the backs of their thick black and light-brown cashmere winter coats, with hands that are magnified in brown leather gloves, weighing down their hands and their bodies bloated by thick scarves and wool and sweaters? I sometimes laugh at myself, as I see my reflection in a store window, as I pass wearing all this clothing, making me walk after all these years with added weight and meaning and cold experience in this new environment, I see how it makes us, at our age, walk with a limp, like huge tamed monkeys, since neither of us has got accustomed to this way of dressing, nor has learned to walk in winter. And all this laughing in the people’s street?

We are hugging each other. I am slapping him, he is slapping me on the back, and I am judging how much size he has put on his frail boyhood body. He is slapping me as if he is a Black Muslim. His after-shave lotion is pungent in my nostrils, as he is moving from cheek to cheek slapping me all the time on the back as if he is trying to make me burp, as our mothers used to do after the bottle; and later, after the Cream of Wheat. His after-shave lotion follows me, as he is changing from the left shoulder to the right, when that first shoulder blade has suffered sufficient pummelling from the affection that had first poured on that sand the colour of coral, the colour of the empty conch-shell, when he showed me how to walk on his hands like a crab.

“I
don’t
believe my two goddamn eyes!”

“If you want to know the truth,” I say, “if you want to know the truth, I was thinking about home, just before I bounced into you.”

“Bounce into me? Man, you nearly licked-me-to-fuck down! Goddamn! And a black man like me don’t look too good sprawl-out on the goddamn snow! Never learned how to walk in all this goddamn snow in the goddamn winter, after all these years. And never want to, neither!” We stand and stare at each other; and do not talk for a long while; and then the need for time and place and history comes spewing out. “Been in England for years. The Mother Country, eh? Tried Europe for a piece. France and Italy and Germany. Like
their food and their women, but not their goddamn language! Catch their winters in my arse! And you know how racist the fuckers are! I hear Canada better.
Liberté
and
égalité
. But France? Those two words are mother-fuckers! Never could figure out how Amurcans like Wright, Richard Wright, and Baldwin could say that France is such a liberal place. France? I had a French wife once. But I never learned to speak their
parlez-vous
. Not one goddamn vowel in
français
pass my lips. Stayed pure-fucking-Barbadian, and spoke the Bajan language. Bajan is
my
foreign language. I spoke it in France as if it was a foreign language. And the French woman that I married would nod her head and say,
oui, oui, oui-oui!
Goddamn! But you was about to say something when I cut-you-off. What was you about to say when I butt-in?”

“I was about to ask you what you’re doing here. If you have a family. You’re here on a job? A conference? Business …?”

“Man, look at you, though! Look at little Timmy! And not one goddamn grey hair in your head! Still
fooping?
Screwing chicks? You’re too goddamn old to be still fooping!” His sudden outburst, like thunder, frightens and embarrasses me. “If you see what I’m saying …”

He hollers so much, and so loudly when he says this, and with such wicked warmth, that all those years are peeled back, revealing us and a time when we were in love with the same girl, Chermadene.

“And neither of us really got to first base with her,” he says, “because she was a virgin, and because we never played baseball in the island, and because her mother threatened us.”

And in his words, I am facing the hurtful memory of those glorious, happy days.

I am standing now in front of a window with men’s suits the size of giants, with matching shoes, and the trunks of men with pink skin made of shining plastic, with false silk hair; and I can see rows of shoes of shiny leather and stiff lasts of large feet attached to long trousers, to bodies that end at the waist, as if a mass-murderer has hacked the bodies into halves, and left them in these show windows which look like glass coffins that cannot hold them from head to foot. And my glance touches matching shirts for men made famous in movies about men who like to chop down trees tall as skyscrapers, and have a preference for heights; and I can see the sidewalk now, for to my right are long windows that reach to the ground, all glass with shirts in them, made in foreign countries like the ones John says he lived in, and made by foreign hands, Polo, Yves Saint Laurent, Ralph Lauren, and other designers; and briefcases and travel bags made from the sides of animals which the television says are killed illegally. I can see now where I am standing, and where I am going. I am standing across the street from the south end of the Eaton Centre. It has taken me all this time, in physical movement and in the span of years, to travel this short
distance from the edge of the Lake, which before this moment was completely blotted out by the thick falling snow. Now I can see where I am standing and where I am going. It is as if John’s breath, and the violence he has put into his laughing speech, his exuberance and warmth, show me how unsmiling an old man’s walk, this afternoon in December, has been.

The snow has disappeared. All around us, it seems, the street and the sidewalk have come alive. And I am sure also that we two black men, old geezers as they call us in this city, and as we appear, two old-age pensioners, we two old West Indian men are the only two living, happy persons in the world, on this cold honest Toronto afternoon. It is like sitting on that warm sand, possessing the entire beach and owning our lives, conquerors of the entire beach, and with no one in sight, no one threatening, no one pretending to our throne of ownership.

“Where’s the nearest bar? This calls for a drink. Goddamn!” John says.

“Not a drink, man.
Drinks!”
I say.

“Do you have time? You’re on your lunchtime?” he says.

“I don’t work,” I tell him.

“Unemploy, huh? Goddamn!”

“I don’t work.”

“Goddamn! You’re retired, then?”

“I am not retired.”

“Goddamn! Things tough with everybody these days? But you still hustling the chicks, though!”

“I am free. Of chicks and work. The only work I do is walking. I walk all day. Work is for immigrants. I was never an immigrant. Ten years ago I stopped working. Nowadays I just walk. As the song says,
I walk the lonely streets
. Ten years almost to the day … the twenty-six of this month is …”

“You won’t be pimping, would ya?”

“Just walking. And looking at people, and …”

“If a man don’t work, he’s gotta be pimping. And I don’t mean
you
personally, nor that you be pimping off chicks, if you see what I mean.”

“…  but the twenty-six of this month ten years ago is when I made up my mind not to lift another finger even if it was to save my life. Not since eighty-six, or eighty-seven. December the twenty-six, nineteen hundred and eighty-seven, to be exact. I have it written down. I even walk with it in my wallet. Been doing that for years! Right here. When we sit down, I’ll show you the note, the reminder I wrote to myself, December the twenty-six, nineteen eighty-seven.”

“Goddamn!”

We are walking slowly now. We are looking for the nearest bar. The snow is deep, and fresh and beautiful like clouds you see from the windows of planes travelling to the West Indies. The snow is pure and enervating as a morning sea bath, when you enter the water first, and here no human foot has touched the long unsullied stretch ahead of us. Our footsteps are slipping still, from the hidden ice. But we are in no hurry to get anywhere.
John’s hand is on my shoulder as we walk, as we used to stand on the school pasture talking, at lunch and after school, while he prepared to take batting practice in the nets: he to bat, and I to watch. “You shoulda seen the length of those needles from the cobbler that came outta my foot that night! One inch long, at least, every one o’ them. But, getting back to you …”

“Here we are!” I say, and we enter the bar we are standing beside.

The bar is almost empty. We move to the rear, in the semi-darkness, away from the entrance, from the sudden blasts of cold, and to give rein and space to the explosion of our happiness in our dramatic chance meeting. When we get accustomed to the new, subdued light in the bar, we see two other men, younger than ourselves, sitting at opposite ends of the long bar itself, drinking draught beer. One of them has just said, “Another Bud, eh, Bud?” And the man behind the bar comes out of the darkness, whistling a tune, and nods in our direction.

“In all this time, in all these years, you ever wondered what happen to me, or where I was?” John asks. “I never wrote, not even a card, ’cause I didn’t know how to track you down. In all this goddamn time.” He slaps me on the back, hard, and says, “I’m here for a few days only. Came in two nights ago.”

“Never,” I say, about the writing.

“I never wrote you a letter. From all those different foreign countries!” John says. “Knew, though. Knew
I’ll bump into you, one o’ these days. Here, or back home. Perhaps, on the beach back home.”

“Ever thought of going back home?”

“Three times. After each divorce. Three times, but never tried it. Thought of it though,” John says, “to relax, and to dead. That’s all home means to me!”

“Can’t decide myself, either.”

“Get married? Ever get married?” John says.

“Going back? I’m not going back, even to die.”

“Shit, I can’t even ask you what you’re drinking these days,” John says, “ ’cause when we last was together, neither you nor me was drinking liquor, To me, though, you look like a Scotch man. Right?”

“Scotch and soda,” I tell him. The other man drinking draught raises his hand towards the barman, who says, “Another draught?” And the man says, “Yeah, Bud.”

“Goddamn! You know something?” John says. “Something I been watching on television lately, that have to do with twins. Two twins. I never had twin-brothers, as you know. Nor twin-thrildren. I know you don’t have twins in your family. But this thing about twins and their habits. Generical twins, they call it. Where one go, the other is sure to go. Goddamn! Just like that nursery rhyme we had to learn by heart in elementary school!
Mary had a little lamb, the lamb was white as snow, and every goddamn way that Mary split to, the goddamn lamb was sure to go!
These generic twins. Where one goes, even in secret, the other twin was sure to go! Who
one
foops
, the other one is
sure
to
foop
. Ain’t that a motherfucker? Now, I axe you,
how
goddamn would I, even though I am a therapist who haven’t seen you in forty-something, fifty-somebody years, how would I
know
that your drink is Scotch, not seeing you after all this goddamn time? Forty years? Or fifty?”

“Forty-fifty,” I say. But I am wondering what he means about being a therapist. I do not think of asking him. “Forty-fifty.”

“Gotta be
more
.”

“Fifty years at least! It was nineteen forty-three. The War was still on. We were ten at the time.”

“Goddamn! That makes
you
sixty-three!”

“Makes you, too!”

Another man enters the bar and orders a beer. “Any brand,” he says. “Cold today, eh, Buddy?” he adds; and I know now that the barman’s name is Buddy. It is warm in this bar, and friendly; and I am thirsty; but John is talking and talking; and Buddy looks at us, wondering. John has just gestured to him, to wait a minute. I can feel the cold thawing from my feet.

“Goddamn! We’re pensioners, goddamn!” John says.

“I may be sixty-somebody years,” I say, “but I’m no damn pensioner. I will never be a Canadian pensioner! And live in a home for the aged!”

“Goddamn! But you never learn to swim! In all this time. That cobbler,” he says, in the way men remember events that have changed a part of their lives, “that cobbler that I stepped on, that day.” To me, life is
nothing but a cobbler. We have stepped on cobblers all our lives, while searching for sea-eggs. But he is bringing it back with his powerful memory of nostalgia; and he makes the cobblers almost as important as all the good times we had on that beach, as important as Chermadene. He does not know this, but his nostalgia brings back Chermadene, and blue, warm water. “I never had the chance before this, after all these years, this late, since you left the island before me, I didn’t have the chance to tell you what happened when I got home that evening bleeding from a cobbler in my heel, and had to face my Old Lady, my mother …”

“How’s the Old Lady?”

“Dead.”

“I’m sorry. How long? God rest her soul.”

He makes the sign of the Cross on the breast of his tailored winter coat, before taking it off. The cold has gone out of his bones, too.

“Long. Died when I was still in France. Got the news from a cousin, and when the letter came, it was three weeks old, redirected from a previous address; and the son of a bitch, you remember him? My third-cousin?”

“Smitty?”