Bivouac Page 13

  The other secretary is probably worse because she is lacking in intelligence; she has a very vicious eye and does not speak English under any circumstances. The third secretary has a pleasant personality and seems to be skilled in the ways of the office, but I get the impression that she has been passed over or kept down. The editor is playing a three-card trick between them.

  They know how pathetic I am. They feel no pity for me. They know I belong to the other party and my presence here is a reminder that they won. I sense that there is a part of them that would like to stone me or lynch me right here in this press room. It is all so absurd, the lines that are drawn. After all, they know nothing about me. It may be my fault. I say nothing to them. I sit here, stoic, quiet, and to them, I must seem like a condescending bastard. I represent everything they loathe. I have a job because the editor is my friend. Me, the enemy, manages to get a job because of connections. And I am probably earning more than all of them, they think. They don’t know that I agreed to pocket change, because I would agree to anything that would allow me to feel productive in some way.

  If I fell flat on my face right now, a quick heart attack or something, they would saunter over, look down at me, then move to the window frowning, spit, and then call for the janitorial staff to come and deal with the mess. I swear, though, I would crawl to one of those red chairs and expire all over it.

  sevenTEEN

  Theresa called at four o’clock in the morning. The phone rang twelve times. Ferron answered.

  “Ferron . . .” She was crying. “Is your mother there?”

  “She is sleeping.” Ferron was looking through the window to see if the other houses had power. Power in their house went earlier that evening. Clarice went out, his mother went to bed, and Ferron stared into the darkness until he fell asleep on the sofa.

  “Oh, sorry . . .” Theresa was whispering.

  Ferron liked Theresa for her ability to love Femi. It took a certain daring to love a man whose presence was never guaranteed. She called Femi for all her significant decisions. Whenever Femi arrived, Theresa was his. Once, she had thrown a young man out of her house for Femi’s sake.

  “Okay . . .” Ferron wanted to wash his mouth. It tasted sour.

  “I am looking for Femi . . . Have you seen him? Is he there?” She sounded worried.

  “No,” Ferron said.

  “Ferron, I think he is screwing around with me. I mean with somebody else. He is, isn’t he?” There was something almost accusatory about the question. Ferron felt the need to defend himself by disassociating himself from Femi.

  “I don’t know . . . Haven’t seen him in a while. But you know Femi,” he said slowly. Then he realized he could be honest by simply quoting Femi. “As he says, when he is in Jamaica you have all his attention.”

  “Yeah, right. I know the bitch!” she said sharply, then fell silent.

  Ferron wanted to tell her that she did know Femi, that she knew that Femi had other links in Jamaica that he had to give time to. Those women, like Theresa, were not demanding, they understood that they each owned a certain part of Femi, a part that he gave fully with sweat, tears, and sperm. But it was all they got, and they had to understand that there were others who got the same. Ferron wanted to say this but did not. It was not something he had ever said to Theresa. This kind of openness from Theresa was unusual. She rarely spoke to him about Femi or about anything intimate. Quite some time ago he thought she’d been interested in him. She’d virtually said as much. Nothing came of it because he felt embarrassed and uncertain. She did not press. In retrospect, he decided that his timidity cost him a sexual encounter with an older woman. But the dream—the possibility—served a useful role as a disposable fantasy to accompany masturbation. So things reverted to normal. He started to notice the thin lines around her gray eyes, the sag of her breasts, and the cigarette stains on her fingers. He noticed that she had no bottom, that her cheekbones were too sharp and awkward on her face, and that her skin was leathery. He noticed the way her hands trembled before she smoked a cigarette, and her insistence on wearing dashikis and African cloth to every function she could attend. He noticed that she always wore makeup now. Always. He noticed her self-mocking attempts at dreadlocks with thin hair that was graying quickly. Black as he was, he knew he would not be black enough for Theresa. Theresa worked hard at eking out the black in her. It showed in her skin: leathery and worn with too much sun, as if she were daring the skin to defy the black blood in her system and break out in insidious skin cancer. Theresa was his mother’s friend.

  “I know it, though. He is fucking around.” She started to cry again. “I . . . we just had a disagreement . . .”

  “Theresa, I don’t know where he is. I mean . . .” Ferron stopped. He felt awkward. Theresa was sobbing loudly on the phone and he did not know what to do, what to say. He wanted to hang up.

  “I am sorry, Ferron,” she said. She laughed a little and he decided that she was drunk. “I just feel badly, you know? I’ve been waiting a long time now and, well, I was getting kinda worried, with him and this business with your father. I thought maybe you might know . . .”

  “No . . .” Ferron had last seen Femi a week ago at the Institute. Femi was there on business, trying to arrange for a group of Nigerian master drummers to come to Jamaica for a series of workshops. He had said that things were getting more and more interesting on the “espionage front.” He said this with a wink. That was all. Then he left.

  “Well, sorry to wake you up,” she said. “Oh, Ferron, you people have power?”

  “No. Went out at around eight,” Ferron said. “You?”

  “Same here. I feel like a dog, eh? I was just worried. So when you moving out?”

  “I’ve moved out already. Just here to help Mother. She’s moving tomorrow.”

  Theresa seemed to have recovered. Ferron relaxed. “Such a shame, eh? Was a damned nice place,” she said. “But things change like that all the time.”

  “Yes,” Ferron said. He looked outside. His eyes were getting used to the absence of light. The road was empty except for two dogs coupling angrily in the road. The bitch pulled away quickly and jumped over a fence into her yard. The other dog trotted to the fence and watched. Hungry. Ferron chuckled.

  “It’s just that the bitch is a little girl, you know? We get insecure sometimes, we old women,” Theresa said. She laughed a light, faraway laugh. It stirred something in Ferron. “We are always holding on desperately. It’s not love. Don’t be fooled.”

  There was a long pause. Ferron wanted to say that he was not fooled, that he sometimes used to feel that Theresa wore her sex like a perfume and exuded it wherever she went. He wanted to tell her that she could do whatever she wanted, because she had the power in the careless way she spread her legs when she sat down, because of the vulnerability in her tiny bones and thinning hair. He wanted to tell her he had dreamed of her many times, a small woman bouncing against his body angrily, loudly, pulling at everything in him. Just there, suddenly like that, he had shifted from indifference to blatant lust. It was happening a lot these days. He could not predict when it would happen, or with whom. It just happened. And when it did, it all made sense. Like it made sense now, staring out into the stark street, the darkness distancing him from his own body, bringing Theresa closer, as if beside him, timeless and without context. Maybe it was the dogs. But he did not speak.

  “I hope I am not keeping you up,” she said. “From something else you would rather be doing.”

  “No. No. I was just dozing off. It is quiet. I was just dozing, I don’t mind talking,” he said.

  “You know, there is a boy next door who spies on me. A schoolboy, really. For almost a year now, this one been looking over, eh. He will turn off his light anytime I come into the room, and wait. And every time I’m about to dress, I close the blinds. I used to find it funny. Kind of ridiculous, even a bit annoying.” She was laughing softly. “Then today, I didn’t shut the blinds. I let him watch, and I kno
w he was watching, but it wasn’t funny anymore. I felt flattered. Frightening, eh? Shit. I think I getting old. It bothers me. I might do something desperate, you know?”

  “Like what?” he said, walking into her trap. And she spoke as if her throat were sore, as if her face were clouded with heat, as if her words were deep secrets only for him.

  They talked till the road turned orange with morning.

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  There was an atmosphere during the war, during my school days at Jamaica College, of an absolutely aristocratic dispensation. It is difficult to explain, now, that I went to a white school, which had some rich blacks and scholarship boys. There were middle-class blacks who could not afford to be boarders and were day boys. We (including the black scholarship boys) despised them. Being a boarder at Jamaica College set you in the highest possible class. I remember how quickly we tried to show the poor boys (whom we called “toes”) that we were no longer part of them. I was made captain of third eleven cricket and we were to play a match against boys from the Half Way Tree school. This was part of Reg Murray’s social work. The boys (“toes”) arrived from Half Way Tree and sidled in by the bottom gate. We sat under the divi-divi trees and ignored them. It was not yet time for the match.

  Suddenly an irate Reg Murray burst from his study. “Who is the captain of the third eleven team?”

  “I am, sir,” I said, getting up.

  “The team from the Half Way Tree elementary school have arrived. You must go and meet them. They are your guests.”

  I went to greet them, very shaken. They thrashed us that day. It is an aristocratic trait that you are very courteous and generous to your inferiors. The point is that I had been to an elementary school exactly like the Half Way Tree school. Another thing that one found was that most of the black boys (including scholarship winners) had attended private preparatory schools and not public elementary schools. One had to hold on to the thing that singled one out. In my case it was Africa, although they despised Africa in general. Africa meant that you had traveled through England and it was likely that your father had gathered up gold in Africa. I remember pointing out to my friend Ramsay Tull that I spoke with an English accent when I first arrived in Jamaica (which I did). Quick as a flash he said that I probably spoke with a cockney accent (which I didn’t), but the point was made—an English accent, in spite of the barbarity of Africa.

  Our family, though, was very much in that kind of privileged middle class. Our eldest sister was a boarder at St. Andrew High School, my brother was a boarder at Calabar High School, and the younger sister won a scholarship to Wolmer’s Girls. My father bought a Ford Model T when he returned from Africa in 1930 and changed it for a Ford V8 in 1934 and then, with the war, we had an Anglia which was used almost exclusively (apart from taking me to and from school) by my brother. My father had two houses in Kingston, two houses in Sturge Town, and a hundred acres of land (Catherine Warren) just outside Sturge Town. By the sixties it had all gone. I am not aware that we made any great showing, any attempt to outdo our neighbors, but certainly my big sister had style, and before the sixties, that is for thirty years, we never seemed to want.

  It’s all gone. Were I to go now, I would be leaving debt. So much for the continuation of generational wealth. I like to joke that I am a socialist, and so I must not own anything. It almost sounds Christian. I was stupid, of course. I have left these children nothing. My brother consumed all that my parents left, and now all I have is class and nothing else. All gone. Every bit of it.

  eighTEEN

  The sun battered Ferron’s head. He was sweating. He could smell the heavy musk of his own armpits. He needed a shower. New Kingston was dozing in the two o’clock lull. He walked slowly. She would still be there. Anyway, he did not want to get there too early and have to wait in the lobby for her to finish. There was nothing to do in the dusty room except listen to the clanks and moans of the men grunting under their weights. He slowed near the Air Jamaica building to catch some shade under a row of sparsely leaved trees. That is when he saw Femi bouncing out of the building grinning. Ferron looked away but Femi had seen him. He walked over laughing, his dark glasses catching the glare of the sun. Femi wore his dashiki today, and a light-blue skullcap.

  “Ahh. You have been avoiding me,” he laughed. He reached his palm out and shook Ferron’s hand firmly. Ferron winced.

  “Been busy, man,” Ferron said.

  “Ah. Your mother tells me that you think I am causing too much trouble.” Femi was rarely less than direct.

  “My mother is mourning.” Ferron tried to smile.

  “So should we all. Mourning is good.” Femi looked at his watch. “What are you doing now? We could get a drink, eh? I have a few minutes. I think I should keep you abreast of the developments.”

  “I have an appointment,” Ferron said quickly.

  “Ahhh.” Femi looked disappointed.

  “Traveling?” Ferron could not help asking.

  “You haven’t heard, eh? Trouble at home. Well, not really trouble, but things are moving, cooking, as they say. America says they want Democracy, eh? So we give them Democracy. Now we are legitimate. I think I will give up this diplomatic shit and go back into the trenches. I miss bullshitting my way into the hearts of people.”

  “Pretty cynical,” Ferron muttered.

  “I was never cut out for this shit, anyway. I belong with the people. You stay in these comforts too long, you lose touch, you know. Lose the edge.” He cleaned his dark glasses on the dashiki. His eyes were red. Ferron could smell the brandy.

  “Develop a paunch.” Ferron tried to be manly about his banter. Femi seemed to demand it.

  “Don’t take this wrongly, but . . . Well, that is what happened to your father, you know. And God knows, I won’t let it happen to me. You die like that . . . it is not right.” He tried to catch Ferron’s eye for some approval.

  “He was happy,” Ferron lied.

  “He was the fucking saddest man on this earth, and you know it. Don’t ever, ever lie to yourself about that. Don’t do that,” Femi said. Ferron saw his eyes filling. He managed to hold it back, but he went silent. “Never.”

  Ferron dropped his head downward; he did not want to embarrass Femi by looking in his eyes.

  “I mean, I had the job almost ready, it was just a matter of . . .” he said slowly.

  “Look, it is over.” Ferron could feel his anger growing. He was not ready to confront Femi today. Not about that, not now. It would leave him empty, weak. He wanted to be in the right mood for Mitzie. She could read into his moods, and if he seemed preoccupied or uneasy, she would leap into him, as if relishing his vulnerability. She had grown more vicious since she found out that he had spied on her. All he wanted to do this evening was to kiss, to touch her, to feel her orgasm clinging to him. He had to be prepared. Femi was trying to get his attention.

  “Anyway, I may have to go home soon.” He looked at his watch again. “Can we give you a lift? Oh, come on, Ferron, let’s get out of this bloody sun, man. Theresa is waiting.”

  Ferron hesitated, then thought of seeing Theresa. He was tempted to see her reaction. They walked to the back of the building where Theresa was sitting in a black BMW. It was not her car, Ferron was sure of that. But she had managed to get a car for Femi. This one, he was certain, had a working air-conditioning system. She was sitting in the front seat reading the Gleaner. Ferron tried to stay calm. He sat in the backseat. She turned and smiled at him. Femi toyed with the knobs on the radio.

  “We have to finish this thing before I leave. This investigation. They are dragging their feet. Look, Ferron, I would talk to your brother about this, but he is too buried in this church nonsense to even begin to understand.”

  “You would be surprised,” Ferron said, “how in touch he is with what is happening.” He was looking at the naked nape of Theresa’s neck. It was slightly red, where Femi had nibbled.

  “You think I am making more of
this, eh?”

  “Not really.” The air conditioner had kicked in. Ferron sat back. He could kill a few minutes and then he would have to leave. He wondered if Femi knew about them, the phone calls. For no good reason, he felt like Theresa’s secret lover—the intimacy of the phone call, the talk of sex, his erection and the thin film of sperm in his underwear after they had finished talking. Theresa’s coyness now, her unwillingness to make eye contact, assured him that she felt the same way. It was absurd. The woman was so much older than him, and yet, in his presence, she assumed a youth and seeming immaturity that was curious. “Not really,” he repeated. He realized that he did not feel any regret for doing this to Femi. None whatsoever.

  “Your father was a revolutionary, and revolutionaries never die by accident,” Femi said, turning around. “You understand that?”

  Theresa started the engine. Femi turned to face the front.

  “Yuh hungry, Ferron? We going by Devon House,” she said, peering at him through the rearview mirror. Their eyes made contact. She held his gaze for a while. They shared a secret.

  “I have to meet somebody. At the gym,” he said. He noticed a slight wince in her face. Her smile slowly retreated.

  Femi was checking his tickets.