A Different Hurricane, page 12
In an essay that attempted to explain rampant corruption in West Africa, he’d read that relatives pool their money to send bright male family members to study abroad. When the graduates return home, they’re expected to get powerful jobs with government or large international corporations and put their relatives in all the posts that become vacant. They are also expected to build large houses so the relatives they cannot place can come and go and live off them. It’s not quite as bad in the Caribbean, but every village abounds with wastrels who scorn work and expect their relatives abroad and at home to pay their bills.
From the way Lillian used to speak, there was a time when large extended families took care of each other, but that time is long gone. The most he and May can hope for is that they’ll find decent care in a nursing home if they become decrepit. His pension will cover the cost of his care. He’s hoping the little money he has saved will be enough to cover May’s if it comes to that.
Last week he broached the subject of old age with her. She said, “I don’t have to plan for it; I going have a short life. See how young Daddy been when he died? Seventy-four. And Mama, she been only eighty-three. She had me when she twenty-two and you when she twenty-six. After that she miscarry two and the doctor remove her womb when she thirty.”
Most of what he knows about their half-brother, Albert, he got from May. She was four when Albert came from Barbados to live with them. Albert was eleven. She liked him. Said he gave her piggyback rides, and when she began going to school, he would hold her hand all the way there. But he used to backchat Lillian, and the last time Lillian called him for a beating, he grabbed a piece of wood and told her, “Na this time, gorblimey. I gon lay wunna flat ef wunna touch me.” That weekend when Ben came down from Mount Bentinck, Lillian told him that Albert and she couldn’t live in the same house; that Albert would have to go, because she had no intention of leaving the house she’d inherited from her parents. May was seven then and she remembered the Saturday morning that Albert left, wearing a yellow shirt, short khaki pants, and white canvas shoes. He carried a small cardboard suitcase. She’d held on to him and cried. He asked her not to forget him. He promised that when he grew up and began working he’d come back to visit her. She feels that he should get a part of Carapan, if he wants it. But all they know about him is what, Mark, Gordon’s cousin, told Gordon in Barbados in 1980 — that Albert was away working on a ship.
Before they get to the notary on Tuesday, he’ll raise the issue of estate planning and urge her to put something on paper about how she wants to be cared for if she becomes disabled. He must do the same for himself.
Chapter 12
He looks out over Kingstown. A cruise ship has arrived. Every space in the taxi stand is taken. The drivers are in clumps talking and gesturing to each other. He remembers that before he and Maureen became sick, she had convinced him to take her on a cruise. Allan wasn’t interested, but Beth had promised to go with them.
He should go make himself some fresh coffee. Or go back to bed and sleep for a few hours. Set the alarm so he’d be up in time to be at Argyle when Frida arrives. In a couple of hours, she’ll be landing in Barbados. His car’s in the garage. He’s supposed to get it on Monday. He hopes Frida calls him from Barbados if the LIAT flight is delayed.
But he doesn’t move. Dexter Pottinger’s face, painted in the colours of the rainbow, comes back to him. Another Jamaican murdered because he was gay. Three years ago, when Gordon travelled to Montreal to attend the funeral of Fran, the sister of Gordon’s Montreal boyfriend, André, the Massimadi Film Festival was on and he saw The Abominable Crime, a documentary that featured a woman and her brother, now refugees in Holland, who’d barely escaped being murdered in Jamaica because they’re gay. The sister was severely wounded. For a long time after the film ended, Gordon remained frozen in his seat, stricken, while Maurice Tomlinson, a Jamaican gay rights activist, discoursed about LGBTQI persecution in Jamaica.
He recalls the dream he had this morning when he eventually did fall asleep. He wonders whether his anxiety over the questions Frida might ask him had caused this nightmare. When she was sixteen, and he saw how confident she was and knew she could defend herself, he’d hoped Maureen might see how empty their marriage was and divorce him. By then they rarely had sex. He should be truthful: he no longer wanted to have sex with her, and, without discussing it, she understood, and didn’t seek it. During the first two years of his relationship with Trevor, he felt a duty to attempt sex with her each time he returned from Trinidad.
Why there hadn’t been a divorce was one of the topics she and he talked about when it became clear that she would die within months. She was propped up with pillows in the bed, he was half sitting on the dressing table. “I didn’t expect you to come back from Montreal. I was prepared to raise Frida alone, just like my mother raised me,” she said with raised eyebrows, and awaited his response. He was silent. She continued, “Any West Indian woman who puts her faith in a man is a fool … but you came back.” She smiled. “I’m glad. Frida loves you, and I know she won’t go through life angry like me about a father who turned his back on her. She won’t have to hate you the way I’ve hated Clem.” She glanced at the laptop on the bed beside her, then stared at him with such intensity, it alarmed him. Then she chuckled and he relaxed. “I expected you to leave me as soon as Frida was seventeen, as soon as she finished her A levels. Weren’t you thinking about it?”
“No. Why didn’t you leave me?”
She clasped and unclasped her fingers and massaged her palms. “Many, many reasons, Gordon. I’m trying to explore some of them in this thing I’m writing.” She made air quotes around “thing” and glanced at her laptop. “I don’t know what to call it … Let me ask you a question. Every week we hear about some woman or other who’s been severely injured by her partner. For years, Christine took all that physical abuse from Freckles until Austin persuaded her to leave him. I had a neighbour in Fairhall who used to beat his wife almost every day. Why do we women cling to abusive men? Even when we take the men to court, we beg the magistrate to let them go free. Why do we do it?”
“Beth wouldn’t.”
“Don’t be so sure. You mean because she sticks to Andrews, her birth name, and refuses to carry Allan’s name, Bacchus?”
“Just my feeling.”
“You only know what you would do when the time comes, Gordon. Have we been conditioned to believe our lot is to endure whatever comes?” She sighed. “You know, Gordon, when I got pregnant with Frida, you accused me of deception.” She pursed her lips, stared down at the sheets, then at him. “To this day, it still stings. But you were right. I loved you, Gordon, and I wasn’t sure that you loved me. You were so damn cold. I learned not to touch you when we were in public. You moved away when I did, and your face twitched. But you didn’t run after other women, and that made you exceptional. But you might have been running after men. Were you?”
“No.”
“Remember how much I used to question you about your relations with your father? Once you said that I should be glad my father wasn’t around, that what you remember most are the scars Ben left on your back.… Now, with the passage of time, I’m sure that you remember more. Good things. You have been a great father to Frida. I loved to watch you and Frida interacting. When you came back from Montreal, she turned you into a toy. Turned you into horse. Sometimes saying, ‘Giddy-up!’” She chuckled. “It was Dad-this, Dad-that. I can’t say I wasn’t jealous sometimes. You were there for Frida, our daughter. I am glad she had a hands-on dad. If it meant setting aside my own needs, well, so be it.”
Was she implying that Maggie should have stayed with Clem? In any event, Clem, it seemed, had had enough of Maggie. Gordon didn’t think to ask her. He was mindful of her weakened state. That day she was in a positive frame of mind; he didn’t want to raise issues that would nix it.
Divorce. She’d touched on something real. A year after he met Trevor, he’d seriously considered asking Maureen for a divorce. But he dismissed the idea for fear of what would happen if — more likely when — it became known that he’d divorced his wife to take up with a man. In any event, Trevor lived in Trinidad. Gordon was forty-eight and Trevor was thirty-six when they met. Trevor is half-Chinese and a good six inches shorter than Gordon. He has a roundish face, flattish nose, hardly any lips to speak of. When they first met, Trevor was working out at a gym daily and had a lean, muscular body. In the later years, he stopped and got a paunch and double chin. His African genes show up in his dark, brown-sugar complexion, his coarse and woolly hair, and his big behind.
They’d met in the bar of a rundown Port of Spain hotel. Allan had told Gordon that it was a secret hangout for gay men.
“Hi, I am Trevor.” He extended his hand to Gordon.
Gordon was hunched over the counter and supporting himself with his elbows. He straightened up, shook Trevor’s hand, and said, “Reynold. Pleased to meet you.”
“A rainy day,” Trevor said and turned his head around to stare out the grime-covered glass onto the street. Dusk was falling. “Reynold, you’re from St Vincent, right?” Frowning, he stared at Gordon.
Gordon nodded.
“Vincentian girls are pretty. A beautiful one was in class with me at St. Augustine.”
Gordon wondered if he was in the wrong bar. “I thought the first prize for female beauty always goes to Trinidad.”
“Okay. Let’s make St Vincent the runner-up.”
Gordon looked at his watch.
“It still early, man. You go to bed with the chickens, or what?”
“No. I had a long day of meetings.”
“Here, for a conference?”
Gordon hesitated. “No, to visit relatives.”
Trevor frowned and Gordon wondered if his lying was so transparent. “Married?”
Gordon nodded.
“Kids?”
“One. A daughter. Eighteen. Heading off to Mona next month. A degree in the sciences.”
“She’s leaving home …”
“Yes, and I am beginning to panic about it.”
“Cheer up, Ray. Can I call you Ray?”
“Sure.”
Trevor tapped him on the shoulder. “They say at my age, midlife crisis hits. Man, I worry like hell ’bout getting old.”
Gordon said nothing. A long silence. Trevor fidgeted. His hands moved constantly — from his thighs to the bar top, to his chin, to scratching his neck. A couple times he gulped his saliva. He drank his beer from the bottle in large gulps. “Another?” Gordon asked.
Trevor nodded.
Gordon took a deep breath and exhaled loud. “You look nervous, man. ’Fraid the missus going beat you when you get in?”
Trevor chuckled. “No missus or mister to beat me or for me to beat … or hug.” He looked into Gordon’s eyes then.
Gordon felt a tingling warmth in his fingers. He knew his eyes would be glowing.
Trevor waved his hand around the bar. There were about twelve patrons, men, all middle-aged or older. “See these fellars. They some o’ the saddest people on earth.”
“How’s that?”
“In here, they’re all bullermen. Once they go out this door, they turn straight. I wonder when they going break.”
“Meaning?”
“When a piece o’ wire bend one way and the next constantly, after a time it does break, yes. I tell you something else too. You see how they chummy with one another now? As soon as they hit the sidewalk, they going pretend they don’t know one another, yes.”
“I take it then that you’re gay?”
“Yes. You?”
“Bisexual.”
“Real bisexual or bullshit bisexual?”
Gordon didn’t answer.
“So you’re bullshit bisexual, then.”
Gordon didn’t answer.
“That means Reynold’s not your real name, right?”
He didn’t answer Trevor but felt his eyes beginning to flood. He got up quickly, went to the toilet, entered the single cubicle, and waited until he was sure the emotion had passed.
You think you have everything in place, that nothing will go awry, and then someone finds a loose string, pulls it, and you unravel.
He went back to the counter. Trevor was still there. A young, smiling South Asian man was standing beside him. Trevor introduced him as Ranjit. Ranjit exited the bar soon after.
“You come to Trinidad often?”
“Every few months.”
“Then, maybe, we can get to know each other better. Here’s my card.” He retrieved a card from his shirt pocket and handed it to Gordon.
“I don’t have a business card.” That wasn’t true. He got up, extended his hand to Trevor, who shook it. “Got to be going. Have an early day tomorrow.” That was true. He had a series of meetings at the CARICOM secretariat starting at nine the next morning.
He asked the waiter to call him a cab and waited at an empty table beside the door the ten or so minutes it took for the cab to arrive. Later, in his room at the Hilton, he looked at the business card. It read “Trevor Anderson, QC. Barrister at Law” and had an address and a telephone number. He wondered if a gay lawyer in St Vincent would give his business card to a stranger, but realized it wouldn’t matter. St Vincent was too small for any lawyer, gay or straight, to hide his identity. What was unlikely in St Vincent was having a safe place for gay and bisexual men to hang out. If there were one, the clients would be foreigners and local male prostitutes, the religious right would hold daily demonstrations outside and send letters to the press demanding its closure, and the owners would spend a fortune removing offensive graffiti.
Chapter 13
Back in his room at the hotel, he sat in the armchair at the foot of his bed and reflected on the fact that it had been thirteen years since he’d returned from studying in Montreal, thirteen years without gay sex, thirteen years relegated to watching gay porn that André, his Montreal boyfriend, sent over the first four years. Thirteen years without the arms of a man ever encircling him, without coarse body hair electrifying him. His own body was as hairless as a bottle. Allan and André were hirsute. André more so. His back looked like a shag rug.
The year before meeting Trevor, Gordon had arrived in Montreal salivating, looking forward to ending a twelve-year drought, to being again in André’s arms. He was on long leave, and he and Maureen spent two months of it travelling through the U.S. and Canada. They lodged with her friends and relatives, and he rarely got away to be on his own. Because of the huge mortgage they were carrying, he resisted the desire to pick up guys and take them to a hotel. Besides, he was never comfortable with one-night stands. Those thirteen months with André, he’d no longer needed them. Those months were the happiest period of his life. He looked forward to rekindling that happiness as he briskly walked the short distance from the Papineau métro to André’s condo on Champlain.
But Gordon found André in a relationship with Bilal. At sixty-three, André was frail and bent, his grey face criss-crossed with wrinkles, blood vessels visible in his face and hairless scalp. Gordon would have passed this decrepit man on the street without recognizing him. What had become of the fifty-year-old, erect, bull-necked, muscular man with bushy eyebrows and a mop of blue-black hair that he’d loved? On the métro later, heading back to Maureen’s friends in NDG — they were putting them up for the first few days until Hollis, who had been a member of the Evesham Youth Fellowship, could organize an apartment for them in a housing complex he managed on René-Lévesque — he scolded himself: What did you expect, you fool? That André wouldn’t age? … But so drastically in thirteen years!
He’d felt such enormous gratitude for those thirteen months he’d lived with André. Those one-night stands with men who later pretended they didn’t know him. A relief when they ended. The intensity of the sexual pleasure surpassed what he’d experienced with Allan. It was because he was more relaxed, had no constricting fears about breaking laws, or feared discoveries that could lead to scandal or extortion. Initially, back in St Vincent, he had a faint hope that Maureen would leave him and that he and Allan would get back together. Allan had not yet married Beth and had said he would marry no one. Gordon had felt no guilt over his infidelity to Maureen. On the contrary, he was happy to be away from her. Not from Frida, though. Thanks to André’s generosity and insistence, he was able to talk with her on the phone twice per week. In 1982, long-distance phone calls to the Caribbean were expensive.
When André proposed that he move in, Gordon told him about his marriage and how and why he’d entered into it. André knew four gay men living with their wives and children in Montreal. In two instances, their wives were aware. A fifth, Jean-Marie, lived in Sherbrooke. Every couple of weeks when he came to Montreal to look for sex, he dropped in to see André before heading off to the bars. He had two teenage boys, aged fourteen and sixteen. His wife was a nurse. Not long after Gordon met him, the police raided a gay sauna in Montreal, and Jean-Marie was one of the men the TV cameras captured wearing only a bath towel as they were marched out of the sauna. Their double life perplexed Gordon. Why would Canadian gays need a heterosexual mask? André said it was more complex than that. “Some people find the stigma of homosexuality unbearable. And there are those who’re truly bisexual. There’s a saying, you know, that Caesar was a husband to many women and a wife to many men.”
“I’m definitely not bisexual.” He believes that Allan is. He never told André about Allan. When he returned to St Vincent, he told Allan that André had been an occasional lover.
The apartment he shared with André had two bedrooms, one of which was André’s office. It was on Doctor Penfield, near Côte-des-Neiges, a short walk uphill from Concordia. André was a partner in a law firm with offices on René-Lévesque. He walked to work.
