A Different Hurricane, page 18
Joseph’s now a Canadian citizen, a university graduate, a high school math teacher, and married to an Anishinaabe man.
He laughs. A bitter one. He’d given Joseph advice he himself could not follow. But he’s glad that someone has benefited from his mistakes. Mistakes. Can we call them mistakes? Where are the blueprints?
Chapter 19
He limps to the kitchen, removes the filter with this morning’s coffee grounds, and empties it into the bin under the kitchen sink. He gets the jar of coffee from the fridge and takes down the coffee grinder from the cupboard above the stove. He leaves the coffee brewing and heads off to the bathroom to shower. Just as he is about to step into the shower cabin, the phone rings. He listens for the answering machine to call out the number. Allan and Beth’s house number. He lets the machine answer. “Hi, Gord. It’s Beth. You’ve probably left for the airport, but if you haven’t, call me.”
He dresses quickly, pours himself a cup of coffee, picks up the phone from the wall in the kitchen and calls Beth. She tells him that she knows he’s probably busy preparing for Frida’s arrival. He hears distress in her voice.
“What’s wrong, Beth?”
She doesn’t answer. Her breathing is loud.
“What’s wrong?”
“Since yesterday, there’s this man with a husky voice calling the house and asking to speak to Allan, but he won’t leave a message. Then he laughs and hangs up on me. Gordon, he calls on average once per hour. I’ve called Allan and told him about it. He says he doesn’t know who it is. I hope he puts an end to this when he comes in from Union Island this evening. This has the smell of scandal … What time Frida’s arriving?”
“She’s coming on LIAT, supposedly around seven.”
“That means any time. Let’s hope it’s before midnight. Thanks for listening to me.”
“Any time, Beth. Any time.”
He wonders what Allan has got himself into now. Allan’s libido sometimes overpowers his reason. He has forgotten his cousin’s warning from years ago. It can’t be the boyfriend from Sion Hill, who disguises as a woman when he goes with Allan to Evesham. They’ve been together now for twenty-plus years. Gordon calls him X because Allan has refused to say his name. X was nineteen when he and Allan began dating. Allan was forty-five. He should call Allan.
He tops up his coffee, takes it into the living room, and sits in the recliner. He’s tired. The pain in his neck is approaching unbearable. All this damn deception. Allan, manage your damn life properly! I’m tired. Damn tired. He pushes the recliner back to its maximum. I don’t care if I fall asleep. Frida, if I don’t awaken before you arrive, take a damn cab. Why haven’t you called? Cool it, Gordon. Cool it. Breathe in, slowly; breathe out, slowly. Perspective, Gordon. Don’t lose it. If you think you are tired, then you’ll have to invent another word for how Maureen felt. You could discuss your feelings with Allan. Whom could she discuss hers with?
He’s fairly certain Maureen never found out that he and Allan had been lovers. She’d have said so in her journal. Not that it didn’t cross her mind. Before they got married, she must have noticed that he spent more time with Allan than with her, and that he often slept at Allan’s place. Winnie was Allan’s girlfriend then. Beth was on the fringes, partying with them as Maureen’s close and younger friend. He remembers that Beth will be retiring next June. She’s taking the sixty option. Gordon met her shortly after she began to teach at Girls’ High School. Then she was twenty-two but looked no more than sixteen. Over the years he came to think that she and Maureen had found in one another the sister they’d pined for while growing up. She’s five foot nine inches, slightly taller than Allan. At twenty-two, everything about her, except her behind, her personality, and her eyes (they’re still big and brilliant), was petite. When Winnie learned that she taught home economics, she said, “You teach home ec? You look like you on a starvation diet.” Winnie wouldn’t recognize her now. Her body lavishly appreciates her delicious desserts. For about a decade now she has been see-sawing between weight gain and loss, as she begins, stops, resumes, and stops again, exercising.
* * *
He’ll be dead before the journal falls into Frida’s hands. Antiretroviral drugs shorten their users’ lives. He’ll be ninety-two when Frida reads it, and, if by some miracle, he’s still alive and lucid, she wouldn’t want to make an old man’s life miserable.
Yes, long before Frida reads that journal, I’ll be dead. Quickly worn out. I don’t sleep enough. Too many nightmares. No drugs to cure nightmares. Glad now I erased the file. Haven’t the strength to face any crisis.
Now, my dear Beth, if you and Allan would just leave me alone. Beth, how can you not know that Allan’s gay? Or are you just playing along? In that case, play along and just leave me in peace.
There’s no doubt you love Allan, as much, if not more, than Maureen loved me. You’re both bossy. Maureen’s suited me fine. She made most of the decisions and got the credit when they turned out right and the blame when they didn’t … Maureen, couldn’t you have fallen in love with a decent, honest heterosexual man? A man like Claudia’s husband, Joel? You were still very attractive when Frida turned eighteen.
When he got around to asking her why she hadn’t left him following the AIDS diagnosis, she smiled, then swallowed. “There’s a Carson McCullers story I would like you to read.” They were sitting at the dining table. She went to her office and returned with a thick volume. She found the story and handed it to him. He told her he would read it later. She was crestfallen. “I’ll read it. I promise you, I’ll read it.”
She often criticized him for not reading “anything except CARICOM reports and St Vincent’s semi-literate newspapers.” Sometimes Frida joined in the criticism. When the tumult over J.L. King’s On the Down Low and E. Lynn Harris’s Invisible Life spread from the U.S. to the Caribbean, he became engrossed in Harris’s books. He read them mostly in his office and on the back porch of Allan’s Evesham house. Once, however, Maureen caught him reading On the Down Low.
“What’s that? Some text about economics?” she asked.
“Sort of.” He waited and only let out his breath when he was certain she wasn’t coming to the seaward end of the porch, then he went into his office and hid the book.
She complained that she, too, didn’t read enough, though he can’t remember her without some book or other that she was reading. Toni Morrison and Alice Walker were two of her favourite authors. She’d tried to get him to read Beloved. With the exception of Harris’s and King’s books, he can’t say that after university he ever finished any of the books he began reading, unless they were books dealing with gay issues. Most of the books he read before going to university were because Allan had suggested them. A week or two later, Allan questioned him about them. It was too embarrassing to say he hadn’t read them.
He read the McCullers story: “A Domestic Dilemma.” Heavily annotated with Maureen’s comments. Her notes interested him as much as the story, which shows a man not knowing what to do about his wife whom he loves deeply but whose alcoholism endangers the lives of their two children and forces him to hire household help he can ill afford. Without Maureen’s comments he would have missed much of the story’s meaning. He wouldn’t have seen the relevance of the barren wintry landscape.
At breakfast the next morning, he was eager for her to ask him about it. When she didn’t, he said, “Don’t you want to know if I read the story?”
She laughed. “I know you read it. That triumphant look on your face says it all. I love it when the little child in you pushes aside the adult. It was one of the things that attracted me to you. Good, you read it, and what do you think?”
He couldn’t answer right away. He searched for the words but couldn’t find any that would state the range of emotions the story had put him through. He said, “If all literature were like this, I think I might have liked it. Thanks for your notes. I remember hearing about foreshadowing; your notes refreshed my memory. I memorized the last sentence of the story. In our marriage, I am like Emily … ‘The immense complexity of love.’” His tears came then. She reached for his hand and her eyes welled up too.
* * *
He’s too wound up to fall asleep. He looks at the coffee cup on the side table to his right. It’s half full. He shouldn’t have drunk coffee. He should just call Frida on her cell and put an end to this tense waiting for her to call. He gets up, goes to sit on the couch, and picks up the telephone on the side table beside it. He dials her number and gets voice mail. He remains seated. He thinks about calling Allan on his cell but nixes it. Allan might tell him bothersome stuff. Bothersome stuff — that’s just what might come up with Frida’s visit. She has important questions for him. He feels guilty that he erased the file after copying it but knows he would erase the copy in Beth’s possession if he got the chance. If Beth dies before the time elapses, the responsibility falls to Claudia. And if Claudia dies too, before Beth, then what?
If I could unlive his life. If only. Joseph, you don’t know how lucky you are. When Maureen died, Joseph told him it was an opportunity to start over.
“How, Joseph?”
“Come to Canada. You lived in Montreal. You already know the country.”
“Montreal isn’t all of Canada, Joseph. And what will I do there?”
“There’s lots of lonely men your age here. Get hooked up with one.”
He did not answer right away. The image of sixty-two-year-old André filled his mind, and he thought of his own body, wracked by the effects of antiretroviral drugs, the arthritic pain in his neck and right knee, the limp he tries to hide when he’s with others. “Joseph, in Montreal I saw those old men in the bars prowling for sex or trying to escape from loneliness. More than a few offered me money to go home with them. Even if there was a chance of meeting someone, my pension in EC dollars won’t go far, not even in one of those Newfoundland outport hamlets full of moose and abandoned houses. Is that where you’re hoping I’ll go?”
Joseph chuckled and was silent for a few seconds. “How about the British Virgin Islands? They use EC there. It’s legal to be gay there.”
“Legal and cool aren’t the same thing, Joseph.”
“Okay, you win. I was only trying.”
“Thanks, Joseph. Too late to start over. Maybe if I were forty-seven instead of sixty-seven.”
* * *
What a life! Once Frida came along, he didn’t even have the option of suicide. Maureen’s compassion denied him the punishment he felt he deserved. Of course, it comes when he’s asleep. On average once a week he dreams of being caught naked in bed with a man. Sometimes it’s Maureen who catches him, sometimes May, sometimes Maggie, sometimes his colleagues at the ministry. Sometimes Allan’s the man he’s with, sometimes Joseph, sometimes Trevor; sometimes it’s some nondescript man who’s threatening him with extortion.
He feels he has been unkind to Trevor. They haven’t been in touch for six years. The website for his law firm is still in operation. He checked it recently. He should swallow his pride and give Trevor a call.
After the diagnosis, he’d planned to curse out Trevor for infecting him. In the end, they held each other and cried. It was a forlorn Trevor, who had just found out about his own infection a week earlier, that he met. He showed Gordon the lab report. A Trevor who, because he’d used condoms, didn’t think he’d passed on the infection to him. Gordon promised that they would stay in touch, but neither contacted the other after that meeting. It’s possible that Trevor thinks he got HIV from him. For what it’s worth, some HIV-infected persons prefer to see themselves as victims rather than perpetrators. Moot point. Until diagnosed, all infected persons are potential perpetrators. It had taken him three years to understand this, to become this sanguine.
Maybe next week, after Frida leaves, he’ll give Trevor a call. Not that Trevor needs his call. He’s out to his sister and brother. They support him totally. He can openly access the HIV support group in Trinidad. There’s now Euphoria, a gay club, in Trinidad, where Trevor can socialize. In St Vincent, Allan’s the only person he can talk to about these issues. These phone calls Beth has been receiving signal trouble. He hopes Allan puts an end to this before it blossoms into a scandal.
Chapter 20
It’s late afternoon of September 12, Frida’s third day in St Vincent. She and Gordon are in a private room in the male surgical ward of the Milton Cato Memorial Hospital. A strong smell of roses comes from the flowers lining the windowsill. Allan is in bed asleep in a half-sitting position. His right arm is in a plaster cast. With the exception of his mouth, nose, and eyes, his head is encased in Styrofoam. An intravenous drip and a cable linked to a monitoring machine are attached to his left arm.
Beth left the room ten minutes earlier to get something to eat. She had been there since Frida dropped her off this morning. Before leaving, she told them that the orthopaedist Dr. Khan had mentioned last night came in from Barbados early this morning, and he confirmed that the blow had fractured Allan’s right cheekbone, dislocated his lower jaw, knocked out most of his teeth on the right side, and caused substantial tissue damage to the hard palate. But he was sure that Allan would recover, possibly with slight alterations in his lower jaw and maybe in his speech.
Gordon is momentarily distracted by the pings and numbers on the machine. He replays in his head the video he and Frida had seen on SVG TV the evening before: a cellphone video recorded by Allan’s Evesham neighbour, Cuthbert Ryan, whose house is on a slope about fifteen yards above the road directly across from Allan’s Evesham house. Cuthbert said he was putting on his pajamas when he heard the sound of glass smashing below the bank. He grabbed his cellphone and ran out onto his landing. The video tells the rest of the story. A car with the rear windshield smashed. A man holding a cricket bat stands on the porch and seems squeezed against the side of the house about a metre from the main door. The door opens and hides the man. Allan, in a green bathrobe, steps out and cautiously looks left; but as he turns to look right, the man steps from behind the door, swings the bat, and delivers a blow, which Allan partially fends off. The fending arm droops. The man swings again. Allan staggers. Falls. The man drops the bat and runs down the Evesham road. For a couple of seconds, the camera stays focused on Allan sprawled on the porch, and there are inaudible comments from neighbours who’ve now come out of their houses. A female voice (since identified as Rita Bullock’s) shouts, “Somebody else in there. A woman. I see a woman go in with him, but she ain’t come out.” The camera picks up Rita emerging from behind a hibiscus hedge and descending her steps leading to the road.
“Jonah, call the police and tell them send a’ ambulance,” a female voice from the bank farther uphill says.
“I do it already,’” a male voice says.
Rita, in a floral nightgown, is now on Allan’s porch. She enters the house. For a while, silence, then, shouting, “A woman in here; she trying to hide behind the bedroom door.” There’s a short silence, followed by Rita’s exclamation: “Is not no woman … O Lord, is the man that does play mas with Excelsior.” The man, over six feet, dressed like a woman, bolts out the front door and races down the Evesham road. There’s a throng of voices outside. Already there’s a small crowd and others are coming.
Siren sounds, faint at first, get louder and louder. Next four police officers get out of their jeep. “All yo’ get off the premises,” the burliest of them shouts. “All yo’ going contaminate the evidence. Move!” The crowd, now about twenty, parts into uphill and downhill halves. “Who witness this? Turn them damn phones off.”
The newscaster takes over: “iWitness News has since identified the man disguised as a woman as Henry Forrester. Indeed, he lives at Sion Hill and is well known for the carnival costumes he designs. The assailant has not been identified. The police think he’s hiding somewhere in the area.
“Dr. Bacchus has since been taken to hospital. We have no word on his condition.”
It had to be a mistake, Gordon thought. When did all this happen? After Frida, Maggie, and Gordon returned from visiting Maureen’s grave, Beth and Allan had taken them for supper at the upstairs restaurant at Cobblestone. They’d left the restaurant around seven thirty.
“This is a nightmare,” Gordon said, got up from the recliner where he’d been sitting, and began to pace the space from the living room to the kitchen, but the pain in his right knee forced him to sit back down. “Frida,” he said, “what has Allan gotten himself into?” Frida came to stand in front of him. She was crying.
“Frida, talk to me. How are we going to handle this?” He crossed the living room over to the kitchen, came back, and crossed again, before plopping down in the recliner, his right hand massaging his knee.
“I hope Uncle Al isn’t seriously hurt,” Frida said. “Let’s call Aunt Beth and go to be with her.”
“She’s probably at the hospital.”
He walked to the phone, but it rang before he could pick it up. Gloria. He let voice mail take it. It rang again. Claudia. He saw Frida get up and walk unsteadily toward her bedroom. He followed her and watched as she dropped heavily across the bed. He limped back to the living room and dialed Beth and Allan’s house number. The voice mail was full. He called Beth’s cell. Same message. He decided to go to their house. They drove to Edinboro. They found the house in darkness. He drove to the hospital and parked the car two blocks away. Several journalists milled about outside the gate. They began shouting at him, “Mr. Wiley, Mr. Wiley, you are Dr. Bacchus’s friend. Have you an opinion? Do you know who did it? Do you know Forrester? Can you make a statement?” Frida clung to his arm.
“Wiley, that you, man?” Ronald, the gatekeeper, called out from the guardsman hut. He had been a member of the Stubbs Methodist Youth Fellowship at the same time that Allan and Gordon were members of Evesham’s. They’d camped together in Bequia and Chateaubelair, gone on hikes to La Soufrière and the Owia Salt Pond, and debated one another on the cultural issues affecting St Vincent. Ronald opened the gate. Two male journalists tried to enter. “Not you. Your name not Wiley.” Ronald’s arm stretched out to block them. “He in casualty,” he said, and gave Gordon directions.
