The Origin of Waves

  “Don’t!” John says. And straightaway, he says, “Buddy?”

  And Buddy comes over and immediately removes the piled ashtray, and Buddy says, “Same again?”

  “No!” John says. “Two brandies. Best in the house. You got any Spanish brandy?”

  “Since that day in July,” I continue, “with the sun shining down on the group of us, the five of us, like a punishment more hard than her death itself, and the flowers all around us in vases leaning against other gravestones, in circles of big, thick wreaths; and the little single sprig of white, the flower she liked so much and which I never knew by name, but the sprig of white with deep-green leaves on its branch, all these flowers reminding me it is really a hot summer, a good summer for growing beefsteak tomatoes in the back garden, and for the roses and the geraniums; all these flowers was like if I was back home, and seeing the colours and smelling the colours, and walking in the colours of the hibiscus and the flowers from the cord-ear trees, those white petals, those thick white petals with the touch of pink in the middle. I don’t know the names of flowers like she does. But I like to know that there are flowers. And since then, I have no feeling for flowers, or for any other woman; not since then. Not even an occasional woman that a man would invite for companionship or a drink in a bar, or in a restaurant; not even a woman he would invite to his house, if boredom comes over him; not even a woman to visit and look at, knowing that I am not really interested in anyone but her; not even in going with a woman, once in a blue moon. It is like I am going through a kind of religious transformation, a conversion. I mentioned atonement before. I remember in Scripture classes at Combermere School for Boys, they taught us about Paul heading for Damascus, and how the sudden power of conversion was like a stroke of blindness, blinding him to all the other activities going-on round him; and at the same time, it was like a stroke of sight. Things around me, like the Main Reference Library, which they say is the best in Canada, I am blinded to. Like the yearly parade when West Indians dance in the streets. Like the baseball games. And the parties on weekends, and dancing to calypso music on Friday nights at Cutty’s Hideaway on the Danforth. Like the presence of other women, like the one who would cook such lovely steaks that were always with too much blood in them, and after dinner continue drinking white wine, and would wear the white, see-through shortie-nighties. Nothing. Nothing comes after that. Nothing after that has any meaning to me. It is like being “saved,” when the pastor of the Nazarene Church pushes your head down under the water, and the water gets into your eyes, and the saltiness of the water gets into your mouth and your ears and leaves a white line round your forehead, from the salt in the sea water; and when you come back up, you are not the same person who was buried below the surface of the sea. This woman. This woman, this Chinese woman. She gave me a seal once, that she brought back from China when she visited her father who was dying, made-outta something that looks like marble, of a rich, dark, silver colour, almost like the colour of the pantyhose you liked that that woman is wearing. She had it made specially by a craftsman in China, in Beijing, with a small white animal on the top of the seal. The animal is reclining. I don’t remember what she said is the name of the animal, but I remember that the animal in question is the animal after which the year, the year she visited her father, was named, the year she gave me the seal. It is in a box. Rectangular, with silk of the same dark, silver colour, with flowers in the pattern; and the thing that keeps the box closed, its clasp, is a piece of ivory, like a tooth from some other animal, or from the same animal. This oblong box that is a rectangle, and that has a lining of deep-red silk, with an indentation in the middle, for the seal to fit it and rest in and not shake. From that day in the summer, when I didn’t answer the telephone, and all these days when I am not walking on the street just outside there from where we are now sitting, I sit and look at this seal and the box it comes in; and I mark the seal on pieces of paper, and on envelopes, and on stationery, and I write letters to her, and seal them, and put them in a drawer, and keep them, and leave them there in the drawer which has dried petals of red roses in it. In winter, when the snow remains for weeks on the black-and-white ground, and when it makes walking impossible and dangerous, I open the letters I write to her, and read them, and fold-them-back and seal-them-back with the seal she brought from China, the seal that has Chinese characters written on it. The red blotter containing the ink on which I have to place the seal is red too, and it is covered with a piece of material, a circular piece of material she cut, careful, slow and with love, with a small pair of nail scissors she would use to clip her fingernails and the excess, long hairs between her thighs; and with this scissors she cut a piece of cloth from a pair of the panties she liked to wear, and … had just taken off, to bind me …”

  “Goddamn!” John taps his Monte Cristo on the edge of the cleaned ashtray and looks me straight in the eye, shaking his head all the time he does this, in compassion, in understanding, in consolation, and at the same time, in shock. “And I been shooting-off my mouth all this goddamn time? And you let me?” He taps the cigar again and again, and then places it beside the ashtray, as if he is disregarding it. “I got something to confess to you, when you finish.”

  Buddy brings the snifters of Spanish brandy; and John lights a match, and applies it to one of the snifters which he then places in front of me. And he does the same thing, with another match, to his own glass, warming the glass. I drink mine off in one gulp. The sting of the brandy is like a sword going through my belly; like the sudden spasm of recollection and of pain I suffer each time I walk out onto Yonge Street, and see a face that is Chinese and a body that is like a young willow sapling, vulnerable and strong and bending to the motion of her legs and arms, a woman with her face wearing a white cotton dress that is loose-fitting and with a band that is loosened and untied; and this sharp, painful plunge of remembering makes me sick, makes me want to stop beside a building and bring up the sadness in the telephone call a day after I had not answered the phone, remembering the loss of those days with the flowers we used to stoop to see and sniff in parks and public gardens, and the neglect of her soft youthfulness of truth and of love. She likes to stand on my shoes and have me move about the room, bearing her on them, as if she is a little child, learning the first steps of waltzing from her father. “I love to stand on your feet. It makes me taller; and I feel stronger,” she says. I heard her voice that first confessing time and it made me younger; and I hear her voice each time I stoop to put on my socks; each time I stoop a second time to tie my laces; each time I take the seven steps down from my front door to the street. All I have now is the reflection of the roundness of her face and her eyes; and the slow start of her smile which never leaves her lips afterwards; and the imprint of her small feet on my shoes. The imprint of the red Chinese characters sealing my name to her love and to the envelopes that hold the words of love she never got to read. And the seal in the box, lined in red silk. When I returned from looking down into the grave the same in dimensions, but on a larger scale, to the box that contains the seal, and when I take up this box these nights to remember her, I am looking into the same space of the grave, of the coffin, the same space which holds her small, tightened body, formed like a slice of a moon, her back towards me, her hand between her legs, her other hand, in a kind of double-jointedness, planted and printed on my thigh.

  “And after all these years!” says John.

  “Time draws her closer to me.”

  “That is real love. One time, and forever. Like my marriages which didn’t work out that way. Once and forever. Goddamn.”

  “This is why I say I have no woman and no child and no love. I do nothing. I am nothing. I feel I am nothing. I feel nothing. Not only in winter when the feeling has to be slightly less cold than the snow. But forever. I have no feeling, no more. Only the feeling of seeing her memory and her face on the faces of the thousands of other Chinese I pass every day and do not know and do not speak to, but watch to see if th
at same miracle of meeting her will repeat itself in the echo of her voice, and bring her back from the grave …”

  “One love. Goddamn! One goddamn, short love that is forever …”

  “The only love.”

  “I don’t feel good after listening to you. After listening to you, I feel like a, like …”

  “When I reach the Lake these days, and look into the Lake, the water is not as clear like silver as it is on a beach, where …”

  “Like shit. I feel like shit. Me, reeling-off a lotta goddamn bullshit, and coming-on strong, and behaving like a real goddamn bragging, ugly fucking Amurcan, when you, my ace-boon, my friend … You are my goddamn friend, you see what I’m saying? The only friend I have ever had, ever will have, brother!”

  “Down by the Lake these days, I look into the water and I see nothing. Nothing. Not even my reflection. And one morning, not too long ago, I am looking into the water by the Lake, standing at the railing beside a ship that doesn’t sail any more, a ship that is now used as a restaurant serving seafood; and that morning I was looking, I am looking into the water and I see her face. And I moved, immediately, straightaway, because I know if I did not move from looking into that dark, green, dirty water, I would have followed the mirage of her face, and jumped in to meet her.”

  “Goddamn!” He takes his brandy glass in his right hand, with the cigar still unlit and in the same hand, and he raises it to his lips, lets it touch his lips, and removes it, holding it a few inches from the top of the shiny, round table, and does not taste it. “I got something to confess, my friend.” And I wait, and he does not say anything for a while. My mind is on the small patch of bright green mowed grass around the plot where we gathered in the small circle of friends, five that she and I could count, with the brown coffin in the narrow width of the grave, and I am still looking into the small rectangular box covered in dark, silver silk with the red interior lining, looking at the marble seal; at the small body which I cannot see, but which I see clearly; and at the sprig of white flowers with the green branch and leaves; at the body and at the marble seal; and as I am there standing on that grass in summer, John is sitting beside me in this bar, telling me things I hear only in the spaces left over from that memory of that afternoon in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery and Crematorium … “I was never married in France, and never had a wife in France … and I never had any children from the parlez-vous woman,” they were not his children, they were hers, from a previous marriage, but he liked them and called them his … and I see her eating with two long sticks of ivory, and wonder at her dexterity, but I know she is double-jointed for the way she can lie on her left side, and protect herself with the left hand placed between her thighs that are soft, so soft, her thighs that are like two rebellions of passion and feeling when I touch them; and she still has one hand left over for me, to comfort me, to print her five fingers of trust on my left thigh. “… is, and was, no wife either in Germany, because I hated Hitler too much during the Second World War, and because my new spouse has Jewish blood among the four other strains in her veins. I could never think of marrying a German woman, even though one presented herself before the other.” He is saying that he visited Italy once, and that was for a weekend from England where he was at university, to play soccer, and that his team was drenched six-nil; so, they turned around and drenched themselves in red wine from the Caves of Barolo … “I was living with the frauleene-woman, and, like the first woman, she has the thrildren, who became my step-thrildren …”; I am still standing over her, as they pour the dark-brown mould, thick as molasses, crumbling and pouring over her small, stiff body, over her soft olive skin, in too plentiful, too hasty, too unspeakably large shovelsful, as if they want to make sure she will be buried forever, and is nourished well by this thick layer of earth, to grow beneath the earth like the plants and flowers she loves. John is still talking: “… and I don’t know why I would tell you all that bullshit, as if I wanted, as if I had to impress you, you who I haven’t lighted an eye on, in all these years. It’s pure bullshit! In my profession, I know what this means. But …”; and I am standing in her small apartment in a basement owned by the Italian construction worker, her landlord, who enters her room after his wife has gone to bed, through the unsealed door beside the furnace which he has never fixed, bending his head under the uncovered pipes of hot water, cold water, and sewage, to stand in the darkness, which is frightening, and ask her if there is anything she needs, and who remains even after she has sworn three times that she is “fine, fine, fine”; I stand in this small one-room apartment watching her three plants that need love and water and some light, watching her cook a meal in four parts using a single pan that looks like a large version of the ink-pad for my seal, a wok; and I watch her dexterity as she keeps hot the previous three cooked courses of the four-pronged meal she learned in China; and how she is able to serve them, piping hot, to suit my peculiarity, even though in the menu of her ancient land and culture, cold was the order of the night; “… but I’ll tell a you the truth. The truth is that I came up from Durm-North Carolina by train, and that my boy is in the hospital, over there somewhere, somewhere from here, at the Sick Thrildren’s Hospital, under annastettics, waiting for the doctor to operate, waiting for an operation that may take his goddamn life, or that may save his life, I don’t know which; and the child’s mother is at the hospital now, ’cause I left her there as I couldn’t bear no more to look at my goddamn child strapped up to all those goddamn tubes and with a machine beating in place of his heart, and suffering so much pain, that little bugger in all that pain and suffering. We’re supposed to leave tomorrow, if everything goes according. Anytime now, or later tonight, he would have come out from under the surgeon’s knife …”; and the second time I arrived at the apartment, she made me ring the bell four times, and knock five times, and she remained at the door until I had done that, and then she answered the door, with a loud welcome, “Come in, come in, come in,” because she wanted me to make noise and announce my presence in full hearing of the landlord, and put him on notice, in case he was lurking in the furnace room. She wanted him to know she had chosen me for her bed. And when I entered, she called out my name, three times, aloud, and later she told me in a whisper that this precaution was her protection from the nightly visits of her landlord; to ward him off …; “… the truth of the matter is that I live in Durm-North Carolina, and I really work in a firm of social workers, but I do not do all the things I told you I do, all that, some o’ that is bullshit, if you see what I’m saying … It’s a damn job, that much is true. I’m the manager of the office, but I try my hand at some therapy and counselling, when the real medical and psychology staff are not present. It’s my way of learning things, and helping with my studies at college, where I go every night after work and on weekends, to improve myself …”; and on that first night, we watch television in black and white on the two channels she gets, and talk about all the languages they speak in China; and how she learned to speak such good English from the BBC International Service; and about Barbados which she has read about in books in school in China; and about the first night she arrived at the airport in Toronto here, frightened by the English language which she could not follow because of its Canadian accent and the Immigration officer who did not speak English with the same BBC accent as hers. She knew what he was saying to her, but still could not understand his English under the glare of the fluorescent questioning, and the people who spoke it in such loud insistence, enunciating each slight syllable and prejudice, stressing each suspicion and disapproval of her immigrant presence. That night, I knew that I loved her, because she and I were so close … and we fell asleep at four in the morning, my head to her feet, at opposite ends of the small creaking bed that had no blanket to clothe her against the cold, against the lowered heat from the landlord’s spitefulness and economy, from the vengeance of his unrequited visits.

  The snow has now completely cut us off from the sidewalk and the street outside. The
re are only six of us left in the bar, the three women who are now silent, fixing their lips with Zilactin in preparation for the searing coldness of the wind that howls at the sealed windows, that pushes against the bolted front doors. Only the three women, and Buddy and John and me. Buddy is polishing the washed glasses, and moving a bottle of liquor one inch in one direction, and then another inch in the opposite direction, for symmetry, or perhaps according to the percentage of proof in the alcohol in the bottles; and as he does this, the two waves of bottles are reflected in the long mirror in front of which they stand, closer now, coming in an unending line like a wave of snow left by the snow-plough against the length of the gutter. He is not satisfied with his arrangement, and changes the symmetry, moving one bottle closer to another, and moving it back an inch, until the geometry in his mind is mirrored by the running line of bottles of all shapes and sizes and contents. The music is no longer playing. But we do not miss it. It must have been buried in our conversation and then was unnecessary, and Buddy turned it off. The music passed away without notice, just as the other customers have left without a farewell. The bar is quiet. And we can hear only the noise of passing cars, the sound of slush and some skids caused by sudden acceleration over ice, like the waves that used to lap over our feet, then speed back to the sea, leaving us sitting in the sun on the sand, beside the old conch-shell the fishermen used to summon villagers for their catch, and summon villagers to a death by drowning of a fisherman.

  “I hope you didn’t get the impression while I was talking all that bullshit,” John says, “that I was suggesting there was anything wrong with you, if you see what I’m saying. It’s been a long day. And we had a lotta catching-up to do, but I didn’t mean to come on strong, and suggest there is anything psychologically wrong with you, and that I was making myself a role-model for you. Shit, I isn’t a role-model even for myself!”