Lisa Allen-Agostini - Trinidad Noir

He was happy, humming as he shifted paper or filed this and that, opening and closing the file drawers.

“Aha!” he exclaimed, ruffling through a pile of newspaper clippings. “Hear nah.” (Throughout this he was obviously assuming that my listening was a settled part of his sorting and whiffling through the paper pile.) “Listen to this joke. A letter to the editor:

Dear Sir:

If a Tobagonian is prime minister this time around, can we, as an enlightened population, entertain the possibility that next time around it can as easily be a man from Debe or Penal? An Indian prime minister, if you please! Can we entertain the possibility that it might equally be a woman from the Indian heartland — from Caroni or Chaguanas? Can every creed and race find an equal place here? What is equality?

“Question, mih dear, question!” He chuckled dryly, waiting for a response, and when there was none, continuing his chatter nonetheless, failing to notice when I stole out to sit in the sunken living room, deep inside one of the big couches.

The stupid letter had filled me with questions — unspoken and unanswered between us. And where to start? My depression was not helped by the setting. The raw glass front let the night in, gaping and gawking, while I sat framed in the low halo of light, which from the outside would surely eviscerate the room and its contents. My sense of exposure was enormous, yet pulling his deep drapes shut seemed completely out of the question. I let the nasty dark overwhelm me and was in tears by the time he found me. He said nothing, only moved to the couch to sit quietly with me and look through glass at the outside, while the outside observed.

Later, the moonlight made lined patterns on the floor of the bedroom. It was then that I noticed the carambola tree, stretching and arching toward the bedroom, its tessellated black trunk clean of vines and stray leaves, but studded with golden budlike growths. Little golden warts on a tree trunk under the moon, a cold moon.

More doubt crept into my heart in bed, during an act of love. His lovemaking was slow, deliberate, a desire to sample and ponder mixed with the earlier, carefree excitement. He ranged over my body, I couldn’t help thinking with some displeasure, calculating its assets, quantifying, almost, the degree to which the effort was worth the price. What price? What was he spending? My ungenerous self took over. I resented being pored over as his particular object of desire. But my sensual self remained present too, loving his possessiveness, wanting it, watching him pore over my breasts and buttocks, evaluating their heft before letting himself go.

Some peculiar anxiety had been invading me for the past week even as he had aided in my recuperation. Now, exhaustion gone, I came alive in sex and knew at once. It was when he turned me over and deliberated on his next move while pulling the hair back from the nape of my neck. He kissed and slurped at my neck but the act was different somehow. My body intuited that it was my hair that was alien: He had been expecting a different head of hair. My hair is straight, dropping clear past my shoulders in an uncomplicated, clean cut. His hands were too inexact somehow, grabbing for something else, maybe more hair, or maybe none, a shorn head perhaps, shaved clean. Not a woman’s head, I thought irrationally, even though many women wear shaven or short, cropped hairstyles. But the thought that had come to me unbidden could not be dismissed: He was fresh from another lover. I realized that I had never claimed him before, nor cared to own him, yet this dynamic was different and strange.

We had always been flexible in bed, not caring who took the lead, so perfectly did our moves synchronize themselves. From the start he had described it as not caring who was man or who was woman . But tonight something had changed. He was being man but he wanted me to be a man too. The intruding lover had been a man. Of this I felt sure. Sure too that this could not have been the first time. He would continue to protest his fidelity to me. No doubt it was true, insofar as he had not taken another woman. I loved him back with a vengeance, hungrily, greedily even — “Oh my God, Micah, Mikey, Mikey, sweetheart, Mikey honey...” — while wondering what to do with this certainty, until a great wave left me alone on the farthest shore.

It was immediately afterwards that the feeling of panic and terror rose up in my throat. It was unyielding in its grip upon my consciousness. Nothing as ordinary as a fear of abandonment. No, it was the opening of a great bottomless cave of emptiness stretching interminably forward, a vacancy that would not be filled by the everyday, that yearned for dissolution into another’s consciousness, that knew the impossibility of that longing for annihilation into death, the little death.

I awoke much later to hear sounds outside, whispering, rustling, a feeling of menace in the air. I opened my eyes but did not move, rigid with fear. I turned toward Micah but an iron hand held me down. I lay still and waited. His hand left mine and all in one motion he turned on his belly toward the doorway; it was then I noticed the gun in his hand. The rustling lasted a few seconds longer and then stopped abruptly. The doorway beyond the burglar bars was wide open to the night. Why, in a country where sudden wealth had brought an avalanche of crime, would he leave himself so exposed? I was afraid beyond all reason, but instinctively I knew that no sound was to be made. He crouched, motionless, for several more minutes, the gun still pointing into the darkness, then he rose decisively, pulled the doors shut, and drew the heavy drapes together. They (who? who? I asked, but no answer came) are gone , he said. It’s all right. He pulled me close and stroked my back, my hair. In comforting me he was relaxing, becoming the master of the situation again. I wanted his touch, I closed my eyes and tried to feel safe in his arms, but just as unerringly as before I knew that these were not burglars and all was not as simple as he wished it to appear.

The next morning it rained and rained. From inside the burglar bars I saw that overnight the carambolas had invaded the tree’s black trunk. Carambolas are strange fruit, alien sojourners from another dimension. Star fruit, five-fingers, carambolas. They lined themselves along trunk and branches like sentries, short, green, and golden, thick and phallic, impervious to rain, thrusting forward dumbly, held securely by their short black stalks. Carambolas resemble cocoa pods in shape, but their surface is succulent crisp, not hard. Cocoa pods, though, hang in some kind of collaborative truce between gravity, the tree trunk, and the leafy earth underneath, eventually ripening and bursting at the seams, the beans leaking out of their sweet cotton wrapping, the collaboration extending to squirrels, manicous, and even the occasional manicou crab. Not carambolas. Carambolas float arrogantly, gold on black, each alone, separate, breaking the even back of the trunk, gloriously wet. I looked at them wonderingly. Life can be this simple; this brutal.

I decided against questioning and accusing and, inevitably, threw myself on his mercy. My questions were now more complex and I hardly knew where to begin. Still I desired him more, even as the vacant days and nights loomed ahead, even as I knew that the maelstrom I sought would come to an abrupt end and I would be disconsolate for days, maybe months afterwards. Any idea of sharing would torture me beyond sanity. The bisexual connection (if it was true, and I would never ask) would be a greater torture. Its secrecy would fill me with contempt, yet if he told me, it would be the end. And my suspicions would not be allayed. The space that I was groping for at the beginning made sense only as I calculated its loss, but the realization left me nowhere. The futility of my needs hit me in the face — mine, his, Ella’s, even the folks at Carrie’s Place — and despair too at my own contempt for people’s struggles. Yet, no way could I have apprehended Micah’s impact on the rest of my life. Not then.