After supper Wayne and I cuddle on the couch. I wrap myself around him and listen to the voices of our neighbours through the thin walls between us and below on the complex. Chopin is playing on the recorder but once in awhile the needle gives a nervous shift, adding a new note.
Wayne is reading me poetry, something from Olive Senior. His voice low, energizing each vowel, makes my eyes drift up and down to follow the words flowing through the room. I am pushing my hair back into a neat bun when my gaze drifts to a painting in the bedroom.
It is a watercolour painting of a boy standing in the middle of a cane field, a silhouette behind the receding sunset. Little blurs of raindrops surround him, pouring from a darkening sky into him.
Wayne’s cell phone rings and after glancing at the screen he stops reading. He looks at me as if asking my permission, or telling me that he did not have a choice, and I peel myself from his side. He gets up to answer her.
As he talks he is smiling and holding back smiles and I hear her laughing freely on the other end. I am stroking the swell of my stomach, fondling with my navel until I shift the sofa cushions and get up to flip the vinyl.
Wayne sits on the sofa arm looking at the painting of the watercolour boy, listening to her. I watch him glance up at me then retreat towards the light above the dining room table for his jacket. The vein that often springs up in his neck is there, throbbing steadily.
On nights like these I find myself reaching out to touch things in the tiny apartment to make sure that I am still present, that this is still us and of course the apartment feels the same but a newness is here too, circling my brain until I kiss my teeth and drift away from him.
Midnight traffic on Molynes Road is building to a domino grid. His sparse paintings laying on the bright warm coloured walls flow into an even palette throughout the rooms. Museum tour brochures with dates ticked off for tomorrow at noon are fanning the mantelpiece and I wonder when I came to look at Wayne with such disgust whenever she called him. I had never claimed ownership before. Had I?
“Yea, me leaving the office now,” he says stretching his hands out to me. Eyes beaming in innocent half crescents. Innocent.
I kiss my teeth again and walk past him into the bedroom slamming the door.
“Don’t be like dat, Kierce,” he says from the outside.
A beat passes. Two beats. Time slows down. A familiar unease rises in my throat then I feel it roll off me like electricity. When the door opens I am already sobbing. He comes in to hold my waist and we sink down onto the floor. His hands pose above the 7 month old bump like a praise. Dark veins and deep grooves trail the length of his arms, his palms wide open, eyes piercing mine like ackee seeds, pleading. “…understan’, nuh?”
So much of him is present in me. His desire to maintain our relationship, his efforts to make me feel whole whenever he comes over– second guessing an idea for a gallery opening, asking me for consent, trusting me to help him believe in himself. Even his strong tolerance for hate whenever he buries his guilt of her accident inside me but there is his deeper sensitivity towards her needs that is near cruel to me. Like now, giving the same excuse of her asking for help out the tub because of a broken wheelchair. Hire in-house help, I say. He says, she doesn’t want it. Of course. I see that there is so much of him that I have outgrown.
There is now a need to repress face beauty, to overpower it with smile lines and fresh wrinkles in my forehead, to burn out of my youth a maturity that makes me understand that this is not new to us anymore and his willingness to participate in her manipulation is insufferable.
I have seen his ecstasy, felt his tears on my wrists, been stolid against his drunk rages, learned to grow out the promise that this is just a two year fling. I have mastered these things and so her late night calls grip and hold me down more than they used to, more than the weight and the sin of this pregnancy. I am so tired.
Nevertheless, his response now is to kneel before me and beg, not knowing what he is begging for. Coming to me a victim, youth glowing in his eyes still, as bright as that fateful night we met at The National Gallery of Jamaica between statues of Edna Manley’s Negro Aroused and Prophet, me, connecting with his silent curiosity as he stared at pain in clay. I am an artist too, he had said. And the attraction was undeniable; even though my mother had warned me about artists: they don’t belong to anybody. Is that why daddy had left me so easily?
“A have to go but, a love yuh.” Shrugging on his jacket, “Remember dat.”
I grab a figurine from the dresser and spin around just in time to catch my reflection in the mirror. “If yuh love me, yuh leave her.” I say to a woman with cool dark skin looking at the man stepping through the door. The kinky coils escaping from the neat bun ring around her eyes to show a creeping madness.
“Yuh know how it go a’ready Kierce. Soon, a promise.”
He goes, leaving me with his gift of the watercoloured boy who is blindly watching the sun rise or set. The rays blurring his face into partial darkness, exposing only drooping eyelashes. I hurl the figurine at the boy.
“Stop stand so still, the sun cah brighten yuh!” I wipe away tears then sink to the floor, blushing when my baby kicks. “Yuh have to do dat yourself, my bwoy. Have to do dat yuhself.”
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Monique Lennon is a 20 something year old Jamaican with a Prince-like obsession with doves. Read more here: lenaugne.wordpress.com
Photo: Jaime Serrano
