Micah was a mixture of several different races, too many to count, he would say. He was hard to pin down, and easy in his careless nowarian identity. In Canada, where these mixings are now being taken so seriously and theorized upon at length, he would be indisputably mixed-race, biracial, or simply black. He cared nothing for these labels, though, he moved through a world unimpeded by these divides, embodying all of them, as it were. Micah — a man to long for, coppery skin, greenish-brown eyes, curling hair and eyelashes, his body taut, his step light, his voice constantly teasing.
In Canada I am South Asian, the name Geeta signaling my arrival long before I appear, circumscribed by every element of that detail. I marveled at Micah’s indifference to race. I also wondered if I really liked him so much mostly because he was not part of my fixed prescription for existence. But I shrugged off these prying questions and relaxed with him over the extravagant dinner of home-grown blackstick cassava and stewed red fish, shrimp, and pumpkin that he had cooked, becoming more mellow after the old-fashioned rum cocktails, the c’est quittes he made with such finesse.
That first week after I awoke, I tried to find my space inside his big, quaintly designed house. Micah had made himself a cozy office in an antechamber just outside the bedroom. He had thought too about my needs. In one corner of the bedroom he had placed a small desk for me, where it was open and airy. But alas, from every direction my back was exposed — to a door, a doorless doorway, and the open grillwork of the burglar bars with the veranda running alongside the entire perimeter of the bedroom. There was no clutter on the desk, only a small lamp and a small bookshelf above it. No computers, printers, faxes, no buzz. A clean space, well-intentioned but so exposed.
The first night that I sat at the desk with my notebook, though, I was in heaven. I had found ways of blocking myself off from the elements by draping a shawl over the chair, and another over my shoulders. Tropical nights get cool in the later months of the year, especially up in the Santa Cruz hills. I put my hands under my chin and stared at the wall, happy, quiet at last, simple.
He came in, stole up to my chair, pulled back the shawl, and kissed, then licked the nape of my neck, “Geeta,” he murmured, “Geeta, my love.” I closed my eyes, enjoying the hardness of his body, his smell of musk and a promise of sex. Then, unexpectedly, he said, “Oh God, I really like it when we work together like this.” He slipped into his office, left the door open, and began to work noisily, shuffling papers and announcing his activity: “Right! Now this one is for tomorrow, ay ay, how Sonnylal file get left back here, hmm... Tomorrow ah should try and meet him, and Sheila de day after, uh hmm... They need the appointment with the Housing Authority soon, the development in Matura filling up fast fast...”
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.