And your perspiration smell so strong! Girl, you only wasting time … all you do, can’t get through, I still ain’t going married to you! … nastiness go’ cause your death, girl no man can’t stand your breath, you can’t trap me with negromancy … Sparrow was talking to Dots? Henry said he was, in his heart. Dots knew. Henry flung his body into positions with a free movement. He was prancing up on Dots, he was screwing Dots, in his mind.
Dots turned from looking at him. She put down her plate. She said to Bernice, “Gal, let we dance, do!” And Bernice became bewildered by the request; but she did not resist, could not resist, for Dots was already holding her round the waist and by the left hand, and was whirling her round in the dance. She was going to compete with Henry and beat him at his game. Sparrow was in good form, too. And Dots, easily overcome by this kind of musical power, released Bernice (who was not a little embarrassed to be seen dancing with a woman, in the company of Agatha and Brigitte, when there were men present), and flung her dress high over her head.
For a second, Henry couldn’t think. His entire mind and body were paralysed. There was a freshness and an enticement under those skirts that he had not imagined possible. He saw the colour of her panties, and he saw the torment of their distance. Henry wondered then how Boysie could even look at another woman, even a woman like Brigitte (who was tall and thin), when his wife possessed such power in her thighs. He shook his head (not to the rhythm of the calypso, this time), and said aloud, “Rass!”
Dots was in her briar patch. “Come to me! Come to me! Come to me!” she was yelling to the beat, talking really to Henry, and not to Bernice, her desultory dancing partner. Henry knew. Dots knew. “Come! Ugh!-ugh!ugh!” she was saying, in spasms, like short, painful overburdening, over-ecstatic orgasms. Henry at once felt he was a fool to have thought of marrying a white woman. He at once thought of the myths (although he didn’t recognize them in his mind as myths) and the facts and the fancies and the facts and the desires and the facts of making love with a black woman. (“Is a long-arse time since I last screwed a black piece, Boysie! And is ’bout time, too!”) And he knew then that even if he did marry this white woman, Agatha, he would have to find the primitive, real, funky, passionate passion and bodily satisfaction in the tightening thighs of a black woman like Dots. Dots knew.
“All you do, still can’t get through, I still ain’t going married to you!” It was Dots singing along with the calypso. Henry knew. When the calypso finished, Henry himself turned the record player off.
“What you do that for, man?” Boysie wanted to know.
“I want a waltz,” Henry said. His manner was so simple and so absurd that no one, apart from Dots, realized how deep were the silent psychologies at work in the room. But Dots knew. And she had beaten him. Henry knew.
“All you do, still can’t get through, boy … ain’t going married to you!” Dots sang, and then laughed out loud, and sexily. And she tapped Agatha on her leg and asked her, “Yuh like that one, gal?”
Henry knew. Agatha was sweating from the exertion in the dance. She was the only one in the room sweating. Goddamn! at a time like this, Dots playing the arse! Agatha is still a better woman, though. Agatha is more learned, got better schooling; Agatha could put any one o’ these bitches in here in her pocket. She got a lot o’ money, too; and she dresses better than any one o’ them. Dots is only good-looking, but I couldn’t be tied down with a woman like Dots. I would have to go out to work, couldn’t stay home, even if I couldn’t find a job. Dots won’t think ’bout helping out a man, a man would have to support Dots. Agatha is a better woman, better in everything. The only thing I think Dots have on Agatha is that Dots could maybe give me a better screw, and that makes me glad as hell that Boysie don’t love the bitch, that he has Brigitte … but just the same, pussy isn’t everything, it isn’t the end-all and the be-all in life, goddammit! But the doubt was already planted. It would haunt him for a long time to come.
They had talked long into the night, that first night in North Bay. And even after Mrs. Macmillan had confessed that she had deceived Estelle with all her grand promises of living with her in Timmins, and had confessed that she didn’t know why she had done it, still Estelle harboured no hard feelings against her. The greatest irony in the whole affair was that she should meet Mrs. Macmillan again, for the second time, when she really needed someone she could trust.
They had walked from the hotel, through a side street, then for about two more blocks, to a small prefabricated-looking house, where Mrs. Macmillan said she lived, “Alone, honey!” She hadn’t the money to pay a taxicab. And Estelle didn’t want to suggest taking
