“Continuing. I don’t like the idea of marrying a white woman with money, no more than any other man like the idea, if he is as poor as me. It ain’t wise marrying any woman who have beans, particularly if the man don’t have a goddamn bean to his name, to back up her beans. You follow?”
“Quod a rat.”
“As man! Now, I want to ask you something personal. But you got to give me the green light to put this propersition to you before I could open my mouth and ask you.”
“Put it, man! Put it! Quod a rat, so put it.”
“Goddamn, boy! I like you. You quodding like hell tonight! You quodding real cool, baby!”
“Okay, I’m listening,” Boysie said.
“Okay! I am going to quod just like you. I shall ask. I shall ask. The question is: I want you to let me and Agatha live in that apartment till I could get my hands ’pon some money, till we could get a place of our own, but remember! I am not trying to force myself on you, in no kind o’ manner, and I am not trying to impose, or nothing so. It ain’t nothing like that, it is only that I feel bad as hell that a woman got to support me in the essentials o’ life, like even buying the toothpaste that I uses every morning, buying the cigarettes I smokes during the day, and goddammit, she even pays for the fucking frenchleathers I uses when I am screwing her! You see what I mean? This fucking woman have me enslaved, Boysie! I am a fucking slave to her, and she turning another screw a little bit more tighter every morning, because every morning, the first thing after I open my eye, and wipe the booby outta my goddamn eyes, there’s something some-damn-thing that I got to want that day, and the onliest way I am going to get that thing is by asking Agatha for it. And that pains my arse to have to ask. I was not born asking, man …”
By this time, Boysie had heard enough of the request, which was contrary to the plans he had already laid for the use of the apartment. Henry’s request was the kind to destroy any freedom which Boysie imagined he was going to have by living alone. He immediately, and expertly, therefore, fell asleep. If he was asleep, Henry could not expect him to answer, could not expect him to hear, could not bind him to anything he might have said, because he couldn’t be completely conscious while he was asleep. Boysie even started to snore; and the noise attracted the mountain of a man, who walked over, stood beside Boysie, and rested his hand affectionately on Boysie’s shoulders. The waiter was already ready, willing and fuming to throw Boysie out of the tavern.
But the mountain man said, “It’s all right, Bill. This here cat’s my main man. He’s cool.”
But Henry intervened and took control of Boysie, who might have been really sleeping, and led him through the onlooking side entrance. Henry was so embarrassed (and very perturbed by the size of the muscles in the mountain man’s arms, which looked like rippling mountains themselves) that he did not notice Boysie’s miraculous transformation from the depths of drunkenness to articulate sobriety.
“Look, man,” Boysie said, when they reached the sidewalk, “I gotta go home.”
Henry did not even notice that it was the first time he had heard Boysie refer to his wife’s living-in quarters in Mrs. Hunter’s house as “home.”
When Boysie left, Henry did not go straight home, where Agatha was waiting for him. She had skipped a seminar in her Ph.D. course in zoology, at the university. She had stopped at the Liquor Control Board store on Spadina Avenue, near the burlesque theatre which was not far from the Paramount Tavern. She bought a bottle of wine, Casal Mendes Rosé, and a twenty-six-ounce bottle of Seagram’s VO rye whiskey. The whiskey was for Henry. She did not like whiskey. The wine was for dinner, and for herself. She stopped at the rundown variety store, two doors north, and bought him three packs of Pall Mall cigarettes. (She had made him stop smoking and accepting Rothmans, because of South Africa.) As she walked down from College to the liquor store, her mind returned to the happy days of first love and infatuation that she and Henry had shared in the Paramount, and other places. In those days, it was slumming for her, a liberal-minded girl of great wealth and social position, to go to “those places.” She could enter her seminar room the morning after, still throbbing from love and the “experience” and Henry’s small room, and tell the other “sheltered students from rich middle-class homes” what real life was.
But today, the Paramount was not a place for her. The tension of this rejection did something to quicken her steps, and she didn’t even breathe easily until she had passed the building. She walked back more leisurely going home, because she always liked Spadina Avenue. It was on this street that her father, and his father before him, had laid the foundation of their fortune in the clothing business. It started with secondhand clothing in the terrible days of the Depression. It was now in a large building, with renovated front, with many employees, in the hardstoned, brown-brick heart of the shopping district, in the heart of Yonge Street between King and Dundas.
But she liked Spadina Avenue most. It was a beautiful street: it anchored her to something grand, something solid, something there in her past. And now that it was autumn, with the colours of dresses and skirts and blouses and shirts and trousers matching the colours of the leaves falling in that paused stage of overripeness and rot; and because there was space on Spadina Avenue, space and a feeling of freedom, on the jousting ground of immigrants and ambitions, Spadina Avenue was one of
