A smudge of fatigue and sweat walked imperceptibly from under Estelle’s arms. Bernice noticed it; and she took Estelle into Dots’s bedroom, and rubbed some of Dots’s underarm deodorant, Ban, on the story-telling odour. “Your time soon come, girl,” she said, and smiled. Estelle smiled, and dashed back out to dance. Agatha, with the first signs of married-hood and possessiveness, sat and watched Henry dancing with Priscilla, the nurse (“But who in hell invited that whore? Who invited Princess Priscilla in my decent place, eh?” said Dots. “Boysie, did you invite Nurse Priscilla?”), and Boysie laughed; and Agatha watched Henry as she watched Priscilla’s stylized and sterilized hips, as they did things with the rhythm that she herself, legal and wedded to Henry, for better and for worse, could not do.
Some men are in the kitchen eating, as they have been doing since five o’clock in the afternoon. There is a big argument going on about cricket. None of these men has seen a cricket match in five years — not since they left the West Indies. But they are arguing about Sir Frank Worrell, and the cover drive he made off an outswinger from Alex Bedser the English fast bowler, at Lords in 1950, many many years ago. One man says, “The English think they are great? They playing they great! Be-Jesus Christ, when Worrell, when Sir Frank leaned into that outswinger from Bedser, it went straight through the fucking covers for four! Right offa Worrell’s kiss-me-arse wrist! And as man, you know that Sir Frank is a man with more wristwork than, than-than … than Boysie in there have stones in his underwears!” And like a contagion, everybody bawled, and poured themselves another larger rum.
The record is changed. Sparrow is talking about his boyhood, in Trinidad. The men dropped their glasses and they ran for the women. They reached out their hands, and lifted the dripping shiningly dressed, rouged-and-perfumed-smelling tired women off their chairs. Boysie is dancing with Dots as if they are lovers: close. His brillantined head, which had sweated four hours, four hours under his moe-joe, is sleeked-down and shining; and Dots’s hairdo, done amidst pain and time, talk and gossip at Azan’s beauty parlour on Bloor Street, the previous Thursday, when the shop was noisy and talkative with domestics on their day off, about “this rich-able Jewish girl who is marrieding some Bajan black man, Christ, he really have his blasted head full with rocks! Wait, he couldn’t find nobody better than she? Why they always have to go and look for white woman?” Dots had listened and had held her peace and her head down: they did not know all the facts. Now, I am a rebel, I seeking my revenge any kind o’ way, I’m a devil. I don’t laugh, I don’t smile, I don’t play … Boysie is smiling. He is holding Dots so close, that she can feel something between his legs: but she is his wife and he her husband.
Estelle thinks of the day before when Bernice and Dots and Boysie came to the room on Bedford Road, and found her delirious with fever and misery and thoughts that could not be achieved; and how they dressed her; how they paid the landlord the rent she owed, the rent which Mr. Burrmann had eventually promised to pay, but which she finally told him not to pay because she didn’t want to be obligated to him; and how they had driven her back down to this apartment; and here she had slept, the first good night’s rest in such a long time. She is thinking of Bernice and her bad luck: “… that woman, Mistress Burrmann really thinks she is somebody precious, to treat my sister so! … one o’ these days Ontario Street’s going to move up in Forest Hill …” And Estelle wonders what Bernice is going to do with her life, what she herself is going to do about Sam Burrmann, or to him. She thinks of the future, and the future looks bleak; and this makes her think of the present. And before her like a threat, like a challenge, is the man who nobody invited. He wants to dance “with the prettiest lady in this house, ma’am.” The compliment is sincere, and Estelle stands up just as Sparrow says: They treat me like a savage, of me they took advantage; when I was young and growing up in town, all o’ them bad-johns used to knock me down … A tear is crawling like perspiration down Estelle’s face. This man is not a bad man, she thinks; but nobody knows him. The man does not notice the tears. He has his mind on other parts of her anatomy.
Somebody was kicking down the apartment door. Boysie went to the door. The same policeman, plus another officer, were standing there. “Come on, I told ya, didn’t I?” the first policeman said. There was a strange kind of anger in his voice. There was also a kind of disappointment. He seemed peeved that somebody would report noise twice in one night. Boysie knew what to do. The guests began leaving right away. Everybody except those who lived there, those who were sleeping there for the night: Boysie and Dots, Bernice and Estelle.
Henry looked at the policeman and said loudly in his heart, “Fuck you!” Had he said it aloud, he knew what would have happened to him: another beating and probably jail. Agatha started to cry. She was still wearing her wedding gown, Henry in his formal morning suit.
The policemen waited until every one of the guests left. As Agatha, walking beside Henry along the long corridor, as if she was still walking that interminable aisle to face the altar and
