“Wait, who owns all these books, man?”
“The wife. She owns all these books.”
“Wait, and who build them bookcases? and put them in them, all over the place, so?”
“The wife. She build the bookcases.”
“She’s a hell of a woman, a wife, you have, boy.”
“Book have now become my fucking enemy in my old age, boy. Books, books, books everywhere. Books in the bathroom upstairs there, books under the bed, books all over the place. One day I was so mad I started to count these blasted books, and when I reached two thousand, I gave up, ’cause be-Christ, Boysie, as a old man, I am too fucking old now to start worrying ’bout books and education. And all these blasted books’re written in a language that I can’t understand or talk in, at all. Zoology-sociology-anthropology language! I don’t know why one person — and a woman at that! — have to know so much just to live in this fucking twentieth-century world!”
“Education, boy! That’s what I mean when I say you’re lucky as hell. Agaffa is a highly educated woman. And she is your wife now. I wish my wife was a more learned woman.”
“My wife. My wife? My fucking wife! Look at this fucking room, man. Man, these fucking books is stifling me, man! I can’t breathe! Look at my room, Boysie. Boysie you know me a long time, a long time before I had this brilliant idea to marry a woman who breathes books! You know me when I had a television set in here, when I could come in here on a Saturday night, with you, and with a case o’ beer on the floor between us, and watch the Montreal Canadiennes beat the shit outta the Toronto Maple Leaves. Boysie, this is one-room-apartment-room. It isn’t no fucking luxury apartment in Rosedale or on Avenue Road. And I been living here comfortable as arse, for years, before my wife, my wife moved into my fucking parlour — said the spider to the fucking fly!”
“The books look good, though,” Boysie said; and he meant it. “They have the place looking like a educated place.”
“My wife did it, man. She is a very fucking educated lady. I didn’t tell you she just qualified for a fellowship? My wife just came first in her class. A fellowship worth four thousand dollars. Some goddamn foundation is giving my wife four thousand dollars to write a lot o’ shite about dead animals, because that is what she tell me social zoology is all about. Man, be-Jesus Christ, in the West Indies, we buries dead animals!”
“I wish my wife could get a …”
“Shut your fucking mouth, boy! You don’t know when you’re lucky!” Henry then poured another glass of wine for Boysie and for himself. They were drinking Mommessin, a red wine. Agatha had bought the wine. She also bought the pure crystal glasses they were drinking the wine from.
Boysie looked round the room, marvelling at the number of books on the walls: all four walls. They were arranged in a certain order, for he could see all the books dealing with one branch of a particular animal and its instincts and behaviour were together; and there were many books about black people. Boysie touched the covers of the books; he opened some of them, and all of them bore Agatha’s name, her maiden name: Agatha Barbara Sellman, Zoology U of T, 5T9; and in a recent mood, a hand of contemporary ballpoint writing, she had written on each book in the house (Boysie made a sample testing when he saw the name first in a book called The Myth of the Negro Past), she had written “née” before the Agatha Barbara Sellman line, and underneath that line she had written Agatha Barbara Sellman-White. Boysie liked it, and he laughed to himself. Only Englishmen from England, those who owned Rolls-Royces and large black Humber Hawks and those big Jaguars, had names like Agatha’s, names joined together in holy matrimony by a hyphen.
He wondered what Henry’s new name was? Was it Henry White-Sellman? But he was not foolish enough to ask.
Boysie sprang off the footstool. His wine spilled. “Man, hey! Man, that is you! That is you!” He was pointing at a piece of paper taken from a large notebook (the holes from the rings were visible, and visibly torn), on which was a drawing of a black man’s head and shoulders, done in running smudging charcoal. The lips of this black man were very thick. The hair was very bushy: but in some way, the face looked like a white man’s face, with the one difference that it was painted black. Boysie looked at it for a long time. “Man, this is you!”
“My wife! She is a fucking artist, too.”
Boysie kept looking at the drawing and then at Henry: at the drawing, then at Henry. What is it, he wondered. And
