“Well, a party with drinking only, is one thing. But stripping in front of a black man all o’ them white women doing it — that is something else altogether completely different. And I intend to look for him in that gloomy place … the candles, only the candles they left burning … heh-heh-haiii! first time, soul, that I realized it is so blasted hard to find one o’ we in darkness, in the dark. Heh-heh-haiiii! And I am a black person myself, heh-heh-haiiii! Well, I spot that brute. That bitch! And guess what he was doing? Guess!”
“Standing up in a corner!” Boysie said. The image of naked women was too much for him.
“He was painting too!”
“Christ, no!” Boysie breathed. The images of all those naked women overpowered him, and he started to dream.
“He was painting a black, black, mind you! … he was painting a blasted black circle round that girl’s you-know-what … so help me God! … so I don’t have to tell you …”
“Oh Jesus God! hah-hah-hah!”
“Ohhhhh-weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
“Lord God in heaven look down!”
“He! That black bitch! Was painting a black circle, round-round-round as a circle is, on that white girl’s private parts! And everybody else was doing the same thing, as if they was born artists and painters. Girl, I almost had a heart failure. Well, I thought the parties at the Burrmann’s in Forest Hill was something. But this paint-in-thing beats the cake. Now, I couldn’t see my mistress too good. But I could see he. And who he was painting, and what he was painting, wasn’t anything you would show a child in Sunday-school, neither! And he wasn’t painting it on her, neither! The wretch! heh-heh-haiii! Dots, he wasn’t painting her! Estelle, Boysie you listening to me? husband and wife don’t paint the same person, they don’t paint one another. Child, those people must really be what my mistress herself calls liberated and freemissive, or whatever the hell the word is …”
“Per-missive!” Boysie told her, not braggingly, as he once would have done.
“Thanks.”
“Oh God, I wish I was there!” he said.
“You wish you was what?” Dots snapped.
“I wish I was there where Bernice was, peeping …”
“If you want to peep at woman, peep at me, you hear?” And she exploded in her sexy deep-throated laughter.
“Oh, Dots, he ain’t mean …” Bernice said.
“Oh!” Dots said. “Go on Bernice, gal.”
“Well, I am trembling at the time. But this is too much to miss. They paint and they paint. They paint this one and they laugh. And they run for that one, woman or man, man or woman, and they paint the next one. Husband painting somebody else’s wife. And vice versa. Then I see that bastard again. The coloured man who shouldn’t have any damn business in this thing, at all, at all, as far as I see …”
“Why, gal?”
“Because.”
“Why? Why why why?”
“Because he ain’t one o’ them, that’s why? He is a decent coloured man!”
“You are talking shit to me, now, Bernice. Pardon me, Boysie. Pardon me, Dots.”
“You ought to know!” Bernice said very savagely. But she went on to say, “I saw that one, and a funny thing was happening. You remember I told you he was a jet-black black man? With pretty smooth soft skin? Well, a funny thing was happening. No matter what colour they put on that bitch, him! still you couldn’t see it! And guess what this woman, his woman, his mistress, his wife — or whore! … guess what she did? She took up some paint in her hand from outta some place, and when she moved her hand from offa that man’s skin, be-Christ, that man was painted white! White! White-white-white! White as …”
“Shite!” Boysie exclaimed.
It was difficult to keep the car on an even course. He was laughing all the time he drove along Yonge Street, north from King. Bernice and Dots and Estelle were rolling with laughter. “Let we pass round and pick up Henry.”
“And Agaffa, too!” Dots suggested. “Don’t leff out her!”
“Yeah,” Bernice said, “she’s all right.”
“Henry hasn’t come round to visit me since the wedding reception,” Dots said.
“I wonder how they making out?” Bernice wondered.
“All right,” Boysie told her, although he knew differently.
“You know something?” Dots asked, still heavy with the memory and the taste of the painting and the paint-in on her mind. “I can laugh at a thing like that, that paint-in thing. But I couldn’t take part. I would be too ashamed to let anybody see me naked like that.”
“I would never do a thing like that,” Bernice said. There was animus in her words and in her breathing. “It is sinful. It is a shame. Sinful.”
“Well, I don’t see it as a sin. But I still won’t do it in front of all those people. And in my own house, and in front of my husband?”
“Gal, there ain’ no better place to behave like a whore!”
“What I mean is, a thing like that, a thing like a woman and a man being naked, well, it should be in private. A man going with a woman should be in private.”
“White people does that all the time!” Bernice said, as if she was sitting in judgment on the white race.
“Not all. Some.”
“Some, or few. They’re white.”
“That is life, child. That is life. And what I think eating out your backside is that you can’t do it,” Dots said. “I looking this spade in its face and calling it a spade! Since I been working at the Doctors, I have seen many things that I have never seen before, that I never thought happened before, nor could happen. And it is all done by white people. If this place was inhabited by blacks, be-Christ, Bernice, do
