The Last Exile

I came home last Friday to discover Revenue Canada wants me to clarify two things – my martial status and the custody arrangements for my two minor children. Set aside there has been no immediate change in my martial status for the last 9 years and I do not actually have any legal documents saying I have custody of my teenagers since one does not usually end up in family court suing for legal custody of children from a dead spouse. I suppose Revenue Canada is scrapping the bottom of the shakedown barrel or someone has far too much time and imagination to ever be allowed to work in any government department.

Of all the tens of thousands of legal papers floating around my home that I have acquired in a life time of living I have discovered that I cannot find the one paper I actually need – my husband’s death certificate. This requires I contact the Jamaican government and deal with the bureaucracy. If I said I would rather have extension dental surgery spread out quarterly over the next ten years rather than deal with the Jamaican bureaucracy would you believe I am actually understating the actual amount of dread and loathing I am feeling. Revenue Canada and the Jamaican bureaucracy – its a twofer or double whammy of misery. I must have really been evil in a past life.

One the plus side, the everything is now online but I simply cannot input my deceased husband’s name, dob, date and place of death. I need to obtain a death registry number before a copy of the death certificate can be purchased and sent. Of course, a copy of the death certificate still requires all the information above to ensure it matches the deceased. There are so many possibilities for error that my typing fingers are shrivelling just thinking about it. The forced expedition through my documents made me search in places I never willingly go – like the box holding all my husband’s papers, pictures and letters. This set off a trip to the attic of my mind and some of the lids of the boxes there aren’t very battered down all that well.

The Last Amazon in an effort to divert me asked me a question she found in her latest copy of Glamour magazine which forced me to open all the boxes in search of an answer because she really wanted to know. In fact, she feels I have a responsibility to answer her because she is my daughter. Simply put; what advice would I give her someone her age about love. I just didn’t know…I could give her dating advice, marriage advice, career advice, health advice but love…I was stumped. I am living in the attic, and directly front and center, are two huge opened boxes. One is marked Colleen and right beside is an older more tattered box called whose name written in the dust is Clay. It was among the first the boxes to go on my shelves of sorrows. It was a box of great joy and even bigger grief.

I was 21 and had never fallen in love till I meet Clay. By 21, I had loved, married and buried one husband but I never had fallen in love. I was raised by ruthlessly pragmatic people whose idea of ‘falling-in-love’ was as alien a suggestion as the idea that the Martians have landed and are in control of the White House.

I had met him strictly by accident when my beloved friend Colleen and I had to plan my escape from home as I had just broke off an engagement rather suddenly with a man my family wanted me to marry. I didn’t want to listen or be forced to participate in the drama. Instead, we drove off in her battered Ford Escort and headed towards the border so I wouldn’t have to chance being hunted down by relatives who might try to force their point of view on me. My grandmother’s last words to me as we drove off was ‘For fuck’s sake don’t pick-up or start anything with any man and remember you aren’t the fucking UN’. Colleen turned bright red in embarrassment for hearing an entirely respectable looking senior woman, dressed in fur and diamonds, swearing and suggesting in public – for the entire neighborhood to over hear – that we might be inclined to pick-up with strange men. Colleen’s obvious embarrassment only made me laugh all the harder and showed very clearly who might be the older sister but it didn’t mean she was the more experienced one. But then again, she didn’t have all of my obvious advantages having been raised by Gypsies. In my grandmother’s world, this was the equivalent of saying ‘good-bye, have a safe trip and I love you’ were in Colleen’s world as we hit the nevo drom – the high road.

We ended up in Buffalo, New York, where the booze was cheap, men were easy and the music went on till the early hours of the morning. This meant she could easily find someone to entertain her while I danced all night. We went to a half a dozen clubs that night but I couldn’t find my groove. Eventually, the man who joined my friend suggested we hit the East side and go to the Cotton Club. The guys at the door had no trouble letting me and Colleen in but her friend was too pale to pass the colour bar despite my best efforts. I cursed not opening the debate without my French accent. Although, one of the bouncer’s did suggested we try a club down the street called Etc.

This time I told the other two to walk behind and let me clear the door first. It worked too. Unknown to me, I was about to meet the man who would change my life forever. In fact, long after we were over I spent a good ten years searching for echoes of him in every man I ever met. Nothing had prepared me for meeting him. I never had school girl crushes on movie or rock stars or the boy next door. I was raised by people who believed ‘falling-in-love’ was only something the gagje movie stars did on the silver screen to fleece the gullible of their cash. Love was family, duty; the kampania.

I was married off and buried my first husband by the time I met Clay but I never fell in love. And who falls madly, careless, recklessly in love in the east side of Buffalo, New York? Apparently, I do, which all suggests one cannot ever know what lies just down the highway and over the bridge. It went on for years. In my naivete, I had only honesty and my famed bluntness to guide me. Tolerance, patience and forgiveness were foreign in my experience and I wouldn’t learn their value until I had children. The last time I saw him was in the late 80’s as I turned to back look at him just one last time as he lay sleeping in bed before I sneaked out the door like a thief in the night and out of his world forever – without explanation. It was last reconciliations of what feels like thousands of reunions. I remember laying in bed beside him and thought I just cannot live a life filed with anger – his, mine, and the world’s. I gathered up my clothes and slide on the door. It would take years before the sight of people like us wouldn’t enrage strangers in on the street and provoke anger.

So I was thinking about love and what advice I could give my daughter and I just couldn’t come up with a single piece of wisdom. I stared at the computer and the blank screen and suddenly I had the urge to look him up and see if he was on Facebook. He was there and very much as I remembered him. I spent a long time debating whether I would send him a message or not – my own personal Pandora’s box. In the end, the young woman who had to play with fire just because she had held the matches in her hand asserted her presence and I did.

I just spent hours talking to a man who I have spent the last 28 years separate and apart from. Its eerie how we so easily fell so easily into our Kate and Clay mould which was forged so long ago. It’s amazing how comforting it is to learn he is still alive and finding happiness. There was a time when we would break up and he’d call me in the middle of the time and say to me – ‘Kate please just talk to me…I just need to hear the sound of your voice.’ I knew things were ‘wrong’ and I wouldn’t fight him but do as he asked. There were times when I did the very same and he wouldn’t fight me. We just knew what each of us needed and we gave it despite all the bad blood that passed between us and our own inability to raise above our petty natures.

He sent me a message today which said he has been searching for me for years and he have never stopped thinking about you. I still have your earrings and I hope you have been happy. You have to call me.

So I did and spent hours lost in the surreal place where the past and the present converge.

Eventually, we talked about the first time we were intimate. I think it was so different for me from all the men I had been with before because it was the first time I let myself carried away and utterly lost in a moment. I approached it as entirely a one-off kind of thing which turned into an experience spread out of years. It was a moment that I wanted to feel forever in. I think the desire started the first time he took me in his arm to dance. Being a dancer I tended to relate to people first by the way their moved or carried their bodies. He just fit me. His body ‘got’ me and mine answered. The first time I danced with him brought out an entirely physical and emotional response in me.

We talked about that first time. He remembered as clearly as I as it left a profound mark on both of us. I think it was so different (at least for me) as it was the first time I let myself get absolutely carried away in the moment.  I thought of it as entirely a one-off kind of thing and nothing mattered more than that moment. A moment that I wanted to feel forever in. I made a promise to myself that if we ever got together then all the rules which govern relationships were off the table for just so I could fully experience and explore this strange attraction I felt for him. Well, all the rules but one – I would do anything as long as it felt good. All my famous walls and inhibitions were entirely down just for one night. I threw my entire focus into just enjoying him for the pleasure we’d give each other….just like I use to do when I would go on stage to dance – to live. I wanted to live forever in that moment and I, we, did.

There were other moments in that long first fall and winter. He had a living room wall lined by mirrors and he would lie down between my legs as I was dressed in nothing but my toe shoes as I practiced my ballet barre while he lay under the ground between my feet. I cannot begin to explain how incredibly the experience was…to be loved utterly loved and appreciated for merely being a woman. Heedy stuff.

I haven’t a clue as to what it all means. I am a fortunate woman, I have been loved many times – probably much more than I have deserved. Men have written stories for and about me – painted my portrait and I have more than my share of bad poetry and songs written for me.

In turn,  I have loved my share of men but I never loved anyone like I loved him. I am not even sure that I ever wanted to love anyone like I loved him.  It was both sacred and profane. The experience of knowing him marked me forever and I spent a good ten years of searching for the Clay in all the men I met and never finding him. Eventually, I learned not to look and found other things – sometimes wonderful things.

I have no love advice to give anyone except for this – if you are ever fortunate to experience love do not be afraid but approach love as a prayer, and pray you get to dance to the end of love.