Coloured TV

Coloured TV

      He lies on his bare back, beside her, holding his head between his hands like a cabbage, rooted and resisting. He twists it back and forth as if to pull it out from his trunk. A faint blue-white light from the TV at the end of the bed flickers on and off.

      “It’s alright Charles,” she murmurs, gliding her fingers toward his hand and then pouncing on the agitating male digits with their sprouts of black hair.” It’s not the end of the world. You’re just worried about the paper you have to write for the convention in Haiti next week.”

      Charles’ body closes like an accordion as he escapes into her words. “Yes, another lecture to corrupt politicians on giving the land back to the people who need it the most. Nobody listens. I just want the sun and the beaches and…” He feels the tropical sun unfolding in his head.

      But  here its the February moon in the Manitoba darkness, sifting the light from the falling snow into the room, casting icing sugar on their reclining shapes- the double bed a white frame with two squirming silhouettes.

      Dark pools of eyes wander over his dusky flesh-silent thighs as they girder hers in place. Margaret’s fingers crawl over his head, gently plying down the creases of his temple, over the aquiline nose to the wetness of his mouth. Two of her fingers search for the tongue.

      “Come on Charles. Relax.” She glances at her husband’s rounded back, immobile now, except for low rhythmic sighs, and she tries to move her fingers over his limp penis. He brushes her aside and his back expands like the ceiling of a circus tent, mooring itself on the outskirts of town.

      A flash of light and the loud resonant dullness from the newsman’s voice suddenly surrounds the bed, circling and rubbing its message into the smoke of their waking thoughts- Margaret, wide dark eyes, staring into the newsman’s handsome face. Charles, trying to blot out the swirling, sweating persistent words:

”  early colonization of the country…. the dictator was facing another coup d’état…poverty of the people.”

      Margaret sits up and pulls away to the end of the bed, her face a blue crystal, turning towards the impassive pencil line chiseled into the mattress. Looking closely, it expands to a massive stone surface, breaking up into the triangles of his soccer legs up to the vanishing point on his broad shoulders he worked so hard on with those barbells and dumbbells at the gym.

      “He was just a skinny freshman when I first spotted him…. at the first year’s orientation ceremony that my class of Sophomores were organizing.” Margaret was pensive as she looked back at him trying to catch his eyes.

“He had a clean open face with large quizzical hazel eyes.” She pondered to herself.” Yes, it was his eyes then that made me determined to get to know him. I had to wait until the first Sadie Hawkins dance to ask him out. He was so impressed that I was in Fine Arts, and I admired the fact he was studying Agronomics to help people in counties where they needed to take control of the land.”

Margaret was smiling at the remembrance while she fussed with the remote control trying to find a more soothing flow of words.

“Five men have been killed….the leader and his family are now under custody…this Island paradise…tourist haven…population barely eat each day….unbearable heatwave….looting and fires…”

      Blue darts dance in the darkness as she closes her eyes and her past disappears, drowned by the audio of the black and white TV. She filters to a personal television scenario and sounds of her own voice.

“ …and scenes of red flames and naked black children running through the streets. There’s Charles in Haiti running frantically through the city streets…a gym bag in his hands. He must be there to give a presentation to the people on how to be self-sufficient. He’s such a good speaker. Gym bag? Does he ever stop working out?”

      The camera follows his long steady stride, the fleece from his green sweatpants straining his buttocks and legs. There’s a look of terror on his face. Eyes squint and make creases as he stares into the bright crest of sun, shooting hot swords from one pinwheel of palm to another, topped by graceful green leaf boas. His feet wiggle in the warm sand that runs in rivulets for miles of pink and brown shells and stones gently caressed by the magenta of the sea. Margaret sighs at her overwriting the scene and looks for other signs of life beyond the crying of children but only the tall, lonely figure of her man stays in the picture.

“He’s always disappearing from me.” She sighs a long whisp of air floating above them both like a hummingbird.

The wet jogging suit starts to sag from the weight and slow his pace in the sand so first he pulls on the tight

 elastic waistband coated in perspiration and throws all his clothes into the gym bag. She could tell he felt so good to be naked.

“I never thought I’d see that on Canadian television.” Margaret smirked, with her small pouting mouth agape, nuzzling closer as if she could enter and join him on the beach with the full growing mélange of colour streaming over the glass.

“But we don’t have a coloured TV.” Margaret mused aloud.” Charles always thought it was too pretentious”. Her five-foot two frame circled the circumference of the bed in vain.

“ He’s gone,” she whispered into the void between her and the TV.

By now he had a trail of clothes behind him, and he was running in the salt spray of the ocean, ebony curls alert and flying.

Charles moves and groans on the bed, asleep now and breathing deeply into the pillow. Margaret is lost staring at the TV newsman dazed by the story from the tropics.

“ Another man is running on the beach now in a green bathing suit. This man has dark eyes and hair and very creamy brown skin. He must be one of the inhabitants of the Island. He smiles toward Charles’ retreating silhouette and then turns toward the water and plunges into the heavy white waves and disappears.

Undaunted, Charles finds a yellow raft resting on the side of a shed tied to a palm tree. Although a feeling of guilt hits him as he unties it, he is determined to chase that smile. There is no one around, although he hears the sound of children screaming in the distance.

      “I’ll bring it right back!”, he yells as he struggles with the knot. Finally, he pulls it apart and wades into the cool sea hanging onto the sides of the bouncing raft. As he approaches the line of the horizon, he lies on the raft face down, searching the blue clear water for the shine of white teeth and red tongue- a branding iron he wants to feel on his white skin that erupts into tiny bumps. The sunlight forces his eyelids shut so he only sees the silvery dairy skeletons and hears the mix of the lapping of the waves and the wind.

      “Charles…. go back….go back…” they seemed to say. Fifteen years ago, he had control. He had Margaret. He had his ideals of changing the world. University had changed his existing world view that altruism would be the key to the meaning of life. He went into his first year with the idea of becoming a Agronomist.  He wanted to help countries develop crops, so they were self-sustaining and not growing tobacco and coffee to sell to foreigners overseas.

 Charles muscular legs moved into a fetal position joining the top of his head.

And he was successful in his work and his personal life, dating a Fine Arts student and even having intercourse on a regular basis. By the time graduation and his twenty first birthday came along she was persuading Charles that marriage was the only way they were going to remain together and through a haze of champagne and roses and tears, they started a marriage that was based on friendship, love and basic denial of some needs that were not being met.

The flirting motion of the sea rocks him off the raft and as he sinks into the water, he catches a glimpse of the green suited man sitting on the shore with legs extended like a gymnast doing splits.

“He’s waiting for me to dock my raft and join him, “ Charles thinks, smiling to himself as he pushes back onto the yellow rubber vessel and he paddles slowly, eyes opening onto the widening scope of the approaching land and the man with the open wet lips and the brown marooned eyes…waiting….

Margaret strains her eyes toward the flashes of light.

The sky darkens and Margaret’s face scrutinizes the shadows of mauve and gray that dot the land on the green grass. The cacophonous cries of the children crescendos on the beach as they start to parade along the shore, fists raised and flags flying.

Margaret’s sympathies are stirred as she remembers her first march against the administration of the college they attended for discriminating against women in hiring and admittance of students.

She and Charles were part of the organizing committee that investigated the admissions policy and found out it favored men despite grade point averages that were higher for a larger majority of women. They wanted to balance the genders at that time, favoring men who had lower scores and rejecting the women who were deserving. After the march, the University changed its policy and Margaret remembers it was also the first time that she and Charles had had sex in her dorm-both charged with the rhetoric and energy of the march, and she asked him back to her room for a celebratory glass of wine. They had only done a fair amount of making out over the last few months but this time, after finishing the bottle of Chianti and sticking a candle in the straw covered bottle, Margaret guided Charles’ hands under her blue jeans while she unbuttoned his  button fly. The candle flickered and sputtered out as they continued to kiss fervently. She remembered Jimi Hendrix staring down at them in the dark as Janis Joplin wailed “there is a place for us, somewhere a place for us.”

“I can’t find it.” Charles sounded frantic. “Where is it?”

All Margaret could do was move her hips in his direction as he started to thrust and prod her pelvic area. She was pinned to the single bed, legs in the air, crossed behind his back. He pressed into her spayed out length of hair, fragrant with patchouli oil.

“I love you, Margaret.” He whispered in her ear as he entered her, smiling in satisfaction.

“What are we going to do now? We are too young to have children running around.” He immediately reverted to his religious background that disapproved of this behavior.

“Don’t worry, Charles, I can get a prescription for the pill from the University Medical center.” Margaret didn’t have any qualms or religious ghosts haunting her.

The TV flashes an ad showing the before and after pictures of the participants in a weight watchers’ program with their before frowns and after smiles.

Margaret looked away toward her husband. He had changed so much in the last few years, she thought. Going to the gym every day, always concerned about his weight and the look in the mirror when he was naked, posing with his biceps flexed. His body had grown harder against her soft flesh so that he felt him recoiling as he touched her now. He always wanted her to shave her legs and under her arms and got very upset when he saw hair on her upper lip. She was buying a lot of NICE hair removal. She couldn’t understand his reluctance to even manipulate her breasts after finding three hairs growing around her right nipple.

“Maybe he has to be dreaming to have sex with me now,” she was looking at his half erect organ under the sheets as he slept. “Why did I ever get that prescription?”

….the children leave the beach to enter a long wooden hall suspended in the air on pilons that jut out into the sea. A storm is raging, with trees bending and rain spitting gobs of white onto the camera, zeroing in on Charles alone and naked searching through the curtains of white water and green fronds.

To escape the blowing debris, he scampers down an indentation in a grove leading to a series of honeycombed holes. The pounding weather noises subside, and Charles sinks into the comfort of a humus bed, fresh earth assaulting his nostrils. A soft furry creature, the size of a domestic cat, nuzzles into the curve of his back. After a short sleep, he wakes to find changes in his body, more bulk and definition, more suppleness and hair and more lines on his face.

He explores the cavern, finding bits of food over the granite floor at the bottom of the inner recess. Falling into sleep again, the skeletons gather into male flesh and clothes, and he finds himself in a city far away where the frozen water covers the earth and the bare branches of the Elm trees point like the long lean fingers of an arthritic man. As night falls, they lead the way to claws of neon scripting male haunts in darkened warehouses. “The Eagle” “Barracks” ,”Gauntlet” and “Falcon”…visions of flight and imprisonment. Charles sees the tight green bathing suit man and their eyes lock-unlock-lock, and the chase begins again.

Down asphalt streets with dappled snow he follows, stops, and then retreats in tango movements down a dark and private knoll of tin and wooden crates until they meet and claw at one another’s clothes until they are exposed to the cold air. They bite and tongue at each other, building fires against the ice, until they squeeze each other by the neck, until they both lose the sheen of blood under their skin….

“Charles! Wake up and come to me” He could feel the steel wool hairs on her legs rubbing against him, hands fondling his genitals. The storm was over, and his head was rising from the tunnel as he stared at his wife who smiled back at him, hands out pleading with him.

“What do you want, Margaret? Why did you wake me up?”

“Look for yourself, Charles. Can’t we finish what we started this evening? Margaret’s voice was straining now.” Don’t you want to make love with me?”

Charles kept quietly staring in her eyes now.

“You are looking at me as if I was some kind of insect you’d like to step on. What are you doing to me?”

He finally looks away in concern. “I don’t know Margaret.” He is searching the ceiling for words.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m still waking up.” Charles sinks into the sheets again on his side, watching Margaret’s fingers gesticulate to the air above her.

“Do you realize what you are doing to me?”

 She abruptly swivels her head toward him and pins him to her eyes in fear for a second, returning to the safety of the ceiling when the silence continues.

“One day you’re all warmth and love Charles, and the next you are cold and rejecting, even cruel. One day you say you love me and then you stop talking for days on end saying you have a problem. Always that fucking problem!” She was shouting to the ceiling now and starting to cry.

Charles moved toward her with arms outstretched.

“I’m sorry Margaret. I really am…if I seem to be unresponsive at times. My reveries, they disgust me, but you see them happen. I can’t ignore them. They are there.” He had his arms around her, so his fingers touched, and she looked up at him demurely.

“Well, we can tackle the dreams but…Charles, do I still turn you on?” She finally blurted it out.

Waiting a few seconds and then breaking the granite silence.” Of course, Margaret.” When you are your feminine self, I am turned on. You always come through for me, you know that.”

She pulls away from him detecting his hesitation.

“Yeah. like a faithful doggie …. Yes, that has been me, Charles.” She sits on the edge of the bed in her old position, staring at an assembly of middle-aged women in glittering black and white sequins, the TV voices of a women’s choir signing off for the night singing, “O Canada”. Around them swirls, yards of cloth from curtains and window coverings that almost engulfs them as they belt out their patriotism in song.

“We stand on guard for thee…”

“So many women in the choir.” she thinks.” Do they all face their men like this?” Charles used to say they looked like a church choir in a brothel.”

“That’s me all right. Singing in a brothel choir.”

She turns back to her husband who is drifting off to sleep again, finally smiling.  

She sighs and curls up into his back, murmuring into the warmth of his skin

“I think it’s time we got a coloured TV, Charles. What do you think?”

Charles grunts assent and turns into his honeycombed cell once again, the TV abuzz with black and white filings in constant restlessness.