THE “COOLIE” LOVER

She was a lovely, slim-figured, fresh-faced eighteen-year-old just new from the West Indies when she met him. Although she was unsophisticated about worldly dealings and human entanglements, she gravitated towards the prospect of romance. Her existence in an immigrant section of East Flatbush, Brooklyn, shut her out of mainstream America, not the rest of the world. She longed to be romanced by a string of lovers before she found the right one to marry and settle down, but her stifling middle-class world didn’t permit it. In her world, “good” girls didn’t have lovers; they found romance after the third try. Mainstream America demanded more from their women: a good education, adventure, and a myriad of experiences from their womenfolk.

She was aware of a man’s lust on the peak of her sexuality: the deep pulse of a man's heart when she awakened his carnal desires, the stern glances her strict mother, Ms. Mavis Gilmore, gave when she gazed at Beverly with disapproving eyes during her sultry stares at members of the opposite sex. But Beverly Gilmore was willing to taste the sweetness of life. She'd known little acrimony in her simple, middle-class world— only that life had become more complicated as she got older. There were more decisions that she alone had to make to stay out of trouble and avoid the tongue-lashing from both her parents. She had to learn to spend her weekly stipend wisely and keep up her grades. If Beverly faltered, they’d raise their voices at her, causing her deep pain. She'd witness the gearing tongue of her petulant little sister, Barbara, and occasionally, a clamorous yell from her mother to make better choices. Her father, Mr. Colin Gilmore, could be more forgiving, being the father of only two daughters. Still, he sometimes didn’t always see eye to eye with them and sided with his contentious wife about their upbringing.

“I want you to continue being mi good little girl,” her father would often scold her.

“Of course. Only for you, Deddy,” Beverly would reply, tucking her volcanic heart away.

He had no desire to know about his little girl’s harbored lascivious desires. He had no idea she felt stifled in his clutch.

Beverly had just started a four-year college as a psychology major away from the protective arms of her parents.

“It is the most exciting city in the world,” she told her good friend, Jean. “We'll take the city by storm!”

Going to Manhattan each day was Beverly’s only escape from the tediousness of life. It released her insubordinate heart into sheer content. She could be herself and experiment all she wanted. She liked to loiter on the busy streets around Central Park, enjoying the stares from members of the opposite sex. She was an attractive young woman and knew how to use her charms to get what she wanted. Whatever the consequences, she did not want her parents to feel the strain of her rebellion. When they did, she knew the outcome very well. Only she alone feared the brunt of her mother's wrath and the silence of her father's voice as he ignored her for months on end.

“Good girls do not flirt with men but behave themselves,” Mr. Gilmore would tell her after he'd decided to communicate with her again.

But Beverly Gilmore craved complexity in her life. Too much sheltering constricted her movement and prevented her from gaining knowledge of the world. She preferred not to live her life in a safe nest. Making mistakes was how one grew to overcome life’s challenges. Beverly enjoyed the hardships she encountered in the city. She liked the hassle the clients gave her at her part-time job at a lingerie store. She liked making the sole decision on how to spend the money she earned and dreamed of leaving her parents’ comfortable home to live with a roommate.

That was the reason why she allowed Moses Ramcharran into her life. He was a complex, middle-aged man when they became lovers. It wasn't about love. It was about stepping into the fire of love for the sheer sake of experience. There he was, standing in front of the Central Park Conservatory shop on Manhattan's Upper West Side. He was a sturdy and handsomely built middle-aged man of East Indian ancestry. He was dressed in full-black jogging gear. Moses’s penetrating glance commanded Beverly to lock eyes with him as he stretched his torso before getting ready to take off at full speed. He smiled at her when she accepted his invitation. Pumping up her chest, Beverly tousled her long braids and struck a seductive pose. She crossed the street to meet the man she attracted.

“You caught me staring at you,” he told Beverly when she crossed the street to meet his acquaintance. “I'm Moses.”

When she met him up closely, he was an unreservedly attractive man of ample height. He was neither too tall nor too short, and Beverly's head fell slightly below his chin when she gazed into his cool, chestnut-brown eyes.

“Yes, I did,” she commented, surveying the attractiveness of his face. “I'm Beverly. Pleased to meet you.”

His luxurious, full beard and brazen unibrow made her laugh, which, in return, sent a jerk to her voluptuous chest. Beverly could feel the lustful desire in Moses as he watched the rise of her chest, encouraging her to become his little temptress. She was aware of the enchantment her youthful figure could have on an older man.

“I'm very pleased to meet you, too,” he added.

From the moment she met his acquaintance, Beverly knew that she wanted to enter his world, slowly sliding out of the mundane rituals bestowed upon her by her parents for self-preservation. That day, Moses didn't go jogging. Instead, they found themselves in a little cafe, eating and talking.

“You're from Trinidad, I take it?” she asked him.

“Yes. How did you know?” he asked her.

“I couldn't miss that certain way you drop your 'r,'” she commented. “I might also imagine that perhaps you spent some time in Europe.”

“I only disguise that I'm an island man from people who don't understand,” he commented. “And yes, I did study for a while in England.”

Beverly was astute for her age, a trait for which her parents never gave her credit. Away from

their clutches, she'd explore all that New York City had to offer. There was hardly any money to spend on recreation, so Beverly enjoyed everything cheaply or for free. She took long strolls along the Hudson River, where she and her friends met. There were museum exhibitions where they all gathered in an excitable group and gossiped along the gallery walks. There were her annual gatherings in Central Park for a showing of “Shakespeare in the Park” every summer. The city brought free music concerts in every corner and invited a mixture of conviviality and mischievousness. They'd all meet, carrying blankets and sandwiches, waiting in line for hours just to get tickets.

“You see,” Beverly would tell her college friends, “we can afford to live in New York if we know where to look!”

Before she met Moses Ramcharran, Beverly's life was pleasurable and simple. This older man brought weekend trips to Block Island and adventures to nice, out-of-state, tucked-away inns. He introduced her to eating at better restaurants and provided her with extra education. As it turned out, she loved the activities that cost money. Being whisked away from the city for a while broke the cycle of tediousness.

“I'm a lecturer in Caribbean history at a city college,” Moses told her.

“Are you married?” she asked him innocently.

“No. I have no other mouths to feed and do not need any,” he told her abrasively.

Beverly had only heard these sentiments from silly boys on the cusp of manhood. She did not expect to hear this from a fully grown man! But then again, she wasn’t looking to get married and settle down at such a fragile age. She couldn’t think straight ahead. She fidgeted with her hands before she placed them in an akimbo, enhancing the shape of her body. Moses broke out in a calculated rupture.

“You’re as brazen as they come,” he told Beverly softly.

The young woman smiled and looked straight into his eyes, observing the hunger of his wet lips.

“I guess I am,” she replied.

“Could you have lunch with me tomorrow? Same time, same place? Moses asked. “I know a small, intimate cafe not far from here.”

“I guess that can be easily arranged if I eliminate a part of my schedule.”

A couple of days later, Moses and Beverly met in the heart of Manhattan. She didn’t arouse her parents’ suspicion by wearing provocative clothing. Instead, she dressed rather conservatively. In her black knapsack, she carried a small, floral blue gift bag containing a seductive garnet-colored mini dress with a revealing neckline. When Beverly met Moses in the Upper West Side eatery's cool atmosphere, everyone turned to gaze at the young woman who grabbed center stage. As she sauntered in, Beverly put on her best upright posture and gazed ahead without battering her large, brown eyes to meet the faces of the people who watched her. She was an unobtrusive tease who knew the power she wielded over men, yet she’d always maintained a certain air of demureness.

“For confidential reasons, could we keep this meeting to ourselves?” Beverly whispered in a faint voice.

She sensed an air of ambivalence in Moses as time went on. He aroused her curiosity about how being with an older man felt. At first, he wined and dined her without asking for much in return. But when his demands surfaced, they overwhelmed her.

“You should come to my apartment,” he told her one day after the spring rain had fallen profusely.

“I'll have to make excuses to ward off my parents' suspicion.”

“Well, do that!” he insisted.

He became rather impatient waiting for their first love-making session. She'd performed the act with a teenage boy on the isle, but only twice. There was nothing special she remembered about it, only a sharp pain and some bleeding. Beverly's friends had told her she would bleed, but they didn't reveal the feeling of hollowness that prevailed after the lovemaking ended. It was her teenage fantasy that turned into unawakened desires.

“I didn't think it would be so dull, so unimportant,” Beverly told her girlfriends. “After a while, it isn't so bad,” revealed one of them.

“At least he used some kind of protection,” commented another friend. “Look at Maxine. She got caught on the first try and had to leave school.”

“It’s a pity our tiny island couldn't provide a way out and let Maxine continue her education,” replied Beverly, shaking her head in shame.

Although Beverly had grown older, she was not skilled in the art of lovemaking, an area she desired to fulfill. Along the way, she'd abandoned the trivial “boys” who fancied her for ones more insightful and more accomplished in the ways of the world. When Moses invited her to visit him at his cozy apartment in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, she felt hopeful that she'd be safe and protected by the wisdom of this older man. She approached his invitation with great eagerness as if a secret path had opened its door only to her and nobody else. She would embark on its course just to discover what was hidden behind it.

“Come in, I see you're not afraid,” Moses told her after she'd entered his apartment to take shelter from the misty drizzle.

“Why should I feel afraid? Is there something you've kept from me?” she asked him in a sultry mood.

“My little seductress,” he said, adding a boyish grin.

Moses Ramcharran was a “coolie” from the island of Trinidad. Beverly hadn't taken a man of his race as a lover before. The epithet given to the East Indians who came to the islands from India wasn't pleasant. She knew of them but only from a distance.

“They are filthy people who crouched over a fetid stream of runnin' water, shittin', washin', cookin', eatin'...” she'd overheard Morris, a grown-up, say.

She remembered the old “coolie” food vendor who sold pancakes and June Plums in front of the gate of her primary school back on the island. She could be seen picking her dirty fingernails with the same fork she used to pick up the pancakes. Beverly never bought from her, but the other students did. No one got sick from her unhygienic habits. She remembered laughing at her schoolmates who bought from her despite listening to the rumors they overheard. She, Miss Ramgaroo, had the last laugh for her ridicule.

Beverly went to visit her coolie lover with great eagerness and contemptible rapture. He waited for her, couching with heat like a tiger hiding in the grass. She had preserved herself for him. Stepping into Moses's apartment, a bachelor's nest designed with an imaginative flair, Beverly felt she'd entered a grown-up world. Alone. She told no one. Not even her best friend, Jean. She could see the hypnotic gaze in the coolie man's eyes as she entered his tiger’s den. She didn't want to take cover because she went willingly, knowing that he couldn't hide his lust, for her youth was her gift to him. Beverly didn't want him to hide his lust. She knew what he expected. He said nothing, only smiled at her when he took her gently by her hand and led her into his bedroom, placing her gently on his flimsy bed. There, amid the pile of a thousand books, Moses disrobed her, mounting her with the unspoken confidence of a mountaineer. Skillfully inserting his elegant and careful, 'indecent' finger into the warmth of the slippery wound between her slim thighs, Moses deeply thrust himself into her. Their bodies exploded into volcanic spasms at the same time.

Their conversation took place after their violent heartbeats subsided.

“I knew you would come here wanting me,” he told her.

“Yes, and all for the better,” she whispered.

As both lovers lay in bed, she could smell the faint drizzle of the rain as it settled on the ledge of the bedroom’s window. It was a time of reflection about their union. Where should they go from here? She had only known him briefly before subjecting herself to his embrace. She didn't think of love, only sweet caresses and acts of making love. This coolie man promised her nothing except an invitation into his arms. She was too young to take on the accountability of a relationship. She didn't need the responsibility, the commitment, the constant vigilance, the planning, and the mundanity that came with adulthood. Neither did Moses. He told her so from the very beginning.

“This isn't a bad arrangement at all,” Beverly told the older man while they lay still. “No hiding

from my parents. No questions asked.”

A look of satisfaction formed on Moses's face when he realized Beverly thought the same way as him. He would receive no phone calls from threatening parents about leaving their daughter alone. She would always take precautions to ward off pregnancy. She didn't need the complexity of single parenthood in her life.

You've messed up, and you need to correct it, her mother's voice echoed in the stillness of his embrace.

She would have betrayed Moses's trust by carelessly causing their love-making session to result in a crying cradle for an infant. She didn't need to cause such perfidy. She didn't need to be another Maxine. Her friend's mistake had taken her way from living too soon. A careless pregnancy was a woe for Caribbean girls who dreamed of better lives. As Beverly lay in the clutches of Moses's arms, her mind pondered the possibilities resulting from them being together. She couldn’t allow herself to feel that way. She coveted him for experience's sake, not for love. Beverly knew that Moses had his own agenda, and as time passed, it would manifest, causing them to fade away from each other.

The young woman looked into her lover's eyes, and the older man's passion aroused. “I'd like to take you from behind,” he told her.

She smiled invitingly, then rolled over on her belly, adjusting her body in an arch while balancing herself on her knees. She could feel the exhilarating sensation as he mounted her, shoving himself deeply inside her.

“Ah... ah... ahhh...agh,” she moaned.

As they both climaxed and lay still for a while, Beverly rolled from under him, positioning herself on her side. She could see the full length of his body: his small, androgynous torso, with a slim waistline and narrow shoulders, his huge feet and fine, graceful thighs, his dark and big uncircumcised sex.

“Don’t Hindus circumcise their sons?” Beverly asked him.

“No,” answered Moses, “for we are made in the image of God. No one has the right to alter his body.”

Had Moses been born in the Gangetic Heartland of India, his ancient traditions would have collided with Beverly's Western customs. Decades before, his ancestors journeyed on the Fatel Razack through the port of Calcutta, landing as indentured workers on the isle of Trinidad. It was a heart-wrenching journey, a conniving scheme by the white man to get cheap labor in the Caribbean. But Moses's people survived and emerged into a rhythmic melody: from the sweet and sour fruity notes, they blended to make something new.

“I'm right by your side now. I don’t want to let you go,” he told Beverly as they cuddled in bed, thinking of nothing except living in the moment.

The night slowly drifted away, and Beverly knew the next day would be Saturday, a day for shopping, reflection, and spending time with her mother, Mavis.

“I have to go,” she told him. “Mama will be waiting.”

“But not before I make you a cup of Darjeeling tea,” he told her.

The older man jumped out of bed and robed himself in full black cashmere. He looked expensive and erudite. She felt accomplished in the presence of Naipaul or even perhaps Braithwaite, great Caribbean men of letters. He was an actor performing his latest play. Beverly wondered about the many times he'd performed the same play for the silly girls he'd had in his bed for dramatic rehearsals. He made the tea and brought it to her in the living room of his apartment. She watched him carefully as he sat on the blue velvet couch, sipping the tea. She watched his small, dainty fingers curl around the white teacup; his sideburns, mustache, and full beard all dissolved into a luxurious alignment.

“I take my tea with sugar,” she told Moses. “Brown sugar, not granulated.”

“Yes. Brown sugar, that's all I've got,” he said.

They both laughed at the pun he used to describe the youthful flavor of her skin and innocence. She felt her lover was obsessed with her youth and the naiveté it brought to such a union. But it wasn't so, for Beverly was observant from the very beginning. She knew that he had a secret locked away in the second bedroom of his apartment. Like most inquisitive females, she'd want to penetrate the padded, secretive world later.

“You're very clean for a single man,” Beverly told him.

“Is that a compliment or an insult?” he asked her.

Pausing to think what he should say next, Moses blurted out, “a compliment, no doubt? I have a woman who comes to clean biweekly.”

His carefully concreted life must have some cracks amid the smooth facade, Beverly thought to herself.

She'd learned about life from watching others around her as their love lives disintegrated into dust. Nothing about love ever ran smoothly.

“Will you drive me to take the 1-Train when I'm ready to go?” she asked Moses. “Yes, I will,” he told Beverly. “I'm at your service.”

While sipping the Darjeeling tea Moses served her in the dainty, rose-colored teacup, Beverly's eyes scrutinized Moses's living room. It contained glimpses of artwork from his travels to India, the Caribbean, and Europe. His ample furnishing provided basic comfort, but the large luxurious blue velvet sofa with a matching love seat took center stage in the pentagon-shaped living room. She could see her lover's life from the glimpses of the photographs of his stay in India, which attracted her the most. Beverly knew of the lushness of the Caribbean, with its green grass and scorching sunburst. She'd read about Europe in its age of artistic splendor and conquering spirit, but it had never attracted her.

“Where in India were these pictures taken of you?” she asked Moses curiously. “In Hampi,” he muttered.

He was having difficulty reading the newspaper while sipping tea on the couch. Beverly could see the hard knots in his forehead as he tried to concentrate while she spoke to him. “Moses,” she commanded his attention, “Where is Hampi in India?”

Abandoning the newspaper to speak with his young lover, Moses looked up from his reading spectacles.

“It's in southwestern India and was once the heart of the Vijayanagara Empire from the 14th to 16th century,” Moses replied.

Beverly knew nothing about India, but she became enthralled by the enigma of the land when she caught sight of Moses standing next to a massively built, pyramidal-shaped relic amid a group of mimicking monkeys and a sadhu, whose colorfully painted face reminded her of a tropical parrot. She wanted to probe his mind more. Did his longing to connect with India match her yearning to connect with Africa? Was it this longing that took him on a journey of self-discovery? She surmised so, for when people are torn from their homeland by trickery, the heart never ceases to wander until it finds what it needs.

“What's the name of that temple?” Beverly asked Moses out of curiosity.

She could see the furrows on his forehead becoming heavily creased before he answered.

“The Virupaksha temple,” he answered. “I think it's about time I drive you to the subway station.”

Beverly could tell that her coolie lover didn't like his private world invaded. He was bolting the door into the corners of his mind. It was off-limits to anyone who tried to get in. After she got home that same evening, Beverly could feel the wisdom that came with a certain maturity in her loin. She rushed to the mirrored wardrobe in the bedroom she shared with her pesky younger sister and touched her face. It had matured into the image of her mother.

That night, she pondered the differences between making love with an older man and a man her age. She felt different compared to when she was rogered for the first time by a silly boy her own age. He was nervous when he took her on the damp grass on the night of the full moon. She'd forgotten his name, forgotten the awkward moment and the slapdash sentiment of her first recruitment in the art of love.

“Do you feel good?” Beverly thought she remembered her young lover asking. She couldn't answer him, only remained perturbed by what he called “lovemakin'.”

“You don't have the cherry to bother you anymore,” Beverly remembered the silly comment made by a girl in her circle of friends.

At the time, she didn't understand what adults saw in making love, for she felt no sensational tingle sent through her body in the moment of the act. Her parents must have gotten stuck in an eternal nightmare of marital duty. But Moses Ramcharran changed everything when she loved him for the first time. After her tryst with that boy with no name, Beverly still yearned to understand why the act was portrayed so passionately in romance novels and movies. The media made her feel that it was an act to live for, an act to die for. Moses changed all of that. That night, when the rain had subsided, Beverly scrutinized the maturity of her face. She could see that the girlish plumpness of her face dissolved into subtle angles that gave her a new identity. She’d become Moses’ whore, tart, bawd, or even vamp! She became enraptured by her new image.

By the time Beverly met him for the fifth time, Moses showed her the true meaning of bliss; they’d become true lovers. He met her brazenly at the front of his door in blue-striped underpants. His brown thighs exuded the fine muscle tone he developed from his years of jogging. He wasn't that much

taller than her, but he was bigger with more bulk. He pulled Beverly towards him and closed the door, shutting out the world and the possibility of a gossipy neighbor spotting them.

“You're here again to give me all that youth, that agility, that.....” he began to say before Beverly placed a finger on his lip to stop him from speaking.

She'd become brazen when she led him into the bedroom the second time around. “It's not about love, but hugs and kisses,” she told him.

She'd become the older man's fantasy, an unstable image in his dream. Beverly reinforced that there was no commitment to their liaison and that their occasional rendezvous was not about love. She wanted to become a sophisticated mirage in his mind, someone who understood how love affairs could become mundane and ritualistic when contrived or stale.

“I'll be here whenever you need me, for as long as you need me,” she told Moses.

He listened but didn't hear the faint whisper of her voice. Beverly's mother and father would have condemned them both: Moses for being her father's age and she for taking on a new set of moral codes contrary to the ones they'd taught her.

This forbidden love affair with the coolie man from Trinidad will not get far, she told herself as she lay on his bed in the back room of his tiger's den.

Beverly imagined that the hundreds of books that lined the four corners of the stifling little room each represented a woman Moses had taken there. His women must have ranged from all different races, sizes, and shapes. He had favored no specific form or type of women, for he wasn't interested in knowing them, only loving them. After an evening of insatiable lovemaking, experimenting with every possible acrobatic position seen in the Kama Sutra, Beverly and her coolie lover lay naked, drenched in sweat, smoking “herb.” It altered their minds, making them believe they could still reach their sexual nirvana, the ultimate climax that would shatter their minds.

“We're still not there yet. There are still more mountains to climb,” whispered Moses, puffing away on the ascetic herb, sending a whiff of transcendence into the room.

“Oh, you'll eventually kill me before I decide to walk away,” whispered Beverly. “You'll never leave me until I ask you to,” laughed Moses.

Moses was a grown-up caught between the worlds of academia and youthful fancies. Separating both worlds for survival caused him to exhibit bizarre contortions of tenacity and vacillation. No one would have surmised about his sexual obsessions and likening to drugs. But Beverly learned early that behind closed doors, a monster hid inside us all. No matter how we look, how we talk, how much education we have, there's always an unorthodox side tucked away from the eyes of the world. If the world knew, it would diminish us.

“This is our private moment, and we keep them so long as we're together,” Moses told Beverly.

“Are you tellin' me that when we're not together anymore, I could dispel your secrets,” Beverly asked, smiling.

She gave him a miscreant smirk that caused Moses to get up and put on his bathrobe. He needed to become more serious with Beverly.

“Are you kidding me?” he asked. “Our reputations might get tattered if such a union gets out!” Beverly understood that Moses was correct.

She was only toying with his mind, making him feel afraid. There was no guilt on either side, for life seized its moment of happiness at any given time. “Don't get too serious with me,” Beverly assured him. “I'm on your side.”

Moses stood in the half-lit room, staring down at Beverly on the bed. Her body was different from the other women he'd taken in the past. She was the only black lover and the youngest he'd ever taken. In the dimmed room, her quince-shaped belly, which was neither too flat nor too protruding, rested on its side. He could clearly see Beverly's broad and high hips flared out to accommodate the soft curve of her slender thighs. The older man stared down with perplexed devotion at the much younger woman who taunted him in his dreams and wondered if she was his ruination. His lovers had been middle-aged white women who weren't too clingy and eager to give him love. One by one, as they shared his bed, they weren't fascinated by his personality, only by his skill in the art of making love. He didn't mind being used; he craved the release of sexual energy. But he and Beverly had been lovers only for a short while. He hadn't yet grown tired of her childish ways and her curiosity to learn about the world from him. Usually, Moses got tired of women easily after knowing the familiar curves of their bodies and their loquacious ways. But Beverly teased him like a kitten, pulling an invisible string that was hard for him to catch.

“You better be on my side, or else we'll both be ruined,” he babbled to Beverly. That afternoon, at the height of winter, Beverly had decided to spend the weekend with Moses.

Not wanting to worry her parents, Beverly told them that she'd be with a girlfriend.

“See you when I get back,” she told her mother, who wore a worried look on her face.

“Mavis, we have to let them go, eventually,” said Mr. Gilmore. “We've raised two 'good girls.'”

But even good girls' have lustful yearnings. Beverly had been harboring them for some time, especially when 'that boy,' whose name she couldn't remember, awakened her curiosity to explore the depth of her carnal desires. Her morals weren't as pure as the driven snow she watched falling down the eighth-floor window of Moses's apartment. Beverly didn't want to cuddle up with him anymore. She wanted to hold a serious conversation with him. She'd always been mature for her age at the insistence of her mother's tutelage. But there was a darker side to Beverly, for she pushed herself to experience the vicissitudes of life. Having a love affair with an older man was out of the question. It wasn't what her parents wanted for their two daughters. Both parents wanted their girls to understand that life wasn't a straight line; bumps along their paths would help them make the right decisions. Both mother and father never protected them from experiencing a little difficulty.

“The more hurdles you get over, the stronger you'll become,” Ms. Gilmore warned her daughters.

Moses realized Beverly was different from the women of color he'd previously been with. She wasn't domineering, and she never demanded much of his attention. She was a younger version of the playful, middle-aged white women he had seduced. It was easy to be with her. But he wasn't sure what he wanted when she was with him. Beverly wasn't clingy, so he craved her more than any woman he'd ever known.

“Thank you for going with the flow and for remembering that I do not want a serious relationship,” he once told her.

“That's all I can do, for you will not let me into your life any further,” Beverly replied, holding her head down.

She couldn't look him in the eye, for she felt their relationship weaning away. She wanted to spend more time with her friends. The sex between them had begun to become jaded. She needed another form of stimulation after the toy faded. Moses refused to let Beverly mingle with his academic circle and meet his friends and peers.

“Do you even have a friend... an enemy...,” she joked.

“My personal life is off limits to everyone until I let them in,” replied Moses.

He was a middle-aged man and had exercised prudence in not settling down with one woman. This sparked Beverly's curiosity and made Moses an interesting case study.

There must be a hidden reason why this seemingly caring man refused to settle down, thought Beverly.

That day, she began to ask too many questions about the locked room in his apartment. He had a passkey that Beverly thought would expose his cryptic world. She thought about seducing him into giving her the key, giving up the entrance into the haven of solace and torpidity.

“You can’t know everything about me so quickly,” Moses told her after Beverly asked him to show her the extra room. “In time, you’ll know.”

“But it’s been long enough,” Beverly told him playfully after attempting to snatch the key from her lover’s hand.

Moses had held on to her hands with the strength of a bull to calm down her perfervid attempt to snatch the key. Beverly capitulated only when the sharp pain gripped her.

“But, but, b-u-t…. B-b-b-u-t. Moses. P-L-E-E-E-S-E!” Beverly asked entreatingly. He left her pleading to use the bathroom without an utterance, which aroused her curiosity instead of subsiding it.

Later that spring, Moses pushed her down on the bed and sprang on top of her back with his short legs apart. Holding her two hands in the air, he brought the roughness of his lips down to hers.

“So, you like it rough, too. Do you?” he jokingly asked Beverly.

She laughed invitingly. Pulling off her little black and white polka dot skirt, her all-white shirt, and light blue underpants, Moses thrust himself inside her. He explosively climaxed, then rolled off her back. The sex was neither pleasurable nor painful. But Beverly had grown concerned about his passive-aggressive behavior as she got to know her lover better. Every time she wanted to delve deeper into the dark corners of his mind, he’d become cruel, inflicting on her some sort of mental or physical pain. She felt it might be an indirect warning from Moses to be careful.

That day, Moses jumped out of bed, showered, and dressed quickly.

“I'm going to a Phagwah festival in Richmond Hill, Queens,” Moses told Beverly.

“I've never heard that name before,” she asked quizzically.

“We Hindus celebrate the first day of spring with song and dance. I need some time alone to be with my people,” Moses told her.

“Yes, I understand. There's no questions asked when you're with your people, ” Beverly told him.

Moses laughed at the fact that Beverly understood the way his mind worked.

For someone so young, she knows so much, he thought to himself.

When he finished showering and went to dress himself in his bedroom, Beverly saw a bunch of keys lying on the kitchen table. She approached the kitchen with a slow silence and carefully slipped off the skeleton key to scrutinize its unique composition. Running her pointer finger along the key's smooth, elongated shaft, which reached down to its V-shaped tip, Beverly could feel a sense of both warmth and ghostliness permeating through her body. Its zigzagged ridges and large antique headset it apart from the other keys in the bunch. She quietly released it from its torment and then went to the bathroom.

“Go have a jolly good time with your people,” she told her coolie lover. “I put your keys in your coat pocket.”

He emerged from his bedroom fully dressed and was ready to go.

“I'll cook a good Jamaican meal for you when you return. In the meantime, I'll keep myself busy,” Beverly told him.

Moses exited the apartment. But the young female, on the cusp of womanhood, had adult ideas. She'd see what hid behind the closed door, something Moses didn't want her to see. Beverly wasted no time, for as soon as Moses stepped out, she slowly put her curious ears to the door and listened to its stillness. She couldn't understand why, although nobody was home, Moses protected its privacy, not opening the room to air it out. Beverly remembered the first time she asked him to let her sleep in the room after wanting more space to contemplate.

“I'll sleep on the couch while you stay in my room,” he told her.

“The couch is uncomfortable to sleep on. The other room would be perfect for me.”

“It was my mother’s favorite room. Her name was Gatravati. She would sleep in there whenever she would visit me from Trinidad before she died. She raised me all by herself, without help from anyone!”

Beverly could see Moses's eyes become dark and watery as he was forced to talk about his mother. She'd never before witnessed a grown man cry. Refusing to succumb to the nostalgic memory of her coolie lover's deceased mother, she inserted the key into the lock and threw the door wide open. Beverly was met with a woody aroma amid the blaze of heat from the fuming heater. She refused to step into the room until the cool air of the apartment dissolved into room temperature. When all the fumes had evaporated, permitting Beverly to enter, she saw at least a dozen snapshots of Moses's life with his mother, Gatravati. It was then that she began to unravel the enigma of his personality. There was a sensitive black and white snapshot of Moses as a boy wearing a knee-high jumper, resting his caring head on his mother's bosom. Gatravati, in her moment of tenderness, tilted her tending head toward her son like a devoted Madonna. Beverly took up the picture, framed it in pewter, and scrutinized the story it told in full detail.

It must have been an unquenchable bond between them both, she thought.

As Beverly walked further, she couldn't dismiss the pictures that were everywhere but tried to look beyond them. The walls were painted in the color of terra-cotta and cast a tropical flavor. The old mahogany dresser caught her eye next. It contained a huge crystal decanter filled halfway with perfume. It was an attractive green glass bottle shaped like a horse's head with a pendent gold ring through its nose. Out of curiosity, Beverly opened the decanter, sniffed it, and dabbed its luxuriant oil on her neck and arm. The piquant fragrance of sandalwood, combined with nutmeg and a faint smell rose, intoxicated her. She closed her eyes and contemplated the aroma.

Moses does emit this scent from time to time, she thought.

Her eyes moved around the room to the cedar wood rocking chair with the rosebud, handmade antimacassar tossed over its back. Beverly remembered that her grandmother, who lived in the country back in the Caribbean, made and sold them to make extra money. To the right of the room, there was a mirrored, old-fashioned wardrobe. As she began to open its door, Beverly looked down on the large cedar-framed bed with its rose-petal printed cotton sheet. She could see the strewn of Moses's mother's threadbare and soiled silken underpants on top of the bed. They were lined in a vertical position as if someone had set them out to wear. Beverly cringed at the thought of seeing them and felt like she was invading Moses's privacy. She picked up one scornfully with her fingertips, looked at it with an intense perturbation, then released it, watching it fall on the bed before averting her eyes into a gaze.

This is rather disturbing, she thought to herself.

She didn't want to pry into Moses's personal business anymore. Beverly had been fortitudinous in her quest to gain carnal knowledge. This shocking discovery was the beginning of her emergence from her cocoon into a better version of her former self. She began to realize that men could be more complex than they looked. She hadn't seen this side of Moses before. He'd kept it tucked away right before her very eyes. She closed the bedroom door in a state of disbelief and went into the kitchen to make the Caribbean meal she had promised him.

Silence merged into hours of deep-rooted thoughts before Moses's quiet recurrence. Beverly didn't hear the slip of her lover's key into the front door when he entered the apartment. When she left the kitchen, she saw him standing there, waiting for her, with his small head held down while he stared up, showing only the whiteness of his eyes.

“Your silence kills me. I didn't know you were back,” Beverly told Moses.

His clothes were damp when she went over to kiss him. He didn't make a fuss; the light had

gone from his eyes. He remained silent, slithering his way into the living room and closing the door behind him. Beverly didn't follow him because she knew the reason for his silence. She wanted to give Moses ample time to communicate what he needed to say. Some two hours had passed, and he didn't utter a word. His silence annoyed her, so Beverly began to tap on the living room door.

“Moses, could you just open the door and let me in so we can talk?” Beverly expostulated in a gentle voice. “I need to explain.”

“No. You go the hell away! You have no right to invade my privacy!”

“Yes. You are right,” Beverly said in agreement. “But I need to explain the reason why I did it.”

She felt an uncanny need to reiterate why she entered the forbidden room and knew how to play on his psychology by agreeing with him, so Moses let her in. His countenance had changed. His body stiffened; his thick shoulders tensed while he clenched his fists.

“Moses, please allow me to explain... I… I… I...”

Before Beverly could explain any longer, Moses threw her down on the couch. She could feel the tousle of her underpants pulled down to her knees and felt a sharp pain as Moses forcefully shoved his middle finger between her thighs.

“You get up right now!” he demanded, pulling her from the couch. “Your problem is that you’re deceitful like all the others!”

While staggering to stand on her feet in great pain, Moses tossed a right fist into Beverly’s face. Then came his left fist, then his right again. Left... Right... Again… Again…

Beverly fell on the blue velvet couch, bleeding and crying.

“It wasn't your place to invade my mother's privacy! You're nothing but a fuck job I picked up off the street. It is over between us!” screamed Moses before he stalked out of the living room.

Such confounding memories about his deceased mother caused stagnancy in Moses’s life. Her coolie lover couldn't love another woman, only his mother. He refused to have another woman replace Gatravati's memory. Struggling from the couch and battered with bruises, Beverly walked slowly into the bathroom to heal her wounds. She could see Moses sitting around the dining room table eating the stew peas with pigtail and beef with the white rice she'd cooked for them to enjoy together. This grown-up situation made her feel old. Beverly's coolie lover from the isle of Trinidad would soon be a faded memory. She made a vow not to hold on to the haunting images of his expertise in the art of love. Other lovers would replace him, and he would be forgotten.

“I love you, and you betrayed me,” Moses told Beverly after she emerged from the bathroom, swollen and aching.

Beverly wrung herself away from his blocked path as Moses tried to take possession of her arm, which she held in a defensive position.

“Moses, please, I beg you. Leave me alone,” she managed to blurt out, writhing in pain.

“But I love you,” he said, sobbing like a boy whose favorite toy had been taken away.

“You—don't—hurt—someone—you—love,” Beverly replied, releasing tiny puffs of breath between her words to prevent her body from hurting even more.

Moses then followed Beverly into the living room and gently closed the door, shutting out the chaos he had caused outside. But the turmoil was in his mind, not the apartment.

“You're a sick man, Moses. You know that, don't you?” whispered Beverly.

Her directness without backing down caused him to throw himself on the couch and weep.

“I know, but if you'd stay with me, I know I could get over it,” Moses insisted to Beverly.

She remained calm without uttering a word. She'd decided to walk away. She would not lead him on with solacing words. She couldn't fix a seasoned and tattered psyche but could protect herself from further hurt.

“Moses, please give me time to think it over,” urged Beverly.

“That's all I ask of you,” said Moses, as gently as the day they first met.

Beverly was aware that she wouldn’t return to her lover. She had no business associating with a man who lived in a world as complex as his. But Moses’s calls came frequently days after her violent encounter with him.

“Tell him I'll call back later,” she would tell her mother, Mavis, every time he would call.

Her little sister, Barbara, had become suspicious of Beverly's personal life when she returned home late that night, panting and fuming about being mugged and beaten up.

“But don't you want to report the assailant to the police?” Barbara asked Beverly. “No. I didn't see his face. I wouldn't ever recognize him, for he moved so fast,” she told her younger sister.

“Ummmmmm,” Barbara sighed in ambiguity.

Beverly dared not tell her parents what had happened. She didn’t tell her best friend, Jean, for she wouldn't understand. Later, when Moses's love letters came in droves after his calls had ceased, Beverly refused to open them. She'd destroy them over and over again in the candle-lit room she shared along with her nagging younger sister, Barbara.

One day, Beverly's meddling little sister recognized the familiar penmanship after a letter from Moses arrived and decided to open it. She read it in silence, repulsed by its sharp notes, and left it on her sister's desk.

“I'm sorry, but I opened this by mistake,” she told Beverly in an apologetic, angelic voice.

Beverly could say nothing, only held in tears, for the letter brought back stolid memories of her coolie lover from the isle of Trinidad. But after Barbara exited the room, Beverly let out the tears as they flurried into her repentant eyes.

Author’s Note:

Coolie- The traditional Jamaican epithet for East Indians, which is no longer used. It is never used to refer to Chinese Jamaicans. Typically, it is used in the form “coolie-man” or “coolie-oman.” It is considered impolite today, like the term nega, but is still used widely in rural areas.