Thirteen Crucifixions 26

Alone with Randall.  In the Pitstop.  Glen felt like his babysitter.  He couldn’t really say that he was WITH him.  There were people, many actually, with whom one could never be authentically WITH.  Co-exist, maybe.  Without hostility, but not really peacefully.  At least not Glen’s idea of peaceful.  He thought that such people as Randall could best be assessed in negatives: nonviolent, inactive, nonparticipating, impartial, immobile, nondiscursive.  Not that Randall had nothing to say.  He had already expounded at length about the peace march, the anti-nuclear movement, Carol and her speech, that he found her still attractive.  Also his ex-wife, who was now in a convent in the Netherlands beginning her postulancy.  That he was looking for work.  Guy talk.  He didn’t seem to want to leave Glen, having silently reclaimed his friendship following a six month absence.  But now, as before, Randall still had not really given anything of himself.  Self-contained, self-absorbed.  Self-centred?  Randall, while he worked at Good Shepherd, was a silent presence.  Bryan had hired him, likely on the basis of physical attraction.  He hadn’t left Good Shepherd on the warmest of terms and Bryan didn’t even appear to know that Randall was there sitting next to him. 

            Glen had himself been captivated by Randall, whose lean stark handsomeness mesmerized and gripped him.  Of himself, Randall revealed little—the silent type.  But Glen?  For him a visit with Randall was like going to confession.  One evening following a particularly gruelling shift together at Good Shepherd, they broke the ice over a beer.  Since Randall lived a few blocks away, Glen stopped in at his apartment—a suite in an old house, much like his own—on the way home. Over several cups of strong coffee they, or rather Glen, talked, and talked, and talked, revealing to this colleague, this virtual stranger nearly every buried secret of his being.  Randall gave nothing in return.  Glen, having flung open the gates of brass—to what?  To what force of light that had been waiting to further penetrate him? But with Randall he had surely been opened.  In the small hours of the morning he walked home, feeling both cleansed, but also haunted, by the feeling that he had thoroughly betrayed himself.

            Randall left Good Shepherd and Vancouver the following month and Glen ached with loss.  Bryan wouldn’t say if he’d been fired, just that it was time for him to move on.  Randall, who had never responded to Bryan on any level that was not strictly professional, soon fell out of favour.  Bryan expected more than a merely professional subordination.  Not really the tacit assumption that any handsome man in his employ should be willing to sleep with him, but at least some acknowledgement of Bryan’s unspoken need and interest.  Glen had so deferred to him well and adroitly.  But Glen was genuinely fond of Bryan.

            Glen had been very careful to not reveal to Randall the secrets of his sexuality.  Not that he had anything to hide.  He had mentioned Tim, but not that they had been lovers.  Sex was not Glen’s peculiar struggle, and he had quickly learned how easily his difficulties and conflicts could take on an erotic disguise. What he most wanted to reveal, and had striven to do with Randall, was this deep, intimate and overwhelming connection that he experienced with other people.  That this poignancy often reduced him to silent tears while lying on the floor in the dark, spread-eagled in a posture of loving vulnerability.  They were due to join the others in the cocktail lounge across the street to where they had vacated the Pitstop half an hour ago.  But Glen felt held, where he sat, by Randall, who with his consent had just made his claim on him.  And Randall, now on his fifth beer, was beginning to show it.  Glen was already feeling overwhelmed, engulfed, that he had to fight for air.  And Randall could get away with it.

            “It doesn’t bother me that you’re gay.”

            “Yeah.  Whatever.”

            “No, I mean it.”

            “What makes you think I’m gay?”  

            “I just assumed it, I guess.”

            “Why?”

            “This is a gay environment.”

            “Well, you’re sitting here, too.  Does that make you gay?”

            “Hey, wait a minute.”

            “Well, yes or no?”

            “Of course not.”

            “Well, there you go.”

            “So, you’re not gay.”

            “Does it matter?”

            “I said it doesn’t.”

            “Then why bring it up?”

            “Just in case, I guess.”

            “Just in case what?”

            “In case you’re attracted to me.”

            “Sexually?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Well, what if I’m not?  Do you wish that I was?

            “No.”

            “Okay then.”

            Marlene slumped into the chair next to Glen and put her head on his shoulder.  She sat up.  “Christ, I’m beat”, she said.

            “Go home.”

            “In two fucking hours.”

            “You can’t leave now?”

            “I’ve got a new waiter coming in to train, but maybe he won’t show.  They often don’t around here.”

            “You’ve met Randall?”

            “Hi”, Marlene said smiling as she reached across her brother to shake Randall’s hand.  “Marlene’s my name.  I’m Glen’s sister.”

            “She’s single.  Ow!”  He said when Marlene jabbed him with her elbow.  They were both laughing.

            “So’s he!”

            “Never mind!”  She couldn’t stop giggling.

            Randall was smiling.

            “Be kind to the sleep-deprived.”

            “Been a long day?” Randall said.

            “Fuck, I’ll say it has.  Sat up till three this morning with a fucking crossword puzzle, then I was here at nine.  Don’t have time for a life, working here.”

            “Do you like working here?”

            “Done worse.  Almost all the men here are gay so no one hits on me.  Dammit.”

            “I’m not gay.”

            “Wanna job?”

            “Here?”

            Glen was laughing.

            “No, seriously.  You can train with my little brother here.”  She eyed him up and down in a slow and langourous Mae West leer.  “You’ll be just dandy.”

            “You’re tired”, Glen said.

            “You’re not homophobic, I hope?”

            “I’m here aren’t I?”

            “You’re not going to meet a lot of women here”, Glen said.

            “Just seven foot trannies”, Marlene said. 

            Pierre was suddenly hovering over Glen.  “Can I get you anything else?”  He was smiling.

            “More coffee would be good.”

            “He just adores you, Glen”, Marlene said.  “He wants to be my sister-in-law.  And yes brother-dearest, Pierre is going to be training you.”

            Randall shifted uneasily in his seat.  Marlene again gave him the Mae West look.  She stifled a yawn.

            “Telephone, Marlene”, Pierre said.

“Do me a favour”, Randall said.

            “Maybe”.

            “Ask her if she’d like to go out with me.”

            “Ask her yourself.”                  

            “Hey, if it’s too much to ask.”

            “She’s my sister.  I don’t know how she’d react to you.”

            “Don’t have to get personal.”

            “I’ve only just met you and you want to date my sister.”

            “Should I date you, instead?”

            “I can’t believe you’d say that.  Anyway, I’m very protective of her.”

            “Why don’t you just admit that you’re gay.”

            “Ain’t nothin’ to admit.”

            “Don’t be like that.”

            “Darling!  Our first fight.”

            They both burst out laughing.

            In the cocktail lunge Glen had at least other people to distract Randall from him.  He really wanted to home.  He didn’t move.  He felt stranded.  Needed. Everyone at the table, as well as Randall, appeared to have made on him a personal claim.  He wanted solitude, a nice lonely walk over the bridge, then along the streets of his east side neighbourhood.  Alone.  Each one here at this table had touched him, had in a way penetrated him: Carol, Randall, Margery and Dwight.  He couldn’t shake them loose.  They loved Glen?  It was too soon to tell.  Their need summoned him.  Glen loved these people?  Each of them?  Or, more simply, Glen loved.  Glen, ever since his death and resurrection, lived as an open channel for love and good will to come pouring through him.  He couldn’t control it.  He had not consented to this.  And now he felt like everybody’s hostage.  It wasn’t simply Randall, nor Margery, nor Stephen, nor Pierre.  Such had become his ongoing experience of others, where they would simply pick up on this current of love in Glen, and depending upon their need, their openness: and so Glen had learned that he really must protect himself from the clamour of this need.   He was feeling overwhelmed.  He really ought to get up and leave, but love compelled him, and commanded him that he remain.

            “You’re a friend of Doris Goldberg? Dwight asked.

            “She is my extended family.”

            “How so?”

            “I’ve known her since I was thirteen.  My mother and I moved into the building that she and her husband were managing.”

            “I’d hardly imagine her as a landlady.”

            “They actually bought the building on the strength of their book royalties and turned it into a co-op.  My mother met Doris in the college where they both teach.”

            “How would you describe her?”

            “Doris?”  Kind.  Incredibly kind.  One of the kindest persons I’ve ever met.  But I can’t really say that I know her.  She’s never really opened herself to me.”

            “And her husband?”

            “Sam was quite a different story.  He never talked much to anybody.  Very withdrawn, actually.”  Glen couldn’t continue, partly out of respect and circumspection, but also—frustration?  He really didn’t know what to say about Doris or Sam Goldberg.  He must have been fourteen at the time.  It was summer.  Sam had been outside cutting the grass.  Even then he looked very old, but Glen had never been able to envision this taciturn man as having ever been young.  He always used a push mower for cutting the grass, as much for the environment as for the exercise. Glen had been drinking ice tea with Doris in her kitchen.  Sam came in, hot and sweaty in a white t-shirt.  Glen had never before noticed his bare arms.  Then, for the first, and only, time, Glen saw the numbers that had been tattooed on the inside of Sam Goldberg’s left forearm.  He asked him what the numbers meant.  Sam flatly replied that the Nazis had done this to all the prisoners in the death camps.  Unceremoniously, he left the kitchen, soon returning in a long sleeve shirt.  Glen never again saw his bare arms.

            Feeling gauche about asking him, Glen said to Dwight, “You said that you’re divorced?”

            “Four years ago this month.”

            “Kids?”

            “Two.  They’re with her in Toronto.”  Glen was already starting to lose the connection he had been feeling with Dwight.  He noticed that he had rather beautiful hands, very white with tapering long fingers.  His left middle finger wore a silver ring that had a large green malachite set in it, rather similar to Margery’s jade ring.  Glen thought that there might be a story to both these rings, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask either Dwight or Margery.  His connection, for now, with Dwight, seemed almost entirely lost, and this was grieving him terribly.

            “Peter and I used to hang out here a lot”, Margery said.

            “Was he drinking?” Glen said.

            “Of course he was drinking.  I was his little enabler.”

            “What’s it like, being here now?’

            “It’s a bit weird.  Like I’m sitting among ghosts.”

            “Guests?” said Dwight.

            “Ghosts.”

            “So you’re having ghosts for guests?”

            “It never ends.”

            To Randall Carol was saying, “I think I’d like to change the subject.”

            “I would like an answer”, he said.

            “No is an answer.”

            “I only want to have a drink with you.”

            “We’re doing that right now.”

            “Alone.”

            “I like being chaperoned.”

            Margery said to Glen, “It was actually my idea to come in here.”

            “With Peter?”

            “This evening.  But, yes, with Peter, also.”

            “Did you ever bring Megan in with you?” Dwight asked Margery.

            “No.  Never with Megan.  But I did the night I tried to kill myself.  This was so not the place for me to be, which made it perfect.”

            “Perfect?” said Glen.

            “This place was full of all these plastic, artificial people, all of them gathered together for their drinky-poo, or hunting down a nice piece of sex for the night.  They were just horrid, pathetic and horrid.  I’ve never seen such ugly, wretched people before. But I don’t think that they were really that ugly.  I wasn’t seeing things very clearly at the moment.  Or maybe I was seeing them a little too clearly.  But, believing that I wasn’t going to be waking up tomorrow, I think that it really heightened my perceptions for me.  It was like being at a masked ball. Everyone wore the same mask.  It was very creepy. There were some authentically attractive people there.  They looked even worse.  I was seeing into everyone’s dark, ugly little soul, and there was their ugliness, staring right back into my own ugliness.  It was like being inside a hall of mirrors.  No one seemed to really fit here.  All the women were wearing way too much make-up.  They were like costume whores.  Their hair was all wrong—permed, curled, artificially waved, artificially coloured.  Artificially everything.  They were all trying to look like Cleopatra or Petula Clarke.  Perfectly ordinary people, with ordinary lives and ordinary occupations, and they were all trying, with the help of alcohol, bad lighting, and make-up, to weave a sense of magic into their lives.  They all looked like circus freaks.  Their clothes were all wrong—often revealing far too much unhealthy looking skin, veins, flab.  And yet I don’t think that some of them, anyway, would have looked bad naked. Quite beautiful perhaps, some of them anyway, if they didn’t hate themselves.  But there they were, as though they were indeed naked. How they sat, positioned themselves, bringing disgraceful emphasis to breasts that were too small, or too large, or sagging or misshapen.  And the way they positioned their hands and arms when they spoke, beating the air like participants in a mad, sick ritual dance, and shrieking hysterically like torture victims, or souls in hell.  The women’s hands resembled claws with filed and sharpened nails dripping with the fresh blood of their victims.  And all the metal they wore, and the cheap costume jewelry, or diamonds—it all looked equally grotesque, unnecessary, equally wrong.  It was all wrong.  And the men were every bit as bad as the women.  They all sounded horrible, like barking dogs or pigs being slaughtered, while poisoning and drugging themselves with cigarettes and alcohol.  They were all desperately having a good time, when it was obvious that if there was any other place where they could be then they would have gladly gone there, if only they knew how to get there.  Or that such a place might possibly exist.  But what was the use of their going anywhere else, since they’d be bringing with them their sick ugly selves, they would only end up polluting and defiling whatever paradise they might accidentally stumble into.

            “It was their eyes that gave them all away. All of them.  I have never seen human eyes that were so full of fear, remorse.  Guilt.  Shame.  It was like being stranded in one of Dante’s circles of hell. I was weeping when I left.  I could no longer stand it in there.  But I couldn’t run away from it either.  I was carrying inside me this same ugliness.  I was the ugliness that I was loathing as I beheld it in these awful, pathetic lounge lizards.  It was like being locked in a small windowless cell and the light is always on.  Out on the street, it was more of the same.  People were headed in droves down to the beach to see the fireworks.  With the crowd, I walked down the slope of Davie Street as far as Denman.  Instead of continuing on to the Beach, I went against the crowd, against the tide, along Denman.  Again, it was the people’s eyes.  They all had the same kind of eyes. empty, bored, tormented.  Deprived.  And these were all physically healthy, well-dressed persons who clearly didn’t want for anything materially, who looked after themselves well.  Every single person who passed me had presence for me; I could see the entire sum of their lives.  As if the Akashic Records had just been opened for me.  Each one that I saw... Was.  Simply was.  And not one of them seemed even to know that they were, much less what they were. It was horrible. I was only too glad to get into my hotel room.  And while the fireworks exploded like the garish flowers of Armeggedon outside my window, I swallowed all those pills and then went to sleep.

            “I started coming in here again when I was living in the House of Unconditional Love.  Even in my psychotrophic haze I knew that I would have to start working on recovering myself.  My sense of who I was.  Only when I was seeing Warren did I really feel connected with myself. Otherwise, with Megan, with the women’s collective—Warren was like a false spring in midwinter.  Had I not ended the pregnancy, had I not permitted Megan, nor the other women, to put all that pressure on me; had I simply walked out of my cage through that open door into freedom—but there’s really no point in dwelling on that.  Killing the baby, my baby.  No, I can’t just write this one off as a first trimester fetus.  For me this was a living, wanted child.  And yes I am pro-choice.  But that ended it for me.  No Warren, no baby.  No Margery.  Bob’s yer uncle.  With Bryan at the House of Unconditional Love I felt like a walking amnesiac.  It was like walking in my sleep.  Now as a diagnosed crazy I had that baggage to carry as well.  Thank God that the drugs, even if I didn’t need them, helped me forget the stigma of being branded as “mentally-ill”.  And even though I’ve since been declared as “misdiagnosed”, I think it’s still a stigma that I will be carrying for the rest of my life.

            “But then, in that house, with Bryan and all those other kind, well-meaning professionals to rebuild my life for me, I might as well have been living in a coma.  I did not know who I was.  Me—Margery Germaine, remained for me a distant, discontiguous memory.  I had to get me back.  So, one year later, I sat here, in this lounge, at this very table, to try to recover what I had lost.  The crowd was much the same.  Only, I no longer found them quite so menacingly ugly.  It might have been because of the medicated haze that I was in.  I wasn’t drinking alcohol.  I knew better than mix it with my meds.  I went into the ladies’ where I was touching up my face.  At Love House, the women were encouraged to wear make-up and look as feminine as possible.  I’d never bothered before, having always considered make-up to be bourgeois and patriarchal.  So, in the ladies’, staring back at me in the mirror, was this tarted-up doll, just like one of the regulars in the lounge.   I looked again, and I recognized me, Margery.  But it also was not me.  After this, I stopped taking my meds.  The staff at the House thought I was regressing, that I was having a relapse.  Much to my amazement, it was my psychiatrist who came to my rescue.  She saw my defiant resistance as a sign of progress.  It didn’t take her long to convince me that I had been misdiagnosed.  She only warned me that I had to be very careful about who I told this to, or they would quickly invent a pretext for recommitting me.

            “It was a rude awakening.  It was like discovering that I actually have a face, that there is a me, just as there is a unique image in all of us, that sleeps uneasily behind that mask of uniform ugliness.  But society conspires to forbid us from showing our true face.  They want everything uniform, bland, homogenized.  Or we think that it all exists somewhere else.  That we can’t possibly have, or be what we really want, where we are.  Here.  But sitting among those stupid, tarted-up middle class people, each trying to evade the present reality, I decided, and I discovered, that here it was.  Me.  Where I sat.  I could be anywhere. And here I was.  Me.  And it filled my heart with joy.  Not even while I was married to Peter could I lose this sense of my present reality sitting with him through his drunken episodes.  I remained myself.  Margery.  Because I had finally touched and embraced in myself that which is permanent.”

            Feeling that she really should have shut up half an hour ago, Margery looked around to see if she still held their attention.  She didn’t want to break this connection.  They seemed still attentive, though subdued, as though they had just witnessed an elephant giving birth, or a python swallowing a pig.

            “And now you’re back with your ex-husband?” Dwight said.

            “Temporarily.”

            “You’re still back with him.”

            “He’s no longer drinking.”

            “You’re still with him.”

            “But we’re no longer husband and wife.”

            “You mean that you’re no longer his wife.  He still thinks he's your husband.  You are still back with him.”

            Of course, Dwight was, as always, right.  It was impossible for Margery to argue with him.  Better to shut up and just let him be right, to go on being right, which for her was a supreme test of character.  She had not yet known Dwight to ever be wrong or mistaken, about anything.  

            “So Margery when are you moving back with me?”

            “What?”

            “I’m keeping the apartment for you.”

            “Since when?”

            “Since now.”

            “When can I move in?”

            “Tonight.”

            “Yes, tonight.”

            Carol had just punched Randall in the face.  He was holding a seviette to his bleeding nose.  Carol sat very still, her face white like a death mask.  Randall, without speaking, got up and left.

            “He tried to grope me”, she said quietly.  “On my left breast.”  Then, as the others looked on, Carol collapsed into a loud, wailing keen.  As she broke down and wept, Glen suddenly noticed, in the dark back of the lounge, seated alone, and looking intently at the weeping woman from behind a half-empty glass of beer, the journalist, Derek Merkeley.