Thirteen Crucifixions, 43

Three youths were hand drumming nearby.  Involuntarily Stefan swayed to their primal rhythms.  He vaguely knew the group of street punks on the other side lying on the grass smoking pot or playing with their two pit bulls.  One of them, Marvin, he did know from when they were both squeegying last year.  Marvin was still at it, sometimes Stefan did, but there seldom seemed much need to.  He preferred panhandling.  He lit a cigarette.  Marvin didn’t notice him and Stefan wasn’t about to go out of his way to be noticed by him.  He wasn’t in any kind of mood for seeing anyone. This much he knew—he had to find another place to live.  And fast.  He needed badly to get away—not from Melissa; she was the best girl he’d ever had—but …what did he need to escape from?  He had been depressed, he knew this. And last night, scamming five hundred bucks from that yuppie paedophile—of course he had the right guy, he had just not expected the whole thing to go so seamlessly.  The five hundred dollars was still securely strapped to his ankle, and deftly concealed by his combat boot.  He didn’t know what to do with it, though surely he’d think of something.  And he was nearly out of money again.  It wasn’t that he was feeling a little bit lost.  He WAS lost.  Or out of control, but for this unseen hand that seemed to be guiding him.  This was after all how he’d met Melissa, and how they’d afterward been befriended by Dirk and his band mates who invited them to live in their house.  Then meeting that asshole again last night, and ending up in the back yard of that waitress lady’s house and that conversation with that weird artist guy.  Surely there was a hand guiding him.

            But things had run their course with Melissa.  He was not boyfriend material, and surely she deserved better.  She was way out of his league.  She was so beautiful that he couldn’t make love to her without feeling that he was committing an act of sacrilege, that he was defiling something indescribably perfect.  Ed would be much better for her.  Good looking.  And decent.  He wanted his next girlfriend to be ugly—well, not ugly, but nothing great either.  A bitchy, whiney trailer trash princess who drank and smoked excessively, always bitching about her bad hair and constantly having to do her nails.  That would be his next pick. He could get it up for something pathetic.  The sex would be awesome.

            Marvin’s friends’ two pit bulls were wrestling and play fighting together. One was white, the other was tan.  He recognized among them Gretchen, this girl he’d nearly had sex with last year when they were sleeping in the same squat a couple nights.  Now that he’d shaved his head and removed his goatee she didn’t seem to know him. It was cold for late April and it looked like it would be raining soon.  He figured that he could just return to the house, get his stuff, and leave.  That’s what he’d do.  There seemed little point in his remaining.  But where would he go?  Tomorrow he would get a welfare cheque, giving him altogether one thousand dollars.  So he would stay until tomorrow.  Not that he had any idea of where to go.  He didn’t. All he knew was that he had to go.  Pack up and leave.

            There she was walking across the park with a shopping bag in her hand.  Her hair was still streaked, but much shorter now, and she was wearing a very expensive looking dark blue car coat.  He wondered if she’d know him.  Not at all bad looking for her age, really.  A bit of a cougar, and she certainly walked with that sort of predatory grace.  Last summer he’d had a brief fling with her daughter, then sixteen, and acting out her mandatory teenage rebellion before returning to the cushy refuge of her mommy’s condo.  He wondered if Juniper was still living with her mother, who was rather an older version of her. She was great in bed, and he couldn’t help wondering about the mother’s skills as well.  She was just three feet from him when he shouted out, “Hey!”

            The woman paused, turned around, and knew him.

            “Why, hello Stefan.”

            “Hi Persimmon.”

            “I haven’t seen you in ages.”  She was bending over him, hovering, her red lips pulled back in a toothy, predatory smile.  As far as Stefan could tell, she knew nothing about his tryst with her daughter.

            “Listen”, Persimmon Carlyle said.  “I would love to visit and catch up with you.  Actually, I would like to talk with you about doing another interview soon.  It has been a year now. And that was the idea.”

            “Sure.  Where can I get hold of you?”

            She gave him a card.

            “Call me tomorrow.  We’ll do lunch.”

            “I will”, he said as she walked away, flanked on her left by the three hand-drummers, and on her right by the two frolicking pit bulls.  The interview had been her daughter’s idea.  Persimmon, a free-lance journalist, had been so relieved to have Juniper off the street that she had to write an article, a whole series of articles about it.  So, she did interviews with street punks, with the idea of following up with as many as possible a year later.  For Stefan it was a lark.  The lunch was free and he could tell whatever lies he wanted to Juniper’s foxy mom.  Now he didn’t know whether to gloat or feel embarrassed about some of the howlers he’d told her.  His stepfather had never beaten him with a lead pipe, nor sexually abused him.  He’d hardly been hit in his life, he didn’t even have a stepfather, nor had his properly married professional parents ever spit up till just two years ago when he’d already been on his own for the past year.  There had been nothing unusual, or noticeably dysfunctional about Stefan’s upbringing.  He had not run away from home at fourteen, he left at seventeen, six months short of graduating from high school.  For a year he had a job slinging espresso at a Starbucks and his own apartment.  He also had a copious appetite for drugs, which cost him his job and, eventually his apartment.  Stefan had ended up on the street through no one’s fault but his own, and he was damned if he wasn’t going to give this Persimmon Carlyle something a little more interesting than just the boring facts.  So what was he going to tell her now?  He’d think of something—he usually did.  Maybe he could even angle his way into bed with her—find out if good sex ran in the family, since Juniper had been one hot, energetic and vocal little lay.  He wondered how she would look naked—it was rather hard to say, given how carefully she packaged herself.  She must be well over forty, and things were bound to be already slipping and sagging with her. What kind of butt did she have?  Did she have varicose veins?  This he would need to know before making any kind of move on her.  He was not going to make love to a woman with varicose veins—it would be almost like having sex with his grandmother.  Juniper had lovely nipples—just the right size, like perfect cherry coloured discs.  Too bad she got tired of him so quickly.  But she did whine a lot, and could be rather clingy at times.  He hated clingy girls.  Which maybe was part of the appeal of some of the men he’d got it on with?  Since Stefan did like having his bit of boy sometimes. They weren’t possessive, nor demanding.  And almost none of the guys he’d got it on with were gay.  Nor even particularly bisexual.  Often it had taken the right combination of drugs and alcohol, but there had to be a certain spark there, first.  Like there was with Marvin, though they’d never had sex together, and Stefan, for the life of him, hadn’t a clue whether he’d be remotely interested in him or not.

            But he really preferred women.  They summoned the very best in him.  Which was why he needed to get away from Melissa?  There was just nothing left in him to summon.  Stefan had become an empty shell.  He knew now that he must get away. If only he knew where he could go.

            He was feeling cold, and would have to get moving anyway.  He struggled to his feet. He felt heavy, tired, not properly rested.  Marvin looked over and said “Hey!” and Stefan said “Hey!” back as he stepped out of the park, taking the utmost care not to move to the rhythm of the drums.

            She couldn’t get it right no matter how hard she tried.  The love seat near the fireplace didn’t quite work, but neither did it quite work against the far wall.  Come to think of it, Persimmon was beginning to entertain serious doubts about the wisdom of getting this love seat, which really didn’t go with anything else in the living room.  There was empty space that needed filling.  Her reason for buying it.  She couldn’t bear living in a place that was under-furnished.  She liked space. What she wanted was a room that was not under-furnished where there was lots of space.  She could always see in her mind’s eye this perfect Zen balance which somehow always eluded her in reality.

           She went into the kitchen and began to unload the dishwasher, then remembered she was still wearing her coat. She let it slip from her shoulders onto the floor.  She thought of leaving it there, then hung it up in the closet.  If Juniper came in and saw the coat on the floor—it would have been bad role-modeling, and she would simply tell tales to her father when she saw him on the weekend about what a slob mother is.

           She returned to the dishwasher, dropped a wine-glass which smashed on the floor.  “Fuck-Fuck-Fuck-Fuck-Fuck-Fuck-Fuck!” she muttered as she grabbed for the broom and dust-pan.  She gave the kitchen floor a thorough sweep, then sponge-mopped it.  She rinsed the mop in the sink when she saw there were dishes in it that she had overlooked.  She put them on the counter, since the dishwasher was still only half-empty with clean dishes.  She looked at the dirty dishes she’d just put on the counter, then at the clean ones in the dishwasher.  “Fuck it”, she said, pitching the mop across the room.  When it hit the table the squeegie came off and knocked over another glass, breaking it.  Persimmon removed her shoes, both of which she hurled against the table, poured herself a tumbler full of cabernet and went to the living room where she nursed it on the inappropriately positioned love seat.
           As soon as she reached for the remote she remembered that she had just sold the television.  “Why?” she said, then yelled it out. “Why!”  The condo was made of concrete, soundproof, and she could make all the noise that she wanted.  She was suddenly out of energy.  She spilt wine on the rug.  Looking at the shade of aging blood forming near her feet she snorted and said, “Have some more”, and dribbled a little more cabernet onto the stain.  “That’s all you’re getting.  The rest is mine.”
          She wasn’t usually a maladroit.  Only when she was highly stressed.  She couldn’t think of why she’d be feeling this way.  Her life was functioning, her daughter was at home again and doing reasonably well in school.  There was plenty of work coming in.  She had arisen out of her humiliation.  She had this new condo—not in the best of neighbourhoods maybe, but the East Side was rapidly gentrifying.  And she wasn’t having to work too hard.  Life for her was acquiring a pleasant, workable rhythm.  So why no sooner than coming in through the door was everything having a sudden hissy-fit in her face?  It must have been her running into Stefan, that bald-headed punk.  Not that she could count on someone like him having an impact on her—why would Stefan have on Persimmon such an effect?  Because he was so goddamn pathetic and there was absolutely nothing that she could do to remedy his situation for him.  One year ago, almost to the day, they’d done that interview.  Mostly lies on his part, and Juniper later confirmed that his family situation had been actually quite ordinary and in some ways enviable. Was it outrage for feeling taken in by him that was discombobulating her?   Persimmon did not wear treachery at all well.  She had after all Jake and his numerous adulteries and other causes for lying to her to thank for not only a long and bitter divorce, but also for her equally prolonged breakdown.  He had used this, of course, as evidence against her being a suitable mother, depriving her for almost five years of having any meaningful contact with Juniper.  Even when her daughter had broken the news that Stefan had told her mostly lies during the interview she could only cope by living the next ten days or so on copious doses of Valium.
          For now the wine was doing the job.  Now all she needed was for her daughter to come in and see mother getting plastered with broken glass in the kitchen and a big fat wine stain on the quality broadloom, and that would be it—she’d be hearing from Jake’s lawyer and Juniper would be gone again.  Three years it had taken mother and daughter to build themselves a decent relationship, punctuated by much mutual strain and nervousness.  Had Juniper not looked so much like her mother--for Persimmon this was like living with her junior doppelganger—things might be a little less intense between them. Persimmon had been surprised by the ferocity of the love that she was suddenly feeling for her daughter.  She had missed her, yes.  And seeing Juniper only once a month for a single day during the last two years in which she was deemed “well” enough to see her, she had still been able to build no more than an abstract of a relationship with her.  Their visits had always been polite and restrained, even when Persimmon was no longer heavily medicated.  It was during one session in particular, six months into their renewed relationship that she actually broke down and wept.  There had been nothing extraordinary about the visit.  They had gone shopping together, though nothing was bought.  They toured the mall and looked inside store after store after store at all the beautiful clothes Persimmon—who at the time was very poor—would have loved to have bought for her girl, just on the threshold of puberty, showing already the promise of turning into an extraordinarily beautiful young woman.  Together mother and daughter made out an inventory list of what her father should buy her, being then, as now, a highly paid executive with one of the major television corporations.

            In a café they had made out the list together.  When Juniper was in the washroom Persimmon reviewed the list.  It contained nothing extravagant or unreasonable.  They had in fact gone out of their way to make sure that Jake would be spared as much expense as possible.   He could easily afford ten times the amount, a hundred times the amount.  Their marriage had been for Persimmon a blur: media, parties, cocaine, and then they stopped making love, but it stopped happening fairly early in the marriage, not long after Juniper was conceived.  There were lots of people involved, none of whom she could say she ever really got to know.  They experimented for a while with having an “open marriage”, an arrangement that worked much better for Jake.  Persimmon had nearly gone to bed with one of the press consultants.  She hadn’t the stomach for it. Where marriage was concerned she was incurably conservative.  She repeatedly badgered her husband to stop having affairs.  Which he said he would try to do.

            He wasn’t present for Juniper’s birth.  It was later revealed that he was having a dirty holiday at Whistler at the time.  Persimmon sunk into post-natal depression, which Jake blamed for his serial infidelity that followed.

            She drove Juniper back to her father’s, then sped off to the basement apartment she called home at the time, where she locked herself in, drew all the curtains and cried herself to sleep.

            Persimmon had a dark secret known to almost no one—not Jake and certainly not to her daughter.  “Persimmon Carlyle” was an invention, her own personal creation.  She was twenty when her parents died together in a plane crash.  They were off to Israel to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary.   Suspected Palestinian terrorists had likely planted a bomb on board.  Persimmon had no siblings, an aunt, her mother’s sister in Montreal, and two uncles—her father’s brothers (one of them was an orthodox rabbi) in New York.  No one knew that her name had once been Miriam Silverman.  She had changed her name, not to erase her Jewishness towards which she had always affected indifference, nor to spite the memory of her dear parents, who had both been completely loving and devoted to their daughter, who grieved long, hard and deeply for them.  Which she supposed might be her real reason for changing her name?  Perhaps self-promotion—she was already avidly pursuing a career in television.  And “Persimmon Carlyle” just seemed to cut more wax than such a blatantly Jewish monicker as “Miriam Silverman” that for her still summoned visions of yarmulkes, matzo balls and klezmer bands.  Not to mention all those idiots and morons in school who used to taunt her ruthlessly, where she was known commonly as “Silverfish”.  She had stood out, being somewhat overweight with a rather large nose.  She still had the nose, which she simultaneously grew into while shedding thirty pounds, just after graduation, which she had managed to keep off.  The classic ugly duckling growing into a swan.  And even with her rather big nose, Miriam was suddenly beautiful with a dramatic Mediterranean flourish.  The family had moved from Toronto to Vancouver, just before she had finished secondary school, leaving her no one to gloat in front of, no faces to rub in their own dirt.  She had no identity to pass on to her daughter, who didn’t even know she was Jewish.  Not even grandparents to give her some sense of history, since both her parents’ sets of parents had perished in Europe during the war.
            She didn’t need anyone telling her that this absence of roots was a major factor in her breakdown.  Along with the divorce.  Not to mention the huge scandal that backfired in her face when she tried to expose on the TV news the cult-like goings on in this quasi-religious community that occupied a Shaughnessy mansion.  Persimmon had tried to spearhead an investigation, after several residents in this mansion died, apparently prematurely from AIDS-related causes.  All the players were exonerated, and Persimmon had major egg on her face.  Which she could have endured had the media coverage not reached such international proportions. 

            Juniper might be home any minute.  But this cabernet was so nice and the deliciousness now inhabited every cell of Persimmon’s prone body.  She wished that she hadn’t sold the TV.  She could always buy a new one.  She had money now.  But Persimmon had dared herself.  She wanted time to read, to think, to begin work on her memoir in which a local publishing house was already indicating interest.  There would be no turning back.  Television had been her life.  She needed to completely disengage herself from the medium.  She set what remained of her wine on the table next to her.  Her eyes were beginning to close….