Derek had never given up pornography on Carol’s account, so why had
he no taste for it now? He stared at the
dark TV screen and ignored the shelf-loads of videos that lay hidden against
the wall. He hadn’t troubled to turn any
lights on. He didn’t even want to touch
himself. In the sixty minutes or so that
had transpired since Carol’s awful announcement he had realized one thing and
one thing only. That he was in love. Brutally, ignobly in love. With Carol.
This fire that had raged so adequately in his loins, and much better—or
worse—than adequately, had spread and now threatened to engulf his entire
being. He had never felt this way
before. Derek had never been in love
with anybody. He was now in love. Derek was in love with Carol. He reached for the phone. He even knew her number. He had never memorized a woman’s number
before. He had memorized Carol’s. It would stay inside him forever.
“Hello?”
“You lied to me,
didn’t you?”
“What—it’s you.”
“You’re not really
pregnant.”
“Derek, why did you
call?”
“If you want me to
go away, then just tell me to go away.
Don’t invent scary stories.”
“Okay, I’m not
pregnant. Listen, Derek, I have company
right now.”
“Who?”
“Dwight and
Margery.”
“Don’t tell them
anything.”
“I’ve already told
them about the mole on your left testicle, darling.”
“You fucking cow!”
He slammed down the phone, then picked it up and dialled again.
“Hello?”
“Carol.”
“Yes, Derek?”
“I-I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“Can I see you
tomorrow?”
She paused. He could hear her mumbling something to her
guests.
“Meet me at the
Sun-Ray tomorrow at five. We’ll talk
there.”
“What about?”
“Everything,
Derek. We have to get it all out in the
open if anything’s going to work between us.”
“Okay,
darling. I love you.”
“’Bye.”
He sank back in his
chair in his dark apartment and smiled out into the emptiness that surrounded
him, the emptiness that was him.
Tomorrow he would see her. And he
loved her, he even had just told Carol that he loved her and surely her
response was more than mere politeness and good manners. And she wasn’t pregnant. They would have dinner together, just them,
for two, but somewhere else, that new French place near Gastown—so what if they
had to step over derelicts in the gutter in order to get there? Tomorrow would be his dancing day as he dwelt
with the woman he loved. She wanted
him. She still wanted him. No woman had ever wanted him back. She must think he’s special. She must see that he is special. He lit a cigarette and inhaled and exhaled
the bitter smoke with the contentment of a Belgian school girl blowing bubbles
in the public gardens of Brussels on a Sunday afternoon in June.
“Good Gawd! What have you done to your hair?”
“I cut it off last
night.”
“You look like a
death camp survivor.”
“You’ve always been
a flatterer.”
“It was so
beautiful. Why did you get rid of it?”
“Time for a new
look. A new self.”
“You haven’t got
any self.”
“Please don’t
start.”
“There is no such
thing as a self. That’s the big
illusion, the great lie. Don’t you see
that yet, we’re nothing but systems of complex chemical reactions.”
“Whatever you say,
Derek.”
“How is your salade
nicoise?”
“A little short on
the olives.”
“You like olives?”
“I love olives.”
“Then let’s pick up
a jar on our way back.”
“Our way back?”
“To my place.”
“I’m not going to
your place.”
“I’m buying your
dinner.”
“Which means I owe
you.”
“Well, yes.”
“Derek, I don’t owe
you.”
“C’mon, Carol, you
have to compensate for last night.”
“There’s nothing to
compensate. It’s over.”
“Carol. You said that you love me.”
“Of course I love
you, but—”
“—But not like that.”
“—But not like that.”
“Well, do I have
to?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I’m entitled.”
“Horse shit.”
“Come home with me,
Carol.”
“We have things to
discuss.”
“At my place.”
“We can do it all
here.”
“We are not airing
our linen in public.”
“You’re a
journalist, for fuck sake. Get used to
it.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, who?”
“Yes Mommy.”
“And we are going
to talk about our relationship.”
“Yes Mommy.”
“And we are going
to reach a compromise.”
“Yes Mommy.”
“Stop calling me
‘Mommy’”
“C’mon, you have to
play.”
“I’m not playing
right now.”
“If you’re not
going to play by the rules then I’m not going to cooperate.”
“You will cooperate
or…”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll shove a
wooden rolling pin up your ass and give you slivers.”
“Will you turn it
and make it rotate?”
“Yes I will.”
“Oh, you’re a mean
mean mommy.”
“So now you are
going to cooperate.”
“Yes Mommy.”
“We are not going
to be lovers now, or at least not for a while.”
“Yes Mommy.”
“Bondage and
discipline and humiliation can be fun once in a while, but please, not every
fucking night. I would like to relax
with vanilla sex for a while.”
“Yes Mommy.”
“You are not
capable of having a normal relationship.”
“No Mommy.”
“And I don’t have
the emotional resources in order to cope with your kinky demands.”
“No Mommy.”
“But Derek, I love
you. I do, I do, I do so love you.”
“I love you
Carol. You are the first woman I’ve ever
loved. Honest.”
“I believe
you. I see it in your eyes. This is the first time your eyes have ever
looked true to me. But Derek, right now,
I don’t want to have a sexual relationship.
Not with you, not with anyone.”
“But—”
“Sex is cancelled
until further notice.”
Yes Mommy.”
“We have both been
bad, and now it is time for us to learn how to be good.”
“Yes Mommy.”
“I am not your
mommy.”
“No.”
“I am your sister.”
“Yes.”
“And we will meet,
here again next week at the same time.
Nowhere else. We will arrive
separately, and we will depart separately.”
“Yes.”
“Now I am going to
pay you my share of the bill, then I am going to leave. You are not to follow me.”
“Yes.”
“Yes who?”
“Yes Carol.”
“Goodbye Derek.”
“Good bye Carol.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“You will come here
next week at five. Thursday.”
“Yes Carol.”
“Have a good week,
my love.”
“I shall think of
you every moment.”
“Only when
necessary.”
“Yes Carol.”
He didn’t follow
her home. And there was no message on
her answering machine. Carol felt
empty. She would have to get used to
it. She filled the kettle, ran her hand
across her stubble and sat down at the table.
She was trying to interest herself in the current issue of Mother Jones
that lay in front of her. Doris had
given it to her this morning, when they had breakfast together. A warm reunion, Carol felt affirmed of their
friendship. Doris was kindness, kindness
and more kindness. All kindness. Carol had never been treated to her shadow
side. On hearing this recently, Margery
had suggested that maybe she didn’t trust her, that their closeness was an
illusion that Carol would have to divest herself of. She couldn’t say that she really knew Doris
Goldberg. For years she had held her in
awe, as one above her, a superiorly evolved being, and thus for her Doris would
always be. She had commented on Carol’s
new look and asked her if everything was well with her. She lied—she had cut off her hair because it
was a bother to take care of, and she quite liked the punky new look her
buzzcut had given her. She even thought
that she might get Suzanne to colour it black for her—or bright orange, that
would be so Annie Lennox. But
whatever. She knew that was not why she
cut it. Early this morning Suzanne had
completed the job for her, choking back her tears over the violence with which
Carol had just ravaged herself. Maybe
she had been foolish. It was hard to say.
What Carol was not welcoming was this recent tendency of, well, not
exactly lying, but employing deception.
And it was becoming a little too easy for her. She could have told Doris everything about
Derek. Not everything but enough to
provide her with a concrete image of how she’d been passing her summer. Surely she trusted Doris, but how could she
continue trusting someone whom for so long she had known only as goodness
personified? Why did she feel she owed
everyone explanations? Well, with the
kind of parents she had—the usual excuse.
She had been abused, physically somewhat—her father had a mean way with
his belt, her mother with the wooden spoon. Emotionally for sure. Where were you, just now? Who were you with? Do your homework, work harder in school,
don’t tease your brother, go see your grandmother, be polite to your uncle,
smile more, it is a sin not to smile. Be
a good example, be a witness for Christ.
God is always watching. Mom and
Dad and God are always watching, Santa Claus and Big Brother; gonna find out who’s naughty and nice. Carol was a good girl, a dutiful daughter, a
good Christian witness, a good example.
She was the only girl in school not permitted to wear her skirts above
the knee. She wasn’t allowed to wear
make-up or to have boyfriends, though she’d suffered her share of
incapacitating crushes. Her parents,
both of them, and God, terrified her.
Knowing what a sin it was to lie, she employed deceit when she went away
to Victoria, not to nursing school where she could acquire one of the few
honourable professions open to decent Christian young women, but to the
University to study arts and comparative religion. She remained a good girl, carrying with her
her imposed vacuum of Victorian era propriety.
Her hemlines still concealed her knees.
Her clothing was generally too loose, concealing and ill-fitting to show
that she had a worthy figure. She
avoided boys. She studied. Hard. Then she discovered the works of Thomas
Merton, Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
These ones, these exemplary lives and teachings Carol read and studied
voraciously. They fed her, and there in
her bedroom one day, while studying for midterms Carol finally discovered what
her parents had never succeeded in drubbing into her: the reality of Jesus
Christ in a form which she could recognize, experience and absorb. She would have to tell them, her parents. Finally, after almost a year, she visited
them. Christmas and Thanksgiving had
been too busy and distracting to necessitate any confessions. At the kitchen table in her family home
Carol, trembling from head to foot, told her mother and father everything. That she had lied, that she was studying in university
forbidden knowledge, and that finally she had found God. Both her parents listened in ashen-faced
silence. Her father, the Reverend James
Hartley, finally opened his mouth and spoke.
“You are no longer our daughter.
Leave this house immediately.”
Carol still hadn’t
fully recovered. The care she had
rendered her mother during her illness had indeed brought them close together,
and her father acknowledged a brief truce.
And even though Carol’s mother had become again, indeed had always remained
so, both towards Carol and her homosexual brother, her father resumed his hard,
hostile silence. Yes, she had
successfully bullied him into submission, and there he remained a lonely and
bitter aging man. His church had
disfellowshipped him on the basis of the accumulated grief caused by his
righteous cruelty. Carol’s mother would
no longer submit to him. Carol was
becoming concerned about him—he was already pushing seventy—his blood pressure
was soaring, and he’d recently undergone two minor but frightrening
strokes. She felt she should get over to
see them, and soon.
Only once had her
father ever touched Carol in a way that was spiritual and good. Her brother Thomas was with her at the family
home, assisting in their mother’s recovery from breast cancer. Briefly their father expressed tolerance if
not affection towards both his prodigal and errant children. They all attended church together, Carol and
Thomas sitting side by side in the backslider’s section in the back by the
door. It was May with dramatic skies and
air full of fragrance and anxiety and the small renegade Baptist church had at
most two dozen faithful remaining of a congregation that had once filled the
one hundred fifty capacity chapel. A vagrant
fly was investigating the back of the pew in front of them. Their mother, who normally sat at the front
had situated herself between her two children, and Carol knew that their mother
had always, and always would, love them, and that her love had long ago eclipsed
whatever obligation she had felt towards her husband. She had admitted to Carol and Thomas both
that if she still loved her husband that it was only in the most elementary
aspect of Christian charity. Her illness
had made him remote and hostile towards her, at times verbally abusive. And that now the disfigurement caused by her
mastectomy had alienated him completely.
She struggled against bitterness, she knew she had failed somehow as a
Christian wife, and despaired of ever finding God’s forgiveness.
The Reverend James
Hartley based his sermon on a passage from Ezekiel that stated that God would
dwell among his people, that he would be their God, and they would be his
people, that all people would know him intimately, that he would write his laws
in their minds and on their hearts, that he would remove from his people the
heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh. A heart of flesh. A beating, pulsing human heart. A loving heart. A feeling and broken heart God would give his
people. A tender and vulnerable heart,
open and receptive. She had never in her
life heard him preach so, speak so, imply so.
Carol was shocked, scandalized and flabbergasted. She had never seen her father naked, and
surely this must be worse, much worse as he stood there at the pulpit skinned,
peeled and flayed. She found him
horrifically beautiful in this his public vulnerability and brokenness. The Elijah figure, the Thundering Elijah
voice of prophecy, judgement and eternal punishment for recalcitrant sinners
was nowhere to be seen or heard on that Sunday morning. In her heart Carol had quavered and trembled
at this visitation from God On High, as in her heart she secretly despised and
loathed this first-ever and primal show of weakness in her father.
Following the
service he had retreated to his usual remoteness. There was a slight flicker in his
search-light eyes, the turquoise eyes of moral authority that were Carol’s
inheritance from her father. He muttered
and mumbled in his usual terse monosyllables.
He spent the rest of the day locked in his study.
The sun was
beginning to set, its amber and gold radiance casting green fire upon the
leaves of the cherry trees, etching on the white wall that surrounded Mahatma
Gandhi patterns of exquisite pale gold and soft blue. She stared long and hard at the old man’s
face. “Are you He?” she asked him. “Are you the One?” She looked again at the fiery-green leaves
and the blazing fire-gold of the perishing sun, then back again at the
Mahatma’s face. “You are not He”, she
said resolutely. “You are not He”, she
said as she gently peeled the poster from the wall. “You are not He”, Carol said, rolling and
taping secure the face of Gandhi. She
sat on the floor next to her bed, and stared at the blank wall, now all
patterns of gold and blue. As the tears
streamed down her face, Carol ran her hand across the stubble of her newly
shorn head and thought of a lamb newly shorn, then she ran her hand across her
left breast, the one her mother had sacrificed to the cancer god, one of two
that had never, by her father’s command, fed and sustained her. Then her hand
rested over her heart and she waited while feeling its slow, strong and
measured beating. She moved her hand
down across her stomach, to rest over her recently vacated womb. She wept silently, heeding not the shrill
whistle of the kettle, as she beheld intently the pattern of light on the naked
wall, as the gold lozenges shrank into little pools of fire and drops of
freshly spilled blood.
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