Thirteen Crucifixions, 86

Derek hated driving in the rain.  Other drivers and pedestrians alike seemed to go brain-dead.  Especially in Vancouver.  Small wonder that the entire city usually panicked and shut down over two inches of snow.  He was on his way to meet Carol.  For almost three months now they had faithfully been meeting together every week, Thursdays at five thirty in the same restaurant in Gastown.  For one or two hours they would visit together and chat about this or that, then leave separately.  He was still desperately in love with her.  They were no longer lovers. She didn’t want him.  She was off sex, off men, and he was sure that she didn’t feel for him as he felt still for her.    Derek had never felt this way about anyone, not even Anne, the eighteen year old college student he was now bedding two or three times a week.  But Anne didn’t take him seriously.  Carol was the only woman, besides his own mother, who had ever taken Derek seriously.  Which was why he loved her?  He had no answer for that.  They were also the only two women who had ever successfully humiliated him, who sensed and catered to his need for humiliation.  But Carol had finally called a halt to this.  And only then did he begin to really love her?  He couldn’t figure it out.  She was like a goddess to him.  She asked him questions, key probing questions that would dig into his psyche, and pull at and uproot all kinds of things that he hadn’t known existed in him.  Carol had become his confessor—perhaps a different type of humiliation.  He told her everything.  She seldom advised him.  He accepted without complaint, the boundaries she had set for him.  She knew all about Anne, and didn’t appear to mind. She did not want to meet her.

            Anne knew nothing about Carol, nor about Derek’s need for humiliation.  Their arrangements with each other were straight-forwardly sexual.  There was no love involved, though they did like each other.  They were not lovers, and only came together for the sex.  They never spent the night together.  He even found her a little bit tedious.  She was after all, young, but not at all idealistic.  She wanted to major in business administration, turn into a corporate slut and make truckloads of money.  She also gave him awesome sex.

            Carol did indicate that this was a shallow relationship that served only to reinforce Derek’s most juvenile tendencies.  He couldn’t disagree.  Then she proceeded to tell him that his arrangements with her were childish and dependent, that eventually they would have to discontinue meeting together, possible forever. He couldn’t imagine this. She had no appreciation for what she did for him, of how she filled his soul, simply through her presence.  She said that he would have to, eventually, get along without her.  To him it didn’t seem possible.  It was five-thirty, and already dark.  Finding a parking space, he rushed through the cold rain towards the café.  She wasn’t there.  He claimed a table and waited.  This was unusual.  She had always been there, waiting for him.  He wasn’t used to being kept waiting, by anybody.

            They would be meeting here at the Sun Ray for the first time in several months.  The café was virtually empty, but for Chris, the Chinese young guy who ran the establishment.  They never spoke, they seemed to have nothing really to say to each other.  He scanned through the day’s paper.  They’d run his article after all, about a new charity organization for feeding starving Ethiopians.  His editor had put him on the human interest circuit, deciding that Derek did not wear well as a writer of political controversy.  He felt emasculated.  He had crossed a professional boundary by dating Carol, someone he’d once written about.  Now he must pay for it.

            He wasn’t used to being kept waiting.  By anybody.  For Carol he would wait, but only for Carol.  He thought of eating. He was hungry, but trying to spend less in restaurants.  His hours of work had been cut.  He still wouldn’t starve, but he also didn’t expect that he’d be doing Club Med till next year.  His dirty holidays would have to be reduced by half to bi-annual.  Carol had suggested that he join her on a silent religious retreat at a monastery in Oregon.  He tried not to laugh.  While he did almost everything she told him, there still were limits.  A silent retreat?  What would he possibly do but go crazy?  Then Carol said that was the idea, to get down past the very root of his being.  The idea both made his skin crawl and his spine tingle.  And in his way he was becoming accustomed to silence.  He no longer watched porn, but upon getting home he would sit quietly in the dark for up to thirty minutes.   Carol had suggested that he try this.  She exercised over him well and prudently her dominance.  So, he’d begun with five minutes of daily silence, then after a week he increased it to ten, then to fifteen and so on.  After twenty minutes he began to discover that place that Carol had advised him of.  A strange, peculiar experience this was.  Only sex had ever brought him near this.  But it still wasn’t the same.  Drugs only cheaply synthesized the effect for him.

No, this was something new, something entirely different.  He would first pass through a barrier of sound—all manner of discordant, jangling noise, voices, snatches of music or songs, his mother’s admonitions, the names of former lovers, the obligations of his career, and his fears.  Then emerged his hatred of his three brothers, his childhood, the bullying, the abuse, the torment, the awareness early in his life of his superior intelligence, his cultivation of ruse and manipulation, his conquests over women. Then would follow his triumphs, real and imagined, over his enemies, and the name he’d built up for himself even at the young age of twenty-eight as a promising journalist of international stature. And now he was relegated to human interest stories and to have slammed in his face the door that had been opening for him at the Globe and Mail. He had lost his edge, he no longer missed having an edge.  And even Anne he had not won over, not through his phenomenal womanizing skills, but through her parking herself next to him at a bar and brazenly telling him how much she lusted for him.  Through all this Derek passed into this quiet, dark place in himself where he beheld a tiny pinprick of light.  And there he would remain until it became scary for him, since stillness and solitude can be very frightening indeed, especially with the directives he was beginning to receive.

            He knew that he would have to give up Anne.  This awareness became very stark during his last two or three sessions of silence.  The pinprick of light was also growing very slowly in size, brilliance and magnitude.  He had discussed none of this yet with Carol.  But he had recently confessed to her that his life for him was boring and meaningless, that he knew that he must change, but was too lazy to make the effort.  But he was making the effort.  He had already resolved that he was not seeing Anne again.  He really did find her odious, which made the sex so good?   Why must he debase himself for pleasure?  Why did he love evil?  Carol might have asked him this.  Someone was asking, posing him this question: Derek, why do you love evil?

            He was still the only patron in the café.  Chris seemed determined to ignore him.  Carol was late and likely wouldn’t be showing.  He looked out the window at the street and shop lights shining on the wet pavement.  He felt safe, cozy and sheltered where he was.  Chris summoned him to the phone.

            “Hello?”

            “Derek”, Carol said, “I’m so awfully sorry for standing you up.  I forgot completely that we were meeting today.  I thought that today was Wednesday and ended up doing something else.”

            “Oh, where the fuck are you!”

            “I’m on my way to Glen’s.  He’s having a dinner party.  Would you like to come?”

            “No.”

            “Derek, please.”

            “I don’t feel like it.”

            “Aw.”

            “Who’s going to be there?”

            “Dwight, Margery, Stephen, Pierre, Randall, Glen’s sister, Maria, Doris—”

            “Maria?”

            “Richard’s widow.  Did I tell you she’s here from Nicaragua?  There might be a story here.”

            “My editor won’t let me touch politics.”

            “Human interest.  Derek, please come.”

            “I said no.”

            “Derek, you have to.  I order you.”

            “Carol, don’t please, don’t play with me.  Not right now.  Please!”

            “Derek, I order you.  You are coming with me to Glen’s tonight.”

            “Yes.”

            “Yes who?”

            “Yes, Carol.”

            “Yes Carol what?”

            “Yes Carol, I’m coming with you tonight.”

            “Yes Carol, I’m coming with you tonight where?”

            “Yes Carol, I’m coming with you tonight to Glen’s

            “Stay where you are, I’ll be at the café in five minutes.”