This was where Michael wanted to
sleep. At the top of the house. Not in his old bedroom, which was now
occupied by his mother. But directly across, where his sister had slept. He’d always envied her this room, which
looked down on the street, and the forest of trees that just now were coming
into leaf. He pulled open the window and
drank in the clean fragrant air of April. His mother wasn’t expecting him until
Saturday. He enjoyed surprising
her. No value like shock value. He wanted a cigarette, even though he’d quit
smoking six months ago. He hoped that
this would have encouraged Matthew to stay with him. It didn’t.
Michael
had never in his life experienced so complete an abandonment. They had been together—twenty years. Almost.
He was thirty-seven now. In gay
partnerships it was usually the younger member who ran off. Michael hadn’t been dumped for another man,
neither for a woman, but for God. He
didn’t know exactly where Matthew had gone.
Less than two weeks ago he’d left Michael a note: he was joining a
Christian community on the Island, the townhouse had already been sold—Michael
had known nothing about this, but he had now in the bank by direct deposit his
half of the sale. He at least wouldn’t
be starving. His mother had agreed that
the house and basement could comfortably absorb most of the furniture. Michael had already decided that many of
these fine antiques he’d just inherited by default could well supplant what
still passed as his mother’s furniture.
Theoretically,
Michael had the better part of two months before the new owner was to take
occupancy of the townhouse. He didn’t
want to stay there, so he checked into a modest pension downtown and proceeded
to pass his time in cafes, bookstores and the library. He didn’t know what to do. He had seen it
coming. In the last six months there had
been a change in Matthew that he found puzzling, at times disturbing. He no longer drank alcohol, nor smoked. He’d
given up sex—not a great loss, since Michael couldn’t remember when last they’d
slept together. He was soon disappearing
on “retreats” as he called them. The
bitchy, catty and caustic edge that Michael had long loved and feared in
Matthew had suddenly given way to a kindly benevolence as interesting as
chilled vanilla custard. It was like
waking up one morning and finding that you were breakfasting with Barney the
Dinosaur.
He
supposed that it served him right, given how often and how badly he had treated
Matthew, often regarding as a contemptible sugar daddy the man that he truly
loved. Predictably, as Matthew withdrew
and became inaccessible, Michael had discovered like a burning bush in the
desert the love that he’d always had for him.
He couldn’t dissuade him.
Besides
his two decades with Matthew, this house had been for Michael his only
home. Large and well-made by
neighbourhood standards, it still held its own as the single, thoroughly intact
grand manor in the neighbourhood. It
still remained, unlike the other big houses, a single family dwelling. It was the stairs he had loved as a child,
the freely running up and sliding down the magnificent grand staircase, and the
narrow stairwell that led to the garret.
Eight bedrooms: four in the garret, which was huge. As he matured he came to appreciate the
artistry and the costliness of such details as the interior woodwork—maple, oak
and walnut—the art nouveau stain glass, the prism glass that cast rainbows on a
sunny day throughout the sitting room, and the lead glass—rectangular and
diamond—that separated the world outside into geometric compartments. This house was actually a mansion, though his
parents had never been wealthy, though he supposed that his father had provided
them with a decent enough living.
He was out of
work. He had worked inconsistently as a
freelance journalist. For a while he’d
done well at it. In 1990 the Globe and
Mail had run his series of articles about AIDS.
What this series had become particularly memorable for was the interview
with Stephen Bloom, the young AIDS sufferer who died two days after. Even though the celebrity status of the AIDS
cause was already cresting, the issue in this article had been eclipsed by
Stephen’s living conditions: a reputedly suicidal religious cult in a
Shaughnessy mansion. Suicidal in the
sense that the residents of this home, AIDS and cancer-sufferers, had abandoned
their treatments and life prolonging medications in order to exit into the
hereafter as quickly as possible. Likely
this controversy need not have dominated the AIDS theme, had this mansion not
been the property of the widow of a well-known shipping magnate and media
baron; and had it not been for that dreadful Persimmon Carlyle, media bitch of
the BCTV. When Michael had arrived for
the second interview with Stephen, she was already there, Persimmon, with
cameras, technicians and microphones.
The damage had already been done.
That evening, the nation was flooded with six and eleven p. m.
broadcastings of ecstatic and enraptured patients disposing of everything but
pain relief for a shortcut to the afterlife; and the various eccentric
personnel who had so “brainwashed and manipulated” these poor victims into
signing over their life savings and rewriting their last will and testament to
the favour of this pernicious collective.
Michael’s story was out the following morning in the next edition of the
Globe and Mail; and forever after he would be branded as the investigative
reporter who had exposed and undermined yet another nasty, anti-establishment
religious cult. He almost gave up writing after this. He was going to launch
against Persimmon Carlyle a massive lawsuit, but lost his will to do so once he
learned that she was being treated for a nervous breakdown in a private
clinic. Satisfied that he had been
vindicated, Michael again resumed his career, however desultorily.
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