Thirteen Crucifixions 7

We're back in 2001 and we are introduced to Melissa and Stefan, two interesting young people in love.

                                                             2001

Melissa traced with her eyes the serpent coiled around the yin-yang symbol.  Clockwise, her eyes always took a clockwise route, whether she was viewing the tattoo on Stefan’s naked back, or the grime in the bathroom sink. He was in a profound slumber, his breathing slow, and measured, amid a chaos of grimy blankets that suggested a tormented night, or the aftermath of frenzied lovemaking.  She couldn’t remember when they’d last had sex.  She pulled off the black t-shirt that she wore as a nightie and looked in the mirror.  Her breasts were full, round, quite perfect.  They looked almost delicious, the slight bluish cast of the subtle veins setting off the dark red nipples, a perfect foil to her fluorescent green buzzcut.  He had lost interest in her?  Or Melissa had lost interest in Stefan?  They just no longer made love, though they spent all their time together.  Perhaps that was why they rarely or never made love?  This evening Melissa was starting her first day waitressing at the Steel Toe.  Stefan had cooking experience.  She might be able to get him a job there, eventually.  It was all about who you know, which was how Melissa got most of her jobs, including this one.  The owner of the Steel Toe was a friend of their roommates’, members of a local punk band that had adopted as mascots Melissa and Stefan.

            She couldn’t figure out just why he had lost interest in her.  She hadn’t gained weight, her skin was good—Melissa knew that she was extremely pretty.  He couldn’t be seeing another girl, since they were together all the time, and even if he was, she would have accepted it, since she was not the jealous type.  Melissa was no stranger to shared arrangements.  It was Stefan who rescued her from the nefarious Bob and Karen.  For nearly a year she was the unofficial third partner in their marriage.  She felt that she had only herself to blame, having out of sheer boredom answered their ad in the personals.  It wasn’t the sex.  Melissa had been wanting a mom and dad.  She wanted two nice mature, responsible and good-looking people to wake up to every morning.  She could still only guess what she’d been to them.  They had been looking for a buxom young punk-rocker with whom they could share their fantasies.  So they said.  They wanted her to live with them.  She thought that was okay.  They wanted her to walk their Rhodesian Ridgeback and feed and groom their oriental shorthair cats.  That was sort of okay, since Melissa was good with pets.  In exchange for a roof over her head, she provided on two levels her services of animal husbandry, given the sexual demands of Bob and Karen, both of whom she could best describe as kinky and insatiable.  Melissa had been like the proverbial frog in boiling water.  Had she already known that, as well as sex and companionship, that those high-powered type-A’s would also expect her to take care of their animals, clean their house, endure their verbal abuse, learn how to enjoy such filthy practices as she’d never guessed could exist, and still bounce happily between Mommy-Karen and Daddy-Bob—sometimes Mommy-Bob, depending on what he was wearing at the time—as their own personal all-purpose attendant, then she would have bailed on them immediately.  It had come on her slowly, gently, and insidiously, until, as Melissa was selling down the river her last morsel of dignity they sprang her with the question of being surrogate mother to the child Karen could not allegedly conceive.  She didn’t want to wish such parents on an innocent child, especially one that had come out of her own body—there was just no way that she felt prepared for motherhood under any circumstances.

            She asked for a week to think it over.  Then she asked for another week.  They were becoming impatient.  They confiscated her birth-control pills.  Melissa faked headaches and yeast-infections.  One night, at dinner, there seemed something slightly odd about the wine.  She woke late the next day with a throbbing headache and the knowledge that a man had had his way with her while she’d been unconscious.  The pregnancy test came out positive.  She knew that she would have to get rid of it.  By this time, Bob and Karen were doing everything they could think of to hold her prisoner.  In the relative isolation of their mountain palace in West Vancouver they became meticulous at controlling her every move.  They confiscated all her footwear, as well as every phone in the house.  Since they kept the office locked, neither could she gain access to their computer.  It was the middle of winter, and there was snow everywhere.  One evening, Karen told her to take out the garbage.  Melissa wasn’t going to move unless she had shoes and a coat.  Unbeknownst to her captors, she conveniently “borrowed” Karen’s cell-phone.  She was drunk and being very careless.  Not knowing when she’d have another such advantage, Melissa chose to act.  She slipped out through the back gate then called a cab, which picked her up at a corner nearby.  At a bank-machine in Horseshoe Bay, she paid the driver.  They hadn’t expected that she would have six hundred dollars in the bank, nor that she would have an ATM card.  She took a bus into downtown Vancouver where she met Stefan who was shivering in a doorway.  His was the first kind face she had seen in almost a year.  They got a hotel room together. 

            That was four months ago.

            Her tongue had recently healed.  Melissa stuck it out in order to fully admire her piercing—a little stud with a smiley-face on it.  She had got it done, just after her abortion.  One day she wanted to find them again, Bob and Karen.  Both of them: that baby-faced moron and his whippet-thin bitch of a wife.  Melissa would hunt them down, surely, she would find them, and then surely she would kill them!  She stuck out her tongue again, looked at the little smiley-face stud, and smiling to herself, she sang, “Sit on a happy-face.”

            It was already after three in the afternoon, and Stefan and Melissa were sitting in the West Wind Café.  The coffee was strong and bitter, prompting her to mix in extra sugar and cream. Sheila was serving them, and Melissa said in her little girl voice, “I saw you yesterday.”

            “And I saw you yesterday.”

            “No you didn’t.  I saw you.”

            “You saw me watching you looking at me,” Sheila said.

            “Can I have some peanut butter for my toast?” Stefan said.

            “May I have peanut butter for my toast, please.”

            “If you’re good.” Melissa said laughing.

            Sheila looked down at Stefan and said, “Stop playing with your food.”

            “Yes, Mummy.  You don’t mind being called ‘Mummy’?

            “It’s a slight improvement over ‘Granny.’  Are you doing my windows, today?”

            “What time?”

            “Whenever you’re ready.  We close at five.  Finish your—breakfast—first.  There’s plenty of time.”

            “Isn’t that when you start work?” he said to Melissa.

            “It is, actually.”

            “Can I come?”

            “It wouldn’t look good.  It’s my first day--don’t pout!  You can come in later, if you want.

            “And what if I don’t?”

            “Then it’s entirely up to you, Buddy-Boy.”

            “Then I’m not coming.”  He began to chew on his bacon.

            “It must be cold by now.”

            “It’s still good.”

            “Cold, greasy bacon—yecch!”

            “It keeps me alive.”

            “That’s MY job.”

            “Yes, Madame Mommy.  Hey, Melissa?  You know, it’s okay with me if you see other guys, like, even if you get a new boyfriend, if that’s what you want.”

            “I like it with you.”

            “Not much to like.”

            “It isn’t a problem, okay?  And you know it’s okay with me if you see someone else.  Are you?”

            “No.”

            “Do you want to?”

            “No.  Do you?”

            “I like it with you.”

            “What do you like with me?”

            “Just being with you makes me feel good.  Like, you don’t know this by now?”

Melissa reached across the table and kissed the stubble on Stefan’s head.

            “I’m eating!”

            Almost everything about him seemed understated—his faded jeans, the flannel shirt that appeared at first glance to be gray, but was actually a faded blue, white and gray tartan, and his hair, ash-gray, whispy but still abundant.  His eyes, which were a light, shining gray, like his shirt, particularly stood out.  A gentle, mature face, such as would never shed entirely its child-like aspect, and rather large white hands that didn’t appear to know where they belonged.  Melissa thought he resembled a great blue heron.  He smiled in her direction, in a manner that appeared both warm and timid.  He was talking to Sheila.  Stefan, having just finished washing the windows, came in, and collected from Sheila his pay.  He said to Melissa, “Want to look at cd’s?”

            “We should use the money to buy food.”

            “We can still do that.”

            “No, Stefan.  We’re not doing that.”                                                                       

            “You could distract the store clerk with your inane questions.”

            “Inane questions—what’s that supposed to mean?”

            “That’s an inane question.”

            She stuck out her tongue at him

“Who’s that guy talking to Sheila?” Melissa asked.

“Looks like a bit of a loser.”

“I heard that”, Sheila said.  She was standing over Stefan with a full pot of coffee.  “His name is Glen.  He is the artist who did the paintings.”

“Cool art,” Melissa said.

“I guess that was kind of rude of me,” Stefan said.

“Think nothing of it, dear,” Sheila replied while refilling their coffees, “I’ve been told worse things by nicer people.”

“The granny from hell.”

“And I heard that, too!”

“I want one of those paintings,” Melissa said.

“You can’t afford one of those paintings.”

“I don’t see a price tag.”

“Six-fifty each,” Glen said from the next table.

“You’re the artist?” Melissa said.  “Your paintings are bee-ooty-fool.  I wish I could afford one.  How long have you been painting?”

“Six years or so.”

“You look like you’ve been at it all your life.”

“In a way I have been.”

Glen McIntyre, indeed, had been an artist all his life, having graduated with honours, more than twenty years ago, from the Ontario College of Art.  He had already, at twenty-one, been “discovered” by a prestigious art dealer in New York, who had connected him with a gay cardinal from the Catholic Church who commissioned from Glen thirteen nude Christs on the Cross.  No loin-cloth, no discreet or tasteful posturing of the legs.  His passage to fame and fortune this would surely have been, catapulting him into the ranks of Warhol and Rauschenberg.  And so Glen McIntyre, to this day, might be the most famous Canadian artist of the new millenium, had the entire series, but for one, not been consumed in fire.  It was Good Friday, and he was toiling over the completion of the Thirteenth Crucifixion.  The warehouse where he had his studio caught fire.  He was pulled out, clinically dead from smoke inhalation.  They revived him.  During his death, Glen had been… somewhere.  He knew that he had seen God, even though he still remembered nothing.  The cardinal, recognizing in this holocaust divine punishment, repented, made public declaration of his secret life, and retired into a silent order for an austere life of penance and contemplation.  For years afterward, Glen was unable to paint, and he alone knew of the existence and whereabouts of the single surviving painting.  It was tightly rolled up and hidden in the back of his mother’s storage closet.  He really felt that he ought to destroy it.  He lacked the courage to do it.  

He hadn’t been having an easy time, having been homeless for the past year.  But his situation had not been critical, since he had lived for that time between his mother’s on the Island, and at his friends, Randall and Barbara, whose son, afflicted with cerebral palsy, Glen had been helping care for.  He didn’t know where he was going.  He was forty-five years old, but living like a rootless twenty-year-old.  He knew this couldn’t continue.  On an impulse he was unable to name, Glen, the previous week, had told his mother that he had to leave.  She didn’t press him for explanations.   They had always got on well, Glen and his mother.  But simply, he had to go.  Pierre put him up in his small West End apartment for five days.  For Glen, this was not a comfortable arrangement.  Pierre, still the most dazzlingly handsome man Glen had ever known, had not got over his not always nascent passion for him.  Glen read the hidden signals—not that he should either put out or leave—but that he should become the property of Pierre Valdez.   This most subtle and insidious dynamic had often characterized their friendship of more than one and a half decades.  Ever since they first met, when Pierre was a young faun serving tables at the Pitstop Café. 
It was Stephen Bloom who brought them together when Stephen was stalking Glen, trailing him to the Good Shepherd Drop-In and Help Centre in the Downtown Eastside where he sometimes occupied the re-upholstered chesterfield of Christina Wilkens, the executive director of Good Shepherd.  The couch had once belonged to her grandmother, who had died while lying on it.  So Stephen would sit, cross-legged, or recumbent, smoking cigarettes and drinking cup after free cup of coffee, pretending not to notice Glen whom he actually wanted to devour from head to toe.  He eventually followed Glen home, concocting a story that he had nowhere to live.  Glen brought him in, where for three weeks Stephen plotted to get him into bed with him.  Unable to get what he wanted, he left in a snit, reincarnating as Tanya, the evil drag queen, adorning the street corner as tarted up doll in a cocktail dress.  While they were teenagers  Pierre mentored Stephen into the street sex trade.