Thirteen Crucifixions 41

2001

 

 

            Michael was wounded.  There was no doubt about it.  He had hoped to find in his mother’s house, his natal home, rest, solace and healing.  He wasn’t sleeping well.  He felt depressed, irritable.  Maybe it was sex that he was missing—but sex he had used as a drug.  And now he must face whatever it was he’d been eluding.  Sitting at the kitchen table alone brought him anything approaching comfort.  He wanted a cigarette, and had been craving one for quite a few days.  It wasn’t the nicotine that he missed so much as the ritual of smoking.  Being at his mother’s should make him feel grounded.  It usually did.  They were awfully close, Michael and his mother.  But instead he had just lost his moorings.  He felt like a hot air balloon ready for take-off.  And where was Glen?  His mother at least had an excuse for being away. She had to be at the café, though he really felt that she should retire soon.  She could afford it.  Where was Glen?  He wanted him here, he needed him here.  It’s like he was smitten, suddenly in love with Glen.  And it didn’t feel particularly sexual this time, though in a way it was.  This made it all the worse for him.  Michael was in love?  Michael did not fall in love.  Not easily, and certainly not often.  But Glen—what was it about Glen?  He was attractive.  Not studly—kind of like a washed out hippy, actually. But beautiful?   Was that it?  Glen was beautiful.  And Michael was in love with beauty?  Michael wanted another cup of coffee.  What had been left in the pot was now stale and bitter.  He looked up at the wall clock—the same clock that when he was little told him what time he must leave for kindergarten.  “When the little hand is pointing at the top—that’s twelve—and the big hand is pointed at the number four—which means twenty after. He had had a difficult time accepting that four could also be twenty.  And then off he’d walk to kindergarten at the Baptist church nearby.  Back in an age when it was still considered safe for a little boy in a city neighbourhood to walk alone for several blocks. It was just after ten.  He’d finally fallen asleep at around five.  But it had been a deep sleep. No dreams, and he almost felt rested.

            He couldn’t imagine where Matthew was.  It was hard for Michael, being a chronic worrier by nature, not to worry.  He always gauged the depth of his love for someone by the intensity of worry he might feel over them.  So then he wasn’t really in love with Glen, towards whom he felt not a tincture of worry?  How could he really tell, now at this time when his entire life was being turned inside out.  If not a cigarette, if not sex, then he at least should have another coffee.  Easy to make, and in a new mug.  Big dark blue.  He hadn’t seen this one before.  He reached to pet the white cat resting in another chair.  The cat purred, but did not stir.

            Pierre.  He had been trying not to think of him.  So Glen was a friend—obviously a long, close and trusted friend of Pierre?  All these years he had known them both, but only now had it occurred to him how well they might be known to each other.  He felt a little betrayed by them both.  Pierre, next to whom Glen could hardly rate in looks—not that he was ugly, but Pierre, stunningly gorgeous and aging beautifully did hardly anything for Michael, who regarded him as a masochistic pansy.  Not bad in bed, and Michael might have even found him quite enjoyable had it not been revenge sex.  He had never been pursued before.  Actually it was more like stalking—and men as good looking as Pierre being not accustomed to being turned down—had this been the turn-off for Michael, who would far sooner have jumped permanently into bed with Glen and stayed there with him till they were two interlocked skeletons than accept from Pierre so much as a token blow-job.  Is this what love is?

            But, Stephen?  Stephen he could have loved, had he not been so sick, broken down and worn away by illness by the time Michael had met him.  He had free-lanced for the Globe and Mail a series of interviews with exclusively gay men in the final stages of AIDS.  Stephen Bloom had been the most memorable.  His dark good looks had still been evident and the photos he had shown Michael revealed a human faun of remarkable beauty.  Rather like Pierre, he thought.  A very hard life—street prostitution from age fifteen, drag queen, he had been the product of a series of foster homes and a rather dysfunctional adoption.  But things had ended very strangely for him.  He discovered shortly before his condition had been diagnosed that his birth mother was actually an extremely wealthy Englishwoman, with whom he and Pierre had, through a bizarre set of circumstances , ended up living.  His father, who he met soon after, was an Anglican clergyman.  In less than three years, just days after concluding the interview, Stephen was dead.  The loss, to Michael’s surprise, was most bitter to him.  And Pierre who looked so much like Stephen was still unsuitable—a tawdry imitation.  And Michael had never been much available for love or sex on the rebound.

            He had nothing planned for this afternoon.  He could go to the library and check his e-mail on one of the computers.  His mother still stubbornly refused to acknowledge the new millenium.  She only used the cell phone he had given her last Christmas out of the most patronizing courtesy.  She was adamant about not getting a computer.  Maybe there’d be something from Matthew.  And he could stop at that café where he’d been going every morning for a while.  Maybe those two young waiters would be there.  Two flirty young men in their early twenties, not likely gay, but probably could still, under the correct circumstances and with the right sort of man, be “had”.  Was this it—Michael reduced to stalking coy young waiters?  But they were safe, nothing was going to happen—ever.  Because Michael didn’t want it to.  He felt like a john being serviced by two rent boys.  Yes, he did fantasize about them—constantly.  So, no, he was not going to that café today.  But he was going to check his e-mail.  But only after sitting here with the morning’s Globe and Mail for just a little bit longer.

 

            He could have guessed.  It was this room.  The three small stained glass windows were incandescent with the spring sunlight that made the rose motifs something dazzling, resplendent and ebullient.  Each window was approximately three feet square and they were positioned rather near the ceiling in an evenly spaced horizontal row.  Each bore the same Art-Nouveau serpentine grace—white and pale yellow with crimson roses on green s-curved stems.  Each window sagged just a little bit near its sill, rather like the barely discernible jowls of a well-preserved woman past fifty who is still considered beautiful.  This had been for Michael the single room in the house he had avoided, and on the terraced white mantle-piece stood the elegant and horrible reason why.  The urn that held his father’s ashes was a splendid cloisonne vase, Chinese and antique.  A gift from Matthew, as were the other contents of the room.  It wasn’t Michael’s idea: a Christmas present for his mother.  Everything from the Dunham lampshade to the plush crimson upholstered divan he was sitting on to the Faberge egg next to his father’s ashes were of the period, which this house was built in.  It had been Michael’s fatuous insistence and assumption that every old house should have one “period room.”  His mother had snarkily replied that she was finally past the age where on a monthly basis every room would serve her as a period room.  Matthew had laughed a little too boisterously and Michael as usual was battling to conceal his embarrassment, for Sheila could be extremely rude at times, but only in the presence of people she didn’t like.  She had never troubled to tell him just what it was about Matthew that she disliked, until one day when Michael cornered her about it.  “It has nothing to do with his being gay.  Don’t you know that already?”  Then what?  “I don’t have to like him, do I?”  No.  “And it’s not him and it’s not the relationship. It’s both of you.  It’s the way the two of you behave like such perfectly trained lap dogs whenever you’re both here.  It makes me uncomfortable.”  It’s because we’re both gay.  Right?  We’re both gay, we live together, we have sex together.  And he’s way older than me almost your age.  You don’t like that.  You can’t stand it.  Can you?  “Now you’re talking complete horse shit, Michael, and you know it.  Look at Harold, Suzanne’s husband.  He’s heterosexual and only thirty-two years old and I don’t like him either.”  Yeah, I’ve noticed.  What is it about you and your in-laws—can’t stand losing your kids or what?  “I can’t stand losing my kids to such insipid mediocre mates is all.  Harold’s a bore and Matthew’s a twit.  You both could have done a lot better.” Just like our mother.  “For God’s sake, Michael, must you kids go and repeat your mother’s mistakes?”  Why shouldn’t we—you haven’t learned from yours.  “Oh go to hell!”  Then you can have me with you for all eternity.

            These quarrels of course never got anywhere and Michael now tried his utmost not to start them with his mother, who otherwise wouldn’t tell him much of anything. Of course he had to pry, hit her with a battering ram, get her to detonate.  Not that he didn’t usually know where he stood with her, it was just a refreshing relief to hear it from her, in her own words and from her own lips, even if it took the heat of an argument to force it out of her.

            It was a beautiful urn, less than eighteen inches high, turquoise with a chromatic intensity of deep indigo in places, all heightened with gold filigree.  One day, just weeks after his father’s death, Michael had caught his mother trying to pitch it into the fireplace.  Being in the neighbourhood at the time he dropped in to visit.  He could hear his mother talking to someone.  She sounded curt, angry.  It was a tone that Michael knew, and feared.  Throughout his childhood, Sheila would only hit her children—which she very rarely did—if she had been worked into this calm, well-controlled wrath.  He had never known her to raise her voice.  Ever.  He came into the room.  She had the urn raised over her head, ready to hurl it into the fire.  “Mom”, he said.  She pretended not to hear.  “Mother”, he said calmly and authoritatively.  “Put the urn back on the mantel.  Now.”  She made as though to defy him.  “He is my father.  He had his faults, but he is my father.  Do not dishonour him.  Do not dishonour me.”  Slowly, without turning around to see her son, Sheila returned the cloisanne urn to its pedestal.  Then slowly she turned around and faced her son.  Her face wore a defeated despairing expression, a white mask-like effect that Michael found truly frightening.  Slowly, like she was in a drugged state, Sheila made her way to the divan, and sat down.  She was staring at the fire.  Then, out of her emitted a horrible sounding wail, deeper than a keening, but loud, ascending, as though all the years of grief she had held in her over this prolonged death of a marriage she had been hostage to were being forced out of her at once.  Michael, terrified, sat next to his mother while she wept.  Never had he seen her weep before, and never had he seen it since.  He had lost track of the time, but she had been weeping like this next to him for quite a while before she regained her composure.  They had a glass of scotch together at the kitchen table.  She went up to bed early and Michael stayed with his mother for the rest of the week.       

            It had all happened quickly and suddenly.  His father and mother had been mutually estranged since Michael was a teenager.  Being a sales representative for an international chemical firm he was all over the world cinching deals, spending perhaps six weeks out of as many months at home.  They had long stopped sleeping together, each having their own bedroom.  They were of course the last to know about their father’s medical condition.  Only when the first purple lesions of Kaposi’s Sarcoma appeared on his father’s forearms did Michael have an idea of what was going on.  He made an appointment to see him—an unheard of event since father and son had simply not bothered with or about each other for so many years.  Michael was nervous, they both sat in the kitchen.  No one else was in the house.   “When are you going to tell us that you have AIDS, Dad?”  He tried sheepishly, apologetically to deny it.  “I know the symptoms”, Michael said.  “I know what to look for.  I’ve been around it for years and I’m not going to bore you about how many friends I have lost to it.  No, I don’t have it myself—I get tested every three months, and I’m extremely careful, but Dad, please don’t lie to me anymore.  It makes no difference to me how you got it.  In fact, I don’t even want to know, okay?  It’s not an issue.  But please come clean with us.  Could you please?  It’ll be better for all of us in the long run.”  His father mumbled something about getting it from a tainted blood-transfusion after he’d been in a car accident three years before.  Then he excused himself.  Two weeks later he moved out of the house, into an apartment in the West End.  This lasted for about six months, when suddenly he became gravely ill.  He asked if he could move back home.  They took care of him.  He took Sheila and Michael aside to tell them “the truth.”  He had picked up the virus from a male prostitute, who he didn’t know, he’d been with so many.  There was no display of emotion. He apologized to Sheila and Michael, both of whom he felt he had particularly betrayed.  He was very weak now and died ten days later, at home, on Christmas Day, surrounded by his loving family.

            Michael held the urn in his lap.  He turned it over and over, caressing with his finger tips its smooth surface.  Almost he wanted to wet his forefinger with his tongue and dip it into his father’s ashes.  Then he would touch the ash to his forehead.  He held the urn arms-length and looked steadily at it in the light of the three rose windows.  He wondered if Stephen, who had died just a year before his father, might have been the one he had got it from.  Then he decided that it was something he would never want to know.  He kissed the urn once, twice, three times, then returned it to its pedestal, more convinced than ever that homosexuality must be hereditary.