Thirteen Crucifixions, 49

As long as Sheila wasn’t in the shade she could sit and paint comfortably.  Still she thought of going inside for a sweater.  It was early, not yet nine.  Birds sang everywhere and the motor traffic roared softly from the various nearby streets.  She couldn’t remember when last she’d gotten out of the city, if just for a day.  There never seemed to be enough time.  “There never is enough time”, she muttered under her breath, as though addressing Tobias the white cat who crouched silently near her feet.  She was painting the apple tree, just as the blossoms had reached their fragrant peak.  This might be her best effort yet.  She’d had the cat for five years, a gift from Michael and Matthew.  She hadn’t been keen on cats, or dogs, or pets in general.  She liked animals, but not as things for her to own.  Sheila didn’t like having to possess any living thing.  Because she did not wish herself to be possessed?  This choice she had already made once she’d gotten rid of her second husband.  This whole notion of belonging to someone, or someone belonging to her, she would have none of.  Where Matthew had gotten the idea of her wanting a kitten—and it was Matthew’s idea--he was always intent on ingratiating himself to her.

            She hadn’t exactly bonded with the cat.  They co-existed.  Sometimes she petted him, but had he not been so assertively affectionate then she probably but for regularly feeding him be paying him very little heed at all.  He was a nice animal, an extraordinarily beautiful cat.  Since he was here he’d might as well stay.  And this was her attitude towards people?  Not entirely, given how glad she was to have someone, even if it was only Michael and Glen, in the house with her.  But this had to be dropped on her head.  It was just after she’d had that most recent vision of the magical youth telling her to prepare when she was suddenly visited by this need or desire for someone to inhabit the house with her.  It had taken little short of divine intervention for Sheila to open her mind and her heart to this possibility.

            Being married to Frank had gotten her very accustomed to solitude.  Most of their thirty years together he had spent on dirty holidays disguised as business trips.  Not once during her enforced solitude had she even thought of having an affair.  She hadn’t even been that interested in getting married—this she had discovered but recently.  Handsome, popular and athletic Frank was courting her.  He made her feel attractive, desirable.  She really had nothing else to do with her life.  Even though she was just finishing her degree in social work, Sheila had few ambitions or objectives in mind.  While she was dating Frank she felt like an amorphous, perpetually inchoate mass—it was like she was walking in her sleep.  Having no real feeling for being married she consented to being his wife.   Caring not about having children, she gave birth to three, doggedly teaching herself to love them.  Now that Suzanne had made her a grandmother she still had to teach herself to really love her two granddaughters.

            Frank she only came to love when she not simply knew that he had AIDS, but when he finally told her how he had contracted the infection.  Learning that her husband was actually gay, had never really desired her sexually, gave her something real, however unpleasant, to grasp onto.  This had woken her out of her dream, snapped her from her stupor.  She had known from the very beginning that he didn’t really desire her, yet she still was not braced for the disappointment of finding this out thirty years later.  She bit hard on the wrath that wanted to force its way out of her.  From that moment everything in her life began to take on a new and frightening clarity.  An emphasis too strong to behold.  For the first time in her life, because of her husband’s confession, Sheila was able to feel, she could now begin to live authentically.  Now she could begin to live for herself.  She got mixed up with Leon, because now she felt entitled to her own happiness.  Several thousand dollars of her own money went up his nose in high-grade cocaine before she was able to leave him, for Sheila was determined to be happy.  Having lost her relevance as a social worker she began working at the West Wind café, because this was something that she had always wanted to do.  Bill, whom she met previously at Frank’s funeral, became her lover, then husband—the first man who had ever really done anything for her.  Then he went crazy, just following a vision she’d had of the magical youth.

            She didn’t care now about her own happiness.  She had begun to accept that it would always be there for her, it would always be there with her.  That the moment she began to seek it out, she would lose it again.  Not until she gave up the quest, becoming still, seeking nothing but… But what was it that she was seeking, for when she was still in the very heart of stillness there was nothing for her to want.  This, she had come to believe, was none other than the presence of God.  But she wasn’t religious, though that didn’t appear to matter these days.  This morning, as always, she awoke at five, sat up in bed and—for a while she went back to sleep.  Then woke into a meditative calm, sometimes drifting in and out of sleep, but mostly awake, though deeply, inexorably at rest.  Nothing could trouble, bother or penetrate this deep, rich solitude on which she had come to feed morning after morning.

            The white cat arched his back and stretched, then meowed to be petted.  With her left hand Sheila automatically stroked him while continuing to paint with her other hand.  She rather liked the name Tobias, even if it did sound a little pretentious.  Like this house she lived in.  It was the most pretentious dwelling on the block.  Certainly unrivalled for grandeur and elegance.  It might have fit in nicely with the mock Tudor palaces of Shaughnessy.  She also knew that she’d cash in nicely if she ever sold the place.  The property itself, a half-acre, had been appraised at nearly a million.  But she was not prepared to see the completeness of this house ravished by developers.  The truth was, this house had a tight, indelible hold on Sheila.  It always had.  This house, long ago, had claimed her, and now there was nothing that she could do about it, though she did realize that one day she must leave this place.  She had known this while she was in London.  She had been away only for four weeks, and once Leon was out of the way she truly felt liberated.  It was early summer and she would spend her mornings in Hyde Park strolling along the Serpentine, her afternoons visiting historical sites, churches and museums.  She loved the churches especially St. Paul’s with its ostentatious grandeur, where she would sit and meditate.  This was where she had learned how. Sitting in the nave of St. Paul’s, staring up and out at the expansiveness of this Baroque interior space.  An externalization of Sheila’s own expansive interior.  She did not wish to leave London, which felt like home to her as no other city ever had.  Even more home than her house.  But she knew she would miss her children.  She hadn’t yet, but if she stayed yet another week that pang of maternal yearning would surely visit her and visit her savagely.  Very seldom had she ever felt this maternal longing.  It would sweep over her as a ravaging internal flame—no warmth, all burning, charring and hurting.  She could remain stoically indifferent towards her children, towards life itself for copious periods and seasons.  Then this pain would leap on her like a lurking tigress, feeding and protecting her young.  She hated this feeling; she so hated feeling this way that she had often gone to all sorts of lengths in order to insulate herself against its inevitable onslaught.

            Which was what had made her house the perfect foil for her.  But when she had Leon to worry about, to fully fill her in soul and body and occupy her every waking moment, she had no time and very little thought of house or family.  On their second night in London they quarrelled fiercely.  She confronted him on his lies, his deceptions, his thefts and drug-taking.  He prevaricated, became defensive, then broke down and wept.  Then he ran off to a gay pub in Notting Hill.  Sheila acted quickly, decisively.  She left him a note, threatening him with police action should he ever try to find her, gathered all her belongings and taxied to a pension in Earl’s Court.  She never saw him again.  With Leon excised from her soul, and a clean severance it was for Sheila, like cauterizing a wart, she could again think of herself, of her own happiness, which consisted entirely in her being left alone by others.  This was for Sheila a first.  She became a habitue of a couple of cafes, establishments favoured by trendy young people, where she kept a travel journal.  Especially in one establishment tucked in the back of a fashion co-op on Kensington High Street she herself became a feature attraction to staff and patrons alike.  Her Canadian ordinariness, as one young woman put it, was the draw—so English, yet so American.  And Sheila was the sort of person with whom almost anyone could sit over coffee or tea and tell their life story to.  Yet, none of these young people compelled her in any noticeable fashion.  She would have her coffee and baguette with brie, write for a while, and chat with this one, with that one, with some other one.  Not much different from when she was running the drop-in center with Madge.  Similar dysfunctionalities, though somewhat better groomed and mannered than the street folk of Vancouver’s East Side.  Which she didn’t particularly mind.

            She wanted to stay in London.  She didn’t want to miss her family.  She didn’t particularly care about seeing them one way or the other, but she was not prepared to go through the pain of missing them again.  She wondered if she could get some kind of therapy against this pain of missing others.  Or was this an inescapable fact of her humanity that she must learn to live with, perhaps even celebrate?

            So living here, in this house, protected her, was something of a buffer against feeling this pain of need.  The house inhabited her, perhaps more than she inhabited the house.  When she returned from London it was like returning to a state of torpor.  It was all awaiting her with all its numbing familiarity: the city of Vancouver as viewed from the spiralling downward plane, the mountains of the North Shore with their permanent profile, the sounds, smells and persons of Commercial Drive, the street she had lived on for over thirty years, the chestnut, beech and elm trees, the neighbouring houses, and her own house.  The white front door and the seven steps that led up to the front porch, the fragrance of roses and honeysuckle, the pong of cat spray.  The way the lock on the door held and grasped the inserted key, and the vibration and the noise of the lock clicking open.  The faintly sour, bitter odour of interior wood and decades of stale furniture polish, the odour and taste of dust in the air, and the dark warm chromatic intensity of the front hallway.  All of these elements together conspired as a net, a spider’s web to re-capture and engulf Sheila, to hold her in thrall again in that same protective embrace from which she had just enjoyed four weeks of liberation.  Suzanne had been in to leave the mail in a neat bundled stack on the small oak table.  Jason had kept the lawn mown.  The indoor plants had been watered and were thriving.  Each room of this large house she visited, establishing afresh their claim on each other, beginning with the kitchen, always the kitchen, its creamy yellow protective ambience and black and white chessboard linoleum.   The fridge and stove were both new, but every bit as white as their predecessors.  The gray arborite table with its four chrome chairs upholstered in liver-toned vinyl beckoned her, but not yet.  On to the dining room, which was almost never used.  The massive walnut table, predating her grandparents and shrouded like an odalisque in delicate white lace, crowned by an heirloom candelabra sporting seven white virgin tapers.  Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter this room was used, occupied, enjoyed and feasted in.  On the sideboard her mother’s delicate Delft and Wedgewood china gleamed in the filtered afternoon light.  She ran her finger along the dark polished wood.  Suzanne had remembered to dust.  She looked in on the ostentatious Edwardian sitting room, at the three rose motif stain-glass windows.  Her eyes just averted the Chinese urn that contained Frank’s ashes.  The sofa in the living room looked beckoning but she first climbed the stairs where she looked in each of the eight bedrooms and two bathrooms, ending in Michael’s room, where she now slept every night.

            She couldn’t remember what she’d come in the house for.  The sound of a man urinating and the toilet flushing suggested that Michael was now up.  She peeked out the window at the rose garden, the fully blossomed apple tree, and her canvas and easel and chair that stood there like a child's neglected toys.  She nearly went into her closet to bring out all her previous paintings of the apple tree.  Against the rules.  What had she come in for?  There was more work to do on the painting, but could it be that she was tired, in need of a nap?  And she was weary. She sat on the edge of the bed.  She had slept well, but had been awake since five, had been working hard, was feeling quite stressed these days.  She was perhaps feeling her age?  How delicious this feeling of lying down mid-morning on her bed with the afghan over her.  She would finish the painting after lunch.  Sheila stared up at the salmon-coloured ceiling, stared at the naturally lit dormer window, then closed her eyes.

            She had been resting for only a half-hour or so.  She had gone deep, and seen him again.  This time he was sitting at the foot of her bed looking at her with his large green eyes, his face suffused with soft radiance.  “Get out soon”, he said, “Get out while you can.”  She felt rested, but disturbed.  She went downstairs for her lunch.  Michael must have gone out.  The easel and chair hadn’t  been moved.  Then she wondered that she would have expected them to go anywhere.  The cedar hedge was intact, inviolable and impregnable as ever.  How that young punk had got in past it she had no answer for.  Unless somehow the hedge had let him in.  An idea she had no wish to entertain.  She boiled two eggs and toasted a crumpet, to which she added Camembert and Branstom pickle.  She wondered where Michael was.  He hadn’t told her anything.  Sheila reminded herself that her son was nearly forty, no longer a child.  Not in any way answerable to mother.  She was glad to have him back, even if he no longer fit this house. Michael was raised in this house, as were Suzanne and Jason.  None of them, and least of all Michael, still seemed like they could still belong here.  As each moved on into adult life, and with Frank’s death, Sheila had been left to fill the resulting void where this house was concerned.  Now it truly inhabited her, as she fully inhabited it?  Hence this dream and the warning that she must get out while she can?  Sheila no longer felt any desire to leave, so comfortable had she grown here.  Like the frog in water that is slowly heated to boiling point.  The frog, unaware of the gradual increase of temperature, adjusts to the heat, becomes comfortable in it, unaware that she is slowly, blissfully being cooked to death.  Sheila felt jolted, a sudden shock being sent through her, nearly spilling her tea.  So that was it—she was becoming dangerously inured?  And the consequence?  She would never be able to leave here, never be able to live away from this house.  The Hag!  That Portuguese widow, who in ten years became a recluse and died here.  Apparently her body was never found. She had simply left her clothes in a little bundle beneath the apple tree, as if she had been lifted right out of them, shoes, stockings and everything.  Another shock went through her.  She remembered now, where first she had seen the magical youth.  She was fourteen, walking home from school.  Passing the house on the far side of the street—she and her friends had attained a superstitious dread of being on the same side of the street as the place—she felt compelled to pause and look at it.   She sat, nearly involuntarily on the curb.  There she was, the old Portuguese widow, shrouded in her usual black, seated on the verandah with a youth.  For that period, the early fifties, he was quite peculiarly dressed, since a collarless white billowy shirt loosely tucked into blue jeans was hardly commonplace garb for a young man to be seen in.  Even from that distance she could make out his eyes.  Who was he?  And why had she forgotten this?  The following day, her father was killed in action in Korea.  On the same day the Portuguese widow died.

            She toasted another crumpet.  The rate at which she was eating Sheila was bound to be getting fat soon.  Madge might know, having grown up with Sheila.  Her mother used to often get groceries for the widow.  She might have said something to Madge.  They had been always constant friends, Sheila and Madge, ever since the fourth grade.  She had retained her dark, fiery good looks, and still hardly showed her age.  Unlike Sheila she left the neighbourhood while still in college, and for more than a decade, Vancouver when she lived with her husband in Montreal, then went off to Europe and the Middle East.  Madge, along with this house, and her children, had been for Sheila a stable and constant fact of life.  And soon she would have to move, if that dream were to be taken seriously.

            It was becoming difficult for Sheila to focus her attention on the painting.  So far she was pleased with her effort.  Proud of it.  But she wanted to ad lib, to paint in a serpent coiled around the trunk of the tree, and a dead white pigeon, its blood staining the grass red.  Or something of that nature.  Perhaps a gargoyle or a troll, or a flock of bat-winged nymphs.  She had a sudden urge to do painterly mischief.  She was fighting an urge to paint the magical youth.  She felt a whole bundle of restless urges stirring within her.  She really ought to call Madge.  Soon.

            The phone rang.  It wasn’t cordless, meaning she had to drop her paint brush and run up the steps to get it.  Michael wanted to get them a cordless.  And why not?  She didn’t need the exercise that bad.

            “Hello?”

            “Sheila.”  It was Bill.

            “Yes.  How are you?”

            “Very well.  Very well.  And how are you?”

            “Fine.  I’m busy right now.”

            “I’m in the neighbourhood.  May I swing by briefly?”

            “Is it important?”

            “It might be.  I might have some information for you.”

            “Regarding?”

            “Your house.  Sheila, I think it’s important that I see you.”

            “When can you get here?”

            “In five minutes.”

            He sounded lucid.  This was the man she’d been married to.  She sat down at the arborite table, her hand resting on the phone like it was a cold, beige-coloured talisman.  She could see through the open door the apple tree, shining pinkish-white in the strong light.  She had washed her lunch dishes.  She really didn’t feel like painting right now.  Madge had bullied her into letting her take slides of her paintings, which, unbeknownst to Sheila, she had given to a prominent art dealer she was acquainted with.  She felt violated, if grudgingly flattered.  She no longer tried to fight Madge’s bloody-mindedness.  Still, Sheila didn’t feel ready for public exposure of her work since she didn’t believe that it was up to that quality.  It was like a stranger being given photos of her naked.  Though Sheila had never been photographed naked, the very thought of which made her shudder.  She had always been extremely modest, and not simply concerning her body.  She had always believed that any person of breeding, of quality, could best present herself by what she didn’t reveal.  Old school, perhaps, but that was how Sheila had been raised, and she had never seen any sense in rebelling.  Only once had she ever permitted herself to be seen emotionally naked.  When Michael walked in on her, just as she was about to empty Frank’s ashes into the fireplace and smash the urn on top of them.  Her son intervened and sat with her while she wept and screamed out her indignation and rage.

            Bill came in, knocking loudly before opening the door.  She wondered why it wasn’t locked.

            “Hell—Hello!”

            “I’m in the kitchen, Bill.”

            “There you are.”  She was quite stunned by what she saw.  Bill looked—normal.  Well-dressed in jeans and a burgundy shirt.  Strikingly handsome, clean, smiling.  Composed.  He sat down across the table with dramatic flourish.

            “I’ll bet that you’re painting.”

            “I am painting as a matter of fact.  You are looking uncommonly well.”

            “I am uncommonly well.”

            “Would you like something to drink?”

            “Coffee if it’s made.”

            “I can make some.  I have Sumatran, Mocha Java and Espresso.”

            “Espresso, please.”  Sheila was up making the coffee.  “How’s the West Wind these days?”

            “We’re not making a lot of money.  Just breaking even, if fact.  Mac’s changed his mind about getting that second location downtown.”

            “Just as well.  You can’t franchise that kind of ambience.”

            “Too true.”

            Bill smiled, that familiar radiant offering of his joy and good will.  Only one other person she knew could smile that way, and that was Michael her son.  Smiling not just from his face, but with his entire body, making as an offering to the world his entire unsplintered being.

            “I am no longer on medication”, Bill said.

            “You’re not?” she replied stupidly.

            “Sheila, this is what I came here to tell you.  Listen to me, please.  Are you listening?”

            “Yes Bill.”

            “I have just been to see my shrink.  He has changed my diagnosis.”

            “Yes?”

            “I had temporary psychosis.  Sheila, this is my first entire week without medication.  You saw me on Monday when I was still pretty delicate.  Then you saw me again on Tuesday.  Well, it’s Thursday, and look, it’s me.  I’m myself again.  If I was really mentally ill, then going off my meds like this, I’d be in a locked ward by now.  Or I’d be living underneath the Georgia Viaduct muttering to myself.  Look at me Sheila.  Look at me.  I’m better now.  I am well.  I—am—whole.”

            She carefully watched the coffee maker as the dark, treacly liquid trickled into the bottom of the pot.  She didn’t feel that she could sit, not yet.  She felt on her guard.  For the coffee.  On her guard about Bill.  On her guard for herself.  She felt certain that she wasn’t going to like what she was about to hear.         “Living here in this house did something to me, Sheila.”  That last comment didn’t quite reach her, as though she was trying to ward it off, to not hear.

            “Yes?”

            “I didn’t tell you about the dreams, did I?”

            “You didn’t tell me much of anything.  Once we were back from the honeymoon you were suddenly extremely busy.”

            “I was trying to escape.”

            “From?”

            “This house.”

            “And not from me?”

            “No Sheila.  Not from you.  Certainly not from you.  But from this house.  It was the dreams.”

            “Dreams.”

            “Nightmares.”

            “You never told me that you were having nightmares.”

            “I didn’t know I was having nightmares.”

            “Bill, this is not making a whole lot of sense.”  She was beginning to feel alarmed.  His face bore that agitated, exalted expression again.  She had seen him this way before. It would take very little now to drive him over.  He was burying his face in his hands, pressing his fingertips into his temples as though to keep his head from exploding.

            “Bill, are you all right?”

            He looked up at her, his eyes glinting, tortured-looking.  “I—have to leave now.”

            “Bill—“

          “Sheila”, he said, getting up suddenly, “I really must go.  I’m sorry, it was foolish of me to come.  Good-bye.”  He almost ran out the front door.  When she heard it slam shut Sheila checked the coffee, already made, a pot full of strong espresso and no one to help her drink it.  In the rainbow mug she poured half coffee and half milk, then heated it in the microwave.  Sheila leaned against the counter, waiting for the microwave oven to beep, waiting for Michael to come home, for Glen to return, waiting for the phone to ring, and hoping, just hoping that it would be Madge calling and having all the time in the world to come over and help her drink this goddamn pot of espresso.  She remembered again the warning she had just heard in the dream, to get out soon, to leave while she could, and Sheila surely would leave this house, now, this very minute, let the property developers raze it to the ground, along with that monstrous apple tree in the back yard.  Yes, she would pack up and leave this minute, if she could; if she had a place to go to; if she only could, if she only could.

            She was in the sitting room with her café au lait leaning back on the crimson divan, and staring at the Ming vase that held Frank’s ashes.  What was it she wanted to know, what really was it that kept him away on those interminable business trips.  Well, not business trips but sex holidays.  Six, seven, eight months of dirty vacation time disguised as travelling on business?  He didn’t want to be here.  Like Bill.  What was being hidden from her?  She went to the phone and rang Madge’s number.  She got her answering machine.  “Madge, it’s Sheila.  Call me at home please.”  A cigarette was what she wanted.  Yes, a cigarette.  She didn’t smoke much these days, and felt on the verge of quitting entirely, with all the horror stories she’d been reading lately about women and lung cancer.  She hadn’t smoked inside the house in well over a year.  Her cigarettes were up two flights of stairs that she wasn’t in the mood for climbing.  She’d might as well go outside and finish the painting, which she suddenly wanted to work on again.  The craving wasn’t really that bad.  She could stave it off for a while.  For a little while, anyway.

            The painting was finished.  A large black snake was coiled around the trunk of the blossoming tree, its sabre fangs bared as though to lunge and strike.  In the foreground on brilliant green grass the body of a white pigeon lay in its crimson blood. On the left stood a woman, and on the right stood a man.  Both were draped in white robes.  The man brandished a sword with fresh blood on the blade, the woman held aloft in both hands a chalice.  High priest and priestess.  They both had green eyes.