Thirteen Crucifixions, 52

Sheila had gone up to bed.  It was nearly eleven and Glen, still wide awake, sat nursing a hot Ovaltine at the kitchen table.  He was drinking from his midnight blue mug and staring at the blank page of his journal.  How to enter these past three days.  He wasn’t sure if he could.  The humming, electronic ticking of the clock on the wall in counterpoint to the rattling hum of the fridge were soothing, sounds of home and comfort.  He had already come to feel at home here, even with the strangeness of this house: its mystic weirdness.  Sheila herself seemed not at all unusual.  A sturdy, intelligent woman, thoroughly grounded in the here and now.  She was for Glen a comforting presence.  An honest presence.  What she and her son Michael had in common: a raw, almost embarrassing candor.  He could safely infer that they were both persons he had already grown to love.  It was not unusual for Sheila to confide in him.  But now he felt that he could really come to know her better as a person now.  He was sure that he could be comfortable here for however long he was meant to live here.  He might stay for the summer.  After that he didn’t know.

            He did not feel prepared to return to his mother’s.  It had worked well for them both, but he knew that he was not what was needed there.  And she seemed almost too eager to have him.  He could understand that she must get lonely there at times.  She wasn’t getting younger, and though her health was good—one never knew.  He hadn’t been there all the time.  Three days of the week Glen was in Vancouver, looking after Randall and Barbara’s son, attending to his art concerns, seeing people—maintaining as much as lay within him a semblance of having his own life.  Which would not have been possible while he stayed at his mother’s—though they loved each other fiercely, and even quite thoroughly liked each other.  They had come finally to some sort of mutual resolution—their relationship had lost its tense, nervous edge.  He felt no longer at the mercy of her silent judgement, her unspoken disapproval, which he had come to realize was merely another face of her maternal care.  Alice McIntyre had never been one to readily show her feelings—she was too well bred for creating scenes.  Rarely, while growing up, had Glen ever heard her raise her voice, and never her hand to him.  He was one of those rare persons who had never been spanked as a child, nor even slapped.  She controlled him with her moods.  Always subtle, she would exert a presence they seldom dared to challenge.  A certain cast of her eyes, a twitching of the corner of her mouth seemed tantamount to several good beatings.  But Alice had mellowed with her years, had become more relaxed, less judgmental.  She appeared even to celebrate, to rejoice in her son’s unusualness.  Though he felt also like he was an exhibit as she showed him off, somewhat shamelessly, to her various friends.

            She was still well-preserved.  She had hardly aged since she was fifty, still carrying herself with poise and grace.  She was still an attractive woman.  They looked alike, Glen and his mother.  They were alike.  He simply jumped at the first opportunity of moving away from her.

            Now he could sit in on someone else’s mother—son dynamic.  Perhaps he had left his own mother prematurely, and this was God’s way of making him reckon with unfinished business  They were both fond of Glen, as he was of Sheila and Michael.  Michael he also found rather attractive, though he wasn’t interested in sleeping with him, for Glen these days was not interested in sleeping with anyone.  Alone he felt complete.  He wrote this in his journal: “Alone I feel complete.”  He stared at the entry, twirling the pen in his fingers.  Usually he did this kind of writing in cafes.  But this table seemed to serve the purpose well.  He wrote, “I am very fond of Sheila and Michael.  In spite of the weirdness of this house, this feels like the right place at the right time for me.”

            He read the entry and continued, “Michael seems to have acquired a strong inclination towards me, of which I still cannot make head or tail.  Bad pun.  Sex doesn’t seem to be the issue here.  There is an eroticism between us, but it seems to be of a rather higher frequency than the get down and dirty variety.  I am already enormously fond of him, certainly hugely intrigued with him.  At this stage I’m not certain how respectful he’s going to be of my boundaries, which makes me a bit apprehensive.  He seems to be in quite a needy state right now.  But so am I, which could be rather dangerous between us if we don’t both exercise some semblance of carefulness and mutual tact.”  Someone told Glen once that he tended to write and speak like an English public school educated upper-middle class twit.  “Quite”, he muttered aloud.  While he was in London he did not mix well with the English, with the exception of certain artists, mostly working class, who had befriended him.  No, most of the friends he made there were among the ex-pat Australians, as well as a few transplanted New Yorkers.  He was a foreigner, though from a former colony, and therefore not one of them.  He journaled extensively on his travels, as he was beginning to again.  Though Glen had grown up in Vancouver, had lived here most of his life, now he felt like a visitor, a traveller.  He had no sense of permanence anywhere.  Returning to his mother was not an option.  His sister, Marlene, had moved to Toronto.  His brother, Brent, was in Chicago.  Pamela he was intending to call.  She had offered, while Glen was still at his mother’s, to put him up for as long as he needed a place to stay.  But as with Randall and Barbara Glen could not accept her offer of hospitality.  Not in such a way that he could live there and feel that he was not splintering himself off into various fragments and compartments.  This had been his reason for leaving his lover  twenty-five years ago, and the Anglican Church a decade later, as well as his refusal to accept any kind of ordinary day job.  He would be splitting himself up into fragments of compartmentalized existence.  He would be intentionally succumbing to neurosis.  He was not taking that route again.  Not simply because he refused to.  It just wasn’t there for him.  It was a door that was no longer open for him.  Here, in this house, for now was where he belonged.  Here he could live out of a sense of his own wholeness.  For as long as he was supposed to be here.

           

            “You’re still up.”  It was Michael.

            “For now, anyway.”

            “What are you writing?”

            “My journal.”

            “I used to keep one of those.”  He draped his leather jacket on a chair and sat down.  “You weren’t here last night.”

            “No.”

            “Where were you?”

            “I was off engaging in my secret life.”

            “Where were you in actuality?”

            “Working.”

            “What do you do again?”

            “I’m an over the hill rent boy.”  Glen started laughing.

            “Oh, you WISH!”

            “Sometimes I do.  Sometimes I do.  No, I was at my friends, Randall and Barbara.  They have a boy with cerebral palsy I assist them with.  They’re old friends from way back in the eighties.”

            Michael’s arms were folded on the table as he stared ahead at Glen with dread blue-eyed earnestness.

            “Yes?”

            “Oh, sorry, didn’t know I was staring.”

            “Hey, I’d rather be stared at than not stared at.”

            “Me too.  Depending on who’s doing the staring.”

            “I don’t mind if you’re doing the staring.”

            “Oh, you flattering sly old dog you.  I could kiss you for saying that.”

            “And I might let you.”

            “We’re not taking this any further.”

            “So what kind of day have you had.”

            “It’s been weird. I got indecently assaulted. By a cop.”

            “What?”

            “Officer Crawley.”

            “You know him?”

            “Out of uniform.  At the Cambie.”

            “That place isn’t gay.”

            “Didn’t stop him.  He was pretty discreet about it.”

            “What did he do?”

            “Grabbed my ass.”

            “What did you do?”

            “What could I do?”

            “Shit.”

            “I almost did.  He was the pig that interrogated me about APEC.”

            “I was there.  When they got pepper-sprayed.”

            “I was covering the event for one of the local papers.  Then, before I knew it I was being hauled into a police van.  So Officer Crawley takes me into this little room where there’s this idiot from CSIS recording the whole fucking interview.  I only wished he’d hit me or something that I could make a stink out of.  Then who should show up here Monday night while I’m having a snooze upstairs?”

            “What was he doing here?’

            “My mom didn’t know I was here.  She wasn’t expecting me till Saturday.”

            “Oh.”

            “So she comes home from work.  The front door’s unlocked and left open, and she figures that the house is being ransacked.  She runs back onto the street and calls 911 on the cell phone I gave her last Christmas.  Next thing, big handsome Officer Crawley is dragging me bodily out of the house with three other gendarmes and I’m laughing my head off because he’s giving me an erection and there’s Mom waiting outside with this horrified look on her face.”

            “Oh my heavens!” Glen was laughing.

            “It is pretty funny, isn’t it?”

            “And then he grabs your ass today?”

            “Something I wasn’t expecting.  Maybe if I see him again I’ll put my tongue in his mouth.”

            “When he’s out of uniform.”

            “When he’s in uniform.  That’s what really turns me on about him.”

            “I’ve always loved a man in uniform!”

            Glen was staring down at his journal, though he wasn’t reading anything that he’d just written.  Michael tried to not look at him.  Nor had Glen expected him to disclose to him anything, though he had sensed that Michael was withholding information.

            “I was having a beer with a new friend.  His name is Lazarus.”

            “Did he rise from the dead?”

            “Apparently.  He told me his father, who’s dead now, was a Christian minister in the American South.  When he was born he wasn’t breathing so he laid hands on him and prayed, bringing him to life.  Which is how he got the name Lazarus.”

            “Where do you know him from?”

            “He’s a waiter in a café at the library complex I’ve been spending a lot of time in lately.  We seem to have taken quite a shine to each other.”

            “Does it look serious?’

            “I don’t expect we’re going to become boyfriends, if that’s what you mean.  But it seems pretty intense right now.  We went out for dinner then walked around for a while.  I want him to come over to visit soon.  I think he’d enjoy meeting you.”

            “What makes you say that?”

            “He needs a compassionate, understanding presence in his life.”

            “Can’t you be that for him?’

            “But I’m needing a compassionate, understanding presence in my own life.”

            “All the more reason for becoming that sort of thing for someone else.”

            “But I can’t give something I haven’t got to give.”

            “Au contraire, that is the surest way to receive it.  Trust me.”

            “If you say so.  I’m going up to shower.  What are you doing?’

            “I don’t know.  Might come up and watch you take off your towel this time.”

            Michael looked hard at him, as though to slap his face with his eyes.  Then he started laughing.  “Oh, you’re SUCH a tease!”  He got up to leave, then paused and said, “Well, are you coming?”

            “I think I’ll stay here and write some more.”

            “Whatever!” Michael said, leaving with a flourish.

            Staunching an inclination of calling Michael’s bluff and following him upstairs Glen returned to his journal:

            “This is going to be a bit of a challenge, this living in the same house as someone like Michael.  Not that I’m afraid of anything untoward occurring between us, so much, as our proclivity for savagely teasing each other, which I don’t feel is appropriate.  But perhaps this is the only way, for now, in which we can express our affection for each other.  Which I suppose is better than nothing.  But I would like us to get through this nonsense as quickly as possible.  I do like him enormously.”