Thirteen Crucifixions, 56

They needed to talk, he and Alice.  Derek knew they could no longer leave things hanging.  Together they would have to agree that it was over.  Or in suspension.  He was often in the habit of resuming discontinued romances.  First he had to get home, watch a video, jerk-off, then shower.  She might not be in, she might not be answering her phone.  Alice had been very good to him.  She had remained involved without seriously involving him.    What he loved most about loving mature women.  They always knew when to let go.  And Carol?  She frightened him.  No, she terrified him.  Those damn hundred-watt eyes of hers—they could almost burn a hole in a wall. Why had he given her his card?  And now that it was established that she had Dwight Llewellyn—THE Dwight Llewellyn—as a friend and protector… Bye-bye to his little revenge strategy.  He had always had a vindictive nature.  He knew this, he had cultivated this, and he was proud of it.  The youngest of four brothers and by far the most brilliant, good-looking and charming, Derek had to scheme, manipulate and weasel his way around each of those morons just to get and secure for himself whatever he could get his hands on.  They had often beaten him.  Savagely.  So, he would set them up, each of them, for a fall. Always Mother would come to his rescue.  He was her favourite, by far.  Never had she laid a hand on him, though the others had all been routinely spanked and worse.  He was five years old when his father died in a boating accident.  Derek always got his revenge.  He didn’t know what to do about Carol.

            He knew that she was attracted to him.  She also didn’t like Derek, or she didn’t like what he stood for.   And what did he stand for?  Nothing.  He had no sense of morality, no concept of right and wrong.  Only of gaining, getting, triumphing, treading underfoot whomsoever should get in his way or oppose him.  Alice found appalling his lack of ethics, but never seemed to think of that when he was raising her to the extremes of passion.  Oh, she was easy to please, and so willing to pleasure.  And Carol?  Another blonde.  Wholesome, not particularly glamourous.  Until today.  She had done nicely at making herself beautiful for him today.  But otherwise, as sensible, straightforwardly good for you as a bowl of crunchy granola.  Which he supposed made Alice eggs benedict?  He often compared the women in his life to food.   And he was suddenly hungry.  He hated cooking.  He could stop at Gi-Gi’s on the way home.  Or pick up some take-out Chinese.  Maybe KFC?  Anything.  If it was food it was good.  And if it was good it was food?  At least as far as his women were concerned.  His women.  Not that he claimed rights of possession, since Derek had never been the jealous, possessive type.  He often enjoyed threesomes and even foursomes or fivesomes. During which he was usually fluently bisexual.  He had never fancied himself as being attracted to men, but if they were sharing a woman between them his mouth and his hands would go anywhere.

            Writing again about Carol had really been an empty threat.  His editors had told him enough already!  They were not going to be running any more copy about Ms. Hartley-Atkinson.   Still, whether empty or not, he was not used to his threats being thwarted.  Especially concerning women.  He would have to learn how to lie better.  But he was already an accomplished liar.  Twice already the Press Council had nearly suspended his license because of his highly creative treatment of facts.  It was all the same for Derek, fact or fiction.  Whatever made the best copy.  But he badly needed to see Alice.  He wanted one final hurrah with her—he always liked formalizing a break-up with sex, though the women were seldom very willing.  Still, the sex in such circumstances was usually awesome, though he still had three rape charges pending.  He liked having his fun.

            “The answer is no.”

            “How can you be sure?’

            “Have we not agreed that it’s over?”

            “Of course we have.”

            “Then why do we continue sitting in here?  One of us must leave.”

            “I’m kind of comfortable right now.”

            “And I don’t want you following me home.”

            “I promise.”

            “You really shouldn’t be drinking if you’re going to be driving.”

            “You have a nice warm couch.”

            “The answer is no.”

            “And an even nicer bed.”

            “Derek, please leave.”

            “You were leaving, remember?”

            “I can’t have you drinking and driving.”

            “It’s my car.”

            “You could injure yourself.”

            “It’s my life.”

            “And you might injure someone else, which would be worse.”

            “I’m glad you care so deeply about me, Alice.”

            “Then you’ll take a cab home.”

            “I’ll take it straight to your apartment.”

            “I’m sleeping alone.  We have agreed it is over, haven’t we?”

            “One last night together will end it beautifully.”

            Alice rose up, an imperious Hera.  “I’m leaving.”

            Derek also got up.

            “If you follow me I shall call the police.”

            “You’re no fun.”

            “Sit down!”

            “Not till we’re finished.”

            “We are finished.”

            “Then why are you still here?”

            “All right, then, I’m leaving. Don’t follow me.”

            “I’m just seeing you safely to your car.  It’s dark.”

            “I can see myself safely to my car.  Derek, I mean it. I shall ask the manager to notify the police.”

            “You’re no fun at all.”

            “Stop following me.”

            “I was on my way to the washroom.”

            “It’s that way.  Excuse me, Harold, yes, I am afraid I’m going to be needing some assistance.”

            “You want me to call 911”, the bar tender said.

            “Could you please?”

            “He only understands brute force.  Here, sit here at the bar with me till they’ve arrived.”

            “Glen, thank heavens, you’re home. I haven’t woken you, I hope, I know it is rather late.”

            “Yeah, I’m still up, Mom.  I just got home.”

            “Where were you?”

            “At work.  I haven’t had time to tell you that I just got a job at the Pitstop Eatery.”

            “Of all places.  Well, do be careful there.  I wouldn’t want you to be mistreated.”

            “I’ve got big sister to protect me.  It was her idea.”

            “Then I shall have a word with her.  Press ganging my son into that sort of environment.”

            “You sound like an Edwardian matron.  What’s up?”

            “What do you mean what’s up?”

            “Well, you’re not in the habit of calling me at eleven p.m., and I’ve seldom heard you sound this agitated.  I mean, you’re never agitated.  Won’t you tell me what’s happening with you?”

            “I was almost raped.”

            “Mom.”

            “I’m sorry—I’m sorry, dear, I’ll try to compose myself.”

            “No, don’t be sorry.  You have a right to cry.”

            “Glen, please, can you come over?”

            “Right now?  Yes, I’ll get a cab.”

            “Please, darling.”

            “It’s okay, Mom, it’s okay.  Look, I’ll hang up and call a cab.  I’ll call you as soon as one arrives.”

            “Thank you, dear, thank you so much, darling.”

            “Okay, I’m going to go now.  I’ll call you right back.”

            “Promise me.”

            “I promise, Mom.  I love you.”

            “Glen?”

            “Yes, Mom.”

            “Please, please don’t say anything to Marlene.  Let me be the one to tell her.  Please.”

            “Does Doris know?”

            “I didn’t want to disturb her this late.”

            “What about that guy you’ve been seeing, Derek?”

            “Glen, please get over here right away!”

            She hung up.

            Dwight was such a gentleman, almost everything a woman would look for in a man.  He reminded Carol of Richard.  A hand over here, his left foot there, and his head, that beautiful handsome intelligent head.  Blown to pieces in the high hills of Mesoamerica.  They hadn’t had much time together, because his work occupied so much of his life.  Carol could continue her studies, work for the Peace Coalition, and keep the bed warm for Richard, who certainly was glad to have her warm easy body to come home to at the end of a long day.  He didn’t often have energy left for love-making, and often Carol would just cradle that big beautiful lion’s head of his in her arms as together they drifted off to sleep.  Living with Richard was for her a stabilizing, normalizing experience.  He was for her like a big round loaf of fresh baked whole grain bread. Especially after her two years of unreality with Stan, the husband that never was.  It was Suzanne who had offered rapprochement.  For several weeks, drifting into months, Carol had tried to ignore both of them.  She would grunt in forced cordiality should she happen on either one of them in passing.  Stan wouldn’t even look at her.  And Suzanne?  One day she knocked on Carol’s door.  She needed hair-cutting models and would Carol like to volunteer.  Carol declined, she kept her hair long, no one ever cut it for her, but finally she relented enough to permit Suzanne to cut off her split ends, which she had aplenty.  Suzanne remained for coffee and out of heart-felt gratitude she opened to Carol like an orchid following a monsoon.

            Dwight had driven her home.  Derek was standing under the oak tree in front of the house, smoking.

            “Can I drop you anywhere, Derek”, Dwight said from his car window.

            “Thanks, but I have a car.”

            “Then may I drive you to your car.”

            “I can walk to it.  It isn’t far.”

            “Then start.”  Derek began to move away.  “Go inside”, he told Carol.  “I can wait out here for a while.”

            “Are you sure?”

            “It isn’t a problem.”

            Stan and Suzanne’s lights were on.  She rapped on their door.  Stan opened it.

            “I just caught that journalist outside by the tree.”

            “Your stalker?  Why don’t you sleep in our guest room tonight?”

            “Are you sure?  I think I’ll be okay.”

            Stan stared past Carol, his dark eyes focused, as though to make out the obscure details in a distant painting.

            “Which way did he go?’

            “East, I think.”

            “Whose car is that?”

            “Dwight.”

            “Who?”

            “He’s okay.  You haven’t met him.  He drove me home, and said he’d wait here for a while, till Derek’s out of the way.”

            “If that guy comes back then phone us, or come downstairs.”

            “Thanks.”

            She hadn’t fancied the idea of sleeping in Stan and Suzanne’s guest-room.  It used to be her own bedroom.  Carol didn’t want to visit.  She’d thought of inviting Dwight up for a drink and would have had it not been so late.  Not that he’d have accepted, though surely there’d be nothing to fear, with either of them.  But they had only just met, and it was always better to be decorous, especially with those whom one didn’t know well.  And perhaps with those whom one knew too well?  Once, while making love, instead of screaming out Richard’s name as was Carol’s usual wont, she murmured most elegantly, “Oh, why good evening, Mr. Bertholdt.”  He thought it was very funny and Carol herself had not known what had come over her.  Between them this soon became custom.  “Mr. Bertholdt, how very good to see you”, became code for being in the mood, to which he would reply, “Why, Miss Hartley-Atkinson, nothing would please me more.”  Stan would become “Mr. Jenkins”, and Suzanne “Miss LaFontaine.”  Doris, Mrs. Goldberg, Glen Mr. McIntyre, and Dwight Mr. Llewellyn.  Quaint, Victorian.  If everyone were to begin addressing one another in the formal, would this bring about world peace?  It didn’t stop World War I.  She only stopped doing it when Richard told her how kinky it was for him being decorously addressed during sex.  “Why, Mr. Bertholdt, you arouse me most eloquently in my nether regions.”  She actually said this to him once while he was pleasuring her one evening.  He stopped immediately and burst out laughing.  They never finished that night.  Carol owed it to the fact that, in college, she was reading both an awful lot of Henry James and Henry Miller.

            And Mr. Merkeley?  She looked out the window facing the street.  Dwight’s car was still there.  She went to the fridge and reached for some left over pasta salad.  She was trying once and for all to give up smoking.  She felt sufficiently tired, but knew that she would not be able to sleep.  She lay stretched on her bed and reached for the Gandhi biography she had been discontiguously reading.  It was far more informative, and accurate, than the blockbuster film—and she was loath to admit that she much preferred the film. Doris had dismissed it as “visual hagiography”, but that was the appeal for Carol.  She still wanted to live in a realm where authentic saints, demi-gods of unassailable virtue, could still exist, and mentor and lead her to that ever-elusive spiritual perfection.  She supposed that Jesus was it.  That He always would be it, but Jesus still reminded Carol of her fundamentalist preacher father, his lectures, his stern admonitions, his temper, his beatings, his controlling exactitude over every micron of her existence.  Intellectually, she knew that this was not the same Jesus, and to prove it, recently she had consecutively read the four Gospels.  She still heard her father’s thundering prophet voice from the pulpit on every Sunday of her enforced piety.  The voice of Jesus was weaker.  But it was gaining in strength.  So, for now, she would have to settle for Gandhi, and perhaps Mother Teresa, even though she was Christian, but also Catholic, which was good since her father believed that all denizens of the Roman Church were consigned to the outer darkness and the eternal fires of hell. 

            The phone rang.  The machine could take this one.  It was Derek’s voice.  “You still have my card, Carol, and I expect you to use it.  I’m not going to stand out there all night and wait for you to throw down your long tresses for me to climb.  I need my beauty sleep.  Ta-ta, my beauty.  Sleep.”  She played the message back once, then again, then a third time.  She looked out the window. Dwight had gone home.  She had heard sadness in Derek’s voice, sadness and loss.  Even though she felt tired, and knew that she must sleep, Carol was bracing herself for another night of lying wide-awake in bed.  She suddenly regretted not having a television.  Usually she did nicely without it.  But such nights as these were made for television.  She looked again out the window down on the street below.  No one walked or stood there waiting for her.  Returning to her bed she reached again for Gandhi.

            Pierre reclined on the bed, rolling a joint.

            “He’s at it again”, Stephen said.

            “Who?”

            “Our window-studly.  Ooh—he’s smiling.”

            “What’s he wearing?”

            “Nothing.  Come have a look.”