Friday, 9 January 2015

Thirteen Crucifixions, 71


Derek had never given up pornography on Carol’s account, so why had he no taste for it now?  He stared at the dark TV screen and ignored the shelf-loads of videos that lay hidden against the wall.  He hadn’t troubled to turn any lights on.  He didn’t even want to touch himself.  In the sixty minutes or so that had transpired since Carol’s awful announcement he had realized one thing and one thing only.  That he was in love.  Brutally, ignobly in love.  With Carol.  This fire that had raged so adequately in his loins, and much better—or worse—than adequately, had spread and now threatened to engulf his entire being.  He had never felt this way before.  Derek had never been in love with anybody.  He was now in love.  Derek was in love with Carol.  He reached for the phone.  He even knew her number.  He had never memorized a woman’s number before.  He had memorized Carol’s.  It would stay inside him forever.

            “Hello?”

            “You lied to me, didn’t you?”

            “What—it’s you.”

            “You’re not really pregnant.”

            “Derek, why did you call?”

            “If you want me to go away, then just tell me to go away.  Don’t invent scary stories.”

            “Okay, I’m not pregnant.  Listen, Derek, I have company right now.”

            “Who?”

            “Dwight and Margery.”

            “Don’t tell them anything.”

            “I’ve already told them about the mole on your left testicle, darling.”

            “You fucking cow!” He slammed down the phone, then picked it up and dialled again.

            “Hello?”

            “Carol.”

            “Yes, Derek?”

            “I-I love you.”

            “I love you too.”

            “Can I see you tomorrow?”

            She paused.  He could hear her mumbling something to her guests.

            “Meet me at the Sun-Ray tomorrow at five.  We’ll talk there.”

            “What about?”

            “Everything, Derek.  We have to get it all out in the open if anything’s going to work between us.”

            “Okay, darling.  I love you.”

            “’Bye.”

            He sank back in his chair in his dark apartment and smiled out into the emptiness that surrounded him, the emptiness that was him.  Tomorrow he would see her.  And he loved her, he even had just told Carol that he loved her and surely her response was more than mere politeness and good manners.  And she wasn’t pregnant.  They would have dinner together, just them, for two, but somewhere else, that new French place near Gastown—so what if they had to step over derelicts in the gutter in order to get there?  Tomorrow would be his dancing day as he dwelt with the woman he loved.  She wanted him.  She still wanted him.  No woman had ever wanted him back.  She must think he’s special.  She must see that he is special.  He lit a cigarette and inhaled and exhaled the bitter smoke with the contentment of a Belgian school girl blowing bubbles in the public gardens of Brussels on a Sunday afternoon in June.





            “Good Gawd!  What have you done to your hair?”

            “I cut it off last night.”

            “You look like a death camp survivor.”

            “You’ve always been a flatterer.”

            “It was so beautiful.  Why did you get rid of it?”

            “Time for a new look.  A new self.”

            “You haven’t got any self.”

            “Please don’t start.”

            “There is no such thing as a self.  That’s the big illusion, the great lie.  Don’t you see that yet, we’re nothing but systems of complex chemical reactions.”

            “Whatever you say, Derek.”

            “How is your salade nicoise?”

            “A little short on the olives.”

            “You like olives?”

            “I love olives.”

            “Then let’s pick up a jar on our way back.”

            “Our way back?”

            “To my place.”

            “I’m not going to your place.”

            “I’m buying your dinner.”

            “Which means I owe you.”

            “Well, yes.”

            “Derek, I don’t owe you.”

            “C’mon, Carol, you have to compensate for last night.”

            “There’s nothing to compensate.  It’s over.”

            “Carol.  You said that you love me.”

            “Of course I love you, but—”

            “—But not like that.”

            “Well, do I have to?”

            “Yes.”

            “Why?”

            “I’m entitled.”

            “Horse shit.”

            “Come home with me, Carol.”

            “We have things to discuss.”

            “At my place.”

            “We can do it all here.”

            “We are not airing our linen in public.”

            “You’re a journalist, for fuck sake.  Get used to it.”

            “Yes.”

            “Yes, who?”

            “Yes Mommy.”

            “And we are going to talk about our relationship.”

            “Yes Mommy.”

            “And we are going to reach a compromise.”

            “Yes Mommy.”

            “Stop calling me ‘Mommy’”

            “C’mon, you have to play.”

            “I’m not playing right now.”

            “If you’re not going to play by the rules then I’m not going to cooperate.”

            “You will cooperate or…”

            “Or what?”

            “Or I’ll shove a wooden rolling pin up your ass and give you slivers.”

            “Will you turn it and make it rotate?”

            “Yes I will.”

            “Oh, you’re a mean mean mommy.”

            “So now you are going to cooperate.”

            “Yes Mommy.”

            “We are not going to be lovers now, or at least not for a while.”

            “Yes Mommy.”

            “Bondage and discipline and humiliation can be fun once in a while, but please, not every fucking night.  I would like to relax with vanilla sex for a while.”

            “Yes Mommy.”

            “You are not capable of having a normal relationship.”

            “No Mommy.”

            “And I don’t have the emotional resources in order to cope with your kinky demands.”

            “No Mommy.”

            “But Derek, I love you.  I do, I do, I do so love you.”

            “I love you Carol.  You are the first woman I’ve ever loved.  Honest.”

            “I believe you.  I see it in your eyes.  This is the first time your eyes have ever looked true to me.  But Derek, right now, I don’t want to have a sexual relationship.  Not with you, not with anyone.”

            “But—”

            “Sex is cancelled until further notice.”

            Yes Mommy.”

            “We have both been bad, and now it is time for us to learn how to be good.”

            “Yes Mommy.”

            “I am not your mommy.”

            “No.”

            “I am your sister.”

            “Yes.”

            “And we will meet, here again next week at the same time.  Nowhere else.  We will arrive separately, and we will depart separately.”

            “Yes.”

            “Now I am going to pay you my share of the bill, then I am going to leave.  You are not to follow me.”

            “Yes.”

            “Yes who?”

            “Yes Carol.”

            “Goodbye Derek.”

            “Good bye Carol.”

            “I love you.”

            “I love you.”

            “You will come here next week at five.  Thursday.”

            “Yes Carol.”

            “Have a good week, my love.”

            “I shall think of you every moment.”

            “Only when necessary.”

            “Yes Carol.”


            He didn’t follow her home.  And there was no message on her answering machine.  Carol felt empty.  She would have to get used to it.  She filled the kettle, ran her hand across her stubble and sat down at the table.  She was trying to interest herself in the current issue of Mother Jones that lay in front of her.  Doris had given it to her this morning, when they had breakfast together.  A warm reunion, Carol felt affirmed of their friendship.  Doris was kindness, kindness and more kindness.  All kindness.  Carol had never been treated to her shadow side.  On hearing this recently, Margery had suggested that maybe she didn’t trust her, that their closeness was an illusion that Carol would have to divest herself of.  She couldn’t say that she really knew Doris Goldberg.  For years she had held her in awe, as one above her, a superiorly evolved being, and thus for her Doris would always be.  She had commented on Carol’s new look and asked her if everything was well with her.  She lied—she had cut off her hair because it was a bother to take care of, and she quite liked the punky new look her buzzcut had given her.  She even thought that she might get Suzanne to colour it black for her—or bright orange, that would be so Annie Lennox.  But whatever.  She knew that was not why she cut it.  Early this morning Suzanne had completed the job for her, choking back her tears over the violence with which Carol had just ravaged herself.  Maybe she had been foolish. It was hard to say.  What Carol was not welcoming was this recent tendency of, well, not exactly lying, but employing deception.  And it was becoming a little too easy for her.  She could have told Doris everything about Derek.  Not everything but enough to provide her with a concrete image of how she’d been passing her summer.  Surely she trusted Doris, but how could she continue trusting someone whom for so long she had known only as goodness personified?  Why did she feel she owed everyone explanations?  Well, with the kind of parents she had—the usual excuse.  She had been abused, physically somewhat—her father had a mean way with his belt, her mother with the wooden spoon. Emotionally for sure.  Where were you, just now?  Who were you with?  Do your homework, work harder in school, don’t tease your brother, go see your grandmother, be polite to your uncle, smile more, it is a sin not to smile.  Be a good example, be a witness for Christ.  God is always watching.  Mom and Dad and God are always watching, Santa Claus and Big Brother;  gonna find out who’s naughty and nice.  Carol was a good girl, a dutiful daughter, a good Christian witness, a good example.  She was the only girl in school not permitted to wear her skirts above the knee.  She wasn’t allowed to wear make-up or to have boyfriends, though she’d suffered her share of incapacitating crushes.  Her parents, both of them, and God, terrified her.  Knowing what a sin it was to lie, she employed deceit when she went away to Victoria, not to nursing school where she could acquire one of the few honourable professions open to decent Christian young women, but to the University to study arts and comparative religion.  She remained a good girl, carrying with her her imposed vacuum of Victorian era propriety.  Her hemlines still concealed her knees.  Her clothing was generally too loose, concealing and ill-fitting to show that she had a worthy figure.  She avoided boys.  She studied. Hard.  Then she discovered the works of Thomas Merton, Gandhi and Martin Luther King.  These ones, these exemplary lives and teachings Carol read and studied voraciously.  They fed her, and there in her bedroom one day, while studying for midterms Carol finally discovered what her parents had never succeeded in drubbing into her: the reality of Jesus Christ in a form which she could recognize, experience and absorb.  She would have to tell them, her parents.  Finally, after almost a year, she visited them.  Christmas and Thanksgiving had been too busy and distracting to necessitate any confessions.  At the kitchen table in her family home Carol, trembling from head to foot, told her mother and father everything.  That she had lied, that she was studying in university forbidden knowledge, and that finally she had found God.  Both her parents listened in ashen-faced silence.  Her father, the Reverend James Hartley, finally opened his mouth and spoke.  “You are no longer our daughter.  Leave this house immediately.”

            Carol still hadn’t fully recovered.  The care she had rendered her mother during her illness had indeed brought them close together, and her father acknowledged a brief truce.  And even though Carol’s mother had become again, indeed had always remained so, both towards Carol and her homosexual brother, her father resumed his hard, hostile silence.  Yes, she had successfully bullied him into submission, and there he remained a lonely and bitter aging man.  His church had disfellowshipped him on the basis of the accumulated grief caused by his righteous cruelty.  Carol’s mother would no longer submit to him.  Carol was becoming concerned about him—he was already pushing seventy—his blood pressure was soaring, and he’d recently undergone two minor but frightrening strokes.  She felt she should get over to see them, and soon.

            Only once had her father ever touched Carol in a way that was spiritual and good.  Her brother Thomas was with her at the family home, assisting in their mother’s recovery from breast cancer.  Briefly their father expressed tolerance if not affection towards both his prodigal and errant children.  They all attended church together, Carol and Thomas sitting side by side in the backslider’s section in the back by the door.  It was May with dramatic skies and air full of fragrance and anxiety and the small renegade Baptist church had at most two dozen faithful remaining of a congregation that had once filled the one hundred fifty capacity chapel.  A vagrant fly was investigating the back of the pew in front of them.  Their mother, who normally sat at the front had situated herself between her two children, and Carol knew that their mother had always, and always would, love them, and that her love had long ago eclipsed whatever obligation she had felt towards her husband.  She had admitted to Carol and Thomas both that if she still loved her husband that it was only in the most elementary aspect of Christian charity.  Her illness had made him remote and hostile towards her, at times verbally abusive.  And that now the disfigurement caused by her mastectomy had alienated him completely.  She struggled against bitterness, she knew she had failed somehow as a Christian wife, and despaired of ever finding God’s forgiveness.

            The Reverend James Hartley based his sermon on a passage from Ezekiel that stated that God would dwell among his people, that he would be their God, and they would be his people, that all people would know him intimately, that he would write his laws in their minds and on their hearts, that he would remove from his people the heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh.  A heart of flesh.  A beating, pulsing human heart.  A loving heart.  A feeling and broken heart God would give his people.  A tender and vulnerable heart, open and receptive.  She had never in her life heard him preach so, speak so, imply so.  Carol was shocked, scandalized and flabbergasted.  She had never seen her father naked, and surely this must be worse, much worse as he stood there at the pulpit skinned, peeled and flayed.  She found him horrifically beautiful in this his public vulnerability and brokenness.  The Elijah figure, the Thundering Elijah voice of prophecy, judgement and eternal punishment for recalcitrant sinners was nowhere to be seen or heard on that Sunday morning.  In her heart Carol had quavered and trembled at this visitation from God On High, as in her heart she secretly despised and loathed this first-ever and primal show of weakness in her father.

            Following the service he had retreated to his usual remoteness.  There was a slight flicker in his search-light eyes, the turquoise eyes of moral authority that were Carol’s inheritance from her father.  He muttered and mumbled in his usual terse monosyllables.  He spent the rest of the day locked in his study.


            The sun was beginning to set, its amber and gold radiance casting green fire upon the leaves of the cherry trees, etching on the white wall that surrounded Mahatma Gandhi patterns of exquisite pale gold and soft blue.  She stared long and hard at the old man’s face.  “Are you He?” she asked him.  “Are you the One?”  She looked again at the fiery-green leaves and the blazing fire-gold of the perishing sun, then back again at the Mahatma’s face.  “You are not He”, she said resolutely.  “You are not He”, she said as she gently peeled the poster from the wall.  “You are not He”, Carol said, rolling and taping secure the face of Gandhi.  She sat on the floor next to her bed, and stared at the blank wall, now all patterns of gold and blue.  As the tears streamed down her face, Carol ran her hand across the stubble of her newly shorn head and thought of a lamb newly shorn, then she ran her hand across her left breast, the one her mother had sacrificed to the cancer god, one of two that had never, by her father’s command, fed and sustained her. Then her hand rested over her heart and she waited while feeling its slow, strong and measured beating.  She moved her hand down across her stomach, to rest over her recently vacated womb.  She wept silently, heeding not the shrill whistle of the kettle, as she beheld intently the pattern of light on the naked wall, as the gold lozenges shrank into little pools of fire and drops of freshly spilled blood.




No comments:

Post a Comment