Thirteen Crucifixions, 74

“Where do you suppose he’s got to?”

            “Michael?  He’s still on the Island.”

            “At that community?”

            “Yes. Randall saw him there just the other day.”

            “He’s coming back, isn’t he?”

            “I reckon so.”

            “They were sitting in the room where Glen slept and did his painting.  Lazarus was reclining on the bed looking at a magazine.  Glen was painting on a large canvas.  Sheila had offered him a different room for painting in but he was emphatic about using his own room.  Outside of going to the toilet and for pretty obvious reasons, he had always favoured the idea of using the same room for as many different purposes as possible.  Separating one room for dining, another for sitting, another for sleeping, still another for reading or watching TV was worse for him than abhorrently bourgeois.  It suggested to him the kind of compartmentalization, the fragmentation and splintering of the self that he had arranged his entire life against.  Sheila appeared to understand.  He was not going to try to explain it to Michael who evidently had already enough worries of his own.  Lazarus looked as though such matters would require no explanation.

            “Have you been there?” Lazarus asked.

            “No.”

            “How come?”

            “I don’t know.”   Glen couldn’t figure out why, especially after being close enough to the community while staying with his mother, it had never quite entered his mind to go there.

            “Why don’t we both go?”

            “When?”

            “Like, soon.  Maybe come back with Michael?”

            “Are you speaking to him again?”

            “Yeah.  I guess I’m over it.”

            There wasn’t any way that Glen was going to tell Lazarus, nor anyone else for that matter, about what had gone on between himself and Michael.  No longer quite so appalled, he was still nonetheless shocked that sex had been allowed to happen between them.  And Lazarus, with his mother recently dead, and now having to deal with the brief fling Michael had had with his co-worker—he just didn’t want to add to his stress.

            “When do you want to go?”

            “I dunno.  Thursday?”

           


            “Are you sure?” Stefan said.

            “Absolutely” Juniper replied.  They were in the West Wwind, which was very quiet right now, whispering over their rapidly cooling coffees.

            “How did you find out about this place?”

            “I know a lot of people.  But it’s open to you if you want it.”

            “When can I go?”

            “As early as Thursday.  We can spend the weekend.”

            “Who-all is going?’

            “You and I.  Melissa, if she doesn’t have to work.”

            “She does.”

            “What happened to your job, by the way?”

            “I was rude to my boss’s mother.”

            “No way.”

            “I didn’t know who the fuck she was.  But she kept getting in my way, just standing there while I was trying to clear tables.  So, I says, ‘will you just move that wide-load butt of yours, you fat old cow!’”

            “So what are you going to do now?”

            “Fuck, I don’t know.  But getting away for a few days sounds like a good plan. So, it’s just gonna be us?”

            “A girlfriend of mine might come too, but no one else.”

            They were both smiling.

           


             “Come on Madge, get serious.”

            “I AM serious.  He happens to be one of the best psychics operating in Western Canada.  And he has an airtight record for solving crimes.”

            “Probably charges an arm and a leg.”

            “He said he’d do it for free.”

            “Are you sure about this?”

            “Sheila, he’s my brother-in-law, for pity sake.”

            They were having coffee in the kitchen, since the unseasonably wet, cold weather they were having this early June made it impossible for them to sit comfortably in the garden.  Madge was as usual animated, and had aged very well, appearing some fifteen years younger than Sheila.  Madge also coloured her hair, lately a rich maroon-chestnut, keeping it short, combed behind her ears.  She was still slender, and her face had held up remarkably well, but for the little lines and fissures that created a subtle network of encroaching mortality over an otherwise youthful complexion.  They had been friends since the first grade, more like sisters than their own sisters—long-deceased in Madge’s case, and living in Ottawa in Sheila’s.  She dressed expensively and stylishly, as always, today wearing a huge oversize shirt of crimson linen draped loosely over off-white gaberdine trousers.  Following a lengthy lunch, Madge got up to leave, reluctantly conceding to Sheila’s refusal of her offer to help with the washing up.

            Sheila wanted to be alone.  She wanted to unwind, privately, while washing dishes and wiping surfaces.  For her a private act, infused with a sacred reality she had never been able to express in words.  She had given Madge—who would have her way regardless—permission to contact her brother-in-law, the psychic, who actually was somewhat famous for his crime-solving acumen.  There had been some sort of scandal surrounding him too, several years ago, regarding adolescent twins—identical—two boys who had vanished mysteriously in circumstances to which he had been somehow connected.  These last few weeks had been bloody awful.  It was mid-June, but the weather was cold and wet, like March or November.  The gardens alone had flourished.  And things had been awful and tense around the house before her son had left on his retreat.  Glen seemed happier, anyhow, now that he was gone.  She imagined Michael had had some sort of design on him after all.  She did not want to know the details, but Glen had seemed dreadfully upset for a while.  She confronted Michael who--very unusual for him—gave only evasive answers.  She supposed he would also have been under a great deal of pressure before meeting up with Matthew on the Island.  She didn’t know what to make of her son’s former partner having found religion.  He seemed to be taking it to an extreme, especially the way he’d just cut himself off from the world.  Though perhaps that’s what he needed.  Religion and spirituality were very private matters, producing often alarmingly public consequences.  She wondered if Michael had got religion over there.  Or if he’d been brainwashed.  She could not imagine anyone successfully brainwashing her son—and she would have pitied anyone for trying.  For Michael to get religion would likely take only a genuine encounter with the Divine.  Such as Sheila had come to experience.

            She still woke at five every morning.  She still held herself in silent contemplation, aware of the presence of God.  She was also aware that that presence had been somehow grievously compromised, that a desecration had recently occurred in the house.  Or perhaps the desecration that had already been there was beginning to surface.  This appeared a bit more likely.  There’d been no further dreams or visions of the green-eyed youth since his injunction that Sheila should prepare to leave.  Perhaps she was feeling the beginning of disengagement.  The phone rang.  She felt like ignoring it, but couldn’t.  She always answered when the phone rang.  She picked it up on the fourth ring.  It was a market research interviewer about cable TV.  She politely declined.  She could not bring herself to be rude to anyone for trying to make an honest living, even when she found them annoying.  She felt tired, and in need of a nap.  Sheila had been feeling very tired lately. She would be returning to work tomorrow, and she knew already that she wouldn’t be rested.

            She lay down on the sofa and heard Glen come in.  She’d been rather enjoying just the two of them in the house.  He wasn’t intense like her son.  He wasn’t her son, around whom she had to do fierce battle against having to care too much.  She could see this now that he’d been gone for a couple of weeks.  Sheila had forgotten just how much energy it took her to staunch these emotions of care and maternal concern around her son, over whom she could only too easily agonize herself into an early grave.  She was exhausted, and hoped he might stay away for another couple of weeks, or months, or perhaps even years.

            


          Glen didn’t know why he was cooking an omelette.  He wasn’t hungry.  His appetite was very poor these days.  After eating and cleaning up he might have an hour or so to relax before having to continue on Douglas P. Furnis’ portrait.  He couldn’t say that he cared for the man, who seemed altogether aloof, remote and ruthless.  He heated the skillet to maximize intensity.  The butter sizzled, browning, almost burning instantaneously, the mixture of three beaten eggs exploding like a thunder clap as he poured it in, watching the sudden heaving and melodramatic bubbling of the breathing, tormented mass.  It was like cooking on the fires of hell.  The slightly singed butter and egg aroma filled the kitchen with its vague stench as he added first the Swiss and Camembert slices, followed with mushrooms, bits of sun-dried tomato and black olive slices.  He flipped the freshly cooked omelette onto a plate, and as he started eating it at the grey arborite table he realized that he was hungry after all, hungry indeed, far hungrier than ever he would have imagined.

            He was relieved that Michael was gone, but also longed to see him.  The consequences of making love.  He didn’t feel worried about him.  He had felt distant, alienated.  He was still recovering emotionally.  If anything, this encounter simply reminded him of why he didn’t have sex. He was too sensitively wired for it.  He had always been, even during his time with Timothy, actually asexual.  It was always like a thousand, no, ten thousand volts coursing through him.  And afterward exhaustion.  He had been short-circuited.  And now Douglas P. Furnis, the sexually omnivorous, was making cow eyes at him.  When would it end?

            He knew he should have turned down this portrait commission.  He should have kept his mouth shut.  But Douglas was so good-looking with perfectly molded cheek-bones and chin.  Sinisterly-handsome, and some dark little urge within Glen took charge, and before he knew it….. He was being paid generously.  This would be the third sitting.  Glen had already received a handsome advance, and much as Douglas seemed ecstatic over the progress they were making, he was less than satisfied.  So far he was synthesizing a good, almost perfect likeness.  It still seemed all wrong.  There was an ugly, leering intensity that wanted to dominate this portrait, which Glen so far could neither cover up nor compensate.  It was a subtle hinted quality in Douglas’ face that was taking on an amplified dominance.  And Douglas approved.  He liked it.  He loved it.  Perhaps he could trick himself into liking almost anything that he was being given a good price for?  It made Glen shudder.  He would be arriving soon for his third sitting.  This was like painting Dorian Grey.  He thought of backing out, of returning the money.  But Glen  needed the money, and if he was going to build himself any kind of credibility as a painter of commissioned work—he knew he would not be backing out.  He washed his dishes then went into the livingroom where  he peeked through the window for any sign of the red Jaguar pulling up at the curb.