Thirteen Crucifixions, 84

            Here they were, curled up together on Marlene’s couch, watching the late news on TV.  Almost two months they had been back together, she and Randall, and already the passion had ebbed.  Still, she had a man in the house, on the couch with her, someone who seemed in no hurry to leave.  He had changed in the three months he had been away tree planting.  Grown up a little perhaps.  He seemed less needy, less insistent on getting his own way.  Now Marlene wanted to be with him.  This was the man she would surely marry. She knew this now.  She accepted it.  He had just proposed to her.  How could she turn him down?  They were perfect for each other.  And yet it was no big deal.  They liked hanging out together, they didn’t always have to be together.  She didn’t even mind his smelly socks.  And they weren’t particularly ripe tonight.  Now he was spending more time with her than at her brother’s and Marlene had asked Glen the other day if he minded.  “Mind?” he replied, looking authentically puzzled.  “What would there be for me to mind?”  Which simply confirmed to her that in many crucial ways she would probably never really know her brother.  Anyway, Randall was moving in with her, the day after Hallowe’en.  Marlene only hoped that wouldn’t put Glen out for rent, such help as she would certainly welcome from Randall, since she was about to become unemployed.

            She wasn’t going to miss the Pitstop.  She’d put a little money away, she could rest for a while.  And Randall had made a bundle while tree planting, giving them lots of time together.  She hated being alone.  But only since Randall.  She thought that maybe two years of working with gorgeous and unavailable gay men had fuelled in her a real hunger for male companionship that could finally comfortably surface.  Actually that was Glen’s theory, but it made sense to her.  Randall’s head lay over her right breast.  She stroked the thick dark hair as though it was her cat, who slept across the room in the armchair.  Randall also slept.  She didn’t want to wake him, she wanted him never to wake.  She wanted not a single piece to come dislodged.

            A normal life Marlene wanted.  No gay restaurant, no coked-out boyfriend, nothing weird.  Her life had always been off-balance.  She had never had conventional parents, but a father who bedded girls younger than her and a mother who stole her boyfriends from her.  Nor an ordinary sibling, but she was proud of Glen’s extraordinariness.  She had always felt cheated, of ordinary parents who stayed together and slept only with each other, whose sense of culture and intellectual erudition was only a little above average.  Marlene was white-bread ordinary.  Now she felt entitled to having a husband, two kids, a house, her cat and a dog.  Other wives to sit and gossip with about children and less than satisfactory husbands, and when the kids were a bit older, a part-time job somewhere, simply to get her out of the house, away from the TV and give her something to do.  Middle-class suburban marriage hell would be heaven to her now, and she fully expected Randall to deliver, even as she stroked his dark hair, invoking under her breath that he would deliver, that he would deliver, that he would deliver.

            “I was undergoing radiation treatment when I saw you last.  I’m better now.”

            “It’s gone?”

            “All of it. It’s in remission.”

            “You’re looking great.”

            “Thanks.  You’re married now?”

            “Yes.”

            “You sound a bit tentative.”

            “It isn’t exactly an ordinary marriage.”

            “I wouldn’t expect you to be in an ordinary marriage.”
            “Dwight is wonderful.  But he’s really more like a brother than a husband.”

            “But not a lover.”

            “No. It isn’t like that.”

            “But you’ve chosen to stay together.”

            “We’re very good together.  It works.”

            “But what about the marriage?’

            “We’ve discussed divorce.  Neither one of us wants to.”

            “So then, in what sense are you married?”

            “I suppose, between Dwight and me, that it’s more like a spiritual union.”

            “But no love?”

            “There is plenty of love there between us.”

            “But no sex?”

            “There was.”

            “But, not now.”

            “It didn’t work.”

            “Yet you choose to remain together.”

            “It works.”

            “For both of you.”

            “As far as I can tell, yes.”

            “Do you sleep in the same bed?”

            “We each have our own bedrooms.”

            “Would either one of you be free to have a lover?”

            “I suppose so.  I mean, the thought hasn’t really crossed my mind.  I’m not the jealous type, myself, and I don’t think that Dwight is, but we’ve both agreed, for now, anyway, that we feel called to celibacy.”

            “Called?”

            “Yes.”

            “So, you believe in…God?”

            “Yes.”

            “That doesn’t strike you as absurd?”

            “Megan, I’ve always believed. Even while you and I were together.”

            “That’s news to me.”

            “I don’t think there’s been a time in my life that I haven’t somehow believed, or known that God is.”

            “Metaphysics and religion bore me.”

            “No, they threaten you.”

            “What?”

            “Because you have always been such a control freak.”

            “Me?”

            “You always have to be God, or Goddess or whatever, and you’ve never seemed eager to share your throne.”

            “If you say so, darling.”

            “But Megan, that’s the way it always was between us, and between you and the collective.  Consensus?  We didn’t have consensus.  It was always the will of Megan.  With all our feminist dogma about patriarchy and male oppression did it ever once occur to you that maybe you were playing the part of the oppressor?”

            “Well darling, I can’t say that I disagree with you.  And, actually, this is why I was wanting to have this chat with you.  You see, Margery, while I was recovering from cancer, I was left with a lot of time on my hands, which means that I had time to think.  And remember, I was soon being visited with some shocking recollections about our relationship.  I was quite horrible toward you, especially towards the end when you got involved with that man and…”

            “And you made me abort his child.”

            “Your child.”

            “OUR child.”

            “Fetus.”

            “Whatever.  Megan, you nearly destroyed me.  That baby was supposed to live.  I felt like a murderer.  I still feel like a murderer.”

            “You’ve become pro-life?”

            “No.”

            “You loved him, didn’t you.”

            “Yes.”

            “More than me?”

            “Yes.”

            “Because he was a man?”

            “No.”

            “Think, Margery.”

            “I’m absolutely convinced that gender had nothing to do with it.  Megan, in matters of love I don’t think in terms of body parts.  Nor even sex.”

            “Hence, your arrangements with your…husband.”

            “I suppose so.”

            “Tell me, Margery, does he desire you?

            “Dwight?  I think he does.”

            “You don’t think you’re being a little unfair to him?”

            “I’ve sometimes wondered.  He does want a family. He seems to really miss his kids.”

            “What if he gets tired of you?”

            “I don’t think I’d mind. It would take a little pressure off me, anyway.”

            “And you wouldn’t feel at all let down or abandoned?”

            “Maybe, maybe not.”

            “I must say that you are looking outrageously well.”

            “Thanks.  Is that a poppy you’re wearing?”

            “That it is.”

            “But you were always, as I still am, anti-war.  It was a patriarchal construct of destructive male oppression.”

            “It still is.  I’m wearing it for my father.”

            “But you hate your father.”

            “We’ve become reconciled.  And he is getting on in years. Dad and I have had several long talks—about him and the war.  He had some real surprises for me.  It turns out that he’s as anti-war as we are.  A lot of veterans are, it seems.  He wouldn’t go into much detail, but it seems that killing a man was the hardest thing he’s ever done—for him a supremely unnatural act.  He believes that the war could have been averted through diplomacy and negotiations, that even the Jews might have been spared their fate had Germany not been allowed to become an international pariah; that even Hitler himself could have been stopped, or at least, redirected through peaceful means.”

            “Even I find that reasoning naïve.”

            “Perhaps.  But you and I weren’t there.  He was.  So, this Remembrance Day I’m going to wear the poppy and I’m going to stand with my father before the cenotaph.  Together we will ignore the war-rhetoric and pray that we might all learn peace instead of war.”

            “You just used the word ‘Pray.’ What kind of atheist are you, anyway?”

            “Ambivalent, I suppose.  I’m not as sure about things as I once was.”

            “Last March, when I ran into you at the lobby of the Ridge, why didn’t you tell me you had cancer?”

            “I wasn’t telling anyone.  You see, I didn’t want to encourage it.”

            “I see.”

            “But it was nice seeing you.  And it’s nice seeing you now.”

            “Likewise.  Are you staying for another coffee?”

            “I’d love to, but I’m expected back at the office.”

            “What is it again that you do now?”

            “I’m a travel agent.  And you, Margery?”

            “Nothing really.”

            “You’re between jobs?”

            “I guess you could say that”

            “Is everything alright?”

            “Fine.  There you go, worrying about me again.”

            “I’m afraid it’s hard-wired into my nature.”                                                                         

            “I’m taking a long rest, for as long as I can afford it.”

            “It wasn’t that nursing home, was it?  I read about you in the papers a couple of years ago.”

            “Everybody read about me in the papers a couple of years ago.”

            “That was very heroic of you, the way you exposed the abuses those poor patients were suffering.  I’m very proud of you.”

            “Thanks, Mother.”

            “How is your mom, by the way?”

            “Fine.  She asks about you.”

            “Well, now you can answer her.”

            “Great seeing you, Megan.”

            “My pleasure, darling.  Call me sometime.”

            “I will.  Come visit us.”

            “Your husband won’t mind?’

            “No.  He’s very open minded.”

            “He’s a playwright, isn’t he?”

            “Yes.  A well-known one.”

            “I loved his remake of the Crucible, especially the lesbian overtones among the witches. Oh yes, I would love to meet him.”