Sunflowers (Tournesols) II 2 страница

Oh, and Gerard still had that mole on his inner thigh, too.

With our life together reborn into something of mystic wonder that we had both spent our days dreaming about, the hardest part had passed. We had both been concerned about this meeting, which was why I supposed we both prolonged it as much as we had. We loved and missed one another, but sometimes the sensation of the dream is a lot better and easier than waking up. Now with our eyes wide open and swallowing the Eiffel Tower in a blink on a daily basis, it was ironic that we spent the first few days away from Paris itself, and together in his in bed, sleeping. Well, we weren’t always sleeping, but we were spending a lot of time on that cramped mattress in his cramped apartment, drinking his coffee from stained and cracked cups, and listening to the rain drops on the windows. I was jetlagged for a long time and Gerard was simply tired and relieved. We needed a lot of time to recuperate.

I had brought my camera with me on the trip, but I didn’t use it a lot, for the most part. Gerard was my creative endeavor, this whole trip as a whole was, and I didn’t feel the need to commemorate it with my flash of light. Everything around me already felt like a black and white photograph. It was a strange image to recollect of Paris, but it really did feel like a Polaroid picture. An older one, black and white, but seeped with the colour sepia from age and constant touches. A photo that one keeps close to the heart, to pull out during hard times to remember and reflect. Paris was that perfect array of clichés, arranged in black and white motifs: the large white walls of Gerard’s apartment, the blackness of the coffee grounds that had slipped to the bottom of the maker and into the bottom of our mugs. the cobblestone driveways in the wet rain and gray dawns with even darker nights. It seemed like the only colour some days was the amber glow of the candles in the darkness or the blue and orange dancing flames from the twisted gas stove. They seemed so singular and picturesque in the lack of colour all around, but I never wanted to commemorate it beyond memory.

Some nights, I would simply watch as Gerard would light his cigarettes with the tip of the flame against his chin, and gray smoke would cover the room like the fog. It never felt depressing or somber, being surrounded by such darkened edges. It was classic, appealing. It made us feel like there was no time here, and that in essence, gave us all the time in the world. We never saw the sun, and when it did come out, we decided it was better to stay in bed, where it could be brighter than ever if we let it be.

Our days blurred into one another and the notion of time really did disappear after awhile. I didn’t know the hours of the day anymore, as Gerard was still true to his hatred of time and never kept a clock or calendar in the house. I began to refer to the periods of days in my mind as flooding mornings, candle twilight, and napping suns. Since Gerard never had a steady job, we took no real recognition of days of the week either, except we could always tell when it was the weekend because Paris seemed to double in size. Sometimes we could tell the Sundays from the others, because the café would always come out with their new specialty coffee and the lady up the street would always bake bread. We could smell it, the buttery fresh aroma of an oven churning out product, taunting us. But those were never constants we paid too much attention to. They were wafting smells and the convergence of people. Everything was in flux and constantly changing around us, but we seemed to stand still and watch it all go by. Wednesdays were the only days that concerned us, because it meant that the market in the town square – L’Hexagone – was open.

The market became my favourite place in the entire world because it was the heart of everything. People tend to think that the Eiffel Tower is the main source of light and passion, of blood-flow and heart in this place and while they are correct in some regards, they would also be fools to come all this way and then turn around after seeing this huge tower.

“A tower is a tower is a tower,” Gerard would say with the wave of his hand. “I love it, but I’ve seen it. I don’t need to always go back. Now the market,” he said, a smile arousing his face. “It changes every week. I always need to see it. Every day should be Wednesday.”

It was the only day we ever paid attention to anything different from ourselves. It was our only time that we walked into other people’s lives and invited them into our own. The rest of the time, we boxed ourselves away and we lived our life together that we had been missing for so long. We had always wanted to live together in New Jersey and now we finally could. Seven years apart, and we were making up for everything that we had missed, or lacked before. It left us tired a lot of the time, but sleep never seemed to satisfy us. Always a waste of time, like Gerard used to say, and was still practicing his methodology. It was in the market where we recharged our batteries, fed our eyes an array of images for creative pursuit, and where we allowed the world to see ourselves one hundred percent.

In the market was where Gerard made a bulk of his living, and where a lot of other artists would too. He would set up shop early in the morning and display whatever he had on easels, tables, chairs, or just on the ground for people to look at as they walked by. Some things he sold were small, like sketches of the Eiffel Tower, Montremarte, or the Louvre on small, postcard size pieces of card paper. Those were a big seller. He would draw a lot of the tourist attractions and have them set up, but he grew to despise doing it.

“I don’t like commercializing my art. If I want to draw the Eiffel Tower, I will on my own time and for my own reasoning. I hate that whenever they pick it up, they are doing so not for artistic appreciation, but as a souvenir they can hide in the back of a closest, or give to someone else in an vain effort to buy love, so someone else can put it at the back of a closet,” he lamented one day when a woman nearly cleared him out of everything ‘touristy’ that he had.

I furrowed my brows. “Then why do it?”

He looked at me like I should have known the answer. I wasn’t seventeen anymore; I should know how the world works now and how everyone gets from door A to door B in life. Money. The only reason Gerard made portrait after portrait of the Eiffel Tower and any other tourist attraction was so he could pay the rent at the end of the month, and so we could eat those croissants and drink our specialty coffee day after day. Commercialism killed him and it sucked the fun right out of that batch of art work, but it was a necessary evil.

It was obvious, though it didn’t really register for quite some time on a truly visceral level, that Gerard was not the famous artist he had once dreamed himself on being. He wasn’t a slave to his tourist postcard business, not at all. He only did that when the rent was due. That was really the only way I distinguished months in Paris without a calendar; the plethora of postcards marked the first.

In Gerard’s day to day life, without the nagging obligation of rent, he was creating art for himself. Something that he wanted to do, something he wanted to see, and something he lived to do. His art was purely selfish, he told me, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Being selfish gets a bad name in the American Culture,” he said once, and it amused me that he was now disassociating himself from the country he came from, and yet was still remaining on the fringes in this one. “It is this wrong and unholy thing to be selfish in American today. However, when one is selfish and gives themselves what they want, then they are truly happy and can be kinder to others. At least, that’s how it’s been working for me and at my age, I’m too stubborn and selfish to change.”

I smiled at his remark, giving him the benefit of the doubt. I had missed his theories, thoughts, and visions. Even if he was a little convoluted at times, I didn’t mind hearing him talk. Even in extreme idealism, he was still inspiring. He had no other purpose in life than art; he had to keep doing it, even if it wasn’t proving to be a lucrative business as he had thought.

I didn’t mention him not being famous. I didn’t even really talk to him about his art in financial terms. It didn’t seem important then; I didn’t even think of it most days. I merely tried to help out with money as much as I could. I brought some what I could part with from my savings when I came here, but it ran out fast. I made the art-conscious decision, as Gerard called it, one Wednesday afternoon to use the last Euros I had and buy an old guitar that I could play at the market. “And to serenade me like old times,” Gerard quipped with a wink, to seal the deal.

To my surprise, I actually remembered some chords and notes and played whatever I could all day, until my fingers bled. Even more of a surprise was that I actually did get money from this pursuit. Not much, but it was enough to buy a sunflower an old woman with a scarf around her hair was selling in the street that day. She was not a part of the market itself, and I had never seen her before, so I feared this would be my only opportunity to purchase something like this.

The sunflower had been the happiest thing I had seen in a long time. Its vibrant colours stood out against the black and white photograph of Paris. When I took it from her hands, I realized it was nearly the size of my face, the stalk of it the width of my pinky finger. It fit perfectly with my features; I knew it had to be mine. The purchase wasn’t a very economical decision, but I didn’t think about that. Gerard didn’t either, because after my very sporadic acquisition, it caught his interest too and spent the money he had made that day from postcards on buying two for himself.

“To cleanse our souls,” he explained. “I always feel slightly robbed when people buy my art, especially the postcards, in exchange for money. This evens out the balance in the world if we exchange art money for artist things.”

He arranged his two new flowers in his hands, one a pink carnation the size of his face, and the other, a purple-y blue azalea that was a little smaller, but still gigantic by any means.

We looked at each other like we were complete and utter idiots and started to giggle hysterically because we really we’re this stupid. It didn’t matter. We had just spent out dinner money on flowers that could light up the entire dreary feel of Paris, and it was okay that it was so irresponsible. We went home with empty bellies, full arms, and bursting with colour. We put the flowers on our kitchen table in big dishes full of water like the main course and drank the last of our coffee, scrapping the bottom of the maker. We smoked butts of old cigarettes in the ashtray until our eyes watered from the smoke and fingers singed. Our stomachs grumbled and roared in bed that night and we were so cold because our heating, when we paid it, wasn’t that good anyway. I could hear Gerard’s stomach rumble, and then as if they were having a conversation, my gut would reciprocate the noise.

“It really is a nuisance to feed oneself,” Gerard remarked, perhaps feeling left out of the conversation. “I mean, what a waste of time, money, and essential energy it is. I mean, it takes so long to cook good food, and why waste your time eating bad food? But then if one doesn’t want to cook, you must pay someone else to do it for you, and well, that’s just too much. And you have to eat three times a day! Pish, posh, I saw to that. One good meal at my café, a croissant with a lot of cream in my coffee and a few good cigarettes should be good enough for me. Maybe some fruit and bread from the market for variety, but that is all one really needs. In my mind, at least.”

I nodded, laughing a little because I could tell so hard he was trying to be humorous to make our stomachs stop bickering. He was also trying to find a way to rationalize his poverty into something artistic. He couldn’t stand the idea of suffering, unless he was suffering for some greater purpose. In his mind, that was always art.

“I guess we’ve really turned into starving artists, huh?” I commented, tentatively trying to clear the air. To my surprise and elation, he found my comment far too amusing and burst out laughing. He laughed more than he needed to for such an overused line, but the slight agitated grimace on his face suggested that it was partly hunger pains snarling his vocal chords.

“Food is so fleeting,” he said calmly, once the air had been settled. He rubbed his hands up and down my back; it had become a calming habit for both of us. “It’s there, it’s gone, and then you do it again. You’re hungry, you’re full, but you’re never really satisfied for very long. I’d rather have something stronger, something someone won’t forget in ten minutes time, something eternal. Like art, or love.”

His words had grown softer, from tiredness or brevity, I wasn’t sure. But I found his hand in the darkness and it was ready to accept my fingers. It took us a lot longer to fall asleep, but we did with our hands on our stomachs, not seeming to feel the pain of being empty, because we had so much more around us. In the morning, the flowers we’re still the brightest things in all of the city. They still made us smile.

And that really seemed to be all that mattered.

Despite some minor pain and discomfort, we had proven to ourselves that we could evade eating. Not only that, but we were above food and the normal every day comforts that people took for granted, and exploited with every chance they could. We didn’t need food, electricity, or good heating, so long as we had each other and art. We were trying so hard to perpetuate every Paris stereotype, as if to make up for Gerard not being a famous artist.

Yet. He wasn’t a famous artist, yet, I always told myself. I clung onto that conjunction so relentlessly, chanting it slowly inside my mind when we’d fall short on the heating bill and Gerard would start to prepare his candles for warmth. Yet yet yet, I’d say into the flicker of a flame. He wasn’t a famous artist yet, but if we could live through this, anything was possible. It was true, each time when I saw the morning after surviving a night in the cold, I felt like we could do anything. My faith had been kept for another night, and my happiness was returned with his arms. Basic survival became something to celebrate and illusions of grandeur became my incantation.

There would be little glances of hope when someone who would buy an original piece of art instead of the cheap postcards Gerard always made in the markets. Someone in the café remarking on some of his work, or simply the days where he would get up at dawn and paint like there was no tomorrow, like something was biting his leg and would only stop once he had completed the piece. Those days were always the best for him because he was always so happy when he was painting. They were good for me as well because I was still clinging onto some dream image I had in my mind that hadn’t really come into focus yet.

We still felt the freedom and the rush of spending our money irresponsibly on flowers or shows or more art. We could do that, and then feel some sense of security that we could still make it up the next Wednesday or next month by working really hard. We both acknowledged that money was evil, along with working steady jobs and dealing with minimum wage (which is why we always ignored the Help Wanted sign in the café window; I had resigned myself from retail labor from now on), but we also knew, despite our heavy and deep-seeded denial, that we simply needed money.

So we tried to trick it and trap it every way we could, in hopes that it wouldn’t leave us feeling greedy or jaded. Some days we were lucky; we would find money on the ground, and again, those days were good because it was like being rewarded for sticking to our art. We would be able to get free food some days, too. The old women who saw us every day walking the streets together hand in hand, the ones who always made bread on the Sundays, would give us their old loaves no one bought if we happened to be around when they were closing (which we happened to be a lot). We’d paint them pictures for a fair trade and they’d tell us they’d never seen two people like us before. I was never really sure what that meant, if it was a compliment or not, but we accepted their gifts and tried to share our own.

“I guess you’re not L’Estranger anymore,” I told him one Sunday after we had left the two women. He smiled and chuckled to himself.

“I wonder what they do call us,” I said out loud, looking around as if to have the answer appear. Even if they had given us a name, I was hard pressed to understand it. French was not adhering to me as well as I had hoped. I dependent on Gerard too much for conversation when we went out places, making him even less and less of a stranger to them and me more of a mysterious ghost by his side.

I worried, briefly, if he was concerned for the fact that I was taking his identity away, but his smile told me otherwise. He muttered a few French phrases joyfully and then looked at me.

“Hmmm?” I questioned. “You know me and French.”

“Je sais, je sais…” He turned around again, as if to make sure the coast was clear before he whispered in my ear. “They don’t call me L’Estranger anymore, no. But I can still hear them chattering away in the café every morning, or at dawn when I go for my walks. They do call me – us - something now.”

I looked up at him with wide eyes. “What?”

He pressed his hand against his chest suddenly, flattening his lapel. The dove bird appeared brighter than normal, stronger than ever. I realized then that he had only started to wear that coat outside of the house once I had arrived. His smile grew as he whispered the words:

“The Dove Man.”

My heart stopped. “Why not Dove Keeper?”

He pondered for a second, rather morosely, as he split the large loaf of bread with his bare hands and handed me a chunk. “Because I don’t need to keep anything anymore. I’m just a man now.”

Not a stranger, not an artist, not a keeper. Just a man. At first, my heart lurched in my body at this deduction. I felt like it was a removal of all that was important to him, all that formed who he was, all that made his identity. He was The Dove Keeper. It was his whole entity, it was who had set me free, it was this whole complete legacy and saga of my life – of both our lives. It was what I thought I had been coming back to see, a dream that was still cooking. But I realized slowly, as Gerard stood there humbled, but not depressed at all from this deduction that this dream hadn’t exactly turned out how we both figured. There was no fame or glory; there was just black and white surfaces where colour seeped in foolishly. He wasn’t a famous artist or a keeper, he was just a man. It didn’t mean it was good or bad or anything. It just was. Sometimes a person didn’t need to rationalize beyond that.

Even if he was just a man now, he was The Dove Man, and I was that dove, still following him home at night.

Home III

It was a few days after that when Gerard realized there was no need to stick around anymore. The colder weather had started to set in as well, a lot faster than it did in the States, and even though Gerard had spent many winters here by now, we both weren’t prepared. I had no sense of seasons being on the other side of an ocean in a different time zone. I knew I had left at the end of summer, and then one day, I woke up and I had to put on a sweater before I went outside and then later that day, I had to cave and go out and buy a jacket from the market. It was as if once I bought the jacket, it was an invitation to the colder weather to come barreling into our lives, and quite literally, into our apartment.

Gerard made the decision to leave, as he did with most decisions, while sitting quietly by himself. I didn’t really notice his subdued nature, at first, anyway. We had gotten ourselves into our own little routines, in spite of the spontaneity of our lives and not having a real sense of time. His mornings usually consisted of getting up at dawn and making coffee, sitting by the window and looking out of it as he drew. Sometimes he went for walks, but with the weather being the way it had been, he stuck to the indoors. This morning, he wasn’t even drawing. He was sitting very, very straight, with coffee in his hand. He looked out the window with an austere contemplative stare that was directed at something far off in the distance. I watched him from the doorway for a little bit, feeling invisible. When I walked past him to get my coffee, he regarded me and then, with a sigh, looked back out the window.

He took out his sketchbook next, and by this time I was watching his actions with acute interest, drew an Eiffel Tower and put a heart in the center of it. It wasn’t a corny, generic heart. It was a real human heart; with veins, blood vessels, muscle tissue and tendons. He had to get out a medical book he kept on the back of one of his shelves to have something to draw from. It was what he worked on all morning, only stopping to take cigarette breaks as he flipped through different pages to get a better look at the left ventricle. He stared at it for hours, and I stared at him, still not picking up on what was going on.

I went onto my little routine after awhile and let Gerard be Gerard. I walked to our café, not realizing it would be the last time I was there, and bought our favorites. The owner of the store had been getting so used to my presence, and understanding my lack of French. She always bagged up the exact same thing for me each time so I didn’t have to risk stumbling over my words. I smiled at her, said the only French phrase I knew with confidence, Merci, and left with my coffee in my hand. When I opened the door upon returning, Gerard looked up. He smiled, very warmly, but it was different.

“I hope you have more of an appetite than that,” he told me, glancing at my half eaten croissant. “I want to take us out for lunch.”

We ate like kings. I should have known something was up when Gerard kept going back for more and more and more, but I didn’t. I was just a greedy little underfed artist and we ate until our bellies were swollen. We had both gotten pretty thin at that point in time. With our shirts off, our ribcages stuck out when we lifted our arms too high, or breathed too deeply in our chests. With the immense amount of food in our system, our guts extended to that of potbellies, while we still kept the cage of poverty wrapped tightly around us, like a visible veil. We hadn’t been eating regular meals in such a long time, it was a relief to feel full again. Our bodies were flushed with excess energy and emotion, and we laughed until it hurt and we thought we would throw up all the expensive food we had just piled ourselves with. It took us ages to walk home, but the bitter cold wind that had started rushing in didn’t affect us. We didn’t allowed it to break our moods because this was the happiest we had ever been.

Under the cover of the Paris night sky, Gerard had decided to take a short cut through an alleyway to our place. I watched him with a smile on my face as his eyes lit up, seeing that this short cut also led us to the beloved liquor store. He returned my glance and then rushed in to get his favourite brand of wine that he hadn’t bought, he said, in over a year.

We drank it on the street like bums because there was no use in going home yet. We felt warmer here with food in our stomachs, alcohol touching our lips, and our arms around each other than we would have ever felt in our cramped, heating free apartment.

I remembered days like this in Jersey at Gerard’s old place when I was so much younger, and I remember being in my first year of art school, toiling away on vapid projects as teachers tore my work to shreds, and I didn’t think it would ever get this good again. Everything in that moment felt surreal, because it had finally become something worth remembering. It felt like I was living a fantasy, a perfect cliché, a postcard, a black and white movie reel. I thought this had all been possible because I was finally in Paris. I was in the market making music again, I was waking up and taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower at dawn, and I was walking and living and eating in this foreign place that I was beginning to get to know like the back of my hand. But I realized then, looking at Gerard as he laughed through stained teeth, that this could have happened anywhere. I romanticized the notion of Paris so much; everything seemed like a dream, not because of the place, but because of him. In reality, the Eiffel Tower was a big hunk of rusting metal, the wine and food here was too expensive, the market was full of transients that would steal your money if they could, the subway smelled like piss and shit half the time, the tourists were idiots and others were rude, and we were dirt fucking poor. We had no money, and we were toiling on the streets like vagrants because there was no point in going home – it was just as cold and dirty as right here. But none of that seemed to matter. We bought flowers instead of food and did art instead of getting real jobs. Gerard wasn’t famous, this wasn’t the magical dream that we had cooked up together, but again, it didn’t matter.

Paris was and it wasn’t what I had expected. There were some days where I would feel so conflicted in being there, especially right then in that alleyway. It was so cold, but he held onto my hand and somehow everything slipped away. I had a moment of complete and utter truth then, a moment where I was able to step outside my body and know what was going on exactly. It wasn’t the dream of Paris itself that had kept me going through all the shit in my life: it was the dream of Gerard. I knew I had had the best time of my life these past few months because Gerard had been there. I could have gone to Paris alone, and it would not have counted this much. Gerard had made it count, not this location on a map. It didn’t matter if we were in Paris or New Jersey or any place on the planet, just so long as I was with him.

I also realized, that though we both had our sovereignty as individuals before all of this, right then in Paris, now, as a unit, we were both free.

He needed to leave New Jersey to finally catch up with a long awaited ambition. I needed to leave him and handle the world on my own. We had done that separately and because of that, could now meet again. We could have never been free together like this in New Jersey because the parameters that we lived in would not constitute it. It was illegal and we were bounded by so many other worldly things. We loved each other so much, but there was no way we could have felt free under the weight of all that burden. So we had to leave one another. But seven years had now passed, and this was our meeting point once again. And this time, there really was nothing wrong with it. I was almost twenty-five and capable to make my own decisions. And though Gerard was old, he was still full of life. We were strange, we were unconventional, but we were free to be that way now, one hundred percent. We didn’t have to hide in an apartment anymore. We didn’t have to keep secrets. My parents knew about my past, they knew I was here right now, and they could know from now on. We were free as a unit of all burdens and I laughed so hard and kissed Gerard in the street because I could.

In the beginning of the trip, I’d wake up some mornings to find Gerard next to me in bed, and in my half dozed, and completely in love state, I’d tell him that I’d want to live in Paris for the rest of my life. He would nod, sympathetically, and then we’d move on in conversation. It was a flippant, fleeting remark. I thought he would appreciate it because Paris was his. But Paris never was his. He was never able to conquer it, as an artist, as a stranger, not even as a keeper. He was just a man.

I never wanted to spend the rest of my life in Paris. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. Now, I could. We could. That fact was crippling. Everything was possible.

I nearly fell over in the street.

He swooped me up with one big swing of his arm. “Don’t be getting too drunk on me. We still need to get you to the apartment.”

Inside the apartment, my new knowledge brewed inside of me. The walls became too much, the alcohol going to my head, and Gerard laid us down. Soon, the warming sensation from food and drink began to fade and we were left with nothing but skin, thin blankets, and the bitter wind. Our gaiety had slowed down significantly, shivers setting in. I hadn’t spoken since nearly falling over, and my shivers weren’t all from the cold. Gerard was calm, for the most part, too calm. Quiet and desolate, like he had been earlier in the day, glancing out the window and spending more time on the heart of the picture, than the twisting tower location.

“You know what this means, right?” he asked suddenly. I recognized the tone immediately. The testing nature of it made me feel seventeen all over again. It had been so long since he had tried to teach me something, but with age, I hoped, came wisdom.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14