March - Like Lions 4 страница

"And you need to mourn," I finished for her. The way she spoke about her own solitude was the way that I needed to let go of that life with Gerard, with our art projects as our kids. One wasn't better than the other, but one was dead now. And we had to grieve.

"Yes, that's exactly it. Whether or not this had happened, it would have ended eventually. All things end. You know the writer Thoreau?"

"The guy that went into the woods, right?"

She smiled and nodded. She always managed her emotions better when she talked about a writer or character, not herself. "That's him, and you've focused on exactly what I wanted to point out. He went into the woods for two years, and that is what everyone focuses on. The merit of it, why he went, but no one ever seems to realize that he came back. You always come back because it stops making sense anymore, living a life full of that much loneliness."

I nodded. I was done with my leftovers now and pushed the half-empty container aside. She was still picking at hers a bit. She smiled, suddenly, and the asked: "Do you remember the last time I made this? When I came over and you were back from Paris?"

I nodded and smiled with her.

"When I left that night, I sat in the parking lot for what felt like hours trying to figure out where to go. I didn't want to come home here because it felt too painful. All of a sudden, I didn't want to be alone anymore because I felt it all around me. It was the worst night. Ever since then I've been working nonstop and trying to run away from that feeling. Now that I have a place to run to, with you and Gerard, it's weird. I see the answer in front of me, but I almost don't believe it's there. I can't buy a house now, even though I want to. Even though we can't afford it, I do want to, Frank. I need you to know that."

"I know you do, Jasmine. You don't have to explain it to me. You need to mourn."

She looked over at me and smiled. She was done with her food now, and we sat hunched forward, our hands in our laps, listening to one another. She got up suddenly, and came over to me. I stood up as well, and there was no space between our bodies. She wrapped me in a hug. "Thank you," she said, and kissed my neck. I held the small of her back softly.

"Are you feeling better?" I asked and she nodded. She took my hand in hers and then motioned for me to follow her into the bedroom. She opened the door and we both walked in slowly. Her room was the same as it had been before, except now there were some newspapers for houses on her desk in here. She laughed when she saw that and then put them in her trash can. She sat down with me on her bed again, and said, "I'm going to miss this room," and then began to kiss me.

Our make out session lasted for a while before I laid her down on the bed and she began to stick her hands underneath my shirt. I took it off and slid her top up a little as I kissed from her neck, and I put my hand on her stomach. I kissed my way down to it and Jasmine took off her shirt. She opened her legs and I sat in between them and rubbed her hips and kissed her stomach up to her bra line.

"Careful," she said as she undid it and slid it off. "They still hurt a lot."

I touched her nipple with the tip of my fingers first and watched her reaction to be sure she was feeling okay. I watched her as I kept going, and after I discovered the right amount of pressure, I replaced my hands with my tongue. She pulled me up to meet her and I kissed her mouth again as she undid my pants. I got off of her for a second so I could take off the rest of my pants and socks; she did the same for herself. We were both naked again when I crawled back into bed with her. It was the first time I had been this close to her since we had conceived the baby. I touched her between her legs for a while as we continued to kiss and she touched me, and then I moved to ask if I could go inside her.

"Yeah," she agreed. Out of habit, I moved over to get a condom from beside her dresser when I laughed to myself. "I guess it's almost too late for that one now, huh?"

She bit her lip instead of responding. "Could you still wear one?"

I was confused for a minute, then I remembered: other partners meant other risks. I was just sleeping with Gerard, I wanted to tell her that, and by reason of deduction I was probably clean. But that probably was the problem. I needed to be sure I was not sick, especially now that she had the person growing inside of her. I reached over and got a condom. It didn't really matter; we had always worn them before, even when Jasmine was on the pill. I slipped it on quickly and her hips came up to meet me as I went inside of her. And even though we were having fun and she was even laughing while we were rocking into one another, it didn't feel quite right. It wasn't that the condom was so utterly important to me, but I had started to feel self-conscious about the whole relationship, about not knowing for myself. Jasmine had been putting such a strong emphasis on knowing her own body and being responsible for it. I had been supporting her, but what about my own body? I couldn't remember the last time I had been to a doctor, and unlike Gerard, I had not gotten anything tested recently, even when in Paris on a student visa. I could have gotten it done then, but I never bothered. I always never bothered, because I had always just figured that I was fine.

I started to kiss Jasmine's neck, but I went to her ear and told her I was going to pull out. I had lost my focus completely now, even though it had been feeling good.

"I can keep going with my hands and mouth...." I offered, but then realized that mouth would probably have the same disease type of issue. So I used my fingers as I kissed her neck, and she seemed satisfied with that. When she was done, I went to the bathroom and cleaned up. Her moans had turned me back on again, and I ended up quickly finishing myself off in there. It felt like I was back in high school, jerking off when no one was looking, but I felt a lot better when it was done. More clear-headed. I knew I had to get that looked at and checked. I was sure I was fine; but things were different now. People depended on me to be on top of these things. Neither one of us could get sick for risk of passing it on. I looked at myself in the mirror as I washed my hands and shook my head. It was one of the first times I saw past my own reflection, past the image of myself that I had coded as Frank, and looked at the raw parts of my body. My muscles (if there were any), my fingers and hands, toes, and bones. My hair and my mind. What was I passing on? And was there anything lurking inside of me that could come at any moment?

When I got back from the bathroom, Jasmine was turned over in the bed. Her bare back stared back at me as I slipped under the covers. I was worried that she would ask me to leave, so she could be alone tonight, but she turned over as soon as I slid next to her. She curled up, still naked, below me and our bodies were so close. Close enough to cause risk? I pushed the thought from my mind and tried to hold her.

"What happens in spring?" she asked suddenly.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean... it's almost spring. We usually leave each other when winter is over."

I held her closer. I wanted her to just know that I knew what she meant, and I wanted to change things. "Just because we always did it before, doesn't mean we do it again."

"Yes, but, it's you, Frank. If you changed in any way, I wouldn't love you anymore. And if I changed, you wouldn't love me."

"Yeah, but things are different now, Jasmine. Things change. Come on, you told me that," I said, trying to remind her. "When we were out on the balcony the night I came back from Paris."

"I know. I was trying to find reasons to hate you for leaving, but I never could. I loved you for leaving because it was you. I'm worried, now, that we'll both stay after the winter and end up hating each other because it's not like us."

I rubbed her back. The idea of hating her seemed absurd, but I knew where her fear was coming from. It was the fear of compromise, of complacency, of arguing over laundry detergent and baby clothing color rather than what really mattered. "We're more than our actions. We have to be, Jasmine, or else we're just being controlled by other forces, and then there is no definitive us. I wasn't any more or less me for staying or leaving for Paris."

"But people can only see our actions. Our actions do matter. I'm vegan for a reason," Jasmine stated quite seriously.

"But you're still Jasmine and Jasmine would have made that decision regardless."

"Then why did it take me twenty-five years to make it?"

"Because you didn't know," I said, but I was speculating. I was trying so fiercely to win a debate I wasn't entirely sure of how to articulate beyond myself. "Knowledge does change things. It changes actions, but I don't think it can change who you are as a person necessarily."

"Without Gerard, do you think you would still be the same?" she asked, and it was like dropping a bomb. I never liked to imagine my life without him. I used to tell myself that it would have eventually gotten on course, and I would be the person I was then, but it probably would have taken years. Decades. "He only changed my actions because of who he was. I was already the way I was, but with no encouragement, no influence. He gave me the knowledge I needed to change what I did. But something about him made me keep coming back."

"And after the spring, in winter again..." Jasmine trailed off, and I finished it for her:

"I always came back to you, too. You changed me just as much as he did. We work well together because of something else, something indescribable. I don't want to write it off as something that we can't choose because I want free choice. But you love who you love. You are who you are."

"Action is still important. Without action we'd be nothing," she stated gravely.

"Not nothing. No one is ever nothing. Without action no one would really understand that person, maybe, the way that no one would probably understand me if I hadn't met Gerard. But I am still here. I have to believe that," I told Jasmine, not realizing how a small debate had suddenly become the reason I was living. When I had failed so much in my life, even when I had tried, I needed to believe that even in spite of all of this that I was still around. What was that riddle that everyone said? If a tree fell in the forest and no one was around, would it make a sound? Of course it did! It fell. It mattered. The world didn't need an audience, and neither did I, if it came down to it. I would be okay by myself.

But I wasn't by myself anymore. That was the point, and that was what Gerard had told me recently, as if to remind me again that no man was an island. I held Jasmine in my arms and there was another person between us. There was this life and this history, and she wanted to know if just as quickly I would get up and disappear like everyone else. She needed to know if we needed to keep disappearing from one another in order to make that presence more visible.

"In the spring, I'll still be here. So will you."

"But what about art? What about my job?" she didn't say it, but I could hear the undercurrents: what if we did nothing at all for the rest of our lives? What if we just lived in a house and raised this kid and never contributed to artistic things ever again? What would become of us? Would we disappear? Would the world hear it if we fell down and made a sound?

I thought of the giant sequoias that she had told me about before and how they were so stubborn and they just wouldn't move. But the other trees, the ones that get moved to the suburbs, they learn to adapt and grow their roots around sidewalks. They didn't wait for anyone else to move for them, or see them, but they did what they needed to do. People adapted. I thought of Frida; we could all endure a lot more than we thought at the end of the day. Jasmine was mourning the death of herself alone, but I wanted to tell her she was always going to be there, no matter what. Like I was too.

I didn't know how to convey that properly within my arguments any longer, so I told her about Frida and the bus accident. She was in bed for months at a time, in pain most of her life, and she didn't disappear into nothing.

"She painted pictures, though, Frank," Jasmine replied. "She produced something from that pain."

"But what are we talking about right now, Jasmine? We're talking about her. Her life. That part of herself that was not connected to paintings, but only pain. We remember her - not her actions. We just remember her. The people who told her story, they remember her. Paintings are inconsequential, but it is because she did them that they matter."

She nodded, but didn't say much else. I looked down at her, to see if she was sleeping. She was still awake; it must have been barely eight at night.

"We have too many people around us, Jasmine, to turn into nothing," I said. "I... I talked to Gerard. He wants to help. He wants to be here for us, just like we are. Like parents."

She looked up at me. "Really?"

"Yeah, he said it a lot, actually. Said it wasn't even a question anymore."

She smiled, and then rested her head back on my chest. I didn't know if she had settled her thoughts about tonight, but I also knew not to push. She was in mourning, and I figured that she dealt with her losses and feelings the same way she wrote essays. She gave them out into the world and then would assemble them again later in order to make sense. I needed to give her space to do that. I stayed in bed with her, but we eventually began to shift our positions. I leaned back on her mattress and she tucked herself into the corner. I found my gaze going towards her window and I stared out at the night sky from where we were. We were so tiny, so small; it was very easy to feel insignificant. I wonder if that was why Jasmine placed her bed the way she had. We were so small in this huge place it was almost vain, though, to think our actions really amounted to something. But they made us stronger, I was sure, they made us feel less insignificant. The person between us made us feel like we had been swept back into the biology that we came from. And yet, biology was not our destiny. I kept looking at the stars as I thought, and tried to get rid of this feeling of being nothing. It was the worst fear in the world. But if success was the same as failure, then nothing was the same as everything.

We were all in mourning. Every single one of us, simply because, there was too much out there. There was too much stuff to do, too many things to paint and pictures to take and articles to write. Too many books to read and people to meet. There were so damn many stars and people and animals. We were so small and the weight of this insignificance was crushing. But we were still here, we were still us, and that was what mattered.

I thought of what Gerard had told me about Guernica and the war paintings. It was made to say something, anything, against all the horror. To even say, hey, I'm here. It was made, like most pieces against the backdrop of war, to avoid being nothing when you couldn't see past all the choices in front of you. All of us had to pick something right then. We had to choose and then mourn the rest. But what we did we would do better and believe in it more than anyone else.

As I began to drift off, I still looked out the window at the black night. I whispered to the stars, I am here, this is what I have to say, and this is what I remember, knowing that it would mean nothing in the morning.

Chapter Three

I went to the doctor the next day. I hadn't seen my family one in years; not since my last physical when I was in college and he had asked me about my sexual partners. I didn't want to tell him, though I knew it was important. I never went after that so I could avoid telling lies through omissions, then after my parent's health insurance ran out for me, I began to just use the free clinic, and only when it was absolutely necessary. I saw different staff so often that it didn't really matter what I said or who judged me because I would never see them again. Most people working at a free clinic in New Jersey had heard it all anyway, and my proclivities were very tame in comparison to some of the other people they saw in a day, people that I could only speculate about.

I went to the free clinic again and didn't have to wait too long before a nurse ushered me inside and took some vials of my blood. Since I had never seen her before, I didn't mind confessing what I wanted to be tested for. She paused after my initial candid response, for longer than I was comfortable with, and dread returned. When she spoke, I braced myself for the worst, but instead she told me that I was a very brave "boy." I hadn't had anyone call me boy in ages and it made me feel very self-conscious about my height and lack of prominent facial hair right then. When I asked why she was proud, since getting an STD test was no Nobel Prize, she said, "In order to get a test for something like that, you have to accept both outcomes as possibilities. It's why most cases stay undetected for so long. It's brave to even take the test because now you could know for sure."

I considered that, and though her logic seemed all right, I rejected its premise. I didn't like the equating of sickness with the medical establishment, and how you had to absolutely be devastated and prepared for the worst if you went inside. It had to be framed that way for the most part because of the ridiculous way insurance worked, though. If we didn't have to worry about things like money, then I was sure that people would go to the doctor's a lot more and it wouldn't be considered a "brave" task.

I had been hanging around Jasmine too long, I supposed. Her extreme authority over her own body made me take things like the doctor for granted as something you did, not because you were unhealthy, but because you were in charge. I had been shirking my responsibility to myself lately and going off base deductions. That didn't mean I thought I was sick; it just meant I wasn't being responsible. Now I was to fix that. Even with this conviction, the nurse's comment got under my skin. I had been calm before, but now doubt had been planted.

But of course, things were fine. No news is good news, and when they hadn't called back in three days, I called them and they confirmed. I was perfectly all right. Even with the new vegetarian diet, there was nothing to warn me about. I walked around all day with my chest puffed up, feeling healthier than ever. I had begun to feel my age recently with Jasmine's pregnancy looming over my head and the fact that the hours at my job were picking up (four shifts a week now, practically full-time), but the nurse's comment of "boy" and my newfound health had my confidence restored. I was still pretty young, and after all, didn't people live until one hundred? I felt like I could live an entire century. That would be so much time, I thought. What would I do with it all? It seemed now, especially with the advent of a job, that time was slipping through my fingers. It was going so fast, and so slow at the same time. My shifts would take a huge chunk of my day, and it seemed as if there was barely any time to eat and then talk to people before I had to go sleep and then repeat the whole cycle. While on shift, though, the time crawled. With less people coming in and the products all out, I was left to stare at a wall. Jasmine was not showing her pregnancy and wouldn't for some time, though her image had already altered in my mind. I knew our child was there, even if it wasn't viable and visible, even if no one else could tell. But I would always be surprised when I saw her and there was no bump. It seemed as if we made something so quickly, so haphazardly, and yet it would take ages to get here.

I had a sudden impulse to call Jasmine and tell her the good news about my health, but I held off. After we had decided to not get a house (at least, not yet), we had turned our attention towards our own bodies and decided we needed to start there. She was probably at her own doctor's appointment right now, or at least, trying to figure out what type of doctor she wanted for all of this. She had been going over her work's health policy when I left in the morning. She realized, through the fine print, that she had been lucky: she could see any type of doctor, midwife, or OBGYN she wanted to for this. I was happy for her, but I probably had a hard time showing it. It still felt like an activity that I needed to be a part of, and not just because of some patriarchical biological right that I thought I had. She had used other large words to describe the urge she thought I was feeling and where it was coming from, but I blocked it out. It wasn't that I wanted to take her independence away - I knew how vital that was, especially in the face of the medical system - but I loved her. I just wanted to be there. I knew that calling her would only complicate my own feelings for her.

"I'll tell you when I know, but I need to know first, all right?" she had stated very clearly. "I have a lot to sort through and this is just how I need to do it."

I wanted to ask her if I would ever get to come to an appointment, but that would be too soon. Like she had said, she needed to interpret her own experience for herself before she let anyone in on it. I realized early on that she was treating it like an essay, like a creative assignment, and she was still in the brainstorming stages. None of us had ever done something like this before, and we could not rely on the parenting books. Judging from how we still answered questions about whether or not we were together or married by looking at our feet, I needed time to assess our relationship as well. And Gerard's involvement with all of this. He had been so busy the past little while, and so had I, that we hadn't touched base since the night of the dinner. It was exhausting juggling through all of these people, I thought to myself as I walked home. My thoughts on health, birth, and all other things that seemed to clutter my mind had taken me right through my shift into the early morning. The sky was red and still a little icy, but I hurried as fast as I could. It was tiring, but the mere thought of catching Gerard before bed made my heart beat a little faster.

He was in his drawing room when I got home. I knocked on his door tentatively and he murmured for me to come inside. He was in all black and the dove jacket was draped over his shoulders. I was pretty sure this was the same outfit I saw him in the last time we had been dressed, and I found it amusing how Gerard went through phases of clothing. Until it stank or was falling apart, he wore it, and then when the laundry was being done he would usually look around haphazardly, forgetting that his clothing was dirty and wondering what on earth to wear instead. When he finally decided on an ensemble that worked, that same outfit would be worn for the next four weeks straight. I walked up behind him and leaned into his shoulder to kiss his neck, and then casually smelled the jacket. Not too bad. He must have been pretty up to date with his cycling fashions.

We exchanged pleasantries, which was something that horrified me at first when I realized we were doing it. The typical question of "how are you?" had never tainted our mouths before. We were used to just telling how we were and then waiting for the other person to comment, share, and move on. We weren't as banal as most couples who said it, I convinced myself, since we weren't lacking our initial spark of conversation. Our pleasantries diverged and we seemed to develop our own dialect when wanting to grab at specific emotion or reference specific days. To get him to talk about his project that he was working on today, I would comment on his drawing. To get him to talk about his day, I would usually say he looked good. For me, he would do the same, although in a lot of cases I could never tell if his telling me that I looked good was an invitation to tell him about my day, or jump into bed with him. There were small things that were lost in translation.

"You look good," I told him, and he shrugged it off. He peered over his shoulder and caught my gaze as he positioned his chair to face me. He told me I looked better, and that, "Something good must have happened, because I have never seen you smile that wide in a long time."

I shrugged, but then spilled the fact that I had gotten some tests done and I was in good health. It felt so trivial and normal when it came out of my mouth, but Gerard commended me for it. "This is great, Frank, and don't be so quick to discount your brave attribute. That nurse was quite correct. I am relieved, though, not that I didn't think the test would come out fine, but now I don't have to go to the doctors." He smiled quickly, and then turned his attention back to his drawing, but it was not a plea for me to leave. The way he still positioned his body only half facing the table, and also kept his head tipped to hear me clued me in. He wanted me to stay.

I thought of what the nurse said and how if you got tested you were accepting the fear that you could be positive. I was even more convinced of my position of its falsehood, because there was nothing in what Gerard had said that evoked fear. He personally didn't want to go to the doctor because it was a waste of time. There were waiting rooms, noise, bad art and magazines, angry people in lines. It wasn't good for him. He already dealt with enough stuff at the university and waiting for students to come to the lecture hall on time. As soon as he was done with that, he wanted to come right back here to draw. He wasn't afraid of being positive or of being sick in general. Part of the authority that Jasmine stressed over her body was that she knew what was right for it. So did I, and so did Gerard. It made me feel better to go to the doctor; it ended up making me feel more youthful, whereas Gerard didn't need to. He wasn't sick. And if he was, then he could handle it. His art kept him healthy, and I could see that with the way he was working. A book was open on the table in front of him and he was doing a character study.

"It looks good," I told him, and then waited for him to tell me what he was working on.

He looked at his book, opened his mouth, and then looked down again. He did this a few more times before I came up behind him and bit his ear playfully as I whispered into it. "You losing your hearing, old man?" I had called him this several times before, and he didn't mind it. He would sometime roll his eyes, but more often than not, he smirked back.

He laughed a bit at my affection and then turned around and pulled me in for a closer kiss. He pulled me onto his lap, so I was in between him and the table. I put an arm around his broad shoulders to steady myself, and looked down at the piece he was doing. With his free hand, he touched it as he explained the components of his new project to me. "I'm going through the work of Degas. There is a lot here, but his nudes are mostly what I want to familiarize myself with. I want to see how he used his paint and how he represented his models." Gerard sighed and flipped through the book to a different page. The one before it had been the bare back of a woman, her breasts visible from a side profile, and she was drying herself near a basin of water. Now Gerard had flipped to a series of paintings on ballerinas. "He also painted dancers, for the same reason he painted nudes. He wanted to analyze the muscle, the bone structure, and the skin. But he also captured their movement, too, which was something that the nudes lacked. He did it quite well, I think. I'm trying to figure out whether or not I like his style and how much I want to imitate, and then couple it with my own ideas."

Gerard touched his chin, thinking for a bit, before he turned over the book. Its back cover was visible now and had one of the dancer paintings at the back; a girl in a blue tutu with her foot pulled over, near her chest. They were an interesting group of paintings, quite well done, but almost, too well done. They didn't seem to have any character and they lacked a certain feeling to them. The artists that I liked had themselves in their work. I could not see Degas anywhere. I told this to Gerard, and he nodded reverently.

"Yes, I agree. That is what's troubling me now. Sure, his studies of the human body are fantastic and impeccable with detail, but did he ever touch a human body? His paintings are all from afar, and from what I've read about him, that is how he lived his life. From afar," Gerard mused. "He lived his life and dedicated his world to art and perfection. And he obtained it, surely, but I am not convinced."

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14