April - The Flood 9 страница

I began to feel very uncomfortable. I was sure Jasmine saw this, because she had been trying to get Hilda's attention, but Hilda was still riding her idea. "You know, with this party and painting, and the different politics that we all possess, I think I really am beginning to feel like O'Keefe. You and I, Frida, we're radicals and this feels like one of the artist parties they had back in the day. Only with less communism, probably." She raised her fist in the air - the kind of fist that was not for punching - mimicking the typical radical fist and then shouted too loudly for the cafe that we were in, "Viva la revolucion!"

Jasmine couldn't contain herself, and she peeled out laughing in bursts. She had been so familiar with that radical fist (the fist that was for punching) in all of the work she had been doing with Food Not Bombs, feminism, and the Black Panther stuff she had been learning about through Lydia that to see that symbol so ingeniously twisted really got her. It was funny and clever, I could give Hilda that. But I was tired of amusing a crowd in the cafe. I was tired of people looking at us and wondering what on earth we were doing. And I didn't even like the artist comparison anymore, because it was too limiting, too constrictive. Why did we need to compare us all to artists? I thought we were growing up and growing so differently in our own ways that we could define ourselves in our own ways, against the crowd that had come before. We had decided that for our house warming party everyone would be participating in painting a picture. What artist had done that? We were doing a collaborative effort. If anything, all of us together made one person, one living and breathing being. We were making something completely new, and I didn't want comparisons anymore.

I was getting tired, and I told the two of them that I was heading out. Jasmine didn't quite buy my excuse and said she would walk me to the door.

"Do you mind if I stay? I was thinking of going to her place tonight," Jasmine told me. She bit her lip, and I realized she was waiting for approval.

"You don't have to ask me. Thank you for telling me, but it's okay. You can go."

"But will you be okay tonight, especially after everything that's happened?" Her face grew serious. "I have someone to look after me tonight, but I need to know that you do too."

I smiled, and I told her that Gerard and I had a date together. She nodded and gave me a quick hug and a kiss. "Good luck telling work tomorrow."

She rolled her eyes. "Luck's not going to help me at this point. But thank you, Frank." And then, after a small pause, "I love you."

I told her I loved her back. It felt so normal, so quick of an exchange. I was glad it had been out of earshot of Hilda, or else she probably would have hailed her fist in the air.

Walking home, I couldn't shake the feeling the Hilda had given me. And I still had not worked out how Jasmine came into all of this in my mind. Hilda was fun and exciting, but it did not seem to fit with what Jasmine was like. Hilda was too loud for her, caused too much attention, and seemed to be different for the sake of being different, not because she could not be any other way. She talked about important issues and always wanted to subvert things, which was where I could see Jasmine finding herself in some way, but I still wasn't sure. If I was honest with myself, I knew I thought it was a phase. It wouldn't last. They were just too different and once the novelty wore off for one of them (I had no idea for who first, and I worried if it hurt Jasmine either way), they would go on with what they normally did in their lives. It was a nice interlude, and as much as I wanted to think it was a phase, I knew that was my own insecurities that myself or Gerard were not enough. It was really the opposite of that. Gerard and I were too much. We were all so serious, so sensitive, so artistic and passionate all the time. We were everything, and that was suffocating. That was maddening on occasion. We had all been flipping out or breaking down in our own little ways this month. It made me nervous, realizing just how much stuff had gone wrong. Even in spite of all of this, it didn't mean we were over or that this all needed to end. What we had, now that we all lived together, had grown so strong - but so internal - that it had fallen back onto itself. We were imploding instead of exploding. We needed to get outside the house and take a break from ourselves every once in awhile, or we would burn out and never want to see one another again. That was just not an option.

Seeing Jasmine with Hilda made me miss her more. It made me appreciate her subtleties and her sensitive nature, seeing it contrasted to the big person that Hilda was. She was an interesting and magnetic character, but I didn't see her lasting long. I felt bad about my assumption, and I tried to work through it. It didn't matter how long she lasted because she was finally giving Jasmine what she needed - a break. Pleasure. Assertion over her own body. I had yearned for so long in the seven years that Gerard was gone for someone with the same body as me, so I could feel and know him as well as myself, and more. I understood the urge that Jasmine was acting out, and Jasmine probably felt it even stronger than I did. She was pregnant, and soon she would be visibly pregnant to everyone she came into contact with on a daily basis. She was getting bigger and bigger and she needed someone else who looked the same as she did, who had the same discomfort and pain, and who she could share with. Her hormones were going crazy in her body and she needed someone else with those peaks and lows, and someone with the same places to explore. I understood that, and once I had framed it with my own understanding of my body, I felt less and less jealous (though that was not really the emotion I had been feeling before) and happier for her freedom.

And if this all wasn't a phase? I asked myself. I considered if Hilda was a regular part of our lives. I would get used to it, I knew I would. I would probably even grow to love her a little myself. She reminded me a lot of a younger, louder, Vivian and in realizing that, it made me miss her. I realized I hadn't spoken as much as I probably should have, and therefore, may have given her the wrong impression. Hilda's presence that night also made me miss Vivian, someone who I hadn't spoken to in ages. I would be seeing her for the party and it had felt like such a long time. She had always been the balancing one in our little group of four. Without her, we had all become too intense. I thought of how many people were on that list and how loved I felt, and it didn't matter if Hilda lasted or was just a phase. We would adapt and grow. We would survive.

Her fisting comments and my reaction to them even began to make more sense as I got closer to home. I was working her out from under my skin, and it meant I had to examine her as well as I had examined myself. It was not that I had never imagined myself fisting or doing anything else extreme to Jasmine - or Gerard, for that matter. The acts themselves never really crossed my mind as something that I had wanted to do. But if I thought about doing them, it was not the act itself that appeared attractive to me. I understood what Hilda had merely hinted at with fisting being extreme intimacy, about breaking down a boundary with a partner, and exploring new territory. That was something that I had done, especially with Gerard, all the time. It was not that fisting itself was attractive, it was that the look on Gerard or Jasmine's face, the vulnerability the act needed, and the fact that they had let me do this to them, that was what was attractive. That was what I had wanted and would always want. I did not need the act, but I did need the connection. The appeal of O'Keeffe was that she had had a young lover, it was that in spite of age they had loved one another. Hilda and I were talking about the same things, but we used language very different ways. And ultimately, we ended up meaning completely different things. She became wrapped up in the acts, in the vaginal flowers, in doing it to do it and say you had fun, while I got wrapped up in the people, in the expressions, in the vulnerability. I knew that Jasmine did as well, and so did Gerard. That was what had made us so intense and about to implode. Neither way of looking at sex or life was good or bad. It just was what it was, but we had all needed a break.

I turned the corner and began to walk down the street that ended in our little cluster of town houses, and I began to grow excited again. Even with all of this, I knew I would always be all right so long as I had Gerard. I began to pick up my pace, my heart beating with anticipation for him to be in my arms again. And just in his arms.

When I got up stairs, Gerard was already in bed. His light was turned off, but he had left the door open, so I took this as a sign that he had remembered our date, but it was just going to be a more subdued affair. The idea of a 'date' was funny to me anyway. I didn't really want to go out and do anything with him; I had just wanted some security that that time we had would be spent together. Even if it was in the darkness of his bed. I knocked on the door and whispered his name before I came in. He rolled and faced me, running his hands through his hair. The light from the hallway spilled in and I could see that he was squinting and then smiled at me. If he had been asleep before, it was a light sleep, and he was ready to be up again. He moved to the edge of the bed closest to the wall and told me to come lay down with him. I got into the bed with my clothing on, surprised that he was still wearing clothes too. He told me he had been drawing ever since I left, but then became very overwhelmed and had to lie down. I began to kiss him and bury my face into his neck and though he pressed his body into mine, he seemed a bit disoriented. Still groggy, I told myself. He kissed me deeply, and we began to touch one another in quick succession, but his body didn't seem to want to cooperate.

"Frank, I don't think it's going to happen tonight," he apologized. He kissed my neck and I ran my fingers through his hair. I was getting hard, but I ignored it.

"It's okay, I just want to sleep with you in bed tonight, if that's okay?" he nodded again my neck. "Can we take our clothing off, though?"

He began to undress me for an answer and we tossed what we had been wearing at the side of the bed. I noticed that Gerard's room was a mess. He had been tearing through things a lot more recently and then becoming so absorbed in his projects that he had let his room go. I didn't even notice the to-do list beside his bed. Now naked, he nestled his body against mine. He touched my cock a bit, feeling it against his leg, but we both abandoned the effort halfway through. I honestly just wanted to lay with him. Too much had happened in the past few days and it showed no signs of stopping. I told him about the party we were having and he perked up and listened to me explain about the idea of the mural full of flowers that were really people's hands. His eyes glowed in what little light we had. He put up his own hand suddenly and motioned for me to place my own on top of his. We stayed like that awhile, our hands forming a five pointed star in the middle of the dark room.

"What was that phrase?" he asked suddenly. "The French one. Comme le... "

" Comme le soleil interminable," I told him, my wording not faltering at all. It was the only French I knew for sure. He smiled and nodded, instantly recognizing it. He was really tired, I thought. His French only really got this bad late at night.

We pushed our fingers together into the spaces in between, and ended up locking hands instead. We rested our arms by our sides and breathed in and out for awhile. I replayed the evening and the last few nights in my mind. Everything seemed a lot easier to handle then, when I was right under his arm. And I realized that I had gone a day without seeing Travis or drinking. The first day was the hardest, I told myself. The negative behavior had begun to become a habit, and it was something that I needed to break. Tomorrow Mikey would drive me home again and I would lurk around with Gerard and we would try to establish our own routine again. We would talk about art and poetry and books all afternoon, until Jasmine came home and we would plan the party. After three days of that, Travis would no longer be a pattern. We could read The Merchant of Venice, I thought to myself. I was sure Gerard would want to hear it again, and we could pull Jasmine in with us too. She could be Portia. Then the party was going to happen on the Friday. I was going to be all right. I just needed to last a little longer.

"Do you know much about Georgia O'Keeffe?" I asked Gerard. It had been so long since we last spoke, I almost thought he was asleep. He murmured a bit before he started talking, but he was awake.

"She had a younger lover," he started and I almost groaned. Why was that the only act people remembered? But the more he began to talk about it, the more I understood why he remembered it. "It was a man name Juan, and he was half her age. He worked with pots, I believe. He had come to fix something at her place in New Mexico and then he kept coming back. She kept hiring him for more jobs until he was finally full time. He was with her, the closest person to her, until her death. She lived to be almost one hundred."

I smiled. I knew Gerard got it in the same way that I got things. It wasn't that she had had a young lover, it was that they had fallen in love under odd circumstances, in spite of age. He went on to tell me that when O'Keeffe began to lose her sight and had to stop painting, Juan taught her how to do pottery. So she could feel the art instead of see it. He was probably the reason that she lived to be so close to one hundred.

"Wow," I stated, completely amazed by this other side of their story. It hit me a lot harder than I'd imagined. "Do you ever think you could live that long?"

Gerard laughed. He rubbed his forehead, his eyes closed. "One hundred? That's a long time. A lot of time."

"Yeah, but I think we could find a way to spend it," I told him. He opened his eyes and looked at me through the pale light of the hallway. He kissed my forehead and pulled me close.

"I bet we could, Frank. One hundred is a lot of years. And this part of me is already breaking down."

I held his waist tighter. I thought he was talking about his inability to get an erection. It had been happening more frequently, but that didn't matter at all. I clung to him, and said so. "I like this. Just being with you here. I would do this for another hundred years."

He paused, a contemplative silence. Then he suddenly hugged back. "I love you," he told me - the words that so rarely came out of his mouth - and he told me in a small, heated breath. "I love you, Frank, more than life itself. More than life itself."

I hugged him back and then our lips met in a kiss. He felt so old then, I could see it in his eyes. He felt so old and I never wanted him to dwell in that pain. I never wanted him to see the bad side of aging. It was no longer the euphemism of growing up to him, it was aging. That was such a scary distinction. I couldn't imagine beginning to make it myself, but I knew, so deeply in the bottom of my heart that I wanted to make it to one hundred years old. There were too many things to do and people to love and paintings to make with all of those people to not live to be that old. There was so much here, so much beauty.

"A lot of people who like O'Keeffe only remember her flower paintings," Gerard began again. "They always read them as vaginal, as vulvas. But people only see what they want to see. I like those paintings, but they are not what I remember."

"What, then? I don't know what else she painted."

"My favorites are from what she did when she lived in New Mexico and had Juan around her. They were done when she was getting older, too. Her painting with the cattle skull in the middle of the desert skyline - that one is beautiful. And she knew it. She saw the beauty in the life that happened before death and she did her best to paint it. She did not dwell in tragedy, she did not dwell in darkness. She only painted - and loved."

He held me close again, kissed my forehead. "I get that a lot more now that I'm old."

I wanted to argue with him, but he wasn't looking for compliments or validation. He also wasn't looking to play the old man routine we had in the past. It was too close to him now, feeling the way he had this past month. He just wanted to hold me, to be that love part of the old age where he was seeing the beauty before the end. I wanted to tell him that he had so many years to go. He was barely halfway there - halfway at one hundred. Only fifty-five years old. That was nothing. He had already done so much, and he could do so much more. Maybe that was what had overwhelmed him. The fact that there was so much more spread out onto his life now, this wide desert plain suddenly becoming filled with people. Jasmine was four and a half months pregnant; she was halfway there too. We all were. Standing in the middle, looking out, and wondering.

We held each other in the darkness, growing more and more quiet with each passing moment. Gerard whispered that he loved me again, more than this life itself, and I told him I loved him too. It was out of character for him to express it this much, but maybe he was catching up. We had lost those seven years together, but they were not wasted, and I knew there were more to come. Even if they were all spent like this, sexless and without our clothing on. Just arms and legs and words about paintings between us.

It was a different type of extreme that I shared with him, I told myself. This was the peak between life and death, the middle ground, and finally knowing where you stood as you looked at your life halfway through. I feel asleep thinking of the desert, and taking our family there to plant, and our endless flower arms pointing towards the sky.

Chapter Six

We told everyone to bring a change of clothing for the party, but we did not reveal what it was for. The invitations that Jasmine sent out via email specified that it would be a potluck, and anything meat, dairy, and eggs free would be fantastic. She also provided people with a website where recipes could be obtained, and let people know what she had been planning on making. That part was far less cryptic, and the email itself seemed to be solely about food until the final sentence, where the "need for a spare set of clothing that could be trashed" was planted in and left there. I thought it was great the way she had framed everything, and lamented that we could not have made this a real invitation. I expected we would, so I got out some supplies in order to craft my own version of it, but it was never used. The only people who didn't have emails seemed to be Gerard and myself, and Jasmine smirked. We had decided to get Internet for the next month in our house, since our bills were a lot less than we had anticipated, and I figured the impending technology was inevitable. Until then, however, I took my homemade invitation up to the only person I knew would appreciate it: Gerard. He smiled, touched the flowers I had painted at the edges (sunflowers, naturally), but then asked where hyacinths, orchids, and irises were. He hung up the first invitation by his bed alongside his new to-do list, and then we began to make more for ourselves. He told me some stories about flowers, and how we interacted with them more often than we realized.

"Especially us," he whispered into my ear. We were both sitting on his floor, drawing these personal invitations. He leaned over to me, our shoulders brushing.

"How so?"

He smirked, now, and then reached down over my body. "The male organ, the testicles - oh, what a terrible name for them. It is not beautiful at all. They are really named after orchids. I remember reading, years ago, possibly when I was in Paris about the origin of that name. I read a lot of medical books, then. I ended up learning more about the plant life around us. We are animals, Frank, but we are plant life, too. We all decompose and go into the ground and then we make flowers. We can also make children. That's why we need to have an orchid on here! There is so much life blooming within us."

Opening a book, he began to show me how the orchid flower held itself up, the subtle nuances of the design. It was hard to fathom, especially after the vaginal motifs of O'Keeffe, that I was as much of a flower as Jasmine or Cassandra or Vivian was. I expressed this to Gerard, and he smiled.

"Of course, of course. We should draw Jasmine's flower here, too."

I nodded, and while I tackled the orchid, he drew a tumbling purple flower, one that I thought was a lilac until I flipped through this book some more. It was a hyacinth. Of course, I said to myself. The Wasteland. I made a mental note to ask Jasmine more about the poem, ask her if she still had the sweater I had bought for her what felt like ages ago, and what else she knew about guerilla gardening. Gerard and I finished our private invitations in silence, and then, hung them up with the prior one, the date marked on them distinctly. Our party was a day away, and there was lots to do.

"Can I borrow this book?" I asked him, and he told me a simple, "Of course."

After Jasmine had sent out her email, we waited for all the curious responses and nosy questions about the spare change of clothing, but received nothing but welcoming RSVPs and recipe ideas. They knew us well enough by now to not be surprised by the prior request, and to abide by it. The afternoon of the party, I headed back from my half day at work, by myself. Mikey had not driven me so he could take an hour early for himself, but at this point, I had earned back most of my trust from the people that were around me. I had been spending nights at home doing art; for all intents and purposes, I was back to normal for most people. I still became cagey and would sometimes hide in the bathroom at work, but I tried to ignore that. I would eventually get used to the place, and even though the extremely macho workers scared me, I knew who I was coming home to: Gerard, who would tell me about flowers, and Jasmine, who fight for her right to anything and push back against anything that made her upset. She needed to feel her initial pain first, like Lydia had said, in order to use it and learn from it. From what I could tell, she was doing that. She was back to work, back to making plans, and when I came home from my walk, I found that Jasmine had also taken a half day. Hilda did not have another workshop until Sunday afternoon so she was also there. They both sat in the kitchen and were mixing dough to make their own perogies, smiling and joking around. Hilda was wearing a plus sized men's suit over her large stomach and when I asked her about it, she said this was what she was planning on getting trashed.

"But before all of that happens, I wanted to play stereotypical gender roles and pretend that this was a beer belly and Jasmine here, was my darling barefoot and pregnant wife," she replied, then belched. Jasmine, not faltering at all, flung an insult back at her. I laughed, never really hearing Jasmine speak like that before, and then I laughed even more because Jasmine really was barefoot. Her feet had started to swell for the first time that morning and she could barely wear her shoes to go out anymore. If she had not taken half the day off for the party, then she would have needed to simply so she could get new shoes. She lamented on having to spend more money on things that probably wouldn't fit her in a few months when Hilda burst her bubble.

"Most women, after they're pregnant, can't fit into their old shoes. Some go up a size or two. Trust me, anything you buy now will probably be fine after the little 'un is running around. It's the shoes you wore before that have seen better days."

Jasmine's eyes gaped open. "My combat boots!" she cried, and the stereotypical depiction of Jasmine in her long dress (another recent edition to her wardrobe) with bare feet mixing dough was completely juxtaposed by her missing her boots and masculine swearing. Yeah, I thought to myself. I guessed that things were back to normal for Jasmine, and that she was back to her normal self. I had no idea what my house had become in the short few days since Hilda had entered it, but I loved it. What they were doing in the kitchen was a different type of dressing up than what Vivian, Gerard, and I had done back in December. I didn't even mind that Hilda was the one playing husband, either. Our house was full of life before the party had even started.

Jasmine had the clothing that she was going to get trashed from painting on the couch in the next room and I left the two of them to go upstairs to my room in search of what I wanted to wear. Gerard was upstairs too, but he was napping, wanting to get enough sleep so that he could be alert and attentive this evening. He was meeting even more people than I was (Lydia was the one I was most concerned about), but this was going to be a lot for both of us to handle. Our final guest list included Mikey and Alexa's whole family, and if my own memory served me right, in order from oldest to youngest was Isaac, Rachel, David, Elizabeth, and then Jonah. I wondered how Jonah was going to fair the entire night with all the noise, but I figured with this many adults around, things would be fine. Although Cassandra and Noelle (she was another one I had yet to meet) were destined for baby-sitting, Vivian had announced last minute that Callie ad Dean would be coming making an appearance. I wondered if it would be odd for them, being around us in a social sense rather than a practical one, but Vivian joked that they could start moving furniture around if they needed to feel at ease. Most likely, Callie ("the quiet one") would want to know what to do with herself and would take over the baby-sitting because she needed something to feel useful. And Dean would probably help, because Vivian was sure he was in love with her. She also elaborated on the phone that his girlfriend had left him just after we moved in the second time, and that he needed to get out of the school environment.

"If I hear one more thing about love and life, and if he paints one more sad and sappy portrait of 'the lost love' or of his black bleeding heart, I will kick him out of school and give Callie all his funding," Vivian complained on the phone. I had missed hearing her voice and I let her go on and on about the two students, who seemed to have captivated her time and interest a lot more now that Gerard and I had moved out. She even let it slip that Dean had spent the night in the basement at one point.

"You're not...sleeping...?" I asked Vivian, wondering how much I could read into her sympathy for him, in combination with her anger. She seemed appalled. "Oh god, no, Frank. No. It used to be tempting before he just started to blubber all over the place, and then talk about another ex he apparently had in school named Chris, but now... no. If you can set him up with anyone, please do it. I think my viewing him with Callie is more my own projection than anything else. He needs to be with someone, and she's the closest one."

I chucked at her response, realizing how much insight I actually had to the situation. I figured that Chris, in spite of Vivian's gendering, was actually the first male relationship he had and told me about. I began to grow more excited about the prospect of having Dean around, even if he was apparently a sad sacks the last week. School was ending for them, and outside of his own studies, he needed a distraction. Hence Vivian's girlfriend insistence. She didn't want him emailing her constantly in the summer when "his identity as a student completely falls away from him and he thinks he's in crisis." She had seen it happen many, many times before. She began to ask about what other women were going to be at the party, and I laughed a little more. He definitely was not going to find people to date at this gathering. All were either married, pregnant and fucking one another, or underage. Even the men in our group were already taken by one another or the women. We were already a pretty tightly closed unit and we passed between one another like a pinball in a brightly colored arcade game. Callie really was the only option for him, but I didn't know if I could do anything to make that happen. I told Vivian that, if anything, he would at least be distracted for a night, and they both would be initiated into the group in a very outlandish way. By the end of the phone discussion, I didn't mind inviting them into the party or into our lives. I didn't feel weird having them see how really ridiculous all of this was getting. They were like distant cousins. Still as crazy as we were, but a different brand. They were artists; they got it.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14