June - The Liars 6 страница

I was surprised at the length of The Professor's reply. Considering I had sent him only a small paragraph that had taken me all morning to compose, he sent me nearly three times that in the ten minutes he probably had to type. I was impressed at his verbose nature, and though it startled me, I took this as a good sign. He still wanted me around, and clearly my drivel from before hadn't scared him away entirely. I began to realize, as I went on to read more about his wife and what she had planned on making us for dinner, that The Professor made me extremely nervous. It went beyond the parallels to Gerard and the perceived threat against that relationship I felt. His ideas were making more sense to me, and I began to feel my mind changing and shifting gears. I read over my previous reply to him and I could see myself picking apart the grammar I had used, the sentence structure, and understanding where my arguments had been weak. The text that I had produced was no longer attached to me and it was an unnerving feeling. It reminded me of when I had watched Hilda and Jasmine pore over cut-ups, and while I liked and understood what they were doing, I did not connect with it. I had reached a stage beyond it, and I began to wonder just how far I could go. I realized how much growth I had obtained from merely reading as much as I had for the past two - almost three - weeks, and The Professor was not done with me. He had made that quite clear by his email. I had thought I was done with him, done with all of this stuff, but his arguments were making sense. Was I losing myself? I questioned and began to shake momentarily. I tried to focus back on his email, and tried to strip away his knowledge base like he had done for me.

I did not like his use of social construction, I decided. I was vaguely familiar with this term from Jasmine's work, and I could see where The Professor was coming from, but I did not like this subservience to this term as a basis for an argument. It left us with no power. If everything was a social construct, and ideologies of the dominant force got inside our heads, then who was thinking for us? If I wanted to believe in freedom, in all that Gerard had taught me, then I needed to believe that I was the one who had power and control then. I could acknowledge that knowledge was subjective and that the words we used to convey this knowledge were equally subjective, but why was I not allowed to verify my own experience? I thought with my emotions and that discounted them as not reasonable. But that seemed ridiculous to me. Following all rules absolutely did not make sense, even The Professor had conceded that in his email. Was knowledge then the ability to think contextually? I certainly hoped so. It was using my emotions through context and comparing it to others that I could see all of my experiences with Gerard as real and justified, and not something branded by society. It was also the only way I could obtain the freedom he gave me. Even Mikey knew that freedom was in the matter of choice. It was easy to look at he and Alexa and think they had been brainwashed by Christian ideology and a heterosexual lifestyle that was dominant. That was the way they appeared - just like in the ideal society, but I knew that that interpretation on their life was the one that was full of lies. When you got to know people and not the abstract concepts, they were no longer ideas and they made sense. That was what Hilda had tried to show me when she kissed me. She got to know Jasmine through bodies, and then, through kissing me, she was showing me that it was what manifested between us that really counted. Was there a word for what we were to one another, for what we had done? No. Did that mean it didn't exist? Fuck no. This idea of social construction took the words to validate my experience out of my mouth, so I had to turn to people.

I decided I would tell this to The Professor. I had nothing to lose, so I typed it out the best I could, and waited for my response. It took him a lot longer than the fifteen minutes before; it was at the end of my lunch hour before I got anything back.

"See? You're doing fine, Frank. Now, I want you to come. You still have not answered me on that. And to make my case even more tempting, I shall quote you some poetry. Because, yes, sometimes Plato is the one who's lying about the poets. But you never really know who's telling the truth and who's lying until you really get into it. Contrary to what you may believe I had said before, philosophy is about life, just like poetry. It does not give us one meaning - that one meaning does not exist. But meaning? There is lots. Take your pick. For now, here is some Lorca. You may have heard of him."

I had, of course I had. Seeing Lorca's poem about Manhattan spread out across my screen made my heart ache with each sudden and quickened beat it took. I thought about how Jasmine and I had envisioned New Jersey under a veil of magic realism, where we were actually in The Garden, and not The Garden State. I saw Gerard, wandering the streets like the man in the poem, shouting "careful, careful" at each person who passed, and then ushering me into his arms to be the most careful of all. I saw Salvador Dali and Federico Lorca, tangled together, in the heat of the Spanish day and while everyone was sleeping, they were moaning, embarrassed and flushed with denial of love. I saw Gerard telling me about Guernica and how Picasso was bearing witness to what he had seen, as if it made a difference, and just in case it did. I saw his daughter Paloma the photographer, and how our daughter was going to share her name, and her legacy of doves. All through the English translation of the poem The Professor quoted to me, I saw the magic of the world that had been created by The Liars, and the world that we had created together in between their words and images. We all talked to one another, and all of our meanings changed while in transition. I saw Gerard and Jasmine, Lorca, and The Liars. Then, I saw The Professor and The Prosecutor, and their son, who was called Kiddo by them and therefore abstracted beyond the tangible, too.

And then back to the email, those images gone as soon as they had gotten there. He told me his wife had an amazing recipe for beef stir fry that he thought I would enjoy. I would have to tell them I was vegetarian, I realized. But I was going, I knew, now, I was going.

"You have won your case," I wrote back. "I will see you then."

His email rattled around in my head the rest of the day. For the first time since I had begun this entire overwhelming search, I took out a piece of paper. The ideas that I had been brimming on the surface before were finally beginning to take shape. I wanted to send an email to Hilda at first, and tell her that she was wrong, that I had actually found cohesion in this trauma culture, but I held off. I knew it was a way to by-pass the actual work that would come from this elated feeling. My resistance from before had been broken, but this did not equal cohesion; it was only a strange articulation of feeling. The Professor had told me that philosophy was a series of arguments, which sometimes took the form of questions asked to the philosopher by themselves. This was the internal version of dialogues - meditations. So, I wrote down all of the questions in my head and I meditated on the sheer number of them. I kept going and going, and then when I had reached the end, I tore my sheet of paper in half. It felt good, destroying all of them from before, and I felt as if I had finally accomplished something. I had gotten rid of my questions that held me back, sending them out into the collective unconscious like I was supposed to, but I had also cut them up. The questions that had disconnected me, I began to disconnect.

A quotation that Jasmine had put on her study door recently began to take on a different meaning in my head. It had been a version of the Audre Lorde one we had heard from Lydia: The master's printing press will not be jammed with his tools. You must bring your own wrench. This was what I had wanted, to get beyond what was holding us back. I needed to get out of the system entirely in order to fully comprehend it. Another line from The Professor also sunk in, and began to aggravate me as the day went on. In spite of his division of emotion and reason, he was bringing his wife into our discussions more. He was even mentioning his son, and he was going to be inviting me to his home. He was breaking down the barriers between what was private and what was public, and though he knew I was having a baby, he did not know the whole story. I was not mentioning Gerard in my arguments to him, even the one that I had typed out about social construction. If knowledge was contextual, then I needed to prove it to him as such and give him that context. The thought of telling him about Gerard scared me, because I knew I could not always anticipate people's interpretations. But I knew that this was part of what I needed to do now that I had my questions out into the air. I needed to talk about Gerard with people, other than the ones inside my little safe and secure group. Hilda had understood because she trusted my point of view and I needed to learn from that dialogue, and begin to trust others. I needed to tell things, not as they were, but as I believed them to be. And I would start with The Professor when I went to his house. I would start to open up my life to the world.

The Professor had also told me to go and investigate more Plato, but to pay attention to the dialogues on love. To interrogate an emotion like that was terrifying, but as soon as I was done working, I told Mikey to drop me off at the library. I found all that I needed to between the stacks, read for hours, and then, pining and hurting inside as I got on the bus, headed home to finish what I knew to be the last step of this lesson: I needed to see Gerard.

I had not spent that much time with him in the past few days. Jasmine had confided in us that the heat made him moody and want to sleep in the evening when it was cooler. This threw off his entire morning schedule, and usually he was up earlier and was already drawing by the time I got to him, completely engrossed and usually mute. Sometimes Jasmine wanted to be with him in the mornings instead, since our evenings were often disjointed from our changing schedules, and I had let her take over. I had become so immersed with my own projects, and then became the spectator for her and Hilda's cut ups, that I had hardly spent much time considering the distance between Gerard and myself. When I realized how much time there had been between us, I began to grow discouraged and anxious in my seat on the city bus.

When I got home, there were no cars in the driveway and Gerard was completely alone. He hadn't been for too long, Jasmine's note confirmed for me. She had just left and would be working late again, trying to figure out a plan for the magazine with Meredith. She said that Mikey was going to come by later that night, like he always did, so if I needed to leave, there would be ample opportunity. She stressed this last section, and my pang of guilt I had felt on the bus came back. Even Jasmine could tell that I had been avoiding him. Even in the mornings when I had come in to see him, if he was drawing, I let him be. I went off in my own world while he stayed in his. I didn't dare disturb him, not since he had had a few really terrible days earlier. It was the first time I had really seen him become angry enough at himself to raise his voice in frustration, and then to suddenly turn it on us. It wasn't much, and he wasn't violent. I knew that he never would be, even when it got too bad. But he had accused us of stealing several times and told us to stop touching his art supplies because we were only confusing him more. He had been extremely apologetic after the fact, especially when we found the item he was looking for, and tried to explain why he had acted out. He knew he had an illness and he tried to articulate this fact, sometimes even when he wasn't angry or in a fog at all. He sometimes called it "the forgetting disease" in an attempt to make it sound more creative. The one time he lashed out at me (it had happened one other time with Jasmine), he had begun to explain to me how diseases, before there was really a cure for them, were often viewed in creative and artistic terms. Especially syphilis and tuberculosis, since most poets and artists had them, their symptoms were sometimes seen as an integral part of the creative process. Sometimes people would deliberately get them in order to achieve this type of fame. "Stupid people, just stupid," Gerard had cursed. His disease wasn't contagious, and in spite of the renaming he gave it, and the Kandinsky colors we tried to repeat together that morning, it was very clear that there was nothing artistic about this at all.

I had hidden myself from him after that, even when I was in the same room with him, I was not there. It was the only time when I did feel like a liar if I hung out with him that much, if we tried to speak about art and I tried to remind him about the ones that he liked, because it seemed so pointless in the face of all that blackness, that Kandinsky inspired obscurity. So I had hid. Jasmine dealt with him the next morning, where he had repeated himself again. But those two, maybe three days had been the worst so far, and I prayed to the god that I knew was not there, that he had forgotten that he had acted like that. I never wanted to tell him, but I was always aware of it, hiding in the back. He was better when he first got up after some sleep, I knew from experience, and I had hoped he was napping most of the afternoon. I needed to see him, to tell him what I had learned tonight, and to make sure I was not wrong about other things.

But I was still scared to see him. The inner meditation I had had about our relationship came back again as I stood alone in our house. I was scared to face him with doubts, doubts that I had never had before. Doubts that I knew drove him crazy just as much as they were driving me crazy. He had been alone for seven years in Paris; this surely must have come across his mind. He was taken in and questioned by police for being just what we all had feared - a pedophile, but had been let go. This was a non-issue, especially now that I could consent. But if I ever wanted to share my past with someone, like The Professor, and my imagined audience in the future, this fact haunted me. What if they didn't understand, like my father hadn't at first? It was possible to change their mind, but how often could I do that? How was I going to be able to argue when the facts were stacked against me?

I shut up my mind. I told myself to be quiet and to just trust. Just trust, Frank, I said to myself repeating Hilda's words. I had begun to trust her more, and even during those nights when she said something I found ridiculous, I was able to let it go. I trusted that her viewpoint was just that and not an ineffable truth. She had her own interpretation of the world, and I had mine. I had to keep trust, that even when people thought Gerard and I were utterly wrong together, that with time, they would also learn to trust my judgement. I had the big fancy words to prove it now. I repeated these things to myself as I walked up the stairs and knocked on his door.

He was painting, thankfully. Usually painting was a good sign, and Jasmine had confirmed this fact. We had gone back to talking to one another about his illness in statistics and information we had gathered the day after he had had the first bad incident. I had learned a lot more about the disease that was now becoming part of our world, simply because I had to now. He was still in the early stages, but sometimes it felt as if it was sneaking up and launching at us without warning. But he was painting, I told myself. This was always a good sign, even before I knew he was sick. His back was to me, sitting at his stool, and he was dressed all in black (collared shirt and tight pants), in spite of the heat. It looked as if he had missed a button or two from the way the shirt hung, but he usually did that anyway, along with leaving it un-tucked. I called his name as I came into the room, and I said the date, too. When he didn't respond right away, I panicked and said who I was, something I had never had the need to do yet.

"It's okay," he said. He didn't turn around, but his voice was clear. "I'm okay today, but thank you. I know you do that because you're worried, and you care."

Breathing a sigh of relief, I walked over to the bed. Painting was a good sign, indeed. I glanced at what he was working on, and smiled when it was Jasmine. The sketches that he had been doing in the morning were finally manifesting into a canvas. This process had taken him longer than usual, but he was still able to do it. He was struggling through the real life portrait without a visual reference nearby, but he was doing okay. I told him what a good job he had done, and he smiled slowly. I hoped he didn't think I was patronizing him; it was the last thing I wanted.

"I haven't seen you in a while. At least, I don't think so."

"No, you're right. I haven't been here."

"What have you been doing?"

"Do you really want to know?" I said, not meaning it to sound as harsh as it did when it hit the air. Even when he was having better days, before the outburst, I had been holding back from telling him much that wasn't of extreme importance anymore. Sometimes when I talked about the marriage, he furrowed his brows and took a minute to comprehend again. It had hurt too much that first time, so I didn't want to continue to get my hopes up that he would remember the minutiae of my day anymore. It seemed frustrating and annoying to tell him that I had read Plato's The Symposium this afternoon, only to have him forget the next day. But when he looked up at me from his canvas, and his eyes were still the same eyes I had fallen in love with, I bit my lip.

"I'm sorry," I stated, feeling bad instantaneously. "I didn't mean that. Of course you want to know. There has just been a lot. I guess I'm just wondering if you want to hear it all."

"Of course, Frank. I want to hear everything," he told me in a small voice. I sat down on the bed, and took a deep breath. My eyes stayed focused on the ground as I thought back through the last couple of weeks, and tried to find the best beginning. "Do you know about the Socratic Method?"

He nodded, and told me through some misplaced words that Socrates had been one of his favorite people to sketch when he was in art school. He would try and find large replicas of Greek statues to study anatomy (before he had Vivian as his own personal model), and the bust of Socrates had the most detail and prominent features. He also told me about the large paintings that were done of him and other philosophers (including Plato and Aristotle), and the final one about Socrates drinking hemlock.

"Why'd he drink hemlock?" I asked, coming across the one piece of his story I couldn't understand.

"It was his punishment for corrupting the youth of Athens. He was given an ultimatum. Live outside of Athens but don't practice philosophy, or stay here and die. He chose death."

It got quiet after that. It did anytime death came up between us now, though I wondered if the silence was only one way because I was making it impossible to penetrate. I thought of Alexa's painting, but I pushed it out of my mind and tried to go forward with the matter at hand. I told Gerard more about the Socratic Method and how I had been trying to use it recently.

"Did you do that too?" I asked.

"Do what? The method... like now?"

"I mean when you first started teaching me. Is that what you were trying to do?"

He got really sad for a second, but not because he had lost that portion of his memory. He was still feeling it; it was definitely still there. But he was growing despondent because I was questioning it and possibly uprooting something. He put his paints down for a second and pulled up his stool to face the bed, and tried to get himself out of his mood. "Socrates once said that no good life is worth living unexamined, and that interrogation has always stuck with me about my own life. But, no, Frank. I did not try to repeat Socrates and his method with you intentionally. I did not know what I was doing with you. You just kind of happened."

I stared at him, trying to derive meaning and truth from this. If the unexamined life was not worth living to Socrates, and Gerard liked this idea, why had he not interrogated his love for me? Would he have found the results that had frightened me on the bus? I knew my own contextual knowledge, but I was still unsure about his position. I asked him and he brushed it away. His face twitched, he felt it, and remembered it.

"I don't want to think about this."

I instantly apologized, feeling the defeat in his voice. What was I even doing, or trying to prove? That I knew more now than I did then? None of that mattered anymore, because we were here right now. I felt the same appalling feeling that Jasmine probably had when she looked at the state of the world through those news, articles, and statistics. I shook my head and swallowed my guilt. I was being an idiot.

I walked over to Gerard and I kept telling him I was sorry. "I don't know why I brought it up. I love you, I'm sorry. I don't know what I was thinking. I just got swept up with this reading I've been doing and this professor I'm talking to. I want to tell him about you, and I just don't know how. I'm sorry."

He looked like he wanted to say something, but he lacked the words. He sat there, staring at his painting, and then began to put his things away. He placed his brushes in the glass jar of water and then went into the bathroom to dump out the multi-colored contents, before cleaning in-between the bristles under the tap. I came in behind him, told him I would take over, and he seemed relieved. So was I; there were no accusations of stealing, no raised voices in anger, and I knew I had my answer. He loved me; he would have never hurt me, but had thought about this and came to the same conclusions: none of it mattered. I would have to trust his word, and I did with all of my heart.

Gerard said he wanted to go to bed again, because it had been impossible to sleep during the heat of the afternoon, and began to undress himself. When I was done with the brushes, I put the caps on all his paints, and put them back in their previous order. I was about to go to his to-do list and write tomorrow's date for him before he nodded off, but he spoke again. He was naked and under the thin sheet, a hand across his forehead, but he was nowhere close to sleep.

"I would never do that, you know."

"I know," I told him, thinking of pedophilia and all of my nightmarish thoughts from before. I knew that, I still knew it. I would never let it go. But Gerard was pressing me about another matter.

"No, I mean Socrates. I would have never done what he did."

"What?"

"Socrates chose death. I would never do that, not to you. I would never choose death over not doing art," he stated. It came out a little roughly, but it was all there. His eyes were closed as he talked, but he was fairly lucid. I stood over him, close to the bed, but made no contact with him. I listened closely to what he was saying, wondering if there was anything between the lines. Was he trying to tell me something about himself, about the illness?

"Even if you could never paint again, you would still go on?" I reframed the question.

He nodded, sincerely. He opened his eyes at that point, regarded me standing above him, and with the hand that was not on his forehead, he reached out and grabbed my leg. He was gentle; his face seemed to soften as soon as he touched the fabric of my jeans and felt me underneath it.

"Get into bed with me, please," he requested above a whisper, and I nodded. He opened the thin sheet that was plastered to his skin, and I glimpsed his nude body before I slid under with him. I took off my shirt so it wouldn't be as hot, and was about to go for my pants when his hands met mine over my fly. He turned on his side and began to take the rest of my clothing off for me, kissing whatever skin he had exposed lightly. I breathed out slowly, letting myself fall under the weight of his touch. A part of me wanted him to undress me so badly, to touch me like he used to touch me, but I had been too conflicted recently to completely let go and have it happen. But I missed his touch; I missed utterly everything. I had put sex out of my mind for so long because of the illness, but I wanted it again. It went beyond desire, beyond simple fucking (though fucking was never simple and he had been the one to teach me that). I wanted him to be a part of me again. To crawl inside my interior and live there forever, before it became too fragmented again and shut out completely, and so I wouldn't have to be alone anymore.

"I would have to go on without art," Gerard began again. We were both naked now, our bodies on top of one another. He scrunched up his face, as if that was not exactly what he meant to say. "I know I don't have to do anything. I know there is a choice. But... art has always been an escape from the madness that is me and my mind. I thought no one would understand the madness that I had, and that I needed to keep creating so I could have something that was mine to combat that alone-feeling instead. But people do understand the madness. Not completely, and not everyone, but enough to go on. I would never do what Socrates did. I'd never kill myself for art. I'd never kill myself to get away from the madness..." He paused, moving his hands as if it made the words come out easier. Then he looked at me. "I'd never hurt you. Or Jasmine. I'd never do anything like that to hurt you. You know that, right?"

I touched his face with my hands, eventually coming to rest on the back of his neck. I nodded and murmured a faint "yes," and then I pushed our foreheads together. He felt the frantic nature of my movements and squeezed my hand tighter. I knew what he was telling me, and I knew it so well. I didn't care about his reliability, about his subject position, or how I could interpret that remark. I had been doing that for the past few fucking weeks and I had almost erased him from my life. I had killed him while he was still alive and then I was tarnishing his memory from before. I didn't need to do that; I didn't have to do that because I already knew. I knew all along. There was never one truth and there was never one meaning. I held his body close to mine and I saw it, I felt our truth, existing between us.

I wanted to ask him more questions, but better ones this time. I didn't want to evoke doubt and fear through my examining and fragment us even more. I wanted to ask the questions that would bring us together and have us move forward from this point. I wanted to ask him what he remembered about us, what was his favorite memory of us, and his favorite color right now. Did he feel like a color when he remembered? It was black when he didn't recall, but did he move through his memory like a rainbow? And what did he want to say about each of those colors? We didn't have to borrow from Kandinsky's versions. We could create our own using our own words and our own logic. A million questions possessed me and came into my mind all at once, but I pushed them aside. He was on top of me, his arms supporting him as he looked down and then began to kiss my neck. I looked over his back and saw his toes and his ankles sticking out from underneath the blue sheet. I saw his veins and sinews of his muscle, the hair on his legs that was going gray now, too. It was all I could see, and it made me want to cry, because we were both so simple and so fragile. We were just feet, just hands, just torsos and arms. But that was fragmenting us, again. I needed to put us back together again in my arms. I needed to become whole with him again.

I opened my mouth then, about to tell Gerard about Plato's The Symposium and what I had read that night on love, but I only kissed him instead. We didn't need to have any lectures between us, and I did not need to prove to him, of all people, just how much I had learned these past few weeks. I had done this on my own, but Hilda had been right about something. There was something to be said for practicing theory, and not just merely speaking it. Words and language were useless, after all. I wanted cohesion.

In The Symposium, one of the people talking told a story about how we were all created. At one point, a long time ago, we used all used to be a part of one another. We used to keep ourselves together, back to back, and we looked both forwards and backwards, while remaining present in the moment. There were three types of people like this: the ones who were two women together, ones who were both a woman and a man, and then there were two men back to back. Love didn't exist as this point, because it had always existed. No one knew what they felt every day; being this close to the person on their back, this was what love was like. Without the separation, there would be no distinction. The separation, especially in stories like these, would always happen. The gods who watched the people realized they were going to be too powerful, so everyone was split apart from the person who was literally part of them, and then they were scattered around the world. All of the gods, I was realizing in my studies, wanted to split people apart. People were always too powerful when they were together, it was literally inconceivable to envision; The Professor had even confessed that point when speaking about the Humanities as a discipline. I didn't think it was so impossible to envision, however. All of us had already remade the Tower of Babel with our new section of language, and I saw it every day when I got up and I walked by my garden. I could still hear all of the voices blending into one, not erasing the difference, but celebrating it. As I looked at Gerard, and our lips met together again, I wanted to remake the human form again, and capture what had been lost between us. I wanted to push our bodies into one again, into us again. Gerard kissed me back and we pressed our hips together, letting out a moan in unison. I wanted to take back the narrative that I knew was ours, and put our bodies back into one.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14