Chapter Thirteen Lesson Four: Image

Over the next few days, Gerard and I got a lot of painting done. Just as quickly as he smashed his art, and I smashed the beer, my days of always cleaning when I went to his place became a distant memory. He was no longer taking his routine afternoon nap, but teaching me about the art he dreamed about. On our feet with the brush in our hand, pallet to the side, we would dream together and consume the art whole, always painting, always living. And if there was cleaning to be done, the brushes getting too caked with our artistic awakening, Gerard was right there, cramped side by side next to me at the kitchen sink, helping with a smile on his face. The only part of cleaning that Gerard didn’t (more like refused to) help me with was the dove’s cage.

“She knows me,” Gerard informed me when I asked why I had to be the only one to scrape bird shit off the metal bottom, when I’d rather be painting right along side him again. “She’s helped me and I know how to sense her. You don’t yet. It’s part of your lessons. You have to learn to be free like the dove.” He stroked the smooth off-white feathers with his elegant fingers, face trained on the animal, docile.

I laughed at his statement at first, thinking he couldn’t be serious, especially with that last line. Doves were a symbol for freedom, but this one was stuck in a cage most of the time. How could that be free? Real doves – the ones that were white and held olive branches in their mouths - were supposed to fly through the hills and through the clouds into the immaculate blue sky. They weren’t supposed to be caged up inside a middle aged man’s place, their feathers the colour of unwashed pearls. Doves may have embodied freedom, but that bird and that concept seemed so foreign and contradictory to the one Gerard held on his fingertips.

When my laugh had fallen into the wide room like a shattered echo however, I glanced over at the artist, and saw his serious countenance remain the same. He nodded his head at me, bobbing it up and down like the bird he admired. My smile fell and I started cleaning again, blood vessels bursting like rose buds under my skin.

“You remind me a lot of a dove,” he informed me, moments later, his voice coming out in a cool and liquid manner, rushing over my body and into my ears. He placed the dove back on the perch and away from himself, while gliding across the room and over to me, this new dove in his own mind. He gave me a sly look, bating me almost to pry more answers out of him, when my lips fell immobile on my face. He kept drifting along, merely sitting on the couch at last, flinging his legs over the armrest and letting them dangle without rhythm. He still kept his gaze on me by the window through half lidded eyes.

“I do?” I found my voice and began to question, throwing him a skeptical gaze.

I had no idea if it was good or not to be compared to this creature, or what one I was being compared to. I had no idea if I wanted to be the mythical bird that people depended on, but I didn’t know if I wanted to be the one still trapped in a cage. I was beginning to fall for the off-white dove in the apartment and her small quirks, just like Gerard had, but I could never make assumptions that this was the meaning behind the artist’s words. I could never guess on matters of such importance ever again, especially with Gerard. I didn’t need cold hard facts – those were horrible and uncreative. I just needed a basis to form my opinions on, and with Gerard’s ever changing and shifting mind, it was like standing in the middle of a frozen lake, about to fall through. I was already starting to feel the chill in the air.

“Yes,” he nodded evenly, his face taking on a placid and thinking stance. He clucked his tongue, figuring out how he wanted to phrase the next part. He glanced over to the side, the sunlight casting a glow across his pale skin as his lips breathed the words his mind had created.

“When I saw you, standing outside that liquor store, I knew you were a dove.” He paused for a second, waiting for me to interject, but I remained motionless. Just the coos of his dove were present, urging him to continue. “You were different from your friends, but you looked just the same. Everyone thought you all were pigeons, dirty creatures and rats of the sky… or a parking lot. But you, Frank.” He looked at me again, staring strong and intent on my wide eyes. His body remained stationary, but it was as if he was pointing a finger right into my heart. He wasn’t waiting for me to interject with something as he paused this time. He was making sure I heard him.

“ You were different. You weren’t a pigeon, but that dove no one could decipher because it didn’t look like the creature they were used to seeing. And even with your uniqueness, you failed to recognize yourself when you came here, and made the same mistake with my bird.” A smile spread across his face as he looked over at me, poking fun at my mistake of species from my first week there, when I had failed to discount the dove as anything but a rat of the sky. I looked over at her slowly, changing my mind at the same time. When I looked back, Gerard’s playful jeer suddenly fell from his face like a shaken Etch-A-Sketch, serious tone masking everything.

“Just because my bird was brown, didn’t mean it wasn’t any less extraordinary.” His voice dipped off at the end, leading me to draw my own conclusions. His eyes washed over me intensely, but it wasn’t invasive. It was like he was looking inside me, and seeing me for who I really was. He was seeing past the brown, past the feathers and past the stereotype. Standing outside a liquor store wasn’t that glamorous and conjured up a lot of bad images in people’s minds. Being stuck inside a cage had the same effect, though and Gerard could see that. He had seen past everything in order to accept me and his bird, who were slowly becoming the same entity inside his head.

The waves of realization hit strong, and I had to look away from Gerard, back down into the cage I was cleaning and subsequently, the animal that inhabited it. I could see where he was coming from then with his bird. She was a dove, she was free and she meant the world to him because of that. I believed him and started to stroke her feathers, not letting the other aspect of his words coming into play. I was like the dove in his mind, even if I thought I was the farthest thing from it. It was the hugest compliment he had given me thus far, but I never said a word back to him. No thank you or anything; I just went back to cleaning the cage. I knew I should have said something, but honestly, there was nothing I could ever say to grasp how I was feeling to his remark. No words had been invented yet, or at least I wasn’t aware of them. Cleaning was the only thing I had been accustomed to, and though Gerard was inching his way more and more into my life, I could only respond with the one thing I knew to do right. I cleaned the rest of my time there that day, going home early.

It was shortly after that brief encounter with the dove when Gerard began to actually help clean his own art supplies again. He still insisted upon me taking care of Dali, or whatever the dove was named that week. Even as I pouted and griped, plugging my nose anytime I stepped near the scat-covered bottom, I knew I didn’t mind cleaning her cage. The smell was alarming some days and a few times I prayed to God that I had white paint on my hands and clothing, but those were minor flaws. I needed to find the flaws in something I loved, and I was beginning to love this bird a lot.

She was quiet a lot of the days I was there, only purring or cooing when someone went really close to her or first came in the apartment door. She was like a little guard dog; only she was welcoming the intruder of freedom into the home with open wings. She didn’t warm up to me as quickly as I thought she would have at first, but as the weeks passed she gradually started to calm down. She even sat on my hand sometimes as I put more seeds into her dish, instead of pecking at my fingers anytime they were near her. I took her completely out of the encasement one time, cupping her in my palm and petting her light brown feathers softly. I thought Gerard was in the kitchen getting something while I stroked the animal, but all of a sudden he had appeared behind me, his hand on the small of my back.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” he asked me, placing his chin on my shoulder and breathing into my neck as he too looked at the majestic creature. His actions were only to get closer to the bird, despite their profound intimacy. Even with knowing this logically, I couldn’t help but feel my heart flutter and my stomach lurch, defying all common sense. And as his hand started to rub across my back, resting on my waist where some of my flesh spilled over the side of my jeans, I thought all was specious.

“Yeah,” was all I could manage to say without my voice leaving me entirely. My tone was still parched and stretched out, flecking off like dried-up paint.

I never spoke much when Gerard touched me, mostly because I couldn’t. Not many people had ever touched me the way he had; so loving and caring, without so much as a second thought. None of my friends even gave hugs all that often, and if they did their arms would clothes-line me across my neck, and cause me to never want a hug from them again. I was not used to having someone paw all over me within moments of stepping into their apartment. I didn’t know how to act, most of the time, my arms glued to my side while Gerard smothered me in his own, not offended by my lack of embrace. I was grateful for that, because even if I had no clue what I was doing, I never wanted them to stop (kind of like the art I was working my way through).

I loved how Gerard made me feel important. When he touched me, it made me feel like I was still there and in the room with him. Most of the time, my mind wandered away from me and I would forget I was in the middle of something. Gerard’s fingers tracing lightly over my shoulder blades brought me down to reality again. And it felt good to be touched by him; he cared about me and it wasn’t in a sexual way, even if those words spilled from his lips. There was nothing persuasive or demanding about his actions; they exuded care and love, and he wanted nothing in return from it. He didn’t want my money for wine, and he had even stopped using my cleaning services all that often. There was no way he would ever take something sexual from me, and I had solid proof of that fact. I had been working there for weeks by that point, coming almost everyday. He had been given plenty of opportunities to ‘take advantage of me’ if he had wanted to. And nothing had been done. Nothing had even been hinted at. End of story.

At that point, however, I wasn’t quite sure if I could have called it ‘being taken advantage of’ because I found myself testing him in small inconspicuous ways.

I had changed in his house once before, bringing extra clothing from home so I didn’t do too much damage to my favourite shirt. He had let me use his bathroom and didn’t walk in on me or make any sexual advance. I even stayed in the bathroom in only my boxers for at least fifteen minutes waiting to see if he would. But he didn’t. He knew I was in there almost naked, he knew I was vulnerable and he knew I had been taking a long time. Any idiot could see I was bating him. And yet, he did nothing; not even mention how long I had taken. He just gave me a brush and a smile when I finally came out clothed, telling me to get to work.

I never knew why, but I always felt somewhat disappointed that he had never done anything that day. I didn’t know what would have happened if he had or how I would have reacted, but I never let my mind wander that far off. I could only focus on the fact that though he was making all these remarks, touching me and I was presenting some pretty obvious opportunities, nothing was happening. He told me he was gay and that he didn’t have a lover. Why had he not done something yet?

When the dove was in my hands and he was breathing on my neck slowly, those thoughts, those promises and those unfulfilled actions didn’t seem to matter in the slightest. I was enjoying myself there a lot. I had so much freedom within these four walls. Gerard instructed me on most days, leading us in the direction we were supposed to be going, then stopping spontaneously and changing the lesson at the drop of a hat, or paintbrush. It seemed like the dove was the one planning our lessons, her name changing from artist to artist, dictating what we did.

When he called the brown bird Monet, we spent our days outside in the small meadows of flowers and grass that were slowly starting to spring up from the now unthawed earth. We traipsed through the weeds and found exotic plants, clovers and grass just coming to life that he would then rip from the earth, killing them before their time had come.

“Just like most artists,” he would explain, bringing up all of the famous painters he loved who ended up committing suicide at some point in their career. Surprisingly, for a man that was so full of life, he seemed to admire a lot of artists who chose death over everything else. When I gave him an incredulous, and a little afraid look, he merely tipped his sunglasses down on his long nose with a smile, assuring me he had no plans of the such.

“I prefer fading away,” he remarked slyly, shooting me a look I could not decipher from behind the darkened lenses.

I had no time to debate further as he dragged us back to the apartment, where he put the once alive nature specimens on his kitchen table for examination. He’d make me look at the hues, the shades and the fine details for hours before he took a paintbrush and placed it in my hands, telling me to go for it from memory. It was hard that first time I had to paint just from the images we had studied for hours in my mind, but I eventually got it down pat. Nature was easy to do; if I made a mistake I could pass it off as one as Mother Nature had done so herself. The images I held in my mind of nature, my vision and clarity of it all would make the best picture, he told me. I trusted him with that ideal and he had been right, as always. I even trusted him as he slipped a blindfold over my eyes, in the final test of memory. There were no specimens to study before hand for this piece. Oh no, this painting was to come from the depths of my mind and imagination, what I held deep inside myself, other than a beating heart trapped in a cage of bone.

“Memories are key,” he informed me, his hands placed loosely on my hips to keep me centered in front of the canvas.

“I thought you didn’t like to live in the past,” I shot back with a smile, my brush just hitting the page. I felt his grip tighten encouragingly on my waist, and though I was blind to it, I was sure he smiled too.

“Yes, but there is a difference between living in them and calling upon them,” he leaned forward and whispered in my ears. “Calling upon them for art is creating something new. Something concrete you can hold. Dwelling on them, well, that’s just a waste of time and energy. Nothing concrete can come from that.” He paused, drawing his lips away from my ear and leaving chills in their place.

“Now paint what you remember,” he concluded, letting go of me then, stepping back only a few feet while I started to paint in a feverish frenzy.

My pictures themselves were nothing compared to his, skill wise. My objects that I painted still looked child-like and elementary, but practice was the only way to get better. It felt good painting with a blindfold on because that meant I couldn’t see my mistakes. I had an excuse for screwing up if I did, but Gerard didn’t seem to think messing up was possible.

“That’s what abstract is for,” he enlightened me one day when I lamented about my shoe picture looking more like a mushy banana. “You tell people it’s nothing and they’ll look for the meaning that you thought you could never portray. And in a mess of lines and splotches, they’ll find what they wanted, whether it’s what you intended on or not.”

Gerard’s advice stayed in my head as I painted, even though the room was deathly silent as I painted from my memory. I could feel Gerard’s presence behind me, a foot away from me, hand most likely poised under his chin with a look of allure and contemplation as he watched. I felt nervous, yet protected under his gaze, but I managed to shut out the world and remember one that I thought I had left behind. I didn’t know what I was doing when I painted, which was the point, really. I just had feelings and vexations stirred beneath me, right in the pit of my stomach and I let myself go on that. I felt as if I was flying at one point, leaning in on the tips of my toes as my brush hit the final stroke, and I came crashing down. I knew I was done after that, and so did Gerard.

He removed the blindfold from my eyes, rubbing his fingers carelessly through my hair to straighten it out. I kept my eyes closed longer than usual, letting the wraith of his touch linger longer on my skin before I gazed at my work. When I did look, I was mystified.

All I could see was blue at first, just gallons upon gallons of blue lines at the top, different strokes and slightly different shades. At the bottom, however, I saw something solid. It was a dark figure, a shadow perhaps, but its outline was more distinct. It didn’t go all over the place like the blue did; it stuck together. I looked at it for a long time before it all clicked in my mind.

“Sacré bleu,” I heard Gerard mutter behind me just as the thoughts collided in the forefront of my mind. I turned around and stared at him, wondering how he knew what I was thinking. He smiled and winked at me, then walked to the kitchen to get more wine.

I studied the picture after; convinced it was my best work I had done ever, not just with the strange and elusive artist. It was my strongest memory after all, and I relived it each time I took a drink from my wine glass that day, and each time Gerard touched my shoulder. He thought it was my greatest piece, too.

I began to make more art, still guided by the dove’s names. When Gerard called her Pollock, after Jackson Pollock, the man who made his living and went insane on his abstract work, we painted with marbles. We needed to make the chaotic lines and cringe worthy colours blend together effortlessly, without the aid of our brushes. We needed the childhood toy to represent the pain where it had all started for the madman, and we placed the objects inside small paint buckets to prepare. Once covered, we rolled them around freely on a canvas, the clanking sound making music in our ears. We did all of our work in silence, despite Gerard’s pleas to put on his favourite opera. I told him his singing distracted me (in the nicest way possible) and he had given in. Silence was just as golden as the music he loved, and in the silence we could find out even more about each other, like the things we never dared to say. The music was a distraction anyway, and distraction was not good for art, unless it was the art itself.

Sitting on his floor with the marbles on the canvas in front of us, we played the game we thought we had left behind years ago, leaving pink and red trails where we went. Gerard told me of Pollock’s life, his wife that had left him, his drunken rage and his insanity as I listened intently. He told me the story of all the artists that he drew upon for inspiration, but none of their stories ever sounded as interesting as his own.

The night after Gerard had spilled the canvas of his life story out to me on the kitchen table, I began to have vivid dreams about him. They weren’t anything too scandalous; merely reenacting the events he had told me about. In the first reverie, he had been sitting in a park drawing pictures for those who passed by until the sun disappeared, when he would crawl into a little ball and sleep in the empty New York park until the sun sliced through, giving him light to do it all again. The next was shortly after, with him colouring in books and talking with his brother, who I had never met before. I kept seeing the aspects of Gerard’s life that I had not been present for, again and again in my mind.

The weird thing was though (as if dreaming about an old artist wasn’t weird enough) that in each version I saw of Gerard, child, youth or mid-life, I always pictured him as the Gerard I saw everyday after school. I always pictured the forty-seven-year-old fag artist. It baffled me at first, why I couldn’t adjust his appearance accordingly in my subconscious, but after a few nights of these constant visits, it hit me: Gerard was still all of those ages. He hadn’t changed. He hadn’t gotten old. He had just acquired some numbers to be added to his birth certificate when really, he still had as much youth as he had ever had when he was my age. And really, I had started to see Gerard as my age. Perhaps a few years older because of the amount of respect I had developed for him, but close to my age nonetheless. He was so youthful and alive; I found it difficult to picture him as being old.

And his eyes – there was something about his eyes. They were still fresh and young. They had not aged at all. One of the rare times I had paid attention in science, I could remember reading that out of all of your body, the eyes were the only organ that never grew. They stayed the same size since birth. What you were born with was all you got; Gerard had been this magical, this appealing since he was a baby.

After I comprehended that key detail, my dreams started to make even more sense. Gerard’s eyes had always been timeless. They had always been that beautiful light olive colour. It had been his eyes I had seen in my dreams, leading me through the life I wish I had been apart of to see unfold. In the morning when I would wake up, and be reminded of the tall tales I had dreamed, I would sigh despondently wishing that I could have been there in any way, shape or form. Even if I had been a fly on the wall or a fucking rat in his apartment. That would have been enough for me.

I wondered if years down the line I would ever read about Gerard in an art textbook. If fifty years from now there would be another couple of budding artists sitting and talking about the painter from Jersey who destroyed all his own work. It was a far-fetched notion inside my head, but Gerard was teaching me that those notions sometimes turned into bright ideas and theories. I let them fall from my mouth as we painted with marbles, but when I did, Gerard only laughed at the ‘impossible’.

“It could happen,” I insisted, smiling wide as I tossed the toy over to him. We were lying on the ground now, our chins level with the canvas. It made it hard to laugh, but it was worth it to get this close to the work we were creating.

“I suppose,” he said, brushing it off as nothing. He paused for a bit, collecting the marbles at his end. He shot me a look before he shot them all over to me at once, sending a clanging noise ricocheting into the air. “They could also be talking about the teenager who spent all his time with an aging, old fag learning to paint, and then becoming a famous guitar player.”

He smiled at me, but it wasn’t a smirk like usual. It was a genuine deep smile, making his wrinkles furrow deeper with sincerity. I felt myself blush and didn’t say anything. Only rolled the marbles more.

“You never did play your guitar for me, Frank,” Gerard called again, getting my attention so I could not divert it away.

“I know…” I said trailing off, not really looking forward to where this was going.

“Bring it soon,” Gerard told me. “I want to hear you play.”

I felt my face blush a shade redder; matching the scarlet hue we were painting with. “I don’t know…” I said, tossing a marble lightly. We were almost done with the piece, the white space disappearing rapidly. I knew I would no longer be able to toss marbles away like I did his remarks. I had to answer.

“I kept my part of the bargain,” Gerard informed me, baring his tiny teeth as he talked. “I taught you how to paint and you’re coming along quite nicely. My duty has been fulfilled. Now, it’s time for your end. I want music to set my art to.” He looked at me and I met his eyes, his assurance practically vibrating behind that distinct hue of jade.

“I’ll think about it,” I told him, making a promise with our gaze. “Just a few more lessons first.” He nodded again, though reluctant, sealing the deal. I breathed a sigh of relief, unaware that my breath had been shallow before, and we got back to work.

Honestly, I wasn’t ready yet to have him hear me play. I had only been practicing every so often, not nearly as much as I should have been. I was getting fairly good, but I still felt like a beginner at everything and extremely unprepared. I didn’t want to only play the guitar for him. I wanted to have something written down. And I needed to write something down by that point. It was getting to be about that time where my head was going to explode and be overrun with thoughts, if I didn’t do something soon.

These thoughts, though, were very different from my normal teenage angst. These were happy, flowing and pleasant thoughts, dashed with a hint of curiosity. I began to envision myself as Gerard in his college years, staying up all night just to write down theories. I doubted anything inside my thick skull though would be great enough to be considered a theory, however, but I still needed to get them down and out in order to comprehend what the fuck they meant.

Painting had been helping me to think clearer so far, and it was helping me again. When the dove’s name changed to Matisse and we were left drawing and painting bright and vivid oblong shapes, contrasting and sometimes hurting the eyes, I didn’t think it could get much more bizarre.

Then Picasso came along and nothing made any sense.

“Why did people paint like this?” I asked while we were hunched over at his kitchen table, looking at one of Picasso’s renditions of a woman. Her face was triangular and blue, the rest of her body complimented with random limbs appearing out of nowhere. It was ugly – for once I was admitting to that. Gerard had been teaching me to find the beauty in everything, even the garbage lying in the street outside. And though I had been successful in seeing some kind of aesthetic in the filthy Jersey streets, this painting made no fucking sense. Who the fuck would do this? And get famous for it?

“A painting can be anything you want it to be,” Gerard told me matter-of-factly, set in his ways. When I looked down at the defaced woman and then back up at him again, my own countenance as fucked as the woman’s we were studying, he continued.

“Look at the other artists we’ve talked about,” he instructed simply, motioning with his hands, grasping at air. “When Monet painted nature, he was showing the beauty of life. When Dali painted his peculiar scenes of flowers hatching from eggs, he was showing his subconscious dreams he had at night. Even when Pollock was painting lines and squiggles it was showing his insanity. Picasso is showing his view point of women – they’re monsters.”

I nodded my head, slowly getting it. Gerard always seemed to think on some other alternate plain of thought. Random stuff would pop into his head and out of his mouth, making no sense, but when you changed the words around and broke out of your own shell of normal consideration, it was brilliant. Fucking astounding on most days. He saw things that no one else did, or maybe that no one else chose to see. I tried to see the meanings he told me were there, but I struggled a lot of the time. And here was no exception. I didn’t see the mutants that were women, which Gerard was seeing. I just saw a crazy fucker who painted whatever came to his head. And I told all of Gerard this, hoping I would not be lectured about fine art again.

“That’s true too,” was all he said, nodding.

“What?” I asked. I was not used to being right, especially when it was the opposite of what Gerard was saying.

“Picasso was a crazy fucker,” Gerard repeated my words with a smile before he continued. “I see Picasso’s view on women when I look at this painting. You see his own mutant aspect, perhaps brought on by women. Who knows?” Gerard shrugged his shoulders exaggeratedly, tilting his head to the side. “A painting is whatever you want it to be.”

I nodded my head again, absorbing information. Most of the time when Gerard told me something, I accepted it as fact. He was older than me, smarter and more educated in that field. But for some reason I felt the need to challenge him here. Maybe because he left his words, just like the art in front of us, open for interpretation.

“What if I want this to be something else entirely?” I spoke up, pointing down at the leg coming out of the woman’s torso.

“Then it can be,” he declared, shoving his words forward with the tip of his tongue. He was looking down at the piece while I looked at him, thinking nothing of it. He tried to turn the page, finishing the conversation, but I pressed it down on the table, making it stay. He shot me a surprised glance, bewildered at my challenge. After eyeing my serious stance, he gave in, curious to see where this was going. I had challenged him before for the hell of it, but now that I had caught his attention, I needed to pick a direction fast.

“What if I wanted…” I trailed off, thinking hard of something – anything so long as it was ridiculous - to put in place of the woman. I wanted to throw a curve ball at Gerard and see if he could still hit back. He had thrown many at me; I wanted him to know what it was like in my shoes, feeling like I was striking out.

I looked around the room for what felt like ages, until I finally just picked a mundane object I that would have to work with. “What if I want this piece of a disfigured woman to represent a clock? Would it still work then?”

Gerard sighed, half-glad and half-annoyed that he was going to have to prove himself right. He looked at me square in the eyes as he continued, reiterating his philosophy from before. “If you can find meaning in it, then it works. A painting is anything you want it to be.”

“But this is a woman,” I stated the obvious, not fully satisfied with his answer. “And I want to compare it to a clock. How on earth could that work?”

Gerard had given up trying to turn the page on the book we were staring in, and now had his hands folded in front of himself. He looked tired with my questions, but I could see the small spark in his eyes for the sheer fact that I kept asking and asking, wanting to know more with every twist and turn. “I don’t know why you picked that object, but I could tell you how I would compare this to a clock.”

I gazed at him, waiting for the response. He sighed; rolling his eyes a bit, and continued. “A clock is a reference to time, and there is a certain time of the month where women are at their most mutant-like.” Gerard gave me a grin, probing to see if I knew what he meant.

I did, of course, even if I had limited contact with women. As far as I was concerned, my mother was an asexual being, along with my father, and none of us ever had to worry about ‘that time.’ I had only heard horror stories from Sam, who had a sister and far more experience with girls than me. He would always exaggerate details though, and make everything seem ten times worse, so I knew I shouldn’t hold my opinions based on his ‘facts’. Girls and their bodies, how they worked and functioned, seemed really scary in my mind; a foreign territory I had yet to conquest. And as time wore on, especially when I was with Gerard, I found myself not wanting to ever cross into that territory again.

Sure, I loved what girls looked like and all that they embodied. I loved the curves and feminine nature of it all, and I really wanted to have sex with a few of them at one point or another in my life, but there was still something so scary about everything. I didn’t know what to do with them, how to treat them or, more importantly, how to please them. At least with my own body, I knew what felt good and I would be able to mimic that. Even if my body was supposedly ‘ugly’ as far as art went, I was getting used to the idea that it could be the only one I would ever explore, at least, for now.

“I mean, I love Vivian and all,” Gerard continued talking, snapping me out of my thoughts and back into reality. Gerard was still on the semi-dreaded topic however, spouting all he knew about women. “But there are some days where I don’t know what is wrong with that woman. I tell myself it’s something I’ll never understand, and some days, I’m glad of that.” He paused for a second, taking in a deep breath with a strong smile over his face. He gave me a playful look, flipping some of his hair out of his eyes. “Being gay does have its benefits.”

I nodded mutely, turning the page of the book.

The next few pages were still littered with the defaced women, and to get back on a more proactive topic, we continued to compare their mutilated bodies to the mundane objects around us. Like Freud made everything into a phallic symbol, we made everything into an art project, with a deeper meaning and purpose that even Picasso himself would have been proud of. The artist was more versatile than I ever thought he was, especially as Gerard found a small correlation between the work and the small cracks in the wall.

“What about in my own work? What about meaning then?” I probed more, once we had exhausted the Picasso book and the minute features of the small apartment. I was leaning over the table eagerly, eyes wide and bright, and a smile on my face. I was even bouncing up and down on the balls of my feet for a bit, acting like a five-year-old child who had ‘why’ on repeat in their vocabulary.

“That’s when you have the most power, Frank,” Gerard assured me, motioning majestically with his long black clothed arms as he did. An idea hit him suddenly and he got up from the table we had been hunched over, walking to where some of his own art stood. He rifled through the pieces as I followed his voice over. “In your own painting you can make the sky orange, the grass purple and the sky underwater. You can make it anything you want, and you can find different meaning in it.”

I exhaled an approval as I watched his delicate hands push back canvas after used canvas that were placed up against the wall. He was squatting in front of it, face twisted in exertion and inflexibility of his old aching muscles.

I had always wondered what Gerard did with his art when he was done with it, and now I knew. He merely left it leaning against the wall, hidden in the crack behind a bookshelf. It seemed pointless to me almost; to spend so much time doing something then never see it again, never use it again. He was pouring his heart and soul into each piece, and then filing them away like they were nothing. They weren’t nothing though; just from where I stood I could see the small flashes of images, colours and hues and I was already blown away. By the time he had actually shuffled through the other pieces, finding the ones he wanted, there was nothing left for me to stand on but my own amazement.

I watched with my mouth hanging open as Gerard placed the paintings, drawings and everything into piles, organizing for something I couldn’t quite be sure of. He rose to his feet suddenly, taking me by surprise. He gave me a mischievous smile before he began to disperse the paintings all around his hardwood floor, lining them up like tiles, inch by inch.

“What are you doing?” I asked, gripping words inside my head finally. I thought he had just wanted to show me some of his pieces before, sharing interpretations. I had no idea what good would come from lining his already stained floor.

“Everything is better from a different perspective,” he told me, with another smile. “Hanging paintings on walls is too overrated. Let’s try the floor for today.”

And, seeing nothing I could argue with, I helped him spread them all out, and then took a spot next to him.

We looked at the paintings for hours, our bodies face down and legs stretched out toward the other side of the room. He asked me each time what I thought his art meant and then he told me what he intended it to mean. Our interpretations differed so widely that it blew my mind. He had drawn his grandmother in one picture, from an old photo he found in his mother’s drawer. When I looked at it, I saw sadness right away. She was sitting at the table, her eyes looking out the window, a cup of coffee in her hands, warming her up. Her eyes looked tired, but Gerard told me it was not from sadness, but quite the opposite.

She was tired, yes, but it was from waiting – and waiting for something good to happen, no less. She held the cup of coffee with tight hands, anticipating something, her husband to come home. The photo was taken around the time of the war, when she was waiting for her husband to come back to their life together, alive and well after fighting.

Our interpretations varied, but that was what Gerard wanted. When Gerard painted or drew something, he wanted to get his thoughts out. And it didn’t matter if people got them or not, because they found their own truth in it.

After falling all over his work at different angles and viewpoints again and again, a question came to my mind. “Do you have any pictures you drew of yourself?”

By this point, we were both sitting on the floor cross-legged (or as close as he could get to that) next to each other, trapped in this stance by the fence of canvases around us.

“No, I never draw myself,” he said quickly, brushing the idea away hurriedly with a wave of a hand.

“Why not?” I was not letting it go just as easy.

I recalled one of the other artists he had told me about, a woman this time, Frida Kalho. She had done painting after painting of herself, often with some disturbing imagery attached. Gerard usually embraced every form of art he saw, painting it at least once. He loved Frida; in fact, she was one of the only female painters he admired. Why didn’t he mimic her art form and have a self-portrait?

“I just don’t,” he stated, brushing it away.

He stretched out his legs again with a groan, drawing himself up to his feet. He began to pile his canvases on top of one another, them making loud clacking noises as he did. Despite this apparent annoyance, he still made no attempt to stop talking. “First of all, I find it vain, painting an image of myself.”

I snickered at that remark, mostly because vanity was never a concern for Gerard before. There was something more to his avoidance, which he answered in his next breath.

“And I don’t want to know how I see myself. I don’t want to paint my image because essentially, I don’t know what that is. And I don’t want people to see what I think of myself. And I especially don’t want them forming their own opinions.” He chuckled to himself, getting wild ideas of how people saw him already – the forty-something fag artist. He looked at me and I nodded, sensing his dilemma. I didn’t really want people to interpret my image; I was still raw from him comparing me to his dove.

“That is why my bedroom door stays black,” he informed me, turning around and pointing to the abyss that always remained the same on his wall. “My room is dark for a reason. That’s where I really go to be myself. That’s where I sleep, where I dream, write and cry. It’s black in there. I don’t want people to interpret it. I just want it to be.”

I silently approved, following along. Though the mystery of why that door was black had been solved, I still had other ponderings. I wanted to know what went on inside there, on the other side and not just from his brief summary. I wanted to get behind that wall (literally) and see him and that room for myself. He said that he cried back there, and when I looked at Gerard I found it hard picturing him with tears in those crystal olive eyes. It was very possible, judging from the amount of pain he had told me about in his life, but I found it hard to picture. Those timeless eyes just weren’t supposed to have tears in them. It was like a crack in a vase, or a tear in silk. It didn’t belong, and it seemed unattainable.

I also didn’t want to picture this strong man, this work of art and waste of paint, crying. It would ruin the image I had in my head of him, based behind those strong green eyes. I didn’t want to see them crack or break; I would have much rather see him shed tears of watercolors. The only way for me to ever believe that he did cry was to go into that black abyss, into the nothingness that he had created for himself. Even if I never saw him shed tears, I still wanted – needed - to go behind that door. He was sharing more and more with me each and every day, but I never felt like I was a part of him. I wasn’t as close to him as Vivian or his brother. I silently wondered if they had ever seen him cry. They probably had, and I felt my face flush with jealousy. If I could only get behind that door, then maybe I could be closer to Gerard. We never spent any time in his room beforehand. There had never been a need to, and he had not invited me in. An invitation was crucial in matters like this. I would need one to get into that chasm, and that sacred summon wasn’t going to be coming for a long time, if at all.

“Hey, Gerard,” I asked suddenly, delving my way past the door in my mind, an idea forming. “Have you ever painted me?”

I felt my cheeks blush as the question hit the air, but I needed to know. If he had drawn me in any way shape or form, I wanted to know how he saw me. He was shooting his mouth off about interpretations and meanings, but other than his dove theory, kept his lips shut about how he saw me. I did not just want to be compared to a bird. I needed a solid and dignified answer. Did he see me as just a teenager who came to his house everyday? Did he see me as a friend? Or more? Maybe if I knew how he saw me, then I could finally make up my mind about him. And maybe, just maybe, get in that door…

He smiled at my inquiry, laughing a bit to himself. “I told you before,” he said with some mock hilarity. “The male body is ugly.”

His just was only teasing, but my face fell regardless.

“That’s not the reason I haven’t drawn you, however,” he added seeing this dismal change. “I’m not quite sure how I see you just yet.” He leaned back to drink me in, squinting his eyes, and glancing me up and down. I felt as though I was naked then, more exposed and ugly than I had been in my entire life. Still, I made no effort to cover myself.

“You’re still growing and changing too much to have a solid image of yourself just yet. Even I still change, and I’m almost an old man. I don’t think I acted the same as I do now when I was your age, at least, I hope not.” He shrugged his shoulders, breathy laughter falling from his mouth as raven locks spilled over his forehead. “If I don’t even know for myself, there’s no way I can’t draw you just yet.”

I nodded solemnly, putting my head down. I didn’t know what I had wanted to hear, but that really was not it.

“You can still draw yourself,” he chimed in, trying to cheer me up. He usually didn’t care if what he had said affected me in any way, shape or form because in essence, it was supposed to teach me. But now he cared, probably because of the intimate nature of the topic. When you strip away skin and are just left with open wounds and cores of the image, it hurts when salt is flung around – and Gerard seemed to have a lot of salt on hand. “Just because I don’t draw myself doesn’t mean you can’t draw yourself.”

“I don’t want to draw myself,” I uttered, pouting slightly.

“Fine,” he teased back, pouting as well. “Draw me then. Or finally bring in your guitar and play something for me. Music can be interpreted the same way. Since you won’t draw me, then I want to hear you play for me. I’m interested in seeing your interpretation, aside from everything else.”

There was a thick silence after, while I considered this offer for a while. It wasn’t really an offer per se, and Gerard eventually got tired of waiting, picking up the paint supplies and starting to clean. I was right there beside him, as always, but my head was still in the clouds, marbles and images, colliding together in my head. I never gave him an answer to anything, but I rehearsed the outcomes over and over again in my mind. And on the lonely walk home that night, where there were no interruptions, I came to my most startling conclusion.

I could draw Gerard and see what came out. I could do the blindfold lesson all over again, seeing where my memories would guide me. I had a feeling I knew how I would interpret everything, without the aid of blindness. I could see where I was going now, even if I felt like I wanted to crash over and over again on the way there. It had been becoming clearer and clearer within the past few weeks. The feelings started off small and inconsistent at the base of my stomach, but now they were spreading, dripping down me like the paint we had just used and studied. My feelings were getting stronger and stronger and I didn’t need to paint them, draw them or play them on the guitar to know what they were anymore. I just had to accept it.

I was falling for Gerard. Falling so hard and fast, I wondered what kind of mess I would leave for myself to clean up.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-24