The Epilogue. 3 страница

I never mentioned Professor Smith’s comments to Vivian or Jasmine. I only told them I was curious about their opinions. Vivian was curious of Professor Smith had been treating me okay recently, but I brushed off the question. I suddenly didn’t want to complain about her anymore and I didn’t want them to console me anymore. I suddenly wanted to erase all those past conversations and their memory of this heinous teacher. I wanted her to be a secret almost as badly as I wanted Gerard to be a secret back then. I didn’t want anyone to know of the way I had been hurt before, how deep her words ran through me. I kept Gerard’s love a secret for so long because it had been the strongest thing I had felt in all of my life. Professor Smith was one of the strongest thing I had ever felt, too, but it was completely opposite. Completely negative, and I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with it other than to keep it as much as a secret as I possibly could. It would hurt me, but not as much as if I let everyone in on my hurt. I kept Gerard in a lockbox under my bed, and her words locked in memory in my mind. The two secret elements of myself, the good and the bad, Professor Smith and Gerard; they could fight it out on who won and who gave me my self-esteem for that day. Lucky for me, Gerard won most of the time. I was more inclined to believe my memories and his strong hands in mine leading me than some off-the-cuff hurtful remarks a simple professor had dished out on some afternoon. But there was this cloud of doubt that loomed over me for the rest of that year. It was this infernal nagging question, this extreme wondering and pressing accusation. With Gerard, I knew deep down inside of me that I was an artist. I knew I could fight for that notion until my very last dying day against anyone and anything. But maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t meant to be a photographer.

I didn’t like to think of it too much, and I never posed that question out loud.

Even in the café, I didn’t tell Gerard the exact dialogue between us. I just told him about “one hell of a professor” and moved onto other things that had been a continual stress on my life that year. With the foundation of my artistic knowledge cracked from Professor’s Smith’s words, it should have been no surprise when the rest of my art school career fell down on itself.

When the school was first built, it was a small visual arts college. But as things progressed and secondary education became a staple rather than a luxury, and the school itself began to gain notoriety, administration decided to expand what the school provided from visual to general arts. Because of this change, the campus no longer had enough space to hold all the new applicants. So they made a separate campus on the other side of town, which was where they shifted a lot of the new general arts courses and left the original campus alone. At least, that had been the plan. For some strange reason (which I was sure Professor Smith was behind, even if she wasn’t a part of administration) most of my photography courses were moved to across town, along with another art history one that I was obligated to take for my degree. The school had foreseen this problem and now provided students with a bus pass for campus to campus excursions. It was a nice idea, and some stress off my shoulders, but the once simple act of going to class now took a half an hour, there and back on a cramped bus, every day. Not to mention my scheduling was just plain awful. I’d have three classes on some days, but with four hour breaks in between them, leaving me no time to do much of anything other productive other than mope, complain, and skip. I skipped a lot that year. Eventually, I didn’t even go to the art history class because it was my only class on Monday and the allure of having a three-day procrastination-filled weekend won out nearly every time.

By the time second semester rolled around, I hadn’t learned anything new in my courses, I wasn’t attending half of my courses on a regular basis, and my grades had taken a nose dive. But I was doing very well at shifting blame elsewhere: on the school, the scheduling, Professor Smith, even Vivian some days. It was everyone else’s fault that I was miserable right now – there had to have been a conspiracy against me, I was fairly certain. (And the ring leader was Professor Smith). It was a real surprise to me when I finished the year that I ended up being the one punished for all of it.

In my second year of art school, I failed three whole courses out of five. Getting that letter from the school had been a particularly hard blow. I couldn’t believe the red letters staring back at me, the official notice from the dean of the school, and the transcript of my grades. This couldn’t be right. Sure, I knew I wasn’t doing too well in those courses, but I couldn't have failed. Even if I hadn’t really gone to class, I had done most of the assignments and I went to all of my exams. College was so much more about teaching yourself, wasn’t it? After all, didn’t professors just profess their knowledge and we were automatically supposed to pick it up? I thought that was how it went, so there was no need for me to go to my classes anymore.

Apparently not, or apparently I hadn’t been picking up the right pieces of knowledge that the professors wanted. This had been the first time I had failed a course since high school, and really, I had never even done that there. I had just gotten very poor grades and barely passed. But I never had to repeat anything. This time I really had failed, and I couldn’t just shrug off all of these courses and just not bother. Not only did I fail, but I failed one of my imperative courses; there was a letter enclosed saying that I could only return for an additional year if I repeated one of my foundation courses. That was, if I still wanted to hold a photography degree. And I didn’t know what I wanted anymore. I was completely disillusioned in terms of school now. But even in the midst of all this turmoil, one fact still remained buried deep within my mind, right alongside Professor Smith and my failures: I wanted Paris more than ever.

~

The café became silent for quite a long time. In normal breaks of my speech, if Gerard didn’t pick up the conversational flow, there would be noise all around us to fill in the blanks. But the breakfast, brunch, and lunch crowd had now come and gone, and we were left with nothing but the lazy afternoon sun. I felt the urge to yawn, but kept it suppressed, along with the festering nervous emotions inside my body. Gerard seemed to be rather lethargic as well; he didn’t say anything and kept his eyes fixated on the basket in front of us. My face had been growing redder and redder and my mind expanded on the reasons for his silence. I hated telling these parts of my story. I always felt so ashamed, like I had let him down. And now, all he was doing was looking down.

“I know you probably didn’t want to hear a lot of that…” I started to speak again, but quickly lost my nerve.

His eyes pierced me, but it was for different reasons than I had originally conceived. “Why wouldn’t I want to hear about you?”

“I feel like I made mistakes.” I shifted in my seat, looking at my hands. “You didn’t teach me to drop out of something when it got too hard. Especially art school.”

“I taught you to do what’s right for yourself at the time.” His words seemed too flat; like they had been rehearsed and he had said them many times before. “Besides, I’m one to lecture about quitting when things become too hard.”

“What do you mean?” I leaned forward on the table, grateful for a shift and intrigued at this new development. He leaned back, shifting his hands as he spoke nervously.

“Let’s just say that if there has been anything that I have been able to gather from my years here, it’s that what we perceive as mistakes are often nothing more than happy accidents. And we shouldn’t let those get in the way of real happiness. I know for sure that mistakes, or whatever you want to call them, are most definitely not what’s important in life.” He tipped his head, proud that he was able to decipher some kind of lesson out of the seven years he had been contemplating in Paris.

I didn’t feel wholly convinced, and it showed on my face. He pulled his chair closer to the table, and then let his eyes fall out towards the city. The noise in the café started to pick up, as his thoughts deepened.

“Sometimes we have to quit. Whether it’s the right or wrong decision in the long run does not matter if in the moment it’s what’s driving you forward. There will be times when you have to leave – there will also be times when you have to stay. The hardest part is recognizing what’s what, because both of these players wear the same clothing. They’re tricksters and devils, but it’s not an impossible game to play. There are so many decisions we make in our lives that we think are all-or-nothing, when really, we get a lot of second chances.” He drew his eyes to mine, and I nodded my head slowly. I wrapped my hands around my large coffee mug and let my eyes drift towards the Paris skyline in hopes of seeing what he saw.

“And also, you clearly have done some things right. You’re sitting here right now,” he added with a bit of arrogance to clear the air. He loved to think himself as one of my better decisions in life, and I would play along, only to realize its true validity. He was the best thing in my life at seventeen, and even more when I was almost twenty-five years old. And really, when I thought about Gerard’s new theory on mistakes and applied it to Paris, well, it fit. The sheer ability of finally being able to sit at this table seemed like the perfect example of a happy accident in motion.

~

That year sort of became a silent vow between me and most of the people around me. It was my fuck-up year. The one mistake we didn’t talk about anymore. I had retreated from school, determined to pay back the money I lost, and not go back to art school ever. Even after I had dropped out of school and had made peace with the fact that maybe art school just wasn’t for me anymore, my heart was still pounding. I was still getting worked up over something that I couldn’t quite name or figure out. I had spent weeks cleaning and cleaning, trying to do something else to take the feeling away, but nothing had been working. I had just stopped doing art; losing myself, that was the heart pounding sensation and doing laundry wasn't going to make it come back.

“Just because you quit school doesn’t mean you stop doing art,” Vivian tried to tell me, but like with many things, it took me awhile to even listen. With her and Jasmine as encouragement, I tried to get some work in the photography field. I was timid getting in, Professor Smith’s words in the back of my mind. If I wasn’t going to amount to much, why bother trying so hard? I worked my way up slowly, ignoring doubt as much as I could, and taking baby steps. I got work where I really needed no artistic integrity; I took pictures for people’s weddings, holiday photos, portraits, things like that. I was freelance, for the most part, although there was this one family that hired me profusely over the summer. They pretty much paid for all my rent and food expenses, and I was able to have a little fun because of their four weddings and two christenings. They began to get to know me a little better, and by the fourth reception, I was no longer hanging out in the shadows and occasionally snapping pictures; they had invited me to the party itself. I even had a place at dinner and no longer needed to hang around the kitchen for leftovers when I had finished my work. Those jobs were there for the cash and I was happy for them, but the art field itself still seemed so out of reach. I had done a few shows when Vivian insisted upon it and she needed a space to fill in a gallery opening. I was always just a space-filler; a few people had bought some pictures, but I never saw the money. It all went to my ‘pay-back for my fuck-up’ account for my parents. And besides, I was sure that the people buying my stuff were only buying it to be a space-filler, too. To hang something they deemed pretty on a wall and have that be it, maybe cover a crack or something. All art to someone outside the art world was merely a pretty space filler, I had deemed, so why bother trying so hard to impress someone who would just hang me on a wall in a dentist office to forget about me? I wasn’t really bitter, not for too long, anyway. I was just totally content to do my art on my own and I liked keeping it in a closet. If someone wanted me, they knew where to find me, but for the most part, I was okay as it was.

I tried to fix all of my mistakes and move on. I didn’t want to go to art school, but I knew I couldn’t live my life in a vacuum of a nine to five existence, or even live between job to job. Working retail again had help to elevate some of the financial burden, but I needed something bigger than myself, something more prominent. Since I kept my art in a closest, I moved something else to the forefront. Paris. Even in my early adulthood, living on my own in my twenties, I kept my teenage notion alive again. It was fun living in a world where nothing could hurt me when everything else around me seemed ready to take me down. I kept the notion very much alive, and annoyed everyone around me again. It felt good – it was familiar. But there was a familiar distance; Paris literally was a foreign language to me. I knew the word, I knew the letters, and I knew the image, but so far as what it actually meant, I lacked definition. Who knew I would actually end up here, right now. I hadn’t been doing much thinking beyond that of the idea of Paris and Gerard. It was a safe word, a safe place when things got too bad. If someone was trying to argue with me about the price of their photos, I’d bite my tongue, count to three, close my eyes and then see the Eiffel Tower. I’d be calm and I could live again. But from dream to reality, it was quite the shift.

Even after I had fixed all my other failings from before, I still lacked the motivation to really change my surroundings. I knew that in a second I could theoretically leave; I was out of school and had no consistent job, so I had no obligations. And yet, something still kept my feet planted in one place. When I did get a job that would last for longer than a week, I remembered panicking because it took away the possibility of leaving. I suddenly had obligations that I had to adhere to, and I didn’t like the idea of it. I didn’t want anyone trying to take away my freedom and my ability to leave in any second. It took me going through a few days of bitterness after taking the job to realize that though I had all this freedom, it was an illusion. I probably wouldn’t have left that week or the week after, or any week, really, job or no job.

The realization saddened me, and even after I wrapped up shoot on the particular event, I still didn’t feel happy. I thought I would be; I was free to go, wasn’t I? But I still held back. Whatever it was that was doing this was as in contingent and ambiguous as Gerard sending his letters; it was like I was waiting for mail, this great big sign telling me to go before I would believe it myself. Some days, I didn’t even think I wanted to believe it. This was giving me a reason to paint with dark colours.

Missing Gerard had become as constant as breathing, and though I expressed my need to take a deep breath some days, Gerard had been evasive on meeting. He never said that he did not want to meet up. In some letters, he would tell me things about Paris that he would want me to see. Like about the café we were sitting at now, or a painting he saw in the Louvre. He would tell me things, but they would be abstract, hanging in the air like icicles - and those too, in Paris, were a sight to see. There were never any dates, any plans, or anything set up for sure. Except for the meeting place. It was always the café.

It’s the heart of my city. When he spoke of Paris, he never used its name. It was always, my city (ma ville). My tower, my museum, my chair, my everything; (ma tour, mon musée, mon fauteuil, mon tout). Gerard owned Paris while being in part of the poorest neighborhoods. But by having nothing, saying nothing, and in a way, being nothing, he really did have everything. That was all Gerard ever really wanted.

I’d read his letters in the middle of my room until dawn some nights after walking all day and I longed for everything all over again. I wanted to own something – really own something. The apartment that once brought me solace I now felt detached from because I didn’t really own it. Even if my name was on the lease now, it had always been Gerard’s. My clothing in the closet, my food in the fridge, even my reflection in the mirror – there was no argument. Nothing was mine. After what had happened at art school, it didn’t even feel like my own art was mine anymore. Anything that I showed people, I felt like I had to give it up in order to handle anything that was said about it. It could no longer be personal because if they ripped on it in any way, shape, or form, I would be crushed. So I had to forsake ownership. Even the things that no one ever saw, the canvases I kept hidden in the dark room or under my bed, they were never really mine, either. I had given everything to Gerard, and now finally, I wanted something back.

Paris was the only thing that was mine. An old beaten photograph of the Eiffel Tower to steer me on and to motivate me to fix my mistakes. But I had fixed them – now why couldn’t I just go and start something new?

I expressed this to Vivian and she just shook her head. She would always tell me that I was worrying for nothing, that if you ask for something and you’re supposed to get it, it will appear to you. If it doesn’t, then you didn’t want it enough. But didn’t sitting in my room late at night suggest that I wanted it more than anything in the world? And wasn't she being just a little too vague, anyway?

“You just want redemption, Frank. You have to find that yourself, and then you’ll get what you want.”

Again, crazy Vivian, I thought to myself. But she’d been the wisest of them all. Gerard was a teacher, but Vivian, she just possessed knowledge like a force. She didn’t need to teach or profess because she radiated.

The act of finally going into the college that had hurt me was my redemption. I started to leave the house more, and took to wandering the neighborhood incessantly. I just needed to go, walk off some aggression, and figure some shit out for myself. My feet ended up leading me to the old college campus, and I found myself there more often than I had been when I was really enrolled. I used to just walk past it, never inside, to poke at old wounds. Some part of me always wanted to run into Professor Smith, though I was never quite sure why. Did I want to show her that I had let her words get to me this much? That she had really won? I always shook that notion out of my head. I was just walking here because I liked the scenery. The scenery of wounds.

For a week straight I went there. I woke up early and walked there and back. I walked to the other campus, too, not bothering to use the bus one day. It had been where I was hurt the most. And Vivian had been right. After I redeemed myself enough to know that my mistakes were not a part of me, then they turned into the happy accidents that Gerard was talking about.

The poster had been bright pink – it was hard to miss. It was in French. Even with my limited knowledge, I knew what it was telling me.

Envie d'avoir un voyage que vous ne serez pas capable d'oublier?
Rappelez-vous ce que c'était que d'être libre?

Remember what it was like to be free? It hit me so hard. It was what I had been looking for. It was as if I created the sign myself out of sheer willpower. I went over to it and touched the corner gingerly. It was real - not my imagination. I tore it down and mailed that to Gerard for my next letter. That and nothing else. Not even small words of a plea, or my normal small spiel. Apparently, that was the thing he had been waiting for.

~

"Of course!" Gerard cried out in the middle of my story, and all I could do was I smiled profusely. The letter he had sent me in response had been the words "of course" in the middle of the page and nothing else. He rubbed his hand over my palm, and I let out a ragged sigh.

"Why 'of course'?" I asked. It was one of the many questions that had been on my mind. Gerard used his words economically in his letters. He was not long-winded. These two words, as delicately as they were put in the centre of the page, had meaning fused into each one. I wanted to extract all I could.

"Why not?" He lit a cigarette and raised an eyebrow.

"Is it really that… simple? That….?"

"Transparent?" He completed for me. I nodded, thinking of the translucent mess the grease made on the page. "Yes. It needs no explanation other than itself, just the way you did. For once, you didn't use words to explain yourself, your desires, or your situation. In fact, you got others to explain it for you. You were able to take a random object, infuse meaning, and make it your own. You just showed me what you wanted and I knew what it meant. It was time.” He nodded, and took another drag. “And it was you who had found me and your own way. That was always very important.”

"Wasn’t I who had found you before? Shouldn’t it be your turn?”

He stubbed out the cigarette, the glow going from orange to gray in moments, and gave me a skeptical glare. “But you are forgetting that I am a very old man, and a very lazy old man at that.”

~

I did and I didn’t go with the school for the trip. Their Paris trip was supposed to be for the first reading break in the fall term, but school hadn’t even started yet by the time that Gerard’s approval had gotten to me. And when I saw that he had finally approved, there was no settling me down and making me wait any longer than I had already. Each second seemed to stretch for longer than necessary. This is where Vivian, who still had quasi-connections to the art school, swooped in to save the day. She knew the professor that was running the trip, and after stroking his ego for a little while about his art, and then inviting him to an exhibit and possibly featuring his art in her new show, she had won him over. She managed to work a group rate for my ticket, but allowing me to have an earlier departure date from the rest of the group. I was so relieved and thankful I nearly tackled her with excitement. She just told me that I owed her one, “and I never forget who owes me!”

Not only was I not going to be broke from this, and get to leave within the next blink of an eye, but I was going to be able to go in this alone. That was really imperative to me. I needed time to think, time to process and access all that had happened in those years. I needed to file them away like I had done with Gerard’s letters, because now it was no longer useful. I wasn’t going to be alone anymore – I would be with him again. Suddenly the eighteen hour flight didn’t seem that hard to handle. It was the final step, final stage, before something bigger would happen. And it would allow me time to rest. Seven years was a long time to be lonely and to feel as if you’re heart is beating like a witch in a fever. I slept the entire time on the plane. I felt like that children’s story, Rip Van Winkle; the man who fell asleep for forty years and then awoke in a different body than before. Only this time, I had fallen asleep for seven years - and had finally woken up in the right body, in the right place, at exactly the right time.

I looked down at myself in the café, and touched my chest to make sure I was still there, still the same. I was, but I wasn’t at the same time. I looked across the table at Gerard, and he was and wasn’t at the same time, too. We fit together like oddities.

“What did you see when you finally woke up?” Gerard asked, bringing the conversation back to the journey.

“The sunrise,” I told him, and he smiled. I had turned over in my sleeping state and clunked my head against the window. Aggravated, I was ready to be in a bad mood. Then I remembered where I was and saw out the window the early pink of the sky. And it made everything all right again. Excitement grew inside of me then, until well - until I met him again, that is -

“And that about brings you to here, right?” he said, cutting off my thoughts. “I would assume so, at least.”

I nodded shakily, lazily. This really was where my story ended, but I still felt uneasy. There were details I had skimmed over, for sure, but I didn’t need to go back on myself anymore. The sunrise seemed like the perfect ending for me. I needed to focus on him, now. Suddenly my many questions came back in a blur; there were so many things I had yet to fully understand. I was back to being the student, and I wanted him to teach me. But my years of maturity had given me ample time to develop pride, and I didn’t want to come right out and say things right away.

“More coffee?” I suggested, instead. I saw our waitress, who I had learned was named Michelle, and waved her over. “I still need to hear more about your life.”

He waved his hands in front of his face, but when Michelle appeared by his side, he did accept the coffee. He stared as the cream dissolved into the blackness for awhile before he started to talk again.

“I don’t have much to say, really, other than what I’ve already explained,” he started. He went on for a bit anyway, but even then, his words came out like they had in the letters. Short, small, equivocal, and non-committal at best. He’d make abstractions and expect me to see the clear meaning of it. I wasn’t sure if he was doing this deliberately to throw me off, or he simply did not know how to express himself or his feelings. He didn’t want to talk too much art or about himself, for once; I figured he had thought about it long enough. I had had my story inside of me for so long; what I had done, how I had done it, why this and this happened. I had gotten such a good memory while being away from him, simply for the sheer fact that I wanted to remember everything to recount it back to him like I had just done. But Gerard had been a lot more quiet, subdued, and careful with his matters. He had summarized himself and his existence in those black little notebooks I had yet to see inside his apartment. That was his work and all he knew about himself while he was in Paris, and it was done, for the most part. There was no need to dwell on them anymore. He acted in the same manner whenever he finished an art project from what I had observed around him. In process, he could not shut up and would integrate it into every conversation. His lively energy and enthusiasm flowed out of him. However, after the final stroke was laid down, it was ominous to be around him. Always in pensive thought, meditative prayer, Gerard was a monk and took a vow of silence as he passed from one art project to another. This was another phase, another venture, and I knew he had finished with it, so he didn’t want to dwell to the insane proportions I did. He just wanted to talk. About the grease in the bottom of a basket, about his favorite coffee, about happy accidents – things that were here and now. But I could tell by the way his voice paused, his eyes danced, that he wanted something new, something exciting to pour his energy into as well. And even though I couldn’t quite see it for its face value, he was teaching me a lesson right then. His methods were altered, or maybe I was become a more perceptive student, but his lack of words, or the word choice itself, was the glaring lesson staring at me in the face.

Let go. The minutes and days and months and years between us may have fallen away, but I was still hanging onto the memories. His advice to me, without really knowing it, was to forget everything, instead of trying to make up for the lack of it.

I took a deep breath, a drink of coffee, and there was a lull in our conversation. The noise of the café was back in an uproar; clanks of dishes, laughter, the gargle of a coffee machine. All I could smell was croissants, and all I could see were the stained napkins in our baskets. But something still clung onto the inside of my chest like a hanging indentation.

I still had one final question.

“Gerard…” I started off slow, unsure if this territory was something I could cross. He looked up, full attention on me, face placid. I proceeded. “Why did it take you so long to write?”

He seemed a little pained by the question, like it was something that had already been answered, something that should have been clear like the napkins. But they never were perfectly clear, always cloudy. It was only in the light that you could even see part way through.

“In between letters…it would take time to work on what I wanted to send you. I’d become busy, or actually get work, or little trivial matters started to get in the way. It was the same with you, however.”

I nodded, this is what I had always told myself in the past. But the first letter was different; the first time always was. That first crucial letter that seemed to take ages to come to me, and then a physical return address to where I could send my own letters to him, that had taken even longer. He had explained to me before that it had been because of his living situation, his apartments were renovated and he was moving, things like that. But I could see in the cagey manner that his eyes were scanning the café and his fingers rapped on the table that there was more to it. My heart sunk when I realized he had been at the same place the entire time.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14