Sunflowers (Tournesols) II

“Come on,” he whispered into my ear, pulling my face closer. “I want to take you to the one place in all of Paris that I feel the most comfortable in.”

Images of grandeur flashed inside my mind, but there was a tenderness in the way he said his words which quelled my thoughts. This place was where he felt comfortable, where he could be himself, completely and utterly. That only meant one thing - this was where he created his art. This made it the heart of Paris to me, and I was ready to go.

His apartment was at the end of a very narrow street, far away from the downtown area, and not nearly as bright and fluorescent as the burning orb of light in the distant; the Eiffel tower was nothing more than a small fleck of an imitation star on the horizon. Down here, the only light poured out of high windows and peaked through drapes. It was amber; an orange colour in some areas, which Gerard explained to me was the colour of oil lamps, or candles.

“Really?”

He nodded, digging for his keys. “A lot of people don’t have electricity for some months at a time, depending on if they can pay their bills. Even if they do have the money for it, not a lot want to piss it away.” Gerard chuckled to himself. “They’d rather be buying booze.” He lurched the door open with his knee-cap, face strained. The wood was worn and chestnut in colour, damaged from years of neglect and rain that spilled off the eaves troughs and collected at the bottom of the stairs. He noticed my wandering eye as he held the door open for me. “I hope you weren’t expecting luxury. I don’t live in a mansion, but I do like where I live.”

I didn’t really know what I had been expecting when I got there. I hadn’t really conceptualized Paris beyond postcards and cultural icons that I had seen on television and romantic films. The only personal part of Paris that I held in my collective memory was Gerard. Since he was by my side, although looking different and quite aged, I had everything I wanted. I was in Paris and I had seen the Eiffel Tower from the café with Gerard. I was completely and utterly satisfied; his apartment was nothing more than a building, one of which that would hold greater ideas inside. And I was welcomed with open arms.

Gerard didn’t have an oil lamp because he said they made him nervous. But he did have a lot of candles, and a gas stove, which shone light through the house. We had been walking back to his place at sunset, now we were completely blanketed by the night sky. It couldn’t have been more than seven or eight at night, but we both yawned from exertion.

“Takes a lot out of you, talking about the past seven years,” he commented, bringing a candle over to the small chair I had placed myself upon. Gerard’s apartment, this time around, even in the dulled light of the room, was just as vibrant as the one back in New Jersey. It was much smaller, consisting of only a small kitchen, adjacent bathroom, and one larger room where there was the chair I sat on. There was also a small mattress in one corner of the room composing a makeshift bedroom. There were shelves made out of planks of wood and bricks holding his art supplies and books. It was simple and lacking the colour I was used to, but it screamed Gerard from every surface, every wall, every nook and cranny. Small and cramped, it was a concentrated version of the man and how seven years had shaped him.

I nodded to his comment. “And we haven’t even hit the half of it yet.”

He scrunched up his face and then sat next to me, on the floor. “I don’t much feel like talking anymore, do you? The past is weighty. Words become tangled. It will come up eventually. Right now, all I want is this.”

He put the candle down on the table in front of us, and it shone like a beacon illuminating the answers. Flames danced across Gerard and our faces and there was nothing I could do to prevent myself from touching him in that moment. It was small, at first, and not overtly sexual. I was merely gathering as much physical evidence as I could that this moment wasn’t a figment anymore.

I moved myself down from the chair, so we were both sitting on the wooden floor. The worn wood creaked and the reverberations seemed to flow through Gerard’s body, making him tense. He didn’t move for a long time; he simply breathed slowly in the firelight. He was sitting as far cross legged as he could push his older limbs, his hands palm down on his kneecap. His back arched and face forward, he waited for me to begin.

I touched the hand over his black clothed thigh and turned his palm up, so our fingers could link again. He pushed his fingers into mine, and though we met eyes as our hands became reacquainted, we didn’t kiss. I put my other hand in his other one, and pulled my body closer to his own, our legs touching, bodies facing. We held hands for a long time, to make sure we still fit together. I noticed Gerard’s breathing was heavy, though there wasn’t much exertion. Satisfied that our hands still fit, I ran my palm along his shoulder blades and back. I moved them down the front of his chest, hovered over his lungs, and felt his heart pumping. I wanted to whisper to tell him to calm down, but I knew my heart was doing the very same thing. I moved my hands between the familiar stitches of his jacket, and felt it pound even more with recognition. Although it was now worn and gray from so much washing and so many years, I knew this fabric more than I knew my own skin. It was the dove jacket. I ran my hand to the right lapel, flipped it over and sure enough, in the dancing orange flame, was the dove.

“You flew back to me,” he said barely above a whisper, almost astonished by this fact. We met eyes again, and something had changed. The words, “of course” danced on my lips, but were never able to fly forward because he was cupping my face and pulling me forward. But even then, we still did not kiss. He started to feel me in the same way as I had done with him, instead. I wasn’t sure what he was searching for, but his fingers seemed to read me with a feverish pursuit to find the answer to a question. I was Braille and he kept his eyes closed for almost all of it.

His kiss took me by surprise, and this time it was far different than the café. It was how he and I used to kiss in his apartment back home in New Jersey, because we knew no one was looking. He was slowed, while I was feverish and persistent because everything, absolutely everything, felt like it was pouring out of me then.

“I love you,” I whispered between gasps. Hearing the words escape from my lips, I fully comprehended those years apart. I pulled my body closer to his and I put my hands under his shirt. “I’ve missed you so fucking much.”

I wanted to close off all space between us. I wanted to press myself into him and never, ever let go again. I didn’t need verbal conversation with him anymore, I didn’t want to appease my other senses, I just wanted him. I wanted nothing more than this moment, the flame in front of us. I was struck by a moment of irony in the moment, realizing the things that I had remembered and the things I forgot about him. I remembered my own existence in every excruciatingly painful detail to tell him, I remembered what he had done for me, but I had not remembered this. I didn’t remember the feel of his skin in my hands, the heat of his body, the smell of his neck. It had been imperative to my survival in the real world that I did forget these details, however, because it would have made it even harder to move on with my life. Because I knew in that moment that this was the pinnacle of happiness. Right there, in his arms, with him everywhere around me that was the happiest I had ever been in my life. It was so separate of an emotion that I couldn’t even really remember it until submerged and now that I was there, it was taking me over. To drudge it up and resurrect something like this that hadn’t been dead, but simply numbed for so long, was too strong for me to handle. It felt like my ribcage was going to tear open and something was going to reach out from inside and utterly explode. My hand motions became frantic and I kissed Gerard more than I breathed.

“Frank,” Gerard whispered suddenly, pulling my body closer to his, but also pulling me to a complete stop. His lips hovered around the outside of my ear. “Frank, slow down.”

I pulled my face away, looked at him. He patted down some hair that had formed a cowlick with the small amount of perspiration on my body like a sympathetic friend. His face softened and then he kissed me, as if it posed an answer.

“I’m an old man,” he stated rather somberly. “You have to give me more time.”

My heart fell with some of the sexual connotations of his assumption. I wasn’t seventeen anymore. It wasn’t just sex I wanted, though I had been grinding against him pretty hard and I could feel myself becoming turned on. It had been so long since I was with a man; it had been so long since I even felt that urge. It was another feeling inside of me that I had inadvertently buried and drudging it up required a loss of control before we could gain control. I didn’t necessarily want to go at have sex right there in the middle of his apartment (though I had romanticized that idea in my mind many times over the years), but I simply needed to lose myself in every aspect of him. I needed to see every part of him right then because I had fully realized how long it had been. Didn’t he feel that way? I suddenly wondered, my anxiety coming back. Why wasn’t he as frantic and as passionate as I was at that very moment?

He suggested that we should go to bed for the night. Despite my sudden raging hormones, I latched onto the idea. I was tired from the plane and as soon as he had spoken the word “bed” my body seemed to give up. His bed was really just the mattress on the floor, so we went a few paces behind ourselves and we were ready. The mattress was small, so there would inadvertently be contact. As both our bodies brushed up against one another under the thin covers, I felt myself lose control again. I kept kissing him and touching him. I just couldn’t stop, and I didn’t want to stop, no matter what. Gerard was understanding, even losing himself in me for a few moments here and there. But no matter how intense we became, and even though I could clearly feel how much he was turned on, he still insisted there would be no sex.

“Not now, it’s too soon. I…” he stuttered, losing the almost perfect fluidity in his voice. “I just want to hold you.”

Although I was slightly confused, jet-lagged, and very sexually frustrated, I abided by his request, as always. I turned over in the bed, so we lay like spoons, his body wrapped around my back like a blanket. I could feel how flushed he had been before, but as soon as he slipped his arms around me and held me close to his chest, he cooled. I could feel almost every part of him and we both breathed evenly, finally getting what we needed. The light of the candle died down long into the night, and the perfect darkness never seemed scary or unknown with him by my side.

It took me awhile, after looking around his apartment in the daylight hours and seeing those books upon books of recollection and memories and everything on his wall, after understanding what was meant beyond L’Estranger as a name, after feeling the way he held me so close that night, breathing the scent of my hair and kissing my forehead… it took all of that and more, to fully comprehend in that moment that Gerard’s memory was a force to be reckoned with. He never forgot anything. Not our passion, our memories, our love, our former life together. He never forgot me, in any way, shape, or form. He may have moved in locations and shifted his existence into another mental realm, but he had not moved on. And so in Paris, his missing me did not simply become another part of his life like it had for me. It had been his life.

“Oh God,” he said, struggling with his words and emotions. Even then, I knew he wanted to say that he missed me, but I didn’t want him to. I could feel it so strongly then that to verbalize it would almost be too much, too painful.

So I turned over on the small mattress, which was held up by nothing but a wooden floor and our two bodies, and I let him really hold onto everything again. I gave him everything I could; I gave him myself, and it was then that his emotions became frantic. He pulled me into him like a child, held my head against his chest, over his heart, and then moved my lips over his. Our breathing was shallow, and I couldn’t see a damn thing in the darkness. He kissed me, kissed me, kissed me again and moved around. When I could feel him crying, I didn’t question it. I let it happen. I let it fall over me and I let it burrow its way under my skin. Our bodies were so clammy, but he held me tighter. We were such a mess of emotions, and before long, I had started to cry too, though I tried to fight it.

We had not been this way since our last night together. It only seemed fitting to do it once again here. I let myself go, and I held him back. It became natural, it became a movement; it became something more. I felt the years peeling away, all seven of them, and I felt something else, something better being built at the same time. I didn’t want to think about it right now. I think we both just wanted to be held.

I was always seventeen in his arms.

In the morning, I awoke to startling brightness. His bed was positioned in the far left corner of the apartment, and a small slit of a rectangular window was about a foot above my head when I sat straight up. I had not noticed the window the night before when we had been cloaked in darkness, and if I had, I probably wouldn’t have slept nestled in the corner. Because the night had been so dark, the morning light was a strange concept. It was another reminder that I wasn’t in New Jersey anymore.

Gerard already had the coffee made. Its aroma wafted over to me from the small kitchen at the other end of the cramped living quarters and pulled the rest of me awake. He was sitting in his chair sketching the scene from another small window he had by his table. When he noticed me stirring, his attention was redirected. He chuckled at my contemptuous nature to the morning light.

“In my old age, I’ve turned into the stereotype and rise at dawn.”

He got up from the table and brought me a cup of coffee. His mugs were white on the outside, but cracked and stained the further and further I drank down to the bottom from years of use. Gerard sat next to me in the bed, though he was far more awake than I thought it was feasibly possible to be at this hour. I scratched my head and tried to nurse myself into consciousness with the coffee. I thought of his remark, and how I myself had turned into the stereotype of the college age kid; I detested the morning and was partial to sleeping well into the afternoon. I thought Gerard had been the same way, too, or at least he had been seven years ago. What had changed?

“You’re not old,” I told him, deriving this as the only logical conclusion of change.

He didn’t say anything right away. Just smiled, amused at how even now, when years had passed, I was still fighting his age. He used to fight his age, too. He would dye his hair, he wore tight, youthful clothing, and he presented himself as this much younger man, one that was full of life, art, and energy. Sometimes he did that to the point of over-presenting himself. He came on too strong. I noticed it the most when he was around other people; a new side of Gerard would emerge. He would feel the need to tell anecdotes, to make jokes, and come up with some kind of spectacle to amuse or enlighten the crowd. Even when he and I had been alone together when we first met, he had this way of overcompensation. He threw blue paint on me; he made outlandish remarks about art and sex to provoke reaction. But he wasn’t doing that now. He was simply bringing me coffee and sitting in bed with me, holding a sketchbook as he looked out the window at the dawn that he had seen rise over Paris at six in the morning. He was still wearing the same clothing that he had before, but they were worn down. Even the new articles that I did not recognize from before had this vintage quality to them that wasn’t simply from their origins at a thrift store. His hair had also become a victim to age and it was the starkest of all the contrasts.

The more I studied him, however, the more I started to believe that maybe it was the other way around. Not a victim to age, but accepting it. Celebrating it. Gerard stated that he had to stop dying his hair because he simply could not afford a luxury like that, same with the clothing, and the apartment. That was another part of growing old, I supposed: knowing one’s limits. Figuring out what was important. Dying his hair and pretending to be a lot younger than he really was wasn’t working for him in Paris. He was an old man now, and he was accepting that fact. Age in my mind had always seemed like something one had to fight to the bitter end of time. I had not wanted to turn eighteen, I did not want to grow up, and I did not want a job and to move onto those phases of my life. It seemed like a death-trap. Gerard had been able to show me that it didn’t all have to be bad, that responsibility could be taken and I did not have to follow in the unhappy footsteps of those before myself. But he had always been fighting his age, with every single step he took, he was wanting to be younger. I hadn’t noticed this before, and, ironically, I could see this now that I had gained some years myself.

One of the things that Gerard had learned in Paris was that it was okay to be old. But I didn’t want him to feel as if he had to be old around me, especially since I was still so much younger. Even though I had grown-up significantly and gained maturity (or at least I liked to think so), there was still one fact that simply was not going to change: the thirty year age gap between us.

Gerard’s attention had suddenly become more focused from the window to me. It was the first time he had really looked at me as a body since New Jersey. His eyes roamed and explored all that he could see above the bed sheet, but they weren’t voracious. He was analyzing the complexity of my shoulder blades and ribcage, how I fit together differently than before. He analyzed the scruff of my facial hair that had started to come in; the fact that I needed to shave a lot more habitually now. I filled out in my legs and torso, losing that abysmal amount of teenage baby fat and gaining structure. Not exactly muscle, though. I was still weak as anything and Jasmine could beat me up if she wanted to, but I was sturdy. I used to feel as if my body didn’t quite fit together; too short and too wide, but now it was better. Nothing could ever be helped for my height, but I felt more confident in my clothing. Dare I sound like a cliché, but I was a man now. I looked the part, finally, and for once, Gerard could rest on the fact that I was not a boy, a simple teenager, any longer.

When his eyes met mine, we studied one another for a bit. He nodded a little, as if to confirm the thoughts inside my mind: I was a man now. Definitely different than the teenager in Jersey, but still a lot younger than he was. His eyes darted away for a second, as if he was humbled by what he saw. His giant hands went over his legs, and now in the full light, I was able to study his body the way he had mine. I saw beyond the clothing and the hair - the superficial matters - and looked at him. The creases around his eyes were deeper, and his skin seemed a little tougher from exposure to the elements and smoking, but his smile redeemed him. All the lines may have run deeper, but it made him young again. And his hands. Well, his hands were always the same. They always fit inside mine and they never showed the age that he seemed to be so hung up over.

I kept one hand on my coffee mug, and the other laced with his. We didn’t speak for quite awhile. We both needed time to process how different, and yet, how essentially the same everything was around us and between us. I couldn’t tell if the change in his demeanor, from outlandish charismatic remarks to dwelling silence was because of the age repressing his emotions, or if he felt like we were beyond that. Though he wasn’t spouting these great philosophies left right and center, and he wasn’t leaping up and extrapolating everything, there was still a charismatic way in how he did things. He was silent, but thinking. Just because someone is silent, just because someone is older, and just because someone is alone, does not mean that they’re unhappy. When everything was really quiet in that apartment, I was able to see Gerard’s happiness. It did not radiate off of him and he did not explode with it as much as he had in Jersey. But it was there. I could feel it in the way his hand curved inside of mine and the way his eyes lit up anytime mine met up with his. Many years had changed him, but it did not repress him. I could only hope that I had aged, and would continue to age, as gracefully.

“Do you remember what Viv used to say?” I questioned finally breaking the silence between us.

“Vivian says a lot of things,” Gerard reflected on his old friend with a snigger. He turned to me, saw it in my eyes, and nodded. “Yes, I remember quite well. She’s a very smart woman.”

He had been right; Vivian did say a lot of things and she was very smart. She radiated her logic when Gerard and I seemed to get too lost in our own chaos. But I was thinking of one thing in particular, her theory on souls and how they were ageless. In the back of my mind, through all this discussion and debate inside my internal monologue, I knew it was all irrelevant. It didn’t matter who was older than who, how we had aged, or what we looked like. So long as somehow, our souls were merging.

I nodded, finished the last of my coffee, and then put my mug down on the windowsill. He finished his own and placed his mug on top of the stack of books by his bed. He picked up the sketch book he had with him before and filed it into one of his many shelves. My legs were bent, still under his sheets, his were straight on top of the white barrier. We waited.

“So,” Gerard remarked suddenly, easing us into something new. “Your first morning in Paris, Frank. What do you want to do?”

I looked around, as if to confirm his point. Out the sliver of a window, I could see cobblestone streets and a stray cat in the alleyway. The morning light was strong, but the clouds lay scattered in gray masses overhead. Small puddles of water from an early morning rain still lay in the streets and water droplets clung to the trees’ leaves. It was gray, black and white, like time had stopped.

“I don’t know.” I took an invigorating breath, the coffee finally kicking its way into my system. I stretched out my legs on the bed, wiggled my toes, flexing the stronger, newer body I had and feeling his just as strong next to me. I was here, this was Paris, and I could do anything I wanted. I glanced over to Gerard with a wild eyed excitement and squeezed his hand. He squeezed back, but his face remained that composed, mature gaze he had had on all morning. His eyes narrowed and we both knew that there was only one thing that we wanted to do, needed to do.

To obsess about the age barrier was pointless, especially when we had the whole world of Paris in front of us. Our souls were present, there, inside of us. They never warranted much dialogue because I always felt that the word ‘soul’ itself cheapened it from overuse by popular culture. It was always something that we could never explain, simply feel. And there had never been any barrier between us beyond clothing.

Gerard started to sit up straighter and he began to take off his shirt. I put my hands over his and started to help. We were both so shaky; at one point I thought we were going to have a repeat of last night. But we prevailed because this was daylight now, this was dawn, this was something more that a dark and lethargic night. We had finally expressed the pain of being apart before; we didn’t need to be sad anymore. But what could we do now? What could we want? Paris was a big city, so full of life, culture, love, art… The answer was clear in my mind.

I began to kiss him slowly, and when I got closer to his ear, I whispered, “I want to do everything here.”

“Me too,” he said in mine.

It was far more painful, in both feelings and motions, to have sex again than I thought it would be. It was painful for me, simply because I hadn’t really done it in a long time with a man before; for Gerard it was due to the fact that he sometimes did have issues with those areas. It took us awhile, but we got the mechanics of it down properly without too much fuss. He didn’t have any protection in his apartment, really, because of lack of funds and no reason to have anything, but I was nearly twenty-five and perpetuating my stereotype even more by always having condoms on me.

His bed was small and cramped like the apartment as a whole, but we could handle positioning. We kissed at the head of the bed for awhile as our hands gradually found clothing that was still present. I took first initiative and laid back down, pulling him on top of me like a shell. We had to move the coffee mugs and kick some of the books out of the way, even more when our limbs became tangled and we lost dexterity. It was sort of funny, really, and we were able to laugh about how awkward this was and how “just like the first time all over again.” But it was manageable. Pain was only pain for a few seconds, and then it dispersed or I got used to it. Anyone could move a coffee mug or something in the way. The mechanics of sex could always be fixed or dealt with easily.

But the emotions that came from sex were some of the strongest I had ever experienced. It wasn’t that I had forgotten that; I had had sex with other people since Gerard where this fact came into play a lot. But he was always so singular, in his life, and in my own. Sex was the physical reminder, the slap in the face, that I needed to start paying attention to absolutely everything again.

When he was inside me, that was all I could think and all I could feel. That moment seemed to stretch and span decades. We could feel everything, even time on our shoulders pressing into us, and reminding us that this was happening again. Wow, this, I thought. Yes, this. I remembered this. Though I had never forgotten him, truly remembering someone was a whole body experience, and it riveted through me with alarming intensity. I couldn’t articulate beyond a noise in the back of my throat and then gasps for sudden air. Gerard heard my cry, thought it was from pain, and looked straight into my eyes.

“Are you okay?”

I wanted to cry then. It seemed so foolish and stupid to me at the time, but I felt everything so strongly, and I truly remembered how much I loved him. I wasn’t gay; I had never been attracted to a man before or after him, but that didn’t matter. I was so willing to completely give myself up to him in every single regard. It wasn’t for the sole purpose of sex alone; I could get friction from anyone and I preferred friction from women. It was how Gerard had sex; he made it beautiful when it could be so ugly. He made it into a dance when it could just be movement of bodies. He made it into love when it could just be desire, and he made it into art when almost every other person would just see it as sex.

I remembered so clearly being seventeen and terrified of the act. I had never done anything, even with a girl before, and this strange man who was thirty years older than myself wanted to have sex with me. To my utter surprise, I wanted to do this too. He could have taken advantage of me, but he didn’t. The way he asked me if I was okay in Paris in that moment was the exact same way he had asked me if I was okay when we first had sex and I was seventeen years old. He always wanted to make sure that I was okay. It didn’t matter that I was now of the proper age and could have sex with anyone I wanted. Gerard treated this event as something that I could never transcend or transcribe. It was so complete and something so ours. Not his, not mine. Ours. It didn’t matter if I wasn’t underage anymore, I was still me, and he wanted to know if I was okay.

“I’m wonderful,” I told him with a vague smile. He looked partly relieved, partly euphoric and strained, and the rest in love. I was sure I pretty much looked the same, too.

We didn’t need to keep secrets anymore, but we still treated this act with a delicate hand and soft voices. We pulled the sheets over our heads, to lock out the world anyway, and to keep our giggles of glee and euphoria completely and totally ours. We moved slow, as usual, and it felt like every other second we were being bombarded by old memories and sensations. But we took solace in the familiar and began to comprehend more and more that this was just how we were supposed to be. Our bodies may have changed in the years since we last saw one another, grown older or stronger, more hair or less hair, gray hair and wrinkles, but when it came down to something as simple and as complicated as sex, there were certain things that never changed. The tone of ‘Are you okay?’, the way someone kissed, the distinct moans from the back of the throat, the sensitive spot on the lower back or behind the neck. Skin still felt the same, hands still gripped as strong, and though bodies broke and aged, those elusive souls, while they did alter, they always remembered the familiar.

Oh, and Gerard still had that mole on his inner thigh, too.

With our life together reborn into something of mystic wonder that we had both spent our days dreaming about, the hardest part had passed. We had both been concerned about this meeting, which was why I supposed we both prolonged it as much as we had. We loved and missed one another, but sometimes the sensation of the dream is a lot better and easier than waking up. Now with our eyes wide open and swallowing the Eiffel Tower in a blink on a daily basis, it was ironic that we spent the first few days away from Paris itself, and together in his in bed, sleeping. Well, we weren’t always sleeping, but we were spending a lot of time on that cramped mattress in his cramped apartment, drinking his coffee from stained and cracked cups, and listening to the rain drops on the windows. I was jetlagged for a long time and Gerard was simply tired and relieved. We needed a lot of time to recuperate.

I had brought my camera with me on the trip, but I didn’t use it a lot, for the most part. Gerard was my creative endeavor, this whole trip as a whole was, and I didn’t feel the need to commemorate it with my flash of light. Everything around me already felt like a black and white photograph. It was a strange image to recollect of Paris, but it really did feel like a Polaroid picture. An older one, black and white, but seeped with the colour sepia from age and constant touches. A photo that one keeps close to the heart, to pull out during hard times to remember and reflect. Paris was that perfect array of clichés, arranged in black and white motifs: the large white walls of Gerard’s apartment, the blackness of the coffee grounds that had slipped to the bottom of the maker and into the bottom of our mugs. the cobblestone driveways in the wet rain and gray dawns with even darker nights. It seemed like the only colour some days was the amber glow of the candles in the darkness or the blue and orange dancing flames from the twisted gas stove. They seemed so singular and picturesque in the lack of colour all around, but I never wanted to commemorate it beyond memory.

Some nights, I would simply watch as Gerard would light his cigarettes with the tip of the flame against his chin, and gray smoke would cover the room like the fog. It never felt depressing or somber, being surrounded by such darkened edges. It was classic, appealing. It made us feel like there was no time here, and that in essence, gave us all the time in the world. We never saw the sun, and when it did come out, we decided it was better to stay in bed, where it could be brighter than ever if we let it be.

Our days blurred into one another and the notion of time really did disappear after awhile. I didn’t know the hours of the day anymore, as Gerard was still true to his hatred of time and never kept a clock or calendar in the house. I began to refer to the periods of days in my mind as flooding mornings, candle twilight, and napping suns. Since Gerard never had a steady job, we took no real recognition of days of the week either, except we could always tell when it was the weekend because Paris seemed to double in size. Sometimes we could tell the Sundays from the others, because the café would always come out with their new specialty coffee and the lady up the street would always bake bread. We could smell it, the buttery fresh aroma of an oven churning out product, taunting us. But those were never constants we paid too much attention to. They were wafting smells and the convergence of people. Everything was in flux and constantly changing around us, but we seemed to stand still and watch it all go by. Wednesdays were the only days that concerned us, because it meant that the market in the town square – L’Hexagone – was open.

The market became my favourite place in the entire world because it was the heart of everything. People tend to think that the Eiffel Tower is the main source of light and passion, of blood-flow and heart in this place and while they are correct in some regards, they would also be fools to come all this way and then turn around after seeing this huge tower.

“A tower is a tower is a tower,” Gerard would say with the wave of his hand. “I love it, but I’ve seen it. I don’t need to always go back. Now the market,” he said, a smile arousing his face. “It changes every week. I always need to see it. Every day should be Wednesday.”

It was the only day we ever paid attention to anything different from ourselves. It was our only time that we walked into other people’s lives and invited them into our own. The rest of the time, we boxed ourselves away and we lived our life together that we had been missing for so long. We had always wanted to live together in New Jersey and now we finally could. Seven years apart, and we were making up for everything that we had missed, or lacked before. It left us tired a lot of the time, but sleep never seemed to satisfy us. Always a waste of time, like Gerard used to say, and was still practicing his methodology. It was in the market where we recharged our batteries, fed our eyes an array of images for creative pursuit, and where we allowed the world to see ourselves one hundred percent.

In the market was where Gerard made a bulk of his living, and where a lot of other artists would too. He would set up shop early in the morning and display whatever he had on easels, tables, chairs, or just on the ground for people to look at as they walked by. Some things he sold were small, like sketches of the Eiffel Tower, Montremarte, or the Louvre on small, postcard size pieces of card paper. Those were a big seller. He would draw a lot of the tourist attractions and have them set up, but he grew to despise doing it.

“I don’t like commercializing my art. If I want to draw the Eiffel Tower, I will on my own time and for my own reasoning. I hate that whenever they pick it up, they are doing so not for artistic appreciation, but as a souvenir they can hide in the back of a closest, or give to someone else in an vain effort to buy love, so someone else can put it at the back of a closet,” he lamented one day when a woman nearly cleared him out of everything ‘touristy’ that he had.

I furrowed my brows. “Then why do it?”

He looked at me like I should have known the answer. I wasn’t seventeen anymore; I should know how the world works now and how everyone gets from door A to door B in life. Money. The only reason Gerard made portrait after portrait of the Eiffel Tower and any other tourist attraction was so he could pay the rent at the end of the month, and so we could eat those croissants and drink our specialty coffee day after day. Commercialism killed him and it sucked the fun right out of that batch of art work, but it was a necessary evil.

It was obvious, though it didn’t really register for quite some time on a truly visceral level, that Gerard was not the famous artist he had once dreamed himself on being. He wasn’t a slave to his tourist postcard business, not at all. He only did that when the rent was due. That was really the only way I distinguished months in Paris without a calendar; the plethora of postcards marked the first.

In Gerard’s day to day life, without the nagging obligation of rent, he was creating art for himself. Something that he wanted to do, something he wanted to see, and something he lived to do. His art was purely selfish, he told me, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Being selfish gets a bad name in the American Culture,” he said once, and it amused me that he was now disassociating himself from the country he came from, and yet was still remaining on the fringes in this one. “It is this wrong and unholy thing to be selfish in American today. However, when one is selfish and gives themselves what they want, then they are truly happy and can be kinder to others. At least, that’s how it’s been working for me and at my age, I’m too stubborn and selfish to change.”

I smiled at his remark, giving him the benefit of the doubt. I had missed his theories, thoughts, and visions. Even if he was a little convoluted at times, I didn’t mind hearing him talk. Even in extreme idealism, he was still inspiring. He had no other purpose in life than art; he had to keep doing it, even if it wasn’t proving to be a lucrative business as he had thought.

I didn’t mention him not being famous. I didn’t even really talk to him about his art in financial terms. It didn’t seem important then; I didn’t even think of it most days. I merely tried to help out with money as much as I could. I brought some what I could part with from my savings when I came here, but it ran out fast. I made the art-conscious decision, as Gerard called it, one Wednesday afternoon to use the last Euros I had and buy an old guitar that I could play at the market. “And to serenade me like old times,” Gerard quipped with a wink, to seal the deal.

To my surprise, I actually remembered some chords and notes and played whatever I could all day, until my fingers bled. Even more of a surprise was that I actually did get money from this pursuit. Not much, but it was enough to buy a sunflower an old woman with a scarf around her hair was selling in the street that day. She was not a part of the market itself, and I had never seen her before, so I feared this would be my only opportunity to purchase something like this.

The sunflower had been the happiest thing I had seen in a long time. Its vibrant colours stood out against the black and white photograph of Paris. When I took it from her hands, I realized it was nearly the size of my face, the stalk of it the width of my pinky finger. It fit perfectly with my features; I knew it had to be mine. The purchase wasn’t a very economical decision, but I didn’t think about that. Gerard didn’t either, because after my very sporadic acquisition, it caught his interest too and spent the money he had made that day from postcards on buying two for himself.

“To cleanse our souls,” he explained. “I always feel slightly robbed when people buy my art, especially the postcards, in exchange for money. This evens out the balance in the world if we exchange art money for artist things.”

He arranged his two new flowers in his hands, one a pink carnation the size of his face, and the other, a purple-y blue azalea that was a little smaller, but still gigantic by any means.

We looked at each other like we were complete and utter idiots and started to giggle hysterically because we really we’re this stupid. It didn’t matter. We had just spent out dinner money on flowers that could light up the entire dreary feel of Paris, and it was okay that it was so irresponsible. We went home with empty bellies, full arms, and bursting with colour. We put the flowers on our kitchen table in big dishes full of water like the main course and drank the last of our coffee, scrapping the bottom of the maker. We smoked butts of old cigarettes in the ashtray until our eyes watered from the smoke and fingers singed. Our stomachs grumbled and roared in bed that night and we were so cold because our heating, when we paid it, wasn’t that good anyway. I could hear Gerard’s stomach rumble, and then as if they were having a conversation, my gut would reciprocate the noise.

“It really is a nuisance to feed oneself,” Gerard remarked, perhaps feeling left out of the conversation. “I mean, what a waste of time, money, and essential energy it is. I mean, it takes so long to cook good food, and why waste your time eating bad food? But then if one doesn’t want to cook, you must pay someone else to do it for you, and well, that’s just too much. And you have to eat three times a day! Pish, posh, I saw to that. One good meal at my café, a croissant with a lot of cream in my coffee and a few good cigarettes should be good enough for me. Maybe some fruit and bread from the market for variety, but that is all one really needs. In my mind, at least.”

I nodded, laughing a little because I could tell so hard he was trying to be humorous to make our stomachs stop bickering. He was also trying to find a way to rationalize his poverty into something artistic. He couldn’t stand the idea of suffering, unless he was suffering for some greater purpose. In his mind, that was always art.

“I guess we’ve really turned into starving artists, huh?” I commented, tentatively trying to clear the air. To my surprise and elation, he found my comment far too amusing and burst out laughing. He laughed more than he needed to for such an overused line, but the slight agitated grimace on his face suggested that it was partly hunger pains snarling his vocal chords.

“Food is so fleeting,” he said calmly, once the air had been settled. He rubbed his hands up and down my back; it had become a calming habit for both of us. “It’s there, it’s gone, and then you do it again. You’re hungry, you’re full, but you’re never really satisfied for very long. I’d rather have something stronger, something someone won’t forget in ten minutes time, something eternal. Like art, or love.”

His words had grown softer, from tiredness or brevity, I wasn’t sure. But I found his hand in the darkness and it was ready to accept my fingers. It took us a lot longer to fall asleep, but we did with our hands on our stomachs, not seeming to feel the pain of being empty, because we had so much more around us. In the morning, the flowers we’re still the brightest things in all of the city. They still made us smile.

And that really seemed to be all that mattered.

Despite some minor pain and discomfort, we had proven to ourselves that we could evade eating. Not only that, but we were above food and the normal every day comforts that people took for granted, and exploited with every chance they could. We didn’t need food, electricity, or good heating, so long as we had each other and art. We were trying so hard to perpetuate every Paris stereotype, as if to make up for Gerard not being a famous artist.

Yet. He wasn’t a famous artist, yet, I always told myself. I clung onto that conjunction so relentlessly, chanting it slowly inside my mind when we’d fall short on the heating bill and Gerard would start to prepare his candles for warmth. Yet yet yet, I’d say into the flicker of a flame. He wasn’t a famous artist yet, but if we could live through this, anything was possible. It was true, each time when I saw the morning after surviving a night in the cold, I felt like we could do anything. My faith had been kept for another night, and my happiness was returned with his arms. Basic survival became something to celebrate and illusions of grandeur became my incantation.

There would be little glances of hope when someone who would buy an original piece of art instead of the cheap postcards Gerard always made in the markets. Someone in the café remarking on some of his work, or simply the days where he would get up at dawn and paint like there was no tomorrow, like something was biting his leg and would only stop once he had completed the piece. Those days were always the best for him because he was always so happy when he was painting. They were good for me as well because I was still clinging onto some dream image I had in my mind that hadn’t really come into focus yet.

We still felt the freedom and the rush of spending our money irresponsibly on flowers or shows or more art. We could do that, and then feel some sense of security that we could still make it up the next Wednesday or next month by working really hard. We both acknowledged that money was evil, along with working steady jobs and dealing with minimum wage (which is why we always ignored the Help Wanted sign in the café window; I had resigned myself from retail labor from now on), but we also knew, despite our heavy and deep-seeded denial, that we simply needed money.

So we tried to trick it and trap it every way we could, in hopes that it wouldn’t leave us feeling greedy or jaded. Some days we were lucky; we would find money on the ground, and again, those days were good because it was like being rewarded for sticking to our art. We would be able to get free food some days, too. The old women who saw us every day walking the streets together hand in hand, the ones who always made bread on the Sundays, would give us their old loaves no one bought if we happened to be around when they were closing (which we happened to be a lot). We’d paint them pictures for a fair trade and they’d tell us they’d never seen two people like us before. I was never really sure what that meant, if it was a compliment or not, but we accepted their gifts and tried to share our own.

“I guess you’re not L’Estranger anymore,” I told him one Sunday after we had left the two women. He smiled and chuckled to himself.

“I wonder what they do call us,” I said out loud, looking around as if to have the answer appear. Even if they had given us a name, I was hard pressed to understand it. French was not adhering to me as well as I had hoped. I dependent on Gerard too much for conversation when we went out places, making him even less and less of a stranger to them and me more of a mysterious ghost by his side.

I worried, briefly, if he was concerned for the fact that I was taking his identity away, but his smile told me otherwise. He muttered a few French phrases joyfully and then looked at me.

“Hmmm?” I questioned. “You know me and French.”

“Je sais, je sais…” He turned around again, as if to make sure the coast was clear before he whispered in my ear. “They don’t call me L’Estranger anymore, no. But I can still hear them chattering away in the café every morning, or at dawn when I go for my walks. They do call me – us - something now.”

I looked up at him with wide eyes. “What?”

He pressed his hand against his chest suddenly, flattening his lapel. The dove bird appeared brighter than normal, stronger than ever. I realized then that he had only started to wear that coat outside of the house once I had arrived. His smile grew as he whispered the words:

“The Dove Man.”

My heart stopped. “Why not Dove Keeper?”

He pondered for a second, rather morosely, as he split the large loaf of bread with his bare hands and handed me a chunk. “Because I don’t need to keep anything anymore. I’m just a man now.”

Not a stranger, not an artist, not a keeper. Just a man. At first, my heart lurched in my body at this deduction. I felt like it was a removal of all that was important to him, all that formed who he was, all that made his identity. He was The Dove Keeper. It was his whole entity, it was who had set me free, it was this whole complete legacy and saga of my life – of both our lives. It was what I thought I had been coming back to see, a dream that was still cooking. But I realized slowly, as Gerard stood there humbled, but not depressed at all from this deduction that this dream hadn’t exactly turned out how we both figured. There was no fame or glory; there was just black and white surfaces where colour seeped in foolishly. He wasn’t a famous artist or a keeper, he was just a man. It didn’t mean it was good or bad or anything. It just was. Sometimes a person didn’t need to rationalize beyond that.

Even if he was just a man now, he was The Dove Man, and I was that dove, still following him home at night.

Home III

It was a few days after that when Gerard realized there was no need to stick around anymore. The colder weather had started to set in as well, a lot faster than it did in the States, and even though Gerard had spent many winters here by now, we both weren’t prepared. I had no sense of seasons being on the other side of an ocean in a different time zone. I knew I had left at the end of summer, and then one day, I woke up and I had to put on a sweater before I went outside and then later that day, I had to cave and go out and buy a jacket from the market. It was as if once I bought the jacket, it was an invitation to the colder weather to come barreling into our lives, and quite literally, into our apartment.

Gerard made the decision to leave, as he did with most decisions, while sitting quietly by himself. I didn’t really notice his subdued nature, at first, anyway. We had gotten ourselves into our own little routines, in spite of the spontaneity of our lives and not having a real sense of time. His mornings usually consisted of getting up at dawn and making coffee, sitting by the window and looking out of it as he drew. Sometimes he went for walks, but with the weather being the way it had been, he stuck to the indoors. This morning, he wasn’t even drawing. He was sitting very, very straight, with coffee in his hand. He looked out the window with an austere contemplative stare that was directed at something far off in the distance. I watched him from the doorway for a little bit, feeling invisible. When I walked past him to get my coffee, he regarded me and then, with a sigh, looked back out the window.

He took out his sketchbook next, and by this time I was watching his actions with acute interest, drew an Eiffel Tower and put a heart in the center of it. It wasn’t a corny, generic heart. It was a real human heart; with veins, blood vessels, muscle tissue and tendons. He had to get out a medical book he kept on the back of one of his shelves to have something to draw from. It was what he worked on all morning, only stopping to take cigarette breaks as he flipped through different pages to get a better look at the left ventricle. He stared at it for hours, and I stared at him, still not picking up on what was going on.

I went onto my little routine after awhile and let Gerard be Gerard. I walked to our café, not realizing it would be the last time I was there, and bought our favorites. The owner of the store had been getting so used to my presence, and understanding my lack of French. She always bagged up the exact same thing for me each time so I didn’t have to risk stumbling over my words. I smiled at her, said the only French phrase I knew with confidence, Merci, and left with my coffee in my hand. When I opened the door upon returning, Gerard looked up. He smiled, very warmly, but it was different.

“I hope you have more of an appetite than that,” he told me, glancing at my half eaten croissant. “I want to take us out for lunch.”

We ate like kings. I should have known something was up when Gerard kept going back for more and more and more, but I didn’t. I was just a greedy little underfed artist and we ate until our bellies were swollen. We had both gotten pretty thin at that point in time. With our shirts off, our ribcages stuck out when we lifted our arms too high, or breathed too deeply in our chests. With the immense amount of food in our system, our guts extended to that of potbellies, while we still kept the cage of poverty wrapped tightly around us, like a visible veil. We hadn’t been eating regular meals in such a long time, it was a relief to feel full again. Our bodies were flushed with excess energy and emotion, and we laughed until it hurt and we thought we would throw up all the expensive food we had just piled ourselves with. It took us ages to walk home, but the bitter cold wind that had started rushing in didn’t affect us. We didn’t allowed it to break our moods because this was the happiest we had ever been.

Under the cover of the Paris night sky, Gerard had decided to take a short cut through an alleyway to our place. I watched him with a smile on my face as his eyes lit up, seeing that this short cut also led us to the beloved liquor store. He returned my glance and then rushed in to get his favourite brand of wine that he hadn’t bought, he said, in over a year.

We drank it on the street like bums because there was no use in going home yet. We felt warmer here with food in our stomachs, alcohol touching our lips, and our arms around each other than we would have ever felt in our cramped, heating free apartment.

I remembered days like this in Jersey at Gerard’s old place when I was so much younger, and I remember being in my first year of art school, toiling away on vapid projects as teachers tore my work to shreds, and I didn’t think it would ever get this good again. Everything in that moment felt surreal, because it had finally become something worth remembering. It felt like I was living a fantasy, a perfect cliché, a postcard, a black and white movie reel. I thought this had all been possible because I was finally in Paris. I was in the market making music again, I was waking up and taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower at dawn, and I was walking and living and eating in this foreign place that I was beginning to get to know like the back of my hand. But I realized then, looking at Gerard as he laughed through stained teeth, that this could have happened anywhere. I romanticized the notion of Paris so much; everything seemed like a dream, not because of the place, but because of him. In reality, the Eiffel Tower was a big hunk of rusting metal, the wine and food here was too expensive, the market was full of transients that would steal your money if they could, the subway smelled like piss and shit half the time, the tourists were idiots and others were rude, and we were dirt fucking poor. We had no money, and we were toiling on the streets like vagrants because there was no point in going home – it was just as cold and dirty as right here. But none of that seemed to matter. We bought flowers instead of food and did art instead of getting real jobs. Gerard wasn’t famous, this wasn’t the magical dream that we had cooked up together, but again, it didn’t matter.

Paris was and it wasn’t what I had expected. There were some days where I would feel so conflicted in being there, especially right then in that alleyway. It was so cold, but he held onto my hand and somehow everything slipped away. I had a moment of complete and utter truth then, a moment where I was able to step outside my body and know what was going on exactly. It wasn’t the dream of Paris itself that had kept me going through all the shit in my life: it was the dream of Gerard. I knew I had had the best time of my life these past few months because Gerard had been there. I could have gone to Paris alone, and it would not have counted this much. Gerard had made it count, not this location on a map. It didn’t matter if we were in Paris or New Jersey or any place on the planet, just so long as I was with him.

I also realized, that though we both had our sovereignty as individuals before all of this, right then in Paris, now, as a unit, we were both free.

He needed to leave New Jersey to finally catch up with a long awaited ambition. I needed to leave him and handle the world on my own. We had done that separately and because of that, could now meet again. We could have never been free together like this in New Jersey because the parameters that we lived in would not constitute it. It was illegal and we were bounded by so many other worldly things. We loved each other so much, but there was no way we could have felt free under the weight of all that burden. So we had to leave one another. But seven years had now passed, and this was our meeting point once again. And this time, there really was nothing wrong with it. I was almost twenty-five and capable to make my own decisions. And though Gerard was old, he was still full of life. We were strange, we were unconventional, but we were free to be that way now, one hundred percent. We didn’t have to hide in an apartment anymore. We didn’t have to keep secrets. My parents knew about my past, they knew I was here right now, and they could know from now on. We were free as a unit of all burdens and I laughed so hard and kissed Gerard in the street because I could.

In the beginning of the trip, I’d wake up some mornings to find Gerard next to me in bed, and in my half dozed, and completely in love state, I’d tell him that I’d want to live in Paris for the rest of my life. He would nod, sympathetically, and then we’d move on in conversation. It was a flippant, fleeting remark. I thought he would appreciate it because Paris was his. But Paris never was his. He was never able to conquer it, as an artist, as a stranger, not even as a keeper. He was just a man.

I never wanted to spend the rest of my life in Paris. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. Now, I could. We could. That fact was crippling. Everything was possible.

I nearly fell over in the street.

He swooped me up with one big swing of his arm. “Don’t be getting too drunk on me. We still need to get you to the apartment.”

Inside the apartment, my new knowledge brewed inside of me. The walls became too much, the alcohol going to my head, and Gerard laid us down. Soon, the warming sensation from food and drink began to fade and we were left with nothing but skin, thin blankets, and the bitter wind. Our gaiety had slowed down significantly, shivers setting in. I hadn’t spoken since nearly falling over, and my shivers weren’t all from the cold. Gerard was calm, for the most part, too calm. Quiet and desolate, like he had been earlier in the day, glancing out the window and spending more time on the heart of the picture, than the twisting tower location.

“You know what this means, right?” he asked suddenly. I recognized the tone immediately. The testing nature of it made me feel seventeen all over again. It had been so long since he had tried to teach me something, but with age, I hoped, came wisdom.

“Yeah, I do.”

This was about far more than the lack of heating, and even more than realizing we could spend the rest of our lives together now, in peace. This was about going home to do it.

“I looked it up already, and the next plane to New Jersey is at noon tomorrow.” He paused, tracing circles on my back. “Do you think you can be ready by then?”

I turned over so I could face him. We had been spooning before in an effort to keep warm, but I wanted to see his face. His serious expression was too much. I knew I wanted to leave, and that I was totally ready to get up and start our lives together again some place familiar, but there was still something hanging in the air. He caught onto my hesitation, his perception still excellent.

“You know, my grandmother used to tell me that you could never truly leave a place unless you left something behind.”

Both of our eyes went to the walls, as if by instinct and by heart. They were all white and barren, smoke stained with years of previous tenants, but the landlord had been adamant about keeping them untouched. By himself or his tenants. It was in the lease, Gerard had told me when I first questioned the lackluster appearance in some places.

But a lease that would have no application come noon tomorrow, because we would be gone. At first, I didn’t mind being in black and white. Suddenly though, I felt a flood of colour. With one quick glance at each other, we were out of bed, and even in the chilled air, our clothing was off. It was back to the things we truly were familiar with: breaking the law and paint sex.

Our mural was small, but it took most of the night. We wanted to keep adding to it; another layer, another coat, another colour. We didn’t have too much to work with from Gerard’s supplies, but since he didn’t want them anymore, we used everything. He still had every colour under the sun – he said he never felt complete unless he held a rainbow in his hands, or the possibility to make one – but we found ways to mix, match, and make our own. Everything he had was up there, from acrylic, to tempera, to watercolor, charcoal, even some modeling clay we somehow adhered to the wall. He insisted upon using everything, and if we could see no place for it on the wall, then it still needed to be left behind. He said he wanted to start all over again, purge himself to build it all up in New Jersey. It was tiring, he told me, but he had a feeling this would be the last time, so he may as well give it his all.

“Are you upset at all?” I asked. We had slowed our pace with the rising of the sun. Light crept in through the small rectangular windows and illuminated our bodies streaked with paint.

He looked at me through blue stained eyebrows, twisted up into confusion. “Why would I be upset?”

“Uh, well, I don’t know…” I touched the back of my neck, feeling as if I had spoiled something. “Never mind.”

He made a noise with his tongue and his cheek, clicking into comprehension. But he still didn’t speak for quite some time. “I used to tell myself that I wanted to be a famous artist. That was what Paris was for. If I couldn’t do it in New York or New Jersey, then I’d know for sure in good ol’ Par-ee. ” He was looking away, as if talking to the former version of himself and not to me. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to interrupt, or if he would continue on. I wanted to ask him, so much, about his dreams and if he thought he had failed himself. Failure had always been a looming shadow in Paris, something in the black areas that I couldn’t always see or speak about. I knew we were happy and we had fun, and this trip was everything I had ever wanted because my desires had been so simple all along. I merely wanted him. But what about something beyond ourselves? Did he feel accomplished in his life here, cramped away in an apartment building that was falling apart because of lack of care and with a lack of colour, just being a man? He was not what I had expected upon returning; this was not what I had expected. I didn’t know if I was disappointed in that fact or if it even mattered to him. Maybe it was my disenchanted nature that I felt in art school which made me want to probe and live through his victories or failures and use them to make myself feel better, or maybe it was sheer obsessive curiosity. I had to know if he felt good, not about love or me, because I knew we were both mutual in that regard, but about other things. We were leaving because we were satisfied – but was he satisfied with the part independent from myself, the one that had made him take the leap of faith in the first place?

He shrugged with a little laugh all of a sudden, and then continued to swirl some colours on the wall by his wrist.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14