Sunflowers (Tournesols) II

The Epilogue

E. Francis Deshane

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."
Kurt Vonnegut

Tout ce qui n'est pas donné est perdu.

Paris I

“So,” I felt his lips brush against the tip of my ear. “How do you like Paris?”

You know when you feel something so strongly and though you know it’s coming, it still knocks you flat? Your breath is sucked right out from your lungs and it feels like you’re drowning though you’re not even near water? Every single emotion in your being is trying to cram through your mouth and you end up choking on your soul? It had always sounded so cliché and way too overdramatic to me. But honestly? That was how it felt when I saw Gerard again.

We had agreed to meet at this small café in front of the Louvre. It has the best croissants, he told me in a letter. It had taken him ages to start sending his correspondence in the first place, and when he did, they were often oil marked from the pastries he had consumed on the small gray tables there. He never bothered to clear the crumbs off before starting to compose his letters, so they were always stained; his pictures ran in some areas, his words were hard to read. It annoyed me at first; these were the only tangible elements I had of him anymore, and I wanted to keep every last bit of him intact and with me. Every picture pristine, every word perfectly legible. The words, when used, were sparse and some letters never contained anything more than an address written on the front with black felt-tipped pen, and the contents nothing but pictures, drawings, and this distinct smell of buttery pastries and black morning coffee.

You’ll love it here. It’s called La Même Âme. The Same Soul, in English. At night you can see the Eiffel Tower. It’s like a burning orb of light. He wrote in short sentences all the time. It was so strange when I finally heard him talk again in real life; I had forgotten how long-winded he could be.

The complicated matters were first in our discussions, like why it had taken us nearly seven years to finally have this rendezvous. I used to accept blame, or shift it off on other people, including Gerard. It took a few years, some aging and maturity on my part, and actually sitting with him Paris to fully comprehend that this was no one’s fault. Blame should not have entered the equation. Everything with our initial relationship had occurred in such a short time-span, so after departure, we had to wait it out a bit, find ourselves before we found each other again, or something like that. Gerard rationalized it in such better terms than I ever could myself. I had been an impatient teenager who was suddenly becoming an adult and too wrapped up in my own freedom.

Years passed without me really recollecting them as thoroughly as Gerard did. Though he didn’t write me until the summer ended, and was then sparse among his words and images, he remembered everything about his days.

He kept journal upon journal and stacked them up to the ceiling in his apartment, recounting and recording all of the days he had been away. He wrote and drew and painted and collected and remembered absolutely everything. When I walked into his little beaten apartment in the shady area of town, away from all the cultural icons of importance, I was amazed. But not that surprised. He lived in darkness over there, taking the only apartment he could afford. He had no money, no job, no friends, and was completely and utterly alone. Although it seemed like a harsh fate for someone, Gerard reveled in it. There were no distractions. It was just art. He knew that to stay sane in a place this far away from the center of the city that he could not even see the Eiffel Tower at night anymore; he needed to create it in his mind instead. This was imperative to his survival. So he collected and remembered everything he could in these books. He ate, lived, and breathed art and literature and culture. He learned French. He did so many things, while not doing anything at the same time, to an outsider, at least.

“The people here… I sometimes hear them call me L’Étranger. The Stranger; or a more direct translation, The Outsider. I don’t talk to anyone here, really, except the shop keepers in the art store or the people who sell me croissants. Even then, it’s a ‘good morning’ and ‘have a nice day’; nothing fancy. At first this was because I couldn’t speak French all that well without tripping over my own tongue. Then it was because I was nervous, and then, finally, when I got over myself, and began to comprehend what was around me in terms more complex than language, I realized I liked being L’Étranger. The Stranger, The Outsider, The Recluse, The Classic Hermit Character. I liked it. I was it. I didn’t need anyone here and it gave me more time to concentrate on what was important.”

“What was important?” I asked him. If he had been so content on being The Stranger, I wondered what had changed. Why was I here now? Why was I given these letters, these brief musings and drawings about times that had passed and now passed for so long? If he had been so happy to be alone, why were there suddenly two of us at this table? Even though I was that little flakey teenager for awhile after he was gone, even with my new sense of freedom and responsibility, and had not catalogued my days to his extent and maturity level, there was still one thing I knew for certain: I had missed the man with all my heart.

But had Gerard missed me?

He took a breath and rested his elbows on our small table. The question seemed to strike him, though at the time I couldn’t really gather if it was a good or troubled emotion that I had ignited. It was clearly something he had considered before; being in a foreign place alone for seven years without any friends gave someone a lot of time to reflect.

“I used to think it was art…”

“You mean it’s not art?” The notion that the center of every living thing was not this burning heart of passion and creativity coming from this man who had guided me so heavily was a weighty statement. “How can you live in Paris for seven years and bring that out as the moral of the story?”

He shook his head, laughing a bit at my heightened sense of horror. “You still act the same way.”

“The same way how?”

“You still never wait until I finish an idea before jumping in with your own conclusions and remarks.”

I felt my face grow flushed. I thought I had grown up in those seven years; I had a lot of experiences shape me, it almost felt insulting to hear that I had never changed. But I knew from the familiar expression on Gerard’s face that that was not what he had meant. The fundamental core of the person - that never changed, especially if one retraced themselves back to the person who helped to shape that core. Gerard’s lips were formed into a smile, one that felt old and worn with time, but was still fighting.

“I never said it was a bad attribute. It shows your mind never relents, never rests. That’s a very good characteristic in a student – in a person. A full human being is one who is always willing to be the student, to be something else, and to learn something new. To change, evolve. It’s a very good characteristic, Frank. Stop blushing over it.” The smile was stronger this time around. “You still blush the same way, too.”

The attention he had been focusing on me was flattering, but I didn’t come eighteen hours on a plane and then spend an obscene amount of euros in a cab to have him talk about my skin tones. At least, not yet. I recollected my confidence, and leaned back on the table. “So if art wasn’t important, what was?”

His face grimaced a little, pressing on. “I never said art wasn’t important, per se. Simply because something else gains a little more importance inside one’s mind, does not negate the fact that the other element had any bearings. You merely start collecting things as you get older. More things pop up that require your attention; things happen; experiences change your entire world view.” He looked around the café at that world beyond the windows and chalkboards with the specials of the day written on them. His eyes ended on me, and that smile was present again. He sighed. “That’s why I move so much slower now. I have so many things that require my attention, so many things that I want to take time for, and so many things I found out in this process.”

“So what did you find out?” I pressed harder. I wasn’t sure what exactly I wanted to hear him say. My own name? That I was the most important thing in his life? I knew that wasn’t true, and in a way, I never wanted it to be true. But I wanted answers from him; I wanted to know everything again.

“Art is certainly in there. But simply saying ‘art’ is never doing that word justice. It encompasses so many other elements.” He paused and started to flick his large lighter around in his hand that had been on the table. He looked off to the side. “Je pense, presque … I think…” he reflected with a small wink. “I think I’m still trying to figure a lot of it out. I don’t believe we ever stop.”

I nodded, and took a drink of my coffee slowly. I could tell by the tone of his voice – which was something that had never changed for him – that this conversation was over. Or at least, Gerard’s side of it was. He wasn’t going to give me any more answers than this, and perhaps, really, this was all he could say for the time being. It was still certainly a lot more than I could ever feasibly conceive at that moment in time.

When I looked around the inside of the café, my eyes wide with this new world, I was not contemplating my past lives lived back in Jersey and what had been important for myself. I was still too awestruck by the deep blue walls of the building and the fact that I was in grand old Par-ee. I probably should have been contemplating; Gerard would have wanted me to, but all I knew were events with a vague sense of time stamped on them from the letters he had sent and letters I had scattered to return. It felt like no matter what I had done or accomplished back in Jersey, Gerard and Paris were still the core of that very young and very beating heart in the center of my chest.

~

The first few months away from him were the hardest. The initial surge of emotion from my freedom eventually cooled and I was left dreaming of him persistently in a cold, feverish sweat. I read travel magazines, collected postcards, and made Jasmine sick of the useless knowledge that I persisted to inform her with about Paris and France as a whole country. (Did you know that French people often refer to Metropolitan France as L’Hexagone? And that from the first to sixth centuries, the city of Paris was known as Lutetia?). It sometimes felt like I was being torn in two, but not for the obvious reasons that couples often feel so divided if moved too far for too long (although that did play a factor). I had spent so long being the student that I didn’t quite know how to shed that role completely (and I apparently never had). While I had freedom of thoughts, mind, and action now and I could see my future laid out in front of me like a wide plain, I felt bipolar on some days. The only way I could approach new situations and people was to act like a student at first, and then guide myself through it, being the teacher that Gerard always had been. I knew I had the confidence to accomplish goals and I knew I could do anything I put my mind to. That feeling was freeing, elating, and what got me through my days. But I was always so torn with emotion, because I felt like I had to know absolutely nothing in order to gain something, and start with inferiority to build up to high achievement.

Needless to reiterate any further, it was tiring. I felt like two people on some days and this perpetuated itself into my daily life. I often played off dialogues in my head between this Eminent Gerard Figure and myself solving problems which he hashed out to me in carefully formulated life lessons. It sounded crazy, and looking back, I pitied poor Jasmine and Vivian who were kind enough to listen to my vapid rantings between two people, but also too kind to dissuade me in any manner.

These dialogues and utter senseless insanity were visible manifestations of how much I had missed him in those first months: it literally made me divide myself into two people, to replace the hole he had left in my life. It made me, and others around myself, crazy.

When the first letters came from Gerard, and I did not have to compensate for his being, it was a weight being lifted from myself. My vehement force cooled. His words and images were abstruse for the most part, vague esoteric renditions of a grandeur place he had built up so highly in my mind, but they satisfied me and quelled my hunger for something more. They gave me a separate part of the whole picture. A visual, tangible element I could look at and know that I had with me at all times, but was not overlapping my existence.

His first letter was a simple drawing of a mountain with a stream of black ink on coarse, off-white paper riddled with fine bumps and ridges. I spent hours eyeballing those soft pen strokes and feeling the texture of the paper between my fingers. I never thought of why he had chosen to draw a mountain, of all things, while being in Paris; it had never occurred to me to analyze his letters in that regard. I was far too concerned with my senses, what was imminent and in front of me, something of which I could finally hold. I pressed the page to my face with sudden relief that this was finally here and was overcome with his smell. It was like a jolt of memory, firing through me, and I had to sit for several minutes in a catatonic state to adjust myself back into the reality of what was going on. With each letter, the impact of these desires grew less and less, which was good for my nerves, but it saddened me, at first. I knew that I missed him, but you can only miss someone so much before it stops becoming the reason your heart beats, and just another lub-dub echo the organ makes. It was a part of me, rather than an effect on me. Each time a letter came, I read it, held it, and then bundled it up with the rest of them.

At first I kept them on my bed with me, to fulfill some strange fantasy that he was still beside me every night. But as my pile grew, and when he sometimes sent me things other than paper, pen, and his fragrance on paper (like the cork from his favourite wine, a leaf from the first fall, a pick to a guitar), I needed to move my collection of Gerard elsewhere. I put him in a box that I painted black and filed him under the bed. He was still near me, but not digging into me every night. He was hidden, too, which was always important. He was always this big secret to me. The only people I’d ever let see the letters in full were Jasmine or Vivian, and that was only because they were, and always had been, exceptions. But even then, I had my own exceptions, and some letters never saw anyone else’s eyes but my own. I kept it that way, I liked it that way; I never thought it could be any other way.

At first this became an anthology, then as years passed, I turned it into a mythology that lived in my mind like a fairy tale, a story that had happened and was now over, and a future that was nothing more than a dream to cling into at night. I knew I loved him, and that would never change, even as new experiences and new people entered my life. He was still always there, in the back of my mind, under my bed, but in the front of my heart. Like a callus, something that appeared on the hands from constant use, driven by passion. It seemed as if this pressing feeling of missing him, and this notion of Paris itself as a whole, was to become a persistent element in my world.

Now with his equivocal presence in my life through these letters, I was able to become more solid on my own, and start achieving the potential we both knew I had inside of me.

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?”

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14