Chapter Fifty-Four Frank 3 страница

We would talk of meeting up in our letters, but it was fleeting. Sometimes there would be several months in between our correspondence and often times, we would forget what the last letter had said. I used to be very diligent with them and try to comment or respond about everything he had sent me. I asked him a million questions in that first letter: How did he like it there? Did he miss me? What was it like? What was he painting? So on, and so forth. I barely talked about myself, which hadn’t been what Gerard wanted. In the next letter there was a sketch of myself and it had been a startling image to see. Most of the time, when he drew me, it was while I was doing something else. Gerard hated posing more than anything in the world (unless nudity was involved, that is) so the only sketches I had seen of myself before had been of me sleeping, reading, cleaning the dove cage, or looking out a window. I was never the sole focus of the photo and it was never as full frontal as this. It was a face shot, as if I was looking into a mirror, shoulders up, my own eyes on the page meeting mine in real life. I felt strange; did I really look that that to Gerard? When I saw that something was written, I hoped it would clarify, but I should have learned by then that Gerard did nothing for clarification purposes. If anything, his only goal in life and art was to make everything infinitely more confusing.

Ceci est que je veux voir. And in translation: This is what I want to see.

I was flattered; he wanted to see me all the time, apparently. But when I held the photo and ran it over my fingers until they were numb, I began to get what he meant. When I sat down to write my next letter, I didn’t ask him questions. I gave him answers, instead.

It took him drawing me a huge easel in the middle of an empty, barren street before I realized he never wanted words in return. He wanted my art. I stopped composing daily updates of myself and began to send him pictures instead. The photographs that I had hung up and then filed away in a dark room that had been swallowing my creativity before began to come into the light of day. They were shipped off to the land of art and culture, into a new type of renaissance.

The pictures that I sent Gerard were the only things which made me proud. I appreciated what people said about my work, and I tried to take criticism and hone my craft as well as I could. But that element of pride for one’s ability, of feeling good about yourself and your work - Gerard was really the only person that gave me that. It wasn’t even like he sent me back these long critiques or praises for what I had sent him. He simply accepted it, as I did with his own. That's all that I wanted: acceptance. We had this mutual bonding and sharing going on through letters, spread out and ambiguous during those seven years. I realized seeing him in Paris, and his extensive library, that I was never as thorough and careful with my own art. He had been cataloguing and remembering, I had been pushing it away hoping for something more. But the emotion was still there; it was strong and constant like art was supposed to be, wrapped up in Polaroids with low-light and high resolution.

I was always the one who brought up Paris. Aside from wanting to reunite with Gerard, the place itself held such strong convictions and ideas in my mind. I had already done so much learning about it and I had heard him speak about it; now I was collecting a pile of sentimental souvenirs that he had sent me. It felt like I was already there in some regards, but I needed there to be more depth to the experience. I needed to put my feet down and say that I had now done it; I needed to log it within time, so I could keep experiencing it as a memory rather than a narrative, or film, or myth. And also, there was Gerard. I knew we had to separate, and I knew it was for the better. But there was always talk of reuniting, right? There was supposed to be more to this, another part, another chapter. An epilogue. I could still remember the conversation clearly. This wasn’t all there was. It wasn’t just New Jersey or Paris and being thousands of miles away.

Feeling foreign around words, and having had them fail me before with previous letters and attempts over the years, I finally probed the idea of a Persian meet-up with Gerard through my art. I took a picture of a book, then another with the final pages open, the words Epilogue reading clearly back. This time, his lag between letters was longer than usual, and I felt every second of its absence.

I took this photo during my first year of art school, after I had finally dragged myself off my ass and gone. I could be an artist all I wanted in that apartment, but Vivian had to smack some sense into me, and have me realize it would never have any application in the real world if I didn't show it to the real world. I always hated it when she talked about the ‘real world’. To her, art was nice, and art was passion, and art was necessary, but “if you spend your life indoors, Frank, how do you expect to find inspiration for that art? How do you expect to find other people like yourself?” Although I thought her logic was vapid (because Gerard was always enough of a muse for myself), I knew I needed to appease her. She still had a second set of keys to the apartment, which I never could figure out the hiding place for, and would drop by on occasion. I knew her visits would transfer from hobby to full-time job if I did not go to art school. I did want to go; it was just a matter of wanting something versus doing something. I was still in those transitional phases and she had to kick me out of them. As soon as I registered, I began to get excited for all the possibilities.

~

The first year was fun, inspiring, and I was awestruck most of the time. It had been a small kick-off that I had needed to get me passionate about art, love, and life again. Anytime a letter from Gerard came, I became peaked with nostalgia for a few moments, but it was becoming easier and easier to reorganize myself and file the letter away with the others. Eventually I would gather up something for a response, but it was during this period where I became rather sloppy and nearly as vague as he was being in the letters. I wasn’t trying to forget about him, or place him on the backburner in any way; it just sort of happened. Art school pulled my focus away from him for a little while and I was enjoying the direction I was going. I was sure that part of him was relieved, and that I was making the right decision. It wasn’t until my first year ended and I didn’t have photography class, dark rooms, and late night talks about existentialist thinkers with students from the adjacent schools to keep my life busy that I fell back on my Paris dream. It was my beacon of hope when things looked bad or boring.

Suddenly, I wanted to go again.

He didn’t respond to my letter, which I had written a month after my last exam, until the end of summer. I knew that had been purposeful. He had wanted me to stay in school and this had been the only way he knew how to do it. To make matters worse, the letter he sent me as a reply never even provided a clear answer on the invitation or a reason for the delay. It was just a fucking picture of a Paris landmark. This gigantic building with a clock on it and a shadowy figure (which I always interpreted it be him, even if he said he did not like to draw himself) looking up at it. Was he trying to rub in the fact that he was there and I was not? This was the first time that I could ever remember being furious with Gerard. I had become so used to missing him that this sudden wave of anger was a strange sensation. I didn’t know what to do with it, and I didn’t know how to place it in with the grand scheme of things. I couldn’t simply file this emotion away like I could with everything else. When the anger dispersed, it morphed into confusion of what to do next.

I didn’t write back for awhile; I really didn’t know what to say anymore. If all I wanted was Paris and he wasn’t even going to answer that question directly, then what did he want me to write back? My summer had been rather uneventful that year; I felt like I had been constantly waiting for something to happen or to change, but it never did. I felt beguiled and wasted, and he didn’t need to hear about my negativity. I had worked retail shift work in an attempt to pass the time and make money for tuition, and had planned on doing my art on the side, but it didn't end up happening like that. I would come home tired and either draw or paint. Photography seemed like too much of a effort after nine hours on my feet. I would daydream about Paris constantly at work, and before I knew it, I was back at school again and he was giving me these esoteric drawings. I had nothing important to say and nothing deemed worthy enough to show him. So I didn’t write back. I focused on getting enrolled in another year of school instead. I applied late and had to deal with a whole lot of paperwork and waiting around in big white offices to get everything arranged and sorted out. I had to borrow money from my parents to secure my place again and to cover what I had not already made. I had received a scholarship my first year, but since it was an entrance one, it wasn't going to keep getting renewed. As I cursed and kicked and muttered under my breath all that day, just to get a little piece of paper to say that I was now a returning student, I couldn’t stop thinking of Paris. I couldn’t stop seeing the Eiffel Tower and I felt what I thought to be a thick rod of bitterness that I had swallowed like a sword and it was now taking up residence in my body. This was what Gerard wanted, I told myself. He didn’t reply until then so I could stay in school. If this is what he wanted, then I would give it to him. At the end of the day, I took my returning student papers to the school library and photocopied them and I mailed them to Paris that afternoon. When I sealed the envelope and dropped it down the shoot, I felt the bitterness inside sour and turn into pure yearning instead.

From there, I was rushed back into the busy swing of school and my former life all over again, so Gerard was put on the backburner for a little while. He had done so with me, it seemed, so I didn’t let any negativity fester inside myself any longer. I was free, after all. And an adult. I thought things couldn't get any better.

But second year was a lot different from the first. I thought embracing change was hard enough when all I wanted to do was to be in Paris with Gerard and he was proving to be more stubborn than a two-year-old; it became unfeasible when everything I had known from my previous year was turned upside down and on its head. The art school I had once felt so at-home in had completely changed forms; as if before everything had been a chimera and it was now showing its full skin. My classes were no longer the walking introductory lessons that I could grasp without much thought and the teachers had much, much higher expectations and saw no reasons to hold their tongues anymore when giving critiques. I began to loathe the word ‘critique’ itself and my heart would start palpitating inside my terrified chest each time I walked into my seminars. Who knew who would be on the chopping block today? I let my paranoia and constant self-doubt return and slowly take over my body. Before long, my heart was pumping in terror from just being on the campus and anticipating their blows. Then, it was jumping simply thinking about school. Before I knew it, I wasn’t even going at all anymore to avoid the risk of heart attack.

It wasn’t just the critiques that threw me for a loop that year; I had several breaking points. Photography, the one thing that had saved me before, was the main fissure in this scheme. And the other major one had been the teacher herself.

Her name was Mrs. Smith. Her first name was Patricia, but she made it implicitly clear that she never wanted to be called by it. She was an older woman; one of the oldest teacher’s at the school. I supposed since she had been there since the doors of the place had been opened, she figured she had some kind of special authority. She did, I supposed, but she abused this power as she inflicted her wrath in small, subtle ways. She would leave insinuating comments on work that would compliment, then undercut. This is by far your best piece, but you’re still giving me the same thing over and over. You need variety, but at least now you’ve finally managed how to do this. Practice does make perfect. Keep practicing.

I strove to do my best in photography – it was my passion after all. In first year I had gotten one of the highest grades in my class (that was mostly because it was everything I had already done or taught myself; it was introductory, and I already felt like a pro even if I didn’t have too much experience or years holding a camera to back that up). I walked into my second year thinking I would be a star. If not a star, then at least capable of fast-learning or some progress. My thinking may have been a little foolish and naïve, but I really was one of the better people in there. I didn’t want to sound arrogant or egotistical (something Vivian would warn me about constantly; “The one thing I can’t stand about artist’s self portraits is that they never capture the sheer enormous nature of their big-headed-ness in their canvas”), but judging from my own standards of art and quality, there were really only a few good photographers in the room. I knew a few people from my first year course and most of them I felt like I was either on par with, or slightly better than. There were a few people who were older and who I did not recognize at all; they intimidated me. They were good – much better than myself – and part of it seemed unfair. They were older than me - therefore they had had more time to practice, more years to hold a camera and get the hang of things. I was still young. It was impossible for me to know as much. I was okay with this, albeit very jealous, because the class had a good enough mix. There were enough people there I felt better than so I had a sense of security, but there were also a lot that were superior to myself to keep me motivated. After the first week, I felt like I was completely in balance and totally ready to take on new challenges.

But she destabilized me. She would compliment me (if she ever got that far) and then she would poke holes at things. The light level is too low, the object I picked totally contrasted the point of the photo, the resolution is off. It felt like I could do nothing right, like nothing would please her. She told me I wasn’t trying hard enough, so I put all of my effort into this one course and practically forgot about my other ones – and she still found something wrong with it. I tried to forget about her. My goal was to come to class, do my work to the best of my ability, and never make eye-contact with her. I would just do art and pretend like she wasn’t even there. But then her comments on my assignments became more detailed, probing, and analytical. It felt like she was writing essays on simple photos of trees. Unlike during lecture or during workshop seminars and I could simply not listen or make eye-contact, her words on a page didn’t give me that option. Upon first glance they didn’t seem intimidating, but then I would read and fall into her critiques of myself and my work (two things that I could not separate from one another). It was infuriating and I was bringing my aggression home, spreading it out amongst everything I touched.

Vivian and Jasmine saw my sinking spirits and tried to cheer me up, but I never let it work. Vivian suggested I talk to Professor Smith in person, that maybe she’d take me more seriously if I put an effort into friendship as well as art, but the notion made it hard to swallow. This professor did not want to become friends with anyone. Despite her being older, she was no Mrs. Rusten.

Professor Smith was tall, thin, and had long, long hair. It was wiry and gray and there was no evidence of what colour her hair used to be before the forlorn rags of aging took over. When she put it in a braid, the sinewy length looked like a horse’s tail. The snarl she would on her face sometimes reminded me of a horse stuck in the mud; her nose was long and angled with her jaw-line, her eyes wide and dark, and when she critiqued out loud, she would get this stark look on her face. It felt like she wore different versions of her baggy jeans and men’s shirts every day of the year. She wore boots every day as well. The distinct clunk-clunk of her boots could be heard a mile down the hallway and always signals a jolt of fear through my body. She said she had taken part in the sixties a little too much, but she unlike most of her counterparts, had refrained from most drugs and retained all of her memory and vision from that era. She had taken pictures of rock stars and done the whole travel journalism thing for a little while. She had even been at Woodstock.

“But it was all meaningless. The photos I took there, I hate them now. I hated journalism. I wanted to do art, not tell fabricated stories for the mainstream culture. Everything in the mainstream is fabricated by the way, children. Never believe a single thing you read in the newspaper or even a single photo you see. They’re all manipulated, trust me, I should know. I took them, I was there. Even the counterculture was fabricated, just in a very different way. There is no side in anything, anymore.”

Convoluted half the time and talking very much inside her own headspace, she was an enigma, a strange fascination for most of the class, while just a nightmare for me. She always called us children, even though there were a few people in the class who were adult coming back to school after a mid-life crisis to get their degrees. I always felt like she called us that to demean us, to make us feel small and little, like we were morons who didn’t know anything at all. She talked in circles the way she did, probably to only illustrate that point.

“She probably only calls you children because she has some of her own, and it’s her way of transcending some type of motherly love as she tears your work apart. Enjoy the little things, Frank, and don’t get too despaired by the big ones. And if you don’t like it, talk to the woman,” Vivian would always try to calm me down. She’d rebutted the insinuating comments I’d make about professor Smith’s insinuating comments, and then tell me to talk to her. So when I finally got annoyed with Vivian’s constant plea (as she was probably getting annoyed with my constant complaints), I wasn’t exactly sure what I would be expecting. But I swallowed my fear and pride and told Professor Smith that I needed to speak with her after class. She only smiled, and then went on to teach the lesson while I felt my stomach tying itself in knots. When the time came and I asked her what I was doing wrong, she gave me that same smile. She didn’t appear to want to talk at all, so I let my frustration roll out. I was going to start critiquing her and see if she liked how it felt to be constantly questioned about something that had once felt so natural. I asked her why I was getting essays on how to improve when all I was doing was trying to impress and progress. I demanded the simple small comments she gave other people; I didn’t want to sit at home at night and dwell on the critiques anymore. I was so tired of reading the same sentence and picking apart insults that never seemed to do much good in the end. It hurt too much – but I left out the pain she caused in my evaluation. I had a feeling she’d enjoy it all too much more than she already was.

“While I appreciate your honesty and your ability to assess problems, they’re not my problems,” she informed me after my spiel was done. I stared at her blankly. Had she not heard a word I said? Was I not being clear enough?

“What do you mean? You are my problem.” If she didn’t want to be friends, then I didn’t really care about being this blunt. “I’m just trying to be a photographer and get my work done, but you keep commenting on every last little thing I do.”

“That’s what I’m here for. And you’ve been giving me stuff to remark on. Finally. I give people comments like that who give me a reason to give them comments.” She smiled, smugly. She always had this way of smiling with complete and utter distaste to her mouth; like she had sucked on a lemon before, but it made twist her face up in righteousness.

I didn’t respond. I couldn’t without yelling and then giving her more fuel to light her own verbal fire with. While I bit my tongue, she let hers run wild. The things she told me next in that conversation were something I knew I was not going to easily forget.

“You haven’t done photography long, have you?”

“It’s what I’m meant to do.” I said it through a clenched jaw and fists.

“But you haven’t done it very long. I can tell. I can really tell. You have an immense amount of work to do. A lot of people here do, but you’re simply not doing it.” She had been leaning against her desk, and paused now, folding her arms over her chest and waiting for me to take the bait. I didn’t. She sighed as she continued. “You’re wasting my time right now. Did you even think of the other options you had before coming to art school? I know you’re older than some of the other students here, but age does not advocate thought processes. I know some forty-year-old men who still have the mentality of a sixteen or seventeen year old boy. You’re about twenty, twenty-one, right?” She nodded to herself contemptuously, not even pausing long enough for a response this time. I wouldn’t have given her one anyway. “Frank, it is my job to teach you. Actually, that’s not even my job. I’m not a teacher. I’m a professor. I just profess the knowledge that I know and if you don’t get it, that’s not my problem. You’re not getting it and I can’t help you until you make a proper effort. Those comments are long for a reason and if you can’t see why then that is a shame. You say you read them and pick apart my words, but I don’t think you do. You’re reading things one way, and you should be reading another. My comments are as clear and as explicit as I can be. You want to be a professional photographer some day, I take it. Everyone here has those untamed ambitions when they first settle in. Some people can achieve it and I try to pay a lot of attention to those students. But at the rate you’re going, you are not going to amount to much.

I was quiet, for a long, long time. It felt like hours in front of her desk, trying to breathe again. She had guessed my age right. I had almost been twenty-one at the time, and while I knew that age was one thing, and art criticism was another, I kept linking the two in my mind. If she had been right about one thing, was she right about the others?

Her next class had started to come in. She straightened papers on her desk and then sent me out of the room.

When I arrived at my apartment that night, I stared at my hands for hours on end. I looked from them to my camera and then back at least a thousand times. I walked around my place and looked at all my old art and photos as her words stung my ears again and again: you are not going to amount to much. And again and again I asked myself: Could she be right? It felt impossible. I looked around me at all the artwork I had done, all the painting, creating and picture taking that I had had spread out over the walls and hidden in dark rooms. I began to doubt myself, to doubt everything I had ever made or created, but then my eyes spotted the black lockbox of letters under my bed. And I thought of Gerard, and I knew that she couldn’t be right. It was impossible. I had all of this around me, I had my past, my present, my friends – I had proof. I held it in my hands. I was an artist, I had created this, and it was mine. I was going somewhere, I was sure of it.

The next day, I talked to Jasmine and Vivian about my work, asking for their input. Of course they said they liked it – they were my friends, they kind of had an obligation to say that. Vivian was a little more critical, giving me advice on different things to try (“no art is good in a rut!”), but she didn’t dwell on what I had done. It wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad; it was mine. I figured that was all she could say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14