Sunflowers (Tournesols) II 1 страница

“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.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14