Sunflowers (Tournesols) II 12 страница

"You weren't what I expected either," I told her with a smile. Then, when she failed to respond, I took the bait: "What did you expect of me?"

"I'm not quite sure. I try to keep my mind from fantasizing too much, lest I be let down. It's never good to have too many expectations, especially for other people. Only for yourself. So I never let my mind form a complete picture of you. But what I did know for sure: twenty-five, photographer, lives in Gerard's old place, and Gerard's old - well, I suppose now, current - lover. Knowing all this, I guess I just expected...." She looked at me for the first time. I felt her eyes go up and down me and it was the first time I had ever felt scrutiny outside of a classroom. "Someone better dressed."

I laughed at her remark, running my hands through my hair. "Oh trust me, I know. I've been getting that a lot lately. But Vivian got us clothes the other day. I will be much better dressed the next time you see me, I promise."

She sort of wiggled her nose. "It's hard living up to promises. I suggest you never say them aloud."

I let out an exasperated, yet really amused, sigh and then took a drink of coffee. I didn't know what to do with this girl. She was one of the most articulate and scrupulous people I had ever met. "You're nothing like your mother," I told her - and then realized my error after I expressed myself.

"I should hope not," she recoiled, her attention at the piano. "Just because she gave birth to me does not somehow make her personality mutable with my own. No type of lineage is really ever inherited. I have a choice - we all do - in the way we act. I choose not to be like my mother."

I thought about what she said for a moment or two. I was very familiar with the element of choice and its necessity in promoting freedom; Gerard had taught me that. But her use of her free choice and interrelating lineage baffled me. She did not what to be like her mother, and yet, Vivian was one of the most artistic, opening, loving, and free spirited people I had ever met. She was just the right combination of pragmatic and passionate. She dressed in vivid colours, held herself with utmost confidence, and as Gerard had once said, she herself appeared to have stepped out of one of Matisse's later works. Just beautiful, colourful, and curvaceous, and all of this became highlighted when I saw her art all over the walls. She was as much a participator in art as a work of art herself. And yet, this was something to choose against for Cassandra?

I looked at the way Cassandra poised herself with meticulous precision. This was something I had overlooked before. Her dress was modest and for a lack of a better word - perfect. I thought, naively, that she just didn't know any other way to dress; that she thought she had to be this prim as a Catholic school girl. But of course that wasn't the case. She had her mother as an example for other ways of being. No, her precise language, dress, and composure weren't natural to her very being, they were carefully selected and constructed out of an array of many options. They, in a way too, were also a work of art, though I could not find anything to compare her image with. Maybe she wasn't an art piece at all, but just a sound, a deep and precise crescendo to a large and overwhelming orchestra.

Her use of choice made me think about myself for a little while. If she was choosing this, and Vivian was choosing that, how was I choosing to present myself? T-shirts and hoodies? What did this equate to? It clearly was not someone who was dating Gerard, in her mind. But I didn't know how else I was supposed to be. I would be better dressed next time, I had promised her, but I felt this sinking feeling in my chest about it. Did I even want to wear those clothes? How much of our images of ourselves was want and how much was adhering to an ideal that you needed to present to function in society?

I needed to stop my train of thought from focusing on myself, so I feebly offered: "Your mother is a good woman."

Cassandra rolled her eyes. "Of course she is a good woman. I just don't want to be like her."

"What's not to like?"

"Again, Frank, it's not that I don't like her. She's my mother. Of course I love her. But do I also want to take my clothes off at a moment's notice? No. Have my nudes all over our living room? No. And invite people back into my life who pretty much left without warning for nearly a decade? Fuck no."

Her swearing caught me off guard, but it was good. It meant we were talking about the outburst, which was what really attracted me to the situation. "Is that why you're mad? Because he left?"

"I hate getting mad. It makes me feel like I'm losing control." She took a deep breath, laying her hands on the keys but not making a sound. "But yes. He left. I was still a child. He was as good as my father, basically. No, he didn't exactly do all the fatherly things that most dads do, and he was certainly more eccentric, but he was an important part of my life. And then, overnight, he was gone. That's not good and there is no excuse for that. I would have thought that after my first dad left that he would be more considerate. But apparently more things were important to him, and I wasn't one."

I wanted, desperately, to argue for Gerard's sake. That yes, he did have more important things to do, lots more! He had to discover his dream and whether or not he could do it. He needed to live his life without regrets. I wanted to tell Cassandra these things, but I held my tongue. It's not that I didn't think she wouldn't understand, I just realized she would be able to argue her way out of it. She was right, and she knew she was right. That was all there was to it.

"It's not that you weren't important Cassandra. He loves you. He talks about you a lot..."

"So?"

"Did he write to you?"

"No."

"Did he leave you a letter or anything when he was leaving?"

"No."

I bit my tongue and wished I had not asked any of these questions at all. There was this large sinking feeling in my stomach, and I hated it. I knew the exact feeling she had, this large wave of realizing that you didn't mean the world to someone, especially your father. I got this all the time from my dad. He was never acting like a dad anymore, and even though he was always around and had never abandoned us, he was never exactly present either. Now this problematic positioning was turned around onto someone like Gerard. I just couldn't - and part of me wouldn't - fathom it. It was just a fluke; she didn't have the full story. Gerard did what he needed to do, and yes, he hurt people, but how much guilt would have fermented in his body if he had not? Wouldn't he have acted like a bitter person and made their lives miserable? He had to do what made him happy, so he could then treat people with a free conscience.

But I didn't dare explain this to Cassandra. She was bitter herself; maybe there was something inside of her that she was keeping hidden, that wanted to come out, but she was sticking herself down with so many rules and procedures that it was impossible.

Cassandra cut off my thoughts again. "Look, don't worry about it. I can see you're strained, which makes sense, because you love Gerard. I just want to make it clear that I loved him too, and he can't just do what he did and have it be okay again. Eventually, we will become friends again. But things are different now and he needs to understand that."

I nodded my head. I was glad she was becoming a little less all-or-nothing in her thinking, but I was still approaching with caution. "I get it. Things change. But sometimes even the mistakes take a different form whichever way you choose to look."

She laughed, getting right away what I was hinting at. "With love? Love is a problem. You think I don't know what you mean, but I do. And you're still wrong." She paused, stopping the scales she had been haphazardly playing before. "I'm in love with someone right now. A girl from my class, and she'll be at the recital. She loves me back, or at least she says so. No one knows, or at least, we haven't made our attraction visible, even to one another. But love - this love - it is a problem. Love is always a problem."

I felt a smile come to my face, and relief washed over me. Cassandra was in a same-sex coupling as well, or at least she wanted to be. Maybe this was what she had restricted herself towards. Maybe she didn't want to be called lesbo by her classmates or get outed without warning. Did her mom know? Vivian would surely be accepting. Cassandra didn't need to be afraid of this at all. I began to prepare a speech in my head for her, feeling honoured that she had opened up to me about this fracture in her precise composure. She was in love with a woman. Of course she was obsessed with choice and decisions - she didn't want to be a lesbian!

"There's nothing wrong with loving a woman, even if you're one too. If you don't want us to tell anyone, or don't want anyone in class to know, then it's okay to stay in the closet there, but you should do what you want. What you both want. It's foolish to waste love waiting for someone else's approval."

I smiled, feeling proud of myself. If I had only been so open minded at Cassandra's age, if someone had told me what I was telling her then, maybe it would have been easier to deal with my feelings for Gerard, instead of griping with so much internal homophobia.

Cassandra didn't respond how I expected her to. She laughed quickly, and then tried to explain. "Of course I know it's okay to love a woman, Frank. I have no issue with being gay. I kind of like it. It makes sense. I read Sappho's poetry in grade seven and I thought everyone felt like this. Noelle, the woman I love right now, she's not the first woman I've been in love with, either. This is the first where the feelings have been reciprocated, though, and I suppose it's from here where I'm unsure of myself. It's not sex either that I'm afraid of, though, so please don't give me a lecture there on how to please a woman, or something, because trust me, I can probably do it better than you."

She smiled, and I felt my face go red. I had been planning on giving her at least a few tips if she had asked, but I shut up and tried to let her articulate her own feelings and apprehensions, which is apparently what she wanted me there for to begin with.

"It's this love idea. I don't want to be in love. I am not afraid of the hurt, though, surprisingly. I've been hurt so much that it's just normal, average. I know how to deal with hurt. It's the pure insanity that I see with people who claim to be afflicted by love that I don't know how to deal with."

"Insanity?"

"Yes. You are insane when you're in love. There is no rational thought. Look at my mother and Gerard. Seven years gone, and it's like nothing happened. She knows he's gay and he's with you right now, but she still loves him anyway. That to me is ridiculous."

"You can be in love with more than one person, though..." I tried to insist, but this only caused Cassandra to hit the base end of the piano in frustration, sending the sound of thunder through the house.

"I'm not ready for that. I don't want to deal with it."

I nodded, raising my palms in slight resignation. I could tell this conversation was going nowhere, and we weren't going to change in our opinions. I wanted to stop trying, and I also wanted her to stop trying to convince me as well. I liked where I was; the apparent insanity that she saw had been home to me for so long I didn't want to suddenly be evicted from it with a rather persuasive argument. I was also getting uncomfortable realizing the intensity of the relationship between Gerard and Vivian. I knew my unease was ridiculous because we were allowed to do what we wanted, but the jealousy - the insanity - crept into me. I was ready for the conversation to be over, and I listened to see if they were in the basement. I looked around for a window, and saw that they were actually outside now, smoking. It was ridiculous - again another motion towards insanity - since it was one of the bitterest nights of the year and Vivian didn't even smoke, but she wanted to be with him, so she went outside. She touched his hair and curled it over his ear, and at one point, I saw him grab her hip and do a little bit of a small twirl and dance. I swallowed hard.

Cassandra kept talking: "I know you want to go, and I probably made you uncomfortable. But thank you for listening. I will probably end up sleeping with the girl, since sex does not necessarily have to include love, and she's really beautiful."

I smiled at her sudden honesty, and wished her good luck. I began to pick up my coffee cup and any other dishes, preparing to leave.

"Thank you, but again, I don't believe in luck. It will happen regardless of that. And afterwards, maybe I can give you some tips." She smiled as I left the room, and I realized I had won Cassandra over. She was still as straightforward and precise as ever, but she had let a little bit of her guard down that I hadn't seen before. I liked it - appreciated it.

"Thanks, but I think we're in different playing fields right now."

"Nice euphemism," she quipped, with a roll of her eyes. She played a deep scale, and then added: "But you still have Jasmine, or at least, that's what my mother says. And Jasmine's a good person. I like her a lot."

As soon as I was comfortable, she had suddenly thrown me for a loop again. She knew Jasmine? She liked her? When had Jasmine come over? I felt as if there was a complete world that had gone on while I was off in my own little one, waiting for Gerard to come back. I didn't even want to extrapolate on the sexual connotation of her comment at this point in my night. I just wanted to go home.

"I will see you later, Cassandra," I said with a wave, and then turned around and went straight outside. I heard her play scales and then go back to The Ride of The Valkyries.

"Ready to go?" Gerard asked me as he tossed his cigarette down and I nodded profusely. Vivian had her arms crossed against her body and her teeth had begun chattering. She still hugged us goodbye, even though it meant the loss of body heat.

Insanity, I thought as I threw my arms around her. Incredible insanity, I thought as I got into the car and with the door still open, letting cold air in, I kissed Gerard for no other reason than to kiss him. I liked my insanity, however, and I never wanted to leave. As I closed the door to my car, I could still hear the piano through the winter night. The Ride of The Valkyries echoed in my head, right until the very last note. Cassandra had gotten her victory, and so had we.

Chapter Five

Gerard began spending a lot more time with Vivian after that night. He said it was for an art show that she was going to prepare for him, but I knew a lot of it was fuelled by the outburst from Cassandra. If he couldn't make up for the lost time over those years and the trust that was ruined, he would have to start again. He was a stranger and the only way to eradicate that notion was through exposure. He began to leave our place right after dinner so Vivian would not be distracted during her teaching, and would spend his time there until one of them caved and absolutely had to go to bed. He would often stumble inside at nearly midnight and crawl into bed with me with his clothing still on. After the first dinner, I declined on going again. I had gotten all that I needed to when I went, and I knew that Cassandra had no need for my company. At least, not until after the recital when she would have more definitive details about her relationship to share. I told Vivian I would come by after that date, but without alluding to why. "Just want to ask her how it went, so let me know when it's all over," I told her, and though Vivian glanced at me sceptically, she did not question my decision. She was too busy planning a show and rebuilding a relationship that had spanned more than my entire life.

I was relieved for some time by myself. I spent a lot of it looking into some job enquiries to keep myself productive until I had the chance to meet with Jasmine and get the hard copy of the assignment she had. The night that she came over, Gerard also had a busy art day. He went by in the afternoon this time, right after he and I had our morning routine together: coffee, breakfast, and, of course, sex. We stopped having sex at night because Gerard said it woke him up too much, and he was too drained after a long evening of creating and planning with Vivian. We swapped out schedules so we could still appreciate one another and then go on with our days, fully awake. It definitely was better than coffee, at least, for me and even as I pored over the classified ads, the impending responsibility never became too much, because the faint touches from Gerard were still in the back of my mind. As Gerard did up his shirt and debated in the bathroom mirror whether or not he wanted to shave before he left this morning, he told me with the bathroom door wide open, that he would most likely be at Vivian's all night.

"It's the final touches, right now," is all he divulged, and I didn't want to pry. He liked keeping his art secret sometimes; it felt more important when he unveiled it. I nodded and told him I was excited to see it all when it was done, and then came into the bathroom with him and started my own morning routines. While I decided to shave, Gerard did not, and began to pack the rest of his stuff as I let the razor go over my neck where his lips had been before we departed from one another.

It was also going to be easier with him at Vivian's overnight, I thought to myself. Since our bed was still in the middle of the living room with no signs of changing, I didn't want Jasmine to feel uncomfortable when Gerard came back to sleep when she and I were still together. I wanted the two best people in my life to spend time together, and at the dinner they seemed to get along, but it was probably best if this night it was just Jasmine and myself. She had been somewhat on edge and resistant to the idea of dinner with the two of us before the hard copy assignment gave it more validity. We needed to catch up, and if we needed to use work as a guise for the time being, I was okay with that, and I knew it would be a lot easier to keep this going when a third party was not involved.

I didn't want to admit it to myself fully, but I also just wanted to see Jasmine. Alone. I didn't know what that would entail exactly, and I forbid my mind from wandering. Maybe we would just eat dinner, talk about work, and that would be it. We would go back to being good, but somewhat distant, friends. I was really fine with that. I just needed her in my life and I wanted to be a part of hers again. The amount of change that she had gone through while I was in Paris had alarmed me, especially when I had perceived her as stable for the entire seven years before then. I didn't want to miss anything ever again.

We had set our meeting time to seven, and after Gerard was gone for the day, the hours seemed to stretch on. When she did show up, she was late.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she apologized profusely as she stepped inside. She was carrying a large bag of groceries for dinner, since she wasn't fully convinced that we would have enough vegan supplies to cook with. She had assured me on the phone that she would take care of them, but realizing that grocery shopping on top of her work day was probably what made her late, I felt bad for not offering to at least meet her at the store. I took the bags from her when she got inside, so she could have her arms free to remove her jacket.

"It was the last day at the magazine, and I should have known everything would go crazy. The woman that I'm replacing, Meredith, she thought she was going into labour so she went to the hospital, and then I had to finish up her paperwork, but then she came back because it was a false labour, and then I discovered I did the paperwork wrong. And things went on from there, so that I couldn't even get to the store before the busiest time of the day, and they were missing garlic. So we don't have that for tonight." She talked in a flurry of words, taking off her jacket, hanging it up, and then walking into the kitchen. I followed with the supplies and was about to tell her that no garlic was completely fine, when she kept talking and cutting me off. She kept over explaining things and finding excuses, and I wanted her to stop. None of it mattered, really, in the end. I was just glad she was here and that I could stop smoking on the balcony and reading the same Rimbaud poem over and over.

"It was intense. I've never really been around pregnancy before, at least, pregnancy in that stage and she was so convinced that she was going to have the baby in the hallway. No one else seemed to care, and though I had no idea what I was doing, I kept trying to comfort her and offered to take her to the hospital. Everything worked out, I mean, but it threw me - so even when I was shopping for groceries, I kept pausing at the baby food aisle. It's weird - this store kept its baby cereal and food stuff next to the vegan or organic products. I got distracted, even though I was late, and should have done this on my lunch. After Meredith went into false labour and left I was going to send you an email to warn you, but then I realized you didn't even have email. And then..."

I touched her shoulders. I was gentle, so as not to make her jump up or become startled. She seemed surprised by my hands on her, but she sunk into them and stopped talking. She breathed a bit, and I noticed the small chain on her neck, buried under layers of clothing, shimmer in the kitchen light. I fought an impulse to kiss that clasp and instead whispered, "Shhh. It's okay. Don't even worry about giving me the reason why. You're here now, and probably hungry. Let's just start cooking."

She looked at me meekly to gauge whether I was mad or not. Seeing the sympathy in my face, she nodded and took a deep breath. I gave her a hug, but she was still somewhat paralyzed with her relief. Her arms were over her chest, and she didn't hug back, but she seemed to find some type of comfort in the embrace. She leaned her head against my neck eventually, but only tentatively grabbed my waist with her hands when she unlocked them. Her stress was coming away slowly, but it would take some time.

"Thanks, Frank," she said quickly. She breathed a sigh and then broke up the embrace amicably and headed towards her bag. She pulled out a cookbook and grinned as if it was something more. "I am quite hungry and I have a really good recipe to try."

Once the topic was placed on food, the attitude in the room shifted, and we were given a focal point other than one another to direct our energies towards. We were going to be making Pad Thai; it was a dish that I had only in restaurants and knowing as little as I did about cooking, I was somewhat sceptical of my own abilities to master. The Lost Bread that I had made for Gerard and myself several times now was something completely different. I had seen my parents making that since I was young and knew almost instinctively how to produce it myself. It was the same with a lot of the dinners that my mom had usually made for me when I was younger and all throughout my teenage years. I knew how to make meat and potatoes, pasta and sauce; that was simple and second nature. But most of what I knew was not vegan, and going outside my own comfort area was nothing to do with taste, and a matter of skill. Jasmine insisted that cooking was no big deal, especially when you had an instruction manual. She cracked open the book on our kitchen table, and pointed to the recipe we would be doing.

"Is this an all-vegan cook book?" I asked her as we set off to work. I had been telling her before about all the cook books in Vivian's house, and yet, her inability to use them. I had been trying to make subtle analogies to myself with how I knew to cook these foods, without any books, but my fear of failure with our new endeavour remained well-hidden. I wondered if Jasmine herself was starting up her own collection or borrowing from Vivian, as well.

"Yes, this is all vegan. It was written by this really awesome author who hosts a punk-kitchen cooking show. Isa Chandra Moskowitz. She talks all the time about living in the Bronx and hosting anarchist feminist potlucks. It seems so ideal and inspirational."

Jasmine was completely head over heels for this new lifestyle, and though I still didn't quite get it, her excitement was evident and I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to ask more questions about what she did eat now and why exactly milk was so bad for the cows, but I held my tongue. I was sure she didn't want to give me a lecture on veganism. She just wanted to talk about punk music and collectives, women's studies, and Brooklyn Pad Thai. So I let her, and I tried to keep an open mind and put my own worries aside.

A few times I found myself thinking, 'man, I could never give up cream in my coffee, or pastries' or anything that I had eaten in Paris. Although Gerard and I avoided meat for the most part while we were there (because it was expensive and we had no money), we gorged ourselves on all the delicacies we could find. A lot of those products had cream, white sugar (which apparently wasn't vegan), butter, and cheese in them. There was also hidden dairy in everything, I was learning, even if it wasn't as blatant as the food we had been eating while we were away. Paris would not have been the same without those things, I was convinced, and I don't know how Jasmine did it. If she ever went to Paris, it felt like she would have been missing out on half of the experience.

"You know, French bread is vegan," she piped up, seeming to read my mind.

I smiled, "Really?"

"Yeah. I figured you guys would have some here so I didn't bother to buy any and it would probably make you feel more at home in this meal. Grab some out when we're about to eat and it can be a nice garnish accompaniment."

I nodded with excitement and went to the cupboard to retrieve it before I returned to the chopping I was doing. She was right; it did make me feel more at ease in what we were doing. I was willing to try new things, but the whole lifestyle was still jarring. I could feel that Jasmine and I were not connecting on a lot of things or on the same level as we used to. When we had all been eating chicken the first night back, she had been okay and didn't make any comments, but that was when the meat eaters had been in the majority. Now that it was the two of us, and we were cooking a vegan meal, I began to wonder how our opinions were affecting the atmosphere between us. Did she think I was wrong? And if she did, how would this change the dynamic between us? Since a lot of stuff we were doing as a group now had to do with food, I couldn't imagine how she felt on a regular basis, being on the peripheries. Would there be a time where we would eventually push her away to the edge completely? I didn't want that to happen, and it seemed even worse than failing this meal or being thought of as wrong. Jasmine was a part of this group and even if I couldn't get my own head around this whole ideology, I wanted her to stay. I needed her to.

"What else is vegan that's kind of surprising?" I offered so I could hopefully find more foods that would be a nice equalizer between us.

"Animal crackers." She laughed. "Isn't the irony amazing?"

I nodded and she listed me a few more common foods: Oreos, some other brands of bread, and of course, peanut butter. "I live off peanut butter and jelly sandwiches now. It's the easiest thing to make and I've been living off them since I've been working so much. I feel like I'm at camp again."

I nodded, and laughed at her camp remark politely, but I didn't get what she was saying. Wouldn't it be so much easier to just eat other things to get variety and a quick meal? Wasn't this just isolating her so much more? I held my tongue, though, and I encouraged her to tell me more about her new life.

After we finished all the chopping and threw it into the pot, she set the table and we began to discuss the magazine. She got out the piece of paper from her bag and explained to me what each person was like and who was more willing and most likely to take on a partner for their work.

"Keep in mind the deadline is just at the beginning of January, and things are getting slow now for people between the break for Christmas and New Years. If you can't contact anyone, look at their stories and see if you already have something that could fit. Submit something, even if you get the brush off. We never know sometimes what we could use."

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14