Sunflowers (Tournesols) II 16 страница

I remembered what Jasmine had told me before she left and what she had said about moving out of the bedroom in Alexa's house before all of that celebration happened. Did that mean she was also alone for Christmas? What was Jasmine doing? I highly doubted that she would go back home to her mother and step father. They had moved recently and were nearly a three hour drive away now. But maybe she was just as sentimental as I apparently was and wanted to at least pretend to be happy on this day and find reasons to fight for something.

I suddenly wanted to call her. Having a minor separation from Gerard made that strong feeling in the pit of my stomach return. I wanted to be around her again and I felt her ghostly hands on me, as if they had never left from the morning before. I longed for her phone number, but I had no idea where she was living now. For awhile, I considered calling Mikey and Alexa to ask, and even got the phone book out, but I decided against it. I couldn't call on Christmas. It would be too weird, especially since I would probably hear the kids in the background and begin to miss my own childhood. I called the magazine once, twice, and hung up after I the seventh ring. If someone was there, surely she would pick up and wonder about the call. The answering machine wasn't on, either.

I stood over the phone book for awhile, studying it as if it was a huge bible and thinking deeply. I realized how much I missed my childhood then. It was something that I had taken for granted, the idea of holidays and celebration. It was always taken care of by other people, organized around me, and usually, centred on me. I was the only child in my family, and of course, in spite of age, always the baby. All of my extended family was older than me, by at least five years, so there was always a gap and I was always the young one. Now that I was no longer that person, I began to feel lost amidst this day that had so much meaning. To recreate Christmas myself meant not only that I was reconstructing possible negative emotions, but that I was no longer a child. Christmas was something very child-centered, full of mystery, fun, and make-believe. It wasn't an adult holiday, and I resented that deeply. I somehow wanted to believe in the impossible again, but I was finding no good reason to, given capitalism and emotional manipulations, and that was disturbing me the most.

I put the phone book away with a sigh, but I still didn't move away from the phone. I knew I should be calling my parents. I hadn't talked to them since I got back from Paris, and I had barely given them warning that I had gone. I didn't send them any mail at all - and would they be expecting mail at a time like this? I knew that expectations lead people to feel strong disappointment or guilt like I was experiencing, but I was also beginning to understand the other side of expectation. Having expectations about someone meant you could count on them. If my parents expected me to be there or at least send word for Christmas, it was a confirmation of my own importance and existence. Having an expectation of me, as much as it was manipulative and ridiculous, was also a mark of a relationship with two willing parities. My parents wanted me because I was their son, and I wanted to be there because they were my parents.

I was in an in between state then, and I didn't know if I should call and say hi, or stay in my own little isolation with Gerard. I kept telling myself that this was all manipulation, but, then again, weren't all relationships, good or bad, full of expectations and manipulation? I thought of Gerard and I. He had his own expectations for Christmas, and though he thought they only had to do with himself, they reflected against everyone he came in contact with and everyone he loved. This included myself and what I had envisioned for us during this holiday. Because he wanted to do art by himself, I was by myself unsure of what to do. His expectation suddenly did not include me, and I felt out in the cold.

It's only for one day, I told myself. It's not a big deal. And yet.... I stood by the phone and dialled my parents' number. It rang once, twice, and I nearly hung up when I heard my father answer.

"Hello?" his husky voice cut through. He coughed; it sounded like he had a cold and I jumped hearing his lungs rattle. I felt like a teenager again and his voice cut through me. He repeated, more insistently: "Hello?"

I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. Eventually, we both gave up on the call and hung up.

It's only one day, I told myself, and went back to my book and window seat. It's only one day.

But Gerard's intense focus on his art became spread out for more than one day. It seemed to keep going and going. I would often wake up last and unable to kiss him, since he was already up, coffee made, and breakfast eaten, completely consumed by his work. While he was dedicated to his art, I ran up against creative resistance. I just didn't feel inspired or want to create. I spent my days curled up on the couch reading or looking out the window, going for walks by myself, and spending a lot of time thinking. I was partly bracing myself for the real world that I knew I would have to enter sooner or later when I needed to get a job, and there were no more excuses of the holidays. Vivian's chastising kept coming into my head, but I blocked it out with French literature and art history books. I became obsessed with the renaissance period and the paintings about saints. During one afternoon haze, I found Saint Thomas and Saint Bernard, and I read obsessively about each of them, hoping that one day we could aspire to such veneration.

"It's funny the affect that art has on people," Gerard commented, looking over my shoulder at what I was reading. He kissed my neck chastely and rubbed his hands on my sides. He had spooked me a bit; I had finally become so absorbed in something other than my surroundings, and even then, he still managed to break through.

"How so?" I asked, eager to have this conversation with him. This was our longest exchange since Christmas, and I was already determined to keep it going.

"Well, there is no God, quite simply. I don't think there can be with all the shit that goes on in the world. But paintings like this, art this beautiful, and stories this complex and deep..." he paused, bit his lip. "It certainly makes me believe in something. Whether you want to call it God, or a soul, or just the universe, there is something that I can't express when I look at these paintings. I don't think these people ever existed, or at least, not in the capacity that they are being represented. But I believe in them as they are presented. Somehow. I know that doesn't exactly make sense, holding two viewpoints like that at the same time."

"No, it makes perfect sense," I agreed. It really did though, and his scattered thoughts helped me to articulate the dilemma I had had with Christmas and the antagonism I had felt over the past few days. All religious connotations to things never did make sense to me, and I would feel very uncomfortable with the idea of god especially within the context of organized religion. But I had been captivated by these paintings. I felt this awe, this sense of wonder, which was beyond articulation. They made so much sense to me and like Gerard, I wanted to believe.

"It's called cognitive dissonance, the ability to hold two different viewpoints at the same time that conflict. It's why, I think, most artists end up feeling a little mad," he stated quite seriously. "Holding two ideas at the same time is tiring. The feeling that there is no God and everything is futile and we're all just waiting to die, but at the same time, knowing so deeply that there is so much purpose and reason to life, and so much beauty there."

"That's what passion is," I suggested. "Right?"

"You're more than right, actually. I'm so pleased you made that connection." He smiled, proud that either something he had said awhile ago resonated and I remembered, or that I was finally making connections on my own. "You know there is a dual meaning to the word passion. And it's heavily rooted in religion."

"Really?" I had a hard time believing it. Gerard was the person who had taught me all I had ever known about passion and how it was integral to life and art. He didn't believe in God, didn't want to give up his freedom to a higher being that may or may not have been there, in spite of his feelings around these paintings. And yet, passion was from religion? It didn't make sense.

"The passion of Christ, no less. The word has such a strong religious connotation it's so hard to avoid, and yet, most people who use it now don't realize it. Most people think of its bodily meaning, the passion between lovers. For some people, that's all that keeps them going," he winked at me and nudged me a bit. He was becoming dynamic, being a teacher again and I was eating it up, eager after days of feeling ignored. "But there is a far more - dare I say it - heavenly side to passion. It's heavenly in the idea of removal from the bodily focus and on a more enlightened purpose. But this type of feeling also causes pain. Passion is the root of all pain. If you love something, even if it is the bodily love of passion that people evoke, you also suffer for it as well. You have to be willing to feel that suffering and that pleasure - that's what makes it passion. That's what made it worth dying for."

I didn't know much about religious history, let alone art history outside of what I had read that morning. It was making sense to me, however. I had certainly suffered for art, but known that I loved it with all my heart at the same time. All of my heart - that seemed to be the key to this analogy. I loved Gerard with all of me, and that had been why I was willing to suffer those years apart.

"I guess you could say that art in itself is a kind of religion?" I questioned. It certainly felt like the last few days what I was doing was akin to worship.

"Yes, I suppose. Art is certainly a passion, but religion has rules, restrictions, and dogma. It's always made me uncomfortable. We're really all just putting symbols and pictures together that somehow make sense. We all organize things inside our mind in a different way. Sometimes it comes out as religion, and that's the most popular paradigm, but not for me. It's too deterministic. Like time is."

Now I was confused and no longer following him. "I thought time had to be deterministic. I mean, it's linear, right? It was 9am, then it will be 10am, and then 11am. How can we change that?"

"Time is deterministic in that sense, but there is also memory." Gerard said this with a smile, trying to evoke his love of Proust again. "Memory follows no set pattern and comes without warning. It can interrupt that flow from A to B to C. Also, if we give into the linearity of time, then that leaves us with no choice. And choice is paramount to freedom. Memory helps us to become free, to allow for variations, even within a world that is held at the crux of time."

I considered this. I thought of how I spent that entire Christmas day, wading in and out of my memories and I thought of Proust and his seven volumes of smell evoked memories. All of this was certainly beautiful and capable of eliminating the fixed nature of the linear model and allowing for some freedom. But I thought of Jasmine, too, who often had her memories get the better of her. She seemed to have no choice in terms of her night terrors and how her flashbacks came and went. It wasn't freeing, really, but it certainly did allow for the linearity of time to become smashed open.

"I once read somewhere," Gerard went on, "that it's not time that keeps clocks, it's clocks that keep time. When a clock breaks, what happens to time? It exposes the construction of it. It is the same with dates and calendars. Why does it matter that it's Monday or Saturday? Shouldn't we be doing what we need to do regardless of the date?"

I considered this as well - but of course, I instantly thought of Christmas. I knew there was such an overwhelming futility in that date, and though we had long since passed it (at least it felt that way, but how was I to really know?), I still kept it in my mind. I wanted to celebrate Christmas, but Christmas as an act, not a date. I wondered if Gerard would understand that. He was diving into art history again, pulling out Dali's works in the abyss of his memory, and constructing his own time through the use of Soft Watch At The Moment of First Explosion and The Persistence of Memory as he poured over his sketchbook again.

"I get Dali. I get art, but, sometimes, I mean, we don't live in a painting..." I cut him off, trying to speak slowly and explain myself. He seemed to be done with his tirade on religion and time, for the most part, and his demeanour was calm. He kept sketching as I talked for a little while, but when I suggested that we "I don't know, celebrate in some way, because I want to be together with you because I've waited so long for this to happen, and that time I spent waiting is not a construct, it is a fact, because I feel it like passion..." he turned around. His face was softer than it had been before. He had been exuding this confidence ever since Vivian had given him a bunch of art supplies to keep himself amused. He felt amazing, in his zone, and doing what he needed to. He was lost in his memories, his past glory, his imagined fame. And he had quite simply forgotten about me, and that I needed attention too. As I tried to explain myself, I kept second guessing, thinking I was missing the complete point in terms of freedom, choice, and how we were supposed to deal with time within a deterministic system. Had I really waited a long time for him, or was it just a blink, and was my mind making it longer than it needed to be, and I was making my world more ugly than it needed to be? Or was this really passion that I did feel for him, and it was as if I was being pulled apart and hung out to dry? I waited for my veneration, my time coming as a saint, but even that seemed pointless and like a fallacy.

Gerard slid his arm around my waist and pulled me closer to him. "Seven years is a long time, Frank. Don't ever doubt that. But I think..." he started and then stopped, his emotion overwhelming him. "I think I used to try and trick myself that it was no time at all. I didn't want to own a clock or a calendar because then I would realize how much I missed you and how long we were gone from one another. I think of Dali and Marx because it's shifting blame and abstracting the real. I didn't want to celebrate Christmas because there was no one to celebrate it with ."

I didn't want to, but I started to cry. I had my hands on his back and I moved them quickly so I could brush away my tears and pretend it wasn't happening. But I felt a small wetness through the fabric of my shirt, and I knew he had been crying too. Not much, but there was something there. We were both so caught up in our own time, and our memories overwhelmed us.

"Oh god, nostalgia is the death of creativity. You live in the past instead of creating something new," he told me, wiping his own tears away quickly. "I'm sorry, Frank, I really am. I should have been more sensitive. I should have realized that this holiday would have been different from all the ones before. I guess I got a little carried away...." he motioned to his canvases and sketches and I followed his gaze, trying to alleviate some of my own emotional burden. His art was really coming along, but they were all bits and pieces still. There was a large tree, a rock, a hand, a statue, and a boy, but one that wasn't me because he had blonde hair and was something that Gerard had probably seen in a book and was replicating. They were still just images being placed beside one another, nothing forming a picture yet. Gerard added, "And I got a little worried with Vivian as well. She has been on my case a lot."

"Mine too," I agreed, and he looked up at me with surprise. We were both facing one another now, though I was still standing and he was on his stool.

"Huh. Well, I think this really does go to show how often we've been spending time together. We didn't even know we were under the same stress." He motioned for me to come down to meet his eyes. He ran his hands through my hair and then kissed my nose, my lips, and over the tear line on my face. I did the same for him, tasting the saltiness, and trying to turn them back into time and make them not real anymore. It was rare we cried like this. I hated the assault on my masculinity, but was relieved when I saw him looking back at me with the same marks on his face.

"I'm sorry too," I confessed. "I should have been able to be by myself when you needed me to be."

He shrugged, and now wiped the final wetness with his thumb. "This is okay, Frank. We're still figuring it out. Even though I'm older, it doesn't mean I know better. Don't forget that."

I nodded. He was running his fingers through my hair, and it made chills go up and down my back. Our confessions and apologies felt as if a dam had burst between us. We had never wanted to admit so much error before, confess so much humanity. It was very strange, and now we were actually working out a bargain - dare I say compromise - between us so that we could both be happy. I felt myself worrying about complacency and all of the warnings that Jasmine and Vivian had bestowed upon us about coupledom. Were we doomed? Or were we just getting started at something more wonderful than they could even imagine?

"What did you have in mind for our celebrating?" Gerard asked. "I don't think we can get a tree..."

"Just you. Just us. That's really all the tradition I need."

"Fuck tradition," Gerard teased. "We will create our own."

Our Christmas was definitely not typical, but neither were we. Even in all the lamenting that I had done, it had never been the tree and the lights and the presents that I was missing. That was mostly pomp and pageantry for children, and we had none of our own. We just had our art and it existed as we existed. So that was what we did for our holiday season: we took pleasure in the joys of being alive.

After we had made up by Gerard's art corner, we began to kiss more and more heatedly and moved our new passion to the bed. He flopped down first and pulled me on top of him, but I soon took over and began to take off my clothing, followed by his, and worked my way down his body.

The first few times we had had sex, it had been at night or in the dark, and the few times after that, Gerard had exerted a more dominant role, or at least a more dominant position relative to where his body was against mine. He was never happy being completely passive, and it took me awhile to realize it was because of his aged body, now more so progressed than when I was seventeen. He never said this out loud, but the way that he never let me fully focus on his stomach or chest, and subtly turned my hands away from those areas let me clue into this a bit more. "It's okay, it's okay, I want to," I would tell him as I worked my way from his neck to his navel and I would feel his body turn away, but I was learning not to fight it with words and proclamations. Just because I said 'it's okay!' and 'I love you!' didn't mean that it would make him feel more comfortable. I tried to let him do what he felt more comfortable with, which was a huge switch for me. Usually he was trying to shelter me and now I was wondering if I was responding how he needed me to his new body.

The truth was that I still did find him beautiful. He was older, sure, and his chest hair was a different colour, his skin a different consistency (his sides were dry, and his stomach was riddled with stretch marks from weight loss), and his bones were more visible, but it didn't matter. There was something about the way he, as a person, inhabited that body that was attractive. That was the only way I could explain it, because no other men attracted me, while he still did. The way he acted inside himself, even now as he was trying to hide his imperfections and deal with his own age, was still attractive. He still kissed the same way, he still touched me the same way, and it was what we did together that somehow made everything work together. The way we communicated, sometimes verbally, but more often than not through the elusive language that the body has and the text that is read with hands only, was what made our masterpiece, our poem, our orchestra. Our passion.

This time, right after we had just exposed our vulnerably and broken down some of the shell of masculinity we both possessed, he let me go farther down. He let me look at his stomach, even though it was the middle of day and still bright outside. Everything was visible. He didn't try to turn or twist away; he didn't subtly turn or take my hands and direct me someplace else. He let me keep going, and my chest fluttered, realizing we were breaking down another section. I traced my fingers along his stretch marks, but not in a garish or comical way. I used my finger and then my tongue. I went under his new ribcage and as he arched his back, I grabbed his chest and sunk my body down lower, and lower, his hipbone at my ear and his body rocking me like a boat. He was hard, and I took him in my mouth to keep him going. I touched the underside of his sack and that piece of skin that drove us both crazy in between. I ran my hands up and down his thighs, and then I switched, so my hand was on his cock and my mouth on his thighs, finding and kissing the stretch marks there too. His legs were a lot bonier than they had been in the past, and I felt the hard outline of his calf against my back, as if urging me onwards. His erections, or lack thereof, were something else that I knew made him feel older than he was, but this too seemed to not be an issue right now. I ran my tongue along the underside of his cock, and touched my fingers to his entrance.

"Are you hard enough to enter me?" I asked him. It had been awhile - not since we had gotten back to Jersey - that he had done this. I wanted him, badly, and I wanted him in this way. I wanted to be the one completely vulnerable and submissive, to acquiesce any power that I had. I wanted to open myself up to him the way he just did to me. I was hard and aching between my legs, but I didn't focus on that. I kept my hand on him, keeping him hard, until he made a decision.

"Yes, I think so," he said, and then we were mute from there. I came back up over his body, holding myself above him as I kissed his face before we switched positions. I dropped down onto my stomach, my arms propping myself up a bit underneath me. He ran his fingers down my back and prepared me briefly as he got a condom on, and slid inside.

He knew to go slow, because it had been awhile with just fingers, and it still did hurt. I never really got used to it, but it was more like a balance. It had to hurt enough so I remembered to stay present, but not enough to want to stop. It really was a passion; the suffering and the ecstasy all in one.

Gerard moaned and groaned as well as he went inside, and he went slowly for himself too. He kept himself in this position for the longest time, both of us getting used to the changes inside us both. He developed a rhythm after a while, and pulled me closer to him. He lifted my pelvis up so it was higher, and my chest up too. He wanted to touch both my back and my chest, and his hands seemed to go everywhere as he carried on inside. I was never sure how he kept his balance. I was never sure of anything when I was in this state.

I was used to using my own hand as he was inside me, but most of the time, I didn't need it. It was unreal how little touching I would sometime need to do before I was done, or before something shocked through my system, and then started all over again. I remembered the first time that I gave Jasmine a multiple orgasm and how incredible it was to watch, let alone feel myself. This too, hitting the right spot inside a man, was also capable of that same quivering and exasperated breathing. I had no idea why more people didn't do this more often. All the time. I was completely unsure how people got anything done in life, because it seemed like once you knew how to do this, once you realized what you body was physically capable of doing, why bother doing anything else?

I came into my hand just before Gerard finished. He warned me with a few encouraging squeezes on the shoulder that he was going to come out, and then when he did, I fell back down onto the mattress, not caring how messy it was. I turned over a bit, feeling a tad sore, but my body was too full of endorphins to care. When he came back from the bathroom, he got inside the covers too, and we folded our bodies together again. Eventually we fell asleep, and slept until late that evening.

When we woke up later, we did so together, and carried on as if no time had passed. We stayed in the bed and read together, exchanging a whispered sentence here and there. He put his arm around me at one point, and I used the crux of his body as a pillow. When it became too dark to continue reading in the streetlights, he got up and lit candles, not bothering to get dressed.

"Reminds me of Paris," I told him.

"Everything will for awhile. It will be hard to forget," he replied.

He began to tell me of one of the Christmases he spent alone in Paris, and about how he went to the lighting of the Eiffel Tower and lost the feeling in his hands. About how he strolled along and heard all the Christmas phrases spoken back to him in French, and ate some of the best food ever. I told him about the time when I was sixteen, and my parents had invited over an aunt I hadn't seen in years, and she told the most awesome stories about travelling across the country, and then she gave my parents and I a trip to Florida for the rest of the break. In this sharing of memories in bed, extrapolating and remembering, we began to construct our past, present, and future lives as quickly as we traded positions and placement of our tongues. We did not talk about the bad memories. I did not tell him about the Christmas where my dad, who was still drinking, fell into the Christmas tree and broke one of the presents for my mom. It had taken me years to realize that that had not merely been "clumsy dad" as I knew him. And Gerard, I was sure, kept his mouth shut about the bad memories he had had, about the time Mikey wasn't even there for Christmas because he had been sick with the flu and nearly died. Or about the year in Paris where he fell on the ice and felt as if he had broken his pelvis it had hurt so bad for so many days. We didn't talk about the guilt, the resentment, and the heartache of being alone. It didn't matter then, because that was over and never needed to happen again.

I got up at one point, telling Gerard I desperately needed a drink, and that's when I heard the weird cheering more distinctly. We had been in our own little bubble before, but now the noise from outside filtered inside and made a fissure. Cheering and clapping. I heading towards the balcony window, completely forgetting about my thirst, and Gerard got up and followed. We stood at the window, both naked, and looked out.

It was the New Year. So much time had now passed through and between us, and Christmas was long gone. Gerard squeezed my side and smiled at me, and I returned his affection. We didn't say anything. It was foolish, I knew, to wish a happy new year. It was calendars and clocks keeping that time. We had already started over again, with resolution and resolve, that didn't involve the standards nor complacency from before.

With another look and a nod, Gerard and I decided to paint until the morning.

"You should tell me about this rainbow you're creating," I told him, and he merely smiled. He invited me over to his art supplies and we began to remake our world with every single colour we owned.

January

Chapter One

I realized I could not avoid my parents for the rest of my life, especially if I did want to have a meaningful relationship with Gerard. They had been at the back of my mind ever since I had tried to call and then hung up the phone. Gerard had gotten sick for a few days, and anytime I heard his rattling cough I thought of my dad's not too distant one in my memory. They were not the same, or even similar people aside from age, but seeing their symptoms match up made me reconsider my actions for awhile. Although I was sure that I did want to see my parents, a part of me wondered how much of me was acting out of obligation and believing that I had to see them. Why couldn't I just let them think I was in Paris? It was a half-truth, at least, since the apartment felt that way some days. Gerard and I were in our little blackout together, appreciating art and one another, so much so that the real world barely penetrated. But as the days went on in the actual New Year, something would rupture our fantasy, and I wanted to be the one to insist upon change to give myself the element of control. As much as I despised this expectation that I felt foisted upon me, I knew it was there, and I knew I would have to answer it eventually.

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