Sunflowers (Tournesols) II 23 страница

"The French call it ennui," he said during the first few days of darkness. This was how I knew he knew I was sad, and that he still cared. He was giving me the means to name it, and once I named it, I could own it. I learned that from him. He was subtly reminding me of that fact, and his own struggles. "I think it's apt to use the French term to describe this feeling. It is the ennui of normal life, something too terrible to fathom - the fact that we're alive, even when we don't create something new. Even though I did create in Paris, most of that time seems like ennui to me. That's what happens when you live alone. When you lack the audience for your creations, they may as well have never existed. Ah, French... it is the perfect language for love, and for despair, too."

I looked over to him from the window. His mention of love, of Paris, had made me feel nostalgic, and when I met his eyes, I expected to be given those reasons to be happy again, but that was not what I saw. He was conveying something else to me; a loss, even if it was unnameable in that instant. Instead of telling me he loved me, which is where I thought his French language analogy was going, he instead said, "Je sais."

And that was it. He went back to work, and I tried to at least begin my own. I curled up in a blanket by the window, and I looked through those photography books he had given me. Most of them were specific books that dealt with iconic photographers that I had studied, albeit briefly, while I was in school. Ansel Adams was there, along with Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz and many people who seemed to like to photograph desert landscapes a lot. They had never interested me much in school (then again, nothing outside of my own work had interested me then), but I found myself fixating on their pages. The plain features of the winter landscape outside maybe reminded me of the works that they were producing, and it provided some sense of comfort. Stieglitz, in particular, had photos that captivated me more than the others. He had actually taken photos of winter and bad weather. "Winter - Fifth Avenue" and "The Terminal" seemed to cry out to me. The scenery wasn't as perfect as the desert landscapes that seemed to look like paintings with their sharp angles and intense focus that his contemporaries focused on. Ansel Adams looked too unreal to me a lot of the time, because of those things. But Stieglitz was capturing the bleakness of winter, the slush underneath a carriage, the ice melting, and the snow and steam in the air. Winter was never more artistic - and feasible to live through - once I stumbled on his photos. Gerard had told me that winter had been beautiful in Paris, like a black and white photograph, but it took me actually seeing Stieglitz's work to really comprehend what that meant.

There was also one book that focused on the top thirty most iconic photographs ever taken. In spite of claiming to know all the best things in this world, the book was very thin. This whole scenario seemed ridiculous to me, and gaining confidence as I went through the day, I voiced this to Gerard. With a smile, he concurred. I went on to tell him about Stieglitz and what I thought he had done for photography, and how he was one of the best, when Gerard's coy smile caught me out of the corner of my eye.

"What?" I asked him. I drew my knees up to my chest, holding the thin book close to me.

"You're doing what that book did," Gerard said. "You're claiming to know what's best when you haven't seen everything yet."

I considered this. "I'm just telling you what I liked."

"So is that book. And I'm sure, if you go through its pages, you'll find Stieglitz in there too. Maybe not your favourites, but he will be there."

"How do you know so much about this stuff?"

"You mean in addition to painting?" He probed, and I nodded. "Well, my dear, you are forgetting that I am much older than you. In my own ennui, I've read a lot of books. It happens. I know."

He seemed sad then, as if this immense amount of knowledge about an area that wasn't even his passion was a particularly bad thing. I still envied him, the way he embodied and carried knowledge around with him, as if he was a book himself.

"I sometimes don't think there's enough time to read them all," I answered, lamenting my own abilities.

"There isn't. There is never enough time to do all the things you want."

I sighed and looked down at the book I held in my hands. These were the top thirty photographs that were apparently worth remembering, I reiterated bitterly. "Books like that," he went on, "are ways of reaching past our own limitations. In case you don't have enough time to look at all the photographers and photographs, all the good art in the world, well, here are some good ones that you should know. It's a helpful cheat sheet."

"But what if you miss something good?" I asked, biting my lip. I wanted to asked, 'like us' but I held off. Where would our art be at the end of the day? I highly doubted it would be in any type of book like this - it was much too thin to contain our pages and pages. I didn't think we would be the top lists, and I knew that we would be lucky if we were a footnote. But even then, even in the smallest parts of the text, the parts that everyone ignores, maybe that would be enough. To prove we were here once, and that we had done something good.

Gerard seemed to understand what I was not saying. He had read enough books, met and loved enough people, perhaps, to know these things all too well. "You will always miss something good. Anytime you make a work like that, or even living through an entire day, you will always miss something good. Do you know why I wake up so early?" He paused, and laughed a bit at himself, "Or at least why I used to?" I shook my head. "I would be surrounded with ideas, potential, and ways in which I could live my day. I used to think that the earlier I got up, the more I could do. But time is finite in a lot of ways. I was always going to get tired again, sometimes more than usual. Especially now." He sighed, touching his knees tenderly. "You will always miss something good. Always. But that doesn't mean that what you have now isn't good, that you never have that ability again. We'll wake up again and try again, and that same person will probably put out another book, a sequel to those thirty photographers, correcting and adding what they have now discovered. That's what sequels are for," he smiled again, knowing more than he let on.

I nodded, absorbing what he said. I looked at the clock in the kitchen, realized that our day was almost over, and felt myself swallow hard with guilt. Had I wasted this day? I looked through the books I had already read, and the pile that I still had to get through. If I was going to always miss something, it seemed foolish to waste my time with a book that was only going to change within the next year. I was about to put the thirty most iconic photographs to the side, when Gerard spoke again, more impersonal, back into teaching mode.

"As for your own photography, books like that can be quite useful. You may miss some beautiful things, but whether or not you want to be famous or make a living at this, it's good to know what is claimed to be famous or good. Keep in mind everything is subjective, though. Don't try to mimic because you think it'll get you money."

I nodded. Money seemed to be another one of those things we were always going to miss at the end of the day. Gerard went back to his work then, and I took his advice to heart and tried to be as sceptical as I could as I looked over these prints. I knew I couldn't really compete with them, anyway, nor could I mimic Stieglitz and produce my own lamentations of winter. Gerard had been wrong, though. Alfred Stieglitz, and his beautiful shots of winter and his wife, were not in this collection. He had been missed at the end of the day.

The photographer that I came close to liking in this book was Dorothea Lange. She took portraits of people during the 1930s depression era. My ability with history was severely compromised, but I knew enough about the subject to follow along. Capturing poverty struck a chord with me, and I admired her ability to stare something like this in the face and be able to deal with it. But then I caught myself wondering what happened behind the camera. Did she offer these starving people food and shelter, or did she exploit them for her career? I didn't help Fred, and I still felt guilty for that. But was there anything I could have done? Probably not, but at least I hadn't taken his photo, and furthered his pain by exposing it to more people. But even with this thought I was stuck between two realities: exploiting him for art or for really telling the truth about the people who needed Food Not Bombs. It wasn't just a group of faux anarchist punks; it was filled with people who just needed free food. I considered this deeply, for an entire day, and vowed that if I ever went again, I would take photos, no matter what. I needed to tell people how fucked up the world was, because, like Jasmine had said, it seemed to be staring me in the face now.

The sun had set by the time I reached the end of that piece. I wanted to call it a day after that, but I pressed on, and without that initiative I would have not found the collected works of Robert Mapplethorpe. It was beautiful, and it was the first time I had seen myself in photos. I felt so obscured and completely alienated with a lot of the work I had seen that day or that I had done myself recently. I was behind the camera, but I was never venerated as a person. My lifestyle was never venerated; it seemed that I was doomed to capture the lives of others and not actually live one myself. But in Robert's work I saw myself. I saw my arms, and nose, and legs, and all the parts of my body represented. I saw Gerard too, and I could even see us together in some of the photos. I used his book as a mirror and anytime I felt overwhelmed, I would view myself against these glossy prints, and try to remember my own name, my body, and my mind again.

Robert mostly took photos of gay men. They were erotic photos and nudity was a major component. There were men in embraces with one another, or simply standing naked in front of the camera. I had been so used to seeing female nudes or heterosexual unions. Robert was gay himself, and had clearly been fed up with the glaring omission of his own lifestyle in contemporary culture. He only knew one way to see himself in art - and that was to make them himself. Jasmine had expressed to me before that one of the reasons she liked Food Not Bombs and veganism was that whole do it yourself ethic; I thought it mostly applied to politics and affiliations, but I could see that same ethic in Robert's art. If no one was going to represent you, do it yourself. I saw it embedded into the skin of each model, stretched across their face, and woven into their arms. I passed over a photograph of two arms linked together in shadow, forming a heart. I knew that tension with light and dark, with reality and fantasy, so well. It was that in-between space where I lived my life. And although Robert's pictures were political in that sense, they were also just plain beautiful. They were beautiful in the way most politics or issues related to politics weren't. I was so sick of being angry at the world because of this lack of beauty. I wanted to create my own world instead, where I could feel at ease. And during the densest of depression and winter freezes, I tried to using Robert as inspiration.

"Gerard," I called out to him the next morning. I had been at the mirror, taking photos of myself using my camera. I was naked. It was the most awkward and most liberated I had felt in so long. Not since I was seventeen and had made myself completely vulnerable to the artist himself had I felt this tense knot in my stomach. I knew I wasn't going to be rejected by him this time around, and that the vulnerability I was professing then had nothing to do with the relationship I had with Gerard. Or maybe it had everything to do with him since he was the one who showed me what passion actually felt like. The passion and the suffering was evident in art, but I was sure there needed to be a third element of vulnerability, too, in order to make it worthwhile. What I was doing then was being vulnerable to the art world again, opening myself up to that. I was staring back at my own body in the mirror and making it into an actual piece of art. And I didn't want to do it alone anymore. "Are you busy?"

Gerard muttered something, but I couldn't hear him with the door closed. I took a step away from the mirror and slid the door open. I stood in the door frame naked, holding my camera in on hand, and asked Gerard to repeat himself. This time he looked over at me when he responded.

"It depends...." he repeated."But I think you have something else in mind, and it may be better than what I'm doing." He smiled and then slowly stood up and away from his stool and desk.

"I was wondering if we could take some pictures. I've been reading Robert Mapplethorpe," I told him, as if this explained everything.

Gerard nodded, and began to unbutton his shirt and take off his clothing. "I figured you would like that one."

"Yes," was all I said, and it turned out to be the last word spoken between us. We had lectured too much the day before, and now it was our chance to speak with our bodies, and make art with them.

As soon as Gerard was naked, I took a picture of him where he stood. I walked closer and with each step, I snapped a photograph. He moved out to the centre of the room a bit, to work with the lighting, and then laid down on the bed. I got on top of him and took a picture of him looking down. We both moved together, switching around our positions and even sometimes swapping the camera. He took photos of me on the bed, and worked around me from different angles. When our bodies met together more and more, our simple nudes began to turn into something stronger as we both became aroused. It made for an interesting shoot, although I knew that most of this would not even be able to be on display in an art gallery. I had read somewhere, probably around the time that I had the feminist exhibition with Jasmine that erect penises classified as pornography. I knew this law, like a line drawn in the sand, was completely ridiculous and arbitrary. Aside from the photographs by Robert, I had also read about his censorship battles. It was so stupid how easily something could be classified as pornography and because of that, deemed not worthy. I wasn't thinking about laws as I took these photos; I just wanted to capture how beautiful I thought Gerard and I were together and not miss anything by the end of this day. So what if we were having sex, or were hard, when the pictures were taken? Sex was not pornography. This was consensual, artistic, and completely relevant. I found words failing me as I tried to talk about it though, because so much of our language was tied up with viewing sex as a dirty act, as a pornographic one, and not a beautiful artistic act. That was why I hadn't been able to find pictures of myself before, a representation of the life I was living. It was conspired obscene by so many people, a danger, and seven years before now, a monstrosity and perversity. I wanted to take these pictures now as if to erase the perceptions people may have had about us before. To get an objective image of what our love actually looked like. There would be consent in these pictures, there would be caring and sympathy. There would be us, as we were then and as we were now. Together. It didn't matter the age difference, all we had were bodies that we liked, and we would lie down together with them.

I took photos until my film ran out, and when that happened, I knew it as a sign. I put the camera down and then focused on making art just for one another. We evoked the same feelings without an audience or without making a statement. I kissed my way down to his hardening cock, and began to kiss and tease it until it reached its full presence. I grabbed a condom and prepared myself to enter him.

As we continued to have sex, I began to understand why some people wanted to film themselves doing so. It was such a beautiful act and it made everything else horrible in the world disappear. I felt so happy - not just in the midst of pleasure - but happy. No ennui. Finally, no ennui. Our lives were not boring without creation, because finally our lives were that creation, that beautiful work of art by simply living and breathing -- together. I felt as if my life made sense and I was with the right person. I grabbed Gerard's hands and I kissed him on the mouth. I wanted to stay this way forever, and I wanted to film this when we could, so it would stay like this forever.

Our breathing was ragged and we were close to the ending. I held his chest and tried to stop moving inside him; I tried to stop time. I knew it was futile, but I tried to do it anyway. Gerard had to touch my hair and kiss me again, before I let time continue. It wasn't the end of the world, I told myself. We could do this again, and until then, I had the camera and the memories to mount on the wall, and show everyone who I was and how I didn't give a damn what they thought anymore.

I was in the darkroom with our prints when Vivian knocked on the door. I initially didn't even realize she had come into the apartment until I became aware of animated murmurings from the other side of the door. Gerard was usually deathly quiet when he worked, so the appearance of noise made it quite obvious that someone else was here. I stopped what I was doing, and since I was still in the middle of a sequence, I waited to open the door and merely listened as they went on in hushed tones.

"This is ridiculous. In Paris they give you nine months before you're evicted!"

"But you're not in Paris anymore, Gerard. How hard is this to comprehend? This is a serious thing right now."

My heart leapt into my throat. I had never heard Vivian this angry before. Even with Gerard, although he spoke with a rather lackadaisical attitude, I could still sense fear and disbelief in his voice. I only focused on their emotions. They were easier to process than my own at that moment. I couldn't let myself freak out too much because I was in the darkroom and there was no fucking around in here. I couldn't ruin the photographs that I had just worked so hard on capturing this morning. But I felt my chest tighten and I wondered if I was going to run out of breath in here. I stood close to the cracks of the door and breathed in and out what I could.

"So what do we do?" Gerard asked. "It's been too long since I've lived in the States. I have no idea what the next step is. Should I contact Dan Mullen and tell him there's been a mistake?"

"There's no Dan Mullen on the eviction notice. It's Stanley Cooper. So it's not even like they're related, though they could be in-laws, maybe?"

"Let me see that," Gerard asked and then I heard the rumbling of paper. My heart beat quicker and quicker, but I still shut down the section of my brain that could connect the dots. I knew that as soon as I really began to comprehend the situation, there would be no going back. "Oh fuck," Gerard uttered. "The entire building switched landlords. It's not independently owned anymore. Mullen and I used to be on good terms, and he was so relaxed about these things. Now it's a company that owns the building. When did this happen?"

I could hear Vivian's standard tsk tsk when she didn't know the answer herself, but didn't want to appear ignorant. There was more crumpling of paper as the eviction notice exchanged hands again. "I have no idea. All I know is that when I paid the rent for you guys when you were gone, I was paying Cooper. This either just happened or when Frank was staying here. Where is he?"

I leapt away from the door, not wanting to give myself away, and feeling as if I was being blamed for actions that I still didn't want to fully think about just then. Gerard came to my rescue, and I slunk back to the cracks of the door and tried to listen quietly.

"He's in the darkroom. Let him stay there. He's doing work and there's no need to upset him with this. We can figure this out, right? Can you help me out, you know, for another month? Just until my show, then I will give you all the proceeds."

I heard Vivian sigh. "No. You know I hate saying no to you, Gerard, and this may even be the first time in my whole life." She laughed, in spite of herself. It was strained, and so was Gerard's response. The tension in the room, now palpable to me, came in through the small cracks in the door. "I love you, Gerard, but I can't do that anymore. There's no guarantee and I have my own house to keep and a daughter that needs college money at some point in her life. I just... can't."

"I know, okay, I'm sorry Vivian, I really am. Thank you so much for all you've done," he apologized sincerely. There was a silence, and I could see through a small crack that he was furrowing his brow and his hands were on his temples. Vivian leaned in closer to him, probably feeling safer that her own part was relieved, but also guilty that she could not help. There was more paper crumpling. Gerard pursed his lips. "There's a fine for being late with the rent. The rent is also higher than I remember it being."

"That's inflation. This is what happens, especially when the companies switch over."

"I can't pay this," Gerard said. There was a strain in his voice. "I don't have much money, Vivian. Paris drained me. I have next to nothing now."

There was a squeaking of a chair, and Vivian sat down. She was proudly touching Gerard's arm sympathetically, calming him down and comforting him, while still launching into her critique in soft tones. "Did you not think about this before, Gerard? Did you not consider how to pay rent?"

"I thought... I thought the show would take care of it. I... don't know what I was thinking," he confessed honestly. "I lost track of time."
Vivian nodded, or at least, it seemed like she was. I was still at the door, refusing to come out although I probably could at that point. Most of the photos were done. I could slip out and not damage them now. But I didn't want to be in that room, especially since the tension had already flowed in. How much stronger would it be on the other side? I wasn't ready to hear that news and actually have to deal with it. I wasn't ready to see Gerard the way he sounded - broken down and old. No, no, this wasn't happening. This was not happening.

"Maybe Frank has money. He was paying the rent before, but then again, that was the old rate and he had a job, or at least something, funding him," Vivian suggested. "Is he as dry as you, Gerard? Did Paris clean him out as well?"

Gerard's body moved - probably a shrug. "We try not to talk about money. It makes us happier."

Vivian probably rolled her eyes at the comment, while it made me smile. "Well, I would suggest starting to speak about it soon. You either pay the rent now plus a fine, and then, since it's nearly the end of January, the rent for February as well, or you figure out something else."

I swallowed hard. What was something else? What did that mean? If we couldn't pay the rent and couldn't live in the apartment anymore, where the hell were we supposed to go?

"I don't know how to deal with this, Vivian. This is the oldest and the most naive I have felt in a long time."

"Real life is hard. You have to deal with it though, or it will deal with you."

I wanted to slam my fist on the door. Don't even try to give us maxims now, Vivian. Just fucking help us. I was surprised and shocked at the rage I felt so acutely then. I had been okay before, and I could even understand why she wasn't paying the rent for us. It would just be a never ending stream of charity that she could not support. But at the same time, I was so mad at her. How dare she make us move? How dare she only tell us now that the rent hadn't been paid and then deny helping us? How dare she not tell us they switched companies so Gerard couldn't even talk his way out of a deal with the old landlord? This was so fucked up, and I knew I was making it even more fucked up by blaming Vivian.

"Look," I heard her tell Gerard after there had been a long silence. There wasn't even the rustling of arms and clothing, of comfort touches and pity rubs. She was relinquishing her physical charity. "Even if you have to move out, even if you have no money at all right now, you're alive and that's awesome. You're in good health, and you have no other strains on your life right now. No children. You do have a show coming up and yeah, maybe you'll make a ton of money there and this will only be a minor set-back. And if you do have to move, your brother and I love you. So long as it's temporary, you can live with one of us."

I heard Gerard let out a sigh of relief and I did as well. It was louder than I expected into be and I wondered if either of them had heard me, or were aware of the fact that I was now listening to the conversation. It appeared not: there was more shifting of bodies and chairs and I imagined that the two friends were hugging again.

"Thanks Viv, thank you, seriously. I feel better now."

"Okay, good. I'm sorry I'm the bearer of bad news."

"Not at all. You'll be my saviour if the time comes," Gerard stated. From the way his voice inflected, I could tell that he thought this was truth -- which meant, I knew in the back of my mind, that Vivian would be our saviour. She must have known it too; she had known Gerard for so long and knew when his words were really shields put in place to hide his true feelings. He was scared, and he was turning to her. She seemed to pause for a bit before she said goodbye, as if the gravity of the situation and the future that it suggested also hit her.

"Call me when you know what you're doing, okay?" she asked, and the friends agreed, their fate together sealed.

And then Gerard was alone in the apartment, because I was still in hiding. I knew it couldn't last much longer, and I knew, hearing their conversation through the door, what was going to happen next. Although Gerard still thought he had one more option, that I was his last hope in paying the rent, I knew that wasn't a possibility and I let myself realize that. I didn't have enough money. I remembered how much the old rent was and even that I couldn't afford. That and the penalty for lateness was too much. There was no way. I didn't have a job or the prospect of one yet, and there was no way I could see money for sure down the road. At least Gerard had a show... I had the photos I took for fun, hung up in front of me. The vulnerability I believed I had captured took on a new precarious fate.

Every part of myself told me to get out of the fucking dark room and go hug Gerard, but I turned my back to the door and looked up at the photos hanging on the line. And I fucking cried because I would never have this again. I cried and sobbed and before I knew it, I had given away my spot hiding and my secret knowledge. Gerard was outside the darkroom door and speaking to me through the wall.

"It's okay, Frank, we will find someplace else to live. We'll find a house, maybe, or another apartment, or maybe our own private island. After I become famous with my art show, maybe I'll have enough money to go and buy us that island and we'll never have to worry about this shit ever again," Gerard's voice quaked. The words he hid behind were falling, and I couldn't take it anymore. I got out of the fucking darkroom and my own self-pitying misery. I got outside and we fell together into a hug that led us both to tears.

It felt so ridiculous, crying over this apartment, but it was sad. It was like a death. I had lived here during those seven years because it had reminded me about everything we had done together, all the art and love we had made. I looked at the walls and the murals that were there; my fucking handprint on his door. In an instant, due to our own oversight and our own poverty, we were losing one of the most important places in the world. We were all over the walls and our memories were etched into every single space. It was ours. It was us. But it couldn't belong to us anymore.

"Frank, it's okay, we still have each other," he told me, feeling the same despair of location that I was. "We will have Vivian and Cassandra now, and their house, and we can live like a family, and everything will be okay."

Although I was still sobbing and not sure about anything, I nodded into his shoulder. We went to the bed - the bed that we had just had sex on and taken pictures of that morning - and held each other for a while. When we stopped crying, we just lay down together, and let our bodies, still fully clothed, touch. We drank up the apartment with our eyes and waited until we couldn't take it anymore. We waited until we knew we would have to move and start to box up our lives. It seemed like forever and not long enough at the same time. We waited on the bed, and pretended it was our island, and for a little while, it was.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14