February - Giants 7 страница

"Well, it's someone else's job to lay that kind of thing out. But thank you - I did edit the whole production and I thought it looked pretty good, too." She smiled again, her eyes fighting the strain that her body was still putting her through. The music behind us was playing a little bit of a softer tune now; the piano dominant this section and the guitar had made an appearance. We both turned around and watched it for a little while, reorienting ourselves. The small rest and focusing back on her task at hand seemed to put Jasmine back in a better mood.

"How much do you know about Jazz?" she asked me, and I told her next to nothing. "Same with me until about two months ago and someone gave me a CD of Thelonious Monk for Christmas. He said it would make me relax more."

"Braden?" I asked, and she shook her head. I was about to ask what other men she had in her life when she quelled my jealousy. "Jason. Surprised, right? My brother who used to play football in high school actually has taste. He was right, too. It did relax me. I began to research it more and when we had no topic for this issue, I thought, why not? It made a lot of sense to me then."

I nodded and let her tell me some of her newfound knowledge. I asked if she knew who the people on the bathroom doors were and she giggled, saying it was actually quite clever. They were Billie Holiday and Dizzy Gillespie, two famous jazz performers, one of them male and the other one female. Instead of having the normal insignia for boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, or whatever other standard gender distinction was used for bathrooms, in this specific place we all became Dizzies and Billies. It gave the entire place another magical quality, she thought, and I agreed. It was a nice deviation from the normal every day signs that we saw. When people went out to a bar or a club, they wanted to enter into a place that was familiar and yet distinctly different. It wasn't home and it wasn't work - it was one of those lovely in-betweens, where things were unexpected. That was what jazz was about, Jasmine explained, and I felt my knowledge expand. This whole musical base was actually a paradigm and a new framework for us to construct our thoughts and our actions within. It was about improvisation; thinking on your toes in order to create something different and wonderful. But all of this did not happen in a vacuum - nothing did - it all had to have a context. Jasmine stressed this point, and referred back to those bathrooms. "In this space, we are not men or women. We are Dizzy or Billie, and we only understand what that means by being embedded within that context. Until you knew about them, you may not have been able to grasp where to go."

"I could have figured it out," I told her, not meaning to be antagonistic. "I could just open the door and go through."

"Yes, but that is through trial and error, or blind guesswork. Even if you did get it right, you are still missing part of the history. You do not know that Billie Holiday sung 'Strange Fruit' that has since gone on to inspire novels or that Dizzy Gillespie was known for his trumpet and his large cheeks when he played. More important, you miss the movement that they were a part of and that has influences this music now. You are missing part of the story. I am talking about the story of jazz now."

I nodded, and eager to hear this new story, I let her go on uninterrupted. I began to understand that she was moving on from the framework and telling me about the ground on which that framework was built. This type of music arose out of a strong history and culture, as all things did. The call and response type of song pattern that this music utilized was part of how slaves used to speak with one another. Forbidden to speak, they needed some way to communicate their longings and frustrations. The same types of songs were also known for containing ways to escape the plantations in their lyrics. They were spontaneously sung as well to mask the noise that the escaping person made.

"Jazz was a way of surviving and it still is. It's one of the reasons that it's still around and still going strong. You know something has to be good when it manages to evolve and change and still be there. It becomes more powerful, the more it adapts," she informed me.

"Is that why the next issue is called Evolution? Is it another adaptation of this theme?" I asked her, and she seemed pleased that I had noticed.

"Yes, actually. I didn't think I was done with this jazz ideology yet. I'm still not. There's still a lot I need to figure out personally and I guess evolution is a part of that. Someone wanted to call it Reproduction and I knew it wasn't that simple. Nothing ever is," she paused for a minute, reflecting on something. "Also, there have been a lot of atheist battles being fought on teaching Darwinian theories of evolution in school and not creationism. One of the writers wanted to focus on that."

She blinked slowly, and then covered her mouth as she coughed a bit. Her sudden divergence startled me. In spite of the spirit of survival that jazz had, the club seemed to take it out of her.

"Do you want a drink or something, Jasmine? I can get you a coffee..." I offered, then realizing my mistake. "Or tea?"

She apologized for her small outburst, but said she was fine. She dug through her bag and got out her metal water bottle. She still wanted to keep talking about jazz for a while, in spite of her raspy voice, so I let her go on. She was working something out as she spoke; I recognized the look in her eye. This was how she wrote essays sometimes, when she got really stuck. She would dictate the words into the air and then wait for them to reform. She once told me during her undergrad that she had read the theories of this one writer who said that poetry already existed. It was like fossils, and was there, waiting to be unearthed. The poet's job was to find where to dig and then assemble it for meaning. Sometimes people found better treasures than others; it was just how well they looked and then arranged and rearranged. Jasmine had liked the idea, but she had found it problematic in the same way I did: it left no room for personal choice or responsibility. How she usually resolved her dilemma was to just keep talking and talking and then eventually, her words would arrange themselves. She usually told me her essays before she wrote then. Anytime she didn't, she was convinced she did much worse.

I let her speak then, about jazz and improvisation, syncopation, and how some of this was similar to the slam poetry that was becoming a phenomenon, only they were using sudden words instead of bars of music. She told me about Andrea Gibson and Jared Paul, but then focused back on the foundation of all of this like Charlie Parker. These people, these sudden beats and slams, made it sound violent, but it was merely the surprise that was the focus. The surprise that life gave you sometimes and then discovering what you were supposed to do with it -- that was the focus. She looked over to the stage, and for awhile, we just watched these men play, their songs never-ending. Jasmine lamented on how since no one was recording what these men were doing, it would be lost forever.

"Maybe not," I told her. "Maybe once it's out there, it's like that poetry thing you told me. It's out there and it will dissipate and rearrange itself, and then, maybe you'll be able to write it down the way it happened. And I'll be able to take pictures of it the way it happened. Maybe those same pieces of the song will still remain, just in other forms."

She looked at me for a while after I had said all that, and in the dark, I couldn't quite see if she was confused or delighted. I wondered if I had butchered her original theory. "Did I get it right?" I asked. "I'm trying to remember something from our undergrad and sometimes those years blur together."

"No, no, it's fine," she stated sincerely. "You got it right, for sure, and it sounds even better than the original theory. I'm just surprised you remembered it. That you still think about things I said that long ago."

I was floored. I wanted to tell her that I still thought about everything, and that, like Gerard, I forgot nothing and preserved every little bit of myself. I did one better, I told her about how her note had reminded me of us playing like spies in high school. She laughed and smiled larger than I expected her to.

"I remember that!" she was surprised at herself. "Oh wow, that was so much fun! I swear we wrote notes to one another in college though, too, didn't we?"

"I guess we did, but nothing as epic as our gossip columns and secret plans for high school take-over those last two months," I replied. In college, the notes that we may have written to one another were just about the food we had eaten or the things that needed our attention. They were grocery lists, apartment maintenance, and phone messages. Boring stuff. Not stuff that leaked with emotion like our high school fantasies. Jasmine seemed to recall the difference, and she smiled with nostalgia.

"I'm still amazed you remember that."

"Don't you ever think about the past like that? Sometimes I can't help it. Gerard once told me about a book called Remembrance of Things Past where the entire seven series is all about what the main character remembered when they smelled something. I may not be able to write seven books about us, but I remember a lot. About you and Gerard and everyone, really..." I had talked longer than I intended to. Jasmine was staring at me with disbelief.

"Must never be lonely, having all of those people to keep you company, if only in your head," she said, but I was unsure how to place her tone. She went on: "I guess I don't think about the past that much, at least, not willingly. There were good things there, but... you know. I have a difficult relationship sometimes with it."

I nodded and leaned forward on my chair. She was sitting next to me on the other side of the square table, and we were both faced towards the music. I reached my hand out to her, but didn't touch her. If she wanted support, I was there. She kept talking, but acknowledged the presence of my sympathy with a nod.

"The future, though, is completely different. I suppose I spend too much time there. It helps to conquer the past and at least makes me feel more in control. But even that becomes overwhelming after a fashion. I thought three issues ahead in the magazine, and then, someone's decided to completely do things against my original intention. It's frustrating. I really wanted to talk about the redwood tree and did the foolish thing of mentioning it at the last staff meeting. Now someone has sent around their story idea about deforestation for the Evolution issue. It annoys me."

"So? Why can't you do your story as well?"

"Really, Frank? Having two stories about trees? The magazine would really be grasping at straws then," she laughed, but it was a little bitter.

"So tell me, instead," I insisted. "Why did you want to talk about the redwood tree?"

She scrunched up her face and then shook her head. "It's not even important anymore. I just used to really admire them. They were so huge and vast; the biggest trees ever, you know. Giants. I used to love them so much when I was little. They would not move, they could not be moved, and if you were to see one on the inside, they were so full of rings. They seemed to hold the world in place and you could count up the history inside of them."

"And that's not important anymore? I think it's pretty cool. I don't know that much about trees or biology, though..."

Jasmine shrugged. "I can't believe we're having a conversation about trees. Have we really gotten that boring?" She stood up suddenly and straightened out her top. I was about to tell her that I didn't think we were being boring at all, that we were more so talking about the solidarity of the tree, it's stubbornness to move. It was the idea of the tree, like the idea of jazz before. Didn't people live in trees like that? It was a life source; it was power. I got that. But she wanted to move on: "How about you start taking some pictures and I'll start jotting down my ideas for the story a little more. Sound good?"

I nodded. I took out my camera and tried to see what I could collect. I anticipated that the light in the place wouldn't be the best, but I tried to make do and use what little was there to my advantage. I took several pictures of the people playing from the back and the side, as Jasmine walked around and made sure it was still okay to be doing so. She had emailed a week in advance, but people forgot these things. After showing the manager her ID, she was set. I took pictures of the musicians, the bar tender, and the backs of the patrons. I was careful to not catch a face in the crowd. I wanted to give them an anonymity that went with the music scene, and I also knew that legally, as Jasmine told me, we'd have to inform them if we got their face. I also took pictures of the bathroom doors because I wanted to capture that sense of changing contexts and being embedded within a history. Aside from being quite humorous, these doors were the best evidence I could think of for creating this third, in-between space. After my round of photos there, I turned back to Jasmine at the table and held up my camera to take a photo of her.

"No, no, not right now," she said, waving her hand in front of her face. "Not inside. Maybe one outside of the bar and then I can stand underneath the sign? It may make a good letter to the editor photo, even though I hate being so vain."

I agreed to that, and then told her that if she didn't want to keep putting her face there, maybe Gerard could do her a self-portrait. "He painted his jacket for the artist info section. It was fun and screwed with a lot of people's heads."

"Of course. Your art show!" Jasmine stated. She ran her hands through her hair, shocked that she had forgotten about it. As her hands came back around her neck, she grabbed the base of her necklace and twisted the empty front between her fingers. Her small nervous habits now replaced the minor nausea she had had before. I tried to assure her that it was okay she hadn't mentioned it until now, because we had been quite busy, but she shrugged me off.

"Yeah, busy listening to me go on and on about jazz for the last hour! Thank you, Frank, for dealing with me there. It meant a lot," she stated sincerely. She moved on just as fast, and dropped her necklace as she did. "So. How was the show? Tell me all about it. I didn't get a chance to go out and see it."

We sat down for a while longer, and I recapped her on all that was going on. I got another coffee and Jasmine filled up her water bottle and I brought her up to speed. She listened intently and seemed really thrilled. She asked me about my job and it was my turn to brush away remarks. "Not the best place. Not nearly as creative as here."

"You should make it creative. Do you think they would let you take photographs? Maybe I could use them in the new issue. We've already done something on medicine, but drug stores are part of the ways of evolution. It's one of the ways we keep ourselves going."

I told her I would think about it. It didn't exactly sound too thrilling for me, but I appreciated the effort. We sat and listened to the music a little longer, our conversations clearly running on empty now. The band was beginning to pack up their gear and the bar tender put on a recording of jazz instead. It seemed to defeat the whole purpose of improvisation, and I found myself tuning out the new piano cadences. It was getting late and Jasmine yawned a couple times before I asked if she wanted to get the final photo done outside. She froze for a second, her eyes widening, but she conceded that was probably a good idea. She got on her coat and I took her bag for her as we headed out. She shot me a glance when I took her bag for her, because she hated all forms of chivalry like that, but I insisted I would give it right back to her after the picture. My intention to hold it was purely for aesthetic purposes in the photo.

"See? As a trade-off, I won't hold the door for you," I teased and then ran out ahead of her and let it fall. She laughed and walked out slowly. We were playing like we did in college and we would try and take apart her Women's Studies readings. I didn't even mind the cold, so long as we could keep up this act. She moved to the side of the entrance, by the large glass windows and just below the sign that said Léger.

"I hate photos," she said, and then I clicked. Her hair had blown in her face when I had done the first one, and I asked her to stay still as I took another. She kept squirming, something else on the surface bothering her more than posing for a photo.

"Don't think about the past or future Jasmine," I told her. "It's late, yes, and you may have to work tomorrow, but right now we're just outside. Think of the present. That's what jazz is all about right?"

She stopped fidgeting and tried to smile. I took her photo and though I was pretty sure it came out okay, I asked her to take another. "This time, be spontaneous! Do whatever you want."

"Frank..." she started, her voice serious.”I should tell you something first."

"No, just forget it for now. We're here together. Right now. Think of all the poetry that already exists out in the world and try to grab some of it. Try to make something new, right now."

She still wasn't moving. I sighed. "Think of the redwood, then. Be strong and solid."

"And stubborn as fuck?" she joked, taking me by surprise. It seemed to be enough to knock her out of her funk. Instead of staying placidly where she was, she kicked a leg up in the air. Her coat and white shirt underneath splayed in the wind, and her hair seemed to fan out everywhere behind her. The light in the background, from the moon, bounced off her near-white hair and looked brilliant against the darkness.

"That was fantastic," I told her sincerely. "I can't wait to develop these."

She had walked over to me now, regaining her composure. I could tell she felt a little foolish losing herself like that, but there was a small pink smile forming on her lips.

"Thanks," she said.

"No problem."

We stared each other awhile, and then Jasmine began to walk. I followed and made my way up on the salted sidewalk next to her.

"That's one thing I like about you," she said suddenly. I made a noise encouraging her to go on. "You know what to do with sudden movements like that. How to adapt. You're the perfect example of jazz."

I laughed. "I wouldn't say I'm the best at dealing with things, especially without a warning."

"Most people are like that, though. No one likes change, but not everyone adapts from that change. Most people let it ruin their lives. I've known you long enough to know that you don't do that. You learn, you adapt, and you do so the best of anyone I know." She sighed, and shifted her gaze from me to the club doors. "I look at the musicians that came out of jazz and at any large group of people, really, and I'm amazed. They know how to organize themselves. Something is taken away and they can survive. Like trees growing in the pavement - they learn to twist their roots. Something happens, and they find another way to keep on going. That's why I don't like redwoods anymore. You can't move a redwood. It's a dead-end. I don't want to be a dead-end."

I nodded, though I found parts of her speech getting almost as convoluted as Gerard's. I gave her my support by putting my hand on the small of her back to show her I was there to listen.

"Is this helping with your story?" I asked. "Do you think you have something?"

"Oh yeah, I know jazz fairly well now and tonight gave me a lot to talk about."

She paused. There seemed to be something she wanted to tell me, or just say out loud, but she was struggling to find the words.

"Hey, are you okay? Do you want me to walk you home?" We were at the part of the road where I went one way and kept going to Vivian's and she went the other block to her apartment. It was getting cold and though I was warm and she had a jacket, I was worried about her. She had gotten dizzy and ill in the club, and I worried about her slipping on the ice in that state.

"No, it's okay Frank. I can get home by myself. But don't go just yet." She made eye contact, and then looked away. I had never seen her act this way before. I began to get really worried. The tissue tearing, the fiddling with her necklace; what was she so worried about? Was it something to do with her family? Was something going wrong at work? Was Braden being a jerk? Was she having flashbacks again? I needed to know, suddenly, and it was killing me. Jasmine was so unsure of herself in those few moments and I had never experienced that. I wanted her to be okay; I hugged her, trying to keep both of us warm, and told her it would be all right.

"I know it will," she said, her voice strong.

So why was she acting this way? "Well, what is it, then?"

And then it came out, sudden and expected, just like jazz: "I'm pregnant."

Chapter Five

Jasmine was right. She was going to be okay. Her voice was strong and lucid as she explained the entire situation to me and answered all of my - mostly ridiculous - questions. Her nervousness was not her own worry, but her extended concern for how I would take the news. With this knowledge (that I cursed myself for not having seen coming), my reality had changed. I was now into this mess as much as she was. Well, I was in this ordeal in a more abstracted, less tangible sense. There was nothing actually growing inside me but panic and fear. My worries were dwarfed by hers.

After she had told me what was going on, I nearly fell down into the snow. It was so sudden and unexpected, I half-thought she was lying. This was an experiment to see how I reacted; it was a joke; a research assignment and part of the magazine story for the Evolution issue. There was absolutely no way she could have been pregnant. She was on the pill. She had been on the pill since she was eighteen years old and could get her doctor to write her a prescription without her mother overseeing.

But she was not eighteen anymore. I should have known better than to just take things like that for granted. Six months ago, when I had left for Paris, she was still on the pill, but as she gradually began to shift her diet to veganism, she also shifted her ethics. She no longer wore wool or silk because of the animal or insect labour involved in their production. Lots of tacky Christmas and winter sweaters and some fancy scarves had been donated or re-gifted to other people since this conversion and her combat boots were traded in for ones made with pleather. She now read the labels of not only her groceries but her shirts, pants, and underwear. She also no longer used products that had been tested on animals or had done prior research on animals in their adaptation. She had changed shampoo, eyeliner, soap, and altogether eliminated the birth control pill since there was no animal-friendly alternative. She used veganism as the political voice to hide behind for this issue, but she was relieved to finally be off the pill. Even as she stood before me, apparently pregnant, she was still glad she had stopped taking it and did not regret her decision. I should have remembered this about Jasmine; she used to complain about the pill all the time when we were together, especially after learning the rocky history behind the drug in one of her classes. But she kept it up, because she thought she had to. Now that she was molding her life around a different ethic, she gave up a part of her regime she had been ambivalent about before.

But none of this explanation really mattered. As much as I could not comprehend her decision and her refusal to maybe admit that going off the pill was not the best solution (since no one could be one hundred percent vegan, right? She had said that, I was sure), I did not and could not say anything. That was her decision and I had nothing to do with it. And we had used condoms! Even though those weren't technically vegan as well, she explained, they were better ethically because she only came into contact with them sporadically, versus the everyday use of the pill. She could handle using condoms that weren't vegan, but taking a pill that had pain and exploitation at its genesis was not part of her ethics now. Though I was livid when I first heard about this, I kept it inside. We had used a condom and apparently that had not worked. That was what I was really mad about, I told myself. Not Jasmine switching birth control.

"Why didn't the condom work? What happened?" I asked frantically. We had done all we could to avoid this - and yet, it had failed us. This was not fair. Jasmine replied calmly.

"I don't know. Sometimes it just happens. It could have broken. It could have fallen off. It could have been a defective batch. There may have been a re-call while you were in Paris and you didn't hear about it. There are so many things that could have happened, Frank. Trust me, I've thought of every single one hoping that something happened and it wasn't our fault."

"But it wasn't our fault! Why did it still happen?"

"Because shit just does, Frank. Life is full of stupid coincidences that somehow just happen even though we prepare for the worst."

"Are you sure it's mine?" I asked, stupidly, just wanting to take the attention off of how things could still explode even though we were as careful as they had always told us to me. I went through every single sex education class that I had ever sat through (albeit, there were not many) and I replayed each instruction they had given me. I had obeyed them all with Jasmine. I always had.

She didn't get mad at my thought or accusation. She just repeated to me soundly: "I do know for sure. That is why I came to you. I wouldn't have told you if I wasn't sure."

Although I still questioned her about Braden, she just shook her head and didn't lose her cool. She should have stormed off; my questions were eager, intense, and one right after the other. I was in a state of mind that I even knew in the moment was not appropriate. But like Jasmine had said, she had gone over all of these scenarios in her mind when she had found out. She must have known that I would have the same questions and fears, and she dealt with them as they came up. Although Braden had made his interest in her quite clear, she didn't go to bed with him. His questionable politics were enough to make her squeamish under his touch. She had to trust someone fully to go to sleep with them. Though we weren't dedicated partners, she didn't have sex with that many people for that reason alone. Since she had gotten her job, she had been too busy to have sex.

Her job was another one of the reasons it had taken her until the end of February to even realize she was pregnant, when we had had sex so long ago. The night when the power went out, I thought to myself. When I had dreamt I was falling and she was telling me about synaesthesia. If she was pregnant, then it had to have happened then. She was already over six weeks along. But her work kept her mind in other places, and even since she had gotten off the pill, her periods had been irregular anyway. So when it didn't come, she accounted it to stress and the busy schedule. When she started getting sick, she thought it was the flu, and when her breasts started hurting she figured she was just going to get her period soon. It was after her breasts hurt for nearly all of February that she started to realize something was off.

"Are you sure?" I must have asked her this a million times. "But how do you know?"

She had bought a test, just to put her mind at ease, but thinking that nothing would come from it. She did it at work the next day (this was the only part of the story I laughed at, because it seemed so typically Jasmine). She had let it sit too long and then, when she couldn't read the damn lines on it, she had just given up and gone to the clinic later that night. She said she had the flu and wanted to get her blood taken to just make sure it wasn't anything serious. It was pretty serious, the doctor had told her. There was a parasite in her body and it was called a baby.

"He really said that to you?" I asked. I didn't think that was in any way appropriate and I wanted to find out who this doctor was and report him. Or something. Anything. That was probably another overreaction, I told myself. I just wanted to stop feeling so fucking powerless over all of this. It seemed like no matter what we did, somehow it got fucked up or people treated us like we were idiots.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14