April - The Flood 5 страница

"I have a new painting. Do you want to see it?"

I nodded, and asked her, "So you finished the Strength one from before?"

"Yes, and the client that came by today bought it, so I took that as a little celebration and sign to start a new one. I think you may like this one." She led me into the small room adjacent to their kitchen. I walked in and closed my eyes, breathing deeply, wondering if the smell of Jasmine was still around. It had been so long ago, I expected it to be gone by then. The smell of the acrylic paint caught me first, but when I sat on the bed, I felt that familiar presence. Maybe it was just my mind, but it comforted me. I began to grow anxious and wondered if I should start to go home soon, and if she was okay alone. I wanted to hold her and it hit me all of a sudden.

The painting that Alexa was doing was a tall tower. She had sketched the entire thing, but only the background - a dreary black - was painted. The tower itself had two widows and sat on the top of a mountain. As I leaned in closer, I realized there were bodies falling out of it and that a lightning bolt was hitting it. There were flames abound. At the top of the piece inside the frame was the Roman numeral for sixteen, and the bottom read THE TOWER. I was baffled; why had Alexa wanted to show me this? She had said I would like it. Was I supposed to like this because she had painted it, or because of the content of it? She stood beside it, boasting proudly though it was barely half done, and I couldn't tell what the reason could be.

"What do you think?" she finally asked.

"I uhhh.... I don't know how to feel," I said. This tarot card was nothing like Strength. This was the type of card that I was used to seeing when exposed to Tarot; bleak and depressing and violent. The two bodies falling out of the tower haunted me. It reminded me of why I never paid attention to the news anymore, and why Gerard had shut out his own national trauma after Kennedy. Who needed to repeat history, even allegorically, when there was beauty other places?

"What does it all mean?" I finally asked, hoping for some resolution that would satisfy me.

"The tower is struck by lightning. Something that was once in place and sturdy, is now no longer as such. All the walls that people kept up, now are coming down. It's not a literal death by fire or a literal tower. It's merely the ideas that we once had, we no longer have them. We learn to take down the walls and rebuild something else. It's a good card, after you get through the initial phase. It's the one I'm trying to work with right now."

I nodded, and impulsively asked if she was okay. It seemed like if you painted something like this and wanted to work with it, something was wrong. But no - Alexa insisted me it was just the opposite. "This is a good card, I told you that, Frank. Nothing is wrong. Finally. It just takes a lot to see that sometimes, even though it's all right in front of you."

I nodded again, but didn't really say much else. The Strength card had pulled me in, it made me want to be a part of this world. It made me look for myself between her thin paint strokes. But this painting stared back at me and made me self-conscious, it made me uncomfortable, and it made me feel very unsafe. I looked away. I didn't want to be in the room with it anymore, as if it knew something about me that I didn't yet. As if the lightning bolt really would come down and fling me from the building.

Alexa nodded, sensing my discomfort, and put the cover back over her art. She gave me a hug as I stood up to leave and told me to not be afraid. She gave me the banana bread she had worked hard on all afternoon. I didn't know how to act or feel around her, and was relieved when Mikey came back.

"See you tomorrow?" he asked. I only had a half day, but everything was still going on as usual. I nodded and that was it. My first day was over, and would be followed by another. I headed home, leaving it all behind.

I called out to people when I entered the front door. The mat where our shoes were kept was haphazard, and I stopped to tidy it up as I waited for responses. I noticed that Jasmine's boots were gone. I walked into the kitchen and checked the fridge, before finally finding her note on the table. She had addressed it to only me:

Hey Frank,

Lydia wanted to meet tonight before the class. Gerard said he would go to Vivian's, and Mikey called and said that he was taking you home for dinner. If you come home before me, I love you and that is all you need to know,

J

Her note made me smile. She had been declaring her love a lot more recently - but only in these little notes. I love you was something that Jasmine, like Gerard and I, almost never said out loud. It made the quality of it come down a lot, the more it was repeated. It wasn't as special or important. But Jasmine had been writing it a lot recently and leaving the notes in small places. She had knocked on my door once when I was still asleep and instead of waking me up, left a post it note that just said 'I love you' for me to find. She put them on the fridge a lot too, sometimes even on items inside the fridge, like on the carton of soy milk we were now sharing or on my lunch I had made the night before. For the first few times, I automatically assumed these notes were for me, but I began to wonder more and more if they were also for Gerard. I figured if she had wanted to talk to him cryptically, she would have left him little quotations from poetry, but maybe they had gotten beyond that or maybe she was doing the same with his door and his art supplies. I did know that they had started their drawing together. Some nights they would both go up to his room and I wouldn't hear a thing for hours but soft murmuring. Jasmine's stomach was only really visible now if she was in tight clothing or if she was naked. I knew that she was comfortable with Gerard - we all kind of had to be with one another at this point - and sometimes I'd imagine what their sessions would look like. It made me so curious that sometimes I would burst with emotion as I was in my room, wanting to be part of it again. It wasn't a jealousy issue. It was just me wanting to be a part of what we had had before, and realizing that sometimes, with three of us in the house, that our emotions became too intense. We were almost destined to never have that again, but strive to want it for a long period of time afterwards.

Our shared intensity was probably why Jasmine was leaving these notes everywhere. She communicated through words; they had been the containers for her emotions, the way paint was for Gerard and photographs were for me. When she couldn't be everywhere at once, she would try to leave some of herself behind with these notes and these declared affections. It definitely wasn't the same as having her in my arms when I first came home, but it was a start. I took the note and folded it in my pocket. I put the banana bread on the counter and then went up the stairs to see if I could find Gerard in his room yet, or if he had left me a picture or something in his absence.

I knocked on his door and heard nothing, and peered inside quickly. His room was a bit of a mess; clothing was out and the bed was not made, but everything else was in meticulous order. He had labeled his shelves and drawers again with their contents and he even had a calendar hanging up in one corner of his room. He had marked Jasmine's approximate due dates and other important things down and it made me smile. For the first time, Gerard wanted to be organized. He had other people to think of as well. I noticed the pad of paper by his bed, and realized he was still doing his to-do lists, too.

As I was leaving, I saw his sketchbook open on the desk. I felt a little bad looking at it, but I took a quick peak. There was a half-finished portrait of Jasmine, leaning back on the bed, her hands on her stomach. It was a very rough sketch and still needed a lot of detail work, but it made me happy. I could see the lines coming together and forming into a new life on the page. I touched the crisp paper and then I walked back to my bedroom. It was odd, being there with no one else around. This was the first time I had really been alone all day and in the past few weeks. I decided to stop moping in it, and try to enjoy it. I became more aware that with a full time job, alone time was going to be waning. I went into my darkroom and began to develop the photos that I had long forgotten about. I felt better, feeling more useful and getting back to what I was meant to do, but the images overwhelmed me. As they came back into focus, I began to remember that night and how different everything had been. It was hard to not wonder what if scenarios when I was developing them, even though I knew that everything that had happened since was the right decision. I knew, standing in the middle of that floor, that everything from that night and from here, would be the right decision as well.

By the time I had gotten to the end, my favorite -by far - was Jasmine standing outside of the jazz club, the one where I had told her to be spontaneous like jazz and she had kicked her leg in the air. Her hair was spread out like a windmill against the black backdrop of the club and the February night-time sky. Her white hair seemed to be attached to her white shirt and she looked so utterly perfect in the photos, though her face was twisted up into a strange expression from the strain of her leg. She would probably blush and put her hand over her face in embarrassment if she knew I had this photo. I wanted to frame it, to keep it around, and add it to the many things I wanted to show our kid when they got old enough to understand.

I realized recently that I had begun to catalogue my work and my stories in my mind. That I had been organizing myself and my thoughts to present it all to an imaginary audience - the future kid that would come into our lives. I had these art shows all planned out, where I would take them on this journey through the depths of the New Jersey landscape and tell them all about how I had met their Papa, Gerard. I would tell them about the sacré bleu, the dove, and the little acts of freedom. Meeting Gerard also coincided with the story of meeting Jasmine too. They were utterly twisted together, so were all of our stories, every single one of us, and I could fill a museum with all of our histories and our artefacts. I started to imagine them watching it all, and then the museum filling with more and more people. Mikey and Alexa and their kids would be there, though they already knew the story of how everything had gotten to this point. But I saw more people in my mind's eye attending this event, and I wondered if I was seeing more children. I shuddered and pushed the thought away. Let's just stay with one, I told myself, because even they sometimes became too much.

After the photos were all done, no one was home yet. I began to feel despondent and strangely bored. I was almost never bored when I was by myself. I was always jumping from one project to the next. I began to feel fear tighten in my chest. Was I bored because I was waiting to go to work in the morning? Waiting for Jasmine or Gerard? I shook my head and began to walk around my room, wondering what on earth I needed to do. I looked at the bare wall staring back at me and realized that I had never asked the two of them to paint it with me. But why did I need the two of them? I could tackle this mural myself. I began to get out all the colors I had and ran quickly up to Gerard's room to get some of his as well. I got halfway through the top coat on the long section of the wall before my body seemed to give out. I sat down on the stairs, tired. I had been sitting at a desk all day, but I was exhausted. There were too many changes presented before me and I still needed to process them all. I capped up what paint I had out and admired the half of the wall I had done. It was just a half done topcoat, but it was there. I felt a little better.

I ended up walking out into the garden. It was late at night now, almost ten, and the sun was gone. Darkness surrounded and there was no moon to add any other glow to the sky. The parking lot possessed a bit of light that managed to stretch itself over to the garden, but for the most part, it was dark too. April had been a combination of pouring rain and then blissful sun with cool temperatures. It was still gray a lot of the time, and the mud caked everything. The garden wasn't growing yet. I stared at the places where the flowers would have been, repeated all their names to myself, and finished with the sunflowers. I felt as if I was waiting forever. I finally went inside, still bored, only to find Jasmine sitting at the kitchen table.

"Hi," she said quietly when I came in the door. "I saw you in the garden but I didn't want to bother you."

"Oh, hi," I said, startled. "Is Gerard home too?"

She shook her head. "At this point in the night, I'd say he's sleeping over at Viv's. He can't drive and Viv won't leave past ten."

I nodded. I took off my shoes and walked into the kitchen. I told Jasmine about the banana bread that Alexa had made and she made a small noise in acknowledgement. She was holding a mug of tea, rather than drinking it. Steam began to rise off of the brim and she stared down into it, but that was all she was doing. She was distracted, I could tell. Though she asked me how my day at work went, I knew she didn't mean it.

"Let's not talk about that, here, okay? Good things should be kept in this house and that day is already gone and done with. Can... I sit down with you?" I felt like I needed to ask permission. Jasmine was more despondent than usual. I was surprised she hadn't run and hidden in her room. She nodded meekly and ushered with one of her hands for me to take a seat.

"Are you okay?" I asked. "Still feeling sick?"

"No, I'm fine, sickness-wise, at least. I'm just thinking too much. I saw Lydia tonight."

"Your note said so."

"Right. Of course." She paused, tried to take a drink, but it was too warm. "We had our first Lamaze and alternative birthing class, and then she and I went out afterwards."

"Was it okay?" I didn't think that Lydia had done anything awful; from what I could gather, she seemed like the most amazing woman in the world. Every time Jasmine came back from talking with her, she was usually bouncing off the walls she was so excited.

"Yeah, it was fine. She's a pretty awesome person and so strong." Jasmine's voice quaked with emotion near the end. She swallowed hard. "How much do you know about Mozambique?"

"Not a lot, honestly." I didn't think we were taught what half the countries in Africa were called in high school. I still knew people now who thought that Africa was a country. Jasmine went on.

"Her mother is from there and got out right before the civil war that started in the seventies. Lydia has always lived here, in the states. But in her twenties, she went back to Mozambique for a summer to visit family. She was travelling by herself and had plans to meet some distant family there when she arrived. And... stuff just went wrong. It was two years before she could come back. She saw a lot of shit. She didn't tell me what, she just said that some things you don't forget. You think you will, but the body does not forget. The mind represses, the body remembers." Jasmine bit her lip. She spoke all of this to the tea mug, and did not make eye contact with me. My hands were on the table and I wanted to reach out and touch her, but I held back. She needed to finish. "Anyway, when she came back, finally, she went home to her mother's. She went to school and decided to be a midwife and run the alternative birthing center and lecture about sexuality, birth, and disease prevention. She's taken the courses necessary to get her degree, but she said that you can really learn the most from your own life. Those circumstances are what really teaches you. She had no idea what she wanted to do before she went to Mozambique. She could have been a midwife before leaving, but at the same time, she couldn't have been. It would not have had the same motivation, the same force behind it. The trip changed her. Sometimes the worst things that happen to you can be used for good."

I waited. I begged her to make eye contact with me, and when she did, I reached forward my fingers and touched her hand. She smiled weakly and let me touch her fingers, but didn't take her hand off the mug. The steam was rising and she tried to take another drink.

"I guess it just got me thinking, you know? I kept trying to figure out why Lydia was telling me this."

"Maybe she just wants you to know about her, so it feels a lot more comfortable when you have the kid?" I suggested, but Jasmine shook her head.

"That's not Lydia's style. I want you to meet her soon, and then you'll get what I mean when I say that. But I think she was trying to tell me something. She was talking about herself, but she never actually told me what happened in Mozambique. I just keep thinking about her going to Mozambique and how that one action changed everything. I keep thinking about some of the horrible things I've read about, the courses that I've taken, and how I can't even begin to understand that experience. I've read a lot, but what does it matter if I can't even accept my own life as a lesson?"

Oh, god, I thought to myself. Oh god, oh god. Jasmine was breaking. This is what Alexa had meant by the card - wasn't it? That the walls that someone had kept up around themselves finally broke down. This was the breaking down of an ideology, of a belief system, of something that kept you safe this entire time in order to start again. I didn't know how Alexa could have even known that something like this was going to happen. Maybe she did have some type of power. But no, no, even she said she couldn't tell the future. Jasmine was just upset. Everyone had these walls that could fall, everyone built up a wall around themselves to keep them safe, and sometimes they just fell down so you had to start again. It just so happened that Jasmine's were falling now. I scooted my chair around to her and put my arm on her back. She pushed her mug of tea away from herself, frustrated, and laid her head on the table. She wasn't crying, at least, not yet, but she was panting and heaving as if she was having a panic attack. I rubbed her back and kissed the back of her neck. I didn't dare tell her it was okay. I knew from past experiences that it was one of the most useless things someone could say.

I knew a lot about Jasmine. She had told me about her childhood and her abusive father. But there were other parts of herself that had been accumulating over the years, parts that she kept hidden from even herself, and especially from me. These parts that would wake her up in the middle of the night screaming and parts that would have to get me to tell her the date and time so she knew where she was. Memories that took over and parts of her life that she tried to deny had happened. She had once told me about the female genital mutilation that had taken place over some countries in Africa, and how she had thought that was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, finding out about that. She had been upset for days and day and days. But that was not her life, that was not her story, and she could no longer use that to learn. These pieces that were surfaces, these pieces that she called herself, they were all slipping and sliding and the earth underneath was shaking. That was not the worst thing that had happened to her, because that had not happened to her. What had happened to Jasmine was dropped off in bits and pieces, alluded to through subtle references and a facial twitch, implied through subject matters and topics, but never in actual truth.

"Jasmine, I'm here. It's April and you live with me and Gerard. You are four months pregnant. You are not where you used to be," I told her, trying to keep my voice steady. "I am not going anywhere."

She began to cry, but it was small and simple. Her breathing was returning to normal and it was no longer the frenzied gasps from before. She was returning to reality, but she entered with a different frame of mind. She looked at me and kissed me once over the lips. It was just our lips and we didn't open our mouths.

"I'm not weak," she told me, and my eyes widened. I gripped her sides and told her, "Of course you're not. Of course, of course. You're the strongest person I know."

She nodded. "I'm not weak or stupid. I know that, but... it's hard. It's difficult."

Before I could say anything back, she kissed me again to silence me. And then she began to tell me what she had learned from her own life. What she had begun to piece together since she had learned to read stories, tell them, and more importantly, edit them. She tried to unlearn through editing. She tried to leave in the omissions from before, and the mistakes, and just gave me words that represented something that was so far beyond language and didn't deserve language to describe it.

She told me everything that night, everything that I didn't know from before.

But nothing had changed. We were still in the kitchen of our house, she was still Jasmine, and I was still very much in love with her. I told her that, and though she kept sobbing, she held me back and thanked me without language. Now, at the ground level, we could try and rebuild from here.

Chapter Four

Jasmine was relieved of her nightmares. She had been having them more frequently since moving into the house, probably because it was a strange and unfamiliar place for the time being, and her consciousness had mirrored her minor insecurities at night. Telling her story, in unedited form, had helped her sleeping and waking world. She unpacked more of her personal items, changed her bed sheets, and then we both completely moved the bed to the other side of the room and this all seemed to help. The place was no longer strange, it was hers. But since I had been her reader and willing audience in her story, it was now my turn with nightmares. These types of dreams never really went away, I figured. They became like a disease in a bloodline instead, passed on from one person to the next. They passed through my brain like a bad song and a tune that I could never hum out. The first night afterwards, Jasmine had slept with me in my bed, and for the next three nights or so until we eventually changed her room around. Sometimes she would still wake up and be crying and I would turn over and rub her back and tell her the date and time and our names over and over again until she was all right. Sometimes my own dreams manifested with her crying, sometimes I couldn't tell them apart. The first night in her own bed, I thought she would be fine, but she woke up anyway. She wasn't crying, but when I turned over and opened my eyes, she was already awake, and staring at the ceiling, a hand on her stomach. She was lucid enough to know where she was and not caught in a dream or flashback, but I asked her if she wanted to talk about the nightmare. She merely stated, "Shylock was after me."

"Who's Shylock? You don't have to tell me if you don't want to..." I asked cautiously. I had not heard her use that name yet and I was wondering if I needed to hear more from her. I dreaded another succession of events, but if this is what she needed, then I wanted to give her a way to bring it up.

"He's from The Merchant of Venice, a Shakespeare play. He wants a pound of flesh because someone has wronged him, and Portia, another character, wants to help but in order for her to enter the courtroom she needs to dress up like a boy. In the dream, I had to do the same, only it was to get away from it all." She went on and told me some more of her dreams, about how Shylock would come after her and how this had been a reoccurring dream. She would feel as if she was being split in two some nights, dressed in so many layers and made to be in so many places at once. I was surprised she had not told me all this yet. Although this was definitely more theatrical than the prior ones she elucidated about, it also held back in a certain way. Jasmine talked about the play, her role in the play, but not about her life surrounding it. She was familiar with this text, but she was an English major; she pretty much had to know about Shakespeare. All I really knew well (other than the standards) was The Tempest, because of Gerard. Jasmine had been quiet for a moment, still grappling with something, but mute on the topic. I wanted to comfort her, but when I reached my hand out and grabbed her own, she only squeezed back haphazardly. She seemed okay with a lot of this dream. It was barbaric and horrific, but putting placing whatever emotion she was fighting with in the context of The Merchant of Venice seemed to help.

"I bet Gerard knows about this play. Do you want to see him?" I asked, thinking that maybe my role was done here. She shrugged me off.

"I bet he does. He knows a lot of things I would have never thought." She pursed her lips, and I thought she was going to go on, but she drew quiet again. I nudged her arm, and finally, she made eye contact with me.

"Haven't you ever told yourself stories to keep yourself alive, Frank? I think that's what I'm trying to do now. We need to tell ourselves stories, I'm sure of it. But I just lost a whole bunch of the ones that I used to tell myself to accept the truth. I want a bit of an escape, I guess. So I'm going back to old favorites," she explained. Her question had been rhetorical, and she never waited for me to answer with some of my own tales that I spun to keep myself standing and participating in this world. I did know what she meant, though. Over the next few days, I found myself reading Shakespeare after I had finished my Frida Kahlo book.

Sometimes, though, Jasmine wouldn't have her nightmares because she wouldn't sleep at all and be looking out the window when I got up in the morning. She was very quiet, only speaking when she really had to. She had said so much the first night - we had talked until nearly three am - and after being purged of such a thing like that, I was sure she was waiting for her sentences and ideas to rearrange themselves in her mind again. She wrote essays out-loud and she edited her life in her mind. Now the two had been merged and switched so she waited. She was going back to old favorites, because she just wasn't sure what to do anymore, what to tell herself. After expelling all that language into the world, it would take a while for it to reconfigure itself in her brain.

"What do you want the baby to call you?" she asked me one morning when she had been awake before me. She was lying in bed, just looking up at the ceiling. I had no idea how long she had been like that. It was roughly six-thirty in the morning. My body was aching from lack of sleep. I flipped my entire schedule the last few weeks, several times over. I went from a night shift, to sleeping in during the mornings while working half afternoons, and now that was switched for an early morning wake up and carpool. Since I started work at 8am now, Mikey was usually picking me up at seven-thirty. I lay in bed and wanted to stay there forever, but I turned over to look at Jasmine. The blanket over her belly formed a huge hill that I had to resist the urge to reach out and touch.

I considered her question. "I don't know. I haven't had too much time to think about it outside of the normal names. But Gerard said he wanted to be called Papa. I don't know if he told you that yet."

She flipped over onto her side, a smile spreading across her face. It was the first time I had seen her smile in weeks; or at least, that's what it felt like. "No, he hadn't told me that yet. I like it."

I nodded. I pinched the bridge of my nose to try and wake myself up more. This was hard; I wasn't even going to pretend anymore. I had been having thinly veiled dreams of Jasmine's own nightmares playing across my mind and then waking up to have her tell me it again. The worry about her was tremendous, more than I had ever dealt with in undergrad. The idea of using the word father or dad to describe myself seemed horrendous. I couldn't do it. I looked at Jasmine. "What do you want to be called?"

"I don't know either. It all feels too prescriptive. I thought about being the dad, honestly, and maybe you being the mom, but that doesn't seem fair."

I thought about that option. I imagined our kid calling me mom and I had to laugh. No, that didn't fit me at all. But dad terrified me, even on Jasmine, though I sensed the fear from a different source. "Why can't we just use our names? Will that confuse them?"

"Our initials?" she suggested. "You be F and I'll be J to them."

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14