April - The Flood 14 страница

He was already at Vivian's, and when we got inside, I rushed over to him and gave him a hug. We kissed for a bit, but that was it. He had just gotten there himself, and I could sense that he and Vivian were in a bit of a heated conversation. He was grateful for the escape and when I asked Vivian if he and I could go into the basement until dinner was ready, she seemed to need an escape as well. Her request was that we keep our clothing on for whatever we did. We promised, knowing that we could easily have sex with taking very little off. Gerard kissed the back of my neck as soon as we got down there, and we flopped on the big couch. We didn't actually have sex, but I was so relieved to be in his arms.

"I had a class with Jasmine today," I told him. I was lying on his chest and he was running his hands through my hair.

"Ah yes, that is where you were. I was wondering," he said. He asked me how it went and I began to fill him in with all the nitty-gritty details of birth and more about Lydia. I never realized until then, but I had been shaking. I was so nervous and full of conflicting emotions. I had been excited with Jasmine, although it was a heavy topic, and then coming into Vivian's place and going back into the basement... it made me weary. It made me anxious. I wondered now, with the advent of the coming baby and the fact that three of us shared a house, not two, if Gerard and I would ever have nights like we had had before again.

"No, probably not," he told me honestly. "We will have different nights together, and they will be equally worth remembering. You only romanticize all of this in hindsight. While we did live here, we were still worried."

"Right," I told him, realizing this was a lot like what Lydia was saying about birth. "We were worried about jobs and money and other things. It still sucked. But... at least we were together." I grabbed his waist and lifted up his shirt a bit ad kissed his stomach.

"We're still together now, Frank." He rustled my hair and we began to kiss in a flurry again. Vivian called us from upstairs just as soon as we had started, and we both sighed and pulled ourselves into sitting positions.

"We just have to learn to share, I suppose," Gerard added to his statement, and then, with a quick wink and one last kiss, we headed up the stairs.

Since there were going to be a lot of people showing up to this dinner and there were too many dietary restrictions and along with picky pregnancy eating, Vivian had just made pasta. It was the easiest thing in the world to cook, you could make endless amounts, and it kept very well. She made her marinara sauce without cheese and meat, and served it with a loaf of French bread that she had picked up. Other people had supplemented the meal so the burden didn't fall completely on Vivian, too. There was hummus and veggies out, along with some fruit (which I took some heaping plates of) and there was also plenty of crackers and accidentally vegan cookies around. We were set. It was a mix-match of dinner, but we were contending with a pregnant vegan, a pregnant person who couldn't have dairy, two vegetarians, and then Vivian herself and her daughter who was just picky in general. I had expected that Noelle would be coming too, but Cassandra just gave me a look and said that they had their own separate lives and weren't attached at the hip.

"Or the mouth or the hand," Hilda quipped, and Cassandra was shocked by Hilda's out-front approach.

"I like you," she admitted after awhile, and she and Hilda exchanged conversation for most of the night. I took this with relief; Cassandra finally had a friend who also had an interest in women and was as upfront about her sexuality as she was. There was no talk of fisting, thankfully, but I did see Hilda give Cassandra her email address and phone number since she was too young to attend her workshops. "But soon," she assured the budding teenager. All her questions until then would be sent that way, I figured, and one day I could envision Cassandra trying to show me how to fist, and then teasing me because I hadn't done it yet. I sighed and tried to not concern myself with their conversation too much.

It was difficult fitting everyone at Vivian's table. Having Jasmine and Hilda there meant that the ends of the table had to be used, and it made Vivian feel as if she was queen at the head end. Midway through the night, the power went to her head. She and Hilda were at opposite ends, while Jasmine and Gerard were across from one another, and Cassandra and I were across. I was next to Gerard, and Jasmine was next to Cassandra. While Hilda and Cassandra exchanged sex advice, Vivian drank from her mug of tea and finished chastising Gerard from earlier.

"So have you given up on the famous artist prestige, then?" she asked. "Are you retiring into family life?"

Gerard smiled, taking her comments in good stride. "Well, I am working on a portrait of Jasmine so we can have it on our house for later, if that's what you're getting at Vivian."

"No," she said flatly, losing her fun tone from before. "I'm talking about you missing a lecture today."

"I did?" Gerard's eyes widened. There were a few moments of intense staring between the two of them, before Gerard dropped eye contact. In a small voice, he asked: "That was the only one though, right?"

"No, you missed one last week, too, but since you were sick and I found out from Frank, I cancelled it for you. I figured you would have eventually, but now I'm not so sure. If you don't want to do this anymore, just let me know. I understand if you want to put your head someplace else right now, and then maybe come back to this later. School is done, and the summer school batch is never as caring. You may as well take the summer off. But it's costing you as well as me time and money to just not show up. Luckily, this time I did the lecture for you but I only got paid half as much. People actually want to see the artist talk about their painting, not the professor best friend." She tsk tsked at the side of her mouth. Gerard looked at his place and picked through his food, not eating. Vivian sighed, trying to temper her anger and her love for her best friend. "I still have some of your paintings to sell, too. Should I just stick with that? Maybe you can work on some more? It may be easier for you to just do that for the summer. "

Gerard nodded. "Thank you. I'm sorry, Vivian. I really am. I must not have written the date down."

"I told you the date, and then I wrote it down for you, Gerard, don't you remember?" Vivian said, her voice rising. The whole table had stopped and were all paying attention to their exchange back and forth. Gerard murmured and shook his head for a bit, but it wasn't enough. Vivian looked to be going through an arrangement of emotions, incensed, worried, and something I couldn’t quite articulate. She opened her mouth a few times, thinking of how she could respond to the situation and take it from a better angle, since Gerard was clearly brimming with remorse.

"Hey!" Jasmine declared suddenly. She got up from the table and began to walk towards her bag. "I have a surprise for everyone! I got really good news today!" She grabbed the ultra sound photo that she had stashed away before. Her divergence plan had worked on getting my attention; I felt my heart pound with anticipation, but I looked around to see if it was working for other people. She sat down with the photo and gave it to Gerard first to break the mood. He took it from her hand and he smiled. I leaned over his shoulder and we both looked at the blob that was slowly becoming more and more human-like.

Her strategy had worked. Vivian took a big drink of tea, but when we passed the photo to her, her defense melted and she began to look at the picture with a smile. She had just been mad before, and had to deal with a lot of shit from work. She wasn't really that mad at Gerard, I convinced myself. People always got unreasonably angry for other reasons, for things and circumstances that they could not control in their lives. She had needed a break from the professional insult Gerard not showing up had done for her in the face of other professors. It was a hard job to get, and until she got tenure, every little appearance mattered for her. After the photo had been passed around and was back again at Gerard and I, the antagonist air was gone and Jasmine began to talk.

"I know you've all probably seen the other photo I showed you and the photos may still look the same to you, but I know what sex the baby is now."

Vivian leaned forward and snatched the photo back to try and decipher. "A boy! I see the penis. No wait, that's a hand. A boy still? I don't know, it's still all pretty blurry to me."

"A girl," Jasmine said with a smile. "The technician said to not get too concerned with that, sometimes the readings could be wrong, but she was about 90% sure they is a girl. She is a girl! Ha. I guess I can switch pronouns now."

Vivian handed the photo back to us, feeling defeated in her guessing. She rubbed Jasmine's arms and said she was happy for her. "For all of you, really, and I am utterly relieved I can stop using they as a pronoun. Thank you wonderful ultrasound technician," she joked. Vivian had always struggled with the singular they. The whole issue made Jasmine extremely frustrated and Vivian unapologetic and defensive. Now there would be no bad air between the two of them, even after this joke, when referencing the baby. She! Her! I said in my head, proud that this was coming together.

"It's odd, not using they anymore," Gerard said out loud. "I had kind of liked it."

"Me too," Jasmine agreed. "But who knows? We may end up using something different if she is something else when she comes out." Jasmine rubbed her belly instinctively, realized what she had done, and then moved her hand away. She caught me smiling at her and rolled her eyes before she smiled back.

"Do you know the sex of your baby?" Vivian asked Hilda, and then realized the fatal mistake. "The baby. Not your baby. The person growing inside of you. That's what I meant."

"The person who should be paying rent, as far as I'm concerned," Hilda said, laughing off the mix-up. "No, I don't. The dads want to be surprised. I think they is a boy, though. I want them to be a boy."

"Why?" Cassandra asked.

Hilda smiled. "So I can say that I grew a penis."

Everyone laughed, and for a moment, Jasmine almost agreed with Hilda, and that she wanted to have a boy for the same reason. But then she looked back down at the ultrasound, and smiled again. "No, never-mind," she corrected herself. "I'm quite pleased with this."

Gerard extended his hand over the table, and Jasmine thought it was for the photo. She was going to give it to him again, but instead he held onto her hands. I reached out too, and we all linked together in the center. We didn't care if it was in the middle of dinner - most people were done anyway - or if it was on Vivian's table.

"Have you guys thought of any names yet?" Vivian asked.

"We just found out!" I declared. We had also just decided what we wanted the baby to call us, let alone what we wanted to call her. Jasmine let out a long breath and nodded, seeming overwhelmed already. Good news past - we knew the sex of the baby (at least as well as we could) - but now came the responsibility with that.

"I had been thinking of gender neutral names beforehand, you know, when we weren't quite sure...." Jasmine started. Vivian was curious at what a "gender neutral name really meant" and Jasmine began to go through the list in her head that she could remember. Ones like Riley, Aiden, and Billy she had considered, but they were really common now. She had become fascinated by old names such as Whitney, Leslie, and Lindsey that had been used for boys up until a certain point in history, and then a specific switch over happened. She began to tell us of the cultural legacy of the name Shirley, which until Charlotte Bronte published a novel with a female protagonist named Shirley, had been predominantly a male name.

"Please don't name a boy Shirley," Hilda lamented. "Even if it is gender neutral, all kids will see is the female aspect of it. Names are hard. Trust me."

Hilda then began to recount her high school and formative elementary years where her name was turned into all of these weird sounds and used against her more than anything It wasn't even that strange of a name, it was just that anything different was fuel to the fire for these children. Things only got progressively worse when her class began to learn about World War Two and the name Hilda looked suspiciously close to Hitler. Then things got even better when she decided it was the best idea ever to shave her head when she was sixteen. It was one of many of her "seemed like a good idea at the time" stories that actually didn't have good of an ending. She told us that Hilda apparently meant "Brave Warrior Woman" in Nordic and that had been why her parents had chosen it.

"I guess it's nice and all, and I am definitely a brave and extremely sexy warrior woman, but try and explain that to children? No, it just does not happen. I became a neo-nazi accidentally with my name, so please be careful with your lovely child. You could really seriously mean well, but it could screw you over."

We all nodded in agreement and then became fixated on the idea of whether or not you wanted an "interesting" name or not. My name was so ordinary; I almost always met someone else with my name, it was so common. Mikey had suffered the same issue, but his name was spelled differently than most other Marks, which led to a further issue of common misspellings. It seemed like there was no even ground that you could find without some difficulty. Either you had a name that was too common or boring, or you knew someone with the name you wanted and didn't want to name the person after them, or the name was so unusual, its legacy followed you around. The discussion had ruptured between us all, and I wished that Alexa had been here to provide some sense of a middle ground and balance.

"How did you get your name, Jasmine?" Cassandra asked.

I turned to her, realizing that even I had no idea. Her name was unique, and not very many people had it where we were from. It was also the most unusual in her family. Everyone else, from what I could recall, had rather innocuous names that didn't raise an eyebrow. Jasmine was different.

She blushed, all the attention focused on her. "Everyone thinks it's for the flower, but it's really not. Well, not really. My mom told me that she never got cravings. At all. Then she was pregnant with me and was walking in the supermarket, saw a box of jasmine tea and needed to have it. She drank it all during her pregnancy, but when she went to have it again, it tasted awful. So now I'm Jasmine." She put her face in her palm. "That is why you will never see me buy that tea."

I smiled and rubbed her back, grateful that she had shared that part of herself with us, though it embarrassed her. I realized that, in spite of the somewhat lack-lustre story that the name had attached to it, that her telling had reached a balance. Names that had a story around them, one that was personal and one that you could go back to for reference and to pass on, that was good ground for a name. Right? I shared my views with everyone and no one spoke for awhile. They considered it. Maybe Vivian was trying to think of the inspiration for Cassandra, or think back to her own mother and why she had decided upon Vivian rather than anything else. I made a mental note to ask my mother why on earth Frank had been chosen. Though I had come to love the name in spite of its common quality, I was still curious. I also realized that I would have to call my mom eventually, again, to let her know my new number and the sex of my daughter (my daughter! It sounded so scary) and I would need a nice innocuous starter. "Tell me the story of my name," seemed like an okay one to bridge that gap.

Gerard broke the silence first. "I like Paloma."

"For the baby?" Jasmine asked. She touched her stomach again, but this time didn't move her hand away when she realized. "It sounds nice. But why Paloma? I've never heard it before."

I hadn't either, and I listened closely as Gerard told us. "It was the name of Picasso's daughter. Her middle name, actually, but she used it for her work. It means dove in Spanish. Picasso went through a huge phase painting and sketching doves, usually with his daughter's face depicted in them. Outside of this work, there are several other pieces where birds feature as a main focus or a side image. His dove paintings have always been the ones that I liked the most."

The table was silent. It was a heavy silence as every single one of us at the table was going through the potential behind the name and the possible future behind it. It was very strange, quite uncommon, but fuck, I thought, was it full of meaning.

"What kind of work did his daughter end up doing?" Jasmine kept asking. She was calm and quiet, thinking over the suggestion and making sure it fit.

"I believe she was a photographer," Gerard answered. He extended his gaze to me and I took a deep breath. Fuck. That name was good. We still had our hands linked and what seemed to be at the same moment, we all squeezed.

So there it was. I was pretty sure we had a name.

We all began to clean up dinner shortly after. Hilda was getting really tired now that she was getting closer to the due date. She had tried to help us clear the dishes and put stuff away, but as everyone went to the sink to help Vivian wash and dry, the two pregnant people continued to sit at the table. Hilda put her feet up on a chair and told us stories from when she had traveled across Europe in her early twenties. She talked about climbing a mountain with her best friend and nearly freezing to death overnight, going and getting a prostitute in Spain because she could, and then sleeping in some parks with a guy who didn't speak English. They were small stories, mostly filled with her colorful language and descriptions of the locals, but they were nice. She avoided telling us about her adventures in Amsterdam and made only a passing reference to them, much to Cassandra's dismay. Jasmine talked about how she felt like she had already backpacked through Europe because she had read so many books in school about it. Hilda said that when they were both no longer knocked up, that the two of them would go and really study the environment. I noticed that Jasmine looked sad when this was said, and not excited. I wondered it if was because she didn't think she would be allowed to go after having the baby, or if Hilda would stick around that long. Hilda was still quite young from what I could gather; under thirty for sure and she had already traveled this much. She seemed to not like staying in one place for very long at all. The fact that she had actually agreed to be a surrogate seemed bizarre to her still, even more than halfway through. Doing something like that meant almost a year of commitment.

"But hey, it's for these two great guys who have so much money it's coming out of their ears. They want to raise a kid. So of course I would help," she said, and shrugged it off. But she, too, looked saddened by her own remarks.

Things were fairly subdued after that; Cassandra and I were washing the dishes, and she kept trying to splash water on me to keep things interesting. Vivian and Gerard were drying the dishes and putting things away. We were nearly at the end of it when I passed a large pot to Gerard. He wiped it as he had been doing in the past few successions, but then suddenly stopped. He seemed to lose his train of thought for a moment, in the middle of Hilda telling us about mountain goats, and then regain it. He walked over to the fridge with the pot, cleared some space on the shelf, and then put it down. He closed the fridge door and then grabbed the lid of the pot off me, dried it, and did the same thing with that.

"Gerard," Hilda said, stopping in the middle of her story. Her tone had changed too. She was more serious than I had ever heard her before. Everyone was now looking at him and what he had just done. He also realized he had an audience, and furrowed his brows with suspicion.

"What?"

Hilda got up, her energy regained, and opened the fridge. She pointed to the pot inside of it and then watched Gerard's expression. He looked at her to the pot, and then back again a few times before it registered.

"Ohhhh," he said. He got the pot out of the fridge and held it in his hands, but he didn't do anything with it. He was still confused, I realized. He had no idea what he was doing.

"Oh god," Hilda said, her voice going an octave lower with dread. "Oh god. Jasmine. Jasmine."

She turned around and grabbed Jasmine's arms. She sat down in her chair and pulled it over to her friends' place. Jasmine's eyes darted around the room, trying to piece the scene together as Hilda whispered in her ear. Jasmine began to cry shortly after, and then Cassandra beside me started to react. It was like a bomb had suddenly gone off, but only a few of us actually knew what it meant and saw the wounds.

"FUCK," Cassandra yelled. She splashed in the water again, but it wasn't for fun anymore. She seemed livid. Absolutely furious. She slammed the counter with each fuck she uttered. "Fuck fuck fuck. I knew it. I knew it. We learned about it at school and yet, still, I didn't want to fucking believe it. I thought it was horseshit."

She backed away from the counter, looked at Gerard, and then ran out of the room. She couldn't take it, and she didn't want to stick around for the tears that were going to come. By now, Gerard had put down the pot on the counter, still unable to place where it actually went. But so what? We hadn't lived here in months. How was he supposed to know where it went? Granted the fridge was an odd place for that deduction, but...I didn't finish my thought.

Vivian walked up to him. She touched his jacket, his face, and then gave him a hug. She had started crying too, but her tears were silent and her face barely moved as they flowed down her cheeks. It seemed that everyone ease knew there was something to be upset about, but I had no idea what it was. I put down what I was drying and threw the towel on the counter. Everything had gone from feeling awesome to shitty in a matter of minutes and if I was going to be bogged down too, I at least wanted to know why.

"What is going on? Can someone please tell me that?" I demanded. I looked over to Hilda and Jasmine. She pushed some of her tears away and took a deep breath.

"He's confused, Frank. He's forgetting things. It's Alzheimer's. That's why he put the pot in the fridge," she said, voice still cracking.

What? I thought to myself. That was ridiculous. I almost wanted to laugh in Hilda's face for being so wrong. I couldn't stand her anymore; she was fun for a while, but her know-it-all attitude was really trying my patience. She didn't know what the fuck she as talking about.

I waited for Gerard to speak up and defend himself. Even when faced with being wrong half the time Gerard almost always refused to admit it. He would have to say something now, to save his ego and pride like he always did in the past. I scoffed at Hilda, and waited, but when I heard nothing from the artist, I looked over at him. He was leaning on the counter, holding Vivian's hand. He did not meet my eyes.

"Gerard?" I asked him. I turned to face him, away from Hilda and everyone else; I didn't even see Vivian anymore though she was still right next to him, rubbing his back. "Gerard," I repeated. "This is ridiculous, right? You're fine. I know you. I lo-"

I didn't have a chance to finish my statement before his eyes finally met mine. He bit his lower lip and his jaw clenched. For the first time in my life, he seemed feeble and small and utterly old.

Come on old man, I thought to myself, wanting to tease him out loud but knowing that I couldn't. Not in the state he was in right then, maybe not ever again. I swallowed hard and waited for him to say something in his defense, to say anything at all, but he never did.

Chapter Two

We were going to the doctors. That was it. Before I could believe anything, I needed to have someone else confirm it. It felt completely backwards to what I had been telling myself before about health and medicine, but I really couldn't see doing this any other way. Everyone else but myself in that room had already diagnosed him, as if they were the final word from the medical establishment. That was ridiculous to me; I knew they were making him sick more than anything. They were constructing their own stories of what was happening to him, the same way that Lydia had said before about us constructing our versions of pregnancy stories. You are now at the place of birth, I thought to myself, and then replaced it with: You are now at the place of forgetting. When did forgetting become a bad thing, pathological and detrimental? And when did Gerard's forgetting suddenly add up to something like this? There were too many other options for these circumstances, too many other explanations for what was happening. Just because people wanted to jump on the bandwagon for the worst possible condition didn't mean that it was true. I rejected that interpretation; I didn't want to start the story there. People just got old and forgot things in old age, that was that.

Eventually, as the night wore on and I eventually coaxed him to speak about himself (I resented everyone in the room for even making him second-guess himself like this), even he insisted on seeing the doctor before he believed it himself. He had been so nervous and anxious before about the fact that there could be something wrong that he had created this sense of guilt and spun himself a web of fiction. He felt like something was wrong, so of course, he had made it seemed ten times worse in his mind. Maybe half his symptoms were really a self-fulfilling prophecy. He admitted to being afraid he had dementia or something similar because he kept forgetting and sometimes woke up confused, but maybe it was really nothing at all.

"Everyone forgets things; it's how the human species keeps going on. You need to forget these horrible things that happen in order to go on," he stated, in the car as we drove home. It was just the two of us, myself driving and him in the passenger seat wringing his hands.

Vivian had let us borrow her car while Jasmine took hers home, knowing that we were going to need it in order to go to the doctors as soon as we could. Jasmine went home with Hilda, unable to deal with anything just yet. She needed a night to herself. I hugged her tightly before I said goodnight to her, and while I knew that time apart from the situation would do her some good, I didn't think she could acquire that distance with Hilda by her side. Hilda's father had apparently had the disease and died while she was going across the states giving lectures the year before. She had watched the early stages of the disease long enough while she had been at home that she knew what she was looking at, apparently. It had been why she jumped to that conclusion so fast, and why she kept trying to give her advice on the situation. She had wanted Gerard to go to the doctors as well, but not to disregard that diagnosis, but to start treatment. There was not a doubt in her mind at what she was looking at, but I knew there was enough doubt in everything. I hoped and prayed that Jasmine with her skeptical and critical mind would also see the holes in the story and realize that instances could be interpreted many different ways. Just because Hilda had seen it before didn't mean Gerard also had it; Hilda was just projecting. Maybe she was even jealous. Either way, we were seeing a doctor just to be sure, and in the meantime, I was attempting to calm Gerard and myself down.

Gerard went on and on about how forgetfulness was really a survival tactic so species' kept going on in the face of extinction. While I agreed with him vocally, I thought of Jasmine and Lydia. They couldn't forget pain or trauma; if they tried it came back and it haunted them until they dealt with it. I thought of the nights Jasmine woke up screaming, crying, or shaking; that didn't seem like forgetting at all. I wasn't sure that the human species really had worked out that whole forgetting for survival thing yet, and even if they had, Lydia had spoken about that cultural memory. No one forgot anything, really. But that thought, though it disproved Gerard's words, made me feel better. If he had lost his memories in this big cultural sphere, what if he could also get them back again? I sat quietly to myself and let him talk out his frustrations. There was a lot, now that the damn had burst and his secret was out. I kept my own secret knowledge now that if he had lost something, it could be found again. I didn't argue with him about the imperative nature of forgetting and I wanted Lydia and Hilda and Jasmine to be the ones that were wrong about memory and repression. If memories never really left, then was Gerard's condition as fatalistic as Hilda made it seemed? What interpretation was I supposed to take? I wanted him, so desperately, to be right about himself. He knew himself, not doctors or anyone else, and if he said he was fine, then I believed him.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14