April - The Flood 18 страница

In between the bits and pieces of our baby’s movements (Jasmine had stated that she was okay with me referring to Paloma as our baby at this point), would be messages of despair at how happy she was. "I was having lunch and she kicked again, and I smiled, but then felt as if I had committed the worst crime. How dare I smile when Gerard may not be alive to see her graduate? I knew this fact when we got into this mess, but now it seems worse, and I can't enjoy it anymore," she would type. I didn't know how to respond to her half the time, because I felt the same way. I would laugh and smile at the stories she told me, but I would feel guilty if I didn't include some remark about Gerard as well. "Reading Lolita at work. I'm getting stares from the ad-execs, but I love it. It's beautiful, and I see Gerard's notes in the corner," I would tell her. Even after I had finished Lolita, I carried it around with me. It smelled like Gerard's room, it smelled like him. It added a bit of reality to my overzealous smiles that would creep in every once in awhile. It weighed me down, but I felt as if I needed this weight, this counterbalance to my own exceeding joy without the backlash of guilt.

Apparently Gerard had finally been awake to feel Paloma kick one morning and had had his hand on Jasmine's stomach long enough for it to take place. "He was thrilled, you should have seen his eyes," she typed to me, but I didn't need to see them. I knew the exact look she was talking about, and for the first time I felt like it was okay to be happy that my daughter had kicked. I had felt her little hand or foot numerous times at that point, but that day at the office was the first time I was really happy about it and allowed myself to be. "I love you both," I had responded, and Jasmine reply back was, "Of course."

A lot of the times our emails went into the neutral zone of work. It was an area we needed to vent about, and since we were at work while we did it, I didn't feel too bad about it. My job wasn't actually as bad as I thought it would be. It was boring a lot of the time, and this made the emails to Jasmine a lot better - after I had learned to master email. It had been a technology that had never interested me before, and now I felt as if my life depended on it. I was sure I would have wanted to quit after a week of full time without it. I would not have been able to maintain my relationship with Jasmine and also spend time with Gerard. It helped my sanity, as well, to have a break from the office atmosphere. The people there were all the same; they blended in the same way I did. A few people got really into their job and that was good for them. I had a life outside of those walls that I needed to attend to and my main force or passion did not lie here in this business. My camera, unfortunately, had fallen aside for now. I was too busy with Gerard, though I did bring it to him some nights and we took pictures of things to try and remember their images the next day. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn't. There was a lot of gray area with memory loss, I was beginning to realize. In spite of it being a degenerative disease, I saw Gerard's own mind go back and forth on a sliding scale. He never remained at one point for too long; it was a relief some days, and torture the next. The gray areas were what had always taunted me in my own life, even before all of this. I liked to always know what was going on and what was next. I was learning, at my job as well, that most of life was never really that certain. I only stayed at work because I had time and Mikey was an ally. It helped having him there, and having Gerard in between us. We comforted one another by sheer presence, even if we never spoke about the illness anymore. It helped having an ally in the house as well, one who loved and cared about me as much as I cared about her and him combined. Because of these things, even in spite of those unsure areas, I looked forward to going home each night, and I did not mind coming to work in the morning. I was keeping my head above water, though it felt like just barely some days.

Jasmine's new theme for the magazine kept her busy distracted, too. She had been interviewing Lydia to talk about issues in Mozambique and the process of child labor that was used in gold-mining and searching for diamonds. It really stuck with Jasmine, and it gave her something else to research with a passion that was not Alzheimer's. She turned the interview into a feature piece and called the issue Gold. She wrote another piece warning people about where they buy their wedding bands and other jewelry from, giving a list of the fair trade producers, and other alternatives for married couples. After completing the article, the necklace that she always wore, the gold and antiquated one that had been passed down through her family, no longer graced her neck. She hung it up in Gerard's room instead, right by the window. She asked me a few days before her production date if I would take any photos for the issue. "It doesn't have to be about gold necessarily, especially since most of our photos are black and white. But do what you can, you know? If you can," she had written to me. I sighed, not wanting to really even consider what was worth shooting, if anything was golden anymore. Her purpose with the magazine, she said when we sent me her Editor's Address section, was to prove to people that something with beauty and prestige almost always has a cost that must be paid at the end of the day, something that went beyond money. The children who had died in order for people to mark their love, that was something huge to consider. Even her own necklace had been part of that pain and suffering, and that became expounded even more when I considered her family history. In spite of all that pain, I was not satisfied with her solution. At least, the solution that she gave in writing. It had been to disregard all gold jewelry because it was built on this foundation of exploitation, and she had mentioned that she had "disposed" of her own items. But I knew that to be a false claim. That night, when I went up to see Gerard and I brought my camera, I took a picture of her necklace hanging by his window. She had not gotten rid of it at all, she did not dispose of the pain, because you never really could dispose pain. You could only give it a new meaning. I took the photo and gave it to her, but I had no idea if she would use it. I wrote to her with my thoughts, and sent it away, not wanting to think about that pain anymore. I had my own to contend with.

The more time I spent with Gerard, the more I began to feel as if I was digging for gold. On his bad days, it felt like there was nothing as I waded through details and dates with him. He hated the fact that we would periodically quiz him, but he knew it was for his own good. His illness probably would have gone undetected longer if we had not been tipped off by Hilda. I still hated her for that, even if we were making progress. I wished for that blissful ignorance of just plain not knowing. Sometimes I wished that we would stop quizzing Gerard because not only did it make him feel bad if he didn't get the right answers, but it made both of us feel like shit, and then our rage got directed onto Hilda or a random doctor or at people who had coal and diamond mines across the ocean. It wasn't fair and it didn't make sense. But then, when Gerard would get the answers right, especially after some struggle, it really did feel amazing. It began to feel like it was worth its weight and effort. The first time I had been successful when I pulled him out of a fog, we took pictures together. I developed them shortly after and sent them to Jasmine for the magazine. "Maybe this is better," I explained to her in an email. "I know these don't exactly fit with the theme per se, but when he remembers, it feels like we've made gold from nothing." I explained a bit more and then forwarded the photos. She didn't reply for a few days (we usually had several messages on the go to one another), but when she did, it was a simple, "I know what you mean. It happened this morning. Printed." When I saw the preliminary draft of the issue, the photos of Gerard were there along with an article on Alzheimer's with a focus on the early on-set element of the disease. Jasmine needed to put down that information somewhere and this was the best place for it. She didn't want to keep it around with her anymore. "Maybe if I bury it deep within the magazine, or push it deeply out of sight, it will act like coal and give me a diamond." I wrote her back and told her to string up the world with them when she did. When I looked through the rest of the magazine, the photo I had taken of her necklace in the window was not there. I didn't press the issue, knowing that she was probably keeping it for herself.

Jasmine also confided in me about her job situation. She had been talking to the woman that she had replaced last December, and found out that she was anxious to get back to work, but still did not want to leave her son. It turned out that her husband had left her halfway through maternity leave. She needed money, but couldn't bear to leave her son. Jasmine told her she was also pregnant, wanted to work, but had an interesting living situation. The two of them had been scheming back and forth on how to both run the magazine at the same time and be there for their kids. Jasmine's text in her emails was always perfectly punctuated, but there was one typo and a slipped comma in these. It was how I could tell she was excited. "We're taking it over from the inside! We're probably going to call the main boss, get some of the contributors to leave because they don't actually work anyway and I do half their articles, and shift around jobs. We're making it into a women's art magazine instead of this hoity-toity politic-y liberal bullshit crap that we've been peddling I'm so excited!!" It had been the first time in a long time she had been genuinely happy in her email, not chastising herself for being happy in spite of Gerard. I took it as a good sign.

The good mood she was in became even more extended in the next few days. While she was open about the plan she was forming with Meredith, she was coy with another one, at least, until it was done. She had been hinting that she had "something else on her mind, something that you, Frank, actually made me think about in a roundabout way. I'm being cryptic and I'm sorry, but this is all I'm going to say for now," she informed me, and I knew Jasmine well enough not to press. While we sometimes had several emails going at once, and it seemed as if we talked a lot, I began to realize that Jasmine's omissions in her texts were her own editing process. She spoke through her silences, too, and the only response I could give her was to wait.

I didn't have to do that long. One morning, soon after her timid remarks, she sent me an email. It was the only one that she had ever sent me where I had to stop and read it a few more times before it really sunk in what it said. "Gerard and I got married this morning. It was the only way to get him healthcare on my plan, since you two can't marry legally and all other paperwork says three people can't be married. We can talk about it later." I really didn't know what there was to talk about. Her explanation had made sense, and she was thinking ahead in a just-in-case scenario. She would be Gerard's significant other because I couldn't be. I got it and I understood, and I really did think I was fine until I went into the bathroom. It was still my hiding spot at work, and though it had taken me awhile, I had found one that was usually empty on the other side of the building. When inside, I realized I was shaking all over. I couldn't tell if I was happy or sad, and I decided a little of both. I was always in that middle area when I was at work, dealing with ambiguities. I was so happy that he would be covered, and that Jasmine and he were married. She even said in the email she was changing her name. "Bergen is my father's name. I don't want that anymore. I'm Jasmine Wyatt now." She had been telling me she was going to get her name changed for years. If this was the way she was going to do it, then great. It was not like I had any big plans of seeing her with my last name. No, not at all. It made me ridiculously happy that it was Gerard's, actually. But the fact that I couldn't his last name, too? That was what was killing me. That was why I was shaking. Because even though he had meant everything to me, legally, I would look like nothing more than prior jailbait.

But I was everything, I told myself in the bathroom stall. I was everything. That was the one thing I couldn't let myself forget.

When I got back to my desk, I sent her a response of "Of course" back and then began to shake again.

When I got home that night, Jasmine was already there. She and Gerard were at the table and rose when I came inside. Jasmine was wearing white, but it was unintentional. It was one of her old short dresses that now looked more like a long shirt with her stomach bulging it out. She also had the white cardigan that I had gotten her, with the flowers all over the back of it, draped across her shoulders. She was wearing black pants, and Gerard too was dressed in all black. He was wearing his dove jacket. It still hand handprints on the back of it from our night painting the mural, but I figured he may have either taken it off when they got married, or had covered them up so they wouldn't raise too many eyebrows in city-hall. It hurt, seeing him wearing that jacket and having their marriage license in front of them. I got a drink from the kitchen and we all sat down together. They showed me the marriage license in more detail and I smiled and congratulated them both as best I could.

Jasmine asked, "Do you want to talk about it at all?"

I looked at Gerard and he stared down at the official looking piece of paper. He kind of furrowed his brow and scratched his head. He was not trying to remember - this was just how he acted when he felt awkward. He was quiet, and eventually, when I said I was fine but that I really wanted dinner, Jasmine excused herself.

"We already ate, but can I borrow you, Gerard, for a minute?" she asked, turning her attention toward him. He put the license on the table and nodded to Jasmine. I thought he was going to just get up and leave with her, so I got up as well and began to grab some food out of a Tupperware container in the fridge. Instead, Gerard came over to me, approaching me from behind as I was at the counter. He touched my head and seemed to breathe in my hair. He leaned down close to my ear and whispered, "My dove," before he went upstairs.

As I placed my food in the microwave, I vaguely wondered if they were going to consummate their marriage, but I didn't think so. Maybe they had done so earlier in the day (it almost looked as if Jasmine had barely gone to work - the leftovers in the fridge were from a restaurant she liked to go to, and there was enough for her and Gerard; clearly their wedding feast). After grabbing my food, I sat at the table and studied the license a little closer, only to notice that the witness they had was Vivian. I felt a little hurt; not only couldn't I be a part of the ceremony, I had been knocked out of the license all together as witness. I was glad the marriage happened, but I still kept trying to find my place in all of this. I had a feeling some of this was Vivian's idea, always the pragmatic thinker, and I debated calling her just to talk to someone who loved Gerard the way I did but who could not be married to him now, but I didn't. I finished up my meal and put the dishes in the sink. I went to my room to look around. Jasmine and Gerard were still upstairs, still busy and still encroaching on my time alone with him. I could hear them moving around and talking lowly to one another.

Something that Gerard had said to me though struck me particularly hard just then. He called me his dove; something he had stopped doing a while ago. We were both doves, he told me. We were both equally independent from one another and both in need of learning. Even at the house warming party, when he had called me his dove, he had done so in a reciprocal fashion. I was to be taking care of him, and he was to be taking care of me. We were both doves, in need of learning and in need of care. No one was keeping anyone anymore. The memory was colored with pain and hindsight, but I pushed those reflections away. I thought of other doves, practical and real doves, and I began to tear through my room trying to find the wooden dove box that he had given me on the night of his show. I found it in a draw with my camera supplies, and the photos of us that were inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe. I looked through those and then I held the tiny wooden box in my hand just to feel its weight.

I had thought he was proposing to me that night. It certainly looked like a ring box, and the message inside the dove's claws could have easily been "Will you marry me?" I remembered how elated and horrified that option had made me. We weren't the type to get married, even if we could have been legally. We used to laugh at the idea of gay marriage when we were in Paris because who cared? You were together if you wanted to be. You were together because you chose to be. Once you added the legal dimension to it, it became too much of an ordeal. Then there was the pageantry of the wedding; as much as he liked spectacles, drama, and plays, the idea of a wedding was too much for him. It was a waste of time and resources. Why couldn't we just have a giant painting party? I laughed as I thought about that. We did have a giant painting party. The house warming party was the one time we had that many people over to our house, and we couldn't even do that normally. It felt good to be so different then, because we were surrounded by as many people who were that different and unique as well. It was powerful. We didn't need the system that excluded us then, because we had created our own. In Paris, in the mornings when we had talked about getting married, we had pushed it aside because we were so much better than that. I wanted us to still be that way, because I was still convinced we were.

I held the box in my hand this time around and felt weak. Very, very weak. We laughed at gay marriage and I had never wanted to marry him (but then again, maybe I did and that was where this inexplicable sadness had come from), and I knew that he would have never gotten married unless he had to. It was the same for Jasmine, too, only instead of the legal weight holding her back, it was the ethical and family history element to her story that made marriage make no sense to her. Even with all of that, we still found ourselves in this circumstance.

It hurt me so much that she had to be the one to jump in and save him. It made me furious that even though we had laughed at gay marriage all these years, I still wanted it. I really did. I wanted it right now so I could be that person. It was restricting and condoning when we had looked at it before, but we had not considered all the benefits of it. By allowing gay marriage, yes, it made us like everyone else, but for the first time ever, we needed to be like everyone else. We needed that healthcare. Everyone had a body, I realized, and that meant that one day it would break down. I couldn't believe that this country did not have healthcare. It was a distant outrage before, but now I felt it so deeply in my throat and in my chest that it made me disgusted. I hated this country for not supporting artists, for not supporting a basic human right. Gerard never had a regular job so he was never ever eligible for insurance through a workplace, let alone being able to pay for it on his own. Now we had to mop out way through this bureaucratic sludge and fake a marriage. But was it even a "fake" marriage? I heard Gerard's bed move and I heard the two of them laughing together. I thought I heard Paloma's name mentioned as well, and I realized that they loved each other. A lot. She had to be the one to save him, because that was just the way the rules were working for this game. She was the one on paper who had done it, and I knew that even she didn't want it to come to this. She hated marriage just as much as I did. She had taken his name because she hated her father more than she hated marriage and needed a reason to change it. I hated so many things in that very moment, so many things that were beyond her control. I wanted to be the one who saved him, like he had saved me, and I needed the whole world to change in order to make that happen. Or at least New Jersey. Outside of those mornings and days and afternoons and nights in Paris, New Jersey had been my whole world.

But they loved each other, I told myself. I could hear them laughing and talking and his bed moving a bit. They were probably just lying down and touching her stomach, possibly kissing. I wanted to be a fly on the wall in the room, just because I loved them both so much. I wanted to see how they interacted with one another. I saw it when all three of us were together, but that was so intense that it was hard to focus on their dynamics. I wanted to see if their relationship was similar to the one that Gerard and I had or not. I wanted to know if it was like being with Vivian for him, and that was why he liked it. He didn't really like women; Vivian had been the only one before this. And yet, in those instances where I did get a peripheral view of their relationship, he looked at Jasmine differently and he talked about her differently than Vivian. I didn't know if that was because Vivian was so long in the past, or what was going on there. I went back to my urge of wanting to be a fly on the wall, but I settled for listening. I knew Jasmine loved him, and that she felt she had done the right thing. She was thinking ahead to just in case something really bad happened. She was practical and she also wanted that sense of security. She needed to know that he would be taken care of. I was okay letting go, to a certain degree, and having that unreliability. I was used to my existence not really making much sense in the face of everything else. She wasn't, and he was too important to her to do the same.

So, they were married, I told myself. I didn't need to talk about it, because I understood it perfectly. I wished for things to be different, but if the world was really in my hands like that, then I would have just not made him sick. But I didn't have that luxury, no one ever did. What I did have to comfort me was the dove box. The small box that I thought could contain a ring, a band of gold that was mined by children and too overpriced, but instead contained a wooden dove with a scroll. He had proposed to me first, I told myself. This was our wedding band. This was our gold plated ring together, bonding us, showing the world how much we meant to one another and always would mean.

I opened it up and took the dove out. I held the tiny carved creature in my hand and looked at it with a smile. His voice repeated in my ear, the gentle sound of my dove past his lips. I undid the scroll, forgetting what he had written on it. It didn't seem to matter with how symbolic the dove was. When I read his tiny handwriting though, I nearly threw up from so much emotion. He had written - of course he had - I Will Never Forget You. I clutched the dove and its box to my chest and nearly burst into tears. This was his proposal, his promise to me. It was a promise that would last forever, and never, ever break. Or at least, it was one that he would try to control the most. He had married Jasmine in the physical world, but he had told me through other means that we would always be together in his mind. In his precarious and ever-slipping mind, we were always going to be there.

I started crying again. My emotions had actually even pretty dead for some time and I had been relieved. I didn't like crying. Snot got everywhere and it just made me feel awful; even weaker than I already felt. But these were good tears, liberated tears, which soon turned into melancholia and sadness. He had given this to me at his art show. This was more than just him proclaiming his love to me before he got his fifteen minutes of fame. He must have known he was sick all the way back then. That was months ago. His paintings came back to me in a blur and I recalled the one that was the center of the show, the one that he told Vivian specifically not to sell, - the one entitled I Remember Everything. He knew, I told myself. He knew he was losing it, but it was all coming back in the same way that had been happening this entire month, only now we were all aware of what we were witnessing. It was like gold, and he had even used gold in that painting. He knew how precious this was, and I knew more than ever that this dove had been my marriage proposal. And I had accepted it, as I always accepted him, even when I was never quite sure what had been going through his head. But he had been trying to show me it all along, trying to see if I could pick up on his eccentricities and expand on them. His memories weren't this huge gray area, I corrected my prior assumption. It was more than that, more beautiful than that. It would come back to him in moments of lucidity and clarity, and then he would paint and remember for that day. And then wake up the next morning, maybe, and forget that it all had happened. He would sometimes tell me that he didn't know how he painted that or could not believe that a piece was his. I thought it was a remark on skill. It was a remark on memory. I had only worked before to replay conversations that I had had with him in order to realize the bad parts of forgetting, to understand that he had been foggy and unclear. I had not considered his art as a sense and perception of his memory or his forgetfulness. But it was. Of course it was. This was how he interpreted his daily world. If his daily world suddenly involved being unsure where he was, then of course it was going to leak into his work. I looked back down at the dove, and realized he never wanted to forget me as a marriage vow, and as one that he may not ever be able to control. But he would try in his daily life. He would try. And he had always been dedicated to making it beautiful.

I was overwhelmed with positive emotion, but as my tears began to dwindle away, anger replaced them. I was mad at the world for doing this to him, but I was also mad at him. I had been praying for ignorance to last a little longer, for Hilda to not ruin it all when she did, but that praying for ignorance was pointless. He knew. He knew all this time. He was in denial and scared shitless to say it out loud, but it manifested itself in his work. How long had he been painting his memories away and his anxiety? Since we got back? Since Paris? In the letters he wrote me just after he left? Was that why he left? How long had he known he was getting sicker and sicker and still stayed away from me? And still pretended that nothing was wrong? Everything he had said before began to fall around me and I just couldn't take it anymore. I thought of Lolita again, even though I had already finished it and devoured it and was disgusted by it. How unreliable was he, how far back did this spread? I held the dove close to me, even in spite of my anger, because it was all I had. And I had already accepted it. I was married to him, and I had a duty.

I took a few deep breaths and practiced what Lydia had taught us all to try and tame the overwhelming feelings inside of me.

I heard Jasmine come back down the stairs and then go into her office below me. I waited a few moments, and then eventually moved towards the stairs, knowing that I needed to speak with him and I didn't care if he was too tired. I knocked softly, the door open a quarter of the way, and he said to come in. He was still fully dressed from before, his shirt un-tucked a bit, but it was clear that he had not taken it off. They had not had sex, though her scent and presence filled the room. Gerard was sitting on his stool again, in front of his bookshelf, looking through its contents. I clasped the dove box in my hand so hard one of the corners dented and almost broke my skin. I was mad at him, but seeing him in person made it quell within me. I sat on his unmade bed so I could see his profile. He smiled at me, briefly, and went back to looking.

"So," I started meekly. "You're married now."

He sighed and then rolled his eyes. "It made sense."

I nodded. "Are you happy about it?"

He stopped browsing the shelves and considered this for a minute. "About the real reason - so I can be covered for healthcare? No, I hate that reason. It's ridiculous."

"Then why do it? Why not just risk it and hope for the best like we had been planning on doing?"

"Because that's not fair," he stated plainly. "That's not fair to anyone involved."

"What about you? Wouldn't you want to stick with your beliefs and not be married?"

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14