June - The Liars 5 страница

But our relationship had been there, and if someone found out about it, it was going to be interpreted by them and I had no control over that. Ever since that conversation with Mikey and he talked about nothing and everything just happening to you, it had stuck with me and I brought it around to this problem. Every time I thought about mentioning Gerard to The Professor, I would back off because of it. This whole issue was in the back of my mind all the time: pedophile, pedophilia, child abuse, monster. It sent a shiver up my spine and it made me want to vomit. That was not what happened to me and it was not fair that the world got to decide my fate like that. It was not fair that by reason alone, I was this person, but by emotion, I was that one. It was that nothing and everything paradox again, and I wanted out of it.

I had missed my stop in all of my thinking and I ended up in the middle of the downtown. I looked out the window, still knew where I was, and shrugged it off. Our house was still a good walking distance away, and it was nice outside. It had been nice this past week, and it always felt odd studying in the library while watching life bloom outside. I began to understand why the spring students were the more dedicated ones. It took a lot of energy to stay seated for hours at a time, watching the sun go across the sky, only to have it cloudy or rainy when I finally did step out. This was the first time I seemed to be catching a break, and as I got off the bus and started to walk, the sun beat down on me and calmed my rapid thoughts from before.

I was beginning to have doubts in The Professor's mindset and I was seeing those critical holes. I thought through our lessons on divorcing of emotion from reason, and though he spouted these two branches of ideology, I did not see him following through with it. I had caught him in one of his holes at the end of our session and he knew it. He was happy I had caught him. He was saying that life was life and that work was work, but my purpose in his life or his work was in that gray area. I was his student, but he wasn't being paid to teach me. So what was I? He had also confessed to me that felt emotion very strongly, but I didn't see how that was possible. Even when he talked about his wife, he ended up relating it to one of Shakespeare's tragedies, and then didn't remember what his wife's vows to him were. That didn't add up, especially when Gerard had talked about The Tempest, he had been quoting Miranda's line of 'Does thou love me?' and he remembered every single way to convey that delicate emotion. Though I was well aware of the similarities between this student/teacher situation and Gerard and myself, I was still strong in my conviction that it would never amount of anything that intense or even remotely physical. We shook hands like men; we even talked and wandered around our feelings like most men. We boasted about family life and then about kids. The Professor was just asking me questions and teaching me about books and then showing me how to do this for myself. Gerard had done the same things, but I was convinced he had done it better. No one would do it better than him. I realised his faults, but that did not take away the experience. I would not let anyone take it away. I sighed heavily, upset that The Professor had gotten to me this much today, and tried to walk off my guilt and tried to understand what I was supposed to do next.

As I walked, I passed by Jasmine's old cafe and saw Hilda inside. At first I didn't even recognize her, her stomach was so visible and huge, it looked as if someone was holding a red backpack in front of themselves. I realized she was nearly nine months at this point and I slowed my pace as I walked by, taking a better look at her. Was this was Jasmine was coming to? She, too, had grown overnight and her already small frame was supporting this large belly. It had not become its own entity yet, much like Hilda's, but it would happen in a blink of an eye. It was already June. We just had to get through the summer, Jasmine and I - and Gerard - and then our baby would be born.

That was another thing that made us different, I told myself, as my thoughts about Gerard and the precarious nature of our relationship came back down on me. We were still together now. It could not have been pedophilia because he would not be interested in me now; he would have moved onto a younger person after me, but he had not. He loved me then and he loved me now. My body had aged and was very different than it had been at seventeen. Even then, seventeen was still pretty old. I was practically an adult; would those four months really have made that much of a difference? So what if Gerard had not waited those months? How much really changed? I grew up more having been with him; if we had started our relationship in spring rather than in winter, it really would not have mattered, because I would have still been immature and angry. And he was still attracted to me now, at twenty-six! I was consenting age and even the notion of a 'consenting age' was a purely constructed. They were words and rules that really meant nothing. I could argue this, now, I thought. I could use their own language against them. The whole paedophilic notion was fucking ridiculous in my situation. I knew it, I felt it, but now I could articulate bits and pieces of it in order to make sense. I felt a little better garnishing as many facts as I could, but it still didn't make me want to broadcast my new revelation from the tops of towers. I didn't think I was a liar, but I knew that other people would. It would still be a while, I figured, before they could see any other way. This made me sad, because I knew a beautiful thing like that should be shared. Not hidden away, kept in a basement or locked in an attic.

"Hey Frank," a voice called to me. Hilda was now sticking her head outside the door of the cafe, waving me over. "What are you doing around here?"

"Going home," I told her.

"Well, wait up for me. I'm going to come too," she said, and before I could answer she gathered her bag and the waddled her body out the doorway to meet me.

"I fucking hate being pregnant," she said, referring to how she was walking, her hips splayed, when we began. I had to slow down to accommodate her, though she noticed, and resented that fact.

"Not too much longer, though," I told her. Our conversation went quiet after that, and I lamented at how it had so quickly died. Hilda and I were not used to spending much time together alone and without Jasmine. Our views were too different, I had thought in the past, and there was also the fact that she was having sex with Jasmine. I still did not know what to do with that knowledge. It was okay, but at the same time, I found myself imaging what the two of them did together. Did they fist one another? Did Hilda do things better than I did them? Cassandra had been teasing me mercifully about giving me tips, and I had begun to consider consulting her with the amount of insecurity that I felt in Hilda's presence. She was a sex expert, to a certain degree. She held workshops, wrote columns in magazines, and she lectured. She literally was giving her "tips" to a roomful of people and getting paid for it. If she made her living teaching sex, I began to wonder where the divide between work and life was for her. I began to wonder about her own meaning of life and how she positioned things. I already knew that Hilda and I didn't have a lot in common because we saw the same things different ways. But I wondered, as we walked and waddled, if I could use the Socratic Method so we would both know nothing by the end of it.

I had no idea how to start things off, so I began with the topic that had been lurking in the background of my mind for most of the afternoon. "How much do you know about Gerard and myself?"

Hilda seemed a bit struck by the question, but she played along. "You mean like before you and Jasmine and the whole baby ordeal?"

I nodded. "Do you know about when I was seventeen? When I first met Jasmine?"

Hilda laughed a bit. "I guess I should have figured that you weren't going to talk to me about the weather or pregnancy. But, yes. I do know about it."

"What do you think about it?"

"Why do you ask, Frank? Was someone giving you shit about it?"

" Should someone give me shit about it?"

"Since when did we become four and decide that the question game is the best thing ever?"

I sighed. I should have known that Hilda would not be into this type of tired routine. "It's the Socratic Method. I don't know. I learned about it today from this professor that I'm seeing."

"Seeing-seeing? Like doin' it on the side?"

I shook my head and upper lip twitched. "Oh god no."

"Why are you repulsed by that notion? Isn't that what you had with Gerard?"

"No."

"What did you have with Gerard then?" she paused. We were at a NO WALK sign and the heat was making her tired, in addition to carrying around another person in front of her. She blocked the sun with her hand and turned to me. "That is, if I can ask that question."

"Yes, you can ask it," I relented. Though I wanted to say 'everything' to answer Hilda's question, I knew that wasn't enough of a response. When everything somehow became not quite enough, I didn't know, but it made me feel feeble and weak standing there, trying to think of something, but finding nothing. It made it sound and feel like pedophilia all over again.

We began to walk across the street. The sun was setting in front of us and the glare was almost blinding. I felt like we were walking on unknown terrain, like I had never carried my thoughts this far ever before. I was scaring myself, getting deep under my skin and trying to find where my experience ended and where language begun and then where other people's interpretation started to happen. I worried at what might be lurking around the corner, waiting to get us. I wondered where The Liars were, and I began to make them into art, for the hell of it, inside my mind.

"Look," Hilda started, realizing that I was not jumping in anytime soon. "I think something happened to you today. It rattled you and your perceptions on reality. I can't say what it is, because that's not my experience. But I can tell from the way you're acting that something is wrong. You can tell me what happened, or you cannot. Either way, I'm still going to be here."

It took me some time to gather my thoughts, pushing the sculptures of The Liars away, but eventually, I said, "I want to know what you think of Gerard and I."

"What does it matter?" she said. "You love him, right?"

I nodded, and then I felt completely overwhelmed. "I love him so much," I confessed. But was that really a confession? Who was I confessing to and what was I confessing for? For feeling something when I should have been critically thinking and analyzing the situation, or was I apologizing for liking the pedophilia? No, no. It was not pedophilia. Ever, no, never, never, it was not, it was not. I refused to believe it. But did that make my entire argument invalid, then?

Hilda stepped in. She put a hand on my back and we leaned against a wall, in the shade. "If you love him, and he loves you, then that's all that matters. If you loved him then, and he loved you, and it's consensual, then that's fine."

"But laws, logics, reasons..." I went off on a rant, but in tiny spurts of words until I finally came to, hidden and ashamed at the end: "Pedophile."

Hilda sighed. She took me over to a bench that was close by and we sat down. "Look, in my line of work, I've seen a lot of muddy consent issues. I've dealt with a lot of fucked up laws. I know, first hand, how the law is constructed and made to reflect the certain moral values of the time. It's not an actual fact, Frank. It's manipulation."

"So what's right and what's wrong? How can you know?" I asked.

"You can't. Every situation is different, and Frank, you prove that rule. You're not a victim. Stop thinking about yourself as one and be happy with your life. Especially now, especially when it's the past and it doesn't matter anymore. You're here with him now, as much as you can be. That's what matters. Don't downgrade any of the memories that you have of this just because something changes, or someone says you should feel a certain way about your life, especially when you don't."

I wanted to believe Hilda, but my emotions made things cloudy. What if when I looked at the situation, being outside of it, it began to not make sense? I was an unreliable narrator of my life. I obscured things at the exact same time that I tried to represent them. "How do I know anything, then?"

"You only can know yourself. Fuck everyone else. You are not lying because you are your only source. Just you, for you," Hilda stated, going directly against what I had just thought for the past hour.

"How can I know myself to be reliable?"

"Oh, fuck, Frank. Seriously? Seriously? You're going to play this game with me?"

"What game? We're having a discussion."

"No, we're having a battle of wills that doesn't make sense anymore. If you can't trust yourself and your own views, and what you know happened, then there's no point in leaving the goddamn house. There's no point in talking to others. You'll just be skeptical from the first word and words are not what is important here, for fuck's sake." Hilda sighed. She cursed me for running into a philosophy professor. "I hated kids like you in my undergrad. They get too caught up on things that don't really fucking matter."

"What matters then?"

" Jesus. Frank, I am going to slap you." She turned to me quickly, and then actually began to raise her hand as a warning. I flinched a bit, surprised at her outburst. She softened suddenly, and put down her hand on my shoulder. She moved it closer to my neck, and then touched the underside of my hair, and eventually, put her face close to mine. To my surprise, we kissed. It was chaste at first, but the aggression from before came out with Hilda's movements. She attached herself to my mouth and pulled me closer to her. To my own surprise, I went willingly. At first, I didn't understand how it had happened, then once it did, I was flooded with relief. My stress, tension, anxiety were all gone. All I felt was Hilda, and though she had intimidated me before, I needed her. I wanted her closer to me. I put my arm around her and pulled our bodies together to erase the distance between us. Her large and overwhelming stomach proved to be an issue, but I placed my hand there to steady us as our mouths kept meeting. She moved my hand from her stomach almost as soon as it got there, to put it on her breast instead. And then, we decided it was probably best we ended the affair. We were still in public, after all (though that probably proved to be more of a challenge than burden to Hilda). I was breathing heavily and when we opened our eyes and looked at one another, I was still not quite sure what had happened. I had no words to describe it. But I liked it.

"Well, that was fun," she stated. She leaned back on the bench and spread her arms out. Her arm extended behind my back as well, and I felt her fingertips brush my shoulder. She smirked at me. I still wasn't quite sure what to make of the whole situation, and I began to find myself thinking of Jasmine. Hilda's mind wandered there as well.

"The two of you are so similar," she started. "Man, it almost makes me sick. That was how I got Jasmine to be quiet when she and I first started having those deep and heavy conversations. We just kissed. It was quite beautiful, actually. I could tell that she was scared of me, somehow. Like I had all this experience and she had never been with a woman before. She kept asking what it was like, how it was different, all of the normal unfortunate bi-curious drivel. Instead of listening to anymore of it, or answering her, I figured I may as well show her." Hilda leaned forward and furrowed her brows. "It was a lot more consensual than I'm making it sound like. I asked her repeatedly if she was sure that she wanted to do this after we kissed and then she pretty much threw her body at me. She said yes, each time. So, well... you know by now."

I nodded. "How did you know?"

"Know what?"

"That it was consensual, that she really did mean yes?" I thought, if it was true that I could only know myself, and that was the only real authority, then how on earth could I even begin to have relationships with people? How on earth could I maintain something without being highly aware that it could all be lies and we were all nothing but liars?

Hilda shrugged. "How do you ever really know anything? How do I know that there are things on the other side of the world that I've never seen? Because someone else saw them and passed that information along, and after thinking a bit, it sounded good enough for me to believe it. But the same goes for feelings, Frank. For people, too. At some point, you just have to trust, and until your gut or experience tells you otherwise, keep that trust."

I wanted to argue about the nature of truth itself, on how her word 'gut' could have multiple interpretations and none of them were quite apt, but it was getting dark now. And she had been right; this was getting pointless. Hilda complained that she was getting tired and her feet hurt and I gave her my hand to help her up from the bench. She put her arm around me as we walked, and I realized, as we went back to my place and I spent the night with Hilda and with Jasmine, that we didn't need dialogues. I didn't need to prove that I existed or that she and Jasmine existed. I just needed to trust them. Hilda was real because I could feel her hand as I pulled her up. I could feel her mouth against mine and my hand was on her breast. She knew I was real because she could feel my hand on her breast. Everything else was just words. What mattered was in between them, in the gray areas. This was where the dividing line was, I realized. There was none. There were only subjects and contexts, objects and positions, interpretations, and thoughts with mingled feelings. What mattered was what I thought, what I knew, what I felt when another person touched me. And though it was allowed to change, it was mine to interpret. It was mine, everything, every last bit of it.

Chapter Three

The week leading up to seeing The Professor again was long. A few days after Hilda and I had our conversation, a heat wave broke down everyone's defenses and seemed to stretch on the longest days of the year. Instead of spending my time at the library in sweltering heat, I decided to spend my evenings with Hilda and Jasmine, the two of them now having a hold over me. I was more lenient with Hilda than I had been in the past. I began to realize that previously, we had treated one another and interacted like men. We nodded and shook hands and never really spoke to one another on a deeper level until my failed attempt at the Socratic Method with her. After she had kissed me, we broke down whatever gender barrier there was between us. Now Hilda, Jasmine, and I all became good friends, and after Jasmine would have her time with Gerard in the evening, the three of us would stay up late together in the kitchen. As the heat rolled through there seemed to be endless glasses of lemonade and ice tea as we all talked together, and all tried to figure out what was happening to us this month. Apparently, it wasn't just me that was having a hard time coping through this. While Hilda was convinced it was just the heat and the longest days making us all so paranoid, Jasmine was more evasive with what was bothering her. Their pregnancies and how their bodies were changing took over their minds and seemed to be the thrust of their issues, while my thoughts were more focused on the interior debate I was still trying to sort through. I had begun to put back together all of the fractures that had happened to me recently. My thoughts were so convoluted at this point, it had all begun to feel like a kind of abstract painting, a Jackson Pollock piece.

"Or like a collage," Jasmine had suggested. Both she and Hilda had a massive collection of zines and Hilda brought hers over that night in question. She was convinced that if we had something to do with our hands, we would reach a cathartic point. The two of them went through all of these cut and paste archives and began to talk about how a culture of anxiety produced these fractured forms and opinions, as they tried to make their own. At this point, they had already sat through my long-winded talks on what had happened recently with The Professor, and what place he had in the grand scheme of things. They had needed a break that night from all of our complaining.

"This is just the problem with having too much theory and too much knowledge at your fingertips. There are too many ways to go, too many directions to think in. You end up cutting yourself up, quite literally, into these little pieces of paper," Hilda was saying, and Jasmine nodded, agreeing with her vehemently. Jasmine talked about how she used to speak out loud to form her essays, but now she was cutting up magazines and pasting them in different ways in order to deal with her job.

She and Meredith, the former editor she had replaced, had gone beyond their planning their take over within the system they were stuck in (Mouth Magazine), and were now discussing how the work system as a whole treated pregnant people. All of this discussion resulted in the latest issue, which Meredith did a guest spot on, called Offspring and Offsprung. Jasmine's goal had been to document varying accounts of motherhood and parenting, then to squash some former misconceptions. No doubt, when I asked her what she was contributing, she discussed her article called "Vocabulary" which she dealt with the distinct of pregnant people as the referent, and not pregnant woman. The issue didn't just relate to pregnancy and birth, but to the metaphors we use birth for. As an underlying theme, (Jasmine was big on those "shadow works") she wanted to talk about the ideas that we carry within us and how they become pregnant in a way. We gestate as we form opinions, and when we finally write them down, it could be painful; it was a birth. Some ideas even formed abject positions within us, and they made our body a slave to our minds, in such a way that we would bend our bodies differently in order to fit into small spaces. The issue theme was not well received by her many staff writers, who were not pregnant and not parents and didn't have particularly good ideas, so it involved a lot of work on her part. Like my library trips (which I did end up returning to, but for not as long, and mostly to take advantage of the air conditioned environment), it was become too long and tedious going through all of this... stuff. Information, facts, articles, statistics and archives.

"I'm dealing with too much news, all the time now. Ever since Lydia's article on gold, I have been researching and changing how I thought about things. I'm fucking appalled by some of what I've read," she confessed to us. She began to elaborate on how it felt as if bodies were being pulled apart, literally and figuratively, to make a point within the mainstream media. She was getting too many images and too many news stories, like I was getting too much theory and criticism. Hilda, on the other hand, was just too hot and too fat. But at least she was coherent enough to know that we needed to move beyond ourselves and just do something at this point. Jasmine and Hilda dealt with this inferiority by cutting it (whatever it was) up and trying to put it back together again through these zines. I wasn't sure how I could deal with it yet. I played along with them, and began to feel more at home when Hilda took up the lecturing position within our little discussion and cultural group. She brought up William Burroughs and Bryon Gynsin and we learned through their cut-up technique one night. We began to dismantle the images and messages we were getting and tried to find our voices within the words that were not spoken. I didn't like it, though. It still felt like I was doing something wrong, like I was missing the point.

"That is the point," Hilda reminded us. "You're not supposed to find it all. You're never going to find it all. We live in a trauma culture. It's almost impossible to form a narrative without it getting cut in some manner now or becoming fragmented in some way. We walk outside and there are lights and noises and car horns and people galore that we've never seen before and who could kill us because the newspaper and the news station has told us that people kill people. This is stuff we've never been exposed to before in this amount. Our language is not capable of keeping up with it, and now there is no cohesion in our lives. Either you're invisible within this story now or you're violently represented."

I thought of Madame Bovary, and how it had been chopped up by critics and how my own story, my own personal story that I had thought was mine alone, was now being dissected and manipulated. Hilda was right, language could not keep up. I could think of no arguments against that and I didn't know how to deal with this fragmentation on an emotional level. Though Jasmine and Hilda found some strength in zines, it was not my thing. I didn't like taking the same tools that were being used against me, just like Lydia had said. I didn't like using the same words and then feeling as if I was victim to them. Words weren't the real things; that much I could still agree with from The Professor, and I thought that Hilda's exercise in cut ups had furthered that point entirely. They categorized with new categories, merely forming a new hierarchy through subversion, but I didn't want to do that anymore. While they worked until three am one morning, cutting up every last issue of Mouth Magazine Jasmine had edited and then rearranging it and laughing hysterically at the results, I decided to abandon the whole project all together.

I sent an email to The Professor as soon as I got into work the next morning, informing him I was not cut out for the academic realm of philosophical discourse. I apologized and thanked him profusely for the invitation, but I didn't need to go to his house. "This idea of not knowing anything for sure makes me feel uncomfortable. I know I'm probably not cut out for this, then, since it won't ever mean anything," I had explained the best I could. I felt strange, trying to use the big words that he had told me about and I had read about, while I typed an email in a business job. I scratched my head a few times, almost wishing I had a beard like him. I breathed heavily, wondering how much of myself I wanted to expose. "I don't think I can represent things as they are, at least, in the way that Plato wants in The Republic. I'm a photographer, first and foremost, and even though that's not a poet, I know that I would be considered a liar. I don't really want to be a liar, so I don't think I'm cut out for this. I thought I was being honest before, and while I understand now that I may not be completely representing things the way they are be, I'm doing what I know to be right. Besides, I kind of like thinking with my emotions. They've gotten me this far, and I need to learn to trust them." I wondered if my half-academic discourse coupled with unsure art failure meandering made any sense, but then I figured he was pretty good at deciphering students jargon on an exam. I gulped hard as I hit the sent button, and I began to panic again when I saw his response come back to me in less than fifteen minutes. He must have been in his extremely messy office where he kept photos of his wife hidden in his desk, jittering from side to side with too much coffee, and not in a class like I had anticipated.

"Don't panic. That's lesson number one, Frank. And - please - perhaps I was not making myself clear before...." the email began. I could still see his characteristic hand movements in the way he typed. He was full of short sentences with little to no paragraph breaks, long ellipses and dashes. It made me feel like he was here, and like I wasn't at work. I was surprised at how much his presence through the screen eased my tension, similar to the way Jasmine and Mikey often did. "All I meant was that knowledge was a construction. What society thinks of as truth is not real. Knowledge that is branded as the only source of pure reason must be questioned. Something that is also declared not-knowledge must also be questioned. They are the same thing - really - they are. You must reject absolutes because nothing can be pure. Not now, anyway. Our society knows too much now. It will never be ideal in the way that Plato talks about it. We have become too jaded with all that we now know. Irony! But seriously, now. Representing things as they are would actually damage those things. Why do you think my wife likes Macbeth? It is not because it us as we really are. But there is something there, lurking in the back of that play, which she perceives as truth. And so, while we don't actually kill for one another, we do love one another. That is all I meant. Sorry if I confused you. But don't panic! I promise you're on the right track. Save The Republic for me to summarize when you get here, but keep reading Plato. Read about that love that lurks behind those things, and try to find that instead. Besides, Aristotle ripped to shreds Plato's argument on poets...but you don't need to worry. Anyway. Would still love to have you for dinner..."

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14