June - The Liars 11 страница

"A child is a child, though," Jasmine countered, and then told them the condensed version of the pregnant person vs. pregnant woman debate. My mom nodded politely, but my dad shifted in his seat.

"Have you thought of any names, yet?" my mom asked. She had grabbed a baby name book, just in case, and even though we had said we were pretty set on Paloma, she gave us the name book anyway. "You know, for middle names."

"What's Paloma?" my father asked, and when I told him it meant dove, he nodded. He didn't say anything else after that, but I knew from his nod that he knew what it was from. He knew why it was important, and he left it alone.

They asked Jasmine and I a few more questions, gave us leftovers to take home, and then we gave them an ultrasound photo I was still carrying around in my pocket and left. One group of people had been visited and taken care of and it had gone better than I thought. There was no animosity and bad blood between anyone, even when we told them where we were headed. So long as we were back for the due date, and they got to meet their granddaughter, they seemed relieved. I had thanked my father for the money when I had shaken his hand goodbye, and he had merely nodded. "You need it, you're a father," was all he had said, and though I had hated the connotations of father in the past, I began to warm up to it then.

"Would you mind, maybe, if I let Paloma call me dad?" I had asked on the way home. I squeezed Jasmine's hand, and though it was dark, I could tell her face was scrunched up. "Or maybe Dad Frank, something like that, so they still know who I am and we can still do things differently?"

While we had been at my parents' place, they had told us their names; I had guessed correctly with grandma and grandpa, but now I wasn't so sure I was getting things right.

"Let's think about it for a little while, okay?" was all Jasmine had said, and I nodded. It had been a big night, we needed to take a step back from those matters.

The rest of the month was spent getting our jobs straightened out and Jasmine getting Lydia's approval. While she was at the birthing center getting her last physical for a while, she heard from Lydia that Hilda had delivered a healthy baby boy and was still in recovery at the hospital. We considered going to see her, but the day that we took deciding was the day that she left. When Jasmine called the room, she got nothing, and then when she called Brian, he said she already had a gig to go to and was gone. Hilda was apparently now lecturing on c-sections and had spent her day after in the hospital writing her lecture for Syracuse. Jasmine was disappointed, for sure, but we didn't talk about it. I was sure that we would have lots of time soon. Daniel called us on and off, arranging ways for us to get there. We were carpooling with someone on the first of July who would pick us up early in the morning and the community we were going to was called The Bear. This was all we knew so far, and the name hit me hard. I thought of what Alexa had told me about Gerard's name meaning big brave bear, but I pushed it out of my head. I would have time to deal with that soon.

Mikey's office was extremely understanding about my going away. Mikey had worked out a deal for me to use my vacation time for the trip, and then manage the time off as my sick days if I chose to stay longer. I doubted that our expedition would last more than two weeks, but I wasn't too sure of anything anymore.

When I was packing, I found myself replaying the stories that people had told me recently, especially the one about Chris McCandless and the idealized way of life living off the land and leaving the city behind. I understood why communes like the one we were going to existed, but they had always seemed too far out of reach. Now that Jasmine had loaned me the book about Chris and her collection of Thoreau and Emerson, I found myself buying into the fantasy because I knew it was soon about to become real for me. I spent the nights reading about civil disobedience and how to portage a canoe in front of my mural, sometimes with my camera and a small cold cup of decaf coffee. If I wasn't doing that, I was packing and listening to protest songs that Jasmine had also given me, or I was spending those final nights with the big brave bear himself, Gerard. We had not told him anything about our plan yet, mostly because we still needed to find a place for him to stay while we were gone. Mikey and Alexa had too much on their hands already with five kids, though they were very supportive of the trip as a whole. Alexa had tried to pull me in for dinner before I left, claiming she needed to show me another card, that she knew this perfect card to represent my journey, but I had not had the time. Jasmine and I both knew that would have been unfair to move Gerard into their house or to make them come to ours in order to take care of him. Placing Gerard in any unfamiliar circumstance right now was wrong; we knew that his condition had probably been exacerbated by our move to begin with. I didn't like to think about it, but it was growing fairly obvious to me that this had been a constant issue with him, and had probably begun in Paris. There was no way it could have progressed the way it had unless it had been underlying for years, and he had figured out small ways of managing it. Environment was one of those triggers and any place that wasn't already embedded into his long-term memory was going to make his condition worse. It would be too disorienting to him to put him someplace new, but we couldn't make anyone stay in our place while we were gone. We were going to have to move him, and the only feasible place and persons seemed to be Vivian.

Jasmine had done most of the organizing with Daniel, so I knew the onus fell on me to call Vivian. I did not relish doing this, especially since we had barely spoken in two months. I called her and tried to make small talk, but she saw through it right away.

"You were never one for 'how are you,' Frank. Neither was he. So what do you want?"

I sighed, hearing her even mention Gerard in passing made her voice quake with emotion. "I need to ask you a favour."

Vivian said she figured, but wasn't willing to let me tell her over the connection. She insisted that I come over for dinner, and was not taking no for an answer, even when I told her it was fine. "You're the one going to be doing me a favour, remember?" I told her.

"Frank, you know I need you here as much as you need me," she stated soundly. "Now come on. After work, come by and we'll have Kraft dinner. Like we used to, remember?"

I couldn't argue with that. I let her win, and told her I couldn't wait to be over. I was lying, though. The sadness in her voice that she didn't bother to hide was the one that I had been hiding from. With a sigh, I sent Jasmine an email from my desk at work, and told her I wasn't going to be home for dinner. And then, I waited.

The house was empty when I got there. Apparently, Cassandra had been spending a lot of time with Noelle. Between her piano lessons and her girlfriend, she was not leaving very much time for her mother. Apparently Callie and Dean had also been off in their own little world, now that they were romantically involved. It was also the summer for them; without the regular functioning of classes and specific due dates, the student part of their identity had crumbled away. They were still working for Vivian as research assistants in order to pay bills, but they worked from home. They were transcribing letters from a collection, in addition to fact-checking a pile of Vivian's papers that she was going to get published soon. They were still handing in the work on time, but they had lost that nervous air about themselves that graduate school seemed to provoke. They were no longer vying for Vivian's attention, now that they had one another's. Vivian was slightly bitter about it and said that it wouldn't last, but I knew she didn't mean it. She said the same thing about Cassandra and Noelle, too, but from what she was telling me about their engagements, I knew this to be false, too. Cassandra was getting involved with the student committee that was trying to save their school. She was craving permanence, and I knew that from there, she would crave love from Noelle. I could see the two of them lasting, at least within the walls of high school. Vivian told me all about the relationships around her that were changing right before her eyes as the water boiled for the pasta. She missed having us in her basement, she told me as she concluded her ramblings. She placed the bowls of food in front of us, and I took that as an excellent opportunity to bring up my subject.

"So, Jasmine and I are leaving for a while. Not long, I promise, not long," I started. My appetite had diminished and I became more concerned with moving my hands just right to convey my sincerity. Vivian had frozen, before even taking a bite, jagged like a statue.

"It better not be long. She's going to give birth soon, and no one else is allowed to go," Vivian stated. It was hard to tell whether or not she was joking. Normally, I would have read her comment as her normal sass, but she had changed. She had insisted that it was the people around her who had changed, but I knew it was really Vivian, at the center of all of this, letting herself chip away.

Gerard's illness was destroying her. She was mourning him day and night, and had barely touched the reality of her own life within her own house. She spent most of the time at work, trying to sell the rest of his pieces and trying to give talks about him in his place. No one wanted to hear about what she had to say, though, only what he did. And Gerard was becoming more and more solitary and speaking less and less. He was still there, still responded to us, but he was growing quieter each day. It was odd, and it hurt me just as much as it hurt her. We were both watching this loud, verbose man go to this quiet, old man who liked to draw. I had learned to appreciate his body, his presence, and him without using words. But Vivian was still stuck. The papers she was getting published were all about him, too, as if she was trying to recreate him out of paper and the words that he lacked. She still wanted to eat Kraft dinner and have everyone over for family dinners. She even wanted us to still live at our old apartment, as if that would reverse time, and maybe prompt his memory back. I considered that last option for longer than I should have, and immediately repelled back. This was just not the reality anymore, and I began to question whether or not this plan was faulty and whether or not I should go. I didn't think that having Gerard there would be a good plan for either of them.

"No, no," Vivian insisted when I began to express doubts. "No. I will be fine. I'm just working too much, ignore how bitter I am. You are married now. You and Jasmine deserve a break."

It struck me that she had said we were married, and it made me smile. It wasn't legal and it never needed to be for us. Being legal would involve too many people who didn't need to be there. But there had been a marriage, and there had been a ceremony, no matter how private. I looked down at my finger expecting to still see the gold paint. I told Vivian a bit about our three-way marriage, and she smiled. Lines at the side of her eyes broke and her eyes watered a bit. She did not cry, but she was moved.

"You two deserve the honeymoon, or whatever you want to call it. So yes, it's okay. Bring Gerard here."

"Are you sure?" I asked Vivian again slowly. I didn't want to get happy before I had a solid answer. Even though work had already cleared, Jasmine's doctors were good, and Daniel had our ride arranged, I didn't want to let myself get too far ahead. We were not there yet.

Vivian nodded. She took a sip of water. "Are you sure you're coming back, though?"

I furrowed my brows, wondering what on earth would make her ask something like that. Her eyes pleaded with me, and then I remembered the place where she still lived. Gerard had left her for seven years. I remembered our tear-filled conversations soon after he had; it all felt like years ago, it had taken place so far in my past. She loved Gerard the same way I loved him. She loved him too much. He had helped her raise her daughter and was there for her during some of the hardest times in her life. He was her surrogate husband and father figure for Cassandra, even if he had been a lackluster and absent one a lot of the time, and even though their physical relationship had long since ended. As soon as I came into the picture, though, he seemed to leave her side more permanently. He was with me. He had left for Paris. And then, coming back from Paris after leaving for seven years, he didn't really rebuild their relationship. He had gotten famous through her, but that had been it. We had lived in her basement, but he was still with me. He was then with Jasmine, and then, all of a sudden, quicker than any of us expected, we were no longer living in her basement but in a house all on our own and this baby was coming into our lives. He had voted her out. Like Alexa had said, the power had never resided in the four of us; it had always been the three.

But where did that leave Vivian, who had been dedicating her life to thinking that it was the four? How often had Alexa told her that, only to change her mind? How often in those seven years had Vivian told herself a story to keep herself going, to keep herself from missing Gerard? Her whole life was missing Gerard. Now that he was back, he was gone again, and now, he was fading faster than ever. So of course she wanted him to come and stay with her, even if it seemed to tear her up inside when she thought about it. He had been all she had ever known, ever since meeting in art school so long ago now, he had consumed her world. I used to envy her having known him for about as long as I had been alive, but there in her kitchen, I realized that it was just that many more years to uproot. It was that many more years to grieve. His love for her had also been diluted in a way I had ignored before, because I didn't think it was possible. Though he was coming to live with her again, it was a different type of relationship because he would be dependent on her. He had never been just hers the way he had been and was mine. Maybe he had been in the past, I countered, but I didn't know. All I could see was this hole inside of Vivian that had not been filled. It was getting deeper and deeper as time went on. I didn't want to add to it.

"Of course I'm coming back," I told her. I slid my hands across the table in an attempt to show how serious I was. "I wouldn't leave, Viv. Not without telling you. I'm sorry I haven't been around for a while..."

"No, you're not, Frank. You're not sorry you haven't been around, you're sorry I'm like this because of it. You wanted to stay away. Just accept that. I don't need your pity," she said. She let me hold her hand, but she didn't squeeze back. She sat straight ahead and took another drink."Do you think his life was magical?"

I didn't know what she was asking. She said it angrily, like an accusation. I thought the correct response was yes, and that was what I told her. Of course his life was magical. He was an artist. It was a life well lived. I was sure of it, and I told her as such. Her face crumpled and she clucked her tongue.

"No, Frank. It was a selfish fucking life. Seven years he was gone. Seven years he cut out the most important people from his life. And that includes you, don't you fucking forget it. He cut you out just as much as he cut me out. Seven years he was gone, and for what? It was wasted. Just fucking wasted. Seven years that we could have had with him if he had not have been so selfish. He knew he was sick, he had to have known. But he stayed for seven more years, and they are seven more he is going to forget." She gasped, and then covered her mouth. She started to crying, finally admitting the fact of his forgetting out loud to us. I started to get choked up too, but I was too upset and angry at her verbal criticism of a man that she loved so deeply.

"He came back, though, Vivian. He came back. It was not a wasted life, and he needed to do what he did," I tried to explain, but she was not moved.

"You don't know everything. All you know is what happened when you showed up. But before then? He would have never gone off and done that. He was worse off, emotionally. Fuck he spent most of his life drinking, bitching, and moaning. And fucking me, though he insisted that he was gay and that we were not together. I hated him a little bit for that, but I knew that I loved him and I tolerated his drunken self because he stayed. He fucking stayed, Frank. At least I could count on him."

"But he was miserable. You just said it. Things changed when I got here. We made our lives worth living."

"It's not that black and white, Frank. You can't just walk around and do whatever you what. That's how people get hurt. That's how I got hurt." She sobbed again, pushing all her dishes and half finished food away from herself. Then mumbled something about how, "Now he won't even remember that he has hurt me, and I can't even be mad at him. I can't be mad. Anymore. No more being mad."

I touched Vivian's shoulder, trying to show sympathy. "Being mad takes up too much energy," I told her. It felt odd, trying to comfort the one person who had tried to shape me and given me lessons as well as him. She had been so strong months ago; she had always been strong since the first time I met her when I walked in on her naked on his couch. I wondered if I would ever reach the point she was at, knowing the fate of Gerard eventually. I focused on the now: "What's done is done."

"I know, Frank. That's exactly it. It's all over now. He's practically dead."

"But he's not dead, Viv. Don't think like that. It's not right. You'll see, when he comes to stay, if you still want him too..."

"Yes, I do. Maybe you're right about that, Frank. Maybe he's okay still. Maybe things can be good between us again." She began to sit up again and straightened herself out. "But don't forget what I'm telling you, Frank."

"What?"
"Don't romanticize his life, and especially not his death whenever it does come. He was human like me and you. He made a lot of fucking mistakes. He was not perfect, but I loved him anyway. I get that, and I know you can probably get that too. But don't you dare do the same thing that he did to us. Don't you dare leave."

I grew quiet. I did not know how to plead my case anymore. This was what we needed to do, that was it. We would come back. We needed to go, but we would return. These two actions hinged upon one another, and I tried to explain that to Vivian. I brought up Chris and I brought up Socrates and tried to get her to see the difference between the two of them. She nodded, but it still never quite got through to her the same way it had for me. I could never articulate her sadness the same as I could articulate mine. We knew different versions of the same Gerard; even without his illness to exacerbate our different interpretations, he had always been unreliable. There had always been many versions of the person I loved, and not all of them were good. It was a horrible feeling talking about him the way we were, but I knew that I needed to accept that about him, even if it did feel as if I was erasing him even more.

"So, come back, Frank. Come back and prove Socrates wrong, and manage to escape death like Chris. Prove what you're telling me now. Bring him here and I will take care of him, but you come back," she told me. She had gained her composure again, though her eyes were red rimmed. She sat up straight and was now the one holding my hands across the table, pinning them down. Her stare had finally turned me into stone, and rendered me mute. This was the end of our discussion.

I tried to remember what book I had read about the defeat of Medusa in, what art piece it had been that had her head on a shield, but I gave up. There was no use mixing metaphors here, not anymore. Vivian had always preferred the more practical route. Instead I helped her clean up and gave her a few more pieces of information about the trip, but she nodded vaguely and wrote them down. As I got up to leave, her words repeated in my mind, and my body felt like rubble. There was a part of me, no matter how small, that wanted to never to return.

When I got home, Jasmine and Gerard were in the baby's room. Jasmine heard me coming up the stairs first, and stuck her head outside the door to signal for me to be quiet and ushered me into the room with a single hand motion. Gerard was painting; I could smell it even before I entered and I could hear the jazz music that was also coming from Jasmine's study. Gerard had his paints brought down and his stool from his room, which Jasmine was now sitting on. She whispered to me that he had wanted to do this all night when she came to sit with him, and after making sure he got something to eat, this was what they had done. For most of the evening he had been unresponsive and quiet, clearly in a mood. He kept asking for the "sky things" and then the "growing things" before he began to paint. He was good, other than a few miscommunications. His dexterity and skill was still there; it was an old habit to him. Sometimes he would pause, seeming to forget what color he wanted to use next, but then he got right back into it. He had drawn on the walls first and they looked to be all flowers; the "growing things". Jasmine watched in awe. There had been a storm earlier that night that had broken the heat wave, and in the chill of the night, Jasmine was wearing her floral cardigan. The jazz was something she had put on, reading somewhere that music actually helped Alzheimer patients' brain development. It seemed to be working. I took a seat on Paloma's bed, next to Jasmine in the stool, and we watched as Charlie Parker played on.

"I think he's painting irises," she said. For the first time since I had come into the room Gerard paused. I wondered how much he understood of what we were saying or if it was all gray noise to him. Was he pretending to not hear us so he didn't have to try and answer? Then again, I knew he did this ignoring technique when he was in art school or when I was around him. When he made art, especially when under the whim of inspiration, it was in a daydreaming blur and it took some pretty serious circumstances to pull him away. If we hadn't known about the forgetting disease that seemed to permeate our every thought, this display wouldn't have raised questions for us. In spite of the melancholy that awareness had to it, I was glad that we knew. We were there watching him, appreciating this artistic whim, because we did know. We didn't have a lot of time to watch something this beautiful happen, and it was nice to see him doing something that he loved.

He had paused when Jasmine mentioned irises, and though we waited for him to tell us something, he did not. He tilted his head to the side, then went back to painting. This seemed to be enough for us, as if his pause was a word in itself and he was communicating with his body. He was moving through each flower, now, adding color to each bloom. Only one was done so far, and it was a purple-y violent. He began to get yellow for the next one, and I was disappointed. I thought he was forgetting what color he was working with and that he was accidentally screwing up. But Jasmine, with her horticultural knowledge, corrected me.

"Irises can come in many colors. They're one of the most distinct and diverse. They come in every single color, you know, except for maybe black," she explained. She began to tell me more that she had learned from Lydia, and how these flowers were named after the Greek goddess of the rainbow because they were so diverse. Gerard paused again when she said it, and this time he turned around to face us, his yellow brush still in his hand. Our eyes met from across the room, and it was then that I noticed I had not taken a breath since Jasmine began to explain the flowers. I knew instantly what he had meant before when he had said "sky things" to Jasmine, and instantly what he was trying to do with the flowers he was painting then. He never wanted to forget the rainbow. These flowers, to him, were what he had been missing before.

I told Jasmine what sky things meant, and Gerard had nodded. He went back to painting, but I was still not quite done with this. Why hadn't he just looked at his canvas that he had done earlier, at the words and the meanings that we put on the wall for him? He had come down here with a purpose, I realized. This was an unfamiliar room to him and this was an odd thing for him to do. Sometimes when I saw him in the morning, I wondered if he even realized there was an entire house attached to his room, and that there were other things beyond it. It seemed that he did know, and he was lucid enough that night to realize this room was significant. I looked around at the seven or eight flowers he had drawn. In her room, in Paloma's room. He knew this was her room, I could tell from the way he had looked at Jasmine before he went back to work.

After finishing the yellow flower, the last one, he came over to us. His movements were so sudden and his change of focus so different that I couldn't help but flinch, and then worry. Was he getting aggressive? I had restricted myself from reading about the disease specifically because I had wanted to avoid making inferences like this one, especially since it was not true at all. It would never be true about Gerard. Violence or aggression seemed to be the first concepts that went out the window, years and years ago. He came over to us, slower now, and put his hand on Jasmine stomach, and kissed the side of my face.

And then I understood. He didn't want to forget the rainbow. It was contained in gardens, the flowers, and the fact that life went on. It was his art and Kandinsky's forms for colors, the sounds of jazz and synaesthesia. He didn't want to forget our daughter, the child that all three of us had made together. He didn't want us to forget the doves, either. He didn't want us to forget freedom.

I kissed him back, and I promised without words what he had just promised me.

The nights leading up to our leaving, with most of the nit-picky details done, we decided to spend as much time as possible together. The past few weeks had been so fast, and since most of our accomplishments had been intangible, it felt as if none of it had happened at all. I wanted to discover what felt real to me, what sent that bolt of lightning running through me. Jasmine was going to The Bear community to help herself feel that, and I knew that I would feel something there, too. But before I left, I needed to go to the first source. Gerard had always made that lightning bolt rip through me, and from that first jolt, had opened up the world. He made me feel so deeply by virtue of merely being alive. Even when he was sometimes not there fully, or he was quieter than I was used to him being, his presence was a strong enough sensation inside of me. His body fascinated me, his life (what I knew of it) enraptured me, and there was nothing that I wanted to do with him the nights leading up to leaving, other than do what we did best. I had done philosophy, one hundred years of feminism, and had heard the dialogues of veganism. We needed as much color and as much life in between us as possible before I left.

I would be coming back. I kept telling myself this and I kept reminding Vivian over and over again. We were coming back. This was not the last night that we would ever have together, nothing like the one we had seven year ago. This was just a friendly goodbye for a little while. But no matter how I dressed it up and told it to myself, it was still a lie. This time was like a last time, or it could very well be, because I didn't know which way his mind would slip. I told myself that I could stay with him and just Jasmine could go, but I couldn't do that either. I needed a break from him, as much as I loved him. I needed to forget too because I had been doing all of the remembering between us both.

I knew that spending the nights together and going over art would not be the same as it always was. He would remember his lessons and references, but only up to a certain point. He knew who we were talking about a lot of the time, but he was having a hard time placing it into a narrative structure. We pulled books out and read different parts out loud to one another, trying to recreate history from the Renaissance to Avante Garde. We depended on those books a lot between us, especially since I did not know enough about the art world as a whole. I could never give him the type of lessons he had given me, nor could I summarize all of this history in even one night of story-telling. That was not the goal, I told myself. Sometimes progress and recreation was not the goal, but maintenance and moderation. What did it matter if I never reached the Art Nouveau period and I couldn't convey the significance of Mucha to Gerard, nor him to me? It wasn't like we were staring at blank canvases all night. We had lots and lots to fill our world.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14