August - An Archive 2 страница

The tape recorder had been Jasmine's idea in the car; I figured I could just keep notes, but she shook her head. "People talk fast about the people they love, especially when they fear what they say. Or the person is dying... just trust me. Tape record it. You never know what you can do with it later." She had to set it up for me, and then quickly showed me how so I could mimic the process later on. I still had a piece of paper and pencil to jot down my own thought process, and I waited. I had no idea what I was doing, the idea was still too new, but I was following my feelings at this point. I just knew that I needed to talk to Jasmine. She seemed like the appropriate person to start with, since I had learned about archives from her. She was also, so far as I knew, the last painting that Gerard had ever done. She was six months pregnant in it, naked, and so radiant. I reminded her of that fact when she seemed uncomfortable and confessed that she did not know where to begin. She blushed as she remembered the painting and the times that she posed for it, and said she was ready. I clicked on the recorder.

"Why are you blushing? Was that a good experience, to be drawn by him?" I began.

She scrunched up her nose a bit, still dealing with embarrassment. She let out a sigh and went on. "Yes, absolutely yes. It was one of the best experiences I had ever had in my life. I had never felt more special, more..."
"Beautiful?"

"Yes, Frank, but shush, this is my story. I get to tell it."

I held my hands up in the air, and apologized. I kept my pencil ready to jot down the things I wanted to jump in with instead. As she spoke, I began to realize how similar I thought Jasmine and I were in relation to Gerard. He had asked to draw her too, and he had been doing nudes. She stood before him naked, but I didn't think she had quite the same back and forth dialogue that he and I had had years ago. And also, Jasmine was Jasmine. She was my age and very much like me, but I could tell that their relationship had formed very differently than my own. It had to. I needed to put my own reservations on hold and let her figure out what he meant to her instead of forcing my own narrative and comparing it with that. This was her story. I tried to be quiet and only butt in when I needed clarification.

"Okay, so where was I? Yes. Him drawing me. It was one of the best experiences I had ever had. His attention to detail and request that I pose didn't make me feel like an object. I've done a lot of work with feminism theories of objectification, probably too much, and I know a lot of the tactics that artists and producers have tried to use. For a long time it seemed like the only way a woman could get into the art gallery was if her clothing was off, and not as the artist. When I first met Gerard, years ago, when we were seventeen, if he had asked me to pose naked for him, I would have been appalled. I would have figured he was just like every single other pretentious artist out there."

"What changed?"

"I think I told you. It was that night after we were walking together from the jazz club and I found him on the street. It was the middle of the night and I just remember thinking, 'oh god, is he drunk? Is this all he and Frank do?' But he wasn't drunk. He looked a little confused, and you know, looking back, this could have been part of, you know...." She put her hand over her mouth, but the quickly tried to move on. "Anyway, he was friendly. Nice. We started talking and I felt something different than before. I can't describe it right now so don't ask me. I just knew that I wanted him to come inside my apartment. I told myself at the time it was to keep him warm."

"What did the two of you talk about?" I felt bad, prompting these questions, but Jasmine was filled with a lot of silences, and unlike my mother, I could not read them. I did not know if they were good or bad, or if this was something I needed to fill in the blanks myself with. She paused a lot though, forming her essay of Gerard out loud before the real coherence could come.

"That first night? Not much at all. Art. I can't really remember the conversation, but I remember it feeling like an actual conversation, not a debate or argument, which is what I always thought I would have with him. I remember telling him the stuff that I just told you about the naked women in art museums. There was a protest group called The Guerilla Girls who went into art museums and protested against that type of treatment. I told him that too, thinking that he would find it ridiculous, but he didn't. Even when I said that they actually dressed up in gorilla suits, he didn't write me off as being too overzealous in my claims. He didn't argue with me, but asked me to tell him more. He wanted to hear what I had to say."

"That couldn't have been new to you, though, with your line of work? You're smart, Jasmine. Lots of people want to know what you have to say."

She gave me a look, and I realized I still needed to work on being quiet. This was Gerard's archive, and Jasmine's story. I was the fly on the wall, the person in the middle. I wanted her to talk less about their first meeting, because there had already been so many meetings for them. Ever since I had met them both, the two of them would pass by one another and not really register in either framework. They were so close together, because of me, but they had known so little about one another on a more personal level and there was no connecting piece. They may as well have been strangers. But now, only a few months after that first strange meeting in the middle of the night, they were married. We were all in a relationship together, and it had been something that surprised me entirely. I thought back to that night together where we were all together, when we had been reciting poetry and moving into our house. When we began to take our clothing off, they never really seemed surprised. They knew it was going to happen. Considering we had all been tugging back and forth to one another, I was interested in that moment of sudden change. But I knew that Jasmine would get to it eventually. This change of state was something that I knew Jasmine had to come through her own way. She needed to start at her own beginning, and construct it from there.

Her place of beginning was the middle of the night on that February, and she went on from there: "We kept talking that night, and I knew that I wanted to keep the baby. I knew before, kind of, but I still wasn't sure. I was trying to be logical and I kept saying, well, I will keep the baby only if this happens or this happens financially and what not. I kept looking up news stories in order to discourage myself from the world and bringing someone else into it. I looked down at my body and was partly in awe and then revolted by it. I just didn't know and that was why I came tell you. I was hoping that you'd have some miraculous insight, or something..." she trailed off, realizing how well that had gone. I was not the person for insights, especially there, concerning an area I had never even thought of before until Jasmine made me pay attention. Apparently even she didn't want to pay attention because for the first time in her life, there had been no wrong and no right answer objectively. She had to find it for herself, and accessing the deep recesses of her wants and desires was something that she had tried to run from for a long time.

Her face changed, remembering the next part of her story: "Then I was walking home, trying to figure out how many more weeks I had to decide before I was past the point of no return, and there Gerard was. Now, you know that part. Things changed in my mind. I knew that you had loved him and he would always be a part of your life, and I accepted that. I loved that so much about us, at first. I loved the fact that we didn't have to depend on one another for everything because you were always with him. I never let myself get attached to you, really. I mean I loved you and all, Frank, but... do you know what I mean?"

Though it hurt a bit, I knew. She and I were both merely circling around one another, and then like magnets, when we got too close we flew away. We were both so afraid of our own feelings for one another, that we couldn't accept life with or without the other. She went on.

"So when it happened that I was now, at least a little, biologically attached to you I didn't know how to feel. I was mixed up, and I thought Gerard coming into this would only make things so much more difficult than I already knew they would be. But that wasn't what happened at all. He made things so much easier. I was shocked, but delighted. This seemed like perfect timing. I suddenly realized what an amazing person he was and established trust. I wanted him to live with us, because it would just be easier that way. But I thought that would be it. I never thought that this would happen." She motioned with her hands, spreading them out as if to encircle a world. "I didn't think it was possible for all of us to be together."

"What was it like between the two of you? How did that switch happen?" I said it, biting my tongue. I had been so good with giving her facial cues and nods, even when she prompted me, so I hoped my minor interruption was okay. She did not chastise me; she took a deep breath to collect her thoughts, went on.

"It was the day of the move. We had been talking a lot more up until then, and he was always affectionate, but that was who he was. I never read into it or let myself feel it too much. I liked his hands touching my back, hugging me, and sometimes kissing my cheek, but that was who he was. He just did those things because that was how he made people feel as if he was really engaged with their conversation, and it wasn't just a shouting match. We were talking about poetry so much, too, that you almost have to be affectionate and gregarious when discussing something like that. I was just relieved to have someone who liked the same poets as I did, or at least knew who I was talking about." She smiled; she was looking at the ground for a lot of this, but she brought her eyes up to meet mine. "Do you remember me going to the community garden? I had felt so much better then, and I couldn't get The Wasteland out of my head. After everyone had left, I went to find Gerard. I knew he had read tons of books and this was probably something he had seen before. I need someone to share that beauty with and quote it back and forth. If he didn't know it, then I knew I could show him something amazing and he wouldn't feel as if I was trying to outsmart him.

"When I came upstairs, I was so timid, and that was a new feeling for me. After we had established a friendship, I was usually pretty open with him. He had been really quiet during the move and I didn't know if he didn't want to be disturbed. I knocked on the door softly and he called out, 'Jasmine, I know you're there but I am a very old man and you'll have to knock louder than that,' and it made me laugh. It was tension more than anything, but he laughed too, especially when I did knock louder. When I came in, he was sitting looking through some books, and I told him about the garden that we had downstairs. He got up to look out his window, and he seemed delighted by the sight. He asked if there were any sunflowers, and I told him that you had found them. He gave me a funny smile and then said: 'You know, I used to always tell Vivian that I wanted to be buried in her backyard, whenever I went, because of her garden. But she never had sunflowers. They were too difficult for her. So I think here will do instead.'"

Jasmine stopped talking for a minute there, and we both just looked at one another. We didn't say anything, and I already knew that this was a moment that was lost in the archive. The silence on the tape recorder could never convey our huge understanding from the significance of that moment.

"So, anyway," Jasmine went on, trying to stay focused and keep her emotions at bay until she was done. "He told me that yes, he knew The Wasteland and when I quoted him the hyacinth part, he asked me if I knew where the flower got its name. 'No,' I said, and his face lit up. He told me that I was the perfect hyacinth and that it was one of the best Greek stories there was. 'It was about lost love, which always make the best ones to tug at your feelings,' he said. The story was about a love affair between two men over Hyacinth. Apollo, the archer, and Zephyr, the god of the west wind, were both in love with the young boy. 'A beautiful boy,' Gerard emphasised. 'He had pale skin, blue eyes, and soft blonde hair, like in the painting by Jean Broc.' I still remember the painting because he took out a book from the shelf to show me, and then told me the rest of the story from there. 'The two gods decided to throw discus in order to see who would win the boy. So the story goes that the discus Apollo threw ended up killing him, but Zephyr, the wind, changed the direction and made the discus fly around and strike Hyacinth. He was envious of the younger archery god for capturing Hyacinth's attention first and knew no other way to express his frustration and anger. The young boy died, but he did not go to Hades. Apollo took his blood and made the petals of the flower and named it after the boy, so he could stay beautiful forever. They say that the sounds of grief over his death were echoed from all around. Ai, ai.'" Jasmine paused, her mouth forming ai ai silently grieving before beginning again. "After he told me that story, he turned to me and said that he would never hurt me. He would never be Zephyr. 'I will never hurt you, Hyacinth. I promise you that.'

"That was when I knew I could really trust him. That was how I knew he was different than everyone I had ever met up until this point, except, maybe you, Frank. But Gerard, the way he talked to me that day and the way he called me Hyacinth was so distinct. It was like he knew this secret about me that I had never told anyone before. He looked at me differently, and when he touched my back and I let myself feel it, I realized he was touching me differently, too. It was just a barely noticeable difference, but it was there. It made me stop and stare at him and wonder how he had guessed, because it had never passed my lips before."

"What?" I asked. She was moving onto myth, which had been the exact thing I had wanted to avoid. Gerard was Zephyr to her, but I didn't know what that meant, still. This was important, but I wanted to be able to follow along. I was on the edge of my seat, my heart pounding. I felt privileged to know this information, and I wondered why she had taken so long to tell me. What else did she have lurking in her interior, what else went on behind people that I was not aware of?

"It's hard to explain, Frank. I know you don't want to delve into myth, but that's the only way I could explain my connection to him. He knew that I was different, and though he didn't know the right words, he knew the story that I fit into. With that story, I also knew that he loved me, too, even though we had not said those words out loud yet and it would take some time to get there. Him calling me Hyacinth, and telling me he would never hurt me, that allowed me to see him differently. It helped me to see myself differently, because I had no idea I had been that transparent. I had no idea he would make me into Hyacinth the Greek god, and not the hyacinth girl from The Wasteland. I had no idea he knew what one I wanted to be more, what person I resembled the most, even if it was just in my dreams. It's hard to explain..." she struggled for a bit, bawling her fists and hitting them gently on her thighs.

"After that night together, when he and I would spend time alone with one another, he would always treat me the same way he had that day. I began to get nervous when I knew he was sick, that he would forget about this secret that he knew about me, but he never did. He still touched me in the same way and we were together in the same way. He would tell me more stories of myth, because he knew no other words to describe me. He could feel difference when he touched me, but he knew that it didn't make sense. 'Like Tiresias,' he would tell me. 'He was the man with so much knowledge that he lived in a cave and then turned himself into a woman for seven years. You are Tiresias.'" Jasmine stopped, she looked as if she was about to cry, and then she tried to get back on track. "This is not about me or my story inside, but I know that without him telling me these things and him showing me those places where I thought I would never exist, that I would not have been able to do this. I would not have been able to be pregnant and to eventually give birth. I felt like I was losing myself when all of this happened. I knew I wanted to do it, but I had doubts sometimes that the means did not always justify the ends. In those moments of doubt when I felt like a monster, like a two-face villain, I would go and see Gerard. He told me the best thing that I think anyone ever had, and he managed to frame the world in such a manner that it did not scare me so much anymore. He told me that everyone was a two faced villain, and that Shakespeare was the most accurate expression of life, because we could not step off that stage. 'But you can choose your part, Hyacinth,' he would tease me. We read The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night and many other plays out loud to one another, over and over again, each of us picking different roles. I began to grow tired of this at one point and even asked him how he could stand to read The Tempest so often. It was his favorite play, but I thought there was a limit. 'Tell me,' he said one night. 'Does a book exist if it is not read?' It seemed like such an obvious question and my response had been of course. But he looked at me and tilted his head, you know the way he does," she stopped and smiled at me, and I nodded, glad from the small relief and to be inserted into this story for a little while.

"Well, he did that and it made me realize that of course those books didn't exist without someone reading it. The reader has always been the most important part of any book. It's the same for the audience of the play, too, and when I told him that I understood, he told me another story. 'Because it won't exist if I don't. But when I was in Paris, I spent a lot of that time reading. I don't have a degree in books like you Jasmine, but I can tell you something that I learned while living there: a book was nothing without a reader and I myself, was nothing without someone else.'"

Something pulled at me, and before I knew it, I said out loud in one of her pauses: "All that is not given is lost."

She raised her eyes to me, and nodded profusely. "He told me that, too. He told me about the suicide note. It had fallen out of a book. You knew about that, too?"

I nodded, and for a moment, we were quiet as we recollected ourselves. We were not mad or ashamed that our special story had been shared with another. We were relieved, actually. It meant that it was going to live on longer than with just one listener, one reader. Now that we had captured it in the archive too, it could keep going. Gerard had told us both about this mysterious suicide note. It was clear and an obvious fact to both of us that it needed preservation as a single entity itself, alongside and apart of both our tales. But we were still with Jasmine, and she was not done yet.

"Anytime I was upset, I would go to his room and he would always be there. He would show me art, too. He would show me pictures of Frida in drag and he showed me sculptures of the gods who were somewhere in between, one person then the next, one creature and then the next. Even on his bad days, I would go to him and read him myth, read him Ovid, and recite poetry and plays. We were obsessed with these journeys of monsters and of metamorphosis. He was big on those things; he liked to see that change that could happen in people, through art and other outside means. He told me I was going through a big change, too. And I knew he wasn't just talking about pregnancy. He saw beyond it. He embraced me for what I was - for who I was."

"Who are you?" I asked her the same question I asked myself at Food Not Bombs. Her story had captivated me; though she did not want to go into the complexities that were there, she had hinted at them quite strongly. I knew this was about Gerard and how he had affected people, but these were relationships. They needed to be two sided, reciprocal. She could tell me wonderful things about Gerard and that would be fantastic, but also too simple. It would be the missing piece, like that book the author gave Jasmine. There was no ethical board here, only her and myself in the room where I used to live, and a tape recorder listening. She could tell me if she wanted to, and I could keep it inside myself until she was ready to tell me more. It was becoming clear to me, however, that questions of who are you, were never easy to answer. Jasmine bit her lip and flexed her hands a few times before letting go.

"I'm different, Frank. I know you've always known that and that's why I've always loved you. But Gerard got that difference on another level. He was able to give me representations of what I was. I knew all the theories and the words for it there, but I also knew the statistics and the gritty facts. I knew how the world really worked. Gerard showed me art, the beautiful side, and then he treated me like that beautiful person. Like Frida, I was a woman in men's clothing and then a man in woman's clothing. I was this genderless being inside a body. I am Hyacinth and I'm sorry to stay in myth, but Gerard is Zephyr. And he kept his promise. He never, ever hurt me."

There was a long silence, another one that the tape recorder could not convey the intimacy of the moment. Jasmine sat there, her hands on her stomach, and waited for me to ask her questions. Though she had said all she needed to say, she still looked and asked if I wanted more. I bit my lip, unsure how to take things after a confession and admission like that.

"What will you remember the most about him?"

She smiled. It was good to see that smile again. "His hands, or his eyes."

"Why?"

"Because he could see me the way other people hadn't and his hands could touch me like I had the body I always wanted. That's not a myth. I know that now. I can only explain it using myth, but I know what I felt. He was as real as anything and because of his encouragement, I feel real too."

When the silence filled the room this time around, we both nodded. She was done, and the recorder could go off. We stared at one another for some time, both of us wondering what to say. She had told me things about herself that, yes, I supposed in a way I had always known. I felt badly, as if I should have been the one to understand this part about herself before Gerard did. As if I should have been more supportive, and not assumed so much. I thought back to Daniel's words to me, that these assumptions were not entirely my fault. The society that we lived in constructed these ideas and it was up to us not to repeat them. I still cursed myself for not knowing - but there was nothing I could do now. It was out, and I had her story down. Her story about Gerard would not change from here. How we decided to display it could be altered, but her story and the story between us was still going on, and we had some pieces to fill in for ourselves.

"Do you want me to call you Hyacinth now?" I asked her quietly. We were both leaning forward and awkwardly sitting on our hands. We could hear Vivian shuffling upstairs, the running of water, and I figured she was putting on tea for us.

Jasmine shook her head. "I don't know yet what I want to be called. I can't think about that right now, not with everything that's going on."

I bit my lip, wanting to press her more because the tension was killing me. But I took a deep breath and assured her: "Take your time."

She merely nodded and began to gather our sheets of paper and the recorder up. I trusted that she would tell me, whenever it was, because she knew as much as I did now that the books and the plays and the performances never existed without an audience. Whenever she knew what part she wanted to play, we could figure out our lives from there, I knew we could. Jasmine was not going anywhere and neither was I, regardless of names or whatever else may change, because we couldn't step off that stage. But I did have a job to do now. I kissed her on the forehead and she hugged my waist for a good ten minutes, recollecting ourselves from our story, before I went upstairs to see Vivian.

When I told Vivian what I was doing, she could not contain her excitement. She thought it was brilliant, in spite of the sadness that it would provoke "and possibly go onto infinity" and she cursed me for not having thought of it herself. She dealt with archives, biographers, and critics trying to capitalize off someone else's work and get all the credit.

"Not that this is what you're doing at all, Frank. No. Not in the least. You are doing this creative act fucking justice," she said, cursing to show her emphasis. I had noticed how often she slipped into expletives when she was excited, and especially when she was away from her students. "You are capturing feeling, varying opinions, and the emotion behind interpretation. This is hard, especially within a field of people who sometimes claim to know all the truth there is to know and scorn subjectivity like this. Varying interpretations lead to disambiguation and destruction, according to them. But no, not at all. You're using this to build someone up." She began to get excited and emotional again, and threw her arms around me. I hugged her back, so tightly. I had missed this Vivian. I had missed her affection, her bounciness when she was about to embark on something creative, her sass. She was such a vital force herself, seeing even a little bit of it vanquished through experience and circumstances was a loss to big to imagine. I told her I was glad that she was feeling better and even happier that she was up for this.

"Oh Frank, I don't think we'll ever feel better," she said, some of her composure fracturing a bit. "Better does not exist when you get older. But good? Yeah, we can feel good again. We can learn to embody this attitude of happiness, and spread it wherever we go. I was miserable before, yes. I was worried about life, but that's so ridiculous! Life is going to happen to me whether I am miserable, working, or out in the garden. Whether Gerard dies tomorrow or ten years from now, it does not matter. Well, it does - you know that - but...." She began to get emotional again and reached out for my shoulder to steady herself. We were sitting at the table, drinking the tea she had made for us, and Jasmine had come upstairs to take Gerard down to his old bedroom in the basement. He could walk okay by himself, but he needed Jasmine's assistance for the stairs and was told to generally avoid over strenuous activities until his paralysis got better. Vivian and I offered to go downstairs, but Jasmine shook her head. I saw Gerard bend down to whisper in her ear and she smiled. I wondered if he had called her hyacinth, or maybe he could have only gotten out the sounds of grief, of ai ai. I hoped that being in the basement again, he would remember the winter we had spent together there, too.

Vivian straightened up again and placed her hands on the table. "So, I'm not better, no, but I'm good. I'm focusing on the good because the bad is going to happen anyway, and sometimes out of the worst times come the most beautiful things," she stated this and nodded. She told me about my work, and how, if this got off the ground, it could fill a room with sadness. But there could also be laughter and happiness there as well, if I let that come forward too. But it would fill a room, there was no doubt about that, with all these voices going at once. She went off on a tangent about how she would get me the art room that they had done Gerard's first show in, the room where he had his The Flowers of Hell exhibit, and then get the same interviews, same press, and try to make some more fliers as well. She began to motion with her hands again, nearly knocking over her tea, and I eventually had to cut her off.

"Thank you, but let's think about this part of the project later. Right now I just have one voice, not voices. I would like to hear yours now, if you don't mind," I waited for her to begin again, but she was quiet, thinking through things. "Do you want me to prompt you with questions?"

She held up her hand, her nails painted with a deep brown polish. "No, no. I know exactly where I am going to start, Frank, and I know exactly what story to tell you." She began speaking in long sentences and bursts of sudden emotion; she took me back to their art school days together, at the campus in New York where they first met.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14