August - An Archive 3 страница

"It was an intense time period, to say the least. Everyone was changing, and things were really becoming different. Suddenly, no one wanted realistic representations, no one wanted natural settings, and everyone was big on space, time, and these voyages. Star Wars was playing and so many people were drawing scenes from it for their projects, Gerard included. He and I went to that movie together, as friends, as a joke. I had been posing for his class then, and he approached me afterwards and asked me to go with him.

"Now, don't get me wrong. I got a lot of offers as a nude model. People would say ridiculous things to me and sometimes it was downright offensive. Just because I took my clothing off, they thought it meant they could say whatever they wanted. When I first saw Gerard approaching, I thought he was going to do the same thing. But not at all. It was this man, who it was impossible not to read as gay after hearing him talk for more than five minutes, who was also so nerdy and had just asked me to go to a space movie with him. He started spouting theory about it, and I figure, why not. What was the harm? This was certainly going to be a new experience.

"I should probably mention that around the same time, I was in a lot of dramatic arts courses. I loved drama, actually, and had come to the school for those courses, not their art ones. Although art was fun too, I never had the patience to get through an entire drawing without hating myself for screwing up halfway through. I didn't like that there was no standard form that I could really follow - like a script. I loved plays, and the more ridiculous the better. Campy, stuff, you know. After Gerard had thought taking me to Stars Wars was the best bonding ritual, then I thought, I'm going to make him see a play I was in. We were doing the uncensored version of Hair at the time, with full nudity and all. He didn't like it, but he was honest about it, and that was what surprised me. He was critical about the things that he should have been critical over, and then left the other parts of the play alone. He told me he didn't always like campy stuff, but that the script had potential with the right people doing it. It's just that the school, at the time, relied more on shock factor than acting or set design. I was surprised he knew so much. Although he was older than me, I thought he was just an art guy. But he seemed to know about everything, and if he didn't, he could still offer an opinion that was based on his observation alone. It was after that night when I knew I liked him."

"As more than a friend?" I asked, butting in for the first time. She had been good with keeping her pace. She talked fast and I began to understand why the tape recorder was there. Although Jasmine had struggled, stopping and starting through hers (with good reason), Vivian was taking her narrative by storm. With the way her arms moved in her seat and the way her body swayed with it too, I would have been surprised if she didn't want to turn this into a one-act one-woman show. She had clearly thought about this enough to merit memorization.

"Oh, please, I still thought he was gay. He still thought he was gay. Even when we got really drunk and made out one night, we both still thought the other was off limits in some strange way," she laughed, and then tried to put this in context for me. There was still the outside world and its own story to contend with, in addition to the personal narrative that went on between two people.

"Think of the time period, Frank. This was a long time ago, post civil rights and the sexual revolution, but still a very divided and testy climate. Gerard could be gay, but only in certain parts of New York and he still got shit for it. He said he liked to go out walking with me at night, not only because I was fantastic company, but so that he didn't get beer bottles thrown at him. I thought he had been kidding before until it happened even when he was with me. You would be surprised at what people are capable of. Even within the gay community itself, you pretty much had to pick a side and commit, or else you would be deemed confusing. Being gay was also a marker of distinction for Gerard, especially within the art community, and especially when he started to go to more theater shows with me. He was that faggy guy - and I know that word is 'bad' now, we're not supposed to call one another faggots and when you sit down and analyze the word, it's pretty fucked up. But Gerard liked it then. He liked being called a faggot because it made him feel as if he had power over his life. If people were going to call him it anyway, he may as well call himself that and learn to live with it. He was still figuring out how to live with it when I came along and decided to make things complicated. At least he was getting better at dodging beer bottles, though." Vivian smiled and sighed, sorting through her years of history that she had kept organized and to herself for so long.

"I can't recall the exact time that our relationship changed, other than the fact that I was studying Chekov in class. He was famous for saying that a gun in the first act must go off by the third. Basically, don't have anything hanging around that you don't need." She scoffed, and then smiled. "Gerard had a boyfriend around that time. I had actually introduced the two of them, and so far as I knew, they were hitting it off. Gerard sometimes complained to me that he was an idiot, but gave good head. We always talked about sex, the two of us, all the time. I think we talked about it so much so that we didn't have to do it. It was during that relationship that he and I finally just stopped talking about sex and finally just had it. We were drunk, but said we were drunker than we had been before. We usually just got tipsy and made out, and usually as a defense mechanism against him being labeled as a faggot in the street. But this time, we were alone. We were in his apartment and we were just drinking. I had come over without pretext, and it just seemed as if we were finally determined to get this over with and this was the only way it was going to happen. In the morning, when we both didn't have hangovers and we did it again perfectly sober, it was pretty safe to say that the gun had gone off."

She paused again, and began to rub her hands together. "I am going to tell you something now that I don't like to talk about, that I don't tell a lot of people, but that is important to understand Gerard and I. When I think of all the good that he has done in my life, this instance is what always replays. So can I tell you this now, for the archive, and then have it never brought up again?"

I leaned forward in my chair, wondering why on earth I was hearing so many secrets, so much information that I was now privy to. I didn't know if I deserved this power, or what I should do with it. Vivian was already ready to go, though. I had to support her, and be honest with my work. "Sure, go ahead."

She nodded, said a small thank you, and then went on with her story. "We were awkward about having sex for a long time. We were too afraid of calling it a relationship, because that meant potential future, and sometimes even addressing it as sex was hard. I was still pretty young, and he was nearing thirty. It felt a lot like I had slept with a professor, and meanwhile he had violated his identity. He got rid of his boyfriend, but we didn't talk about it. We didn't want to. We were trying to go back to being friends, but I noticed he was skipping the classes that he knew I was posing for. I wasn't too hurt about him not being in class, but I did miss him. I began to get mad when he was no-showing in other areas. I was working on a production of Waiting for Godot around this time period, and I wondered if he was ever going to come see it. I played the boy that walks in while everyone is waiting and threw off the main characters. It wasn't a big role, but it seemed so apt. The night it opened, I had told him a million times what day and time it was, and I kept looking out on the crowd, wondering where he was. He wasn't there. I waited around until after the show for a while, because he would often come backstage, but there was nothing. I felt like shit - and then, after it was all over, I skipped the after party and came home to find my place had been robbed." She closed her eyes and took a moment. This was the part that she never talked about, and never wanted to, even then. She placed her hands on the table, and tried to compose herself.

"I know, I know, a robbery is not that big of a deal. I'm lucky in the sense that these few events are the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Even when Cassandra's dad left, I didn't feel the same sense of despair because I knew what Ted was like. But I was still young when I was robbed, and still thought that there was a sense of some security in the world. The moment of shock, of coming home alone and realizing that I had nothing was something that I'll never forget. My money was gone and I didn't have much then, but they still took it. Someone had taken something of mine, and someone had walked around in my place. They had broken in and I felt completely violated. I called the police and waited for them to come, and in spite of the initial shock, I was okay. But I missed Gerard, that feeling overwhelmed me. I needed a friend at that moment. I called him up after the cops were gone, and told him what had happened. He was over at my place before I could even blink. He comforted me, you know, all the ways friends are supposed to. He hugged me and showed affection, but it was never what I wanted. I figured I had already lost so much that night that I should just be grateful for what I had, and I hugged him back and accepted what was done. But I had really wanted to have sex with him, to have him make love to me and actually mean it, and for us to have some security within ourselves. But that didn't happen, at least, not yet.

"I stayed at his place that night because my apartment still gave me the creeps. The landlord called me the next day and said he had fixed the window that was used as the point of entry. Though no one had been caught, and my place was apparently as safe as it could be, I was allowed to go back but I still stayed with Gerard. Some part of me was probably still waiting out on my girlish hopes with him. We didn't have sex, but he did make me dinner and then we watch Star Wars together. It made us both feel more comfortable with one another, to be brought back to that time period." She smiled, but didn't take too long to pause. "Don't you dare think I'm done this story, because it gets weirder. And yes, I know I'm long-winded but deal, Frank. You'll get a lot of different stories and ideas thrown at you and this is excellent practice. So. Where was I?"

I was about to jump in, but Vivian's pause was all for show.

"Yes, Waiting for Godot. The next night, I did my second performance, only this time Gerard was in the audience. He actually came to see me. I can still remember that moment, just as I stepped out on that stage and made it to the middle of the barren set, I said my lines and then looked out at the crowd, and spotted that tuff of black hair on a black-clad body. I swore I could smell his cigarettes from where I was, too, though there was no smoking in that theater. His presence in my life at that point was so all-consuming. I had just been robbed and where I lived was violated, and at that moment, in the middle of this play about suicide and the bleakness of life, he provided some type of beacon for me. He was there. He made me feel better.

"After the performance, he wanted me to come to his place. He had hugged me extra close and I could tell we were both getting that look to ourselves. Like we were getting nervous about what that meant, but it didn't matter, because we wanted it anyway. I wanted to be swept off my feet with him, and I thought it was finally going to happen, but I still couldn't shake this sudden plaguing notion I had in the back of my mind. I needed to go to my apartment. I told him it was to get a different set of clothing, but I knew it was to check on things. It had been after I did my last performance of Waiting For Godot that I was robbed, and I kept thinking, is it happening again? I knew it was ridiculous, but I needed to know for sure.

"When we got there, the door was open, and my thoughts were confirmed: I had been robbed again." She shuddered, just thinking about it. "I know the odds. Two robberies in two nights? Impossible. But it happened to me. It's bizarre, absurd, and everything else there is. But life is that way. It's fucking absurd, especially since I didn't have that much stuff to take in the first place. This time around, they had walked through my bedroom, they had gone through my drawers, and my clothing and underwear was stolen. I had felt like shit before when it was just two hundred bucks and a watch that was gone, but this was a new extreme. Who takes underwear when they rob a place? Really? Why were they taking my clothing? It was women's clothing, with some props and costumes for the play, too. It didn't make any sense and while I was on the verge of tears, ready to stomp up and down like a little child because it had happened again and this was not fair, I turned to Gerard. I wanted him to give me the sympathy he had from before, and he just laughed."

" What? " I said, not being to help coming in then. Her story was dramatic, but in different ways than Jasmine's had been. It was also painting an entirely different view of this man. One who was afraid of his feelings, one who didn't want to admit liking a woman for what it may do to his identity, and now, he was laughing at her pain? Vivian didn't seem upset, though, and I waited eagerly to hear. She rolled her eyes and shrugged a bit, saying, "Yes, I know, it was the strangest response. But it was exactly what I needed.

"'This is absurd,' he had told me. 'What are the odds of this? Vivian, we need to go out and buy a lottery ticket because if things can go this wrong against all odds, then let's try to make them go good again.'" Vivian smiled, and then she suddenly laughed herself. It was a large belly-laugh, one that I had heard her use before when she was stressed out and sad. She was getting rid of one form of energy with the other. "See? It's really easy to just laugh, even in spite of everything. I remember he kept telling me to laugh that day. We called the cops and waited for them to come together, but he was perpetually smiling and trying to make me feel good. He said he would wait for the cops in my apartment by himself at one point and gave me money to go buy lottery tickets. 'I'm serious,' he told me over and over again until I finally went. We didn't win, of course, but it had been his effort to get me to laugh in spite of this ridiculous act of fate. I had lost a lot during that robbery - and my sense of safety was one of those things. After the cops left, Gerard told me to grab the things that were important and that I was going to stay at his place until we found me a better one. I looked around the room, but I ended up only grabbing him. I just held him and told him thank you, over and over again. He held me back, and eventually we went towards the couch.

"It... took a long time, this time when we tried having sex, mostly because we knew how much this meant and how vulnerable we both were. But eventually he told me, 'What are the odds? I guess there are always exceptions to the rules, and that's when situations like this happen.' I knew he wasn't talking about the robbery, or at least, not completely. We kissed then. It wasn't the first time we had kissed, but it was the one that I remember as the first. It was the one that we weren't drunk for or didn't deny afterwards. We had sex in his apartment that night and it had been a learning experience for both of us. After being robbed, I was skittish, and he made me feel safe again. For him, it was his identity that was falling away, and I validated him as an artist, not just a fag artist, although he liked that moniker too." She smiled, and touched my hand. We were quiet for sometimes, but I held my tongue, because I knew that Vivian was reaching her end. "You know, basically, more or less, how our relationship turned out. I love him and I will always love him. He got me through one of the hardest times in my entire life, and I lived with him for nearly six months while I was recovering from that robbery. Our relationship was intense, then quiet, then intense again. And even with all that discrepancy, he has remained my only constant."

"What about Paris?" I asked, remembering how vividly upset she had been.

"Frank, as much as I hated him for doing that, and as much as I still think it was irresponsible to be gone for that long... he was leaving me as much as he was leaving you. I love him and always will, but I understand now I don't need him to feel safe anymore."

I nodded. Vivian had grasped my hand completely now, and had paused her narrative. I asked her the last question I asked Jasmine, to help myself mark places and end chapters. I was highly conscious about when and where I was coming into the narrative and wanted to stop being that looming force. But I couldn't pretend to be invisible, because my impression of everything would be everywhere. I just needed to be as honest with their voices as I could be.

"What do you remember the most about him?"

"That kiss. That first kiss where we were actually with one another. I remember the way his lips felt against mine and how he gripped the side of my face and brought me forward. The sound of his laughter when my place was robbed for the second time, too, will always stick with me. It's a laugh I've never really heard him repeat. He spoke a lot when we were younger, and even now, and I think that's yet another thing I'll remember the most about him. His voice was always so beautiful." She smiled, and we tried not to think about the fact that he was mostly mute now. He would talk once in a while, but the difference from before was immense. We stayed silent, Vivian and I, to mark the change, before we turned the tape recorder off.

After Vivian was done, we had nothing left to do but to take Gerard home. It was getting close to dinner time, and Vivian had packed us some leftovers knowing that we'd have no time to cook. She was a lot more placid and tender than she had been earlier. She was still boisterous and full of resolve and as happy as she could have been, but her sharing of her private pain allowed for us to share an intimacy beyond just her story. When we hugged one another goodbye, she told me she loved me (something that I had never really heard her express before and which I echoed), and wished me good luck. She didn't end her final words with, "Don't drink, Frank." She knew now that I was creating, that old habit was the farthest thing from my mind right then. She hugged Jasmine as well and told her good things about the baby, and then she went over to Gerard. She leaned down and lowered herself to his eye level.

"You going to behave?" she teased him. Then, softening her outlook, she wrapped her arms around his neck. He hugged her back, and said "bye." She seemed so utterly moved by the one word - as we all were - that we didn't want to utter anything else as we left.

I took Gerard to the backseat of Jasmine's car (which Vivian had picked up and driven here earlier today) while she got to the front. She was still managing how to drive with her belly in the way, and insisted upon continuing to figure it out. Gerard got out of his wheelchair easily, but leaned on me for support. We stepped inside the car and then I buckled him up and we got ready to go.

"Did you enjoy your stay?" I asked him, or at least, I wanted to. I wanted to ask him so many questions and treat him like nothing was wrong, but I was very, very afraid. My hands quaked oh so visibly as I buckled him up and I gripped my knees in the backseat with him to try and get them to calm down. I knew that he could talk if he wanted to, and if he did, I figured he would. He had managed a 'bye' for Vivian, and if he wanted to answer my questions, he would say something first. Besides, I had to remember not to carry all of this on myself. Making an archive was enough.

Jasmine was quiet as she drove. I knew that she was probably thinking the same thing as myself or she was dealing with her own narrative. I held onto Gerard's hand in the back, and he looked out the window. I wanted to touch his face, the skin on his cheek and get him to look at me, but I didn't. I didn't want to risk ruining the image I was building, though I knew that an archive of Gerard would not be complete without the skin on his face, the feel of his hand in mine, and the way his clothing hung off his body. Nor was it complete without his bones that were visible, the shoulder blades like wings, the mole on his thigh, his hip that he smashed when he fell on the ice in Paris, his knees that hurt when we moved, and finally, the brain that was slowly dissipating and disappearing. Vivian had given us some pamphlets and small books on dementia caused by strokes and a list of symptoms that indicate a stroke just in case he had another one, which was very likely. That was important, and I knew that Jasmine would deal with it, but I didn't want to obscure his own body that way. I didn't want to obscure his knowledge of his illness, or what was plainly visible. What I could not see was his brain, and the changes that were happening there. But what I knew, what I could feel, was his hand in mine. That was what I was putting down here, his body from head to toe, his skeleton, his skin.

When we pulled into our house, the feeling of elation overwhelmed me. The community garden was blooming. We were about to take Gerard into the house to struggle with him to get upstairs, but he stopped moving when he saw the flowers. We walked him over and he leaned on the fence. He pointed to the back, where there were sunflowers. He touched the petals in front of him, and then seemed to be okay to go.

This is what I was categorizing. The flowers and the way they moved in and out of our lives, his remembrance of Paris, if only vaguely, and of his future wishes. His touch, his taste, his smell, his sound, and his sight; all of the five senses all at once, and mixed up together, forwards and backwards. I wanted to capture the way his eyes looked around and tried to place himself here, the way he was creating himself again against the images all around him, and how he must have had to do this almost every morning. Then the flare when he heard his name, I would carry that with me for the archive, too.

"Come on, Gerard, let's get you inside," Jasmine said, touching the small of his back. We got him inside the house, and I took him up the stairs and got him into his room. It was a long way up the stairs, but he seemed determined to keep going. I kept asking if he wanted to stop, and he shook his head. His arm was around my shoulders and he gripped the railing tightly. His knees were hurting him, I could see his facial ticks give that away, but there was also the lack of access that was testing him, too. He had three flights, not the one like at Vivian's place, and it wore on him. I got him to his room and he showed those same flares of recognition in his face, his body, and his eyes. I undressed him and got him ready for bed. He fell asleep right away, without having dinner, and I knew we would have to start making sure we were more diligent with his meal times. I watched him sleep, sitting on the edge of his bed. I had missed so much of him over the past month, I wanted to log some missed hours. I wanted to tell him that I was creating something for him, all about him, so that people would remember him. So that we could always remember him.

It was still too early to tell how the ending would fit, having only collected two voices and many, many images of him in my own mind, but I knew it would be soon. But his dreams, I told myself when I got up. Don't forget to collect his dreams.

I had wanted to sleep by myself that night, just to process all that had happened, but when I passed by the mural on my wall, I knew that was not an option. I could hear Jasmine's voice in my head whispering ai ai in grief, and I knew that I needed to make sure she was okay. After becoming so close at The Bear community, I did not want to lose the connection we had with one another, especially during a time like this.

I knocked on her door and it took her a while to answer. At first I thought she was ignoring me, and that she needed to be by herself that night to process things, too. But she called me in just as I was about to leave, and said she was good now. I opened the door carefully, sensing something in her voice on the other side.

She had cut off her hair. I stepped inside and saw the small strands splayed out on the carpet like windmill blades. She was sitting on the bed with her mirror in front of her and was holding the scissors. It wasn't the perfect cut, but it did its job. She had once had hair to her stomach, past her hips almost, and in the summer sun it had almost become pure white. Now, with it cropped closely to her scalp, it was darker. She was still a blonde, and there was enough hair to hold onto, maybe a few inches long now, but she was different. She was wearing my t-shirt and boxers - her typical bedtime clothing that she had adopted in The Bear, but they looked strange now. They were oddly out of context, and given a new meaning when we were back in our home, at the center of a city and not a community. She sat crossed legged, and looked over to me, waiting for me to respond.

I didn't know what to say about the hair. This scene was so familiar to me, even if Jasmine herself had somehow changed. It was a Frida painting, I realized. It was Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair where she was sitting the same way, wearing one of Diego's suits, and she had cut away all of her long dark hair. I got stuck in that image for a while, before I commanded to myself that this was not art in that framework anymore. Jasmine had not done this to go and paint her portrait after. She had always been odd about me telling her she looked beautiful, or even that she looked good. She would usually say thank you, and then quickly move on. Now I could tell she almost needed me to approve. I did - she could do whatever she wanted to with her body - but it was just a shock. I had been used to holding that hair in my hands when we slept together, playing with its tangles at the base of her neck, just before her spine notches became visible.

"I did it out of grief," she said finally, with a sigh. "Also, the baby is going to try and grab it. It's one of the things that Alexa warned me about. I may as well cut it short so she won't have so much to pull on."

She was approaching my silence with explanations, one of her old defense mechanism. This was not what she or I wanted. I sat down next to her on the bed, and I ran my hands down the sides of her new hair, just above her ear. She shivered and then smiled. She had always loved me playing with her hair before, so now, that was what I did again. We lay down in bed, leaving the tendrils on the ground and the scissors to the side, and I touched her newly exposed skin. She shivered again and again, then pulled me closer around her. We hugged, and we seemed to feel the desperation in both of our demeanours. We tried to be the other's comfort, but we needed to express grief, exactly like Jasmine had said. Although, in the back of my mind, I was not sure what death she was grieving; her death as Jasmine, or Gerard's as Zephyr.

"You look good," I told her, trying to show my approval. She looked up at me, and pretended to be sceptical. Only for a moment did I see that spark in her eyes. She liked her short hair. I held her and tried to make whatever she was feeling easier, because the tension crept back into her body.

"You know this wasn't our fault," she said astutely, trying to convince herself as well as me. She was talking about the stroke, the muteness, the person we had carried upstairs and who we were now trying to piece back together.

"I know," I said, but I didn't believe it. It felt like our fault, and she had broken the seal between us. I felt it spill forth, and I just began to cry. No matter how many voices I ended up collecting for this, it would never be enough. He would always be missing, because at some point he was going to die. In ten years, in ten days, in ten months, with or without Alzheimer's, he was always going to die before we were. He had thirty years on us and nothing could change that. There would never be as much life between us to catch up. It was hitting me hard, and I had only just started an archive. "We fucked up."

"Shhh," Jasmine told me, and then she started too. "We did, I know, but we can't undo it. Maybe we should have gotten him medical attention sooner. Maybe we shouldn't have gone to the community, but it was going to happen, and it did, and now we have to deal. We can't keep thinking we fucked up, even if we did."

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14