August - An Archive 6 страница

She decided she was ready to speak again. "The night I'm thinking of, I was playing The Ride of the Valkyries again because I was pretty upset. It was when Noelle's mother had found out about us and had forbid us from doing that 'heinous thing' in her house again. So whatever, I told myself, we would just do it here and had started to do that. But it still made me feel awful. I'm not used to feeling like that, especially because of who I want to fuck. My mom has always been good with that type of thing and it's just never factored in as a problem in my mind, even though I had seen stuff on television about it. That type of ignorance has always seemed unreal to me. Half the people around me right now are different in some way. Being different has always been normal. This was really the first time that I had felt disgusted with who I was and that was not cool.

"Not only is The Ride of the Valkyries just a great piece that could help anyone get anger out, it was something that I knew I played well. I had that recital a while ago and it was a proud moment for me. I had felt like I knew how to do something pretty cool then, and I wanted to recapture that feeling. It was also before Noelle and I had been together, though it had just been beginning to form then. I wanted to get lost in that music that night, and it had been working, at least, until I noticed that Gerard had come into the room.

"My mom had warned me about him wandering, but he was normally fairly good and stayed in whatever room he was in. He was so docile, all the time, it surprised and saddened me to the point that I denied he was in a room so I didn't have to feel that disappointment. But I couldn't deny it now - he was no longer docile. He had gotten up from where he had been and followed the music until he realized where it was coming from, and then he sat down on the couch. I waited for him to say something and I stopped playing. He seemed sad, so I started again. I just played a small scale in case he still wanted to talk to me, but he responded again like he did before. His face lit up like I couldn't believe when I went back into The Valkyries, and I kept it going, mostly to keep seeing how happy he was. He didn't say much, mostly, 'nice' and 'good' and small words like that. I went on and played some other pieces, but he seemed to like the Wagner one the best. It was familiar to him. He knew the painting, he had told me about it before, but he also knew the music. I kept playing it, and then when I got to the end, he told me, 'thank you.'" She paused, and clucked her tongue in her cheek, almost like she was mad at herself for admitting all of this. "You want emotion, Frank? Here.

"This was the first time that I had felt like a pianist. He watched me so carefully, so astutely, and so quietly with undivided attention that I could not believe it. He was not really looking at me, I realized, and he may not have even known who I was, but he knew that music so intimately that it was the only validation that I needed. I disappeared. I was not the Noelle issue anymore, I wasn't even Cassandra. I was just a sound, and it was wonderful. That was all I had ever wanted to be, really. All the other things that had to do with piano and music and that fucking arts school had been extra, and not always good extras. Yeah," Cassandra said, nodding her head. "That was it. I liked that. I liked that feeling, that presence he gave a room, oh fuck, Frank," she cursed, looking at me as her face scrunched up in agony. "Oh fuck it, he was always like that. He always paid attention to me, or made me feel like I was the only person in a room. Oh fuck you Frank for reminding me. Fuck you."

I got up from the table, and walked over to Cassandra. Her face was bright pink and she held one of her hands over her mouth as if to try and shove the sorrow back in. But it was too late; it spilled out and all I could do was tell her I was sorry, and that this was why I was the younger brother and she was the older sister. She was there to catch me in mistakes like this, and make realize what I should have done instead.

"This wasn't a mistake," she told me softly. "This just sucks. "

I hugged her and let her cry some more, until Jasmine came downstairs to see if we were all right. She was about to come over to us and join our hug, but first, she shut off the tape recorder.

Jasmine had put Gerard to bed already, and after Cassandra left, it was just the two of us. She looked at me and tried to curl her hand around her ear, to push her now non-existent hair back, only to realize it was gone. It was a nervous tick that she had, one that seemed way more pronounced to both of us now that there was no hair to exercise it with. She smiled, and then took my hand. She had been busy talking to people all day, and so had I. I knew I would have to go to work soon and that my project was going to slow down in speed. I already had five voices, and so many emotions had already spilled forth. I was relieved for the small break, though the project would rattle around in my mind like it was still doing even though a day had now passed since I first interviewed Jasmine. I knew that with something like this, it would not go away until I was done and it would eat away at me until then. For the time being, Jasmine and I put our arms around one another and relished the silence between us. It felt good. We made our way up the stairs together, hand in hand, before she stopped on her floor and then asked if I wanted to come with her. Having a floor between Gerard and our room made me a bit uneasy, but I went.

"I've set up the baby monitor in his room, just in case," she assured me. She let me in her room, and I took a look around. The hair had been cleaned up from before, but the tendrils were still sticking out of the small garbage pail underneath her desk. The scissors, now forever associated with that moment, were in a jar on that same desk, their gray handles looped together at the top. As I looked around the rest of her room, her closet drew my attention. Usually kept quite neat, the doors were open and there was a garbage bag full of clothing that was jutting out from inside. Jasmine noticed my gaze, and sat down on the bed across from it. I followed her, and noticed that the contents inside of her closest had changed, too. There were more empty hangers that before and some clothing left behind was hung haphazardly and falling off the wires. A flash of Vivian's robbery came before my eyes; her empty closest and her upturned drawers, and then the distinct sound of laughter. I shook it off.

"I gave some of my clothing to Cassandra," Jasmine explained. "My shoes, too. They're probably not going to fit again after the baby, since, you know, progesterone changes the shape of bones, and they become looser. It may go back afterwards, but it's okay."

I nodded, staying silent. She was doing it again. She was explaining away her actions, instead of focusing on the emotion that provoked them. I placed my hand on her knee and she put her head on my shoulder. She had washed her new short hair for the first time and now I could feel how fluffy and different it was from before. I asked her if it was nicer having a lesser drying time and she smiled and told me it was the best feeling in the world.

"The garbage bag?" I asked, feeling as if we were on better ground with one another. She sighed, "That's Hilda's old stuff. She was moving and said she wouldn't need it anymore."

"Pregnancy clothing?" I asked, and Jasmine shook her head. "It's some stuff she would wear for workshops sometimes or to parties. It's mostly men's jeans and collared shirts. There is a suit or two."

We were quiet for a long time after that. Jasmine was not ready yet, and I was exhausted. I could not hear another story, not when I was still trying to sort out how I would arrange them all and have them make sense.

"Are you okay, Frank?" she asked, sensing the tension between us. "Does this change things?"

I shook my head. I may not have been able to comprehend much, but I this was a definite answer. I put my arm around her and held her close. "I love you, and I always will. I want..." I struggled to know what I wanted to say, what I needed to say right then. I looked down at her, and we met eyes. I wanted her or... just... whatever. This person in front of me, who was the only person that I knew to be real, the only person that was stable, even in this constant process of change. Jasmine, whoever that was, I wanted to know and to love.

"Hyacinth," I said, then remembered she didn't want to be called that. "I mean ---"

"No, it's okay, now it's okay. I know, Frank, it's hard. I have no words either."

I bit my lip, wondering what sign or symbol we could use to communicate and convey our ideas, then. Alexa said that some pictures structured the way we thought and we did not need language because of that. So I leaned down and began to kiss her instead. I knew that we could not explain anything to one another right then, nor could either one listen. We were so full of other people right then that we needed to peel it all back and just be ourselves. I kissed her, and she kissed back, relieved. We began to take off our clothing, but as soon as I put my hand on her side, I stopped. I whispered in her ear, "Show me how to do it, how you want to be touched, so I see you right," I wanted to add, "like Gerard" but I didn't. It would have been too hard for both of us.

She looked at me and gave me a broken smile. "You always have. You've always known, too."

In spite of what she was telling me, I still didn't think so. I felt almost as self-conscious and as vulnerable as she did, but I wanted to be with her. I wanted her to know that it was okay to be with me, and that we would get through it. I kissed her, deeply, and she kissed back. Her stomach was in the way, but we moved around it, we worked together, and we explored the parts of ourselves that we had never seen before, not even at The Bear. She touched me like I had a secret of my own, a secret that I could not put into words yet either. We both breathed, ai ai, in our grief of one another, the parts that were lost without words, and we did the best we could with whatever we put into our hands.

"It will be a bit easier once Paloma is here," she told me, and though there was a quake in her voice, I believed her.

Chapter Three

As the days passed, so did the people I interviewed. Every day after work, I would embark on someone else and try to forget all I had already known from before. I was accumulating quite a pile of tapes and quite a pile of paper. The raw materials that made up the archive were still too much to comprehend right then. None of it seemed like art or anything worthwhile as they laid on my desk, but it could see the potential beginning to form and crystallize. At first I had tried to transcribe the tapes as soon as they were done, but it left my mind reeling, especially since I was taking in so many interviews at once. I had to keep pushing forward and gathering all that I needed before I sat down and tried to make sense of what was left behind. I knew that process was eventual, but like the five stages of grief and Alexa's tarot cards, I knew I had to go through one at a time. Waiting for me at the other end would be Vivian, pushing and ushering me forward into a show that she insisted we were going to have for this.

"How can an archive have a show? It's basically a record," I told her, trying to downplay my own work. I knew that normal archives were basically like unique libraries. They were quiet affairs, there for public access, but not on display in the same way. Vivian wanted to treat this like a gallery opening and an intimate art show, maybe even a public performance piece where me, The Archivist, could go around and walk through each story of a story. But these details seemed so personal and closely guarded that I didn't know how comfortable I was with that idea yet.

"What's the difference? You're still having strangers look at it if it remains public access."

I had shifted from side to side, trying to reconfigure my thoughts. "It is different, though. I know that I'm getting strangers to read it, but it's not like I'm brandishing it in their face. I'm not standing there next to it, there is no picture of me, and I am not involved whatsoever. I'm not the author or the artist in this. This is about Gerard..." I tried to shift the conversation, but Vivian saw my real apprehension for the show: myself. I did not want to be a part of the archive other than the person putting it together. If I did my job well enough, I would appear as some invisible hand guiding all of this information together and holding it up. Like Cassandra, the best vision of this art project would be to completely erase the outside factors and to simply be a sound. Or, in this case, to simply be the mute story teller. This was not my story, it was Gerard's, and I tried to tell Vivian that.

"Isn't the reason you're interviewing us because we're all connected?" she retorted, and leaving me in a corner. I had no response for that. It was the reason I was doing all this work and having all of these sleepless nights. But I was just pulling the strings, being form and not content. I was just organizing it and making sure things went all right. I had been trying to downplay my involvement with other people's stories, as if I had to keep the information secret and not remain privy to it. This was especially true for Jasmine's conversation. Outside of small references to Hyacinth between the two of us, I never brought it up. I didn't know if I was supposed to, and I found as the days progressed, I was growing more and more confused at what was happening in our house and inside her head. A few people had commented on her new hair cut, but other than that, no one else noticed. I was convinced it was so transparent at this point, especially when she continued to wear my clothing or Hilda's old garments, along with her hair closely clipped, but if there was a level of doubt stirred, it was instantly restored by the pregnancy stomach. But I even knew that people got pregnant, not just women. My thoughts and others' motivations were becoming too convoluted when I considered people's stories and how these experiences had affected them presently, not just with Jasmine. So I needed to step back and away from speculation. I need to be the archivist and have people gather around me. I was the thread spinner and the heart lines were all going through Gerard.

Vivian nodded, knowing that she was right, but then let it go. "I'm still booking the show. It doesn't have to be a huge thing, but there needs to be something. It will be in September. You will have plenty of time to get things together," she assured me, but I had my doubts. The tapes were growing and I was still going through people. I knew I wanted to have more than just interviews, but I needed to gather them all together before I could see what shape they took.

I called Hilda one day while I was at work. I had gotten her number off Jasmine, and she had been informed of what I was doing. When I called her, the line cracked and I could barely hear her over the static. I had to raise my voice in my small little office cubicle and it became very obvious that this was not a work call. Any proficiency and chance for promotion may have been compromised, but when I considered how most people didn't actually do work, I figured I was fine. They did have better ways of hiding their solitaire games, novel reading, and internet porn, though.

"Hi Frank! How have you been? Are you taking care of things? Anyway, yeah, that's enough for small talk," she said in between bursts of sound. "I dig the idea of the archive, but I don't really know what you want me to say. I only met him the one time at the party."

"Well, tell me about that then, anything, really," I yelled.

She grew quiet, and the phone overpowered her. I thought I had lost her completely, but she started up again. "You saw the way he looked at Jasmine, right? Are you taking care of her?"

"I am," I said sternly.

"Okay, good, well, you know, it does get easier. It's really not that hard. I know these things, but I could never force her, right? I'm still using those words, too, those devilish pronouns, even though I know she's uncomfortable. You have to go on the same as before, you just have to until she says she's ready to change. I know that can seem like a life sentence in pretending, but think of how she has felt for most of her life. Cut her some slack. She will tell you, she knows when to speak up..."

Hilda trailed off for a bit, and I was getting a headache from the reception. I had no idea where she was, possibly in a car (more likely a bike) or on a broken cell phone. Hilda was busy either with work or travelling and she needed to find any opportunity to speak. I had lamented that I would not be able to tape her phone conversation and I was making haphazard notes as we talked in bursts.

"I know, but can you talk about, Gerard, please?" I asked, hating to interfere but also needed to get this done and out of the way. The admin assistant at the front of the office was looking at me over her computer screen.

"I am telling you about him. He was the first person that made Jasmine realize. He was the first person to understand her. He was even before me! Even though I knew all this stuff and casually hinted, that never did any justice for Jasmine. It didn't matter. Books about these topics, she had read them all, and knew them inside out but it felt too unreal and unattainable for her. They didn't matter. She always liked things that were real, practical. She was who she was and she liked that. She likes her body - oh does she ever like her body..."

"Hilda, please. I'm at work."

"Sorry, Frank. You should have said so! I would have been vulgar from the start and gotten you to put me on speaker phone. But back on point," she said, static improving slightly. "She loved that man, so much. What he said mattered to her, and he told her stories, which I know now is what she had always wanted. Stories were keeping her going the way she was, even though it was also slowly eating away at her. She needed stories to relate to, but she was running out. You know she once read a hundred books in a year? That she still keeps a catalogue?" I shook my head, then realizing I was on the phone, I spoke up and told Hilda no. This was becoming too much about Jasmine, but I let her speak. It felt nice having another person, other than Gerard, knowing already what I knew. We didn't say the specific words out loud, even though I knew that Hilda knew them and, through Jasmine, I knew them as well. I liked that more. It left our silences and pauses to fill in and symbolize the change that was occurring. "Anyway, she likes to read, basically, but she was running out of material. He gave her more, and it opened her eyes.

"Jasmine will figure things out. She's already in the process of doing that. It will take time, but Gerard changed her life. That is how I remember him. I got to know him through her and I watched her bloom into this wonderful, wonderful person from his influence. These names that we give one another, they really don't mean anything. They do in terms of existing in the world, and we all need to decide on them for that purpose, but when you go home at night and see her or when she went to see him, the meanings of those words cease to exist and all you have is one another. You don't align or pick sides when you're with someone you love. But you can't always be with that person in order to know who you are and Jasmine is realizing that fact with his decline and eventual death now. I know it sucks to talk about, but this is what she's doing. In his absence, she is figuring out how she wants the rest of the world to see her. We all need to do this at some point, sometimes several times. Our life is based on the choices we make, but I guess you know that by now, Frank."

I could hear the smile oozing out of Hilda's voice. If she had been with me, she would have elbowed me or given me a friendly and very masculine slap on the shoulder. Through a physical gesture, I was doing all that I could by her standards, and I knew they were okay ones to go by now. She chuckled a bit, then went on: "Gerard, though, man, he's an artist. Like really good. Only he seems to make people. I don't know what you were like before now, but I know he changed you, too. He seems to do that. Unfortunately, I peeled out of there before that happened. Which I think is good for me. I like who I am. I don't need to change. But for some people, they spend their lives hiding until someone takes off the blanket covering their eyes. Gerard, from what I could see, did that."

I didn't respond right away because I had been writing it all down, every last word she was saying. The static was improving, and for a while I was silent and she thought I had disconnected her. "No, no, I'm still here."

"And with good reason," Hilda reminded me. "Take care of yourself, Frank. I hope I've given you what you need."

I was about to tell her thank you, but she had already hung up the phone.

The same night, I tracked down Dean and Callie. Vivian had given me their email addresses, and though I had now mastered the art of email, I wanted to meet them in person. I was surprised at how attached I was getting to my little tape recorder. Even when I knew I didn't have anything scheduled, I still carried it around in the back pocket of my pants, the other side of my wallet, just in case. I would sometimes be tempted to turn it on at random intervals when I was with people and I heard Gerard's name mentioned, but I didn't. At one point I considered splicing together a tape of people just saying his name and maybe have that on repeat in one corner of the display, but I shook my head. It had a distinctly modern art feel to it that I knew Gerard would not appreciate. Sometimes when I was by myself I would turn it on for comfort and have it capture whatever white noise was around me. I learned that I sighed a lot when I played back the tape and I soon stopped that activity, too. Its dead weight in my pocket, reminding me of my task, was enough. I had note paper with me a lot of the time, too.

Hilda's was the only transcript that I did right after the actual interview, and typing it out a second time made me feel a lot better. It had been rough going with her, and a lot of it had been about Jasmine and not Gerard, but I was beginning to see the shape that this was all taking. Since I knew how the interviews all ended, their beginnings seemed to take a better form. I began to wonder if there really was cohesion in our lives, and that none of us were aware of it because we didn't tape every last thing or try to transcribe conversations we had with one another. I knew that a lot of the time our lives felt like a bunch of haphazard events, but once we were able to stand back from it, wouldn't it make something on its own? Even people looking at Pollack or Kandinsky were always trying to find a hidden shape or special meaning that was lurking in the array of colors. Maybe our lives, or the lives that surrounded Gerard, were the same? These questions motivated me further into my research. Not only were the events taking shape, but I was beginning to see more parts of people, and while it was confusing as well as enlightening, I began to wonder if we could be whole this way, too. I had decided to interview Dean and Callie together for this purpose -- to see if I could form a conversation instead of a dialogue. I wanted a brainstorm, instead of a tug of war for control, and I wanted to capture all of us, archivist and all, on the tape to form a bigger story.

We met at the coffee shop just around the corner from their campus. They were still doing their projects a lot of the time, but their graduate school lives had changed. We had started with general talk about school when we met and ordered, but as they went on about how they spent their time now, it became evident to me that I should have been recording from the beginning.

"Do you mind, guys?" I asked and put it on the table. I flicked the on button when they told me so. The background of murmuring and clinking of porcelain mugs was heard as we both gathered our bearings and tried to start the conversation off again.

"Where were we?" I asked, surprised at how little I remembered when I was participating and not watching. I leaned over my coffee, and tried to be more inviting. I was well aware that the thought of being recorded was enough to startle some people. Vivian had also warned that while she knew and loved me dearly, I was really stern looking when I had no expression on my face and graduate students scare easily. I was being hyperaware of my movements and what I was saying, but it didn't seem to matter. Dean and Callie were all smiles.

"We were telling you that our thesis defense is in September, but we're considering staying another semester. Both of us," Callie was speaking. She was sitting next to Dean, and he had his arm loosely around her waist. He nodded to Callie's information, a small smile forming on his face. "We live separately right now, but want to get a place together in the fall so we can enjoy that semester."

"What will you do?"

"Paint more," Dean said. He took a sip of his coffee. "It was funny - both of us never really talked before. We were told by the head professor - not Viv, don't worry - that graduate school was going to be all we had time for. They said that the readings were going to hurt, the criticisms were going to be hard, and it was supposed to be. If you felt like you couldn't take it, then they were doing something right. It was supposed to inspire us, or something."

"It made me freak out every single day," Callie said. She combed her hair behind her ears, and I realized she had gotten it cut recently. It was long and hung at her shoulders before, pin straight and dark. It was lighter now, fluffy. She was wearing a deep purple top with an ornate necklace at the center of her chest, while Dean was in a collared shirt, tucked in at the waist, and even in the heat, he had on a v-neck sweater over the top of his outfit. He was extremely well-dressed, and so was she. They had definitely not worn this when they helped us move, nor when they went to our house warming party. I wondered if they dressed like this all the time now when they just went around the corner for some coffee. I couldn't pinpoint anything starting this change, other than the lessening of anxiety from school and perhaps realizing that they were no longer professional students, but professionals.

"What changed the atmosphere? How did graduate school suddenly become bearable?" I asked, knowing it had something to do with my story as well.

Callie smiled. "He did, of course. But maybe not as much as you think. Oh, I don't know. It's hard to explain."

"Try me," I told them. "Trust me, I feel like I've lived through it all at this point."

Dean waited for Callie, but she insisted he tell this part of the story. "Callie and I, we liked one another, but not in that way, you know? We didn't have time to think that way. We both had Vivian as a supervisor, and she was the most outstanding prof ever. You can tell that she didn't really get a usual education, but she blows everyone's mind when she enters a room. She probably developed this huge aura and attitude about her to contend with the people here who are all Ivy League and coming from daddy's money. They never knew art, they just knew prestige. We could tell right away that she was not like that, and it didn't make her any less intelligent. Callie and I... We're both going into serious debt to do school, but we knew it was worth it. When we saw Viv, we finally felt like we had some solidarity with someone and we weren't as isolated from the institution itself. It was nice. And then she began to bring us on those strange errands, and our time here got even stranger."

"We thought it was a test at first. That she was going to get us to create art from it, write a paper about it, or something," Callie said. "We actually confronted her about her motives at one point. We had a meeting and we demanded to know what was going on." Callie scrunched up her face, rolling her eyes. "We were ridiculous, and she told us so. 'Do you think that art is just about your own damn skill? Get out of your heads. What I asked you to do was still about art. It was about helping a friend out at the airport and helping him to move. Who cares if he's famous or not, or even an artist or not? This is how you have friendships. There is no such thing as a solitary genius who just creates. You need connection for the art business to work, and even leaving that behind, you need connections in order for life to work. You better learn the last one before you even think of the first one.'" Callie took a breath, mimicking Vivian's tone of voice and gestures perfectly. "She was harsh, but she had to be. We understood she was trying to open up to us after that."

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14