September - Last Words 1 страница

"And all this strange experience, as I remember it, confounds itself in a fugue."
Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve

Chapter One

The show was on a Friday night, just before Labor Day. Everything felt so rushed. Callie and Dean literally stayed up the night before helping Vivian to organize it. Vivian also pulled a night shift for the show, Cassandra and Noelle staying up until the wee hours of the morning and acting as coffee and pizza people before they both crashed on the couch Vivian had in her office on campus. Vivian had wanted a vacation from school before she started up again, but with this undertaking she ended up spending even more time there than she thought was possible. When she wasn't there overseeing Callie and Dean's efforts and the transportation down to the art center, she was with the professor in his office. Walter, his name was Walter, I reminded myself, and though he was still suffering from bursts of dead white man's disease he was getting out of it slowly. He had been helping Vivian with Noelle and Cassandra's duties after they had passed out from exhaustion, and brought everyone involved breakfast as soon as they were done. He came bearing gifts of eggs, cheese, and meat, but since those who were helping us out had the least amount of diet restrictions, his gifts were welcomed with open arms. Vivian, between praises of thanks, did try to warn him that it wouldn't be so easy to please us.

"Not that you all are picky, or anything. I totally get your decisions and respect them. But this'll be a good test for him. I need to know how he copes under pressure," she quipped, and in spite of all the teasing she did about her boyfriend when he wasn't around, I could tell she was falling for him fast. The laughs that I had begun to associate with her in Gerard's presence became transferred to her relaying a story about Walter. Similarly, the flash in her eyes and playful gestures were now all reserved for this new economics professor, who we were going to be meeting very soon. He was going to go to our show tonight, and if that wasn't going to be a large eye-opening experience for him, I didn't know what would. It would make or break the relationship, Vivian knew, but she was determined to have him come. She was no longer teasing about vegan and vegetarian diet quirks. This wasn't just her livelihood she was letting him come into; this was viewing her family in what they did best. Out of all the art shows she had organized during her career which began way too long ago to remember ("and don't make me, Frank"), this was going to be her favorite one. There would have been no way she would have given up the last days of her vacation in order to get it all together if this didn't mean the world to her. If Walter didn't like it, she knew she would no longer be around Walter in the same context.

"May as well know right away whether or not it will last. It's only been a month, but we're both old and running out of time," she quipped, trying not to betray herself and give away how much this did matter. Vivian was forty-eight this year in November, and Walter was actually only forty-six. She liked being the older person in the relationship, for once, though I assured her that she really wasn't that old at all. Walter had no children and had never been married before. Family life was something he never experienced yet, but was definitely warming up to the idea and getting used to the amount that Vivian seemed to have buzzing around her. He had already met Cassandra on several occasions, and knew that Noelle wasn't just her really close best friend. Although Vivian had told him her daughter was dating a girl, Cassandra wanted to make that point extra clear and put her arm around Noelle at the dinner table, and then up her skirt at one point. Vivian recounted the story to me with her face in her palm and shaking her head, saying that this was worse than any teenage boy. Walter had been fine with this display; he tried to bring up discussion about the local politics and gay marriage. However, he did figure that this was as weird as it got. It was a real test when Vivian had been talking about Jasmine when they first met one another, and then suddenly switched to Hunter and began to talk about when he was due to give birth, probably after the show. This had caused Walter to pause considerably, and while Vivian's explanation wasn't as in depth as Hunter would have given, she managed to convey the situation. It took him a few days to let that information sink in, but he was learning the importance of asking questions and not assuming anything. He was very used to dealing with numbers and while some of the financial theory he taught became highly conceptual, it was still dealing with something that had a fairly material basis.

"Don't be surprised if he tries to talk about your new house when he meets you," Vivian warned me. "It's not that he's ignoring the fact that there is a pregnant person named Hunter in front of him or that you're half naked in most of your photos. He's fine with that. Trust me, he has already seen a small preview of the art space and he only widened his eyes once. It's just that houses and financial markets are what he likes."

I smiled, chills coming up my spine. We were almost ready to show and I was so envious of Walter right then because he had a preview. Vivian had been adamant about setting this up with the help of others. Since we had given everyone such an enormous gift with the archive, Vivian insisted on paying us back this way. While everyone we loved set up the display how Hunter and I had vaguely instructed and drawn on paper like a crude map, we were left to our own devices and merely imaging what all of this could mean. We didn't even have a title for the display.

"I will take care of that," Vivian had insisted. I raised my hands to object, but she merely shushed me. "You all have your individual pieces that can be named by you. But all three of you can't come together and see what you've done objectively. I can. I will do you justice, Frank, remember that."

I opened my mouth to add something, but closed it and sighed with welcome defeat. I knew Vivian was right, and for a few moments, I wondered if it really had been the four of us that could change the world. The three of us would always be center stage, to a certain degree, and the ones producing. But that production meant nothing if we could never seen what it meant on the outside. Vivian was the fourth one standing, overseeing, and organizing. I hugged her before she insisted that she needed to leave me for the day and finally get some sleep that she desperately needed.

"Good luck, handsome," she teased me. When I questioned her word choice, she merely shrugged and told me that I better get used to some comments like that. "You're naked in your photos. People are going to love you."

With one final wink, she was out the door. The morning sun was still heating up from the chill of the night before, and the blue sky looked absolutely picturesque as I watched her pull out of our driveway from our front window. I looked at the clock on our microwave after she was gone, and sighed, realizing I had barely fifteen minutes to get myself ready and out the door for work. I passed Hunter on the stairs as I began to take them two by two, and stopped briefly so I could kiss him before I had to go. He was taking the day off work so that one of us could be present and around Gerard to help him get ready for the show. One of Hunter's mobiles had broken in the set up process the night before and Vivian had brought it over, so he would be attending to that and making sure my last piece of The Tower of Babel got out the door when Callie was supposed to drop by in the afternoon. He was also planning on cooking for most of the day, but with the way the heat was still creeping into the house, and the exhaustion that we both felt from stress or just being pregnant, we didn't know how productive we could be. Before I had a chance to shave, I heard Mikey's car and I was gone again.

In the car on the way in, Mikey told me to reach into the glove compartment. I pulled out picture after picture that his kids had been working on all week. Most were simple pieces drawn on standard printing paper with bodies that were shapes rather than full forms, but some were far more delicate and intricate. Elizabeth had tried to do cut out people holding hands and had drawn faces on each person, and then labeled the names of us underneath. There were other pieces that had distinctly glued pieces, like glitter, sequins, or construction paper and they were an array of colors. There was one piece that was nothing but color, in fact; this was Jonah's, who had taken all the crayons he could find and mashed them into the piece of paper to compose this amorphous rain in many colors, including browns, grays, and blacks. When I looked up at Mikey, completely overwhelmed by these images, he smiled smugly. His pride for his children was definitely showing through.

"They've been drawing for a week straight. They heard there was an art show, and they wanted to participate, too. They thought it was just for Gerard, so that's all they drew," Mikey said. His smile fell for a second, and when we had gotten to a stop sign, he looked and held a few of the pieces before he handed them off to me again. He began to tell me in a quiet voice that seeing the way his brother had been represented through his children's eyes made him realize how much he missed him.

"The show is tonight," I told him. "You can see him then."

He nodded and dropped the topic, and I thanked him again for his contribution. I ended up putting the pictures inside the archive binder that I kept at my desk. Hunter and I had made some for ourselves in addition to everyone we had interviewed, and I kept mine here for purely strategic purposes. Anytime I got overwhelmed, I would just take a step back and look through this. I had page protectors in the back along with some dividers and I had started to list Appendixes. I slotted the kids pictures inside and made a mental note to bring this home with me to show the others. I realized that having so many copies of the archive out everywhere for people to hold onto, also meant that they could add to it at their own pace. Vivian had already confided to me that she had the newspaper interview that Gerard and I had done a long time ago and it had been slotted into her version. I had been worried about the asymmetry before, but now I knew, looking at my own unique part of the children's drawings, that this was half the fun of the project. I still had not added my own contribution to all of this, but I knew I would soon enough.

Hunter had prepared Gerard in his wheelchair for the art show and we were using Mikey's van to get him there. He had been having a good day, Hunter assured me, and the two of them had gotten very close again. Hunter had been worried at first, with the new name and slightly new style of dress, that Gerard would become confused again, but nothing had happened so far. It was not often that people, one on one, addressed each other by their name or using pronouns. There was no difference in how the two of them interacted, because, according to Hunter, Gerard had always known this about himself and had always treated Hunter like he was special in that way. The familiarity between them had not diminished and it felt like it could never break. Gerard was his eternal audience to the role that Hunter had finally selected for this play. They had apparently read together for most of the afternoon (The Tempest, as usual) to not tire him out with talking too much. We knew that he might have a tough time tonight with all the people and attention. He knew he was having an art show and was very excited for it. He had dressed himself with the right amount of attention to detail and over dinner demanded wine for the special occasion. He didn't argue when he took his medication, but he did raise a bit of fuss about the wheelchair. He wanted his cane, since it was far more stylish, and we compromised with bringing both. In spite of his grand gestures (as grand of ones that he could make now), I saw a faint sign of relief as he sat back down into the chair. He was used to getting up early and going to bed just as the sun went down. He had not napped today, and the disjointed sleep schedule would no doubt affect him later on tonight.

Mikey picked us up after dinner, and we loaded all of us, plus Cassandra and Noelle, and took off. Vivian had been with Walter most of the day, and the two would be coming in Walter's ridiculously expensive car after they had had dinner (at, no doubt, a ridiculously expensive restaurant). Alexa was coming in her father's truck and would be picking up the graduate students. Lydia had been invited, and so had Hilda, but we had heard no word from either of them. I was amazed at how many people were coming to this and still quite anxious with how it was all going to be received. Callie and Dean had made fliers to distribute around the campus, but since it was still the summer and people were still just moving in, it was hard to tell if it had garnered a response. The audience reception didn't matter to Gerard, Hunter, and myself, however. Everyone who should have been there, was there. Including Mikey's kids, who were ushered back into Callie and Dean's care and felt very at home now with the two students. Two professionals, I corrected myself again. Dean donned a nice blazer with an insignia and crest I did not recognize and Callie was in a long black dress with another ornate necklace and earrings to accentuate the attire. They made the art of baby-sitting look like quite a posh profession, indeed. Jonah was now walking, but his stroller was still taken inside so no one had to worry about him falling down and hurting himself on a display. He was even dressed up, too. It was the first time I had seen the young child outside of anything but an onesie and he looked absolutely adorable. He was almost better dressed than myself, with his little white collared shirt and tiny clip-on tie. I had jeans and a blazer with a nice shirt underneath, which I thought had been okay when I left. As soon as Vivian saw me she walked right over and demanded I tuck in the shirt, and then began to do it for me and clucked her tongue the entire time while I laughed. Most of Mikey's kids were in special attire, and all the boys (plus Elizabeth, since pants were easier for her to run around in) were wearing dress pants with nice shirts. Rachel and Alexa were the only two in the family with skirts, and when I looked closer, I realized they had both been previously owned by Hunter. Alexa's make-up was incredible; her eyes were blackened with kohl and extravagant colors accentuated her lids. I had never seen her do something like this before, and with her dark hair tied back and her gold beaded necklace, she looked absolutely wonderful. Everyone did. We all got there around the same time and our entourage of vehicles were the only few in the place. Vivian had said it was a good idea to get there early, for parking's sake, and then so we could all go through the exhibit before the crowd got too intense.

"You're giving us way too much credit, Viv," Hunter had told her. He was nervous, I could tell from the way he kept gripping the handles on Gerard's wheelchair and making his knuckles go white. Vivian just rolled her eyes, and kept telling us about how many people would be there and how we would need to see our wonderful fine art before the eyes of scavengers were laid on it. Though her voice was coy, there was a definite serious quality. My blood began to pump faster, not being able to contain my excitement to see what she had done with our work. Her pride in herself, in all those who gathered just outside the well lit entryway of the center, and the art we had produced was evident. We all murmured and greeted one another, making sure we knew our positions and thanked everyone for the help they had provided. Vivian said that Walter was coming later, and that a few other faculty members, in both her department and his, were coming.

"But those are only the people who RSVP'd me. They didn't have to, and there will possibly be more," she explained to us and then began to go through the whole procedure once again. The show was going to work very similar to the way that Gerard's last one had gone. We had the space for the rest of the month and each piece had a price tag. If someone wanted it, they contacted Vivian and she made the sale. The painting would stay there until the end of the month, the price tag for that piece removed, and the show would always be open in the afternoons for people to come in and look through. Other than this grand opening she was organizing, the rest of the month was going to be a low-key affair. Since Gerard's show had been so successful, the art space owner let Vivian have the space for free, but got a cut of the sold pieces. We were probably going to earn very little from this, but it was a good trade.

"And trust me on that. I'm sleeping with an economics professor," she quipped, feeling the need to brandish her new happiness wherever she went. She smiled amidst the groans of the crowd, and flipped her hair over her shoulder. She gave a better breakdown of the finances that Walter had worked out for her, but at that point, the money did not matter to me. We needed to have this show, and we all needed to be there. It was just a fact. Whether or not the public came, the pubic bought, I did not care.

My palms became sweaty as I waited for Vivian to finish. Another car rolled into the parking lot, and I began to wonder if having an audience for this at all was really such a good idea. Like the archive which was to be kept between the people I trusted, I wondered if this art was supposed to be handled the same way. This nagging doubt was especially aggravated when I fully began to comprehend just how intimate the art that Hunter and I had produced was. Vivian's comment of handsome was okay, but what if, like she had teased, other people would try to say that to me? What if people were insincere about it? Were these feelings something to share, to display for people?

In the end, with Vivian's persistence, I knew it had to be this way. It wasn't me bearing my entire soul and showing people the dark history of the family, but it also wasn't staying completely silent about my life. If I stayed silent, if I did not have an audience, then it may as well not exist. I thought of part of Hunter's interview, and how, like his new identity, this entire show became useless when we were by ourselves producing it. Even within the confines of my small, but ever-growing family, the show needed to keep going on in order to have any purpose. There was no point in living my life if I was not going to tell people about what I had done. It wasn't necessarily confessing every little detail, but it was choosing something, a small section of my life, even if being naked and with Gerard in some photos felt absolutely huge. It wasn't nothing and it wasn't everything. It was a part of me and by showing that part, I could hopefully invite others inside in which to fill in the rest. I didn't care about the economy from this show, but I wondered how people would factor in. I was okay walking away with empty pockets, but I knew I wanted to have something more in my hands. I hoped, as I saw more cars begin to pull into the lot, that this was working out.

As we all prepared to go inside the doors, I took a deep breath. This was it, I thought to myself. This was the last bit of ourselves before our worlds entirely changed. This was our final go at things, our last step before the retreat home, our Alaska. I had suggested Alaska as a title very early on, when we couldn't find anything that was making sense. I had no idea what Vivian was planning, but I reviewed the long index of names that we had all pulled our hair out over trying to decide. Hunter had suggested, "Fight the Good Fight" but I didn't like the connotations. His work was aggressive, visceral, and it did feel like a fight to him a lot of the time. He found freedom in that pushing back, in the solitude of hunting and planning before attack, but I didn't always, and I knew Gerard never pushed back. Instead he went to the back, drew his life, and built this alternative all around. For myself and my own work, it was a more emotional struggle and the merging of two lives I had lived concurrently, one with and without Gerard, with and without photography. I wanted to be able to show the parts of myself that had once brought me shame. I wanted to know that I wasn't invisible, and I did this the best way I knew how: I took pictures of myself, and others around me, and I tried to place them together with some meaning. My own intention felt so lacklustre, especially compare to Gerard's previous foray into the carnivalesque and grotesque with The Flower of Hell exhibit, but it was different this time around for all of us. This showcase was the three of us, our interiors, and how they all meshed together. It was a grand display of how we could all be in a relationship with one another, so completely linked, but separate and distinct entities in and of ourselves. We needed to have this display, not only for ourselves, but for the world to accept us and the life that we were soon bringing into it.

In spite of all the melodramatic relations between the pieces, I knew that nothing was really going to change from this exhibit. I wasn't going to find myself through others, even though that was what I had wanted to do for so long, and it was what Lydia saw from the beginning. I wasn't going to have any revelations about the meaning of life, and even Hunter, who had probably gone through the most progressive change of us all, still didn't believe in that one earth shattering moment. It was always a general progression, and this was the next step. This art was representative of that general progression, because I knew I was always able to find the pieces of myself through the pieces I had made. It had already been there, waiting for me to discover. I had made all of these beautiful objects and the ones that were placed next to mine were the other beautiful objects that had influenced me, but they were not me. Gerard's abstracts were his own self as Hunter's collages and mobiles were him. I had my photos, what I chose to remember about this life and keep contained. There were photos of me naked, but there were also photos of myself in a mirror, a jazz club, and others inside my world. There was also my tower, too, which seemed so out of place next to the photos I had taken. But it was still mine, and this was still me.

"I think everyone is up to speed, so now, enough of my babble," Vivian said with a smile, sharing the expression with Alexa. "Let's go inside."

Jumpy on my feet, I walked inside the corridor. Hunter was busy pushing Gerard in his wheelchair so I had no hand to hold for support. Vivian had once been acting as leader of the whole affair, noticed my anxiety and placed an arm around my shoulder. Calling me handsome as she whispered in my ear, she asked me what I thought. The title was the first thing people saw once past the front desk, and it was where Vivian's eyesight was leading me. The word Babel stood before me and I smiled to myself, far too large. It was black against the white walls, and each letter was rendered in a different font. For such a small word, it conveyed multitudes of meaning. Underneath the title of our display was each one of our names. To my surprise, Vivian had put my last name as Wyatt and not Spinelli. I smiled at her again, feeling so elated. She had done such a good job.

"See? I pay attention to these things," was all she said before kissing me on the cheek. "Proud of you, you know that, right?" Before I had a chance to answer, she took my hand and held it in a strong grip as we began our ascent through the gallery.

Gerard's paintings were first. The space he was given had two corners of a square and then the forth wall vanished and was where we stood to gaze in. The walls were blindingly white and the gallery was not dim; both of these factors contributed to Gerard's canvases absolutely popping with color. On the wall to our left, were his first set of triptychs, The Dream Ones, and on the opposite wall were the matching triptychs, The Life Ones. Of course, inside the center of the display was The Rainbow piece. It was simple, almost minimalistic, but it conveyed the beauty of his pieces perfectly. I thought back to his show in February when the room had been downright dark with strings of lights everywhere to illuminate the pieces; it had felt more like a nightclub than an art gallery. Now the lighting was soft and tranquil, and the sun was still out. Through the large windows of the front of the gallery, the natural light filtered through the room and added a calm atmosphere. There was no urgency to these displays, though one set of his triptychs were distinctly about capturing all the life that was left, and the wood floor underneath our feet made squeaking noises that seemed to contrast the whole feel. We still ushered by quietly, discretely, and tried to absorb all we could. After we had lingered and examined a few of Gerard's pieces closely, we began to turn the first corner, and came face to face with Hunter's work.

His pieces had needed the bigger room at the center of the gallery, mostly because of the floor space. On opposite sides of the wall, he had needed to hang his mobiles with enough room around them for people to look and not crash into one another or more art. The first one we saw was his version of The Tower of Babel, where bricks of color and each language hung one after the other, until they all reached the top. He had placed nothing there but the sun and then written in Sanskrit the word for light with grains of sand. I thought it was beautiful, until I turned around and gazed at it from behind, only to realize there was another dimension to this. On the new side each brick was made out of newsprint and utterly indecipherable and a big black hole with the Sanskrit for darkness was at the top. Sometimes, if a breeze caught this mobile right, the bricks would turn and shift and lightness would be transposed to darkness and the other way around. Impressed even more, we moved onto his other mobile that had been made from one of his old notebooks, where he had cut out animals and hung them in the same manner. This one was called The Flood, and I saw now how he had added flicks of blue paper to the coat hanger it hung off, to make rain fall down onto each paper creature. The coat hanger had been wrapped with yarn and made into a boat, but again, there was no person, no mythical creature or anyone steering the ship. It was just rain and the animals.

As if his mobiles were not enough for three-dimensional art, he had also made one diorama that stood in the center of the back wall. It was filled with flayed out paper and cut outs that were supposed to represent a tree in the forest. They were text heavy, thickly printed, and layered to the back of the piece. Front and center were a boy and a girl looking at the house in front of them. It was a log cabin, made of cardboard and cardstock. The house was not garish or brightly colored at all, though the piece was titled Hansel and Gretel and this was clearly his interpretation of the old childhood story. The children before the house were colored gray, forming a shadowlike outline, from the newsprint and papier-mâché that made their bodies. They were holding hands. I stopped and stared at this piece awhile, realizing that it had not been newspaper that made this, nor his notes from school, but a letter and diary entries. I tried to read them, but Hunter had deliberately obscured the details. Although this piece, because of the amount of grays it contained, seemed to be the least developed, there was something here, some nugget of truth, that Hunter was trying to convey.

Most people fixated on the two framed pieces on either side of the diorama that held the best of his collage work. There was the Hunter/Gatherer piece with its coloring and underlining, and then there was another framed figure of all his Women's Studies notes made into the body of a man. He stood at that one a long time, before he moved on. He had traded the wheelchair with Vivian for a while, and I came up behind him to see if he was all right. I noticed the title of the piece: Reclaimed. As I looked and began to ask some questions, he began to tell me that no matter what happened to him, he would always be a feminist.

"That theory helped me when nothing else did. Just because I know I'm not exactly a woman does not make my attraction to it any less valid," he explained softly, before moving on. In the center of the body, though it was a collage, I could clearly see the words cut out and rearranged to see a single sentence. It was from Audre Lorde, a woman who I had begun to get familiar with myself: The Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house. We were all done with this display now, and it was time to change again.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14