September - Last Words 8 страница

"She was born on Thursday, September 15th, guys, at about 10:45 at night, and she's beautiful. Her name is Paloma Iris Wyatt, and she has brown hair that keeps getting thicker and dark blue eyes. Hunter says they'll probably change. She's healthy and weighed something like seven pounds. So there you go, mom, no more waiting for those grandkids," I joked in the email. I told them a bit more about my daughter, and about how the two people of my life were doing. I even told them stuff about Gerard and his illness, how he was healing from the stroke extremely well, but that he still sometimes got really foggy in terms of his memory. For a moment I wondered why my father, who had always been the same age as Gerard, had not been afflicted with this condition, but Gerard was. I pushed it out of my mind, and tried to keep typing. I was not here to debate how fair my life was, I was there to tell them how good I knew it to be.

I thanked my father for apologizing, and those words felt so good coming off my chest. I realized then how strongly I wanted a good relationship with them both. It seemed to overwhelm me. "I don't know," I wrote to them. "I guess becoming a parent has made me think about you a lot. I told Paloma about you both. You should see her." I took a deep breath and pushed forward. I wanted to have a relationship with them, but it was going to be difficult. It was going to take time, but I had to begin putting in the effort and not wasting it. "We will visit you," I said, emphasizing the power dynamic and the element of that choice. They had made me feel ashamed for a long time, and though it was better, we all needed to work into this slowly. I told them I didn't know a date yet and it would depend on how everyone felt, but I would let them know. "Before the end of September," I finished, and then signed my name. It felt good to hit send and have the email disappear. I was left with this satisfied feeling and this sense of power. I wondered if Callie and Dean were our distant cousins, how my biological parents played into this. Hunter was still distancing himself from his family and had severed most ties. He didn't want to be involved. He would send them an email or a call eventually, but he knew they wouldn't care too much. I knew a lot of this was because of his recent decisions, but tried to not push the issue.

"It is what it is," he told me. "I have so much more right here and I'm okay with that."

While I encouraged Hunter to see his family for Thanksgiving, maybe, so that they could have time to process the decision, I knew that he had made up his mind for the time being. He was still sending letters and emails to Jason, his step-brother, though, and considering he was in the military and a bit of a jerk for the most part in high school, I was impressed. He had changed a lot in seven years, Hunter assured me, and I knew that if Jason understood Hunter, there was hope for the rest of his family. Perhaps not right then, but soon. Until that day, I knew that with my parents in the mix, even if we treated them as a long-lost friend, or like third-cousins-twice removed or something like that, that they would eventually get close to Hunter too. At least, I hoped. I had never thought my father would apologize, let alone use the right pronoun. But it seemed like a lot was possible, and I didn't want to shut anything down.

At my desk, I took out the archive that I kept there. It was the one that had the drawings that Mikey's kids had sent to me, and some of the emails that I had gotten, including the long drawn out conversations with Scott. I needed to reply to some of those within the rest of my week, I reminded myself. The archive, still busting at some of its seams with information and memory, was still not done. I printed off the email from my parents and slid it in the back.

It still wasn't finished, and I knew that. Even as the days progressed, and our house was still alive and booming with people, giving us a million other things to consider adding, it never felt finished. I figured that was the point of an archive, so I didn't let it bother me too much. In fact, it seemed to fuel me further in my collection, including Hunter. We were adding little tidbits about Paloma, and like Vivian said, I was marveling in her like a true parent. Hunter had to stop me several times from putting in the most asinine and gross items. When she spit up for the first time, I treated it as this monumental occurrence and insisted that my shirt be preserved. I was going a bit overboard, I knew, but I wanted to. I had to. I wanted her to know that she was who she was and that included throw up. While I had been joking around (only a little) about the spit up and the diapers and her first bottle being preserved, there was always a more serious side lying underneath a joke. I wanted to thank her for being around and for her to know that she was special. It wasn't every day I got to tell people my problems, and I enjoyed that even at only a week or two old, she was willing to put up with my many conversations about my anxieties over being her father. Even when I was quiet with her, and merely held her to my chest instead of talking, she was immediately calming. Once the situation with my father had been amended, and I had my interview at work, we talked about that some more.

"I mean, I don't know, Paloma. It's a big job. It means more money, which is good, but Mikey - he's your uncle, I guess, but we can ask him what he wants to be called later. Actually, he'll probably be The Storyteller to you because he's got a million up there in his head. He read to his kids a lot. He has seven kids! You're coming into a big family, but we will make you feel welcome, I promise." I smiled at her, and she smiled back. She had started to do it more recently and each time it happened I wanted to cry. I held back, though, and I told her more about her Papa's brother Mikey, and all the stories he could tell. He had been lamenting to me one day at work when I brought in more Night Kitchen Pizza about how he would never get to tell that story again. I told him he could tell Paloma, and that had helped a bit. But he was quiet for a bit before he confessed that he was thinking of writing his own.

"What about bass?" I asked him, "and Rachel?"

"Most children's stories are songs, anyway. Even The Night Kitchen has a distinct rhythm." He began to say the first verse, and used his hands to tap out the beat. "See? I could combine the two interests and maximize productivity and efficiency."

He laughed and then began to reflect a bit, and I ate my pizza and let his mind get going. I told Paloma all of this later, and said that perhaps she should be looking out for her uncle's claim to superstardom. "Famous children’s author- it has a nice ring, don't you think? And he's fifty, too! Just had his birthday yesterday. He had his birthday just before yours. You, Mikey, and Cassandra are all September babies. Isn't that great?" There was that smile again, and the kick of a foot. "So yes, you should look out for his book, Paloma. He could get famous, you never know. You really never know."

I picked her up and rocked her side to side, though she was not crying. I found myself scrolling back the dockets of memories I had now, enough to fill a whole room, and back to the show I had with Gerard, where his fame finally happened. "Yes, everyone gets those fifteen minutes of fame, Paloma. That is your first art lesson. And Mikey will get his, like you'll get yours, and maybe I've already had mine." I thought of the responses from our show, which were now slowing down, but still distinct and vivid in my memory. "Gerard got his fifteen minutes. But I think his goal was beyond that. I think he has something special, or at least, I think his Alaska was something different." I kissed her cheeks and held her very close to me. It was really hard for me to talk about Gerard with her, so I quickly moved back to my original topic.

"Yes, I was telling you about my interview. My Human Resource interview. I don't know how well it went, since it was my first serious business type of interview. I hate that I'm in business or banking, and when they asked why I wanted to work for the company I couldn't ass kiss as well as others. I just couldn't," I paused wondering if I had sworn around my child, if "ass" counted, and then I discarded that worry. I had probably done worse without noticing. "So do you know what I told them, why I wanted to work there? I'll tell you, because this should be your first word and not any of the drivel that I've been saying before this. I told them I wanted the job because of freedom." I paused, held her head, and then had us make eye contact. I nodded to her, and told her the word again. "Freedom. I told them that though I didn't know everything, that was for sure, I knew what freedom felt like, and I wanted to make sure as many people as possible would feel the way that I've been feeling for most of my life. At least, ever since I met your two other dads. Freedom, Paloma. Please don't forget that. It is very important."

I wanted to believe that she nodded and smiled, but I knew that her expression had something to do with the fact that she had definitely just filled her diaper. " Again?" I said, joking again. I kept my tone positive, even though it was nearly eleven at night, and I had to go to work and do laundry still. "Well, that's all right, Paloma. Let's get you cleaned up. I have another thing that I need you to remember for me. This is about art, and how important that is, too."

That night was the first of our art lessons together, now that the tensions and anxieties from my real life slowly faded into the background. There were still other tensions and issues that cropped up in our house, but by focusing on art, I felt like I was still dealing with those emotions. I told Paloma more than just Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame, but about his factory and all the people that lived inside of it and how they made movies and prints. I told her about Magritte's pipe (not Duchamp's) and his portraits of The Lovers, which her dad had adapted to his own pieces. I told her about her Papa a lot, and about his three favorite artists, or at least, the ones that seemed to stick with him and define him the most: Frida, Picasso, and Van Gogh. When I didn't want to talk about that anymore, and she was asleep when I got home from work, I picked up Gerard's copy of Remembrance of Things Past and began to read out loud to her. I went to Rimbaud, but thought we should wait awhile for Baudelaire and Lolita.

My time began to oscillate between the two people that needed taking care of the most in the house: Gerard and Paloma. Hunter was doing much better, and usually wanted to be with Paloma in the morning after he was writing now, and so I began to take Gerard in morning shifts. At night, he would sometimes join me with Paloma though and those were the happiest times with my daughter that I could ever remember. I didn't need to voice the anxieties out loud, because nothing was wrong then. Sometimes he would tell her about art, especially about the primary and secondary colors, but he mostly made faces at her and waved his hands around. We had started to make flapping wings with our hands at one point, in order to get these "doves" to fly over her crib.

"You get, Paloma? You're a dove, you're free!" I teased and reminded her seriously at the same time. These moments seemed to stretch infinitely across the crib, and across our memories, between Gerard and I. He smiled as we played with her and mocked our old world together, and I leaned forward and kissed him over the crib. Our daughter stared up at us. Our daughter. It didn't seem real, and all I could do was keep flapping those hands, those dove wings, and telling her that she needed to remember freedom. Gerard grabbed my hand one of the times we were doing this, and then tried to speak French. We had taken her to his room in the past and shown her the colors on the wall and gone through their names in French and English, but this was something else he was trying to enunciate. It was not colors. He kept stuttering a bit with, "C-c-c-" and then, as he kept pointing to our hands, I realized.

"Comme le soliel interminable," I said. He nodded empathetically, and for a while, everything fell away and it was just the two of us, placing my hand on his wall.

Instances like this, while they were common, were not the norm. He spent time with his daughter, and he grew to be articulate and affectionate about her, but sometimes it was difficult. It was still hard for me to speak to her about him some days, so I pushed it from our reality, and I tried to be solely with him in the mornings, before I left for work. The words that Scott had told me about intimacy were not forgotten, and I tried to embody them the best I could and feel how Gerard was doing. Every morning, before I got food for us both, if I had not slept with him the night before, I crawled into bed with him. I laid myself next to him and I tried to touch as much of his body as I could. I waited until he was awake and he was aware of who I was before any of this, though, to make sure that things were okay. Then I would let him touch me, and try to lie back into the touch, lie so far back, I could feel his hands on me for the first time when I was seventeen.

It was hard, taking our clothing off again. I came in and lay down in bed with him, and sometimes he would reach over and touch me. It was a familiar action to him, and I tried to let him touch me and feel okay about it. I took off my shirt and I helped him with his. He had been gaining weight, which was a plus for him. His skin was a much healthier color, and it was no longer dry in some places. We kissed a lot, and ran our hands over one another, but it was rare we descended lower. His hand had been going across my chest a lot one morning, and then seemed to be permanently fixated on my hip. He had been calling me Frank that morning, so I felt okay to touch and kiss him back, to feel desire for him. He still had those feelings, I kept reminding myself, it was just his ability to express them that was compromised. Everything was still there, and he was still himself. I slipped my shorts off, and lay next to him naked, and then he began to take off his clothing next. We lay face to face, on our sides in the bed, looking at one another slowly. When we eventually bridged the gap, his body was cold, and it seemed to cut right through me. We gyrated and I touched his erection, and began to go up and down. I ran my fingers along his back, and was about to use my mouth, feeling better with his cognition that morning, when he grabbed my shoulders and told me to stay.

"You," he said. "Frank. I want to see you."

I nodded, not giving it a second thought, and put our foreheads together. I placed my hand on the back of his neck, and we both gripped one another. We didn't orgasm, but we spent most of that morning touching and exploring the others' body, the places we forgot were there and the places that we would always remember. I ran my thumb over the mole on his thigh, and we kissed so hard our teeth grated together a bit.

"I love you," I whispered in his ear. I knew I was going to have to go to work soon, but I wanted to stay here forever. He was so important, so much a part of me, I debated calling in sick. If he was sick, I was sick. I didn't expect a response from him, and I uttered the phrase mostly out of guilt because I was leaving. He gripped me back, and said, "you too."

It wasn't exactly the phrase all over again, but this was a rare expression for him. When he did say I love you, or I said it to him, we rarely said the mirrored phrase. But he had. I hugged him closer to me, and told him I would be back that night. I was always coming back that night, I told him desperately.

"Je sais," he murmured, and for a moment, I truly believed he was getting better.

A lot of the times in the morning, we would feed one another. Oranges had become his new favorite food, and while Paloma's palette was still mostly from Hunter, I got to experiment with new tastes with Gerard. He was discovering all that he used to love again and I would try to surprise him every morning. I brought up chopped bananas, grapes, and a section of watermelon, and we would eat with our hands and try to manage the juice that was spilled. We kissed a lot then, and I fed him, though he was able to feed himself still. He couldn't cut or peel anything really, though. The first time I brought up the oranges, he stared at them wide eyed as he held it in his hands. He knew what they were, but the concept of peel seemed to completely leave his mind. I started to do it with one orange, but eventually took his from him and did it. He wasn't upset that time that I had taken over. He was actually elated with this food choice and it didn't seem to matter how it was presented to him. The second time I brought oranges, I cut them into sections and this seemed to delight him even more. I shoved the slice in my mouth and made a smiley face for him, and he did the same.

"Vivian," he said, and I took this to mean it was something that the two of them did in art school. I cut up oranges a lot for him after that. The juice got everywhere when I did that and would become sticky on my hand. Sometimes as I would feed him, he would take his fingers into my mouth. He would never bite, just quickly taste. He knew me, I was sure of it, and this was his love for me expressed. I brought up oranges a lot, after this response to them, and I hoped that these small moments would last.

I began to look for intimacy beyond the physicality of our bodies together, and I found it in an unexpected act: shaving. In the mornings, this would sometimes become a task for all three of us as Vivian changed Paloma downstairs. It was rare that Gerard got much facial hair at all. Odd really, since anytime I missed even a day now I looked like a beggar by the afternoon at work. Gerard's hair, when it did come in, was lighter with age and barely noticeable. I had been helping him shave in the past, but it was mostly watching him as he did it to make sure he didn't hurt himself. This was the first time I had taken the blade to his neck and ran it up and down. I thought this was a trust exercise for just me, but I realized that I was also depending on him not to suddenly move. This, like all acts performed with two people, was always reciprocal and interdependent.

When Hunter first noticed that Gerard was shaved, he had expressed interest in learning for himself since he was eventually going to need this type of training. So one morning, all three of us piled into Gerard's crammed bathroom and I gave them both a lesson before I left for work. It helped me to talk out loud, because I felt as if I was keeping a lot inside at that point. I was writing and talking to people, keeping company, and still doing art - I had taken a disgusting amount of pictures of Paloma - but this deep seated anxiety still weighed on my chest that I did not want to acknowledge.

"So, in this case, we probably should use shaving lotion...." I began. I wanted to give them both the best treatment possible. I got the shaving cream out and squirted some into my palm. Hunter had put a towel around Gerard's chest and neck, and rubbed his back as I applied it. He squinted a bit when the coldness first registered, but he seemed to understand what was going on. I was using a disposable razor, and though it did not do the job as well as the other ones, I felt a lot safer using this. I told them each movement I was doing as I dragged the thin razor across his skin. I was amazed, the level of trust and attention they were both giving me in that moment. Though Gerard was the only one with the razor close to his skin, Hunter was still listening intently. He was learning this iconic masculine habit from me. I had learned this, ages ago, from my father. It was when we had still been getting along, when I was still young and hadn't been too rebellious yet. I remembered watching him shave in the mornings, and then him sitting me down when I was twelve and deciding that he was going to show me, even though I barely had a shadow. I was sure I was still using the same shaving lotion as him, because I rarely did use it, and I bought on impulse. The scent filled my nose in the bathroom that we were in together and I realized how the memory of when I was twelve was now becoming muted, changed. Hunter was watching me, and we were all reflected back in the mirror. I was positioned sideways over Gerard, and he was next to Hunter. These were the parents of a daughter, two of them learning how to shave again in the middle of their life. I wondered if this was how Gerard perceived all his memories now; overlapping, folding together, and creating something new. I knew his paintings had become abstract, when he did do them, and I remembered what he had said about Kandinsky. It all became folded together, kaleidoscopic. But not always beautiful. I knew that for sure, more than ever then.

Though I felt the intimacy between the two of us, especially as I tipped his head back and got under his chin, I knew there was a definite sadness. I saw his Adam's apple bob as he swallowed, and I moved my eyes to Hunter. There was distinct sadness, there, too. Hunter was starting all over again, but though he sometimes lamented the life that he had lost as a woman and the life he thought he never could live as a man, he was happy to try again. He did not have the milestones that I had grown up and received, but that didn't mean his acquisition of those times were any less relevant and significant as my own. It was going to be an exciting few years for him, I knew, whatever pathway of transition he ended up taking. After I had shown him what to do with Gerard and the task of shaving, he began to take over.

"It's good practice for me," he insisted, and declined to have me supervise. I knew he was sure with what he was doing, but I felt disappointed. I had wanted that time between the two of us, Gerard and I and this thin piece of life and death, to remain ours. He was getting weaker, and I didn't want to admit it. I just wanted to shave him every morning, go to work, and then come home to see my daughter. I was glad that Hunter was finding himself, but sometimes I wanted him to just go away so that Gerard and I could fold ourselves together, reconstruct our memories, and maybe, hopefully go back in time. If I knew he couldn't get better, well, maybe then everything could just stop.

Paloma was the only notion that got me through those thoughts. Her cries knocked me back into reality, and she helped me to express myself on another level. "I love him, you know?" I asked her one night when I had gotten up to attend to her crying. We were co-sleeping, Hunter and I, in an attempt to move away from the crib, and it had been her turn with me. I changed her, and looked at the garden from my bedroom. "I've loved him my whole life, because it feels as if my life really started when I met him. There was nothing before it, it's just blank. And I guess Hunter feels the same way too, as if Gerard was able to help him start that part of his life from before that he had always been ignoring. He was happy before he met Gerard, maybe just a little scared. You should really ask him, though. I guess what I'm trying to say is, Paloma, is not that I don't want you to be afraid of being afraid, because that's all fear really is. I need you to know that I'm afraid too. We're all afraid. I want you to know I love him, a lot, too. He's not dead, I know, and I want you to spend as much time as you can with him. He's not dead. But..."

I pinned her diaper, and then I scooped her up. She had begun to cry a bit, perhaps sensing some of the tension and anxiety spilling forth in my voice. The days since her birth were growing and all blurring together. But my thoughts about Gerard and the situation we were in had become a compulsive urge that I did not want to feed, and yet, could not go on starving anymore. My vision shifted and changed, and I was forced to stare at the situation like I had stared at him in the mirror when we shaved.

He had shut down that morning. I had tried to get up and talk with him, but he wanted nothing to do with us. We gave him food, and then backed away, but it had been the first time this level of disassociation had really happened. Usually when he shut down, he just stopped talking. This was completely different - he didn't want us near him at all. For a brief moment, Hunter and I began to consider moving him out of the bedroom so he could be closer to one of us if this got worse, if he had another stroke, and all the bad things we could think of, but we eventually decided against it. It sucked, having him shut us out, but his paint supplies were there. That room reminded him of Paris. It was a safe space to him. Even if he felt odd waking up there, he would stay there because of the art. Even if he shut us out, he would stay there because of the art. We had his white-board loaded with information, and we had added at the bottom that he had a daughter, hoping this would help him. On his good days, it did, and I would bring Paloma up to see him. While I delighted in her, Gerard merely watched her, and Hunter could not fathom that she was real some days and had come out of him. Gerard had been holding his daughter more regularly, having regained a bit more of his strength, and no matter what, he was always quiet with her. He always just looked at her, and I was curious at what he saw.

"Beautiful," is all he could really articulate. He was growing frustrated with his lack of word choices. It was mostly his language that was failing him, but that morning it had been different. He had completely shut down personal relationships, and it worried me far too much. All the bad things that Hunter and I had been reading in books were now happening and we were no longer viewing ourselves as lucky with his progress so far. I was ranting about this to my daughter who could only understand that the person who was supposed to be taking care of her was also upset, and therefore making her upset. I tried to calm her, rocking her and speaking as smoothly as I could as we waltzed around the room, but it was futile. I needed to know if he was okay at that moment, and since she was still with me and I didn't want to let her go, she came with me too. I tip toed up the stairs, still half asleep myself. It was four in the morning, but it felt like the sun could rise at any moment. The daylight savings was catching up to us, and I kept thinking of that poem that Hunter and Gerard used to say to one another.

In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.

I felt like I was trapped in that poem then and was astounded by my memory of the line. While I had ranted to my daughter, Hunter usually read poems to her, so I figured I had overheard it. I crept up the stairs and thought to myself, revising the old line: In the room he comes and goes, thinking like Picasso. It didn't quite work, but I was tired, half-delirious, and my worry was hitting a point. I knocked on his door softly, and then I went inside. His light was still on, but he was asleep in bed. His face looked back up at me from the pillow and I went to sit by him. I touched his hand, and prayed that I didn't wake him up, or if I did, it was a soft waking. He seemed out pretty well, but his hand was warm, so my worry was quelled for a second. But it came back when I looked at his white board and I realized that he had erased everything and written "madness" in its place. I closed my eyes and turned away from it.

He was still there, I thought. He was there, he had to be, because he knew what was happening to him. And he hated it. That was why he had shut us away in the morning. Perhaps that had actually been his most lucid moment, the final realization hitting a peak and then feeling as if it was too much to bear. We had talked about his illness through so many other names for such a long time. He had bad aging, accelerated deterioration, the forgetting disease, and anything but. We tried to forget about words like dementia, early-onset and Alzheimer's, but it had consumed him to the point where it became the only thing he remembered.

Holding Paloma, I started to cry then. All of my worst fears were coming back. I had been holding them off for so long, it almost felt like they would disappear. I had tried to establish that connection again, and it had been working. Then in an instant it was shut down. I knew that it was not necessarily permanent. As much as this was a degenerative issue, there was some leeway from what we had seen. Things more so got folded and confused, than completely torn up and eradicated, at least at this stage. His memories were turned into origami birds rather than burned away. Nothing was ever completely gone, I knew that for sure. But things did change, and I needed to accept that. On the days that he would be lucid, and he would be told back his life, he would be so happy. Then in the morning, or sometimes even in the same afternoon it was like something small had shifted and it wasn't the same anymore. I had been holding on for so long because he did shift so much. He was great, and then not so great, but he would go back and forth, like he was not quite sure yet if he was remembering or forgetting today. But no matter what, the worry was always coming back. The madness always fucking returned, and I hated it. I worried about him having another stroke and we were all good about making sure he got his medication. We left a bottle in his bathroom so we were sure it got into him. We were all worried about him, no doubt, we all were. It was why Vivian had moved into the living room, and this past week, even when Walter asked her out, she had been declining.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14