Chapter Fifty-Four Frank 2 страница

“What was important?” I asked him. If he had been so content on being The Stranger, I wondered what had changed. Why was I here now? Why was I given these letters, these brief musings and drawings about times that had passed and now passed for so long? If he had been so happy to be alone, why were there suddenly two of us at this table? Even though I was that little flakey teenager for awhile after he was gone, even with my new sense of freedom and responsibility, and had not catalogued my days to his extent and maturity level, there was still one thing I knew for certain: I had missed the man with all my heart.

But had Gerard missed me?

He took a breath and rested his elbows on our small table. The question seemed to strike him, though at the time I couldn’t really gather if it was a good or troubled emotion that I had ignited. It was clearly something he had considered before; being in a foreign place alone for seven years without any friends gave someone a lot of time to reflect.

“I used to think it was art…”

“You mean it’s not art?” The notion that the center of every living thing was not this burning heart of passion and creativity coming from this man who had guided me so heavily was a weighty statement. “How can you live in Paris for seven years and bring that out as the moral of the story?”

He shook his head, laughing a bit at my heightened sense of horror. “You still act the same way.”

“The same way how?”

“You still never wait until I finish an idea before jumping in with your own conclusions and remarks.”

I felt my face grow flushed. I thought I had grown up in those seven years; I had a lot of experiences shape me, it almost felt insulting to hear that I had never changed. But I knew from the familiar expression on Gerard’s face that that was not what he had meant. The fundamental core of the person - that never changed, especially if one retraced themselves back to the person who helped to shape that core. Gerard’s lips were formed into a smile, one that felt old and worn with time, but was still fighting.

“I never said it was a bad attribute. It shows your mind never relents, never rests. That’s a very good characteristic in a student – in a person. A full human being is one who is always willing to be the student, to be something else, and to learn something new. To change, evolve. It’s a very good characteristic, Frank. Stop blushing over it.” The smile was stronger this time around. “You still blush the same way, too.”

The attention he had been focusing on me was flattering, but I didn’t come eighteen hours on a plane and then spend an obscene amount of euros in a cab to have him talk about my skin tones. At least, not yet. I recollected my confidence, and leaned back on the table. “So if art wasn’t important, what was?”

His face grimaced a little, pressing on. “I never said art wasn’t important, per se. Simply because something else gains a little more importance inside one’s mind, does not negate the fact that the other element had any bearings. You merely start collecting things as you get older. More things pop up that require your attention; things happen; experiences change your entire world view.” He looked around the café at that world beyond the windows and chalkboards with the specials of the day written on them. His eyes ended on me, and that smile was present again. He sighed. “That’s why I move so much slower now. I have so many things that require my attention, so many things that I want to take time for, and so many things I found out in this process.”

“So what did you find out?” I pressed harder. I wasn’t sure what exactly I wanted to hear him say. My own name? That I was the most important thing in his life? I knew that wasn’t true, and in a way, I never wanted it to be true. But I wanted answers from him; I wanted to know everything again.

“Art is certainly in there. But simply saying ‘art’ is never doing that word justice. It encompasses so many other elements.” He paused and started to flick his large lighter around in his hand that had been on the table. He looked off to the side. “Je pense, presque … I think…” he reflected with a small wink. “I think I’m still trying to figure a lot of it out. I don’t believe we ever stop.”

I nodded, and took a drink of my coffee slowly. I could tell by the tone of his voice – which was something that had never changed for him – that this conversation was over. Or at least, Gerard’s side of it was. He wasn’t going to give me any more answers than this, and perhaps, really, this was all he could say for the time being. It was still certainly a lot more than I could ever feasibly conceive at that moment in time.

When I looked around the inside of the café, my eyes wide with this new world, I was not contemplating my past lives lived back in Jersey and what had been important for myself. I was still too awestruck by the deep blue walls of the building and the fact that I was in grand old Par-ee. I probably should have been contemplating; Gerard would have wanted me to, but all I knew were events with a vague sense of time stamped on them from the letters he had sent and letters I had scattered to return. It felt like no matter what I had done or accomplished back in Jersey, Gerard and Paris were still the core of that very young and very beating heart in the center of my chest.

~

The first few months away from him were the hardest. The initial surge of emotion from my freedom eventually cooled and I was left dreaming of him persistently in a cold, feverish sweat. I read travel magazines, collected postcards, and made Jasmine sick of the useless knowledge that I persisted to inform her with about Paris and France as a whole country. (Did you know that French people often refer to Metropolitan France as L’Hexagone? And that from the first to sixth centuries, the city of Paris was known as Lutetia?). It sometimes felt like I was being torn in two, but not for the obvious reasons that couples often feel so divided if moved too far for too long (although that did play a factor). I had spent so long being the student that I didn’t quite know how to shed that role completely (and I apparently never had). While I had freedom of thoughts, mind, and action now and I could see my future laid out in front of me like a wide plain, I felt bipolar on some days. The only way I could approach new situations and people was to act like a student at first, and then guide myself through it, being the teacher that Gerard always had been. I knew I had the confidence to accomplish goals and I knew I could do anything I put my mind to. That feeling was freeing, elating, and what got me through my days. But I was always so torn with emotion, because I felt like I had to know absolutely nothing in order to gain something, and start with inferiority to build up to high achievement.

Needless to reiterate any further, it was tiring. I felt like two people on some days and this perpetuated itself into my daily life. I often played off dialogues in my head between this Eminent Gerard Figure and myself solving problems which he hashed out to me in carefully formulated life lessons. It sounded crazy, and looking back, I pitied poor Jasmine and Vivian who were kind enough to listen to my vapid rantings between two people, but also too kind to dissuade me in any manner.

These dialogues and utter senseless insanity were visible manifestations of how much I had missed him in those first months: it literally made me divide myself into two people, to replace the hole he had left in my life. It made me, and others around myself, crazy.

When the first letters came from Gerard, and I did not have to compensate for his being, it was a weight being lifted from myself. My vehement force cooled. His words and images were abstruse for the most part, vague esoteric renditions of a grandeur place he had built up so highly in my mind, but they satisfied me and quelled my hunger for something more. They gave me a separate part of the whole picture. A visual, tangible element I could look at and know that I had with me at all times, but was not overlapping my existence.

His first letter was a simple drawing of a mountain with a stream of black ink on coarse, off-white paper riddled with fine bumps and ridges. I spent hours eyeballing those soft pen strokes and feeling the texture of the paper between my fingers. I never thought of why he had chosen to draw a mountain, of all things, while being in Paris; it had never occurred to me to analyze his letters in that regard. I was far too concerned with my senses, what was imminent and in front of me, something of which I could finally hold. I pressed the page to my face with sudden relief that this was finally here and was overcome with his smell. It was like a jolt of memory, firing through me, and I had to sit for several minutes in a catatonic state to adjust myself back into the reality of what was going on. With each letter, the impact of these desires grew less and less, which was good for my nerves, but it saddened me, at first. I knew that I missed him, but you can only miss someone so much before it stops becoming the reason your heart beats, and just another lub-dub echo the organ makes. It was a part of me, rather than an effect on me. Each time a letter came, I read it, held it, and then bundled it up with the rest of them.

At first I kept them on my bed with me, to fulfill some strange fantasy that he was still beside me every night. But as my pile grew, and when he sometimes sent me things other than paper, pen, and his fragrance on paper (like the cork from his favourite wine, a leaf from the first fall, a pick to a guitar), I needed to move my collection of Gerard elsewhere. I put him in a box that I painted black and filed him under the bed. He was still near me, but not digging into me every night. He was hidden, too, which was always important. He was always this big secret to me. The only people I’d ever let see the letters in full were Jasmine or Vivian, and that was only because they were, and always had been, exceptions. But even then, I had my own exceptions, and some letters never saw anyone else’s eyes but my own. I kept it that way, I liked it that way; I never thought it could be any other way.

At first this became an anthology, then as years passed, I turned it into a mythology that lived in my mind like a fairy tale, a story that had happened and was now over, and a future that was nothing more than a dream to cling into at night. I knew I loved him, and that would never change, even as new experiences and new people entered my life. He was still always there, in the back of my mind, under my bed, but in the front of my heart. Like a callus, something that appeared on the hands from constant use, driven by passion. It seemed as if this pressing feeling of missing him, and this notion of Paris itself as a whole, was to become a persistent element in my world.

Now with his equivocal presence in my life through these letters, I was able to become more solid on my own, and start achieving the potential we both knew I had inside of me.

~

The waitress came over to us, her hair in a messy blonde bun and her slender figure cloaked in black. She looked as if she had been plucked from a stereotypical movie or postcard about France. When she asked in Persian tongue if Gerard wanted more coffee (voulez-vous plus café?), he replied like a pro (un peu, dans un moment, merci – ah, attendez, est-ce que tu as mon régulière?). Knowing no French myself, and never really ever picking it up despite my efforts anywhere, I could only decipher their conversation though tone of voice. He declined the coffee, but then gave me a look and started to gesture grandly with his hands. She smiled at me before left, and Gerard looked like a child on Christmas.

He wouldn’t tell me the source of his excitement no matter how hard I pestered, but it wasn’t before long before the golden answers were delivered to our table in the form of a half dozen croissants. They were in a basket, the lining inside made of dark green cloth, the exact same colour as the clay mugs we had been drinking from. Gerard dove in right away, and we continued to talk as we picked away and consumed the best part of Paris. Near the bottom, I noticed the stains of grease on the delicate green cloth. My heart jumped inside my chest, remembering the same marks on the letters – and my frustration towards them.

“Hey,” I pestered, whipping away crumbs in front of myself to reiterate my point. “Why did you never clean off the table before you wrote your letters or drew your pictures?”

He laughed, and then pressed his coffee to his lips. He regarded the bottom of the basket, and it seemed fascinating to him.

“I never saw the need to.”

I was about to interject, but he was still as perceptive as ever in guessing what my qualms were in life. “The grease stains… they were purposeful, in a way. I ate my breakfast first, so I could have a clear head and have time to meditate on what I was going to draw and tell you about my day. The first time I noticed the splotches, I wanted to cover them up, or start again. Perfectionism was a nagging voice inside of my mind – but then I held the letters up to the light.”

He reached into his pocket suddenly of his own worn jacket and took out the same familiar paper that I had stockpiled in my room so far away. He placed it on the table where he had just finished eating, his large hands spreading over the page and pressing it down, before he held it up in front. The grease spread out like a ripple in water, and then I finally saw what he saw.

“A window. A fraction of light. It goes through the paper and it shines on. Sure, it ruined the picture, but it doesn’t, really, in my own humble opinion. It makes a new one, gives you a new way of looking at things.” He had been talking into the page, looking at me through the greased stained window. He put the page down, eyes adverted, feeling a little embarrassed by his methodology and my prying eyes. “I suppose I wanted you to see the world how I saw it every morning. Looking through the light, the small grease stain, it reminded me of you.”

I smiled, then teased. “Should I be flattered that I’m compared to grease?”

“Never grease. Just the light inside of it,” Gerard corrected me with a slight wink. He rushed through his next words and actions, determined to shift focus as he put the stained paper away in his jacket pocket. “But never mind these banalities of my former life here, alone. I don’t need to show you my morning through a page anymore. You’re the morning now - you’re here to experience it for yourself.”

I took a deep breath, my eyes wide. The whole notion of experiences, here, in this place among many, seemed too overwhelming. I regarded Gerard from across the table, exchanging devilish eyes. I felt like there was so much we had done together, so much I had been able to do on my own, but looking around, nothing that I could ever do would top this. I felt inferior and in awe like the first time I had stepped into Gerard’s apartment in Jersey. This was amazing, and felt so far beyond me. I couldn’t decipher if I was disappointed for the past, or elated for the present.

“Anything I tell you won’t compare to a fraction of this,” I uttered slowly.

“I wouldn’t say that. I don’t know very much about your mornings in New Jersey – or your life, for that fact.” He furrowed his brow, bewildered by his own remark. He leaned forward on the table. “So tell me.”

The request was so simple and yet, I had no real idea where to begin.

~

When his letters weren’t coming as rapidly as I would have hoped, I was forced to move on with my life. For the time being, at least. I never forgot him – no, that was an impossible task. How could I? Even without his letters, I lived in his apartment. I saw the man’s soul on the walls every day when I got up in the morning. If I ever felt the urge to paint or sketch, I was using his materials. When I developed my photos, I was doing it in the darkroom he had created for me. Everything around me that I used to make my art had been his, or he had touched it and shaped it to its full potential. Including myself. I ate with his dishes and cleaned myself with his old soap and shampoo, and when the essentials that he had left me with ran out, I bought the same brands in the store as if by instinct. For the first little while I was there, my fresh food kept spoiling because I unconsciously bought for two people. I had him all around me, inside and out. He was just there. I swore I could hear his voice some days, his off-key notes of his bad French opera. I never forgot anything, but I also didn’t allow myself to become stuck. After awhile, and with some gentle pushing from my two female counterparts, I stopped living in my memories and I started to create some other ones. I had to do it, if not for my grocery bill’s sake, then for my sanity.

The first step was getting out of the house. I had been so content to stay there for so long because it was someplace that not only reminded me of Gerard, but was truly mine. Being an only child, I probably had some leftover immaturity on the whole sharing issue, but I was also an artist. I was greedy and I was always in a constant state of perpetual want. Once I was on my own and in a perfectly prolific environment for the arts, I realized that I never wanted to leave. Gerard aside, this place was a heaven among earth for artists and Gerard had created it that way. We both had the same appetite for solitude and visual stimuli. His place fed me with so many emotions, and once I was able to sift past the old, painful ones, I was able to make art again from all this madness.

I took a lot of pictures, I painted with his materials, and though I still wasn’t very good, I tried guitar for awhile. I stayed indoors, only leaving when I had to. I had to repeat an extra semester of high school, along with attending some summer school courses in order to get my degree. My marks had been terrible before Gerard and I had been together, and then they took a nosedive during the relationship because I had been skipping school so much. When everything exploded, and teachers started to pity me, things got a little better, but only because Jasmine had turned me around scholastically. She took me under her wing entirely, getting my homework or helping to explain the lessons I had missed. She told me that she could probably convince the teachers to let me pass with low sixties if I was able to do well on my exams, since she could vouch for being a study partner (Jasmine had ridiculously high grades, and was almost valedictorian). While it was tempting to just be done with that hellhole of a place, I didn’t want redemption out of pity and from someone else’s efforts. I knew Gerard wouldn’t have wanted it as well, which pretty much sealed the deal. I wanted something more than sixties and I wanted to drop all of my math courses and take something better for myself. I was pretty set on going to art school, but I didn’t exactly know how to get there from where I stood. I had a feeling, though, that being in Computer Science would not help me.

My school didn’t have photography, but they had a few elective art classes, which ended up being elementary at their finest points. But it got me out of the house, and it got me thinking about something new with people around for discussion. Vivian had told me to stick with it persistently, and “even kiss a little ass while you’re there. You’re going to need references for art school, my dear.” I was so glad she was still watching over me like a protective, albeit atypical, mother. Some days my head was too in the clouds to really comprehend what I was doing.

So, I did art, though it felt like nothing in comparison to what Gerard and I had done in his apartment. I also made friends with my teacher. She was an older woman, named Mrs. Rusten, practically next door to retirement. I had no idea why the high school kept her on the teaching staff. She was only part-time in the summer and did supply work all during the year. But she was nice and kind, and always smelt like Werther’s Original candies. I knew she had a huge stash of them under her desk, but she would always insist that she could never touch sweet things.

As far as art was concerned, she taught the subject quite well, but some of her painting techniques were strange. My jaded self declared that she was faking it, and for the first few classes I was cynical towards her every movement. That was, until she decided to teach pottery on a whim. Her voice changed that day. She normally had a very tranquil and simple speaking tone, which was calming to listen to, but triggered afternoon narcolepsy during some classes. As soon as she uttered the word pottery, however, it was like her voice had come alive. Before she had just been reading what she had memorized from textbooks. She liked it, and did it with a smile and lucidity, but they were never really her words.

This was. She taught this lesson from her head with her voice raising octaves until she was giggling hysterically with clay on her nose. When I watched her hands go over the mound, I knew that was why everything else in the class before had felt so stiff and forced. She wasn’t a painter, a sketcher, or even a teacher. She just wanted to make pots and play with clay all day long.

It was after that class when I decided to take Viv’s advice and start to gain Mrs. Rusten’s (or Vera, as she insisted I start to call her) friendship. I would stay after class and she’d teach me some stuff about pottery, mostly the history of it, which didn’t really fascinate me. It elated her though, so I stayed. She gave me animal crackers and apple juice, like I was seven, and eventually we started to have lunch together. She was quirky and fun, always picking up trash from the ground and putting it in a garbage can as we walked around after eating or making clay magnets. The time I spent with her wasn’t measuring up to anything of epic nature like Gerard, but it was nice. I didn’t really talk much, mostly because she had that area completely covered and because I couldn’t really find much to say. We couldn’t really relate in artistic fields – she knew nothing beyond family Polaroids from 1972 – but we still enjoyed the company. When I went back to high school the second time, I didn’t bother with attempting to make friends my own age. I seemed to be able to relate more to older people, and yet, still feel so naïve around them at the same time.

“You’re just someone that others want to take care of,” she explained when she gave me the animal crackers for the first day. I was never really sure how to take it, so I didn’t really think about it. That was probably for the best, because apparently she liked what I had done in her class, or what I had let her do, and she managed to give me a good reference for art school.

I did a few English courses, as well as a history, just to thicken out my transcript and broaden my horizons to finish up high school. It wasn’t as amazing an experience as I could have hoped for, Mrs. Rusten – Vera – aside. Half the time I felt old, bored, like I wasn’t being challenged, and all I wanted to do was go home and sit in my apartment. I was eighteen and didn’t have to be there, technically, and it was too hard emotionally some days. It was during that first semester, especially when winter hit and the one year mark was approaching, when I missed Gerard the most.

When I finally finished, with decent grades and a much better outlook (at least on paper) for the future, there was still a lag on my life. It was the middle of the year, and art schools wouldn’t be taking anyone for awhile. I had time to work on a portfolio, but nothing seemed to intrigue me as much anymore or I just didn’t feel like sharing it. I did a whole set of photos and paintings about Gerard, about our sequence of events that led up to everything (except the end; it was always too hard for me to reflect and paint anything to do with the dove, or doves in general, actually; they were the one subject I could never capture and outright refused to), but I never showed them. I left them hanging in the darkroom and I destroyed or painted over the canvasses after a few months.

I did learn how to drive for real this time, though, courtesy of my father. Our driving lessons during the hot July months of summer made us relate to one another on a professional level, so we could have a foundation to start a personal one again. We started all over, essentially, with mutual respect and clarity and it was one of the best things we ever did for one another. Moving out the house itself and finally being completely truthful with my parents cleared a lot of the tight-aired tension between us. They were not exactly pleased with my relationship, but I was an adult now. It had happened, and now Gerard was gone, so there was no pending threat. I would try and make an effort (if I didn’t, Vivian would drag me there and then invite herself inside) to come home and see them once a week, which eventually morphed into the standard family setting of Sunday night dinners. They weren’t my favourite things in the world, but it helped bring us together as much as set a distance between us. They could see me become a fully autonomous person, while still offering their friendly parenting advice every so often. And trust me, they offered it a lot over the years. The topic of Gerard would come up on occasion in discussion, but I tried not to dwell on him too much. Even if my father had now accepted the relationship and they could both see what a better person I was becoming, I still thought it was a little odd to chat about over green beans. Besides, this way, he became even more mine.

~

As I told Gerard parts of my story, I could see his eyes light up with pride. He was so proud of me, not for his own work in shaping me into this person, but for the sheer fact that I was able to do this by myself. He had left because he wanted to take no credit for my actions; he wanted me to do it alone, and make the right decisions without his constant influence. And from what I was telling him at that table in Paris, I had been successful. I had been successful enough to turn my life around from the trainwreck course it had been heading on in the first place, but to be able to do it on my own was phenomenal to him and I could see it in his eyes. He was so proud of me. It was all I had ever really wanted, but it almost didn’t feel right. I tried to insinuate that I was still winging it a lot of the time, irresponsible and utterly clueless for the most part, and some days I did let the memories take over, but he didn’t seem to pick up on it. He was simply happy for me. He kept ordering coffee and croissants and we moved to an outside table so he could smoke. His eyes kept dancing with anticipation and I remembered them from so long ago – only it had been theother way around. He had been telling me his story then, about New York City art schools and galleries, Raymond and Vivian, his rise to art academy fame, and I had been the one listening without much to say other than ooohs and ahhhs.

Myself as the perpetual talker was strange and it felt wrong, like violating a barrier. But Gerard’s happiness was infectious. And really, I was happy, even back then. It wasn’t always this nostalgic rumination that I couldn’t shake. I really had made a better life for myself, even if it was hard to enact on some days. I knew it was there, I could feel it pressing against me. I felt so much on some days. Gerard had opened the floodgates on all of my emotions, the bad ones included, so of course there was going to be a little turbulence. I was still searching, still struggling to cope with everything he had left me. On some days when I walked around his apartment, I felt as if I was attempting to solve this giant puzzle. I’d look at his old canvases, the ones we left behind together, and the ones I had made since his absence and I wondered how they all linked together. How did the story begin, how did it end? I would stare for hours, trying to decipher, and the only real tangible answer I could come up with was that it was meant to happen in Paris. In Paris, it would all make sense again. We would link everything together and the story would be complete. Our story, our epilogue. I hung onto that metaphor the most. It made perfect sense in my mind, and it allowed me some satisfaction. I knew that my freedom was present: I could feel it in between my rib cage, hovering over the solar plexus, in the center of my heart. It would not go away, even in tough times; it lay hidden under all the layers for protection. It would always be a part of me, but there were some situations that would call for a bigger part than others.

I was still waiting for my real shining moment. My kick off, my explosion. Disenchanted for the most part with the world around me, I knew this would only happen in Paris, so I waited, and moved on. This solace of information, though not exactly what I wanted, made me content with the waiting process. I was a lot more outgoing, happier, livelier, willing to take chances and risks because I knew – I was sure of it even without proof – that something big was on its way. I had everything in my life that I wanted, logically, but him. What I did have of him were those grease-stained letters in a locked box under my bed and the knowing force that something more was about to occur. I had him with me, as much as I could.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14