Sunflowers (Tournesols) II 7 страница

Still naked, and getting over the precarious nature of how I felt in my own skin right now, I walked over towards the window. I felt empowered with each step I took. Though the removal of my clothing had been innocent enough and merely for sleeping comfort, as soon as I stepped towards the window, I began to remember what we could do now. What we finally had the option of doing now as the only restriction from before was removed. It didn't matter who saw me naked at his window, and it didn't matter if Gerard were to come up from behind, put his arms around me, and then...

I looked over to him at the bed, hoping he had been roused and maybe fallen off the same cliff in his own dreams, but no, he was sleeping. I debated for a moment waking him up and sharing my new idea for us, but I remembered something he had told me in Paris about how, with old age, if he was woken up, he almost invariably had to get up right then because his body would feel rested, even if he had only slept for three hours. This was predominantly why he had started to get up so early - his body almost forced him to. I decided against my plan, letting him sleep, and also coming to terms with the fact that we lived here now, and were going to be staying awhile so there was no rush on things. For once, there was no rush. Even in Paris, there had felt this constricting timeline of what we needed to do and how we needed to be together to make up for lost time. Now it felt like we were on even ground. And fuck, it felt so good. I let Gerard sleep and actually felt okay about it.

Seeing the clock from the kitchen, I realized it was about three in the morning and I wondered if I was going to be able to fall back to sleep. It was a passing thought at best, and I focused my time on looking out the large window, at the many city lights. I had not been awake at this time, in this place, for a long time, and though it was cold and I risked diminishing some of my parts, I opened the door and stepped out for a bit. I was still naked.

The only lights that were on were the street lamps and the stars, or so I thought at first. I looked down the railing to see if anyone was on the sidewalk - saw nothing - and began scanning the streets. I saw lots of cigarette butts in the gutter, and I first I thought one was still lit and smoking, but it was next to a sewer grate and the steam rising off of it was hitting the cold air and producing a cloud of smoke. I really wanted one of Gerard's cigarettes, but they were inside and I wasn't craving it that badly to go and get it.

We almost stopped smoking entirely in Paris - there just wasn't money to. Sometimes we would pick up half used butts from the ground and try to get what we needed to off them, but my nicotine addiction had never been that strong. It was mostly a nostalgic crutch than anything, and I never smoked around anyone but Gerard. When he was gone, it was a way of conjuring his memory. Besides, it was the time period now where most people looked down on smokers and heckled them publicly - forcing me to do it alone even if I had wanted to do it with anyone other than the artist. In Paris, things were a little different, and we were able to get what we needed to, but for the most part I had no use for nostalgia, and Gerard was making other art. We passed it up. At the airport he had bought a package, brand new, and this first new one I had seen in months. For stress, he later explained, and then added that he hoped that this was probably the last one. He said this almost weekly in Paris, so I paid no attention to it.

I was beginning to grow cold, now, and realized I was probably still half in a dreamy delusional state if I thought coming out here in the middle of the night was a good idea. I began to turn around and head back inside, when I saw a light that was not government owned or in the sky. In the neighbouring building, I could see it was all dark in their windows but one lone one at the top. I couldn't see inside - and they probably couldn't see me save for a shadow - but I could tell that the light was on, and that there was someone inside the top floor apartment. At three in the morning, on a weekday, it made me smile. I wondered what was going on behind the light in the middle of the night, and if they were an insomniac or nocturnal for the same reasons I had been in those months leading up to Paris. Except for this minor infraction now, I had revolved around a practically normal sleeping schedule in Paris because Gerard didn't always have electricity - which meant light in the middle of the night was impossible. In spite of how much I enjoyed Paris, the secret thrill of insomnia made me smile, and made me glad to be home.

Inside the apartment, I still didn't put clothing on, and I didn't immediately jump into bed. I walked around to infuse my bones with a little bit of warmth. I was enjoying this feeling of being naked, this empowerment that Gerard had taught me before - of confidence - but with a new flare. I was allowed to be naked, naked with him, and I had this exhibitionist delight from being against the window like that. I stood there again, my hands on my hips, and I realized how much older my body was. The lanky limbs and chubby belly that I had had before, synonymous with adolescence, were gone. I was more muscular than before - though it was not something I worked at, something that just happened. My chest and shoulders were broader, and my hair, though more expansive than before, seemed to be more orderly (though again, I did nothing to help that). The hormone craze that had gone through my body from before when I was with Gerard had evened out and my body showed it. It was different, though essentially the same. My hands went from my hips to through the line of hair I had, and then I touched myself. It was not a sexual grasp, however. I just wanted to see who I was, and in a strange way, make sure I was still there. To revel in my body, something which I had been so awkward with before, the last time I was here with him.

When I got back into bed and under the covers, Gerard was still very much asleep. I slid over to him, and the blanket we shared I pulled up to my shoulders. And then, feeling like an explorer, I pulled my face and head underneath and let in some of the light from the stars and streetlamps to guide my sight. Gerard had flipped over at this point, his chest up, and I had a fair comparison to examine. I looked at our bodies under the blanket, lying down together. This wasn't a sexual longing, this wasn't even really curiosity because I had seen it all before; Gerard still wandered around naked sometimes in Paris, and he had seen me do the same. I didn't know exactly what I was doing, my eyes scanning my navel and then to his, my nipples and chest hair and then to his, and finally my penis and then his own, to our knees and knobby ankles, until a sudden thought occurred to me and I realized how utterly the same we were. Our bodies were the same, they were strong, hairy, and though his was aged, it was still mine. There was a familiarity, like coming home, with looking at Gerard's body and feeling my own inside myself. What he had, I had, and what I liked done with me, he usually liked too. It was so hard to articulate how utter sameness felt so good -- at least, not until I had difference for so long.

Gerard was the only man I had slept with, and who had seen me the way I saw him. I generally wasn't attracted to other men at all. I had been to a few parties in college, and definitely had guys hit on me, but it wasn't something I was into. I rejected them politely, and for the most part, it never happened again. Especially after people saw me hanging out with Jasmine so much (although she got asked regularly if I was her "gay best friend" as she told me, and she always said she told them no). Jasmine would never tell anyone else I was gay, or even bi, but she knew about Gerard and we would talk about Lorca and Dali as if it made the best sense in the world. She understood my sexuality - hell, she understood a lot of sexualities, and its purpose as a whole for diversity. But not everyone else understood the sexual diversity that there really was in this world and everyone outside of the small group I had who knew about Gerard always wanted over simplifications. So Jasmine never told anyone I was gay, and told most people, if they asked, that I was straight. Categories like that had once comforted me so much when I was younger, and they still did - I had always liked the idea of exceptions - but from what I learned vicariously from Jasmine, there seemed to be no point in the categories to begin with, and therefore eradicating exceptions. It was also just easier to ignore the fact that I was really in love with a man - a man who was thirty years old than me, no less - than to explain the history of sexuality as a whole to someone nosy enough to ask and then enlighten them on my own. Most people in my age bracket only had enough time for small talk while drinking before moving onto fucking, not for a lecture or a six hundred page novel explaining it all to them.

Jasmine was the only one who really knew me like that, and that was probably why she and I did have sex together so much, or would constantly flee to one another during the winter months. But she wasn't the only person I had been with. In college it was relatively easier to meet women and it was alarming sometimes how easy it was to get sex. It took me a long time after Gerard left to have sex with someone other than Jasmine or myself, but as soon as I felt remotely ready, all I had to do was walk into an art school party. Each time, I went home with someone. I couldn't believe how easy it was - and then, the next day, how there was no real commitment. It was weird - and at first I didn't like it. I tried actual dating, hoping for something better. But after a few dates and quasi-relationships with women, I gave up. I knew that I was never going to actually be that into someone if I always had Gerard at the back of my mind. I was going to go to Paris, I would remind myself constantly, and then things would be good. It began to become unfair to those women that I was seeking half-serious relationships with when they wanted someone who was actually going to be around and not redirecting most of our conversations to talking about art. For the last three years or so, ever since I officially quit school and could not stand it anymore, I had not had sex with anyone but Jasmine. I seemed to forget this part of myself, this sexuality that was deeply rooted. Not Gerard, though, I would remember what it was like to be with Gerard for as long as I was alive, I was sure of it. But I forgot this part, this deeply prevalent and almost animalistic being in myself. I was the same as him. We had the same parts, and the feelings that were evoked from this realization were overwhelming.

I looked up at the clock in the kitchen, and realized it was heading towards four in the morning. It was too early still. I couldn't wake him up - and tell him what, exactly? That I was relieved he was back? That I wanted to thank him for being the same? No, none of that sounded right. It didn't make sense when I tried to put it in dialogue.

He moved suddenly. Turning over, he now turned his body towards me, still deep asleep. I turned myself towards him now, my chest facing his. I began to feel small hints of sleep wanting to come back into my body, now warmed since being outdoors. Relaxing, I did what I could for awhile, and watched him closely. I saw his subtle breathing in and out, his eyes back and forth during a REM cycle, and I wondered if he ever did the same for me. I knew that language was fallible in this situation and I could never really express to him this feeling of sameness without it sounding boring, complacent, or horrifically normal. I moved my own body into the crevice of his own instead, and fell back asleep with a calm knowledge flowing through our bodies.

I ended up sleeping in much later than I thought I would. When I woke up, Gerard was already up, and pottering around the apartment. It was an extremely bright day in December, and the sun filled the room. Considering both the sun and Gerard had been around for awhile and were not being quiet or calm, I was surprised I had slept until nearly ten in the morning. I rolled over and made a groaning sound, mostly for show, and trying to get Gerard's attention. I did not. He went into the kitchen and seemed to stay there a long time. I didn't smell coffee, so I lifted myself up to a sitting position to look into the kitchen and see what he was doing. He was at the table, leaning over it instead of sitting down, and writing things on a million little white cards that were spread across the wood surface. His long hair fell over his face and obscured any type of expression he had. He was fully dressed, too - in exactly what he was wearing yesterday, plus the now-faded dove jacket. He had given me that years ago, but it had made its way to Paris, and now back onto the artist's back. I was glad; it had always fit him better than it ever would myself.

As I got myself out of bed and found underwear to put on, I began to hear him muttering under his breath and clicking his teeth. It was when I turned around to grab a t-shirt that I saw what he had done in the other parts of the apartment. If there was a piece of furniture, it now had a small white card over the top of it, stapled or taped to it, with some type of writing on it. I walked towards the drawers that had already been done and tried to figure it out. At first I thought it was a poem, or a phrase of some kind. It was all in French and little pieces of it were broken up here and there. It was only when I got to the paint supplies that I realized what was going on.

Rouge, orange, jaune, verte, bleu, violet, arc en ciel. I walked over to the window, and confirmed my thought - fenêtre. As I looked at everything else he had labelled, I could feel my French vocabulary expanding. I had learned practically nothing while we were in France, and mostly because I was a visual learner. Hearing everyone speak things around me just confused me. I needed to see how words were spelled before I could understand what they said, and then, when speaking, I needed to form in my mind the pictures that words were in order to comprehend. I felt good walking around the apartment to see what he had labelled things. It made me feel like maybe I could redeem a French education after the fact. A chair was une chaise, the couch was la canapé, the door la porte, and the floor was la plancher. I walked back and forth, from the art supplies to the furniture, and tried to commit it all to memory.

"Morning," Gerard greeted, coming up behind me. "Or maybe I should translate that phrase into French as well and paste it on the fridge. Hmmm."

I turned around and put an arm around his waist. "I like it. You should translate more. Maybe have an entire collection of common phrases. You know, like those guide books have?"

He rolled his eyes at me and then kissed me on the forehead before he turned away. "Of course you would compare this to a guide book. I thought living in the heart of Paris - which is poverty, by the way - you would get beyond mere tourism!"

I rolled my eyes right back at him. "I just woke up. You've got to give me a bit of a break."

"Oh, my poule," he said, his attention focused on his work.

I furrowed my eyebrows. I knew that French word. "Did you just call me your chicken?"

He was crouched on the ground now, labelling more things. "Did I not call you that in Paris? I swear I did. It's a common term of affection there."

"My chicken is a term of affection?" I was highly sceptical.

"Well, pumpkin is one here and I don't really see the difference. At least the chicken is alive and not some random object that people hack up in October to celebrate a pagan ritual." I laughed at Gerard's astute observation, and he added: "And besides, at least a chicken is a bird ."

"All right," I conceded. "I will give you that."

Gerard nodded as a response, and then went quickly back to work. I wandered around the apartment some more, tracing the lines of his paper and hoping to get the French words inside of me a lot more. From one end of the apartment to the other, I walked and tried to learn. Gerard was still absorbed, and still labelling. I got to the window again, and noticed two fenêtre s hanging off of it.

"Hey. You did this twice." I pointed to show him, and he looked up and shrugged his shoulders. "Good practice."

I nodded, and then informed him, "You probably just need coffee. Some food, as well." I heard my stomach rumble as I mentioned it. "I have the perfect idea - French toast!"

I wandered off into the kitchen to begin my project for the day, as Gerard rolled his eyes again, and continued with his own.

By the time I had finished making our breakfast, Gerard was in the kitchen. He had been working most of the morning, and his hunger had won out over his pursuit of knowledge. I had also deliberately made strong coffee so that it would waft through the entire apartment and tempt him over. It worked, and he had begun to clear off the pieces of paper on the kitchen table so we could enjoy our first breakfast together in our apartment.

"It looks wonderful, Frank. Thank you very much," he said as I gave him his plate. I was feeling extra active that morning and handed his coffee to him elegantly, and then with my own plate, sat down and teased, "Shouldn't you be saying that in French? Le Francais... Toaste? I have no idea," I confessed. Gerard's face twisted into mock disgust at my butchered French. "I'm taking a stab in the dark."

"Well, it' a good thing I'm doing these labels. Maybe this way, you can learn and I won't forget anymore." He cut a piece of his food and started chewing. "This morning when I got up, I looked at myself in the mirror and I realized I forgot how to ask someone's name in French. Then how to say man! It was terrifying, Frank. I hope you never get old like this so you don't have to feel what it's like to suddenly get up and not know anything at all."

"I don't have to be old to feel like that. I'm a college student; I always forget everything before my exams."

Gerard smiled. "That's what bullshit is for."

I nodded, ate some of my breakfast as well. "Besides, how do you think I feel?" I added. "I was in Paris for four months and I still didn't learn much French. You don't have to be old to forget."

Gerard nodded, but he was less exuberant. I figured he was hungry, and so was I. We ate in silence for awhile.

"So what do you call this meal in French, anyway?" I asked, hoping to give Gerard some type of conversation he was good at - correcting and informing me.

" Le pain perdu, actually. It's kind of funny." I waited for him to continue, since I still didn't know what those words meant. "It means the lost bread."

"Lost as in the sense that, the bread is old, and has no meaning to its life?" I laughed at my bad joke. "Translation is weird."

"Actually - you're right in a strange way, Frank. The verb perdre can mean a lot of different things. Mostly it's used to express a feeling of being lost and not knowing where you are or where something is, but it can also mean a measurement of time. Time doesn't really get lost - does it? There would be times in Paris where I would go for a walk, and then I would look at a clock in a store window and I'd realize that three hours that I thought were still around were not, but that's not quite lost. Those three hours, instead of wandering, I could have been doing art - and I will never get that time back. I didn't lose it - I know where it went. It was wasted on walking instead of lost without being found. Perdre can mean both wasted and lost, depending on how you use it and what you want to articulate. The bread is actually wasted, maybe not lost."

I thought about this for a second - and then sort of laughed to myself, because what type of person gets this involved in breakfast food for conversation - but it was really interesting. I was trying to remember something that Jasmine had told me years ago, a book she had read in a modern lit course and there were varying interpretations of the title because of this French word where it was translated from.

"Do you know who Proust is, Frank?"

"Yes!" That was it - that was the name I had been struggling to remember and losing. "I haven't read it, but I know who you mean. Jasmine told me about him."

Gerard nodded, seeming very impressed. "She's a smart woman. Marcel Proust wrote Remembrance of Things Past. It's a massive novel, made up of seven volumes, but a fascinating read. I read it while I was in Paris. It's all about a moment, right as someone is eating, and the smell triggers their memory and they go back through their life. In French the book is called A la Recherche du Temps Perdu- there's that verb again. Some of the later translations of the title read not as things past, but things lost or times wasted."

I nodded, finishing my meal. I held my coffee cup up to me, and suddenly had an urge to breathe it in deeply. I wondered what memories would be triggered, and where I would go one confronted with the smell. I didn't know if it was my mind deciding this and playing along, but I went back to Paris, with Gerard, again. I didn't think I could get seven volumes of work out of that, though.

"It's scary," Gerard said, snapping me back into reality. He was only half-done with his recollection.

"What is?"

"That verb. Perdre. It always seemed to haunt me in Paris, and would show up in odd places."

"What do you mean?"

Gerard pushed his plate away, so he could put his elbows on the table. He grabbed cigarettes from his pocket and lit one as he began to speak. "Well, I got lost a lot. It was one of the only phrases that I seemed to master in talking to others while I was there. Hello, I am lost. Can you help me? Bonjour, je suis perdu. Pouvez-vous m'aider?" He smiled, proud that he had been able to recall the French phrase. He took a small drag on the cigarette, and then continued, "There was also the fact of being lost in Paris, losing those hours for drawing, but the worry that maybe I was losing those hours for something else. Wasting them instead of losing them, or worse. Was I making the right decision? Was I spending my time wisely? Time isn't like money, Frank. There isn't always a way to get it back."

"I thought you said you had no regrets," I asked.

"Oh, I don't," he said, bringing his eyes to meet mine. He had been staring at the ash building at the end of his cigarette before adding, "But it's that feeling in the back of your mind, the what if? What if I am wasting my time? If you realize you are, there is an inability to get it back. In spite of what people say, time is linear. It goes one way, and you cannot redeem minutes, so you have to spend them properly.

"But memory," Gerard went on, inhaling and exhaling rapidly. "That is not linear. That comes when you least expect it - like with Proust, writing seven volumes for one smell. And what if you regret what passes before you? What if things were wasted? You can't redeem them, but they revisit you when you don't always want them to."

"But the good ones," I began, wanting to remove the desperate nature to the way Gerard was speaking, and thinking of my own memories from the night before, "the good ones - they come back as well. I haven't read Proust, but I'm sure that in spite of the wasted times, there were ones that made up for it. I'm sure of it. There has to be."

I wasn't sure who I was convincing at that moment, but Gerard seemed responsive. He touched my hand, before butting out his cigarette. "I know. You're right. I probably shouldn't have read Proust my first year there. It seemed to stick with me and be the only thing I remember, in spite of reading many other books and things."

I nodded, and wanting to eradicate the sadness that still lingered in his voice, I brought up a topic that I loved: the merger of art and books, and of Paris and Gerard. "What else did you read there?"

He smiled, and brought out another cigarette, and asked for more coffee, because it was going to take awhile. "Libraries are not meant to be browsed through, they are meant to be lived in," he stated, and then he began.

The rest of the morning, I learned about French Literature. He told me of Albert Camus, and his book L'Étranger. It was another one that had a strange English translation because the French's conception of stranger is more like outsider and not the stranger in what we talk about and warn kids about in the US. The Outsider, as it is usually translated into English, is a small book and only a day's worth of reading to Gerard. But there was more by Camus that kept him busy. There was The Plague, The Fall, The First Man and A Happy Death. There was also Jean Paul Sartre and his massive text on freedom and existing, Being and Nothingness. His partner, Simone de Beauvoir, Gerard also tried to enlighten me on, but I gave him a run for his money on what I knew there, since Beauvoir was also popular among Jasmine and her women's studies classes. There was also Emile Zola and Germinal, about the Parisian riots, the protesting, and political upheaval. Most of the anarchist or recent political issues that were happening while he was there, Gerard tried not to deal with. He wanted memory and sensation, passion and enlightenment. He focused on politics that were present in poetry, like that of the Beat Hotel in Paris around the time of the 1960s.

"It wasn't as beautiful as Rimbaud and Verlaine, but there were many men in love with one another there as well," he quipped, and I found time to usher in my story of Lorca and Dali, one that Gerard had never heard before.

"I do like Spanish, but not as much as French, and I can't fathom learning another language now, not at my age."

"Can you really put a cap on learning like that, though?"

"I didn't put the cap on it. My mind and body did," Gerard quipped, half-seriously, and then moved on. "I could probably follow along easily enough if I really wanted to. They are both romance languages. And you know what they have in common?"

He was playing with me, I knew it. I could feel his foot rubbing up against me under the table and his grin already on his face. "What?"

"They speak their passion with their tongues," he replied, and yes, leaned across the table to prove his point, and I let him win that debate.

We talked about books and film for a long time; about old French authors more so than the new ones, and the English translations of work and the meanings that were lost there. He told me that Camus' A Happy Death was published after the author's own death, after a freak car accident. There was a lot of debate about whether or not The Outsider and this one were related to each other and though Gerard found the debate interesting, he also found it utterly absurd. "He did not want that book published, and they all did it anyway," he lamented. "It does not matter if they were linked in some obscure way, if Camus did not want it around, then it should not have existed."

"But what about his audience? What about the people who would have benefited from reading it?" I asked. It was a healthy debate - not one where we were at one another's throats. I knew I was walking on thin arguments, but with my next point, I figured I would win this, hands down. "If it was not shared, then wouldn't it be wasted as well?"

Gerard, who had begun smoking again (literary discussion just called for it, he explained), stopped and breathed in and out on his own. He grew quite serious for a moment, and then turned to me with a grin. "You're getting too good at this," he commented, and offered me a cigarette. We both went on, discussing more poems and poets, and even a play, M. Butterfly. I realized this was the name of the French opera he was always playing, and it delighted me as much as it was somewhat despairing. I suddenly had the names to place all these distant memories with, the correct words to call things. I knew it was better to say M. Butterfly instead of Gerard's old French opera, but it also changed the dynamic. We were having a discussion as equals, I realized. I was learning names for things, not associations. Even though it was him telling me about a lot of things that he knew, I was just as engaged and surprising him every once in awhile. I asked him if he knew aboutMarguerite Yourcenar because it had been someone that Jasmine mentioned to me years ago, and he was shocked. He told me he had no idea who she was, and that he had lived there long enough to learn. I explained her novel Alexis to him, probably butchering it from what I remembered Jasmine telling me, but he was enwrapped nonetheless. It was another work about gay love affairs, or at least, the suppression of this animal urge inside of someone fighting to get out. It was something we both related to, and when I was done my explanation, we both sat in silence and drank coffee for a while before we moved onto other topics. From Madame Bovary and Colette, and of course, back to Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. They were our favourites, always, and anchored us in our conversation. We held hands a lot, when we weren't gesturing empathically to make our points. It was wonderful, and before we knew it, our breakfast was cold and it was getting cloudy outside. The bright day had suddenly gone gray, and it was well into the afternoon.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14