Chapter Thirty-Three Understanding Aesthetics 1 page

I talked to Jasmine for what seemed like hours. Terms and stories flew out of my mouth that I had never thought of before, and there were so many – too many – connections inside of my head to keep them flowing. Jasmine didn’t talk too much, compared to myself anyway, but she was an attentive listener, nodding her head as her blonde bangs swayed. She would occasionally pop up with a question, or a small story of her own, but it was no match to the index of terms that I was building up, and finally spewing out.

As I spoke to the young girl, a flippant and iridescent memory started to make its way to the front of my brain. It wasn’t a memory so much, as another definition I had stumbled upon much like maladroit. I discovered this term completely by mistake while glancing through one of Gerard’s art textbooks. We had been looking for a specific painting, one by Frida Kalho, which was very rare and he couldn’t remember what textbook he had found it in. It had been in the middle of the night, and we had been talking on his bed. Once Gerard got the idea of this painting inside his head, however, the sleep that had been clinging to our eyes was a distant dream and he just had to show it to me. And there was no arguing with Gerard once he got an idea in his head.

I followed him into the living area where he nearly ripped down the entire book shelf with a wild gleam in his eye, handing me half of the pile of textbooks before he told me to get to work.

Gerard kept all of his art books, even the ones he hated, because they brought back memories of the school he loved, and they represented another form of art. Even if Gerard hated the artist, he kept their stuff and it boggled my mind. I would have gotten rid of half the shit he kept on his shelf. A vast majority of the artists he presented me with, I found myself developing a strong dislike for. It wasn’t always because of their work – sometimes there would be a biography of the painter next to their work, or Gerard would tell me any information the book lacked, and a lot of them were just shitty people. Most were alcoholics, drugs addicts, and completely full of themselves. I found myself hating them as if I knew them personally, and flung that distaste onto the medium they used to express themselves.

But Gerard never did that. He refused to do that. A painting was a part of someone’s soul and personality, and yes, they were pompous jackasses most of the time, but that was how they presented themselves. There was a whole world of images out there that a person could manipulate and control and that was what shone through the surface. That was what the words beside them represented about their life. It was the things that they couldn’t control, the parts of themselves that they wanted no one to see that would somehow get out there and onto that piece of art.

“But how?” I had asked, wide awake with not a chance of sleep in my mind for that night.

“There is no how in the things we cannot control, Frank,” he had answered, clucking his tongue in the side of his cheek, still perched over book after book. “They may have not wanted their real image to get out on a painting, but it did. And there is still the issue of being able to see it in the first place.”

Before I had the chance to ask more questions, he began to explain himself, dictating the hidden meaning, even to the artist. It was like Gerard’s words were paint thinner, and he was breaking the piece down bit by bit, until the underlying forces, the artist’s soul was brought through. And no matter how ugly the person they really were, the leftover remaining pieces after Gerard’s own thinly veiled destruction technique was astounding.

There were a lot of artists I liked as people, but just couldn’t fathom their work for anything. Kalho was one of those people. She seemed like a decent enough person, especially given the hard life she had lived, but her paintings were warped. Half of them were self portraits, and none of them were flattering. There was a lot of blood in some of her pieces (one of which she was depicted holding her own heart) and she didn’t flatter herself in her work. Not in the least. She had thick bushy eyebrows – even worse than Gerard’s, which looked like caterpillars crawling across his face on bad days – and instead of downplay her bad attributes, she highlighted them. She made her eyebrows bigger, bushier, and sometimes into one long thing that extended across her brow. I didn’t get it. I chalked off all the self-portraits as an exercise in narcissism, but Gerard had been quick to correct me.

It had been an exercise in bravery. He never could paint himself, he never wanted to paint himself, because he was always afraid of how people would depict him. Kalho was afraid of the same thing, but embraced it. She thought people might make fun of her eyebrows, so she did it first. Gerard really admired her for that, and I began to find myself understanding her paintings (and others) a little bit more with each word he said. Gerard was long winded, talking a lot, but if you heard him out long enough, there would be times where his genius would pop through, and he’d actually teach me something that made my brain stop its thought patterns, back up, and start working in another way. He would point out little details I had refused to see in the piece, and showed me that beauty could exist in everything, even if it was hated.

You destroy the things you love, he had dictated so many nights ago. But you learn from the things you hate. We both had to learn from these artists he kept on his shelves years and years after he had finished studying them, because he could continue to learn. Besides, it was impossible to hate according to Gerard; true artists just didn’t do that. Although Gerard did admit it, he found more flaws in some things than others.

After Gerard had grabbed a stack of books that had listed Frida Kalho in the contents, he handed off half to me, and we curled up on the sheet we had dragged out from his room. We stayed there the rest of the night, his voice high and excited as he talked about this obscure and obscene portrait of a woman with thick brows, poised beside her monkey, looking dignified. He riffled through the pages too quickly, unable to give me a title to accompany that vague description. Even that wasn’t much help, considering Frida painted that monkey a lot, and I ended up being distracted by the book.

I let my fingers run over the glossy pages, surprised that this text wasn’t as worn away as the others. Most of the ones Gerard kept by his side were falling apart, the pages torn and frayed and even falling out of their cracked spine. This one looked brand new and it struck me as different. I couldn’t exactly tell why it was different, other than the thick adhesive glue smell that kept the pages bound, but it almost felt hot in my hands. I had to keep reading it. Its content actually held pictures I enjoyed, a lot of the softer stuff by Monet and Da Vinci, but it contained hard rigid symmetrical designs that I could get lost in by Escher too. I had been transfixed with an Escher piece for about twenty minutes, trying to decipher the copious amounts of stairs and ceilings, when I noticed a bolded word in the vocabulary. It was aesthetics, and it intrigued me right away. I must have read the definition over and over again at least twenty times, completely blown away by its meaning.

Aesthetics was the study of beauty; the branch of philosophy dealing with aesthetic values, such as the beautiful and the sublime. My mouth hung open as I read it, my finger tracing the glossy pages in a repetitious manner. It was so poignant at that very moment, laid out on a frayed sheet with the man I was sleeping with, the dark night air coming through the glass pane of the window we were not allowed to go near. I had the sudden urge to look at Gerard in the moments after I read the definition, and when I locked my gaze on him, I saw the term before my eyes.

Gerard was always philosophical, no matter what he was saying, and it had a complex transition into the real world. But he wasn’t philosophical about movies, books, or politics; he yielded away from those aspects. He didn’t own a working TV, he hated the government, and he barely read anything, other than these art textbooks and random poems in front of us. And yet, he was still philosophical. He was always philosophical about art, I noted, but as I broke it down further, I realized it was something else entirely he was theorizing about. Beauty. Art itself was the epitome of beauty – it had to be. You wouldn’t stare at a painting much longer than a second if it wasn’t visually appealing. Gerard just didn’t stare at art, though – he stared at nature, people, his apartment – anything and everything that could be art, and therefore, could be beautiful. It was always beauty he was bantering about, going on and on in all of its different forms. Beauty had so many forms to it, and you didn’t need to have a TV or read a book to understand them all.

He had caught me staring at him in a quick flash before he changed books, still looking for this ambiguous picture, and paused for a second, glancing over to the book I had placed in my lap.

“Ah,” he had said to himself, comprehending something. “I rarely read that one.”

And then he went back to his search, leaving me with my mouth still hung open.

The term had always stuck with me after that; anytime he opened his mouth to theorize, the definition coming in random strong bursts. Unlike all of the other things that Gerard threw at me, this hit home more than usual. Probably because Gerard was studying something without actually being aware of it. He didn’t read that textbook; he didn’t know that definition. I had searched for it in the other ones, clawing my way through the pages, but it had never turned up. This was the only book that had it, and it was one of the only ones he never read. He did his theorizing all by himself, not influenced at all. It was as if the term never existed before this book, and never even been there before Gerard had been around. Maybe he had created it on his own, and he had already lived part of his dream about being remembered as an inspiration. It was almost as if he was fucking born to do this, to spout beauty and knowledge like it was nothing. And it had always amazed me, especially as I related this to Jasmine.

We continued our talk on the rocks, shifting positions when our legs got tired and sore from staying bent in the same place for too long. I couldn’t help but smile through the whole discussion, the word coming to my mind over and over again. I was being just like Gerard, aesthesis taking over and guiding me. I may not have been born with the talent, but I had certainly spent enough time around him to start to pick it up. And judging from the way Jasmine’s eyes lit up and seemed to cloud over with thought, I figured I was doing a good job. It felt so good to be teaching someone else, to be on the other end of the spectrum and not feeling like a naïve stupid teen most of the time, not exposed to high culture. Jasmine was no expert, but she had a little more knowledge than I did about some artists. I figured it came with being a girl; they were allowed to go to museums and pay extra attention to this kind of stuff, while boys were always shied away from it and were told to be a man. I knew I was probably giving away my sexuality, just from the way I carried on about art and culture, without even mentioning Gerard and our relationship, but she never said a word. She seemed impressed most of the time, her eyes wide and lips always ready to ask another question. And though I knew, as we packed up and started to go back to the cabin, the talk of aesthesis still on the tips of our tongues, that Sam and Travis would bring on the gay jokes fully again, it didn’t matter. Boys weren’t supposed to talk about art, they were supposed to be men and fuck anything with legs. I found it ironic, though, that talking to Jasmine about the specific hue of the green leaves on the tree, and its significance in a work of art, was when I felt the most like a man in my entire life.

When we got back to the cabin, though still entranced with each other and our words, we separated briefly to clean ourselves up. We were still sticky from our ice cream fight, despite the licking and sleeve scrubbing we had done to clean ourselves off. I washed my face in the small cramped bathroom, the water from the tap smelling a bit off. (It was okay to wash with, Jasmine assured me before I had stepped inside, but she took no embarrassment to remind me to never drink it, because of her little experience).

I looked at my cheek in the small musty mirror when I was done, rubbing my finger along my jaw where Jasmine’s tongue had been. Anytime the memory of the deepened kiss we had shared came to my mind, my stomach did a little flip and my blood rushed to other areas. I didn’t like the feeling at first - it scared me, mostly because it reminded me of the first time I had had sex with Gerard. For days – weeks, even - after that first event, and each time I thought of it, my stomach had done the same flip.

I didn’t like sharing the special feelings I had for Gerard with someone else. Those were ours and ours alone. The talk of art seemed to be the only thing that calmed my nerves and thoughts, rationalizing everything as okay. I wrote off the feeling as the excitement for Gerard’s passion, and the excitement for someone finally understanding me. And gradually, just like the paranoid banter, my thoughts about Gerard began to take on a new form.

He was still present in my mind; it was almost impossible for him not to be. Now that I was spouting the same knowledge as him, he too, became knowledge inside my head. He was no longer at the forefront, poking and jabbing me, reminding me that I had fucked him and cared about him. I still felt that way, but those feelings had calmed within me. I was in a relationship with him, and he wasn’t going anywhere. I could trust him. Even though the kiss (now kisses) with Jasmine had been awkward and, in a way, wrong, I was sure that he would be proud of me for teaching someone else about the art we both loved so much. When that thought came to me, it cooled my blood and I only began to draw on Gerard as an entity, not as my lover. He really did become just the person that taught me art, and I in turn became the prodigy that was blooming in Jasmine’s company. It was for safety purposes, only, I assured myself, and walked out of the bathroom.

I wandered around the house for a while, trying to find Jasmine again. I walked past the living room, and saw just the mere carcasses of teen bodies, wasted and passed out from only one night of partying and drinking. Some of them were awake and talking halfheartedly, while others were splayed on the floor and on people’s laps, breathing heavily. The pile of vomit that I had spotted in the morning was gone, but its smell still lingered. I almost wanted them to start smoking up again, just to rid my nostrils of the putrid odor. I spotted Sam and Travis intertwined on the same couch, the body of the girl in dark clothing, Nicole, situated to Sam’s side. They were all passed out on the single couch, pushing those who had regained consciousness to the floor. Travis was at the end, leaning into the arm, his face almost as squished as Sam’s appeared to be on a normal basis. Following like a line of knocked over dominos, Sam was leaning on Travis, his face buried in his shoulder. I chuckled as I spotted Sam’s hand innocently resting on Travis’s thigh as they slept. I had to fight off the urge to wake them all up, and draw complete attention to the oblivious gay act going on. Though it would have been fun to label someone else’s sexuality, I knew that they would somehow find the way to turn it back on me, and besides, I knew how shitty it felt to be labeled without regard. I was bigger than that; more mature, with still the air of childlike ways Jasmine had given me back.

With the brief thought of her entering my mind (again), she appeared at my side, panting and breathing hard from jumping on the trampoline. She had changed her clothing, to a different set of jeans and tank top – a light red, but not quite pink, and had discarded her hoodie. Her small bare shoulders were coifed off by her hair, falling down them in loose tendrils.

“Hey,” she breathed close to me, making sure I could hear her from the roar of the room. People began to regain their consciousness (but not their willpower) and were starting up the party again. Sam and Travis were still passed out, Nicole just beginning to stir, blinking her eyes open and then doing a double take for the hand positioning. Instead of moving Sam, however, she merely pointed over to the other people who were conscious, motioning and giggling over its meaning. I felt myself beam inside; Sam still got what he deserved, without me degrading myself. I looked back over at Jasmine and felt myself smile inside again. Maybe things weren’t so bad here after all.

“Hey,” I greeted, genuinely happy to see her again. It hadn’t been long, maybe one or two hours at the most, but it was nice to not be left alone for too long. The smile she displayed also told me she was happy to see me, too.

“I want more art lessons,” she teased, taking my hand and pulling me down to the spot where we had sat the night before, against the wall and watched the display of idiots in front of us. I let myself be led, my smile never skipping a beat like my breaths did. When she had placed us both to the ground again, but still didn’t dislocate her hand, she concluded her statement. “We never got to finish.”

“I don’t think we’ll ever finish,” I scoffed, rolling my eyes. “I could probably tell you about art all night.”

Though I talked in a half-serious manner, it was really true. I had spent months with Gerard by that point, just learning and absorbing things. I probably had enough knowledge to teach a full course on the subject. Now that I was expanding and adding to his theories, I could probably talk for years.

“Is that a bad thing?” she asked, cocking her head a little to challenge me.

“Probably not,” I stated sincerely, feeling my heart swell with what I told myself was pride.

I would have never, in a million years, thought I could find someone actually interested in my art babble, especially out in the middle of nowhere in this shitty and desolate cottage. And fuck, I was going to take this opportunity and run with it.

I began to spill out knowledge again, picking up from a random point in my head, when I noticed her squeeze my hand that I had forgotten she was still holding. We had been getting closer and closer as we talked when we were by the river, bridging the inches between us and throwing legs over the other person’s, but we have never actually linked like this before, other than the kiss. It sent shivers up my spine, but when I looked down at Jasmine’s smiling face, I knew it was okay. We were sharing; bonding, like I had done with Gerard at the beginning when we were first starting our lessons. He would always touch me when he talked, lingering close to my body and the canvas I was doing. I had liked it then, and I still liked it, even if it was Jasmine. Sure, I wanted Gerard to be there, but he wasn’t. I was dealing and accepting it, moving on and remaking the scenario I missed. Only unlike before, I found the courage to reciprocate and squeezed her back. When I had something solid to hang onto, I noticed how easily the words fell from my mouth and into the air, making a picture that only we could see.

We kept painting that picture, like we had hours before, only this time Jasmine had a brush, too. She would pipe up more often now, with something other than a small story to relate, or a question for clarification. She’d add on to my theories, which were really only my rendition of Gerard’s. I was surprised at how easily everything came to her; how it just rolled off her tongue so soon when it had taken me weeks to absorb everything and work up the courage to say it all over again. I had always thought that if I spoke my opinions that were parallel to Gerard, I would fuck up and end up representing something wrong. Jasmine, though, she was fearless – unashamed and unabashed. She kept going, not knowing when to stop.

When I brought up Picasso and his views on women, she had gone off on a complete and utter tangent, relating the work that she had never seen, let alone studied, before to her own life and her experiences with her father.

“I’m almost positive I would love Picasso,” she stated once I had told her about the jagged picture of the women with a triangular face.

“But why?” I asked. “He hated women.”

“Exactly, but it has to be more than that,” she started to explain, taking over the conversation. She motioned with her free hand, the one that wasn’t still clinging onto me. “I mean, my dad hated women, too. But, he only beat my mother. Why did he leave me alone? It was more than just leaving me to watch, hurting me in a different way. He wanted to hit my mother, but he inflicted something else on me. I was still a woman and so was my mother, but how were we so different in his eyes? Maybe Picasso was expressing his viewpoint of certain kinds of women, I don’t know. I’d have to see more of his work to draw that conclusion, and maybe if I can find it in there, I can figure out what type of women my dad hated. And then, maybe, why the fuck he did all those things.”

She took a deep breath after, recuperating from her story. I felt my heart ache for her again with the mere mentioning of her father, and found my arm snaking behind her back to pull her into a hug. Though she said she was fine, and the somber nature was no longer in her voice, she still gave into the hug, grateful to have something else to cling onto.

“I don’t know how you can do that,” I said suddenly, my thoughts spilling from my mouth too soon.

“What?”

“Relate paintings to your life,” I said, but it still didn’t sound exactly how I wanted it to.

It was hard to explain, but I just never related paintings to my life. I could see and value interpretations, but I had always been more drawn to what the painter was thinking. Especially when I looked at Gerard’s work. When he painted something, he painted what he saw, or what he wanted himself and others to see. I always stretched my mind to find that meaning, and then saw where it applied in his life. I saw a picture he drew once of his brother, but it was completely out of context. His eyes were too small for his head, and his thick-rimmed glasses too huge over his small nose. It was almost like a caricature that someone could buy at the fair for five bucks, but there was something distinguishing it from that. It wasn’t drawn in the same manner, for the same purpose. It wasn’t for entertainment. The lines were too detailed and serious for it to be a comical description. The piece was for interpretation, like how all his work was, but I couldn’t get it right away. It took me hours before I finally unraveled the mystery.

The picture represented his brother’s struggle to fit into his own life, his own skin, and to see the world for what he wanted to. His eyes were too small to represent how he was blind to his own needs, sheltered too much by the big glasses (that could have represented a big brother) from society. When I had figured out that much, I had stopped, leaving it as is. I didn’t apply it to my own life. I couldn’t see how to apply it to my own life. It was Gerard’s brother, not mine. It was Gerard’s work, not mine. When and if I did paint, I let my life seep into things, but never before or after the fact. It just didn’t make sense to me, and I informed Jasmine of my situation, not understanding how it came to her without thinking.

“How can you not relate painting to your life?” she merely questioned me back, her mouth falling open in a surprised gape. “You’re a painter, Frank. Everything has to relate.”

I shrugged my shoulders; she already had my answer. She scrunched up her face for a moment, studying me.

“Maybe you should look deeper then,” she suggested, an unrecognizable tone coming into her voice. “Or maybe you should go out and live. You know, get a life.”

She nudged me in the stomach, teasing me. I tried not to take offence to it, but when I replied, I could sense (and almost taste) the bitter resentment in my voice.

“Hey, I have a life.”

“Of what?” she countered, coming closer to me, almost face to face.

“A lot of things…”

She had turned the tables on me, making me think about the other side of Gerard. He was my teacher, my mentor, but fuck, he was also my life. I spent all my time there, painting and fucking. But she couldn’t know the other side of the equation. There was no other side to it, at least right then. I may have ended up looking like a loser at that moment for my answer, but it was better than losing him.

She pursed her lips a bit, accepting my response, almost seeming to know that I was hiding something important, something I didn’t want to share just yet. Or at all.

“Maybe I’m not seeing things the way I’m supposed to,” she replied, her voice cool and alluring. She raised her eyebrows a little, mocking some of my statements on interpretation beforehand. “But you can’t expect people to know you, if you don’t let them inside.”

“People do know me,” I countered, feeling her words sting a wound I didn’t know was there. She had started to become almost as philosophical as Gerard, and I didn’t like her overshadowing me so suddenly. I liked us being equal, sharing back and forth and bonding. It was something that I never got with Gerard. I always felt like he was better than me in some ways, because of his age and experience. Jasmine and I were the same age, and hopefully had the same amount of experience (though not necessarily the same type). I liked being equal for once, and I didn’t want it ruined.

“I don’t,” she interjected, her voice no longer taking on a joke-insult format, but a clear and concise need to know.

“You do know me,” I replied, trying to convey my serious tone. Though she didn’t know the full story of everything, she knew a lot more than I had ever let Sam and Travis find out.

“Fine,” she gave in, rolling her eyes at my stubbornness. “But I want to know more. You’re interesting. I don’t know why I haven’t talked to you before.”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling a wave of self-consciousness and relief rush through me. “You’re interesting, too. But I don’t know what more I could tell you.”

Or should tell you, I found myself thinking after.

“Doesn’t matter,” she stated, moving closer to me. She paused for a second, feeling both of our hearts beating faster than they should have been before she continued. “Sometimes actions are just as good.”

I swallowed hard, wanting to push her away and grab her close to me at the same time. Just like from before, our legs and hands had been becoming entwined, but with the mention of her very sentence, I had a bad feeling that something good was going to happen.

We turned our heads slowly to look at each other, our eyes darting around the other person’s countenance slowly, debating our next move. I knew what was going to happen, I could fucking feel it in the way her arm was looped with my own, and the way our heads started to move together. I knew what was going to happen, but I didn’t stop it. It wasn’t like before where she had caught me off guard on the trampoline, or when I had changed my objective in the ice cream fight. We were both aware of this, and we both wanted it. I needed it to happen again, even if I knew it was a little more than just bonding, just thanking, and kissing for the sheer sake of it. Everything always had double meanings and I couldn’t fucking escape them.

Before our lips ever had the chance to touch again, a voice with an octave so sharp landed in our ears and tore us apart in shockwaves.

“Fucking finally,” Sam shouted, pitch increasing with each syllable. I felt my heart drop out of my stomach, but I wasn’t sure if it was because Sam was talking again or the distance that Jasmine was now from me. “You’re no longer a fag.”

“I never was one, Sam,” I said through gritted teeth. I refused to look at him, keeping my eyes focused on a distinct patch of hardwood flooring.

“Sure,” he nodded and teased, his voice oozing with pride. “We’ll be the judge of that.”

“Fuck off.”

I didn’t want to be apart of another stupid fight, but I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I could feel Jasmine’s body stiffen in my arms, anger or fear (maybe a little of both) running through her veins.

“I think you should fuck off,” Sam stated, insulting tone dripping away at the end. “Fuck off and fuck her, then you’ll be fine.”

That was it. Something inside of me snapped and I could feel my male-dominated urge coming out in me. I had sat there and taken all the shit Sam had ever given, not saying a word to defend myself. I didn’t even try to fight. I was sick of being a fag in his mind – even if I was one in real life. I had to prove myself to him, show him that he was wrong, and do something he would never expect from me. And what’s the least likely thing for Frank the fag to do?

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 507