Chapter Forty-Four Love: Part One: Survival 1 page

The sun was high in the sky, an orange and yellow weight, as I walked up to the metal door, its cold handle surprising me. I looked over and saw the normal intercom system, no longer falling apart at its seams. There were actual buttons now, a speaker, and everything else a normal apartment building should have had. The outside of building was still dreary, drab, and coated with disintegrating red bricks, making the new system appear to be the sore spot, not everything else. The building reeked of things that were so broken, old, and damned that the desolation just fit. Everything always seemed to fit here – there were always pieces missing, and therefore always new holes and spots waiting to be filled, even if it was with the wrong portion. Perhaps it was because of this synchrony that I still continued to go and see the artist when I was nervous and naïve, before we started our relationship. The building itself made me feel like I was at home, like I belonged somewhere, even long before the artist had come into my life. It had been the one thing I saw as I stood out in front of the liquor store. I had just never predicted what could have been laying awake for me inside.

I ignored the intercom system, despite its new working facilities, hoping that I could surprise Gerard. I figured the police had made John, the landlord, fix the system for an illusion of safety, but I still knew my way around the place. They could fix the intercom all they wanted; it didn’t mean that doors would stop working – or more importantly, that my key would not fit in the door. The cops had not been too smart; they had searched my bag, my room, even inside my brain for links to the artist and I having an illicit relationship, but they had never bothered to check my key ring.

As I slid the jagged metal into the brass lock, it became apparent that they never checked Gerard’s doors either. Love and incrimination can be found in the most devious and untouchable of spots.

I stepped inside slowly, wanting to preserve each little memory I had. I had to go slow to appreciate sensations, so I knew it was real and so I could grasp this moment inside myself forever. The memories flooded back to me, like the first time I had undressed Gerard, his liquid cool voice telling me to go as slow as I could. I remembered those words right then and slowed my halted pace even further, closing my eyes and breathing deeply as I stepped inside. I could smell the aroma of paint fumes, still long present after hours and hours of paintings, and I smiled, knowing that at least Gerard had found something to distract himself from the matters at hand. I tapped my camera and film that I had tossed into my school backpack before leaving home, and remembered that there was another thing I couldn’t wait to tell Gerard.

I had found my passion. I knew he would be proud of me, and I knew he would love me back. I had never been full of so many positive feelings in my entire life. But my life had not been that long, barely eighteen years, and I didn’t like to count the first seventeen of them because I had been too drunk, or not even there enough to preserve them. They hadn’t been a waste, but a learning experience on how not to live. It had only been the past few months, when I knew Gerard, when I was with him and in his apartment, that I started actually living. I had been too afraid before. Now, fear was still present. I had so much fear it fucking scared me some days. I didn’t want to get caught, I didn’t want to get in trouble, and I didn’t want to leave Gerard. But the fears were different than before. It wasn’t that I was afraid to live, but that I was afraid that something may prohibit me from living.

As I stepped inside, shut the door, and leaned against it, I waited. I waited and I heard nothing; no sirens, no phone calls, no world collapsing on itself because I was with Gerard again. But unlike before, when I had been somewhat disappointed when the big extravagant event that we had expected didn’t happen when we were on the balcony, now I could just breathe easy.

And then I heard Gerard’s voice.

“Frank,” he started, his voice in a cool, placid, and unfeeling tone. He was sitting by the bay window, fully dressed in his normal black attire, his legs spread out elegantly on the mustard cushions. His head was leaning against the window pane, staring off into the distant outside. He had been waiting for me, I realized, my smile beaming inside. He looked despondent and weary, but he had still been waiting for me. I felt euphoric inside. He had never waited for me before, even when I had disappeared for those few days at the cottage. He just went and got me. Gerard was not about waiting. If you were waiting, you were not living, and that was one thing Gerard had to do.

When the cops had come and questioned him, however, though I knew little to no details about that incident, they had taken away his right to live. He was forced to stay inside, and though he was used to that, the fact that they had taken away the option of leaving and doing whatever he wanted, seeing whoever he could, was enough to hurt just as bad. I realized then, as I watched from the doorway, just how sad he looked. He was waiting for me because he couldn’t go out and get me. That killed him. Just the fact that he was waiting for something, anything, not necessarily me, was sad. He was waiting for permission to live again.

But they had told him to live again, I reminded myself. They had removed his bail conditions completely, and it had been that way for awhile. Moreover, I was standing in the closed doorway. Why wasn’t he back to his old self? My brows furrowed as I walked forward slowly. Why wasn’t he rushing over to me and hugging me? He always did that before, even when we weren’t in a relationship. He was just sitting there, staring outside and not even looking at me. He had been painting, but as I looked around I only noticed that the tops of the cans were off, giving away the smell, but not the art. Gerard was different from before and I felt my worries leap into my mouth along with my heart.

“Frank…” Gerard started before I could say anything. “Go home.”

It wasn’t the first time he had told me to leave, but it was surely in a different tone. The day he had caught me stealing his cigarettes and I had caught him with Vivian had been one of those days, but he had said the request so genuinely. He was doing it to teach me a lesson and let me get myself sorted out. Now, he wasn’t trying to teach me anything. He just wanted me to leave. I couldn’t see his face, just the side, and what was there was covered by his hair and hand, so I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. With the way his voice ached, came out so hard and fast that his words were like bullets, that made me think he was. Gerard was no stranger to being this serious, but there was a difference in his stature. He was being stern not because he wanted to, but because he had to.

“What? Why do you want me to leave?”

“You’re not supposed to be here, Frank,” he informed me, as if I didn’t already know.

“But… but…Your charges have been dropped!” I exclaimed, raising my hands into the air at the absurdity of it all. I waved my hands a bit more before they dropped to my sides like dead weights, my mouth agape and breathing slightly ruptured. I was next to hysterics with the single phrase, but Gerard, fuck, he was so calm, so placid, and so not fucking human.

It was not Gerard I was looking at. It was his ghost, the shell of a person the police had left him as. In fact, a ghost may have been too warm to describe him. I didn’t know the man before me. I had to get Gerard back, and I was going to keep talking and keep doing anything as long as I could. It had only been a few seconds getting inside the door. He could still be convinced.

“They could still catch you,” Gerard commented weakly. He sighed again, and it seemed to be the only way he knew how to breathe.

“I don’t care. I’m here and I belong here,” I informed him, motioning with my arms to a lesser extent. Though my bag had been heavy before, digging into my back and leaving a fine red groove where the strap was, I didn’t feel it anymore. I didn’t even remember I had it on, or that the camera was inside. I was too focused here.

“No, you don’t, Frank,” he stated, his voice hitting a high note in both volume and despair. This despair bled into both of our souls, inching its way to our voice. He repeated my name as he talked, making me feel like he was talking down to me. When he said my name before in all the times we had been together, I had never felt that way. He had only been using my name to get my attention, but now, my own fucking name burned into my skin. It was a brand, and I knew the next one coming: my age.

“You’re too young to belong here.”

“Fuck, Gerard.”

I wasn’t mad at him, just the whole fucking situation. I had been walking on a cloud when I got there, but now it was raining – storming - though no lightning had been used just yet. I began to walk over to Gerard, my mouth slightly ajar in a sneer. I saw his posture stiffen as he heard my footsteps echo in the empty place (that used to be so full, so fucking full of life before the cops had drained everything), but he didn’t look at me. I stood there for a few moments, just by the few steps that lead up to the higher level where the bench was, and he still didn’t turn to look at me. He didn’t sigh, he didn’t do anything. I wasn’t even sure if he was breathing anymore.

“Gerard, look at me,” I commanded, my voice just as hard and stern as his was. When he still failed to do anything, I lost it. I yelled my next words and waved my hands in the air, not meaning to sound so mad.

“Gerard, just fucking look at me. Let me know you’re serious about this. I came here for you, risked all of this for you, and I’m not leaving empty-handed. The least you could do is fucking look at me. You don’t have to say a goddamn word. Just listen.”

I had struck a chord in him; I could see that from the way his body paused and then melted into the seat cushions. The morning after we had first had sex, when we first started the relationship, Gerard had made me look at him. He needed my eye contact to correlate to my voice and prove that I really was okay. I was using his own words back at him, and he knew he couldn’t fight me forever.

He sighed again, brushing his dark hair out of his eyes and then bringing the green hue over to me. In that split second our eyes connected, I realized how much I had missed him. The dark and dreary cover that had been over Gerard’s eyes, blocking him from seeing me how he wanted himself to when we first began, was back. It had not been there since that first night we were together, and our actions, feelings, and motions towards each other had melted it away. Something had opened the door to this apartment, letting the heat out and the cold back in. Gerard was in a hypothermic state. He was cold again, trying not to feel anything towards me. Before at least, when he had been my teacher, he would rush over and hug me, touch me, and let it linger. There was barley any reaction in him now. He was only going to talk to tell me to leave, and he flinched when I tried to reach out and touch him. I gave up with a sigh, letting my hand rest idly at my side. This was pointless, this was horrible. I was watching a train wreck in front of me, and if Gerard crashed, I couldn’t do anything to stop him. To make it worse, I would crash right there with him, because I was the next train on course and there would be no one to guide me. I fucking needed Gerard. He needed to open his eyes again and see me.

“The police really got you, huh?” I declared, not really knowing if I wanted him to answer the statement.

“You could say that,” he retorted, almost bitterly. He scoffed and placed his thumb in his mouth, chewing on the thumb nail.

“I was questioned too, Gerard,” I eased, not moving or touching him, hoping to persuade him with my voice. I spoke slowly and surely, trying to convey the sense of trust we always had with each other. In a way, it was still there, but the trust of others around us had dwindled us both away into nothingness. “I know the cops hurt. They hurt me just as much as you. But they’re gone, and I’m here. It’s okay. You can leave the apartment again if you want, and I can come over again every day like I used to. We may need to be a little more careful, but we can do it – I know we can. We did it before, after all. We can go back to painting, laughing, sex, and –”

“Frank, no,” he cut me off frantically with the very mention of the forbidden word. His hands flew off his face and onto his knees, which he had curled up in front of his chest. He still looked forward, but I could see him sneaking glances at me from the corner of his eye in moments of weakness and desperation. “We can’t go back to that. Not now. You shouldn’t be here. Go home.”

“No. I’m staying.”

“But the cops –“

“Fuck them, okay? Fuck the cops, fuck my parents, fuck the rules, Gerard. Fuck everything. We’ve never been very good at following rules in the first place. Why should we change now?”

Gerard still failed to move, but I could see him suppress a smile that tried to come across his face. Even if we hadn’t happened, Gerard would never follow the rules. He would walk on the road instead of the sidewalk, break his pictures instead of putting them up for a show, and keep his wine in the fridge when it should be in a cellar or at least at room temperature. He didn’t follow rules.

What made it so hard all of a sudden to not want to be with me anymore?
I knew the cops hurt; they had hurt me too. But why had they affected Gerard so much more? I even had to go to a shrink and deal with my parents. It was just himself Gerard had to deal with; his parents were long gone, Vivian already knew and lied for us, and he didn’t keep anyone else close enough.

“What did the cops say to you?” I asked when the silence became too much and my mind had wandered on too long. I was calmer in the question, more so for Gerard’s sake than my own. I could tell he wasn’t mad at me, he was just perturbed. Deeply disturbed about something I didn’t understand, and as he started talking, in a low and quiet, almost distant voice, I didn’t know if I wanted to anymore.

“They asked me what I wanted with a seventeen-year-old boy,” he breathed out, almost sardonically. He scoffed, rubbing his chin as he went on, eyes still transfixed on the wall ahead of him. “They asked me why I took this boy away from his friends and gave him wine. They asked me why I let him drive my car and why there was so much room in the backseat. They asked me what I wanted from this boy – never a teenager, never a man, but a boy – and they asked me if I got what I wanted. They made me sound like a monster. They made me into a monster.”

His voice grew quieter and quieter, finally forcing him to pause. He took a deep breath, preparing himself to finally look at me. His eyes hit me like the vile words that were tossed at him by the officers in blue before he gave his final response in a darkly serious manner. His tongue flashed and flicked the words, giving him the final retransmission into the forked tongued being the cops had been looking for.
“I am a monster.”

“No,” I said immediately, putting a foot on the step. The hollow sound echoed throughout the room and nearly made Gerard jump out of his skin. His eyes went wide, not wanting me to come closer to his ghastly flesh, but I had to. I placed another foot on the step, stopping there as I talked.

“You’re not a monster. You’re an artist.”

Gerard scoffed again, turning away from me with ease and looking out the window. “Sometimes I think they’re the same thing.”

With those words, I witnessed the collapse of Gerard. Or maybe he had already been broken and it took him breaking apart the pieces in front of me for it to actually register in my mind. He had always been the teacher and now the lessons were back on again, only this time he was showing me something I didn’t want to understand. I didn’t want to know how Gerard could go from being an artist – being the best fucking artist in the world as far as I was concerned – and within a few days, a few weeks, crumbling into this monster the police had told him he was. The police hadn’t even been able to gather enough evidence to prove this monstrosity. They were just given enough evidence to tear this once worldly teacher into shreds. It hurt me inside thinking about, thinking that the one person I could lean on was broken. I was trying to fly, realizing that I could no longer avoid it – that I needed to do it – and he was leaving me falling. He could not do that do me, but the cops had done it to him. It was coming back around in a vicious circle.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 525