The Dove Keeper

Lesson Three: Gerard

Chapter Twelve

Lesson Three: Gerard

Gerard finally began to open up soon after my brief encounter with the one and only woman in his life. It seemed that after Vivian, whether consciously rousing the questions in my head for the first time or not, it was her physical manifestation and its place in the relationship I had with the artist that made me finally ask the questions I needed to know. They weren't much, just on that day wondering who the fuck this chick was on his vapid orange couch, but it was enough for Gerard to begin to start the ball rolling himself, without my constant probing and confused looks. His sexuality was now confirmed in my mind, and we could move on from such trivial matters. I wanted to avoid the who course of sexuality in general, mostly because unlike his, mine was still very much up in the air, my clouds of doubt accumulating like paint fumes that began to become a regular smell, clinging to my clothing long after.

Gerard had always been close to me, sharing his thoughts and whatnot, but that had always been in the present, in that moment in time. He always stated if he felt tired after working until three in the morning on his new art piece, or if he felt angry because John, the super, had turned off the hot water again. However, he never told me when and if he had ever felt any kind of those emotions before, and in what situation. I found it hard to picture the artist with a fiery temper, but when his hot water had been vanquished and his hair was drab and listless (in his own opinion, of course; I had no idea about hair), his olive eyes had been flaming and his mouth alive with curses, both French and English. They were never directed at me, and he never did follow through with his threat on the janitor, but I wondered if there had ever been a time in his long life where he had felt those feelings for someone else and maybe even gone through with them. He never delved into his past, his story about how he got to be this forty-seven year old fag artist living in somewhat seclusion from the outside world. And I knew that he had a lot of stories to tell; he had many years to accumulate them.

"The past is the past for a reason," he would tell me, shrugging off any inquiries I came up with. I'd ask him little bits and pieces of history as we talked, painted, and cleaned. Stuff like where he went to school and why he became an artist. It was never too personal, but he still didn't like to answer those questions. Each time he'd shake his head with the same response. "We're in the present now and that's all that matters."

The present seemed to be more important than life itself to Gerard. He'd jump from one thing to another when I was with him, teaching me about flat brush strokes and then grabbing me to go outside and look at the sunset, all within the same breath. The present was vital to him because that was what kept him alive. He didn't want to think about the past because it was done, and he didn't want to think about the future either because that could change. The present was what he had and he grabbed it by the teeth. It was what caused him to destroy all of his painting supplies, not caring that spending the money on buying new ones would cause him to forgo groceries for another week. He lived on wine, bread, and cheese that he kept at all times in his fridge. Vivian would also stop by, getting something else into his physical system, rather than artistic. There seem to always be half a casserole in Tuperware, cheese melted to the matching lids, or some kind of cookie inside the bare walls of the fridge, but even then he didn't feast on the home cooking. He gave me a lot of the desserts in grease stained paper bags, stating he was too fat to be eating it in the first place. I would try to tell him otherwise, but he still gave me the treats, laughing off my pleas of his lack of pudge, popping a whole cookie into his mouth in defeat. He was not a starving artist by any means, conquering with his thoughts on that first day, but satiety went so much further than the food he kept in his fridge, or shoveled off on me. He lived off his art and culture leaving him fuller than he had ever felt before.