The Rainbow (Frerard) [underwater_sky]

February- Giants (Part Three)

            One more interview. Just one more interview and then Gerard said he was done. The show only had a few more days to run, and the newspaper wanted a retrospective voice on the show. They wanted to talk not only about how the show was affecting Gerard's life now, but also to get a biopic of him as well. Vivian had agreed to it, stating that it would be good to establish a narrative focus, so people could sympathize and then buy, buy, buy. Establishing mystery was no longer an option. Soon his paintings would be gone from the display, and his lack of visual presence would be enough to form that half-truth the audience could then play with. The narrative of his life, though, was a different matter and used for a distinctly different purpose. We were dealing with emotions now; it was doing the nude in another form. People wanted to see the nude, and they wanted to know everything; not because they had a perverse interest in Gerard, but because they needed to know more about themselves. Vivian told us what was said in the interviews didn't have to be true necessarily, it just needed to be evocative of truth. She was getting to her most philosophical, and meanwhile, Gerard was becoming his most base and honest. He knew he did not need to speak truth, but I knew he also felt compelled to anyway. He dreaded this interview and would have never said yes to this by himself. But he trusted in Vivian's judgement on these matters, although he teased her mercifully about this whole art business up until the interview actually happened. He both loved the woman and feared her simultaneously and she knew it, too. She would have never made him do this if she didn't think it was necessary.

            He just insisted that I come along. "To keep me company, and to make sure I don't get into trouble," he joked around with me. "To make sure I don't tell too many lies to make myself sound interesting."

            One of the things that he had teased Vivian with, especially after her remark on the superficiality of truth, was threatening to make every word that passed his lips sensationalist drivel and melodrama. Like how he and Vivian had a secret love child and had been married illegally in Morocco and now that the art career was over, they were both planning on opening a bed and breakfast in Vermont. He would also practice answering interview questions with "once upon a time" and give bastardized version of the Grimm's fairy tales where he was somehow both Hansel and Gretel and the witch all at once.

            "They're going to lock you up," Vivian chastised him, and he proclaimed that that would probably be good for his career.

            "As soon as they think I've lost my marbles, I'll start selling like crazy, pardon my wonderfully apt pun. Prohibition always produces something far greater. If there is the threat that I am somehow negated, I will flourish. If these works suddenly become the final works, the need to covet becomes much larger. We suddenly have an end to the story, no? And isn't that what people want when they interview me now? They want to know how the story ends. I could give them that."

            Vivian didn't say anything back to him, probably because she knew he was right. If Gerard spun crazy stories and was put away for it, it fed the tortured image of the artist as this misanthropic, misunderstood figure that was perpetually alone and misunderstood. If he really did disappear, it was an end to his artistic story. I saw the undercurrent of sadness that sometimes plagued him come back for a moment, and I wondered if there was more to what he was saying. I wondered what other stories he wanted to create in the wake of art. 

            "Perhaps I could cut off an ear?" Gerard suggested, bouncing right back into a more playful demeanor. Vivian sighed and ended up throwing a towel she had been cleaning with at him.

            "Would you suggest another body part, then? You know, to be more original? Does Van Gogh have his ear copyrighted?" Gerard kept teasing, unaware that he had gone past the threshold for the day. Vivian stuck her tongue out at him and then declared, "Cut off your tongue, you foolish old man and just be quiet."