Page 87 of Center of Gravity
I stopped in the doorway. Alex’s father’s eyes were closed, his hand folded within Alex’s, who had a blank stare fixed on the muted TV. He looked up when I came in, slid his hand from his father’s, and came to stand before me.
“Thank you for coming.” It was awkwardly formal and somehow indecisive all at once.
“I told you to stop—”
Before I could finish, he was against me, his fingers so tight around my shoulders they dug into the tender bits of muscle between the blades. It was a desperate sort of clench, the kind you used to keep yourself from falling, the kind I’d wanted to give somebody—anybody—when my own father died. I wrapped my arms around him, tucking his head into my shoulder, the ends of his hair tickling my jaw and chin. He smelled like shampoo and lost sleep, and I would have held him for hours if he’d wanted. His body shook with one great breath before he exhaled shakily against my neck and drew back.
“Will you sit with me for a while?” His eyes were glossed with exhaustion and rimmed with pink.
“For as long as you want.” My hands were slow to drop from his shoulders and release him.
I greeted his father with a gentle kiss to his forehead, announcing myself before finding a chair to drag over next to Alex’s. We sat in silence, the nurse occasionally coming in to push some pain medication through the IV or check a reading. Alex’s mom delivered coffee and then sat with us.
We talked into the night. They told me stories about Alex’s father, stories about their family that made them laugh and tear up. And at last, during a lull, I went out into the living room to lie down on the couch and rest, and to give them some privacy.
Alex fit himself next to me sometime later and we dozed, my arm around his shoulders. Just before dawn broke, his mom came into the room and gently shook him awake.
“Is it time?” He bolted upright, rubbing the heel of his hand to one eye.
“I think it’s very close, honey. Would you rather just stay out here?”
“No.” He pushed off the couch, insistent. “I want to be with him.”
He glanced over at me, his eyes startlingly wide, and I reached out to land a light, reassuring touch against his hip. “I’ll be here.”
It was too odd to just sit on the couch and wait while his father passed, so I went into the kitchen and searched for things to do. I put up what dishes were in the dishwasher and made a fresh pot of coffee, then wandered outside into the first fingers of dawn to look at the work in Alex’s garage.
The door creaked on its hinges and the interior was cold, but when I flicked on the light switch, I forgot the temperature. I was floored.
In the months since I’d seen him, he must have been working furiously. The garage was a chaos of bits and baubles. There were no actual sculptures or pieces in the garage, but tacked up along the back wall were large three by four foot photographs of them strung like a gallery exhibit, with Alex’s scribbles along the bottom. I walked down the line examining each, a paradoxically chaotic order and energy to each piece that came through even in two dimensions.
On his worktable, a folder lay open with his thesis statement and a list of the pieces with an accompanying blurb. I flipped through each description, visually matching them to the proper piece. There was a large sparrow composed of CDs and raw metal welded into swooping wings, glue made of ash, studded with glittering dark brown glass.Sparrowwas in honor of a lady whose son had overdosed. There were happier ones too, a dancing figure composed of bits of children’s toys melted and fashioned together in a kaleidoscope of color and shape.
On the last page was a double helix of shining sheet metal that spun out into chaos at the top—bits of silver jewelry, a metal cast of a man’s hands, an etched profile that I recognized as my own, some of the civil war figurines I’d given him that his dad must have painted. A pair of women’s sunglasses, knots of a white linen shirt with buttons. It seemed almost intrusive to look at the blurb copy, which he must have still been working on, judging by the strike-throughs and messy notes.
Alex Andrews: Still Points. The necklace my mother let me wear for weeks when I was five. I located the necklace in the photograph, a chunk of white that unspooled into beads over the length of the piece, climbing from base to tip.
My father’s hands. The cast metal hands, appearing in different configurations over the length of the sculpture.
White linen shirt, knotted. Alain. First clumsy attempt at love.
Rob’s profile, a man who…and there the description ended mid-sentence, though noted in the margin was the portentous scrawl:Need to figure out how to wrap this up. What does he mean?I studied the piece again, then my profile, distracted by the preponderance of questions that little unfinished fragment brought up. A man who…what? A man who pissed me off, hurt me, wouldn’t listen? A man I fucked? A man who wouldn’t tell me what his favorite color was? All of the above? None?
I closedthe folder when I heard Alex come in and turned as he approached with a fading tell-tale redness to his eyes. His cheeks were blotched with color, his hair wild. When I searched his face, he nodded.
“Don’t give me the whole ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ thing,” he said. “Not yet. Okay?”
When he came closer, I opened my arms and pulled him against me. His fingers curled into my shirt and his tears seeped into the fabric at my shoulder. We stood just like that for a long while.
“My senior thesis,” he said, finally drawing back to gaze at the photographs.
“It’s unbelievable.” I couldn’t fathom the creativity it took to parse the intangible and give it physical representation. Alex was so much more than I’d allowed myself to think he was, and the pathos and intimacy that washed over me as I looked at the pieces he’d clearly put his soul into was breathtaking. I’d sold him short over and over.
“You think so?” He wrinkled his nose as he examined my face. “It’s all junk. Literally.” The laughter that followed was humorless and self-deprecating.
“No, it’s magnificent.” I pushed a chair in his direction and when he took it, I found one for myself and sat alongside him, sharing my cold last half cup of coffee with him while we stared at the photographs.
“I didn’t know how to describe you. For the artist’s statement, I mean. I’ve written a million things and I keep starting over.”