Author's Note: Well I initially had hoped to have this update up during early February. I suppose late February isn't too bad. Especially considering the fact that it didn't take me over a year to write. Also, ghost ships and demons were inspired by Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse.
Disclaimer: The lyrics used from Elton John's Blue Eyes and the Everly Brothers' Love Hurts are not mine.
Chronicling Babylon
5. Deuteronomy to Kings
How does a love end? – Then it does end? To tell the truth, no one – except for the others – ever knows anything about it; a kind of innocence conceals the end of this thing conceived, asserted, lived according to eternity. Whatever the loved being becomes, whether he vanishes or moves into the realm of Friendship, in any case I never see him disappear: the love which is over and done with passes into another world like a ship into space, lights no longer winking: the loved being once echoed loudly, now that being is entirely without resonance (the other never disappears when and how we expect).
- extract from the chapter "The Ghost Ship" from Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse
America had become a different world in Tristan's absence. The cities, the towns, the streets, the landscape were all barely familiar, like he had only ever caught a glimpse of this country from a photograph in a travel brochure. Tristan was navigating the murky terrain of a past he had tried to repress. And in his journey back he had become lost. The front passenger seat of the rental car was filled with maps. There were red scrawling lines tracing different routes and various paths that all lead to one point…
Black dot –
here –
Hartford.
2 a.m. The mansion was cloaked in black, home to some of the lost souls of material society. He crept inside – night thief here to steal his childhood back – and was assaulted by the stench of lilies and narcissuses. He clenched the maps in his hands, paper crumpling and red ink staining palms and fingers.
Tristan trembled and shivered. It was winter in America and everywhere, especially this house, was cold. So, so cold. And he could barely remember warmth, humidity, Malaysia.
Slowly, every move an effort, he began to ascend the DuGrey staircase, stairs to six generations of DuGreys. Step. Step. Step. Then there was the sound of oak creaking and a lamp was suddenly switched on. He had forgotten to skip the squeaky fourth step.
In artificial light Tristan saw the broken Barbie of his mother again.
"Darling," she slurred, "you're back! I waited up for you. I know you said you were going to stay at work late but I didn't think you meant this late. You must be tired and hungry. Poor dear. I got the maid to set aside dinner for you. It's in the oven."
"Mo-"
"Hush, William, hush. Hush. Hush. Shush. You have to be quiet. Shush. Very, very quiet!" Evelyn DuGrey exclaimed. She waved her hands erratically and attempted to place a finger over her mouth but ended up poking her left eye instead, sending her off into fits of hysterical laughter.
"Mother," he said, "it's Tristan. Your son."
"Don't be ridiculous," she scolded. "Tristan is just a baby. Itty, bitty, rock-a-bye baby. Rock-a-bye baby."
"Mother," Tristan attempted once more but she didn't hear him, lost in her own world.
"Tristan: my baby with my blue eyes. Blue eyes, baby's got blue eyes," she crooned. "Like a deep blue seee-eeee-eeea…on a blue bluu-uooo-oooe day." At the top of the staircase, hands clutched to the railing, tangled blonde hair draped across the dissolving lines of a time ravaged face, Evelyn DuGrey sang in a wobbly and drunken but otherwise perfect voice. And Tristan noted with the jaded eyes of his adulthood that she was still the most devastatingly beautiful person he had ever known.
She stopped her singing suddenly and began to play with her hair, twisting it into golden curls. Then speaking to the empty space beyond Tristan's left shoulder she mewled, "William? Why do you work so late? You're always working. Why won't you look at me, William? I fucked the accountant yesterday. He touched me like you touched me. Made me feel so good. Touch me like you used to, William."
Evelyn DuGrey's right hand ran across her thigh, white crepe de chine bunching up in her palm. With a cast of night shadows surrounding her, she seemed to be posing in severe spotlight. A dreamy smile crept on her face and she swayed to the rhythm of her breathing and softly recommenced her singing. "Love hurts, love scars, love wounds and mars…take a lot of pain, take a lot of pain," she hummed.
The second hand of a clock ticked over to 2:17 a.m. and she blinked three times as a moment of clarity hit Evelyn DuGrey. For the first time that night she recognized her son. "Tristan! What you doing here? You're meant to be in Malaysia," she exclaimed, eyes flickering with something he might have once remembered as motherly love. However before Tristan could reply her eyes glazed over and she was lost to him once more.
Tristan did not know what to feel for this fragmented doll of a mother-woman-stranger. He was too tired and too lost himself. Instead he resigned himself to walking up the rest of the stairs and heading to his room. But as he passed his mother, her tiny perfectly manicured hand reached out and grabbed his arm. She held him firmly in her grasp, left hand cupping his chin. Tristan's eyes met the identical pools of blue on his mother's face. When she spoke, her voice was uncharacteristically hard and didactic, "First commandment, my little prince: love is just a lie, made to make you blue." Even after she had released him and quickly disappeared into the depths of the mansion, there was heavy silence which pressed the air – a silent reminder of his mother's words.
When he finally entered the room that he had always called his own – now only holding the traces of the person he once was – Tristan headed straight to his bed, lying prostrate across the mattress. He wanted to close his eyes and fall into oblivion but it was impossible; his blue eyes remained wide and unblinking as he stared up at the blankness of the ceiling.
He pulled the card out of his right pant pocket, fingering the paper: tough, durable, textured and hers.
RoryRoryRory. Mantra in his head. LoveLiesBlue. Mantra in his head. DeepBlueSea. Mantra in his head.
Desperately he tried to forget those things, promising himself that he would deal with them tomorrow. Right now he needed sleep. But when sleep eventually claimed him, he dreamed of a ghost ship in stormy sea waters, captained by a demon with indistinct features. The ghost ship was sinking as waves flooded the deck, thunder roared up above, lightening struck the mast, and the demon captain yelled, "This can't go on!" Lightening struck once again, and in that flash of light Tristan saw the face of the demon – his own.
Then he woke up.
In the morning it was as if nothing had happened. No crazy dreams, no crazy mother, nothing. His mother – apparently without a memory of last night's events – made the expected noises of 'how nice it was to have him back' before disappearing to arrange his reintroduction into Hartford society. His father gave him a perfunctory nod as acknowledgment of Tristan's presence before returning his attention to the eggs, bacon and toast which constituted breakfast. And as Tristan slowly sipped his orange juice, he wondered if he had done the right thing by coming back to a past and a country that no longer felt like his own.
Still he had made promises to himself to come home, to see Rory, and so he went on the road again with the windshield wipers swishing white slush across the glass. It had snowed heavily in the time before sunrise. The whiteness of the world seemed to refract and glare and he felt blind. The road home had been paved with good intentions and Tristan tried to remember them as he approached Stars Hollow, the town which had cultivated one Rory Gilmore. But his head was full of demons, ghost ships and his mother – love, lies, blue – reverberating. He could not see and he could only hear love, lies, blue.
Somehow he arrived at the Gilmore household. And standing on their front lawn, staring at the house, the front porch, the gnomes, he realized that everything seemed achingly the same. With shallow and uneven breath he willed his legs and feet to march those thirteen steps it took to Rory's front door. Then Tristan DuGrey knocked on wood.
There was no answer.
He waited until 9:47 p.m. before he finally gave up. For the next six days Tristan sat on the Gilmore porch waiting. He was slightly astonished that no Stars Hollow native – Taylor, Miss Patty, Kirk, Babette – had appeared with their demanding questions. Had their standards slipped? Still, he wasn't going to voluntarily seek them out even if they could inform him as to Rory's (and even Lorelai's) whereabouts.
However despite flittering away part of the six days on the Gilmore porch, the majority of seconds were actually spent hiding in his room staring at the gold of trophies, the blue of first place ribbons, and living at the edges of his boyhood. He spent the six days thinking about his mother, his father, their marriage and love. He thought of high school and college and friends and lovers and Rory. He plotted and mapped all the significant and insignificant black dots that had lead him to this point in life.
On the seventh day, Tristan allowed himself to be reintroduced into society. The evening's gathering was exactly what Tristan had expected: boring, pretentious, skin crawling. Mothers and daughters were all over him, seeing the prospect of a future husband and the DuGrey fortune. It was like something out of a trashy romance novel set in nineteen century England that he had once caught Paris Gellar reading when they were ten.
"Malaysia is so exotic, so foreign and so far away. It was so brave of you to go live there for three years!"
"My, my. You are looking wonderfully tanned."
"Did you meet anyone interesting over there?"
But maintaining a charming smile and making small talk came naturally to him, like the blood flowing through his veins. And so it continued as Hartford's elite welcomed him in grand style, the event coordinated and overseen through the critical eyes of his mother.
Tristan had to give credit to her: Evelyn DuGrey had defined and refined the art of always publicly maintaining the image of perfection. She knew her role, as did his father, as did Tristan. They were the perfect picture of the perfect couple of the perfect son of the perfect family of the perfect empire. No one was to suspect anything but perfection, no one ever did except maybe during that little slip-up in junior year which led to Tristan's ejection into military school.
It made him sick and sad and scared. This was to be his world, his sovereignty. This was the black dot on the map. This was the place he called home. But truthfully, he had had enough. Tristan had kept his promises as best he could. It was not his fault they could not be fulfilled. And his return to America had not been a complete waste of time. If nothing else, he had proved that there was not a single thing left here for him anymore.
Tristan turned his heels, ready to pack his bags and run back to Malaysia, when a high-pitched voice from a nearby conversation stopped him.
"Have you heard about the Gilmores? They say it's cancer. Richard, of course, is devastated. And their daughter, Lorelai – yes, the one that was embroiled in such a scandal with the Hayden boy when she was fourteen? no, sixteen or whatever her appalling age, too young indeed, was – is at the hospital almost every day. And the granddaughter…what's-her-name…or it's Lorelai too?…returned from somewhere in Asia. Yes, they've been staying with Richard for a few weeks now…really very sad. Everyone's expecting her to go any minute now although it has been over a month now..."
*****
There was a dense clump of tree trunks – the branches bare, spidery and seemingly touching the clouds – that gave an empty haunted feel to what had once been a pretty country garden. Through the overgrown grass, flecked white with evaporating snow, his feet stumbled upon a line of pebbles that had once served as a path. Tristan followed the trail, distinctly aware of the black shape of the derelict Independence Inn looming in the background.
Earlier in the day he had been in Hartford, knocking on the elderly Gilmores' front door with an offering of flowers and condolences. He had been thanked by a maid and informed that nobody was home. Apparently Richard and Lorelai were visiting Emily in the hospital and the maid wasn't quite sure where young Miss Lorelai was. So on a hunch he was here, trampling through the Inn's gardens.
As Tristan rounded a bend he caught a glimpse of a small tool shed. Rory's first home. Her favorite place in the world.
He noted that a small perimeter around the shed had been cleared, the density of grass having been hacked to bay by a pair of gardening shears. Not to mention that the door to the shed, despite its squeaking hinges, appeared to have recently acquired a new layer of red paint.
When Tristan opened the door he saw her; a mixture of the girl he had loved and the woman he had wanted to hate. She was crouched on the floor with a brush and bucket at hand, wearing a faded blue t-shirt with the Chilton emblem imprinted on the top left corner. He recognized the t-shirt as one which had once served as part of their prerequisite gym uniform. It was not surprising that she could still fit into it. Physically she hadn't really changed that much from her fifteen year old self.
Watching as Rory scrubbed the floors furiously, the headphones over her ears making her unaware of his presence, Tristan wondered where the time had gone. Clichéd thought really, but he had spent almost a week examining and re-examining his life and relationships only to be gob-smacked by all the time that had passed him by. All those hours, minutes, seconds gone. Irreclaimable. And it wasn't about all the things he had done wrong and all the things he should have done differently. Nor was it about all the things that she had done wrong and the things she should have done differently. They didn't matter, because that time was gone. The ghost ship had sailed. Demon vanished. And calm acceptance washed over him.
Tristan walked over to her hunched form and gently placed a hand on Rory's shoulder. She stood up and swiveled around, eyes widening, fingers tugging the headphones down.
"Hey, there," he greeted.
"Hi. Hi," she replied, her voice inflecting to demonstrate her surprise, her questions.
"I heard about your grandma," he told her. "Hartford gossip mills are still working as hard as ever. I'm sorry, Rory."
"Are you apologizing for those flibbertigibbets or about my grandma?" she attempted to lightly joke, but there was a slight strain in her voice.
"Both," Tristan answered. His hand was still resting on her shoulder and she had unconsciously leaned closer, taking comfort from his touch. The space between them was almost nothing. "But more so about your grandma," he continued. "I know how much she means to you. I know how this must be tearing you apart."
"I'm okay. Well, not okay. But compared to mom and grandpa," Rory said trying to shrug off his concern. "Anyways, what are you doing here? Back in America, I mean."
"It was time to stop running away. It was time to come home," he began to explain.
There was a lot to say and it all came out as a gush of words stumbling over commas and full stops. Tristan ran his fingers through his hair eleven times, a nervous gesture he wasn't quite sure where he had picked up from. It seemed weird, surreal, downright bizarre that they were having this conversation in light of everything. Let alone having this conversation in such a civilized manner. He had expected it to be harder, more painful, more tears, more yelling and with a ring of finality that would end everything that was Tristan and Rory. But all that had ended was years of pent up resentment and anger and sorrow.
"I'm sorry about Malaysia. I didn't handle things very well," Tristan concluded.
"It's my fault too," Rory insisted. "I knew when I told you and I knew when I did what I did…well…I knew. And there's no excuse for that considering how you felt and I felt. And even how Dean felt. I hurt him terribly, you know. I've been selfish and stupid and…and…scared. I'm scared, Tristan. Of what we had or could have had and even of what we have lost. Your friendship means everything to me and the knowledge that I've lost that…that scares me more than you know."
"Almost lost," he interrupted. "I wouldn't be here if I wasn't still your friend, Rory."
She smiled gratefully before continuing, "I'm scared of being an adult when I still feel like a kid, Tristan. But most of all, I'm scared of grandma dying. She can't die-"
He moved forward, wrapping his arms around her, enfolding her into a comforting embrace, and there was no space, no time, nothing between them. She stopped pretending to be okay, letting go of her composure and sobbing into his shirt. He held her tightly, now and then rubbing circles across her back as her body shook with distress.
After awhile it grew almost peaceful. He could smell the distinct odor of the lemon-scented cleaner and the icy, grassy, woody fragrance of the garden surrounding the shed. There was the chirping of birds coming from outside and the rustling of wind. The wooden floorboards of the shed creaked as Tristan shifted a little. Rory let out one or two muffled sobs but mostly the shed was filled with the sound of their breathing.
The afternoon light cast a warm glow which illuminated the room with hues of gold. He noted that Rory had been busy. The walls were a pretty soft blue and appeared to have been recently decorated with hand-painted sunflowers. There was also an assortment of flowers in six vases placed throughout the room; flowers that Tristan assumed Rory had picked from the Inn's garden.
Eventually Rory pulled away to ask, "So how did you know where to find me?"
He laughed then, a series of chuckles that was as liberating as Rory's tears had been. She stared at him weirdly, not sure what to make of his response. Then when his laughter had subsided, Tristan twisted his mouth into a familiar insufferable grin, "This is me you're talking about. The omniscient, omnipotent Tristan DuGrey."
"No, seriously," she complained.
Still smirking he replied, "I know you."
Rory nodded, accepting his words and with it the history that bound them. She reached down to take his right hand, giving it a quick squeeze as she said, "I'm glad you're here."
His answer was simple, without thought and over-analysis: "Me too."
