Charming Grace

by Deborah Smith

  But off to the sides cameramen could be seen waving their arms. Something metal clattered on the floor. There were muffled voices and commotion. I had a mental image of TV people yanking their hair and mouthing You can’t just walk off it’s live.

  Grace Vance stood, jerked her earphone and the tiny mic off her lapel like they were ticks, and rushed off camera. She didn’t care if she left the leading member of the Ex President’s Club sitting across from an empty chair.

  She had to go see if her husband was okay.

  She must have been afraid, even then, that he wasn’t.

  Back at Chez Senterra I was unloading Shrek and thinking about Harp Vance, Grace Vance, life, death, meaning, purpose, want, need, and the meandering ramble my life had always been, while the nannies herded the girls inside. Suddenly Kanda called on the intercom. “You’re needed in Command Central.”

  Code words for trouble.

  I made a bee-line through 20,000 square feet of Italianate California mansion, down one of the three elevators, past the professional gym, the indoor basketball court, the forty-seat theater, into a suite of offices filled with Stone’s big-game trophy heads, also his sports collectibles like Joe Namath’s football jersey, and his movie memorabilia, including George C. Scott’s army helmet from Patton and John Wayne’s Stetson from McClintock. In Stone’s big museum-office I always felt like something was about to bite me, tackle me, or shoot me in the ass with a pearl-handled Colt .45.

  When I saw Stone, I stopped cold.

  He was crying.

  To say I’d never seen Stone Senterra cry before was like saying I’d never seen little green men from Mars or Michael Jackson’s real nose. The Stone Man was one of the toughest, most disciplined, most righteous muthas I’d ever known, and that included lifers back in the Gumbo State who made Hannibal Lecter look like a sissy. I glanced around for a diplomatic spot where I could pretend I didn’t see an ex-wrestler and ex-Army Ranger watering the knees of his black silk workout sweats.

  Stone sat with his back to me at his buffalo-leather topped desk in his buffalo-leather executive chair. On a wall of wide-screen televisions, CNN was still talking about the Turn-Key Bomber and heroic GBI Agent Harper Vance. Stone turned just slightly to the right—his best three-quarter face shot, the angle that pulled the muscles tight on his jaw line. He was bigger than me by nine years, five inches, seventy pounds, and several hundred million dollars. But I had a better jaw.

  “If you tell anybody you saw me bawling,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll make you walk Shrek through West Hollywood wearing leather chaps and a t-shirt that says ‘The Other White Meat.’”

  “Boss,” I said carefully, “you’ll never get the pig to wear chaps and a t-shirt.”

  Stone frowned. He didn’t get irony. “I’m not joking,” he said.

  I nodded. “Me, neither.”

  He wiped his eyes, looking like hell, making me feel bad for not giving him a hug or a pat on the back. Like I would or he’d let me. I felt a cold breeze up my spine. Back home we called it a voodoo shiver. Big mojo. A cat running over your grave. I didn’t want to be there with my thoughts about my life and Harper Vance’s better life. Ditto Stone’s shrewd, watery scrutiny. Sometimes he looked at me like I was a doorman to the dark side. Like I could tell worldly secrets to a middle-class Italian boy from the suburbs of New Jersey. Stone was not exactly a streetwise punk by background. More like an altar boy who’d grown up to playact at being tough.

  “Harper Vance was one of my favorite good guys,” he said.

  Ahah. Stone followed criminal investigations the way some men follow sports. I could picture him happily buying a big-city police force like it was a football franchise. The Los Angeles Handcuffers. The Chicago Miranda Righters. The Dallas Patrolmen. He’d played noble lawmen in so many films that “A Senterra” had become cop slang for a flashy take-down. Lawmen admired him, and he admired them. Stone kept elaborate files on famous investigations, collected insider info, and discussed the on-going ups and downs of current cases with his cronies among the police and FBI. Now I understood. The Turn-Key Bomber—tracked for months by Agent Vance and his foot-long hunting knife—had been one of Stone’s personal interests.

  “Tell me why Harper Vance isn’t worth my saltwater,” Stone ordered, wiping his eyes. “I watched him die on live TV fighting to get the bomb detonator away from that crazy bastard. Right now I feel like when I was a kid and saw the film of Kennedy being assassinated. As if I ought to pray for the whole world to survive.”

  I made a show of not making a show while the invisible cat walked right over my RIP spot again. “Vance was where he wanted to be.”

  Stone stared at me. “How do you know that?”

  “Because it’s not a bad way to die. Being called a hero.”

  “All right. But tell me what motivates a man to risk his life for the safety of strangers in a hospital. And don’t say duty, honor, et cetera. That’s what I’d say. Tell me what you say. What a guy on the street says when he takes a blade or a bullet for someone else.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “He wanted to be remembered better than he was. That’s all that matters. To be remembered better than we think we are.”

  I spoke those words without knowing I had them inside me. The effect was so strange I stopped cold, listening to myself in surprise, the way I’d looked at my fist when I hit the rockers. Maybe I didn’t want to believe the catwalk of my own destiny. I thought I wouldn’t be remembered, at all. “Harper Vance deserves to be remembered,” I went on. “We should all be so lucky.”

  Stone stood as if someone had live-wired his knees. “My God. You’re right.”

  I could see the wheels of his mind turning behind his eyes. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. “Right about what, boss?”

  “He deserves to be remembered.” Stone chewed each word, thinking, squinting, working his mental gearshifts like a trucker trying to get a big rig up a long hill. Then, faster, “He deserves to be remembered! He deserves. . .to be. . .remembered!” Stone threw out both arms, wide. “Noleene, you’re right! It’s my job to make sure no one ever forgets Harper Vance! And so. . .I’m going to make a movie about him!”

  “That’s not what I—”

  “This is a perfect story for a film!” He slapped a couple of tissues to his face, yelled for his assistant over the intercom, and began talking out loud to me or just himself about story angles, research, directors. “I’ll direct the film myself,” he said suddenly. “This is the project I’ve been waiting for. My debut as an artist—not just a cartoon character. Dear Mary Mother of God. Mama mia. This is it. The project I’ve been waiting for. I’ll immortalize Harper Vance—and I’ll get my Oscar. Screw Mel Gibson.”

  “Get you your what, sir?” one of his many assistants asked nervously, peering into the office.

  “Call my wife!” He leapt at the woman and nearly chased her from the room, barking ideas, yelling for Kanda as if the mansion had no intercoms, listing a dozen people to track down in L.A., New York, London. I listened to his conversation fading with his size-thirteen jogging shoes. The assistant’s Gucci pumps made rabbit-like scrambling noises on the hallway’s imported marble floor.

  I was left behind in Hush Puppy silence. My feet hurt from the weight of my self-disgust. Sometimes, having no words is the best punishment. Alone in Stone’s office, I walked to the TV screens and pressed a universal control button on the console at their base. “And here, once again,” the CNN anchorwoman purred, “is the tape of the incredible and tragic story that unfolded this morning in Atlanta.”

  I just stood there, looking at the dying GBI agent, the tell-my-wife-I-love-her kind of man who knew he would never see that wife, again, and the wife he loved. And that I loved, too, at first sight, as crazy as that sounds.

  “I’m sorry, Grace,” I said. “I’ll make it up to you. I swear.”

  Two years later, sitting across from Grace on a stormy Savannah night, I couldn’t tell i
f telling her the truth had been the smart thing. “I looked at you on television that day, and I said ‘I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you.’ And that’s what I’ve been trying to do, ever since.” Graces stared into the dark around our candlelit table as if lost in thoughts that hurt too much to share. For all I knew she could be contemplating how to gut me with a lobster fork without getting caught.

  She picked up the computer disc and slowly got to her feet, swaying a little. I leapt up, intending to steady her, but she stepped back. Tears slid down her face. “Thank you for your faith in me.”

  I groaned. “I didn’t tell you my sob story to make you cry, chere. You can laugh, you can ignore me, you can say ‘What a crock of jambalaya,’ but don’t cry.”

  “I’m not someone you should. . .care about.”

  “Sorry, chere, you don’t get to pick and choose who I care for. I’m stuck with you.”

  “I’d try to run your life. Try to make you over. I did that to Harp. How many times I made him unhappy. Doing what I thought was good for him. He’d have been content living in a cabin in a hollow.”

  “Not unless you were there, too.”

  “Because of me, he tried to prove himself. If I’d only said. . .don’t go into law enforcement. Don’t try to impress me and my family by protecting the world—”

  “He was scared of the world, chere. Believe me, I know the feeling. He was protecting himself.”

  She looked at me for a long time. Finally her shoulders sagged a little. “I don’t deserve your faith,” she repeated.

  “Sorry, but my faith’s got a mind of its own.” I held out a hand to her. “Gracie, you made Harp a better man. And you make me want to be a better man, too.”

  She held out her praying hands with the disc in them. “I have to go. . .go read this on Mika’s laptop. Right away. I. . .thank you. Good night.”

  She rushed off as if scared of herself, of me, or us both. I watched her disappear into her room without turning on a light. A gust of damp wind blew out the candle on our table. Rain began to fall. I didn’t feel like moving, so I let it drench me. Eventually I walked over and sat down on a bench near Grace’s door. I had to be there if she needed me. A big if.

  We shared the dark, if nothing else.

  Midnight. Dressed in nothing but an old t-shirt of Harp’s and a blue silk robe, I sat barelegged on the floor of my dark room with only the glow of the laptop computer in front of me. Rain fell in soft, sad rhythms on the cobblestones of the courtyard outside my door. Dew called to say she, Mika, and Leo were sitting out the rain and would head back to our hotel after one more set at the jazz club.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” I lied. “I’m going to bed.”

  I doubted I’d sleep at all that night. I read the Hero script one or two scenes at a time, then took long breaks to cry. I couldn’t decide if the final film script upset me because it was pure cheese with a thick slice of Senterra ham on top—or because, as G. Helen had earlier predicted—it gilded Harp’s life with painfully appealing simplicity.

  I read the scene about me confronting Harp at the army recruiting office. It wasn’t remotely realistic. I had just come from a ritzy Buckhead salon, not the Miss America rehearsals; my hair was a rat’s nest clamped in long placards of aluminum foil. I wasn’t wearing an evening gown—for god’s sake, I was dressed in shorts and a dirt-brown salon smock with smears of white highlighter paste on one shoulder. And as for the dialogue—Harp hadn’t said a word when I rushed up to him. He’d only sunk his hands in his pants pockets and scowled. I was mad, I was crying, and he knew why, so he just stood there as I drew back a hand and slapped him. Then he grabbed me and shook me and begged, “Go away,” and we both cried.

  Then we went to the nearest motel and had sex for the first time, and that night, at a justice of the peace’s office across state lines, we got married.

  I gave a high-pitched moan when I finished reading Stone’s version. “Harp would have cut out his tongue rather than speak these gooey lines about love and togetherness.”

  But don’t you wish he’d tried? whispered the voice of secret confessions, that prissy little id that likes to tell the ego its lipstick is smeared.

  “What I wish is beside the point, goddammit.”

  But maybe it’s all right to remember him the way you wish he’d been. Maybe he wished he was the kind of man who knew how to tell you how much he cared. The way Boone opened up to you tonight. You were so afraid of loving Boone you had to run to this room.

  I pulled my tote bag off the couch behind me, fumbled for the flask of bourbon inside it, and took a deep swallow. “Take that, Id.”

  You can run, but you can’t hide, my conscience said back.

  I hit the computer keyboard with my fist. The Hero file scrolled forward like a casino slot machine headed for a jackpot.

  SCENE: Dawn. Grace and Harp’s handsome apartment overlooking an old Atlanta neighborhood. Harp has gotten a call that the Turn-Key Bomber is hiding somewhere in the city. After months of cat-and-mouse pursuit across the mountains of Georgia and its neighboring states, the serial bomber is taunting Harp from mountains of a less familiar kind—the skyscrapers of Atlanta. This is the ultimate grudge match.

  HARP

  (pulling on his clothes quickly)

  This is it. Either I catch him this time or he’ll pull a disappearing act for good.

  GRACE

  Don’t do anything reckless. He wants this confrontation. Don’t let it happen on his terms. You should flush him out of the city, keep him on the run, and track him down where you know the terrain best—up in the mountains.

  HARP

  (kissing her)

  Sssh. Get dressed. Go to work. Don’t worry, Ladyslipper. I’ll call you as soon as I can.

  GRACE

  (defeated, kissing him back)

  Please be careful.

  HARP

  I’ve been fighting all my life to see what’s in the dark. You’ve always been my light. Keep shining for me. And if anything happens to me—

  GRACE

  Stop. Don’t talk that way. It’s bad luck.

  HARP

  (pulling her to him, fiercely, tenderly)

  If anything happens to me, you find some other lucky man who needs you, and you bloom for him. Promise me.

  GRACE

  I won’t promise. It’s bad luck. Don’t talk that way.

  HARP

  (kisses her one more time)

  My ladyslipper. Good bye.

  If only the truth had been that sweet. If only our last morning had given me some perfect summary of our time together. But it hadn’t.

  Suddenly the hotel room closed in on me. The darkness, pervasive and grave-like, made me think of Harp’s body buried in Ladyslipper Lost, of his soul wandering those dark, rainy hollows, alone and afraid, in the dark. I shoved the computer aside, staggered to my feet, threw open the room’s door and burst out into the midnight courtyard.

  A street light beyond the high, greenery covered walls couldn’t do more than made a dim halo in the stormy mist. I staggered to the table Boone and I had shared, fumbling until I found the drenched candle in its glass votive and a small butane cigarette lighter Boone had left beside it. I sat down hard in a wrought-iron chair with the candle in my lap and the lighter in one trembling hand. I managed to light the candle after several soggy tries. I hunched over it, crying in long, choking gasps, rocking a little, as rain poured down on me. The small flame wavered inside the cave of my body and arms. It was all I had left of Harp to hold.

  I’m with you, I whispered. I’ll always light candles for you. I won’t forget. But do I have to remember everything about us exactly as it was?

  I heard footsteps splashing behind me. Boone loomed over me, sheltering and big. “Aw, Gracie,” he said hoarsely as he bent over me, a human umbrella. I pivoted in the chair and looked at him. Old jeans hung low on his waist. An unbuttoned dress shirt hung open over his chest. He looked as if he’d been outs
ide in the rain for hours. For my sake.

  Trust him, Harp whispered.

  “Stone got the scene all wrong,” I sobbed, leaving it up to Boone to decide which scene I meant. “I’d never have begged Harp not to do his job that last morning, even though I wanted to. Even though I . . . I should have. He wouldn’t have listened. And he didn’t say much as he left—just ‘I’ll call you after I get the bastard.’ I grabbed him for a quick kiss on his way out the door. He was in a hurry; he barely noticed. But then he stopped in the hall and said, “If something happens to me, light a candle and take care of the ladyslippers, keep moving and don’t look back.’ Then he turned and kept walking.

  “I was speechless. I was horrified. Ever since my mother died I’ve had small charms to ward off the death of someone I love. I ran after him; by then he’d turned a corner. I yelled, ‘Don’t you dare get. . .hurt. . .I’m expecting you to hand over your birthday wish list tonight!’

  “But it was too late. He’d already stepped into the elevator. He was gone.” I moaned. “If he’d only heard me. If he’d only listened.” I cupped my hands over the candle and looked up at Boone tearfully. His face was a rough, handsome landscape of sympathy. Rain soaked us both. I broke down completely. “How can I take care of you,” I sobbed, “when I couldn’t take care of him?”

  Boone made a hoarse sound. He slowly put his hand over mine, on the warm glass of the votive. “I’d be happy to put my life in the hands of a woman who can keep a candle going in a hurricane.”