Grace

by Calvin Baker

  “It is early. You must have more patience. Unless it is not your nature.”

  “I just flew in this morning,” I explained.

  “Do we bore you?” she asked impishly.

  “Of course not,” I replied.

  She twisted her mouth with distaste. “I see it all on your face. We were being rude, arguing about work. Do not lie.” She let her fingers slide across my wrist, and her touch spread across my skin with the lightness of morning over a familiar landscape, inspiring confidence and the feel of being seen. “Better not to say anything.”

  I was embarrassed. She saw it. Davidson saw it. Florin saw it. Davidson smiled with bemusement, Florin with pique, and Genevieve unabashedly as my attraction to her began to show.

  “Let’s talk about something else. I did not mean to say the wrong thing. I thought you knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “Nothing. Tell me, what is your last name?”

  “Roland,” I said.

  “Do you know the poem?”

  “Yes.”

  “What poem?” Davidson asked.

  I began to recite what little I could remember from the Song of Roland.

  “Charles the king, our emperor and sovereign, for seven years has been in Spain, conquered the land and now no castle against him remains,” she translated. “I am impressed. How do you know this?”

  “I was caught in a lie by my high school French teacher,” I confessed. “As punishment I was made to memorize the first ten stanzas.”

  “What lie did you tell?” she asked.

  “I do not remember,” I said. “That’s how I got caught.”

  “I bet I can make you remember,” she turned serious. “But never lie to me. I will know.”

  “You think you can always tell when people are lying?”

  “Not everyone. But you, yes.” She laughed softly. Her bosom rocked, and her eyes flashed bright like coins from the depths of a fountain, spirits from the bottom of a lake. I wanted nothing more than to see them twinkle again.

  “I’m bored,” Florin called from the edge of our flirtation. “Let’s go. There’s a new club nearby, one of my friends owns it.”

  Davidson looked at Florin, and then at Genevieve’s hand, which had made its way back to my wrist, and he was my friend. He began talking to Florin, listening as though she were the most interesting woman he ever met, and the one he had intended to talk to all along. Florin was happy for the attention, and I was happy for the sympathy, and Genevieve was happy because of an irrepressible spirit. Davidson was even more bemused than before, which for him was close to happiness, and we set out for the club.

  It was a fine summer night. The club was crowded with people celebrating the beginning of summer, and soon Genevieve and I were pressed against one another.

  “I thought you liked my friend,” I said.

  “No,” she replied with certainty. “You are my man.”

  “When did you decide that?” I asked.

  “You are so foolish, and impatient,” she said. “Since I saw you. That is why I made you jealous.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Why? Because you are my man.” She laughed.

  I did not usually move fast, but it was a brief trip, and it was clear, so we left for my hotel where we stayed our first night together. In the morning when I woke, she was still curled languorously in my arms, where she remained, as I inhaled the perfume from the top of her head, and did not wake her, because I did not wish to break our embrace.

  We went out eventually for a late brunch, then wandered the streets idly, people-watching and talking, before returning to the hotel, where we made love again in the high, perfect afternoon.

  She was a beautiful, sensuous girl, with a bright spirit, and I knew it was not practical for us to be together—we did not live in the same city—but was struck by what the Parisians call a coup de foudré—stroke of lightning about which little can be said. Silver quick as a message between worlds. She was my girl. Even if we did not know what would happen when we parted, we had the expanse of the weekend like a summer meadow beyond the reach of time.

  We did not leave the room again until late the next afternoon, when we bought lunch at Rose Bakery, and farmer’s wine from the Jura, to make a picnic in front of the cathedral. When we went for our bread, even the baker could see we were flush with love, and bid us wait a few minutes, then blessed our union with warm loaves of new bread. The wine was good, and the bread was good, and the lawn was filled with couples kissing, as Genevieve curled against my chest like an explosive new galaxy. I did not know what was happening, but I felt fortunate and full of her and thankful.

  6

  “You know you’re betting the long shot,” Davidson said, over dinner in St. Germain the following evening. “The improbable. Not to mention impractical. Love rarely works even in the best of cases. You know this, and yet will not help yourself. Either because you crave intensity of experience, a more and more potent drug, or else give privilege to the primal instinct for whom you can love, even when it does not withstand the scrutiny of what you yourself say you want. You wish for reason and desire to be the same, but sense they are at eternal war, Apollo and Dionysus, and know, or should know, misery is when you try but cannot reconcile them. Which will it be? The Romantics chose ardor and were undone. Ancient gods fell into the same divine snare. All perished.” Read the myths. Neither will you escape this unharmed.”

  “None of us will,” I answered.

  “Lover’s gamble. What Olympus would you challenge to palm the fire of gods?”

  “It’s worth it.”

  “She will cause you grief. Better to take up a hobby, or check into an ashram, than learn what you are going to learn the way you’re going about it.”

  “I will take my chances.”

  “Just remember, then, all things tend toward equilibrium. The ending may be as bitter as the beginning is sweet.”

  “Why are you being a such a cynic?”

  “Because I am your friend. Don’t get me wrong, I applaud your decision. It is the right way to be. The way things should be, so I’m jealous, and not for the reason you think. I wish I could still be that way too.”

  He told me about his marriage, when he was twenty-eight, which had ended in divorce a year later. He had sworn afterward never to marry again, and, at forty-nine was good as his word, living from affair to affair, some of them longer, some shorter; neither, he claimed, expecting nor seeking more.

  “That is the nature of modern life,” he argued. “You believe you will find someone who embodies all those things you want, all those things you have been told are appropriate for you, and think you should want. You believe when you find the perfect person your life will be happy. The truth is not that way. You feel a spark, then one day it’s gone, leaving you to decide whether to stay on and slog it out, for another kind of idealism you call practicality, but really it is you are hoping the spark might return, or making yourself a martyr to the secular religion of children and family, which is ridiculous on the level of the individual but keeps society whole. Or else you leave and find a new flame. You cannot do what the old gods did, see, under Zeus, which was both at once. So the answer to your future bind rests in whether you can incorporate the thousand tiny failures, or whether the thing for you is the fire itself.”

  “I thought you were a cynic, now you sound like a romantic.”

  “Are you an undertaker?”

  “What?”

  “Stop trying to put people in your boxes.”

  “That is not what I’m doing.”

  “No? You’re making things binary. They’re not. We are all cynics, and all romantics. Stop reducing people to fit little theories and ideas. It says more about the categories in your mind than it does about life. Creating the category is nothing but an attempt to control.”

  “That means nothing.”

  “That means everything. Just remember what I said.”

 
; He salted his bread and swam it through the olive oil.

  “Let’s drop it,” I said. “I know you are trying to be a friend.”

  “I am,” he affirmed, as we finished dinner faster than usual and parted.

  It was late evening, and I went to meet Genevieve at a cocktail lounge near her apartment, where we had drinks on the terrace and debated going on to another place, but began kissing in the open air, ending up back at her apartment, where we entwined until the morning alba spread out over the rooftops.

  The curtains were open and the room flooded with light as we fell asleep, but we did not rise until the sun was high over the day, when we enjoyed a light breakfast in the kitchen with the windows open to the ocean of the city below.

  It was Sunday and we went antiquing in the markets, then stumbled on a street fair, where we bought Martiniquean food, which we carried down to the river. She took out a white sheet from her bag, which she spread across the white stone, and we reclined and loafed on the banks of the Seine, listening to a Brazilian band play bossa nova standards on the lower banks.

  “You are my man,” she said, leaning to kiss me.

  “I have to go back to New York.” I forced myself to be practical, as I considered the uncertainty of a long-distance love affair. “I’m not sure this is possible.”

  “Because you have fear? So what if we have a crazy love? As long as it is love.”

  “I have to leave,” I said ruefully.

  “You do not,” she replied. “You can change your ticket.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Yes. Stay with me. We will be happy.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I always know my man.”

  “I thought you liked my friend first.”

  “Do not be like that. He is the kind of man who goes to parties where the people ask what his last film is about, which they did not see, and what he will make next, and he explains it to them.”

  “What should he do?”

  “Let it speak for itself.”

  “I know that is how Americans are. Everyone has to say he is the best. But I only care that he will be a good friend to you. For me he talks too much about money, and pretends to be radical, when really he is safe as a housecat. It makes a little excitement for the bourgeoisie, but it is not freedom.”

  “Davidson is his own man, even when he does what he has to do.”

  “Yes, that is what the people always say. But he is losing his chance to be a real artist, from being in a business where they confuse money with art. At least he knows it, I guess, and does not lie to himself. And neither should you, even if it makes things difficult. He respects you for that. That is also why he stays here. He hates going back, because in America they only like dead artists and he knows it is making him dead. But you will stay because you are in love, and that is the only thing that makes our lives less alone.” She skipped a stone across the river.

  “We are all alone. Not even love alters that.” I stared up, squinting at the sun.

  “True. But it is also true that you will stay for me.” She kissed me again slowly as tasting the future. “But you already know.”

  “Do I?”

  “Are you telling me you are leaving? Because you have only to look at me and say, ‘Genevieve, I am not your man.’ And I will let you go. I will wave my wrist and walk away. Go, say it.” She fluttered her fingers and closed her eyes.

  I said nothing.

  “Good, now let’s discover our mystery. Feel how exciting it is?” She took my hand to her breast, so that I could feel how wildly her heart pulsed.

  “Yes,” I said, unwilling to resist even if I had been able to, which would have taken an effort of will beyond me. I was her man, if only for the time we were together, which is all there ever really is.

  She called in sick to work the next morning. We spent the afternoon wandering the streets, and evening in bed, and the next morning as well. Tuesday the museums were all closed, and she had arranged for us to go to the Louvre, which was empty of people except the curators. We roamed from gallery to gallery, looking at the work without any of the usual noise but the crackling energy between the paintings.

  “Are you looking at the art, or the naked girls?” she teased, as we made our way through one of the modern wings.

  “What is the difference?”

  “Don’t be superficial,” she teased. “The girl and the painter are pilgrim and bridge on the way. The art is a lens, holding still a moment, reflecting it back to us, like a memory we have forgotten. Now do not talk, or else you will miss it if your spirit wants to tell you something better than your own questions.”

  The pyramid was bright with light, illuminating the world anew, and the rest of the week was the same—the two of us orbiting reality from a celestial perch, until the following Sunday, when I could not change my ticket again, and had to catch an early morning flight for New York.

  “Will you vanish, or will we see each other again?”

  “I hope we will see each other again,” I said, afraid of losing it. “I feel like we might have something.”

  “Then you should move here.” She nested deeper into me, before I could leave the bed to dress. “We are free. We can live wherever we wish.”

  “I do not know if it is that easy. Let’s see what happens.”

  “We will see what we make happen,” was her riposte. I was old enough then to appreciate what I had been given, and knew the sympathy between us demanded I do whatever I could to see if we should be together. What I still did not know was whether I had the faith to trust in it.

  7

  I returned home plagued with longing, unable to focus on anything besides her. Weeks later our calls and messages to each other continued to grow, leaving me surprised at the strength of my yearning.

  “Do you want to come for a visit?” I asked, late one night for me, early in the morning for her, after we had spoken of the strength of our emotions.

  “I thought you were against long-distance relationships,” she said matter-of-factly. “You are supposed to be forgetting about me, and focusing on all of your important things in New York. I did not want to cross the ocean for an affair.”

  The sound of her voice over the line always excited me. But I matched her move and retreated. “You are right. I should not have asked.”

  “You are awful,” she said. “How will anyone ever live with you?”

  “Who said anything about living together?”

  “Do not joke around with what you care about,” she declared, present and unafraid of showing herself. “Now you miss me and are sorry for the way you behaved. For your fear.” She did not ask, but stated it triumphantly. “Because I know you understand how we must embrace the people who deserve our embrace, without reservation.”

  Listening to her made it sound so simple, and the distance no longer seemed so great an obstacle. I asked her again to come for a visit.

  “I will think about it, but what about your other girls?” she probed. “Won’t they be jealous?”

  “There are no girls,” I said.

  “Tell me you miss me then.”

  “I miss you,” I assured her. “I want you here.”

  “Are you completely certain?”

  “Yes. Come over next weekend.”

  “Before it was simple, now you must wait. You will not catch me again so easily.” She gave out the deep, breathy laugh of vitality that had won me before, and it won again. “But if you do, it will be because you are my man.”

  When we hung up I realized my fear of giving in to what I wanted was not dread of not having it, or of gaining and losing and the resulting pain, only the anxiety of being exposed. As we ended the call I understood why people make such fools of themselves for love. I had no desire to be a fool, of course. But who was I not to be?

  She arrived a few weeks later, and I took the train to meet her at the airport, where I found her as beautiful and high-spirited as I remembered, the magnetism betwee
n us an electrical storm of attraction. We went back to my apartment, where we made lunch, then spent the rest of the afternoon making love. In the evening we went to Film Forum to see a lost Kurosawa movie, and afterwards walked the sweltering summer streets to Washington Square Park, where we sat on the edge of the fountain to cool off and listen to a jazz quartet, before heading to dinner.

  I loved the city in summer, when it metamorphosed from a northern capital to a more southerly pace, but Genevieve had no interest in it. “Let’s go home,” she said, looking up from her half-eaten salad. “If you don’t make love to me this second I will explode.”

  We taxied back to my apartment, where the unbearable intensity of our thirst for each other was slackened and slackened, but could not be quenched.

  “I told you I always know my man,” she said, as we lay awake late into the sultry night.

  “How many times have you known it?”

  “What kind of question is that? I share with you the most beautiful thing, and you ruin it with your petty little jealousy.”

  I was not a jealous man, but the strength of our attraction made me greedy and insecure even for the past before I knew her.

  She soon made it clear, though, that if I wanted to pursue the relationship it would have to be in Paris. After we left dinner with friends at a locavore place in Brooklyn the next day, she told me exactly what she thought of New York.

  The restaurant did not take reservations, so our wait was interminable, and I could see she was not going to enjoy the meal, even before we sat down. I suggested we try another restaurant, every place on the block seemed like better or worse versions of the same menu, but it had a meaning to the friends we were with, so we waited.

  When we were finally seated the wine was overpriced, and not very good. The food was perfectly fine, but the waiters, and our friends, made too much of it, so no pleasure we received could compete with their self-satisfaction. Genevieve grew antsy, mouthing the word pretentious to me when no one was looking.

  “What is wrong with Americans?” she asked, as we walked back to the subway. “Everything is ‘I like. I do not like.’ But it is only opinion, not discernment. All they could talk about was money and food, as though they have never eaten before. But there are more people in pain than in restaurants, and they cannot speak about that, only put money in their stomachs. And then, did you see on the way to the subway, they put books in the street, which I have never seen except in war films, so that is the truth about them.”