Grace

by Calvin Baker

  “No,” she said, smoothing my brow tenderly. “Sometimes I think when people say anything is only business that’s the lie. Maybe I didn’t choose the best work, but everything is real. I’m still a woman. You are still a man. This is still life. And I’m glad we met, even if you would never let yourself fall in love with a puta.”

  “Come back to bed,” I reached for her. Sadly, tenderly. Full of pain and vulnerability that flashed the brighter amid the seediness.

  “Just remember what we talked about.” She kissed me when she finally left a while later.

  “Remind me.”

  “Oh, amor,” she smiled softly. “You will remember. It is what you are truly looking for.”

  I tried to recall what we discussed the night before, but it was all as distant as yesterday’s dream. “I can’t remember anything,” I said.

  She hugged herself to me warmly, and rested her hand on my chest briefly and just smiled, before leaving. When she walked away all I could think of was an hourglass.

  I shambled back to the hotel, still unable to recall the details of the night before. I felt a tarnished, divided joy, sadness and liberation tempered by self-reproach. All I could remember was a feeling between us of pure physicality, an absolute freedom of being completely in the body and completely at ease. If there was no more truth to it than that, at least there was nothing false.

  The only falseness was between me and myself.

  It was eleven o’clock by the time I reached my room, where I discovered the maid vacuuming, and my luggage nowhere in sight. When I asked where my things were, she shrugged and pointed a finger toward the roof. I knew what she was talking about, and took the elevator up to Doc’s suite, where I found Schoeller and a couple of random guys splayed around the living room in various poses of sin-sickness and suffering. Schoeller was still bumping cocaine from a tiny spoon.

  I went to the bathroom to shower and change, then crashed across the bed, where I was fast asleep when Doc showed up half an hour later. He was swaddled in a fresh linen suit, happy as a butter thief, and wide awake as the morning he was born.

  He glanced around the room, shaking his head with dismay as he considered us. “Amateurs,” he pronounced, before shoving Schoeller aside on the sofa, to open his bag on the table.

  “Where have you been all this time?” Schoeller asked.

  “Up Corcovado way, to say confession.”

  “There’s a church there?”

  “No. I went to speak directly to O Cristo. What I did, no priest could comprehend.”

  “Where did we lose Freddo?” I asked.

  “In jail. Here. This will even you out.” He was passing out uppers to those who had gone too far down, and downers to those who had gotten too high.

  When he reached me he opened my eyes wide with his fingers, before searching them with a penlight.

  “First time?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  “She gentle with you?”

  I smiled.

  “Kiss you on the mouth?”

  I admitted to it.

  “Wrap her legs around you, and rock you in her arms until you felt the heat from the center of the world?”

  I laughed weakly.

  “Say what you needed to hear? Make you forget your worries, and feel like she knew you? Laugh with you until the darkness shone like diamonds, and make you remember how bounteous loving can be?”

  I closed my eyes in wistful reverie.

  “Wish you met her under different circumstances?”

  I winced.

  “You give her all you had? You give her the jailhouse key?”

  “I don’t want to play this game.”

  “Circle well done. You found a saint in a cathouse.” He grinned at me, and placed a horse pill on my tongue. “Eat this.”

  “What is it?”

  “This one eases the conscience.”

  He turned back to the room. “We need to get moving. We’re driving south to Ihla Grande to surf, and then a little surprise I’ve worked up.”

  “No more surprises.”

  “Mermaids.”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Wait till you get there before you decide. We also need to go spring Freddo from the pen, and buy him a new watch.”

  “What’s he doing in jail?”

  “He refused to give his girlfriend a present last night, like a good little boy, so she gifted herself his watch.”

  “How did the police get involved?”

  “When he realized it, he lost his cool, then she lost her cool, and security came. He still did not calm the fuck down, so they put him in the tank to chill him out.”

  “Why didn’t you spring him last night?”

  “And ruin the party? Besides, nobody told him to check his common sense at customs, and, because he is our dear brother, as all of you are my dear brothers, I decided to leave him in peace awhile to remember himself. Just as someday I will find new livers for each of you. Now, when we get him, he will be repentant, and no longer an adjective-defying asshole.”

  “I’m fine bailing him out,” Schoeller said. “But let him get his own watch.”

  “We have to,” Doc answered, “because he will not have time to do it before going home, and Doris gave him that dumb watch for their first wedding anniversary, when he had no bread and she was making cake. So if he shows up without it she will know something happened, and he will not be able to get himself out of it without lying to her. She will figure this out, of course, and send him to hell. They don’t have the kind of relationship where he can simply go home and say honestly: Sugarstack, I know you don’t want to hear this, and it’s not what I want to be telling you at all, but I was unfaithful to us and as a material consequence lost your watch to a ho in Rio.”

  “Let her leave him. Who cares if they get divorced?”

  “First off, there is no such thing as divorce after you’ve had children, only nonconjugal polygamy. Second of all, raise your hand if you want him sleeping on your couch. Better to do it this way.

  “Why does Doc care so much?” I asked Schoeller.

  “You don’t know? His father dropped him off in a place like that when he was fifteen, and never came back for him.”

  “I don’t believe you. What kind of father does something like that?”

  “His father was a politician.”

  “How much did you pay her, Doc?” I asked.

  He smiled. “You miss the point. It is not about money but her self-worth, and that each time she meets a man like Freddo, a tiny portion of that dissipates, until she has no illusions except what is permanent in the heart, and, she is too young to know this, but by the time she realizes it she will be on an unalterable course she does not control, and to which she has sacrificed herself. Who am I to say what it takes to compensate her for that? Even she will not fully know for years, when she comes to understand what each of you knows, which is the world is brutal and whores do not love anyone. Except, well, me and Harper here.”

  “How much did it cost, Doc?”

  “It does not matter, it was a gift. Not payment or substitute for human affection, but a genuine token of esteem, as she is a person and I am a person, and as our friend was not a person, and as the police, who are not people, became involved, and as she alone has it in her power to press charges or not, I, in the name of all our persons leaving this country come Monday, made a contribution to the scholarship fund for her children, who do not know their father, as well as to the retirement account her guild does not provide.”

  “Why didn’t you get the watch back then?”

  “Because, fool, the policeman kept the watch.”

  It was Sunday, and the stores would only be open a little longer, so Doc, who was fluent in getting things done, went to the precinct to get Freddo, while Schoeller and I went to buy a new watch, which we could do in any language.

  We spent two hours after that searching high and low for an engraver, until we were able to track
one down to his house, where we paid him to open the shop.

  When we met back at the hotel in the late afternoon Freddo was there, sheepish, unable to bring himself to say anything as we loaded into the car for the drive south.

  When the city snarl unfurled to the open highway, he tried haltingly to account for himself, looking around at us with battered eyes.

  “Don’t explain,” Doc said. “You have nothing to say.”

  We continued in the Atlantic silence, and by the time we were two hours on the road his sheepishness had worn off only a little. We stopped for a late lunch at a roadside restaurant, then surfed on an empty stretch of beach, and napped in the waning sun. Freddo’s shame was starting to burn away by then, and we presented him with the watch.

  “You got it back?” he asked, wide eyed with relief. “How did you manage? Thank you.”

  “No. We bought you a new one.”

  “I have to find an engraver,” he said, panicking. “If I go home and Doris sees the inscription missing she will destroy me.”

  “You don’t deserve her.”

  “I know.”

  “Say it again.”

  “I don’t deserve the woman who married me. She deserves better, and everyone else knows it too.”

  It was awful to hear, because it was true, and he looked good and miserable and full of self-loathing for one of the few times since I’d known him.

  “Okay enough groveling,” Doc said. “Look on the back.”

  Freddo rotated the face of the watch in the dying light, and the timepiece was new, but the inscription was what had been there on the one she first gave to him: “For the only man I ever loved. All my hours. All my life.”

  We hit Ihla Grande just before sunset, with still enough time to get in a little more surfing. A group of locals had claimed the beach for their own, and when they saw us approach with our boards, one of them threw a rock to warn us off.

  “If you were not here since morning, you cannot just show up and have the last wave,” he snarled, the sound of heavy metal blaring from a speaker beside him.

  “If I am here for the first one tomorrow, then I can have the last one?” Doc asked.

  “What language do you need me to explain the concept get lost to you in?”

  “Whatever pleases you,” said Doc.

  “You impertinent delinquent,” Freddo said in Spanish.

  “Did he say impertinent?” one of the kids asked.

  “He is trying to stone us to death with syllables.”

  “Japanese,” said Doc.

  “As you wish,” answered their headman, whom they called Jeitinho, in Japanese, so Doc swore to us afterward.

  “You can’t just come in the morning and take the best wave,” Jeitinho said, drawing from his joint, and blowing smoke at Doc.

  Doc looked at the kid and inhaled from his own joint, and nodded to the kid he thought it was a fair rule.

  “Sure we can,” Freddo said, pushing out his chest. “This is a public beach, and we came all the way here, and this pipsqueak is not keeping us off it.”

  “Chill,” said Doc. “He lives on the wave and that has rights.”

  “All you tourists come all the way here from somewhere, but you don’t know anything about this wave,” the kid said.

  “I’ve been riding waves since you were swimming in your father’s gonads, you punk.” I realized as he said it, Freddo was afraid of the country, which was why he kept behaving like a gringo.

  “Punk?” laughed Jeitinho. “That is a compliment in these parts. Cankerous mulefucker, there’s an insult for you.”

  “Why did you call the sheriff a mulefucker?” One of the other kids asked.

  “’Cause he ain’t good enough for no horse.”

  Freddo snorted sardonically. “Your life,” he said, thinking of the cruelest thing possible he could tell the kid, “is not going to be what you imagine.”

  “That’s enough,” said Doc. “There’s always another wave.”

  “There is only one wave,” said Jeitinho.

  “When I was a young knight errant, I believed the same,” Doc nodded.

  “What’s a knight errant?” asked Jeitinho.

  “It is all knights who follow their own path.”

  “Ain’t no knights I know about,” said the boy, “but knights who follow the grail. Mine is this wave, and you and your posse of jokers are in my path.”

  “Admirable,” said Doc, “but the wave is not your grail. Still, I will not take it away. What’s more, I like you, my friend, and will smoke with you.”

  Jeitinho smiled and nodded, pleased to be acknowledged with respect, as he passed his joint to Doc, and Doc passed his joint to the kid. When they had finished the exchange the kid asked in earnest what Doc meant when he said there was more than one wave. Doc finished the joint, and told the kid he was failing to allow for either the non-Euclidian possibilities of the question, or the bicameral nature of the body, but would learn it all in time. The kid nodded and told him he had no idea what he meant but he liked his style so he could surf with them the next morning, but not the rest of us. Doc demurred, telling the kid he should surf his wave while it lasted.

  We went swimming instead, further up the shore on an unmarked beach, where we discovered a cove carpeted with oysters, which we harvested from the cyan waters. When we had hauled our treasure back to the beach, we began shucking them greedily, except Freddo, who had not brought a knife.

  “Where’s your knife?”

  “I didn’t know I would need one,” Freddo answered.

  “A man needs a knife.”

  “Can someone open some for me?” The question was answered by silence, and averted eyes.

  “The woman shamed you, Freddo,” Schoeller said finally. “The lawman shamed you, and even the kid should have taught you something, if you do not see it.”

  “See what?”

  “Freddo, have you ever stood naked before a mirror and asked, if I were dropped, just as I am right now, in the middle of the jungle, what would my place be in the natural world? Could I survive? What would I serve? Who would I be?”

  “Never mind.” Doc opened his kit bag and retrieved a Chesapeake stabber, which he tossed to Freddo’s feet. “We would not want you to starve.”

  “You can use his, or there is a village up the road, where you might be able to get one of your own,” Schoeller said.

  “Jerk. I don’t know the language,” Freddo answered, looking at the darkening, unfamiliar road, and then to the plump, cool oysters and the shucking knife shining in the dying sun, as he tried to figure out what kind of life to have.

  When we had opened the remaining oysters, sprayed them with fresh limes, and slurped them down with the arctic cold local beer, the sun had set, and a bonfire appeared on the beach.

  It was what Doc had promised, and there began to appear every predictable pleasure.

  I refused to join, not wanting anything more than to enjoy the sea and the stars, and not sink any further beneath the waves.

  “You’re not coming to the party?” Doc asked.

  “Not after last night.”

  “Why not?”

  “I broke my code.”

  “Your what?”

  “My code. There is a right way and a wrong way of doing everything.”

  “And that is your code?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you broke it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you have sinned?”

  “I have no God. I only have my actions over myself.”

  “Even better. You have sinned boldly. Now you are free. So you broke your code. What happened to you? Nothing is what happened. You did not go to hell. The world did not become any worse or better, except to the extent your own sufferings were added to it. Or were they alleviated? That is in you to decide. You say whore. I say the Magdalene. Jesus’s wife.”

  “That’s a historical misreading. Mary Magdalene was conflated with two other women in the sixt
h century.”

  “Do you ever let up?”

  I knew he meant to be helpful. But I did not know how to let go. How to float in the hands of fate as he seemed to do. Was afraid of what might happen if I did.

  “Let yourself make mistakes,” Doc said sympathetically. “Let other people make them. Trust the universe a little. You are free to take up your code, or drown it in the sea and make a new code to live by as you wish. Only stop flagellating yourself. You have done it since we met. It drives me crazy. It drives you crazy. First you wear one mask, and so what if then you wear another. They are only masks. But the universe makes everything, and allows all things. The difficulty is only understanding what portion of it all He allows to you. Now did you do something wrong, or only forfeit your imaginary right to judge Schoeller and Freddo? That is for you to answer, for my part I absolve you.”

  “You’re a doctor, not a priest.”

  “I’ve been ordained, by the Church of Universal Life, for the wedding. Besides, in my tribe who heals the body also heals the spirit, so if you wish to be in thrall to some rule outside yourself, by the powers of the Church of Universal Life, I hereby absolve you of all sin. Here is your brain, your heart, your courage. Now what happens when you sin again?”

  “I will not.”

  “Poor Protestant. It is part of the journey. The hero’s heart is bound by an evil force, he is stuck in Casablanca, trapped at the bottom of the well, and only love will alleviate it. Or else he goes off on a journey, without knowing why, for something mysterious and impossible as the lost ark, which has a hold over him he cannot explain. Somewhere along the way he falls off the path, Siddhartha at court, seduced by the world, or betrayed by his own sad little ego, and has to be helped back onto his path, but broken now of the sin of judging, and off he goes again, in search of his ark, which he now knows is not whatever shadow first set him off, but love itself. Always love. And beyond that, of course, himself. So he is allowed whatever he chooses, so long as it comes from his joy, and not childish conscriptions of what you must not do. It will increase his path, and is the only way forward. The path itself flows from that. Maybe she’s the woman you were supposed to marry, but you could not see it because you had in your mind some received idea of who you should be with. Suppose now you go back the other way and find someone who checks every box on your list and you get married, then seven years into it you have been having the same fight for all of eternity, and you wake up one morning and understand you are not in love. Will you abandon your wife, or will you find the part of yourself that is connected to her, not because of what you have in common with her, but because of what you have in common with all humans? What if only then do the true depths of love open up.”