Grace

by Calvin Baker

  “That scares me less than missing an opportunity for happiness.”

  “Me too.” She said, looking away. “Do you have another woman?”

  “If I did I would not kiss you.”

  “Do you swear?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I nodded, and she cried. It was then I kissed her the first time, careful because I understood why it was she always played so godforsakenly hard.

  26

  The southern summer passed too quickly. We left our little island and returned together to her apartment in Farodoro, where I caught up on my affairs and balanced my accounts in New York.

  The film had enjoyed a good opening, and the final wire from the production company, a bonus Westhaven had negotiated, had reached my bank. It was as much as I had ever received at one time, enough to not worry for a couple of years, if I was smart with the money, so I felt flush and brimming with energy.

  As I was logging off, my cell phone rang with a call from Davidson, who was out in Los Angeles. He told me he had been trying to contact me for weeks, which I was happy to hear because I needed to get back to work.

  “Well?” he asked expectantly.

  “Well, what? I need work. Where have you been, by the way?”

  “In the Gobi Desert, where I had the most amazing vision. I asked the universe to show me the future.”

  I took the bait. “What did you see?”

  “Television.”

  “Of course.”

  “So, did you get paid?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “And what? Like I said, I need work. I have expenses, plus catching up to do.”

  “What are you going to buy? A house? An electric car? A car with bad gas mileage?”

  “Nothing.”

  “A man Friday who drives and build houses?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Maybe a little more time for myself to figure things out.”

  “You cannot buy time, my friend. Time cannot be created, only used up. Compensation is for time you have spent. They give it to you to make you forget for a moment you’re going to die.”

  “In that case buying something will not help.”

  “Trust me, it will. Go buy yourself something that has a meaning for you, Harper. Anything. So long as it is something you will continue to enjoy.”

  “I will think about it, but my pleasure is in the work.”

  “Interesting. I did not know you had that in you.”

  “Had what?”

  “You don’t know your own power. Remember when you were a kid, before you ever got some, and you were walking around, all nuts, because you were tired of being a no-name chump virgin? Then one day, at last at last, you get some. You got some. But it was not how you imagined it would be, or what you heard it should be, because you were a no-name chump virgin, who would believe anything, and she was a no-name chump virgin, who knew nothing, so neither of you knew what you were doing. But you got some—alleluia—and were still marked by the newness of her skin; of the experience itself. You smell every electron in the room; feel every hadron, every boson; sense every tau in the air and it didn’t even feel like you were doing it. It was not bodily, but ethereal as innocence. Afterward, you don’t know how you feel, or how you are supposed to feel. Part of you wishes you had waited and were still a virgin, but you walk your half-virgin self through the streets, over the hills, across the lawn, down the beach, not knowing you just entered the hall to the big dance, and you do not know the steps. You just float through the subway, down the highway, over the hills where the dew has not burned away yet, like the baby fuzz on your upper lip, looking at the little kids playing tag, as you hear music and voices drifting from the houses you cannot make out. Everything has a new feeling to it. You got some. And you don’t know what or how, but something is different, take-me-to-the-river changed, because Time just looked out over that field, down that street, up across the sands, and noticed your chump self for the first time—putting a hand on you in a way you will not understand for years.

  “Later that day, you see your friends, and one of them looks at you strange. He knows. ‘I hear they gave you some last night,’ he jibs.

  “‘They did?’ another asks.

  “‘That’s what I hear.’

  “‘Who?’

  “‘Seraphine.’

  “‘Which Sarah? Black Sarah? White Sarah? Asian Sarah? Spanish Sara?’

  “‘Not Sarah, Seraphine.’

  “‘You mean those two supernerds are trying to make Godzilla nerd.’

  “‘How do you feel?’ they ask, when they tire of ribbing you.

  “‘Feel about what?’” You play it cool.

  “‘Feel now that you did it, and ain’t a no-name chump virgin.’”

  “‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ you insist. ‘I ain’t never been a no-name chump virgin. I been doing it my whole life.’”

  As the call ended I agreed to meet him and Elsa on a ski trip out West, if I made it home before Easter.

  “Don’t disappoint me. We made something good. We should commemorate that.”

  After hanging up, I went out to the kitchen, where I found Sylvie standing next to the sink motionless.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she replied.

  “It looked—”

  “It is kayotsarga pose,” she said. “I was practicing non-attachment.”

  I took up a knife to start chopping vegetables for dinner.

  “I can do it.” She pushed me aside, taking up the knife.

  “What is wrong?”

  “You’re going back?” she asked. “You should just leave now and get it over with, instead of drawing it out, letting us get more attached.”

  “Who said I was going?”

  “I overheard your conversation.”

  “I agreed to go skiing. I thought you enjoyed skiing.”

  “I don’t want to go back to the States.”

  “Don’t you have to at some point? We can’t hide down here forever.”

  “Who is hiding? Maybe it started that way, but now it is living. It is choosing a different way of being.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” I said, but she would not be put off.

  “We could be happy,” she argued. “But New York does not make sense to me anymore. People there live too asymmetrically. The only important thing is work. I do not want that anymore.”

  “You want?”

  “A family.”

  “We can do that anywhere.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too soon for this kind of talk. We’re not going to have it. If we were having it, though, I would say everything there is so competitive, and I could never find myself in the middle of it. I was always suffocating. See, it provokes all my insecurities.”

  “That is why you left?”

  “No, I can handle my insecurities. It is because we will end up doing things we do not like, only to support a lifestyle and values which are not how I want to raise my children.”

  “You think should have a family together?” I probed.

  “Maybe,” she said. “That’s not what I said, though.”

  “Why don’t we just go on the trip, and decide the rest later?”

  “I don’t want to grow closer until I know how I feel.”

  “That’s a little bit complicated. About where to live or whether to have a family?”

  “I know I want a family.”

  “So do I.” It came out before I knew what I was saying. Before I knew it was what I had wanted to say. I felt exposed, but also a feeling of contentment I could no more explain than a leaf could explain why it loves the sun. I wanted that as I wanted my next breath—to keep multiplying until time commanded me stop.

  “Do you know what you are saying?”

  “I think so.”

  “You should be certain. You know, I was n
ot looking for anything, except minding my own business in the middle of nowhere, until here you show up, and made me fall all in love.”

  “Is that what I did?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I am happy,” I said.

  “Me too. I think. But I don’t know if we can be equal to making something together, or even whether you are careless or not.”

  “That’s fair,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I mean, I will consider anything you say.”

  “Let me know when it is not something you consider, and it just is.”

  I nodded. I felt linked to her, like a golden chain uniting my past and future. The feeling, poor, dumb Adam must have had that made him listen to his woman instead of his god; instinct that whispered this is what was truly available of life.

  What Eve, that defiant queen, knew when she woke him from slumber—Eat this, Adam. There’s suffering all around this menagerie. We’re going to suffer, too. See the lion. See the lamb. Wise up, baby. It’s just me and you. To hell with Yahweh. We can create ourselves—was, if the price was to suffer and toil and try to create, and fail, and try again, sometimes to win, but always to die, then that is what it meant to be human and alive.

  God knew it to be the same.

  It was dark and we had gone to the roof to grill, but a gusting wind made it difficult, and by the time our meager fire was finally lit the sky was already crowded with stars.

  “Look how many constellations you can still see in the city.”

  “You can’t see any in New York.”

  “Look, there is Taurus, and there is Orion, the hunter, and those are his two dogs. The big one, Canis Major, was a present from Zeus to one of his lovers. There is the boat Argo. Over there is the clock. They all used to have a meaning to people. Their whole lives written across the sky.”

  “Isn’t it sad, for us it’s just balls of burning gas, and no more than that?”

  “They still mean something. Maybe just beauty.”

  “Beauty is not enough. I want meaning, Harper Roland. A whole life of it.”

  “Yes,” I said, turning the vegetables on the flames, and looking up. “Taurus, the bull, was the form Zeus transformed himself into when he was courting a mortal woman so exceptional she made even the gods love her. That’s you. She was charmed by the bull, and accepted one day when he offered her a ride on his back; then Zeus stood and spirited her off to his cave.”

  “What a brute. Is that you?”

  “No. The hunter, Orion, sprang to her aid. He’s more ancient than Zeus, and was called Gilgamesh in the first writings, before they were lost in the fog and meaning of a different time. But all stories are still written on the sky. Maybe he was the first person ever to lose his way, or go his own way, and have to wrestle the world for his soul, to return to where he belonged. But stronger, wiser. And when he returned he was the first hero. That is more ancient than any god we know.”

  “That’s nice. But I don’t want either of us to lose our way again. And the only way for that is if you stay with me.”

  She looked over to me with unguarded eyes, and my hand reached out to her before I had thought about it and embraced her and pulled her closer to me and that was the whole truth.

  27

  “Wow, look, Mommy, the whole world,” a child in the seat ahead of me exclaimed, as he stared at the earth from above for the first time. The barren Andes stretched up, otherworldly and jagged in the evening sun. Nothing else stirred or seemed alive in the firmament around us, as the plane taxied through the gloaming.

  I disembarked, and hurried to catch my connection. As I rounded the corner from security a stoop-shouldered old woman stopped me with her eyes.

  “You are not traveling alone,” she said enigmatically.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “There is an energy traveling with you, protecting you.”

  “Thank you,” I said, lost. “You see such things?”

  She looked at me mysteriously again before smiling and moving away, as I made my way to the next gate. I was still perplexed, but pleased for her blessing as I embarked again, the mountains quickly invisible and the lights of the city rapidly fading.

  I awoke in the gray early morning, banking through snow clouds over New York. Ours was the first flight to land that day, so the customs line was empty when I made my way through, only to be stopped by the Homeland agent who examined my papers.

  “This passport is full.” He scowled his disapproval. “I shouldn’t stamp it.” His display was meant to provoke uncertainty. I knew he would let me pass.

  “I’ll get a new one first thing tomorrow,” I said, performing my part in the drama, as I waited for his foul morning mood to pass. At length he went through a great kabuki of mercy, before relenting, and stamping on top of another stamp. “Next time I won’t.”

  My suitcase was the only one on the carousel when I reached baggage claim, and I moved efficiently through the automatic doors, past the people holding flowers and signs for whomever they had gotten up so early to greet.

  It was soon rush hour so I took AirTrain. The train was at the platform when I arrived, and whisked me to Jamaica Station, where I caught the LIRR to Atlantic Avenue. There I found a cab, but was thwarted by traffic near the Brooklyn Bridge. I asked the driver to leave me at Fulton Ferry, where I picked up the first water taxi of the season, and made it across the gray river in the fluttering snow.

  The empty apartment needed dusting, but was otherwise as I left it. I poured myself a glass of water, which was the only thing in the refrigerator, set a kettle to boil, and went to shower.

  When I returned to the kitchen I ground coffee beans, which I measured into a filter and bloomed with a bit of the water before pouring the rest slowly over them for three minutes. I finished my coffee, unpacked my luggage, and stored it away.

  That evening I ordered a movie in English over the computer, and American dinner over the phone, and ate my meal as I watched the movie, and drank a nightcap of Kentucky bourbon.

  When I went to sleep I was happy to be in my own house and not some strange shore for the first time in months, and snug with my own comforter around my shoulders, in my own bed, and to fall asleep dreaming American.

  By midweek, though, I was aware only of the emptiness of the rooms, an incompleteness that stayed with me until Sylvie arrived a few weeks later.

  I was curious to meet her friends, and pleased to find I got on with them without undue effort. But by week’s end she was spent from the city, and happy to get away when we headed west, under the great sky again.

  Other than Davidson and Elsa, we were joined by Ingo, one of the film’s backers, Ingo’s fiancée, Ola, who worked at a bank in London, and Gabriel, a cinematographer, and his wife, Renata, a famous Hungarian dancer and beauty.

  Everyone besides me was an accomplished skier. I had planned the trip mainly because I thought Sylvie would enjoy it, and was glad to see she did. The snow was fresh and powdery; the mountain not too crowded; and when I fell, as I took my first lesson, I learned to take it in stride.

  “Your ski edges are set at ninety degrees from the factory,” Sylvie consoled me when I grew frustrated. “Mine are bent to eighty-eight degrees. It makes it easier to carve the powder.”

  “Yes, that is why.”

  “Don’t worry, you will get better.”

  “How long do you think it will take before I can go off trail?” I joked, after falling down again.

  “You’re so sweet in the country. But I’m afraid you’ll never be a good skier.”

  “Because I started too late?”

  “No, because you don’t love it. You’ll plateau, and lose interest.”

  “We will have to find another hobby, then.”

  “Diving. Bookbinding. Cooking. Gardening. Tango. Would you take up tango with me?”

  “We will do it all.”

  “But what happens when we lose interest?”
/>
  “We will find new things.”

  “What if we run out?”

  “We will be happy and old by then. Don’t you think?”

  “Yes.”

  The third evening we were at the bar in the lodge, playing pool with a group of locals, who lived all season on the mountain and were telling the others about the best trails. We had dinner in town that night, and afterward were in such high spirits we decided to drive to the casino on a nearby reservation.

  We left in two cars under the Easter moon, over the empty roads, through the darkness in the country with nothing but the white headlights reflecting back off the white snow, blue evening stillness, and the wine-dark forest against the twilight.

  When we neared the casino red and orange neon lights burst through the darkness to meet us on the highway, breaking the spell of a lunar landscape, but transfixing us with how tawdry they had made that part of the wilderness.

  “It all seemed so innocent before,” Ingo remarked, unhappily. “Like the America one imagines.”

  “It was a way of bringing hard currency to a poor country,” Gabriel told him. “They did not know what came with it.”

  “What is the difference between innocent and ignorant, anyway?”

  “Ignorant means not knowing. Innocent is intending no harm.”

  “Ah, so they overlap, and pull apart, as in our language.”

  We were on the casino floor. Renata and Gabriel had never been in a casino before, and looked around with superior awe, the way Europeans always try to condescend to Americans in the heart of the country. As we fanned out toward the tables, the others tried to egg them into gambling, which they refused.

  Davidson and Elsa were dressed to the nines, elegant as always, even amid the whirling slot machines, with everyone else in ski vests and blue jeans, as the speakers piped in Johnny Cash and Joni Mitchell.

  We settled down to the roulette wheel in pairs, playing alternately the red or the black, so none of us was up or down very much, and as a group we were not leaving too much behind. Davidson and Elsa grew bored with the small stakes, though, and put a pile on seven, which they lost. They bet another stack on four, and lost that, too. Ingo and Ola were calculating the odds, which they did not like, and did not deviate from their calculations, win or lose, so did not move too far up or down. Neither did we, leaving the only excitement in watching Davidson and Elsa blow their chips in spectacular fashion.