Grace

by Barbara Boswell

  Huddled against a wall, Grace struck a match, cupping her hand as she brought the flame up to the cigarette dangling from her lips. She closed her eyes and inhaled, welcoming the first hit of fragrant smoke as it journeyed to the depths of her body. Her limbs loosened, her hunched shoulders fell back a bit and her headache dulled. A pleasant numbness crept over her body, and her brain mellowed to a calmer frequency. She exhaled, watching the plume of smoke stream from her lips. Relief. The smoke looked so pretty. Some smokers found their habit disgusting and clung to it out of need. The problem with Grace was that, if she was honest, she truly loved smoking. She loved the striking of the match, the first little drag that ignited the tip of the cigarette, the charge from the hit of the first inhalation, the soothing relaxation that followed. It was a small sensuous pleasure, a cigarette, a private universe she could draw unto herself which was entirely hers. Grace opened her eyes, feeling a bit more prepared to face the day.

  Johnny was sitting on a low wall directly opposite her. Her heart quickened. He had shaved his stubbly beard. He looked good. She didn’t need this.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Well, I work nearby. And by the way, it’s a free country. People can go where they want.”

  “So you just happen to pop up in my street?”

  “I wanted to see you again.” He spoke softly, solemnly, making it seem like an entirely reasonable desire. “There’s a lot we must still talk about.”

  “What? Anything you have to say to me you can tell me right here and now.”

  He looked down at his feet and remained silent.

  “It was nice to catch up with you, but we’re grown ups now. We really don’t have that much in common. Life has to go on.”

  Grace wasn’t going to waste any more time here if Johnny didn’t have anything to say. She turned to go. He stood up swiftly and blocked her path with his body.

  “Nothing in common, huh?’ An edge crept into his voice. “I see you, up and coming, office job. You forget where you came from?”

  The accusation stung Grace. Of course, yes, she wanted nothing else but to forget where she had come from, but not in the way he was insinuating. She wasn’t like that. Tears pricked at her eyes.

  “Wait, wait. Grace! I didn’t mean it. I just want to talk. Can you hear me out?”

  Somewhere in her body, that body made up not of platelets and cells but of memory and forgetting, of love and the places that shape, a nerve jangled. She stroked the cross around her neck.

  “I love you. I love you, Grace. That is what I have to say. You were the first person I loved, really loved, and I’ve always loved you. Not a day has gone by.... And then seeing you again. Those feelings, right there, right here.” Johnny struck the place on his chest where his heart would be. More words fell from his mouth like unripe fruit reluctant to leave the tree.

  Grace looked at him, really looked at him. His eyes were moist, his face red.

  He loved her still. What did that mean after all these years? Sympathy softened her. To say it like that, to someone you didn’t really know, must have been hard for him. And stupid. Another part of Grace delighted in his words. Had she not loved him too, every day, longed for him? Wondering and wishing, even after she’d given up waiting for him? Was that love? Or was it the remnant of that other love lost, so enmeshed with his disappearance: the longing for both of them blending into each other as day into night; just one gaping yearning for her mother and Johnny’s return. Was this love?

  “I loved you too, for a long time, Johnny.”

  She sounded soft, defeated.

  He lifted his head and gazed directly at her, his hypnotic eyes drinking her in and pulling her at the same time. Much had changed about his face, but the long brown lashes, the inky stare, were as beautiful as she remembered.

  “I wish we could just go somewhere and talk for a while, take our time.”

  “My house is up the road.”

  With those words, Grace knew that she had crossed every single boundary securing her place in the world. She was tugging away at the scaffolding of her life, and she knew it.

  They walked wordlessly to the gate she’d left just a few minutes earlier. The street was quiet – all the neighbourhood children were at school. If there were people at home they gave no sign of it. Not a single car passed them, and if any lace curtains twitched as they entered the gate and walked up the steps to the front door, they remained oblivious to it.

  An air of abandonment clung to the walls of the empty house. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink, articles of Sindi’s clothing littered the living room sofa. Johnny stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, looking unsure. Grace gathered up Sindi’s clothes and gestured for him to sit down. He remained on his feet. She went to put the kettle on to make tea. From the kitchen she could see him scanning the row of framed family photos that hung on the front room wall: Sindi as a newborn, portraits of the three of them, a large confection of a wedding photo in a flowery frame. His presence jarred. Johnny was larger than David, whose frame was the only familiar one to Grace in this space. Johnny was broader, taller, and disproportionate to the room and the furniture in it. As if reading her mind he stooped a bit to get a closer look at one picture. Grace brought the tea and sat down as a soft rain began to pelt the windows. As the house darkened, a sense of desolation crept over her. She felt like crying. She felt trapped with this stranger whom she couldn’t let go.

  “Well, all right. What else is there to say, Johnny?”

  Wordlessly, he contemplated the question.

  “Well, I spilled my guts already down there. Do I have to say it again? You like to see a man completely powerless before you, huh?”

  The attempt at a joke fell flat.

  “Yes, I know what you said. But now what? What is it that you want?”

  He sighed. Grace noticed fine lines criss-crossing his cheeks, running up to the corners of his eyes. She noticed for the first time, too, that his eyes were circled by dark rings. He looked tired.

  “I don’t know, Grace. It’s confusing to me. All those years ago, we were just children. But I loved you. You were something good in my life, something beautiful. And you loved me, I know you did. And after you left, after the thing with your mother, I was sad, bitter. I had lost a good thing in my life. I was back there, next door to your house, but nothing was the same. The cops, they kept me for ninety days. Nothing was the same after. I was never the same. I was broken. And I came back and you were gone, your mother gone. My parents were dead. I asked myself, why did I have to lose everyone I loved?”

  There was nothing Grace could think of to say, so she kept quiet and listened.

  Johnny’s tongue continued to loosen.

  “And through the years I’ve thought about you, wondered. But you became unreal, like a beautiful dream that I’d had, something I could go back to in my mind whenever I needed it. When I was sad, hurt... I could go to this place that was you. You became a place for me to go to. I could feel better there. And then I saw you again. Just like that. Real. I knew right then that I still loved you. You were alive and... shining.” He smiled at the recollection. “Don’t laugh. It’s the only word I can think of. You were shining with this light from somewhere inside you. I knew it would be easy to love you, because I could see you were still the same girl. You never really left me.”

  He was crying now. Grace had never seen any man, except her father, do that. He lowered himself onto the couch.

  “Oh God, I know what you mean, Johnny. I loved you too, so much. I never said it to you then, and after, when I thought you were dead, I wished I had. But what did we know then? We were kids. But, yes, I did. I loved you. You were the one constant thing that kept me sane in those days.”

  They sat looking at each other, each absorbing the other’s words. Having him there was like having a bit of her, Mary, with her, a part that Grace thought she had lost forever.

  “I’m glad you thought about me too,” Johnny sa
id. “And to hear you say you loved me. That means a lot, even if it was long ago. I’m glad to hear it, that you’ve thought of me too all these years, Grace.”

  There it was, out in the open, an old love posthumously declared. A reciprocal love. And what could be sweeter than the delight of loving someone and having that love returned?

  “But, Johnny, things are different now. Yes, I thought about you every day, but now there’s this.” Grace gestured around the room with her hand. “I have a family. I’m sure you do too. I am building something now, something I never had.”

  “Is he good to you?”

  “Yes, he is very good to me. He is a very good man.”

  “Are you happy together?”

  “Of course. He’s my husband.”

  Johnny put his cup of tea aside. He stood up, scooped his jacket from where he’d put it on the couch and folded it over his arm. He said something about having to leave and although Grace nodded she knew she didn’t want him to leave. If Johnny left now, she would lose him all over again. She watched as he walked towards the door. Her limbs felt like lead.

  “Wait!”

  She jumped up from the couch, reached for his shoulder and pulled him back around to face her. He turned, pulled her towards him and kissed her. She didn’t resist.

  This time there was nothing to break the spell between them. She kissed Johnny back with everything in her, every cell rejoicing at the marvel of his touch, the homecoming of skin on parched skin. Years, longings, grief melted away until there was nothing, nothing but a searing heat between them, burning them both until the edges between them blurred and disappeared. Johnny’s body became a hollow into which she slid with perfection; he was a balm that erased every hurt and care from her weary soul. Grace allowed him her body and the unentered corners of her heart, and nothing else on the entire surface of God’s beautiful earth, or below it, mattered.

  17

  So began their affair. This was not something Grace had ever imagined herself capable of: the lying, the deception, the fabricated alibis that slithered off her tongue with startling ease. Yes, there was the big, foundational lie, but that was different. Her new lies required a constant inventiveness, a creativity and dexterity Grace almost admired in herself. At home, she invented a weekly after-work social, to which David encouraged her to go. Of course she felt guilty. Of course she hated the lies that slipped ever more effortlessly from her tongue. But not once did she hesitate when David asked questions about who was attending or what these evenings had been like. Her mind became a wellspring of lies. She found herself able to concoct the most elaborate stories. It seemed she had a penchant for fabrication hitherto unknown. It was such an easy thing to lie to David: she had, in fact, been doing it their entire life together.

  It was wrong, she knew, but after a few weeks she stopped caring. Grace needed Johnny like she needed cigarettes. Seeing him once a week made her brighter, happier, more vibrant in other areas of her life. Having him back, knowing him intimately, having him listen with his attentive gaze to her stories and feelings; possessing him in that way had made her come back to life. The years without him she’d been asleep, she realised now, a somnambulist. Johnny had awakened her to happiness, to life itself. Feeling like a child again, Grace even caught herself skipping down the street one day. At home she was more attentive to David, more patient with Sindi. The baby didn’t tire her as much. Grace felt more energetic than she had in years. She could even be heard humming as she made dinner or washed dishes. David noticed, relieved, and remarked at how well she was settling into motherhood. A false peace descended on their home. David was happy.

  In these moments Grace felt terrible about her deception. The funny thing was that she didn’t love David less after Johnny returned. Instead, Johnny had pried her guarded heart wide open, making it bigger and more capable of loving everyone in her life. In her worst moments, Grace rationalised it as good for her family. It was making her happy, and therefore David and Sindi were happier. Where before, she had struggled to relax and enjoy them, now she could fully embrace them with a healed heart, overflowing with joy. Johnny had fixed something in her. Something in that first embrace had gone “click”, and the old stuff, the muck of suffering, flew out of her, leaving her light as a bird. She could dance around the kitchen table with David now, in the midst of the evening chaos, where before she would have brushed off his little gestures of affection.

  Others noticed the change too. Mr de Vries complimented her on looking beautiful one morning. No one had ever told her that before, not even David. It astonished Grace. She started taking more care with her appearance, choosing a new lipstick colour and some fresh blush. She had never bothered before. Now she found herself before a fancy make-up counter at a department store in the heart of the city at lunchtime, where a consultant helped her find the best shades for her skin tone. Peering into the mirror, Grace saw Mary looking back through her eyes. So this was what it must have been like to be in Mary’s skin; the admiring glances, the turned heads, the compliments and affirmations. Grace realised with a start that with her new look, she resembled her mother. Yes, she looked beautiful. For the first time, the memory of Mary made her smile. Mary would have loved this, taking her dull daughter to a make-up counter to try out a new look. Oh, Mama, why did you have to leave so soon?

  Her hours with Johnny were never enough. They would meet close to Cape Town station after work on the designated night. Sometimes he brought his car, and they drove to the furthest beaches from the city. They couldn’t go to the closer, more popular ones, for fear of being seen. Other times, they walked from one bar to the next down the spine of Cape Town, Long Street, which livened up in direct proportion to the day workers leaving the city. No one Grace knew frequented these parts, and there were enough little hole-in-the-wall places where they could sit, tucked away, drinking and talking. Sometimes they didn’t even talk that much. It was enough for both of them to just be together, Grace leaning her head against Johnny’s shoulder, or feeling his hand resting casually on her thigh in a gesture of possession. Sex happened in Johnny’s car – always a furtive and desperate coupling that left neither of them satisfied, but holding just enough promise that the next time would be better. Grace disliked the empty parking lots and deserted beachside roads, but she couldn’t stop. It made her feel closer to him, sealing the precious bond she thought she had lost forever.

  They spoke little about their home lives. Obviously, Johnny knew about David and Sindi and in the beginning he would ask after Sindi, but Grace always cut him short. She didn’t want her child’s name to cross his lips, and after a while he stopped asking about her. Grace wondered where he lived and with whom – they had never been to his home – and she remembered the woman who had answered the phone that first time she’d called. She had suggested that they go to his place once but his reaction discouraged her from doing so again. Unreasonably, she was jealous of his life, jealous of the people with whom he shared it in daylight, with whom he could be and be seen freely. For all she knew, Johnny was married. He had said once that he wasn’t, but she didn’t quite believe this. And what if he was married? Would she have the right to be upset and demand an explanation? She, who was lying to and cheating on her husband – what recourse to morality did she have with Johnny? Grace decided that she didn’t want to know about a wife, kids, girlfriends. When they were together, Johnny was hers and she could stretch each encounter into a lifetime if she leaned in and turned her focus on him. Her soul, her mind, her body – she brought everything, everything into the car with her on their nights alone. She was present and attentive in the manner of a surgeon slicing through a body. If that was the only way she could have Johnny, then so be it.

  They spoke often of Mary. Driving around the upper contours of Signal Hill, the city twinkling below them, they would call her back from the dead and breathe her into the present.

  “You know, I loved your mother,” Johnny said one night. “It was like she recog
nised something in me, something good, that others didn’t see. I mean, at first she was stuck up. Remember that first time I came knocking at your door?”

  They laughed at the memory.

  “If she’d had a gun, she would have fired it in the air to get rid of me. But once you got to know her... your mother was good to me.”

  “How? Tell me how she was good?” Grace implored.

  She knew her father had liked Johnny and taken an interest, but Mary? She had not seen any explicit expressions of affection. Mary had softened towards him over the course of their acquaintance, but definitely regarded him as one would the help.

  “Did you know she gave me a pair of your father’s old shoes?”

  Grace hadn’t known that.

  “Yes, she did. I had never owned a pair of shoes besides my school shoes until that day. That was so good of her, to think of me like that. She didn’t have to do that, you know.’

  Grace smiled and fingered the cross of gold around her neck.

  They sat in silence as headlights blurred into beams of swishing light below. Grace felt she could have stayed there forever, in the warm car with soft rain tapping the roof and Good Hope’s smooth love songs on the radio.

  “The funny thing was, I never even wore them. Just having those shoes was enough for me. They made me walk a bit straighter somehow.”

  Grace turned and smiled at him.

  “Your father was a good man too.”

  Grace stiffened. They’d hardly ever broached the subject of Patrick after that first night.

  “I know what he did was horrible, unforgivable. I can’t even begin to imagine what that did to you. But sometimes people can do the most horrible things, things that define them for the rest of their lives. That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t some good in them. That doesn’t mean we should forget about that good, the small kindnesses they showed.”