The Third Grace

by Deb Elkink

“If it was good enough for Oscar Wilde, it’s good enough for you.”

  But Aglaia didn’t finish it. Instead, dizzy, she slumped down in her seat and hid again behind the veil of her lids. Hebe, she recalled, poured the nectar of immortality as a libation to slake the voraciousness of the blood-thirsty gods, with the Graces gathered around her in worship. Was Lou chasing the youth of ever-young Hebe in her mad pursuit around Paris today, as she force-fed Aglaia lessons about the Age of Enlightenment and the blood of the revolutionaries spilled on the altar of the cobblestones before the Bastille, lifeblood seeping away into the cracks between those dead stones? Aglaia’s own sleepy inebriation, allowing the flow of such loosely associated thoughts, was no protection against the sharp words that so quietly cut to the very marrow of her memory: Come to Him, the Living Stone… like living stones… offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God.

  Lou tipped the goblet up for the last drop of her wine and then reached for the absinthe. At least Aglaia was not locked up in the hotel room, poring over that Bible. Keeping the girl’s mind in the here-and-now was becoming a chore. She’d hoped today’s schedule would result in at least more vigor on Aglaia’s part, but instead here she was nodding off and likely plotting how soon she’d be able to get back to her reading. Lou considered perusing the diary François left behind in the Bible’s margins. Her voyeurism didn’t typically include such tame entertainment and she was inclined to leave Aglaia to her own fantasies, but perhaps she’d delve into it after all.

  Lou toyed with the idea of appropriating the book and then dumping it somewhere, to get it over with, but the least obtrusive action might be to just fulfill Aglaia’s demand to locate François, or at least make it appear as if she were aiming for that goal. Suggesting Aglaia purchase the phone card today had been a good stalling technique. The girl would never be able to negotiate the bureaucracy of France Télécom alone to find a listing for someone she wasn’t even sure lived in the city, anyway.

  A couple sauntered through the door. Lou could tell they were native to Paris by their aloofness in scanning the room, their offhandedness in ordering kir. The man was tall with thick, straight hair, wearing an expensive trench coat open over designer jeans. Aglaia’s age, Lou surmised. His girlfriend had narrow hips and was reaching into her Prada bag for a lighter when their eyes met—Lou’s and hers. The woman held her gaze just long enough, then shifted over to Aglaia and back to Lou. Her mouth turned up slightly, a query in her eyes.

  Lou motioned them over and jostled Aglaia. “Wake up. We’ve got company.” This was the kind of excitement that would do them both good.

  The room was roasting when Aglaia got back to the hotel, alone. She shuffled across the carpet to the window and fought with the heavy latch till it gave way, skinning a knuckle in the process. The late-night air floated in, clammy and close, and it wasn’t much of an improvement.

  Aglaia collapsed on the bed. The taxi ride back from the bar in the Latin Quarter had been difficult without Lou along to do the talking. Unable to comprehend Aglaia’s accent, the driver resorted to stopping the vehicle and examining the name on a packet of matches she dug out from her purse. “Ah, l’Hôtel du Caillou. Oui, bien sûr, mademoiselle,” the cabbie had said courteously enough, but with a hint of exasperation as though he were tired of dealing with tourists.

  On top of that, Aglaia had botched the payment and offended him with too small a tip. Now she was no longer sleepy. She surveyed a crack running alongside the molding of the ceiling, fuming over Lou’s indiscreet behavior tonight.

  Philippe and Emmanuelle, or whatever their names were, dominated the conversation and even Lou couldn’t keep up with translating out loud. She didn’t try for long, soon ignoring Aglaia completely and throwing herself into animated discussion with the couple, some of it seeming to be about her—the buffoon who couldn’t speak French. But Philippe was checking Aglaia out and his girlfriend didn’t care much, concentrating as she was on Lou and even, at one point, sipping from her glass—playing Wormwood to Lou’s Screwtape, Eb would have said.

  “They want us to join them for cocktails in their apartment around the corner,” Lou finally explained.

  “I’m not comfortable with that.” They were total strangers after all, and, besides, Aglaia didn’t like the dynamic. “I’m tired, Lou. I need to get back to the hotel.”

  “Philippe would be devastated. He has a taste for blondes, he says.”

  “I think we should leave right now.”

  “Oh, loosen up,” Lou said. “Your lack of libido is putting a damper on the whole night.”

  A blush burned Aglaia’s cheeks, and she was sure that Lou’s English insult could be understood without translation. “It’s after midnight and I have that meeting tomorrow,” she said.

  “I’ll have the proprietor call you a cab, then.” Lou’s words were clipped and snippy. She arose with the couple and left Aglaia stranded to wait for the taxi by the window like some stood-up date as the three of them walked off arm in arm down the narrow alley.

  Now, sleep was not an option for Aglaia; she was too keyed up. Lou’s desertion took her off guard, but Paris was the woman’s second home, after all. And hadn’t Aglaia been jaundiced about Lou tagging along with her in the first place? She should let Lou do what she wanted and get on with her own responsibilities. This was a business trip, after all.

  Aglaia got ready for bed and then leafed through her documentation again for the morning. She packed her satchel, unwrapped and rewrapped the miniature oil painting, and opened the costume box to rearrange the tissue. But all the while she was wondering when Lou would show up.

  After a couple of sleepless hours, she thought again about finding François’s number. The bureau drawers held no Paris phone book, and it was too late to begin calling around for any Vivier that might be listed. But Aglaia slipped on her jeans and her shoes, then picked up her purse. There was a phone booth down the street and it had to have a directory. She might as well get going on her research.

  The night clerk, snoozing behind the front desk, woke up enough to stretch out his hand for the gigantic brass key she held, and he placed it in the slot corresponding to her room number. She turned left outside the door of the hotel but found, when reaching the phone book, that the last pages—everything after “Trotte”—had been ripped out.

  Aglaia’s aggravation was replaced with her common sense. What were the odds that she’d happen upon the right number, anyway? And when she did call, she’d likely only make a fool of herself without Lou’s intervention.

  Now almost three o’clock in the morning, Aglaia’s insomnia had set in for good. She counted backward; it was evening in Nebraska. She’d promised to call Naomi from Paris and now was as good a time as any.

  The French instructions on the booth wall were unreadable, scratched out by some vandal, but Aglaia consulted her traveler’s guide for directions. She inserted her phone card and punched the buttons for the Ennses’ phone, and she was almost surprised to hear Naomi answer. The children were raucous in the background.

  “You just caught us in from harvesting,” Naomi said. “I can’t hear you very well—hold on a sec.” She shushed her kids and clattered some pots, and the homey sounds made Aglaia ache. She pictured Naomi in her kitchen—fertile mother, bountiful farm wife weary from her day in the field with Byron. “How’s Paris?” Naomi asked. “Are you having fun?”

  “It’s great,” she said with false gusto. She recapped the day’s events, leaving out the escapades at the bar. There was a lag in the timing of the telephone transmission so that Naomi’s appreciative mumbles broke into Aglaia’s descriptions, and it took a while to get through her report. Then Aglaia let it slip that she’d packed the Bible along with her after all, and she heard no response.

  “Naomi, are you still there?”

  “Have you found François, then?” Naomi asked, her voice reedy and hesitant.

  “No, but I’m sure Lou will help with that in the morning.” Wa
s she so sure?

  “Because I need to tell you something first,” Naomi said, their words crossing in midair. “I should’ve come out with it before now, but I didn’t know how.”

  Aglaia strained to hear her. A dog yelped in the room.

  Naomi was puffing, shooing the dog out the door perhaps, and she said, “Before you meet François—”

  But then the line went dead. The phone card credits had expired and when Aglaia plugged in her credit card to redial, she was unsuccessful. She tried to call collect, but one attempt at speaking to the rude French operator convinced her that the ethnic barrier was insurmountable tonight. Naomi’s confession—whatever it was—would have to wait.

  Aglaia spent the next hour kneading her pillow into different shapes and stewing over Lou’s continued absence. In all probability she’d be going to the costume museum on her own in—what was it?—five hours, and she was beginning to reassess Lou’s loyalty as she sank into a short and troubled sleep.

  The air in the attic smells stale to Mary Grace. Mouse droppings litter the floor between cardboard boxes full of holiday decorations and outgrown clothing, but François doesn’t notice, taken up as he is with her. His lips tickle her neck.

  “We’re supposed to find the coffee perc,” she scolds. Mom wants it in preparation for harvest time, when caffeine is needed in great quantities.

  François pays her no mind but draws her in closer to push her breasts up against his chest. Something sharp makes her shrink back. “What’s this?” she asks, and pulls a postcard from his shirt pocket.

  The photo is just discernible in the dusky light and she sits down on a rough wooden desk to examine the Three Graces—their burnished nudity, their otherworldly air. She hasn’t seen the card since the night François arrived over two months ago, though he refers often to the Graces in his storytelling.

  “See how they’re worn smooth with time, as you’re smooth with youth,” he says, stroking her face. He perches beside her, his thigh pressed close to hers. “Three silent girls telling a story of the gods. Les Trois Grâces are lovely like you, innocent and so full of mysteries.” His breath in her ear makes her stomach do gymnastics. She’ll never get used to his touch or his flattery! But she elbows him, fearful that her mom, impatient for their descent into the kitchen, might pop her head up through the attic trapdoor and discover them.

  “What mysteries?”

  “The mysteries of a woman’s beauty,” he murmurs, his hand sliding around her waist under her top, sending electricity across her skin.

  “No, François.” She pulls his hand away and thinks that he can’t have been carrying the card around for a thrill—the nudes aren’t that detailed. By now he’s seen her nearly naked, in her skimpy bikini. Why would he want a picture of them?

  Jealousy digs at her and she reprimands herself; they’re just old statues, after all.

  François inclines backward on the desktop to rest on his elbows, stretching his long legs out in front of him. “You like the Graces, my little Mary Grace?”

  She nods. “But why do you?”

  François takes the card from her hands and examines the photo, smiling to himself. “I first saw them with my classmates when I was a boy. We studied ancient Greek poetry about them.” And he looks deeply into her eyes as he recites words that she vows never to forget: “ ‘Then Eurynome, Ocean’s fair daughter, bore to Zeus the Three Graces, all fair-cheeked, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and shapely Thalia; their alluring eyes glance from under their brows, and from their eyelids drips desire that unstrings the limbs.’ ”

  Her breathing has become ragged. There’s a mania in the way his pupils dilate, but if it’s madness that makes François so irresistible, she wants to be mad, as well.

  “They’re my ideal,” he says to her. He grins crookedly at her, but she thinks his meditation upon the Greek goddesses is not such a stupid idea; the guys in Tiege are all talking about Sharon Stone as if she were a goddess. At least somebody wrote real poetry about the Graces. “Together they represent total happiness,” François continues, “the three of them serving the gods with their gifts. Which one of them are you?” He points to the middle statue. “Maybe you’re like this one. Aglaia was the youngest and most beautiful of all.”

  Most beautiful? Mary Grace can’t help herself then; she slams her body into his and kisses him with ferocious jubilation, and he says, “You unstring my limbs.”

  The nighttime rain of Paris didn’t present itself with ear-splitting acclaim. Aglaia grew aware of its presence through the shroud of her awakening, through an odor cheesy like the sourness of her brother’s bedroom in the morning, clothes strewn on the floor. As a girl, she welcomed rain, even during harvest—especially during harvest, though her dad would gripe that the crops should be in the bins by now, out of the weather. Rain on a weekday after school had begun was no fun because she and Joel had to slog through the mud up the road, and the driver would be foul about their mucking up her bus. But on rainy Saturday mornings, the day they’d normally be roused by Dad’s voice from the bottom of the stairs—“Kids, the chores won’t get done by themselves!”—she’d be allowed to stay in bed a bit longer with nothing urgent to do but listen for a while to the music of the rain. Mom loved rainy days best for baking bread, the humidity giving the dough a wonderful elasticity, and so the household cleaning waited until after a midmorning spread of crusty Bulkje sliced thick with gooseberry or wild plum jam. It was like a holiday when Aglaia awoke to the rain pounding against the farmhouse window.

  The rain of Paris, on the other hand, made only a soft pattering on the panes of the half-opened French window. So, after noting that the second bed in the hotel room was still vacant and that her alarm wouldn’t go off for another hour, Aglaia fought back into an uneasy somnolence like the burrowing beetle in her childhood sandbox kicking the grains out from behind its rear legs into a soft pile of bedclothes.

  Sixteen

  Eb MacAdam steeped himself in the writings of the Reformation by such giants as Luther and Knox and Calvin. In fact, he kept a stack of their books beside his bed on the floor—piled up so that his dear wife complained whenever she vacuumed—and he would read some nights as he dipped into his stash of butterscotch candy after Iona had drifted off to sleep.

  Eb was doing just that late on Tuesday night, working his way through a bag of the sweets and the pages of Institutes of the Christian Religion. It would be Wednesday morning in France, he thought, and Aglaia must be preparing to deliver the costume to the museum about now. Maybe that was why he couldn’t sleep tonight.

  His study in theology was an ongoing affair because he found such immediate application to everything he read by the great figures of the church. Take the section he was perusing right now, entitled “Scripture, to Correct All Superstition, Has Set the True God Alone Over Against All the Gods of the Heathen.” Here he’d just been thinking about the swarm of gods that inhabited the chaos of imagination found in the pagan stories of ancient peoples, and which were being revived in current publications.

  Not that he read much of the drivel written today.

  Eb reprimanded himself for his pride. He had his own superstitions that needed correcting, he supposed. The idea that he couldn’t live without sugar might be one, and at the thought Eb resolutely tied a knot in the top of the plastic bag of confectionary and hid it again under some old letters inside the drawer, where Iona never dusted.

  Eb had been thinking about the subject of paganism lately because of Aglaia. Of course, he’d never heard her use the word and she likely didn’t think of herself as a pagan at all—perhaps not even as a spiritual being. But Eb suspected a religious influence somewhere under her defensiveness.

  Just last week, for example, using busy-ness as her excuse, she’d relegated the biblical research for costumes of the three Magi—commissioned by one of Denver’s large churches—to the student volunteer, as if reading the story of the nativity might trigger dangerous emotions.

  Eb re
called the days of his own youth, when he wondered whether the Bible itself was just a superstitious myth, whether its writers had simply borrowed themes from civilizations pre-existing the Jews. After all, oral folklore from every tradition included stories that sounded similar to what was written by the “people of the book”—stories of creation and of a great flood and of propitiation through a savior coming down from the skies.

  Eventually, Eb found that argument weak. Mythological literature tried to explain origins using symbolism (much like costume making tried to illustrate personality using caricature). Mythological religion based its rituals on sympathetic magic—if the crops withered, the pagans believed their god was dying and so offered sacrifices to ensure their bellies would be filled—but those stories said nothing about life’s spiritual, transcendent meaning or mankind’s purpose on earth. Those stories expressed a desiderium, a longing for something lost, that only biblical truth could satisfy.

  Eb believed that back in Abraham’s day Jehovah called His people out from the blind worship of nature to a relationship with a living and personal and holy God. And he believed that God was still calling—calling him, Eb MacAdam, not to some mythic record of so-called “sacred history” that revered the mysteries of world religions, but to the supernatural events recorded in the Bible and taking place within the framework of real-life history.

  That is to say, Eb believed in miracles but didn’t trust in magic. He believed in a Book written by a loving Being but didn’t trust books full of imaginary beings. The Bible might be a story, he thought, but it was a true story; it might be a philosophy, but it reconciled daily life with Holy Spirit. He reached down beside his bed and picked up his own worn copy of that living Word and entered it, expecting to find God in its pages.

  Aglaia sat by herself in the hotel’s small breakfast room, her suit already constricting because of the clamminess. Last night’s rain hadn’t broken the heat and the morning sky again threatened precipitation. She tore off chunks of baguette to dunk in her chocolat chaud, as the French couple by the fireplace was doing, then quaffed the rest of the cocoa in spite of the crumbs.