The Third Grace

by Deb Elkink

  But Orion was refused consent to marry her and so, in his passion and frustration, he raped her. The hunter, rendered blind in revenge by Merope’s protector, was cured by the wonder-working rays of the sun to continue his amorous pursuits until he was punished again, this time stung to death and then placed in the heavens opposite his nemesis, Scorpius in the east, from whom he still perpetually flees beyond the western horizon.

  And so Orion remains among the stars forever—a twinkling, cold, dead monument that bears witness to the wrath of the gods of Olympus.

  She’d come so close to giving herself to François there on the dewy grass, but they heard someone open a window in the house and snuck back to their rooms unfulfilled. She couldn’t fall asleep for hours on that long-ago night, shivering with the dark, divine sensations that threatened to snuff out the light of truth that had, till recently, so warmed her soul.

  Aglaia shivered now beneath her sheets in the French hotel bed. She was sleepy but licked her finger and turned another page. She must be very near the end of François’s notations, she thought. The youth group had been outlining the Gospels about the time the crops had ripened in the fields that summer—about the time François was forced to leave.

  Yes, there it was in the margins of Matthew, where John the Baptist preached by the Jordan River. François had written a string of names—Abraham, John, Jesus, and then Amphion—with an arrow pointing to a line of text: Out of these stones God can raise up children. Aglaia stared at the names, trying to make sense of the quartet.

  She strained to remember who Amphion might be—what god François might have inserted into this mix. She closed her eyes in concentration and finally it came to her: Amphion was the king of Thebes, who fortified the walls of his citadel without bodily exertion by charming the stones with music from his magical lyre, raising the stones up into place under the melodic direction of the Three Graces, those conductors of all charm.

  Was François comparing Amphion’s construction with Jesus’ declaration that He would raise the stones of the temple—the flesh of His own body? And with God’s promise to Abraham of progeny, numerous as grains of sand on the seashore?

  The images were muddled in Aglaia’s mind: sand on a beach; cobble on the Jordan’s banks; the mighty walls of Thebes, long ago crumbled; the quarried bricks of Solomon’s Temple, not remaining one on top of the other. And the broken and resurrected and instituted body of Christ, more lasting than fragile earth.

  She knew her speculations tonight went beyond anything François could have intended. It was as though her thoughts were being directed by something outside of herself. She was curious in spite of her resolution not to be drawn into the Bible, and told herself it was the mystery of Amphion alone that held her spellbound. She closed her eyes to focus her deliberations but, try as she might, she couldn’t take her thoughts captive and make them obedient to her memories of François.

  Aglaia shook herself awake. Lou could enter the room at any moment and Aglaia wanted to finish her overview. She wasn’t sure there was anything left to discover, but then she came to François’s last handwritten note scribbled into that big, black Bible on the day before he fled home to France, next to the story of Jesus’ temptation in the stony wilderness—the final Wednesday study he’d attended. She wasn’t prepared for it: Aglaia, quelle belle diablesse!

  The words staggered her. François saw her as a “beautiful devil?” She was his angel, he’d said. And except for a hint or two that she hadn’t even picked up at the time, François never directly referred to her as Aglaia; that hyperbole had been her own choice, a secret and subconscious conception given birth at Joel’s funeral. But had she originated this name for herself, after all, or had it in reality been chosen by François without her acknowledgment? She’d been devilish all right, she recalled as she was pitched back to the youth group in the basement of the church that fated August evening a decade and a half ago.

  “Flee youthful lust,” Pastor Reimer admonishes them. Mary Grace peeks from under her lowered lids at François, whose hand rests high on her upper leg, hidden beneath the open Bible.

  “Read how Jesus dealt with temptation,” the minister goes on. “ ‘It is written’ is what He said. When Satan told Him, ‘Turn these stones into bread,’ Jesus replied with Scripture. When He stood on the highest pinnacle of the temple, tempted to leap off and prove the angels would stop Him from even bruising his toe on a stone, He had a ready answer. When Satan ordered Him to bow his head to the stony ground in worship, Jesus again quoted the words of the Bible. And so should you.”

  She’s never felt so convicted in her entire life, and she has no intention of repenting.

  That very evening before the meeting, when François was changing from his work clothes, she crept into his room and wrapped her arms around him from behind, thinking of his kisses and his roaming hands. She couldn’t look him in the eye; she was too scandalized at her own deliberate transgression of God’s commands.

  “Soon,” she promised, standing on her tiptoes and wanting to lick his neck to taste his saltiness. “As soon as we can get alone again.”

  So when the youth meeting is over, she and François slip out through the cloakroom door of the church. Her brother catches a ride with someone else, as if by answered prayer or luck of the gods, leaving her alone with François to take the pickup home.

  They drive the back road over the fields and they park, half hidden in the standing grain beside the swather still toasty from the sun’s rays, grasshoppers bouncing off the truck’s chassis. One springs into the cab through the open window and she stomps it, the crunch beneath her sneaker making her queasy.

  “Poor Tithonos,” François exclaims with a laugh, and launches into the tale of the mortal son of a water nymph, loved by the goddess Eos who asked Zeus to make the boy immortal but forgot to ask for his eternal youth.

  So Tithonos aged into everlasting senility, wizening until he turned into a cicada dressed by the goddess Aglaia in a suit of vibrant green, and danced with by her sister Euphrosyne, and sumptuously fed by generous Thalia—a pet for the Three Graces.

  Mary Grace shudders at his story, so François opens the glove box and removes a brown paper bag. “This will help,” he says. He unscrews the top from the bottle of gin and gives her the first swig, the unfamiliar liquid burning as it goes down.

  He slides her over to him, dust puffing up from the seat fabric. A magpie scoffs at them from its cache of road kill as the evening wind dies down. François turns on the radio and kisses her, gently for a while and then with increasing urgency. She trembles as he undoes the buttons of her shirt one by one, exposing her bra and then removing it. He doesn’t say anything and doesn’t meet her eyes as he caresses her.

  He’s working on her zipper when they hear the whinny of Joel’s horse.

  In her hotel bed in Paris, Aglaia was immobilized with exhilaration or exhaustion—or maybe exhumation. Yes, that was it; she was being dug up by the spade of her memory and subjected to an autopsy that should have been performed years ago. She opened her eyes; she tried to put the recollections out of her mind, but they were coming to her in real time now and she couldn’t prettify this one.

  Joel had been enraged that night, and he wrestled François from the truck onto the ground, yelling at him to get the hell off their farm while she fumbled for her top to cover up.

  “Not with this girl, you don’t!” Joel shouted, and she heard the thump of flesh on flesh, and a French curse. They tumbled in the tall grain, grunting, while she cried and begged Joel not to hurt him, damned Joel for being mean, promised Joel anything if only François could stay.

  But François was gone the next morning without a word of good-bye, stolen away in the night by her brother, she assumed, and likely dropped at the Greyhound stop on the highway, with his guitar and his airline ticket and maybe enough of Joel’s cash to get him to the airport in Denver.

  At breakfast time, Mom took the biscuits out of the oven and a
sked, “Is François still sleeping? Can’t he smell the Schnetje baking?”

  Joel shot a hollow-eyed glance at Dad, who gave a slight shake to his head to silence him.

  “Mary Grace,” her mom said, “are you sick this morning?” She placed a hand on her forehead but Aglaia shied away. “Well then, please get the butter from the fridge. Henry, where’s that boy?”

  Harvest was in full swing and Mom would have expected François to do his fair share.

  Her dad cleared his throat. “Tina, Joel tells me he’s gone back to France.” Dad looked right at Aglaia then—right through her—and she was ashamed. He said, “I guess that’s what happens when we invite a city kid to the country.” Her mother began to fret but Dad shushed her. “Don’t worry about it, Tina. It’s all taken care of.”

  The despicable subject was never addressed from that day forward although, sitting at the kitchen table that morning, Aglaia knew in her heart that her father fully comprehended her indiscretion, and she wanted to kill Joel for telling what she and François had been up to.

  She waited in vain for Dad to bring it up but he never did, and their relationship changed for good at that moment.

  Then again, that was the day Joel died and everyone else forgot about François.

  Lou finished up her paperwork well after midnight, the clerk having long since shut off the lobby’s main lights and, shooting her a reproving frown, gone to his own bed. Aglaia was sleeping as Lou entered the room but breathed erratically, mumbling a few indiscernible words as she rolled towards the wall. The Bible was open on her blankets and slid to the floor with a thud. Lou shook her head in disgust. What did Aglaia hope to find in its pages?

  The thing seemed almost to have a life of its own, at least as far as Aglaia was involved, and it had been working its way between them from the beginning. Lou caught the girl reading it at every turn and she resented the interference while at the same time acknowledging that, if not for the Bible’s emergence from Tina’s basement, she may not have had the excuse to come along to Paris as an intermediary in locating its owner.

  Lou retrieved a cleansing wipe from her cosmetic bag and began to remove the day’s residue from her face. Her fabricated excuse to help Aglaia find François had been handy, but not something she ever intended to fulfill. The girl’s badgering had gotten to her this evening; she couldn’t put Aglaia off any longer. Hopefully her action tonight would keep the peace between them in the interim and they could enjoy their last couple of days together in Paris—as long as her plan didn’t backfire on her.

  The Bible lay on the floor between their two beds. In light of all the time Aglaia spent reading the literature, one would think she’d have something to say about it. But she withheld her perspective and, even with a couple of drinks in her, she wouldn’t open up. Lou didn’t care to hear any moralizing or a reiteration of the Jesus myth; she got enough of that on the rare occasions she returned her sister’s phone calls. But Lou was running out of ideas on how to stimulate meaningful discussion with Aglaia—that is, discussion that would earn her the girl’s intimacy. Lou needed leverage, but it didn’t appear as though the Bible would afford that after all. Unless, she thought in the middle of applying paste to her toothbrush, the Bible itself held the secret to her quandary.

  Lou stooped to pick the book up. Aglaia was out like a light; now was the time to read for herself what the elusive François had to say that so commandeered Aglaia’s concentration. Lou sat on her bed and opened to the first turned-down page and read, In the beginning, the gods created. That was innocent enough, if a bastardization of the original writing. The second page was inscribed with the words, Naked and we felt no shame, and that, along with a couple of sexually charged remarks and François’s attribution of devilishness to Aglaia, looked promising. But overall the words and phrases held no significance for her except to suggest that François hadn’t been too interested in the biblical content itself. His comments relating to Greek mythological figures were erratic and disjointed, and leafing through the book left her unenlightened about what fascination the notes held for Aglaia, as scant as they were. But it seemed François and Aglaia shared an interest in the gods of yore.

  Lou came to the last creased corner in the book of Acts, where the name of Artemis was circled without any attendant notation. Apparently that was as far as Aglaia had gotten in her reading, and as Lou paged through the following books, she understood why. The remaining margins were clear of any writing—until, that is, she came to Revelation at the end of the Bible. Possibly François had started into the book on a whim and grown discouraged at the confusing language, or perhaps he’d been browsing and this passage caught his eye. But here Lou read an arresting message not yet discovered by Aglaia, if her folding of the corners indicated the extent of her reading.

  François had underlined a verse that referred to the writer giving someone a white stone with a new name written on it. The allusion was lost on Lou; she was uninformed about the much-disputed apocalyptic writing and couldn’t fathom why this specific verse might attract François, until she read his words scribbled up the left-hand margin and across the top of the page: Idée de génie! Des biblots, des joyaux, y graver “Kallistei,” en combler mes Grâces, et leur donner la pomme!

  For the first and only time throughout Lou’s perusal of the Bible, François had dropped his terse note-taking style and written a complete thought, perhaps working out some spontaneous inspiration that had just come to him.

  His salacious remark made it clear that he was a bit of a knave when it came to girlfriends, what her students nowadays called a “player.” The whole thing smacked of licentiousness, but Lou was unfamiliar with one word in the message. She knew Latin, of course, and several Romance languages, but Kallistei was almost certainly Greek. She postulated that it related to a particular myth with historical implications, something she’d have to think about.

  In the meanwhile, Lou might make some mileage out of her discovery. Aglaia would doubtless find the French too advanced to translate on her own when she came to this section in her reading. When and not if she came to this section, Lou emphasized to herself; she knew the Bible wouldn’t be going home with François on Friday despite Aglaia’s plans. Positioning the book firmly on her knee, Lou snatched a pen from the night table and wrote in capital letters in bright blue ink below the pale penciled French scrawl: SEE ME. LOU.

  That would grab Aglaia’s attention, she thought. Then, satisfied that she’d yet have the final word over François Vivier, Lou went to sleep.

  She was awakened an hour later by Aglaia’s sobbing. She turned the lamp on. The young woman—hair mussed, eyes running—was contemplating the tears wetting her hands with the glazed gaze of a sleepwalker. Lou moved to her side in a show of comfort.

  “Blood everywhere,” Aglaia mumbled.

  “There’s no blood,” Lou said. Was she visualizing some tormented nightmare—perhaps her first sexual encounter?

  “He begged me,” Aglaia whimpered, staring straight at her with wide, blind eyes. “He begged me, ‘Don’t go, Mary Grace.’ ”

  “Who begged you?” Her guess was accurate, then—François in an ardent moment wouldn’t be dissuaded. Lou hoped to get Aglaia talking. “What did he want?”

  But Aglaia just jabbered incoherent phrases about fallen stones and stones raised to life, about Orion and the Graces and shining like stars in the universe. Her agitation increased and she kicked away the covers and shrank to the far side of the bed, her expression horrified by some imagined scene. “Get up! Oh, Joel!”

  Lou reached for her and pulled her into the restraint of her arms, the terror making Aglaia rigid. Wasn’t her dead brother named Joel? Maybe this had nothing to do with the French boyfriend after all.

  “Hush, Aglaia.”

  “All alone, all alone.” She was doubled over with the labor of crying, her fingers clawing with the desolation of a supplicant begging for absolution.

  “You’re not alone now,�
� Lou said, patting Aglaia and nuzzling her sweet-smelling hair. The girl’s distress was pitiable but Lou’s tranquil words didn’t issue from the motivation of compassion; rather, the heat of Aglaia’s bed linens on her own naked thighs aroused her. But she denied the urge to kiss Aglaia on the lips and instead hummed a line from a lullaby.

  “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,” she sang out of tune, not remembering when or where she’d learned the ditty. The girl’s body relaxed and her breathing evened out, and Lou tucked her back under the duvet with some regret, not even stroking the luscious curve of Aglaia’s waist. Though the girl was unlikely to remember the whole incident in the morning, it was better to move slowly. She needed to gain more of Aglaia’s trust for the benefit of her own career, even at the expense of her personal gratification.

  So Lou began to have second thoughts about her newly devised agenda for Aglaia at the Louvre. The phone episode earlier this evening had been a knee-jerk reaction on her part, maybe a strategic error, born from Aglaia’s insistence that she contact François. But she couldn’t undo her action now and she might as well make the best of it. At any rate, Aglaia needed to wake up to reality. The imminent lesson would serve her right for her high-and-mighty show of morals, turning her nose up last night at the bar over the arrangements Lou had made with Philippe and Emmanuelle.

  Tonight Lou had glimpsed beneath Aglaia’s daytime costume of propriety. At last she might be getting to the heart of the matter. The girl was unbalanced. Aglaia had been madly in love and she hadn’t recovered from her brother’s death, both traumatic enough events for a teen. But how did they relate to one another? It had to do with Aglaia’s current insistence on delivering that Bible back to François, Lou deduced, but she couldn’t see desire to connect with an old flame as motivation enough to pack a Bible around Paris. Maybe there was a religious element, Aglaia wanting expiation for past sins by tying up the loose ends of this romance. How would she react when she discovered she couldn’t offload the Bible on François after all? Watching the struggle made up for some of Lou’s impatience in waiting for Aglaia to respond to her own supplications.