Grace (10 page)

I felt knifed through the core and stood frozen with pain; afraid for her and afraid of her, and in awe of the sheer amount of energy that had poured out of her, as I navigated that divine madness, not knowing what I should do. I reached her at last, but she only bit down on her lip anxiously, and turned and went straight away to the bathroom, before emerging with a bunch of pills, which she took with water from the faucet.

“How long has it been since you stopped taking them?”

“Two weeks,” she said. “I will be fine again. You will see. But perhaps it is you no longer love me, because I do the wrong thing, the crazy thing. But the crazy thing is necessary.”

“I still love you,” I said.

“Okay, we go now.”

“Where?”

“To the hospital,” she answered, as I tried not to cry and kissed her wild, wild eyes.

I stayed with her until I felt confident she would be all right alone, before leaving one afternoon, two weeks later, to meet Davidson, whom I had not seen since dinner at the restaurant.

“How are things with Genevieve?” he asked sympathetically.

“Fine.”

“You're a terrible liar.”

“I know.” I was silent after that. There was nothing to say.

“You know it is impossible to be happy when you are with someone who is not well.”

“You are not suggesting I leave her when she has fallen on hard times? She will get better. She is ill, not crazy.”

“That is not what I said. I only mean sadness is contagious. You see, the educated classes can all be located on a graph, with the queen of England on one end and a renunciant monk on the other. For the creative, it goes from those willing to accommodate the world to those willing to follow art to the edge of the map. It is primarily a function of talent, but the
y
-axis is fear.” He took out a piece of paper and began to draw. “Genevieve is talented and unafraid. I respect my fear, which is why she dislikes me. She fears making the compromises I do. People with modest talent, and reasonable fears, stumble along the axis, there, doing what they can, according to formulas, and thinking the formulas are real. People with greater imagination and either lavish fear or lavish greed do the same, only they know better. People like her have a chance at making something brilliant and changing the world, then again they have a chance of getting lost. You I cannot plot yet, because you have not decided yourself. Worry the koan, it will help. But, what am I saying? I suppose we all fall for the wrong person once.”

“You don't leave who you love because she is unwell. I am sure there are other ways of looking at it, but they are not ways to live.”

“You love that woman, don't you?”

“Like a blues song I love her. Are you going to tell me to call your shaman?”

“It will not help.”

“I thought you said he was a real medicine man.”

“First class at fixing things when you get outside of yourself. For what comes to you from your own spirit, nobody can fix, only help you see.”

I did not want to discuss it further, and we talked shop instead, then had a glass of wine, but I did not have the taste for it, and went back to my hotel to rest.

The last days had been uncertain and exhausting, with me constantly checking to see she was taking her medication, which she sometimes did and sometimes resisted. She was there, but no longer present, not really, until slowly my faith that she would be well again was sapped, so I was there but not present as well.

I was responsible to her, though, and did not break with her. How could I? I had asked for a great love. They gave it to me.

When I arrived back at her place that evening, she was in a state of tranquility, and we were eating a quiet dinner, when she stared up from her plate all of a sudden. “I always knew you would leave me one day,” she said.

“Who said anything about leaving you? I care about you.”

“Do not be sorry,” she said, “and do not be a coward. Sometimes the people get married, and sometimes the people get divorced. I give you a divorce. You are free. But always remember we were married.”

“We still are.”

“We are not anymore.
Non
, I was not the right wife for you. It was not right.”

“You are the best wife anyone ever wanted. I can wait as long as it takes.”

“Yes, I will be better. But no, you cannot wait and see, so don't make me love's beggar. I am too proud.”

I felt worse after that, like a weak liar and coward and every mean, worthless thing there is. I did not leave her, though—not that night, or the next one, or the rest of the season.

The following month was September, and things had grown no better. Some days were up and some were volcanic, and I was due to return to New York to attend to my affairs and renew my visa.

“You will call when you arrive?” she asked. “Or you will let all of this fade into the past?”

“Do not say things like that.”

“As you wish. Since you are afraid and have doubt, I wish to let you go now, face to face.”

“We are still together.”

“
Non
. We were. Not anymore.”

“Of course we are.”

“
Non, mon amour
. Not anymore.”

“Don't do this.”

“It is done. You wish to be the hero of the story, you tell yourself, but when people tell their own story it is so they can hide what kind of fool they are.”

“I'm a fool for you,” I said, letting the subject drop, and I returned to the hotel to pack.

When I returned the next morning to say goodbye before my flight, there was an ambulance picking its way down the hill. My heart sank, even before I reached her apartment, with fear of where it had come from. When I reached the top of the stairs, and opened her door, the apartment was empty and squalid. There was no answer when I called, and no note, and no music anywhere to be heard. I saw the neighbor in the hall, but he did not have to tell me anything.

She was a fine, beautiful girl. Luminous. Fragile. True. And she was my girl, and I was broken-spirited with grief to lose her, and our love that ignited all of a sudden to burn brighter than anything I ever knew. And I was hollow and sick with myself for how lowdown it was to give up on her like I did. Haunted every sunless day I crouched low around my own spirit, with no company but all the other ghosts behind my eyelids.

The film wrapped in early May and there was a cast party afterward in a club on East Broadway. The club was filled with beautiful people, who made media and fashion and nightlife, and knew, or thought they did, all there was to know about popular culture, and what people wanted, and how to give it to them. The air was clouded with weed smoke, which I never indulged in, but I took a hit from a joint passed to me by a beautiful girl, and had a sip of my cocktail, which I soon finished, and ordered another.

I wanted to abolish the past from my memory, and focus on what came next, which I could not fathom as I leaned against the bar, trying not to look too empty and centerless. Soon the festiveness and laughter washing through the room were enough to numb my worries, as the air began to buzz with electricity and an omnipresent desire—for sex, for money, for conquest—which the beautiful-looking people displayed in their gestures, in their clothes, in the ease of coded references laced through conversations that exuded confidence and spoke of belonging.

There were a smattering of famous faces scattered through the room, whom the regular people, the outsiders, watched surreptitiously. The famous people found each other, while the business people tried to circle next to the players, who manufactured and sold glory they themselves no longer believed in, as they but longed for something new they could hold to a while.

What was left for them was boredom, cynicism, self-deceit. They bullied, they schemed, they manipulated, they threw tantrums. They were broken narcissists who wished to be worshiped. Whatever the chink in anyone else's armor, they looked for a way to exploit it. It was their value proposition. They thought like gangsters, and the only lasting value was survival itself. Whatever happened in the struggle for that, they kept moving forward and never mentioned those fallen by the wayside.

The rarest among them, who had reconciled how it was their world worked and who they themselves were, inhabited that apex of fear and insecurity and uncertainty, like gods walking through a dream. When they bullied and manipulated it was no longer for power or money but to serve some other, invisible truth they believed in absolutely. They were impressed by intelligence, talent, charisma, authenticity. If they could package those things up and sell them, so much the better. That was the game, but they had by then eyes on either side of their heads, one focused on the business at hand, the other turned inward to whatever kept them from losing themselves.

I watched the crowd schmooze, front, hustle, and ordered another cocktail, and took a hit from a blunt someone was nice enough to share as I waited, watching as the reality in the room bent with the force of raw ego and condensed desire in so small a space. My part in it was done. Everything belonged to the machine now, and I did my best to not worry about what came next, and simply enjoy the night.

Our party was upstairs on a balcony, affording us a clear view to the stage below, where last year's pop superstar was making an unannounced appearance to test out the first single from his comeback album, which would be heard all around the world come summer. It was good and catchy the first time you heard it, and still hooked you the hundredth time. But by then you wanted the damn thing out of your head, which is why the machine was busy, even as they listened to it the first time, working up next year's novelty the people did not yet know they wanted.

The tables at the foot of the stage were filled with business people from another party, still in their suits, and their lawyers, still in their ties, ordering bottle service; all wired on coke. They were powerful and connected enough to be in the club, but removed enough from the industry that they served as the first marks, who would start the buzz humming in the next circle out, until the energy from the room rippled across the country, like wavelets across a fishing pond. It would no longer be about the music by the next morning, but an economic reality of mass experience. To be in the club that night was to witness its magical transformation from private art to public culture. And, slip of time, its first step toward the reliquary of the past.

When the superstar left, the crowd was cresting with energy as the next performer, a midget Marilyn Monroe impersonator, took the stage. She did not imitate Marilyn exactly, but gave a pitch-perfect burlesque of the last golden idol to get her ticket punched that way. Unlike the ingénue she impersonated, she could actually sing. Raised-in-church-papa-was-a-traveling-preacher-mamma-used-to-cry-holy-all-the-damn-time-sing. When the black girls in the audience said
That girl can sing
, they didn't qualify it with
white girl
.

She sang like there was something inside her she was on fire to tell, cutting clean through the derivative cunning, the manufactured desire, the Warholian wannabes before her, who had nothing to add but rode the latest trend until it ran out. Hers was a further station, and she knew it, as she tapped at the twin roots of desire and yearning. When I looked her up later there were no recordings from any of her performances, and when I reflected on it, that seemed right too. She sang like she had been here before, and it was the purity and depth she made you aware of in a single, exquisite moment that made you think maybe you had, too.

If she were four inches taller she would have been on every screen in the country. But who knows what the tradeoff would have been? She was not four inches taller, though, and did not get what came with that, but she had that voice. And she had that wanton, unbridled fire; and the people on the screens, and the people who decided what went on them, were watching her with awe and desire and joy that filled them completely and wanted for nothing else, as she made them know what they had come here for, if only for a vanishing moment.

She wore a skintight red leather bodice to complete or complicate the effect, her ass fat and fertile as a harvest moon, so the suits downstairs, who were ginned up, and everyone upstairs, all weeded out, could do nothing but fall under her spell. Downstairs it was to screw her, because she was hot, or because they were freaks and it was something different. She knew that about them, of course; you heard it in her voice when she sang, saw it in the thrust of her hips. She knew everything there was to know. She had been here before. And she teased the crowd, promising any minute now to come down from the stage and fuck us all. If she ever got half a chance she would fuck the whole world.

She never would get her big break, the world is unfair; you suffer that and do not complain. But we were fortunate to be in the room and hear her. Those who were not and knew only what had been put before them by those who did not create, lost out on the chance to know how beauty can overtake you unexpectedly. That is how this world works. It does not give you what you deserve. It gives you part of what you work for, and halfway what you want. Beyond that it gives to you randomly some part of goodness, and all you can take of pain. That is what it was like for her too: somewhere in between. She was still blessed with that sanctified voice, though, and that irreligious fire she copped for herself.

When the set ended I noticed my friend Nell sitting with an animated group at one of the tables, and made my way over. Their laughter was light in the darkness, radiating fellowship, and, as I sat down, a tall, winsome girl in a halter and shorts that showed the long line of her perfect legs saw me notice her, and we traded smiles.

“Oh, you need to friend her up,” Nell said, catching the exchange, as we cheek kissed. “Come on, I'll introduce you.”