Grace (15 page)

“I do this, and this, and
this
if I like you. If I
don't
like you, I do this. This if you're good, and this if you are wicked.”

I wanted all she showed me, as I looked at her and wondered what it would be like to fuck a goddess.

Even if I had decided to leave with her, it would have been impossible, because I could not find my limbs. But as I lay there debating with myself, two other women approached, a tall, light one and a taller, dark one. Both looked like mutants from some further stage in human evolution as they sat down on either side of me.

“What language?” The taller one asked, as she took my head in her lap, while the other took my feet, stretching me out between them. The light one spoke Italian, Arabic, and Spanish; the dark one Japanese, German, Afrikaans, and Dutch. In the state I was in I spoke them all as we laughed and they asked if I wanted to go upstairs. Temptation was wearing me down, and I thought to go, telling myself it would be worthwhile if only for the experience. However, through a colossal and super-valiant effort of will, I declined.

They left and I was proud of my willpower, self-satisfied that I remained true to my discipline, as I watched the lights and color bend so that there were no longer angles in the room, only swooping curves of red and purple emotion until I locked eyes with a woman standing directly across from me, who I remembered seeing when I'd first entered, but had lost sight of amid the undifferentiated faces. When our eyes locked, though, she came to me right away, smiling enigmatically and asking what had taken me so long.

She was a large-eyed, big-bosomed country broad, no other term would do; there was something earthy and old-fashioned about her seductiveness. The kind of woman you hope to find on a lonesome night: apple-bottomed, quick-witted, bewitching, Old and Middle English words from the womb and the milk of the language.

Not beautiful, maybe even a little bit homely if you were slow and missed the point; when I looked at her, there was no explaining it, my dick signaled like a compass. A roost cock, keening and crowing to her soft heat as she sat down and took me in her lap, rocking me back to my first body.

“You work in entertainment,” she said perceptively, “but you were in the army before.”

“Close,” I answered, asking how she knew. She shrugged, and ordered herself a drink and put it on my tab. We began to talk and I poured out my tribulations, my conflicted desires, my whole damn life. She crooked her head to the side, looking down at me, and told me to wise up, I had a grand life if I looked the right way.

“Let me get you a spyglass, Watson,” she said. I still didn't understand, and she didn't answer again, only slid down and cradled herself against me to show me what she meant.

“Let's go,” she said.

“I should not,” I answered. “It is against my code.”

“Your what?” she asked.

“My code.”

She laughed. “That is because you still do not know what is right for you, or what you want. If you did you wouldn't say
should
. You would say
will
.”

“I don't will anything from this place,” I said. “That's not what I'm about.”

“Come with me, let me find out what you're about,” she teased.

“I suppose you will help me know what I want, too,” I said.

“Yes,” she answered, turning serious. “The body has a knowledge of its own.”

“I do not sleep with odalisques.”

“You still do not understand, do you? That's not what I am.”

“What are you doing here, then?”

“I am a professional lover.”

“What does that cost?”

“What is that worth?”

“What is the difference?” I looked up at her, but she was just a light among all the lights.

“The qualia of experience,” she answered.

“That's a fine word.”

“I used to read in the library, when I dropped out of school and moved to the city to find a job.”

“You should have stayed in school.”

“If I would have had money.”

I had studied enough languages to appreciate the complexity of the verb tense she had constructed. “That took effort to master.”

“The compound subjunctive,” she said ruefully, “is the story of my life. If I would have known, if I could have done, if it should happen that. If it were up to me. Should it ever be. It's not really the same in American as Brazilian, though. It's the official verb tense of mad visions and inconsolable sorrows, and belongs to poor people and dreamers. This lifetime brought to you by the subjunctive tense.”

I laughed at her nerdy joke. At the same time I was touched and knew I was going to leave with her, despite my own rules. Smart girls turned me on.

“So,” she said, taking a sip of rum. “The physicalists believe all phenomena can be reduced to the material. The essential concern with all of these things is, of course, how consciousness arises from the body. Whether the consciousness, or soul that makes us human, is only another phenomenon of the body.”

I was too far gone to follow, and asked her to clarify.

“Take for example a hypothetical woman, named Maria, who is a brilliant scientist but has lived in a black-and-white room her entire life where her entire life's work has been to study the red of flowers. She understands red is the longest wavelength visible to the naked eye, and she knows how the brain is excited by and reacts to red. She knows, in fact, all there is to know about red, without ever having seen it, or a flower.

“One day Maria decides to finally leave the black-and-white room. She steps out from her little box, and she sees the world for the first time, and she sees red for the first time, and she sees her first flower. Does Maria know what red is?”

“I don't know,” I answered. “Does she?”

“It's just a philosophical game,” she cooed, stroking me playfully. “Not real life. They like to ask questions like that because I think God does not talk to philosophers very much.”

“Why did you bring it up then?” I was confused, still burning to know the answer to the question.

“Because, baby, I know all there is to know about love.”

She may have said
you
. She may have said
blue
. I do not remember. I was high on opium, and she had me in her hands.

She led me through the halls of that ode to Dionysus, to a room carpeted in silk and exquisitely woven cushions, where she slipped off her dress, and led me to a marble bath. She undressed me and drew the water, then led me in, where she washed me and afterward toweled me dry, before massaging my entire body with rose-scented oil. We went to bed and she laced her legs, long as a country day, around me and I felt perfectly within my skin, undivided in a way I had not since I was a boy. We made love and it was as she said, she was a professional lover.

The next morning, as we sat in bed she kissed me before rising from the sheets, looking down at me still amid the pillows. My head hurt, and my cock, and my conscience as well. “We had something,
meu amor
,” she said, rubbing my temples. “Maybe not what you're looking for, but something all the same. You should drop me a postcard from time to time. Come back and see me when you can.”

“I do not think I will be back this way again,” I said, even as I warmed to the sound of her saying
my love
in the unguarded southern way. “So you don't have to lie to me. I know it's business. Me projecting a fantasy onto you, and you playing it back to get money. It's okay.”

“No,” she said, smoothing my brow tenderly. “Sometimes I think when people say anything is only business that's the lie. Maybe I didn't choose the best work, but everything is real. I'm still a woman. You are still a man. This is still life. And I'm glad we met, even if you would never let yourself fall in love with a
puta
.”

“Come back to bed,” I reached for her. Sadly, tenderly. Full of pain and vulnerability that flashed the brighter amid the seediness.

“Just remember what we talked about.” She kissed me when she finally left a while later.

“Remind me.”

“Oh,
amor
,” she smiled softly. “You will remember. It is what you are truly looking for.”

I tried to recall what we discussed the night before, but it was all as distant as yesterday's dream. “I can't remember anything,” I said.

She hugged herself to me warmly, and rested her hand on my chest briefly and just smiled, before leaving. When she walked away all I could think of was an hourglass.

I shambled back to the hotel, still unable to recall the details of the night before. I felt a tarnished, divided joy, sadness and liberation tempered by self-reproach. All I could remember was a feeling between us of pure physicality, an absolute freedom of being completely in the body and completely at ease. If there was no more truth to it than that, at least there was nothing false.

The only falseness was between me and myself.

It was eleven o'clock by the time I reached my room, where I discovered the maid vacuuming, and my luggage nowhere in sight. When I asked where my things were, she shrugged and pointed a finger toward the roof. I knew what she was talking about, and took the elevator up to Doc's suite, where I found Schoeller and a couple of random guys splayed around the living room in various poses of sin-sickness and suffering. Schoeller was still bumping cocaine from a tiny spoon.

I went to the bathroom to shower and change, then crashed across the bed, where I was fast asleep when Doc showed up half an hour later. He was swaddled in a fresh linen suit, happy as a butter thief, and wide awake as the morning he was born.

He glanced around the room, shaking his head with dismay as he considered us. “Amateurs,” he pronounced, before shoving Schoeller aside on the sofa, to open his bag on the table.

“Where have you been all this time?” Schoeller asked.

“Up Corcovado way, to say confession.”

“There's a church there?”

“No. I went to speak directly to
O Cristo
. What I did, no priest could comprehend.”

“Where did we lose Freddo?” I asked.

“In jail. Here. This will even you out.” He was passing out uppers to those who had gone too far down, and downers to those who had gotten too high.

When he reached me he opened my eyes wide with his fingers, before searching them with a penlight.

“First time?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“She gentle with you?”

I smiled.

“Kiss you on the mouth?”

I admitted to it.

“Wrap her legs around you, and rock you in her arms until you felt the heat from the center of the world?”

I laughed weakly.

“Say what you needed to hear? Make you forget your worries, and feel like she knew you? Laugh with you until the darkness shone like diamonds, and make you remember how bounteous loving can be?”

I closed my eyes in wistful reverie.

“Wish you met her under different circumstances?”

I winced.

“You give her all you had? You give her the jailhouse key?”

“I don't want to play this game.”

“Circle well done. You found a saint in a cathouse.” He grinned at me, and placed a horse pill on my tongue. “Eat this.”

“What is it?”

“This one eases the conscience.”

He turned back to the room. “We need to get moving. We're driving south to Ihla Grande to surf, and then a little surprise I've worked up.”

“No more surprises.”

“Mermaids.”

“Definitely not.”

“Wait till you get there before you decide. We also need to go spring Freddo from the pen, and buy him a new watch.”

“What's he doing in jail?”

“He refused to give his girlfriend a present last night, like a good little boy, so she gifted herself his watch.”

“How did the police get involved?”

“When he realized it, he lost his cool, then she lost her cool, and security came. He still did not calm the fuck down, so they put him in the tank to chill him out.”

“Why didn't you spring him last night?”

“And ruin the party? Besides, nobody told him to check his common sense at customs, and, because he is our dear brother, as all of you are my dear brothers, I decided to leave him in peace awhile to remember himself. Just as someday I will find new livers for each of you. Now, when we get him, he will be repentant, and no longer an adjective-defying asshole.”

“I'm fine bailing him out,” Schoeller said. “But let him get his own watch.”

“We have to,” Doc answered, “because he will not have time to do it before going home, and Doris gave him that dumb watch for their first wedding anniversary, when he had no bread and she was making cake. So if he shows up without it she will know something happened, and he will not be able to get himself out of it without lying to her. She will figure this out, of course, and send him to hell. They don't have the kind of relationship where he can simply go home and say honestly: Sugarstack, I know you don't want to hear this, and it's not what I want to be telling you at all, but I was unfaithful to us and as a material consequence lost your watch to a ho in Rio.”

“Let her leave him. Who cares if they get divorced?”

“First off, there is no such thing as divorce after you've had children, only nonconjugal polygamy. Second of all, raise your hand if you want him sleeping on your couch. Better to do it this way.

“Why does Doc care so much?” I asked Schoeller.

“You don't know? His father dropped him off in a place like that when he was fifteen, and never came back for him.”

“I don't believe you. What kind of father does something like that?”

“His father was a politician.”

“How much did you pay her, Doc?” I asked.

He smiled. “You miss the point. It is not about money but her self-worth, and that each time she meets a man like Freddo, a tiny portion of that dissipates, until she has no illusions except what is permanent in the heart, and, she is too young to know this, but by the time she realizes it she will be on an unalterable course she does not control, and to which she has sacrificed herself. Who am I to say what it takes to compensate her for that? Even she will not fully know for years, when she comes to understand what each of you knows, which is the world is brutal and whores do not love anyone. Except, well, me and Harper here.”