Grace (19 page)

“Not well,” I said.

“We have a lovely court,” he offered, “which you should feel free to use.”

“I saw it when I arrived, it is a lovely court. Thank you.”

“While the weather holds, please feel free to play whenever you wish.”

“Would you like a game?” I asked. “As long as you don't beat me as badly as you did at bocce.”

“I'm afraid my knees do not allow me to play much anymore, and when I ignore their advice it is my pride that puts an end to it. Sylvie is quite accomplished, though.”

“You played competitively?” I asked.

“Not seriously,” she said modestly, “but I played.”

“When did you stop?”

“When my father lost all his money.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“No, it made me know something about life.” She looked me directly in the eye with the full, steady gaze of someone who has done copious self-reflection. “What it means to have things, and what that is worth. What it means to lose them, and be without, and what that teaches you. But mostly, what it means to dream and to chase recklessly.”

“He get what he was after?”

“It cost him a family.”

She did not say it with bitterness, but a matter-of-fact evenness that touched me that much more. I did not know whether her sadness was in the past and healed or permanent, but she seemed sterling clear, without either illusion or anger, and there was no question that I liked her. Not with lust, simply the way some women make you think about family.

“Do you still enjoy the game?” I asked, turning the conversation back to tennis, and our plans for the next afternoon.

“I enjoy what it shows about people,” she answered, with what seemed to me a challenge.

“Don't be lulled,” Mr. Saavardra cautioned. “If she offers you a wager, don't accept.”

“I won't bet,” I said, “but I'll play.”

She and I talked in the airy living room a while longer, sometimes disagreeing strongly, but whenever she laughed I saw how alive and free she could be, which softened any edge.

When our conversation broke off we looked around to see everyone else had gone to bed. Realizing we had talked so intently, we grew awkward and I stood to say goodbye. She looked at me full and steady again and smiled with the transparency of those who might see us fully, and I was arrested another moment, sensing some unseen possibility and abundance just out of reach.

There was nothing dramatic; a tiny lunette opened—unformed desire—until our shared question—fear, uncertainty, caution—was whether we would leap through the high, small pane or flee. It was a feeling I knew not to trust. The pain of erring was too much.

We broke apart—the tension between us alive enough to name. The current was soon replaced by awkwardness, as I thanked her for her family's hospitality and excused myself to walk back around to my own side of the island; feeling, as I made my way through the dark, the quick pulse of want and hope from some other body hidden within me that wished to override the rest with its own certainty. I silenced it with the simple, rational knowledge that I did not know her. It was merely something in my subconscious that had caught and fought back irrationally, and difficult to resist.

Thiago answered the door the following afternoon when I arrived.

“I hope we did not keep you up last night,” I apologized, as we waited for Sylvie in the vestibule.

“I am sorry we did not say goodnight,” he said. “But we did not wish to interrupt your conversation. You know, Sylvie is an excellent person, a deeply good woman.” He nodded thoughtfully. “The women on that side of the family can be real forces.”

“Friends should not be involved,” I said.

“True, but men and women need each other. What are rules in the face of that? Some of them matter some of the time, and others are arbitrary. Even those that matter become irrelevant when you have in mind the thing you must do in work or life. There is no authority above that. Power, consequences, perhaps. Authority? Not for people who know what they are about. You elect your values and burdens and way of being after considering carefully the options available to you, and their cost. Who is great serves what is great, and pays the cost. Who is less, serves something less and pays for that. But I think you know this already. It is something we hear in the first part of life, and only understand in the second.

“I trust you, in any case, to know what you are about. If you do, everything else is in compliance. Things will work out or not. The rest, only the two of you can determine: whether she is whom you would be responsible to, and entrust with your life, and vice versa. If so, the only thing for me or anyone to say is,
Olé, señors
.

“If she is not, you will know in an afternoon, and she will know inside an hour. Whatever this true voice says, you will abide by. That is the way to be gentle with each other. You are young, enjoy your game.”

“Thank you,” I said, as Sylvie entered the hall breathlessly. His exhortation in another context might have made me apprehensive, but here it only made me glad to see her so well loved.

“Whatever my uncle said, don't listen,” she said, looking at each of us as he went back to his study. “He is old-fashioned and patriarchal. Did he tell you I'm an innocent virgin?”

When she alluded to sex it made me flush and as we walked to the court, where we hit a few balls to loosen up and get a feel for each other's game before we started to play. She had beautiful form, and beautiful instincts for the game. She could not out-hit me, so worked patiently, waiting for my errors. I had weight in my right arm, and relied on my harder serve and forehand to make up for any lack of finesse when she tested my other wing. In the end I took the first set, not beautifully but I won.

Midway through the second set my legs began to cramp, but I played through stubbornly until the end of the set, which she won. As I tried to stretch out the cramp, she came to see if I needed help.

“I am fine.”

“Don't be macho. Tell me if you want to quit.”

“No.”

She smiled and laughed, and we started the third set. The cramping did not let up, however, and she showed real concern for me. But I was determined to play through.

She was mindful of my situation in the beginning, until I gloated the tiniest bit, after a long rally. After that she was meticulous and relentless, making me run as much as she could.

“Don't worry,” she said, “I will still respect you when you lose.”

“It's not important to me.”

“That you win, or that I respect you?”

“Either.”

“So I see.” She laughed.

“What do you see?”

“You're in a bad situation either way.”

“It is only a game.”

“That is what my ex-husband used to say, and he meant it. But I don't believe you think anything is only a game.”

“You were married?”

“Yes. I thought I mentioned it last night. It was what you were supposed to do at the age I was then, which was also old enough to know better.”

“Who did you marry?”

“A man I thought was the right kind of man to marry.”

“He was not?”

“He
was
the right kind. He just was not the right man. Uncle Thiago is the only one who saw that, and questioned why I was doing it.”

“You didn't know?”

“I didn't listen. I was doing what I was supposed to do, because I did not know what
I-me-myself
wanted to do. And even if I had, I might not have known how to do it, let alone how to be in a real promise with someone else. I went ahead with it, and it was just right, except for the voice somewhere saying, are
you
sure? Are you
sure
? Of course I wasn't. How could I be? But the people had been invited. The hall was reserved. I walked down the aisle to the wrong prince, and the wrong castle. They all look the same from the
outside
. But once you get
inside
, oh boy little boy, that's a whole other story.”

“How long since you divorced?”

“We separated three years ago. We just filed the final papers. I came here to get away from all of it. The papers had a meaning I didn't expect, and the lawyers were a way I did not know.”

“But you're a lawyer.”

“Not that kind. I know about hammering together constitutions, not chiseling apart marriages.”

“Sorry it was difficult.”

“No harder than it should be. But no one ever listens to that part of the fairy tale. They tell you all these little girl lies, and I'm sure they told you little boy lies too, and then you are living to fulfill the lie, not knowing what else there is, and so you are stuck in a relative life. I have this in relation to that. But still need that over there. Once I find my prince, my castle, my pot of gold everything will be fine. For men, it is probably just: be tough and work hard. That is the only thing you think is required of you. But you think I'm just justifying my mistake.”

“How do you know what I think?”

“I'm sorry. I should not assume. All I meant to say is if you have just a partway idea of yourself, how can you have a wholehearted relationship to anyone else? Does that make sense? It's too hard to understand what another person goes through, if anyone ever really does, if you don't know what you yourself have been through, so that was the hard part of it for me.”

“You think you know now?”

“I see the look in your eye. Maybe. I just hope someday, some wise kindergarten teacher will take all the boys and girls into the coatroom, right after they have heard their first fairy tale, and tell them the score: Okay, now forget everything you just heard about the end. You are going to keep hearing it in everything they tell you from now on—how beautiful the princess is, how rich and handsome the prince, all about the gold standard. Just listen to me, kids, and pay close attention. First you will get lost in the woods. Or waylaid by ogres who sell you out to the witch, who is going to put you in her pot. Or else you will spend the best hundred years of your life fast asleep. And for you poor coyotes who think you are clever, Acme has special traps they are going to use to fix you up like Ozymandias. If not that, it will be the dragon who catches up to you and singes you to within an inch of your life. You will have to spend years in psychotherapy explaining why you can't go into the kitchen, because you are afraid of fire, and that's why you're so goddamned thin.”

She took a drink from my water bottle, before finishing her thought. “So you might as well do your own thing starting now, and live your own life in your own way, because I promise you this, whichever way you head, and whatever it is you're after, if it is worth anything at all, sooner or later it's going to hurt like hell.”

“Can't we all just stay out of the woods?”

“What, and turn into the dragon one scale at a time?”

Our game was long since ended, and we were sitting on the red clay, next to the net posts, careless of anything else. I wanted to spend more time with her, and invited her to join me on the river later in the week.

“I return to the city tomorrow,” she said. “I can come back on the weekend, and we can go out together then.”

“I would like that,” I said.

“I see what you are thinking,” she smiled. “Don't worry.”

“Don't worry about what?”

“You are wondering whether I'm available.”

“I am?”

“That's what I would wonder if I were a sensible man and had met a random girl I liked. But you should not. I have paperwork to take care of in the city that will dredge up old feelings, and I'll be sad and probably cry. But that will be to clean it all out. Hopefully you won't get insecure, or run away, because it will just be the sadness, complex but complete, you feel for what is vanished and gone. I will be better than new after that because I know something I did not before. Some of it I wish I did not, but I do, which makes me wiser and perfectly available. And if you play your cards right—who knows? So, second date?”

As I listened to her the idea lodged in my mind, and with it that joy of anticipation and new possibility. I was impressed again with her forthrightness and self-possession, and not anxious as I had been the night before, as I commanded myself to meet her steady gaze, and tried to observe what I was feeling, which was that perhaps it was not only my subconscious that was being snagged but my spirit.

Still I only did not know what our next meeting would hold.

A torrential rain was falling in Farodoro and predicted to sweep over the islands by evening, lasting through the weekend. Sylvie postponed, and I rowed to the main island in the afternoon for supplies to last through the storm. At the counter I asked Doña Iñes for batteries, but she had already run out, so I bought candles and extra matches, hoping if there was a blackout I would not burn the place down. There was only intermittent Internet on the island, and I had not read anything of the outside since arriving, so I put a stack of days-old newspapers in my basket as well. I scanned the headlines as I waited on line, saw the world was unchanged since I'd left, then put them back.

“
Oh, mi niño,
” Doña Iñes said, pushing me aside and packing my rucksack with the groceries, when she saw how ineptly I did it. She was from the Canaries, and had married a local man who died on her three years after she arrived. She never remarried or had children and called everyone “my child.” But I thought she was especially fond of me, because I knew her island and all about how the sea was there, and the fish and volcanoes and the light of first day in the middle of the Atlantic.

“
Buena suerte con la tormenta,
” she waved, as I took my supplies out to the dock.

“
Gracias.
”

Outside again I could see the pregnant, swollen clouds up river, and hurried to get back before they burst. As I loaded the boat the unmistakable sound of a child's crying reached me, and I turned to see a nine-year-old girl, in a navy dress, bawling on the other side of the wharf.