Grace (2 page)

She caught my gaze, and a sly smile dashed across her face under the green leaves, until she allowed herself the beginning of a chuckle. She had been my first girlfriend, and we dated from the end of high school until just after college. She was the most substantial girl I had ever met at seventeen, and twenty, and twenty-four when we parted. She had grown into a beautiful woman, and I was a sterling fool. I saw in her smile that she knew she still had an effect on me, leaving me to wonder whether she was upset, and what it might mean if she were.

“I am sorry for how things ended,” I said. “I was not ready. I had things to learn.” I halted, afraid, like all men who hoard their emotions, that if I let her know how vulnerable I felt she would see I was all vulnerability.

“I know,” she answered briskly, her voice quivering with complex emotion. “You still do. It took me a few years, but I'm over any of that now.”

“I just wanted you to know.”

“And I just wanted you to know I am a husband, two children, a mortgage, and an entire decade over it.”

I did the math and did not speak again until we stopped at her car, where we hugged, and parted, then considered each other, and hugged again. Held tight, and did not part, only pulled deeper into the comfort of our embrace and the memory of others deeper still, so that I felt in my marrow what I had been told but never understood before: regret is illumination come too late.

I pulled her tighter and felt her chest heave in time against mine, as my throat clenched around my vocal chords, and remained silent. I did not try to kiss her, afraid what would happen if I did. We clenched each other, absorbing the minute movements of each other's body and the feelings that flowed between us with each circular breath. And in the silence between—all the words we used to say.

I was embroiled in a shapeless relationship at the time with a woman named Devi, who worked as an emergency room doctor. A romance? A love affair? I no longer understood its form, only that it felt like an entanglement without a future, which disquieted my conscience. It had never been my intention for it to grow so amorphous or continue so long. We had merely slid into the thing after meeting at a party. I had been standing outside on the balcony and she came out to smoke a cigarette. “I thought you were a doctor,” I said. “You smoke?”

“We all have to die of something,” she answered, holding out the pack. She was attractive and poised, if a bit high-strung, but otherwise excellent in every way. When we'd gone back inside, so obviously drawn together, the other men in the room envied my monopoly on her time.

We went home together that night, and soon settled into a pattern of meeting each Thursday, whenever we were both in town. We went to the theater and to concerts, and afterward shared meals, wine, easy conversation, the splendor of each other's bed. It was a civilized affair. But our affection never grew and was never transfigured into love.

Our Thursdays had grown familiar, though, chronicling the domestic ups and downs of daily life, and in this way we had gotten caught in a limbo between lust and bliss. If it had broken free of the clay of the affair it had been, it also lacked the breath of a deeper bond. I decided it was time to become more serious or else end things, as it dawned on me how much I was wasting time. I had never tried to imagine a future together, but I admired her and it frightened me to know how pleasant and easy it might be to keep sliding.

When the taxi reached my apartment, the night we first met, I still had not decided to kiss her. “Are you going to invite me in?” she asked.

In the morning when she left, I felt it had been a fine evening, but that would be the end of it. She was the kind of girl who went home with a man she had just met. I was the kind of man who had taken a strange woman home. There it ought to remain.

I called the next day out of a sense of consideration, not intending to signal anything more than fondness, and to keep from adding to anyone's negative experience of the world.

She was careful as well. Telling me she had had fun without regret. We chatted awhile, until she seemed confident again, as she had been the night before. As we talked my interest in her was rekindled. She was not as boring as most doctors, who, because of the way they are trained, usually develop only one part of the mind. Before the call ended I asked her to dinner the following Saturday.

She told me she had to work. “It's not that I don't want to see you. It's just . . . that is when the world goes all to hell and people fall apart. Whatever holds them together during the week dematerializes, then they slip. They spill out of themselves. They crash. They burn. They overdose, or else go into withdrawal. They stab and shoot the people who love them, and generally rage and bleed and come undone all over the place. Afterwards they show up in the emergency room with their regrets, shame, anger, and sad confusion exposed for the whole goddamn world to see. If it wasn't my job I would not look, but it is just as wrong not to do something, so I try to stitch them back together into some human shape as best I can, but what's really the matter is always deeper than whatever wound I am suturing. But it is only an emergency room, so a temporary fix-up is all I can do.”

She was beginning to have what sounded like a panic attack, which she managed to prevent. I was not afflicted by them myself, but I was sympathetic to people who were. It was dinnertime by then, and neither of us wished to dine alone.

The next morning we made plans for the following week, setting the frequency to follow, although we were careful never to assume anything, and limited our communication, from one date to the next. Three months into what had become an unspoken understanding, we permitted ourselves to grow genuinely intimate in certain moments, but never beyond the moment itself. An animal baying in the nighttime, that never ventured any closer.

I did not ask what she did the other days of the week, nor open to what she called the box of things that haunted me. I still thought of it as a passing affair, in fact, until one of my friends referred to her as my girlfriend. She was not in the usual sense, but fixed in a state where neither of us wanted to push the other for definition, or press ourselves for clarity. We were simply sliding along in that way that happens in the city.

Whatever we named it or did not, though, after eight months it had grown more intricate, tendrils of expectation, obligation, questions poking forth and hanging in the air. It was this lingering doubt that multiplied our time together, though we knew that was not an acceptable standard. The diffuse, unsatisfied energy of the relationship also kept us from any clarity, and kept us from knowing what our true desire was. It was only abject fear of a muddled, false life that finally stirred me awake.

That Thursday we had tickets to a performance at Lincoln Center, and met at a bar down the street from the hospital where she worked. When we finished our drinks, the early spring weather was alluring and we decided to walk to the theater, chatting idly as we made our way down the rich Westside streets, full of lighthearted ease.

After the show Devi had made reservations for us at a restaurant near Gramercy Park, where we sat out in the garden, which had just opened for the season. The tables had been artificially distressed to look like antique farm tables from the country, and we enjoyed a seasonal meal among the heirloom plants that had provided our salads.

At the end of the meal she suggested a nightcap on the Lower East Side. I still had not unburdened my mind, because I did not like having intimate conversations in public. The weather was still fair, and the food had been satisfying, and her beauty was intoxicating in the candlelight, and I was divided. Wondering if I could will myself to love her. We went for one more drink.

“What is it?” she prodded, testing my drifting thoughts as we walked past a happy young couple, wheeling a stroller.

When I grew pensive, she knifed the silence. “I see where this is headed,” she divined, following my eyes after the family.

“What do you see?” I asked, as we floated past the bar and hit Canal Street, where the stench of trash from the fishmongers, piled up curbside, was overwhelming.

“We should break up. That's what you want, isn't it?” She tried to sound clinical and matter of fact, taking a cigarette from her handbag and lighting it. As she exhaled with detached coldness, the emotion it masked made me retreat further into my own doubt. My emotions were at odds, and I still did not understand which to trust.

“I think we should decide if we want to have a serious relationship,” I said. “I'm not comfortable with casual anymore.”

“You think we should decide,” she said tentatively, parsing each word. “Don't you know what you want?”

“We are not in love,” I blurted. It sounded awful even to my own ear, and I immediately began trying to reclaim the words from the air and put forth something more decent in their place. “Maybe we can be.”

“No, we are not, and no, we cannot. But we are having fun.”

“I don't want to have fun. I want to have a relationship.”

She laughed, then we both did. The temperature had dropped and she wrapped her arms around her shoulders.

“I did not think you wanted a relationship,” she said. “I don't want a relationship. I want to enjoy my youth.”

“Alone?” I asked. “You know, serious people have serious relationships. They choose intimacy, and give themselves fully to a passionate connection with another being, even if they make commitments.”

“My mother married young,” she said. “I've seen what that's like. I'll do it when I am thirty-three,” she calculated. “I'll get married at thirty-five and have children at thirty-seven. Until then, what's wrong with this?”

I thought to protest, to pour out the contents of my heart, but I did not wish to turn it into a conflict or risk rejection. I took off my jacket and placed it over her bare shoulders.

“Why now?” Devi asked again, pulling the lapels of the jacket tight.

“No reason. Only that it has been eight months, and I do not think we should continue like this anymore.”

“We have a good time together.”

“I want more than just a good time.”

“Call me in two years.”

“What are you going to do if it doesn't work out the way you have planned?”

“I froze my eggs,” she looked up at me. It was as much emotion as had ever flowed between us. “I refuse to let my life be circumscribed by anything, including my body. Know what I mean?”

I nodded. “I guess so. But we both know it's not that. I mean, it's not like we fell head over heels for each other.”

“Is that what you want? Head-over-heels madness? That is just the brain producing chemicals. You don't let your brain lead you around randomly. You decide. Someone makes sense for you, and what you want in life at that time. The other thing is crazy and frightening.”

She touched my arm lightly. “If it took you this long to realize you really want me, maybe it's a sign you really don't.” She had warmed enough from walking to turn down the lapels again, and took off the jacket, handing it back to me.

“I thought we would find out,” I shook my head, declining the blazer.

“If that's what you wanted, compromise, you would have taken any of the countless opportunities before now. You don't believe it, and are trying to convince yourself. But you can't, because it's too bleak.” She draped the jacket over her arm. “If we were meant to have more we would have it by now.”

“So we were just—”

“Having fun.” She smiled dimly, and took my arm again. “I thought we agreed to that.”

We had walked down to the East River by then, and were beneath the Manhattan Bridge, where the air was cool and the fishermen were casting lures under the high moon into the black river. We leaned over the rail, watching them awhile, as I became aware we were on an island in a way I had not appreciated moments before.

“You will find whatever you're looking for,” she said. “We both will.”

“Yes,” I answered, not wanting to drag it out any further. “When you are ready for what you seek, it reveals itself, I guess.”

“Is that a theory?”

“I guess.”

“So you don't want to continue?” she asked, her coolness giving way to a vulnerable coil of uncertainty and analysis—what I said I wanted, what I really wanted without admitting it, what I was projecting; how she responded to that projection, what she desired, her relationship to her own want—like a complex math problem we knew we would never manage to solve. She took the jacket from her arm and handed it to me again.

I should have taken it and gone home, except the liquor, her guilelessness when she let down her guard, the sheer beauty of her dark face, and the pleasure in hearing the emotion beneath her intelligence when she opened the microphone inside her head to me, all reminded me what had attracted me to her in the beginning, and betrayed my resolve.

“It wasn't so bad a time, was it?” she asked, still holding out the coat and looking across the length of her arms with a tenderness that surprised me.

“No,” I said. “We had a lovely time.”

“I don't have any regrets. Do you?”

“No,” I said. “It's just—”

“Shh. Don't say anything.” She put her finger to my lips. “Let's go back to your place and have breakup sex.”

“We shouldn't.”

“Well, at least kiss me goodbye.”

I began trying to explain why we should not, but she planted her mouth on mine.

When our lips parted it seemed to me that her feelings ran deeper, that there was doubt, and it provoked a greater empathy for her as I imagined I saw her human ache.

We found ourselves in bed again. There was, whatever else, a bond between us to remember.

She rose the next morning and dressed with a distant indifference that made clear it was the end of the affair, and not the uncertainty of other mornings after a hard night. I found myself hoping aloud we would remain friends, but stopped as soon as I realized I was making one of those
pro forma
statements that ring false even when sincere.