Grace (3 page)

“You mean in case I change my mind. I won't,” she said. “I like that we were always honest with each other. Even in what we did not say. Don't change that now. We will not be friends. If you decide you want what I want, you can call me. Otherwise you should delete my number. It's easier that way. Let go the past. Always. Even if it hurts. I always thought we respected that about each other.”

I nodded. “I always appreciated what we had. I want more now. As you said, we were honest.”

“Oh, Harper, we didn't have claims on each other. That was the point. I was here whenever you asked me to be, and I am not exactly burdened with excess time. I never made demands. We were decent to each other. What else do you want?”

“Not to fight now.” I tried to match her coldness. “Why go deeper into it? Why stop being decent now?”

“May I ask something personal?” Devi asked. We were standing in the kitchen, and I made coffee to have something to do with my hands.

“Why not?” I handed her a cup.

She took a cigarette from her purse and raised her eyes to see whether I minded her smoking in the house. I shrugged, and she opened the window, then sat on the sill. “Have you been in love before?”

“Yes. I believe so.”

“And it didn't work out, or else we wouldn't be here now. I have as well. I do not need that now. It is too, too unreliable. Know what I mean?”

“I believe so.”

“I mean, you think life always works out for the best, if you're smart and work at it. It doesn't. Life makes no sense. You work hard, and you're clever as anyone, and you get banged up despite yourself. If I get banged up again, I at least want it to be beyond my control.”

“You think we would hurt each other?”

“I know we would. We would look at each other one day, when we were dissatisfied in general, and wonder whether there was more. Something we had robbed ourselves of. As it is, we have exactly the deal we struck. You call me whenever you want. I answer. Neither of us ever has to say, ‘I want you.' Or ‘I miss you.' Or ‘I feel alone.' Or ‘I love you and am devoted for the duration.'” She gestured toward the streets beyond the window. “The messy things that lead to disappointment and worse, when you are still misunderstood and feel alone inside a couple.

“You gave what you wanted, what you could. So did I. And if I didn't give any more, I never gave less. But if you start asking me for more now I
will
give less. Eventually I will hate you for demanding, for needing, and you will hate me for not giving. At least that would be the smart way to feel. But if either of us was emotionally available to the other, we would have owned up to this long ago.” She placed her coffee cup down on the sill, and looked out the window.

“It's not a logic problem,” I said, still uncertain what I felt, other than we had achieved the clarity of knowing it was over. “It's the difference between what we think—I admire this person; maybe we can be happy together. What we feel—this is fun; we like each other—and what we experience, which is that we are not in love.”

“Maybe we are not emotional people.”

“Everyone is emotional. Even us.”

“I am a realist. And you? Maybe when it's a war somewhere.” She turned from the window to look at me. “Or a disaster, or someone so far removed the camera only looks one way, with no chance of the other person turning it back. Then you understand everything, and feel everything, including your own self-gratifying, morally superior
emotion
of empathy. What about the person next to you? What about me, who was in your bed?”

“You said you were not available in that way.”

“Maybe I would have been.”

“That's irrational.” I was confused, but it was clear our deepest selves were not present, and would not be. We were simply analyzing the end of the affair, shifting the ruins of a vanquished civilization for some muddy understanding of why it was predestined to fail.

“Maybe it would have worked if you had taken the risk in the beginning, six, four, five months ago. You know what I mean? The risk people take when they put everything on the line for what they want. Now you will go chase something else. Why worry about what we had. I don't know why I am arguing about this.”

“Because you care? I don't know.”

“Because I'm confused. You're confused and confused means no. You don't want me. You've merely talked yourself into it, because you like the idea of me. If you wanted me and I wanted you we would have known. But we cared for each other. It's right to acknowledge that. If you want a family it's wrong that we should settle for that alone.”

What she said rang true and I relinquished the argument. What I felt, to my chagrin, was relief.

“Or maybe in the end all we can do is settle. But not yet.” She rose from the window, brushing down the skirt of her dress. She came and stood next to me in her bare feet, looking up wistfully.

“You're right.” I smiled at her.

“I know,” she sighed, moving away to find her shoes. “Yet here we are in this kitchen again. Isn't it the worst?”

“No,” I said. “The worst is that more was not given to us.” The pain I felt was not only the anguish of separation, but the agony of being at cross-purposes with myself.

I still thought dimly we might figure out how to love each other, not accepting that love was exactly that which refused to be figured. Reason, though, made me want to rationalize that what I had with her was enough, because it seemed to make logical sense, and that was the way of thinking I trusted. The rest of it, the phenomena I could not prove logically, and were threatening to reason itself, I had been trained long ago to shut down. But, as I stood there debating what I was doing, I wondered whether I had not led myself into a trap. What I knew was the uncertainty I felt, which I could not explain, but on some level I think I wanted her because I knew it was a relationship that, even if it did not offer the depths of love, would never produce any sharper pain. I think we recognized that in each other. That we wanted to keep from feeling too much pain. What I accepted that morning, whatever hell it might cost, was I wanted to follow the other part of myself, if it was available—the rest of love.

I cannot pinpoint when I first stopped trusting and following my own emotions; whether it was due to something I witnessed, something I read, or somewhere in my experience. But I distrusted them as much as any false comfort or all-explaining ideology anyone claimed to believe.

The “great events” I witnessed, during the years I worked as a correspondent, covering wars for a small, barely read liberal journal, certainly did nothing to restore my faith once it was gone. The last thing I remembered before changing careers was a nineteen-year-old farm boy with three limbs gone, calling for God to help him, as the bomb blasts still rang in the air. He did not want to die, and he did not want his death to be meaningless.

A cynic would ask which limb remained. I only swallowed my disbelief at the official version of things, spooned out at a press briefing the next day.
Five of our men made the ultimate sacrifice defending their country.
He was a hero, they claimed. I knew they believed it. But it seemed to me to defy the point of life. I was fearful for the future after that, and fearful of the place I was in.

Nights I returned to the hotel, where I drank alone, writing out lifeless copy and searching through the thesaurus for another locution for
lie
, for
injustice
, for
self-serving
,
self-perpetuating
, until I knew the meaning of every word in the language except innocence, benison, absolution.

When I could no longer abide the world I was in, due to what it seemed to do to the world within me, I understood what danger I had cast myself into, and decided to abandon that path. I quit to earn money and figure out the next part of life. As for war, human rights, and the rest, I had come to suspect they began to be destroyed with the annihilation of the Neanderthals, so deep was murder in our nature.

I was past thirty-five, had few savings from my meager income, and watched as my friends assumed lives of greater and greater ease, while my own plunged into ever-deeper uncertainty. I decided to sell out, if you want to call it that, and get with the rest before it was too late. Not because I had lost faith that anything I did or said or wrote about what I saw mattered. It was because I had come to accept nothing anyone experiences or says matters at all.

I could not get rid of the past completely, of course. Part of that other place remained with me, calling out some days still, in meetings, in restaurants, on the street, whenever I saw people with the same treacherous look in their eyes I associated with greed, suffering, and the nihility in each of us.

I wondered in such moments about Lucifer.
When he was cast down, and transformed from his station as God's favorite, at what point in the fall did he understand himself to be no longer an angel?

I did my utmost never to be a hypocrite, but comprehended the duality in all our natures. My talisman against my own had been to look to the better part of it. And so keep the more mysterious, equally strong, forces at bay. I policed myself vigilantly in this, as you would a caged panther.

Like Lucifer, though, I knew that I was gifted, and tried to remember all gifts serve a higher purpose, lest I become like the people I saw who compromised, then abandoned, their ideals, until they could justify even the most mortal behaviors. Appetites I shared—I had poured out most of a year in an affair that was too much idle time and empty bottles—but did not approve. It was behavior that belonged to those beings in us who slip free their cages through the ruptures of pain and loss. Until the only sin left was murder.

Sin I learned as a boy, saying prayers every night before bed. I remember reading somewhere that if you said the name of God, any name of God, enough times it would eventually become part of your heart, and only then would you see Him. I came to know rationally where there is no god there is also no sin. In this way I lost my first religion by thirteen. Only to find later what bitter solace reason was for what I had given up.

And like Lucifer, I knew, pride was my greatest sin. By fourteen I was perhaps worse than the devil, who only battled God over His heavenly throne. My war with Him was over creation.

I knew my fortune, though, in being able to choose a life I desired, and the values I would live by. I thought the best way to honor this was to be steadfast in them. I was no longer an idealist, but still tried to believe there was a life of the spirit. At times, sensing it when I listened to music, or read psalms alone on Easter. I left money sometimes for orphanages, for the homeless, for monks whenever I happened past a temple, glad to see their prayer flags chanting against the wind.

Devi left, and from the balcony I watched her make her way down the block toward the subway, her body swaying lightly beneath her printed sundress, the color of forsythia in April. I wondered at the mystery that compels us to feel our entire being awaken to one person and not another, alongside the remorse that the only thing the matter with the person in my bed was nothing to do with who she was, but only who she was not.

I already missed her human company, though, as she slipped away, and the familiarity that kept our affair going so long, the solidity of another person in the immaterial gloom.

As she vanished into the mouth of the subway, I wondered whether if I had said nothing, and let things take their natural course, we might have learned to be satisfied, second-guessing myself again as possible happiness, possible futures collapsed like light switches in an abandoned house with each step she took.

I understood then why the relationship had gone on so long: because I feared there was no such thing as lasting, unconditional love; or else, if there was, I would wake one morning only to find myself unable to fulfill its demands. Her yellow dress disappeared into the subway, and I watched as it swallowed her from my life, alone again and utterly free, as I used to be before I knew her.

When I checked my e-mail that morning, I was struck to receive an invitation to Schoeller Mitchell's bachelor party. I knew him from college, as the man I least expected ever to marry. He embraced his debauchery with such zeal and openness, whenever I saw him the word
corrupt
always presented its naked syllables in my mind. The fact that he was finally committing himself to marriage was remarkable, even if it was a woman he'd once dismissed in the most graphic, vulgar terms.

“How did you meet?” A mutual friend had asked, after one of their early dates, at a West Village bar where we were gathered for drinks the last time I'd seen him.

“I was out with Rex, and she was walking down the street with her boyfriend.”

“And that didn't deter you?”

“Survival of the fittest, my friend. I knew I was going to marry her.”