Grace (14 page)

“Will you stay for dinner?” Sally asks Anna.

“Did you cook?” Justin asks.

“No,” Sally says. “Giselle and I just lazed around all day.”

“Good. You look much better.”

“I feel much better. Giselle doesn’t have a temperature and her nose is not running. Anna came to keep us company. Will you stay, Anna?”

Justin frowns. “Should we order out?”

“Yes,” Sally says.

“Chinese? You’d like that, won’t you, Anna? I know you love Chinese.” He is aware of his tone as he asks this question. He knows she could find it offensive, she could think him patronizing. It is a tone that has been directed to him more than once:
You like watermelon, don’t you?
‘But he is angry. He wants to bait her.

She bites. “I’m American,” she says. “I eat American food. My parents were eating American food when your parents were picking bananas off the trees in Trinidad.”

“Whoa!” Sally says. “Peace.” She holds up her hands.

“What did I say wrong?” Justin asks.

“I think you should apologize,” Sally says.

“Anna, I apologize for thinking you are Chinese.”

“That’s it,” Anna says. “I’m leaving.” She walks swiftly to the parlor. Sally and Giselle follow her.

“Will you come tomorrow?” Sally asks her.

“When will you be home?” She is already in her coat.

“About four as usual. After I pick up Giselle.”

“Then five,” Anna says. She whispers something to Sally that Justin does not hear. Sally says, “No. It’ll be okay, it’ll be fine.” Or did she say, Justin wonders,
“He’ll be fine”
?

Anna waves to Giselle. “’Bye Giselle.”

Giselle hugs her.

When Anna leaves, Sally says to Justin, “Why can’t you be nice to her?”

The afternoon is ruined for him. He has come home to fix his marriage. He wants to make peace. He wants to talk to Sally; he wants to find out what’s on her mind.

They play their roles perfunctorily. They are a family: he orders dinner from the Chinese restaurant, she sets the table, he cleans up afterward; she gives Giselle her bath, he reads a bedtime story to her; they sleep on the same bed, she on her side, he on his. They say Good night. They do not kiss. They do not make love.

Justin is not a religious man, but his mind has been on Ursula. Perhaps he will get God’s sprinkling of stardust; he will receive the gift of grace. He can steady Sally; he can steady their marriage.

Sally began watching the talk shows on TV a few days after Giselle turned four. At first it was
Oprah
, but soon, it seemed to Justin, even
Oprah
became too realistic for her—too many grays overwhelming her. In the morning, before she left for work, she would set the VCR to the earlier shows. Sometimes it was
Sally
, sometimes
Montel.
Before long she was taping both and the others, too, that came later in the day. At night, while Justin was in the den grading papers, writing or reading, she looked at them in their bedroom.

Justin would hear the laughter coming from the TV, sometimes the strident voice of a man or woman, sometimes the sounds of tears, but it never occurred to him to stop what he was doing and join her. They had made their pact with Khalil Gibran. There were spaces in their togetherness. After Giselle went to bed, each gave the other time to be alone. But one night, feeling a sudden chill, Justin came into the bedroom looking for
a sweater. Their bed was at the far end of the room, near the windows, and Sally was sitting on it, her eyes glued to the TV. She didn’t turn when he entered in the room, and curious about what held her attention, Justin stayed to watch.

The moderator, Justin has forgotten which one it was, was standing in front of two men seated on armchairs.

“Can you look into his eyes and say what you told me? Say that you’re sorry you hurt him? Admit to him that you slept with his wife and that you are sorry?” The moderator was speaking to the older man. “Because, to tell you the truth, I don’t think there is any hope for the two of you to have a relationship as father and son if you can’t do that. Face him. Say what’s in your heart and in your soul. Tell him you want his forgiveness. Tell him you love him.”

The older man’s bottom lip was trembling. The moderator tugged the younger man’s chair. “Get closer. Your daddy has something to tell you. You want to hear it, right?” The younger man burst into tears. “You want to hear what he has to say, right?”

The younger man’s shoulders heaved with his sobs.

“Your daddy loves you. He wants to tell you that. You want him to say it, don’t you?”

“Yes.” His voice was muffled.

“Your daddy can’t hear you, David.”

“Yes.” David’s eyes were bloodshot, dripping wet.

The moderator patted his back. “Everything will be all right, David. Everything will be fine. I guarantee it. When you hear what your daddy has to say to you, everything will be
okay. Guaranteed. Yes, doctor? Yes?” The moderator turned to a preppy looking man in a navy blue blazer and gray slacks who was sitting in the front row of the audience. The preppy man nodded and smiled. Affirmation secured, the camera swung back to the two men. Once again the moderator urged them to pull their chairs closer together.

The older man complied.

“You’re ready?” the moderator asked.

“I’m sorry,” the man said.

“Look at him, not at me,” the moderator admonished him. “You want to tell him, not me.”

“I am sorry, David. I am sorry I slept with your wife.”

“Tell him how many times. He needs to know the truth. There can be no forgiveness without the truth.”

“For five years,” the older man said. “I slept with Stacy for five years.”

Even the moderator seemed taken aback by this confession. Perhaps his aides had not warned him. Perhaps the man had lied to them. But in seconds the moderator regained his equilibrium.

“It’s not the time that matters here,” he said. “It is your willingness to tell all.”

The camera was back on the preppy man in the front row seats. He nodded vigorously and mouthed, “That’s right.”

“So ask David to forgive you. Get closer. He has to hear you.”

The father took his son’s hand. The moderator approved. “Good, good,” he said.

“Will you forgive me, David?”

The son was crying harder now.

“So what do you say, David? What do you say to your father? He is asking your forgiveness. Do you hear him?”

“I am sorry. I am sorry I caused you so much pain. I am sorry I caused your wife to take her own life. I am sorry.”

David collapsed in his father’s arms. The audience erupted into cheers. The moderator strutted over to the doctor. He smiled, the doctor smiled. They slapped each other high fives.

“Jesus! What crap! What inane, stupid, ridiculous, unmitigated crap!”

Sally spun around, her fingers skating to the power button on the remote.

“How could you look at such crap? The father has sex with his daughter-in-law for five years and drives her to suicide, and now he looks in his son’s face and asks for forgiveness? Have they no shame? Have the people who put such crap on TV no shame? Why are you looking at this, Sally?”

“It works,” she said, pointing the remote at the blank screen. “I’ve seen it work.”

“You’ve seen it work?”

“They come back. On another show. They talk about it.”

“They come back on another show? How long have you been looking at this, Sally?”

“I like these shows.”

“Is that what you’ve been doing every night?”

“When they come back, they talk about how they were able to heal the hurt between them.”

Heal is another word Justin despises.

“Heal,” he shouted at her, “nothing heals. Wounds form scabs, scabs drop off, new skin grows, but the scar remains. It does not go away. Only God creates, Sally. Only He can make new things. We just go on living, adding to the past, adding to the old, living with the pain. Accumulating. Everything in the present contains the old. The future is the past. Have the courage to face that truth. ‘In my end is my beginning. In my beginning is my end.’ Read the poets, Sally. ‘The child is the father of the man.’”

When they first met, she was reading Eliot; they were discussing Wordsworth. They read Langston Hughes and Derek Walcott together. What had changed? What had made her begin looking for the road maps to her life in the fairy tales they told on TV?

The signs had been there for Justin to read. New books had found their way onto her nightstand:
Rebuilding Lost Moments, A Life Fulfilled, Finding the True You.
The stack grew. Every week, it seemed, there were others:
The Goddess Sleeping within You, Repairing the Wounds, Daring to Live in the Present.
Clichés slipped into her conversations, presented as truisms, as considered philosophies by which she seemed to want to guide her life.

This morning he sits with Sally at breakfast and in spite of his determination to feel otherwise, the name on the tag that hangs from the string of the tea bag dunked in the hot water she has just poured into her mug annoys him. Mystical Mornings. He thinks of these names as trite messages of hope to the weak-willed. “What does this one mean?” he asks her.

“What does what mean?”

“What’s mystical about the mornings?” He flicks the tag with his little finger.

She does not answer him. When they leave for work, they are barely speaking to each other again.

But at lunchtime, he is remorseful. He calls to apologize. He wants to talk, he says. He wants to listen to what she has to say.

She is expecting Anna in the afternoon, she tells him.

Perhaps she can ask Anna to watch Giselle tonight, he says. She is silent. He had been rude to Anna. Before that he had practically accused Anna of being negligent with his daughter. “I’d like us to go out to dinner,” he says. “Just you and me, only the two of us, Sally.”

“The two of us?”

“A date, Sally.”

She considers this. Hold on a minute, she says. He waits. When she comes back to the phone she says she will call Anna. If it’s okay with her, she’ll drop Giselle off at her apartment. They decide on a restaurant.

The first thing he notices when she takes off her coat is that she is lovely. The first thing he thinks is that he is a lucky man.

The man at the table next to theirs stares at her. Justin reaches over and touches Sally’s hand. “Thank you for coming,” he says.

“I wanted to come,” she says. “We need to talk.”

She is wearing taupe and pale beige, her favorite colors—a
pale beige sweater set and a narrow taupe skirt. Justin thinks she has the body of a goddess, a Nubian goddess. She has lost every ounce of fat she had put on when she was having Giselle. It has sloughed off like magic. “And jogging three miles a day,” she had told him.

“Wine?” He has a sudden impulse to put it off, this to need to talk, as Sally says.

“It’s much too early for wine,” she says.

“What then?”

She brushes back the tight curls that crowd her head. “Fruit punch,” she says.

The man next to them is wearing a burgundy sweater. He, as usual, is dressed in black. Perhaps he should have worn something brighter, something not so serious, not so morbid.

“You look lovely,” he says.

Sally smiles. “You want to start first?” she says.

He clears his throat. It is why they are here. It is why he has asked her to meet him in this restaurant. “Before we begin,” he says, “I want to give you my terms.”

“Terms?” She raises her eyebrows.

The waiter interrupts. They place their orders.

“You were saying about terms?” she begins again.

This hardness he hears in her voice makes him uneasy. Anna has said something to her. He is sure of it, as he is sure that it is Anna who put the thought in her head that she should move in with her. Misery likes company. Anna has never been married. Anna does not have a boyfriend. He thinks the current hoopla about female bonding is simply the consequence of the unavailability
of men. It is not politically correct for him to say this, of course, but he believes he is not alone in having this view. Even women seem to agree. They say that when their women friends find boyfriends, they hardly ever see them.

“Terms is a harsh word, Sally,” he says, “I want to be anything but harsh, but I think it is best that we set some bottom lines. These are mine: I love you. I do not want our marriage to end. I do not want Giselle bumped from one parent to another. I do not want her in two places.”

“Is this about Giselle?” Sally asks.

“No, it is about us. About you, Sally,” he says quickly. “I want to know … I want you to tell me what is bothering you.”

“And you won’t criticize?” She eyes him over the rim of her glass.

“When have I … ?” He decides to stop there. Whatever he was going to say is a lie, and she will point that out to him. He does not want to start this way.

“You won’t talk about my platitudes and clichés? Because you may not like it, Justin, but that is how I speak.”

He does not say,
That is how you have begun to speak. You did not always speak this way.