Grace (23 page)

“I like my job just fine, Justin.”

“Because I’m sure the president has to be impressed with all you know about gardening.”

The church lady brings their food. She gives the fish to Anna and the chicken to Justin, and when they tell her they had ordered just the opposite, she begins a long story about a man who looks exactly like Justin and always orders fried chicken. “All the Southern men around here love my fried chicken,” she says.

Anna laughs. “This is not a Southern man,” she says.

“Well, he sure looks like one to me.”

She leaves and Anna says, “See, Justin, she took you for an American. You know what they say. All black people …” She leaves the rest of the sentence hanging.

He knows she is getting back at him for his innuendo about Chinese food a few days ago. She was none too pleased either with his quip about her interest in gardening. But he lets her have the upper hand. There will be time enough to let her know what he thinks of her.

They eat. They talk. Light banter. If Anna is curious about his reason for inviting her to lunch, she gives no indication. She comments about the food. She says she wishes she could make fried chicken the way the church ladies do. Hers is always too dry, she says, or undercooked.

Justin complains of the many papers he has to correct. Anna says it’s the worst part of teaching. Justin restrains himself, but not entirely. It’s not the worst part, he says, but yes, the hardest part.

They talk about the cuts the mayor has proposed. Anna says
that just when the immigrants who come to the City University are no longer white, the politicians charge tuition. It is an offering to Justin. She is being nice. Generations of European immigrants have had the advantage of going to college free of charge, she says, but the poor Caribbean immigrants have to scrimp and save.

The church lady brings their dessert. They are talking now about marriage, not Justin’s and Sally’s marriage, about the marriage of a colleague of Anna’s whom Justin knows, a marriage that is on the brink of tottering. The subject is close enough, and after his second forkful of the cobbler, Justin decides to begin. “I was thinking, Anna,” he says, “that Sally needs time for herself. Lately, it seems to me, you and she—”

Anna stops him “Look, Justin,” she says, “I know we don’t get along. I know you don’t care for me, but I wanted to have lunch with you today. I was glad you called. I wanted to tell you that I was wrong about you. I had no right speaking to you the way I did the other night. Sally told me.”

In spite of his best intentions, Justin finds himself becoming irritated again. “Sally told you?” He puts down his fork.

“That you said she should go to Bermuda for a week. I think that is a very good thing to do. I think that was really thoughtful of you.”

“Thoughtful?”

“I think that was really kind of you?”

“Kind? I am always thoughtful and kind to my wife, Anna.”

“I know. I wasn’t saying—”

“Then what were you saying?”

“Sally has been so depressed lately. I was saying a trip to Bermuda will be good for her. That’s all. It will give her a break.”

“A break from what, Anna?”

“I’m not fighting with you, Justin. I may not have the right words, but I just want to tell you that I’m glad Sally is feeling better. It was great to hear her laughing on the phone with me last night over my silly joke.”

It is the wrong image to put in his mind. It is Sally’s laughter that set him off. But they have come to the end of their lunch and now is the time to let her know that he is on to her. He knows her dirty secret. “What is it you want with Sally, Anna?”

The expression on Anna’s face changes. The softness vanishes, replaced by a simmering indignation, not yet anger. “What is it I want? Sally is my friend, my best friend.”

“I am Sally’s best friend.”

“I mean after you, of course.” Anna smiles, a forced smile that unnerves him.

His jaw tightens. “I know what you are doing, Anna.”

“Doing?”

“Working your way into getting Giselle to like you.”

“What do you mean? I’ve known Giselle from the time she was born. Of course she likes Aunt Anna. I take her for ice cream. Okay.” She raises her hands in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, I know you don’t want me to do that, but I should’ve thought you’d want her to like her Aunt Anna.”

“Not if her Aunt Anna has plans for her mother.”

“Plans?”

“To seduce her mother.”

“Seduce?”

“You know very well what I mean.”

Had he not been blindsided by Helen, Justin would have thought he was in the middle of a tawdry melodrama, something one sees on a soap opera in the early afternoon. And, indeed, it is in the early afternoon that he is having this conversation with Anna. He would have laughed at the character who had spoken his words, regarded them as the simpering ravings of a foolish, weak, insecure, paranoid man. But this is no laughing matter for Justin. He is serious, dead serious, and Anna can see that he is.

She leans over to him, her eyes hard as nails, and whispers: “I like men, Justin. I fuck men. It may not seem to you I fuck at all, but I do. Men. Men who are a hundred times more handsome and smarter than you.”

Justin sits back shocked by the language she has used, by the reference she has made to her sex life, by the intensity of her emotion. He has no repartee, nothing he can think of this second to say in his defense.

“I could never figure out how a woman so beautiful as Sally could be married to a stick-in-the-mud shit like you,” Anna is saying. She picks up her fork and points it at him. “You are Sally’s problem. You criticize her for the books she reads, the programs she watches on TV. You make her feel stupid.”

Justin reaches for the glass in front of him. Anna does not let him speak. “That is how you want Sally. You want her to be your little wife who has your dinner ready for you when you
come home. You want her to be the mother to your daughter who feeds her, dresses her, plays little games with her. You want her to be a teacher of little elementary school children. But you don’t want her to think. You don’t want her to write. Because, Justin.” She is looking intently at him now, forcing him to face her. “Because she may discover that she does not need you to make her happy. She may find out she can be happy without you. That she can write again without you.” She puts down the fork and gets up. “Sally was a good poet, goddamn it.” Her voice is strained; it comes through clenched teeth. “I don’t know how you can sleep at night, Justin, knowing that she’s wasting all that talent.”

She leaves without giving Justin a chance to respond, but he comforts himself. He says to himself, to her back advancing toward the coat rack near the front door, “But I don’t know that, Anna. I don’t know for sure that Sally is a good poet, that she is wasting her talent.” All he has read are four poems. All he knows is that they terrified him. And what he believes is that a poet, a real poet, would let neither his terror nor hers silence her.

Later that afternoon he sees Banks at the college. Mark’s back in school, Banks tells him.

He is still thinking of his lunchtime conversation with Anna. Stick-in-the-mud shit is what she called him. “Then I should be hearing from him soon,” he says.

“He looks great,” Banks says. “That’s the advantage of youth. No question about it. You get over stuff real fast.”

“I think it’ll be a while for Mark,” Justin says.

“Don’t know about that. Looks like he’s back in the swim.”

Banks walks with him down the corridor. They are on the side of the building where the classrooms are. It is Wednesday. Faculty like to teach on Wednesdays. All the doors are shut, and though the corridor is empty, it is noisy. It is the kind of noise Justin likes to hear—the sounds of students thinking, seeping out from under closed classroom doors. But today these sounds do not lift Justin’s spirits.

“Bet you wish you were home right now,” Banks says, stopping in front of a bulletin board in the corridor. He twists his head in the direction of an ad for a vacation in the Caribbean. A blonde wife and an equally handsome bronzed husband are windsurfing on a bright blue sea. From a white sandy beach, the children wave to them—a blonde boy, and an equally golden-haired girl.

“That, there, is not where I come from,” Justin says.

Banks misses his point. “Perhaps it’s not Trinidad, but it’s the Caribbean and I wouldn’t mind being there.”

“So go at Easter break.”

“Wouldn’t know which one to take.”

“The wives?” Justin asks.

“They both want to come.”

“Well, they get along like a house on fire.”

Banks frowns. “You making fun of me, man?”

“That’s what you told me.” He does not want to be mean, but it is hard to feel kindly either, not when he has just been accused of causing his wife’s unhappiness. If what Anna said is true, then he deserves the name she called him. Banks makes an easy target. Less painful than aiming at himself.

He turns to walk away but Banks stops him. “They’re threatening to leave me, man,” he says. “They’re ganging up on me. They want me to choose.”

Justin knows he wants his sympathy. Banks can barely mask the pleading in his voice. But Justin has no sympathy left to give. Thoughts of Anna, his uncertainty about his marriage, make it impossible for him to give Banks the attention he seems
to be begging to get. “That’s how it is in the free world, Banks,” he says. He shrugs. “Women want more.”

Those last words expose him. Banks detects his fear. “Sally, too? I told you you should’ve asked about those letters. That’s some heavy shit, man.”

Justin feigns indifference again though Banks gets under his skin. “Hey,” he says and throws up his arms.

“I don’t know what to do. Things are getting worse at home.” Banks remains mired in his problems.

“Decide.”

“I can’t choose.”

Justin steels himself. He wants to separate Banks’s troubles with his wives from his. Their situations are not the same. He has one wife, not two. He is going to make things better in his home, not worse. “This Afrocentricity is a bitch, isn’t it?” he says, not masking his sarcasm.

But Banks is too absorbed with his Solomonic dilemma to pay attention to him.

IN THE EVENING, after dinner, he talks to Sally.

“Have you decided when you will go to Bermuda?” he asks.

They are sitting in the living room. They are reading. Usually at this time, he is in his den grading papers and she is in the bedroom looking at her tapes of the talk shows. But something has changed between them. A yet unarticulated intimacy has eased them, if not to its ultimate expression, at least to the point where, unconsciously, they seek each other’s presence. He has not said any of the words Anna probably would think
he should say, but he wants to try. He wants Sally to be happy and he thinks she senses his sincerity.

She looks up from her book. It is not one of those books that are stacked on her night table, offering airy solutions and false promises to the desperately hopeful. He recognizes the dust-cover with its black background, its title in red, a stamped letter wrapped into a scroll and pointed downward in the middle as if it were a dagger. He had brought it home and left it accidentally on the kitchen table. He is glad she has picked it up. Anna is entirely wrong. He does not want a simple wife, a mere mother for his daughter. He does not want a wife who does not think, who does not read books that challenge her.

“I’ve been wondering if a week isn’t too long,” she says. “Anna disagrees. She thinks I should go for a week, but I’m not sure.”

It upsets him that she has sought Anna’s advice, but he is reminded simultaneously of his folly, his stupidity. His desperation. Hadn’t he told Banks and Mark that a person cannot be seduced into becoming a homosexual?

“Why is a week too long?” he asks.

“To tell you the truth,” she says, “it’s not just the length of time.”

“Then what?”

“It’s the place, too.”

“Bermuda is terrific. You loved it.”

“You were there,” she says. Her eyes drop to the book on her lap as she says this. “That is why I loved it.”

It is the second time in only a few days that she has told him
she loves him, and he had to ask the first time. Now she volunteers and they are both made shy by her admission.

“Well, I think you should think it over some more,” he says.

She returns to her reading and he is angry with himself. He has let the moment pass. There is so much he could have said to her. He could have said, for example,
That is why I will not go there without you, too.
Or, perhaps, perhaps, he could have seized the moment, put an end to the formality still skirting the edges of their conversations, and said,
I love you, too, Sally.
Instead, he has spoken like a counselor, an advisor, a friend. Anna.

Now he wants to begin again, to engage her again. “Do you like it?” he asks, titling his head toward the book.

“This novel?” She uses her finger to hold her place.

“What do you think of it?”

“Have you read it?” she asks him.