Grace (29 page)

Sally knows the old joke her mother-in-law plays with Justin. “You had a good time at Nana’s?”

“She gave me a doll. A pretty, pretty doll.”

“Oh, Nana spoils you, Giselle.”

“I’ll show you when we get home, Mommy.”

“What else did you and Daddy do?”

Giselle winks at her father. Sally misses the secret signal between them.

“Anna took her to the movies,” Justin says quickly. “And I took her for pancakes.”

“Pancakes? So that’s what you two do when I’m not here.”

Giselle giggles. “But Daddy bought you soul food,” she says.

“Sorry. I didn’t cook,” Justin says, but he knows Sally will not miss this attempt to please her. Soul food, though he eats it, is not his favorite food.

“A treat for me, too,” she says.

Justin smiles. “That ashram seems to have done you some good. You look great,” he says.

“It’s peaceful there,” Sally says.

“And what
did you
do?”

“At the ashram? Sleep, eat, walk, yoga, meditate, sleep and eat some more.” Then, as if in an afterthought, she adds, “Oh, yes, I did some writing.”

“Poetry?”

“No. No, nothing like that. In my journal,” she says. “I wrote in my journal.”

WHEN THEY ARRIVE at the house, he unlocks the front door and walks quickly ahead of them to the kitchen. He switches on the light. It is sufficient to illuminate their way through the living room, but not enough to expose the books he has placed on the top of the bookshelf, or the empty space on the credenza
where he has removed Sally’s photographs. He knows, like Anna, Sally notices everything.

Giselle helps him unintentionally. She hurries Sally to the back of the house. She wants to show her how much the plants have grown. Aunt Anna, she says, told her she must have been a really, really good girl because plants don’t grow that fast.

Later that night, after they have their dinner, Sally gives Giselle her bath and Justin reads a bedtime story to her. Sally sits on the rocking chair while Justin reads, and when Giselle begins to nod off, she gets up. She is unpacking her suitcase when Justin comes into the bedroom.

“How was Giselle?” she asks. “Did she give you any problems while I was away?”

“No. Not at all. She was an angel.”

“An angel?”

“Well, to be honest, I wasn’t unhappy when Anna came this morning to take her to the movies.”

Sally smiles knowingly. “Giselle can be a handful,” she says. “Anna is really good with her.”

Justin agrees.

“You two getting along better?”

“Trying,” he says.

She continues to unpack her things. He wants her to tell him more about the writing she did at the ashram, but he is unsure how to begin. “I’m glad you got the chance to write,” he says.

“Yes,” she says. She is moving back and forth in the room, from her suitcase to the drawers in the armoire. “I think I know
exactly what I’m going to do in the weeks that are left before school lets out for the summer.”

He is puzzled. “School?” he asks.

“I got a chance to work on my lesson plans at the ashram.”

“But you also wrote in your journal, right?”

“That’s what I wrote in my journal,” she says.

“Lesson plans?”

“Well, thoughts I had in the day about projects I could make for my students. Ideas for trips. That sort of thing.”

“I thought …,” he says. He begins again. “I hoped when you were there, you would write. Poems, I mean.”

She is carrying a folded sweater to the drawer. She stops and turns toward him. “There were a lot of people in that ashram just like me, Justin, all agitated about life’s meaning, life’s work. But the truth is we were just afraid.” She wraps her arms around the sweater and pulls it tightly to her chest.

Justin thinks of a life preserver. It could be that she is holding on to, a woman treading water.

“You know that old fear of getting old, dying,” she says. “Confronting your mortality. It’s so common at my age. I can’t see why we are surprised by it.” She loosens her arms and puts the sweater in the drawer.

“And are you afraid, Sally?”

She had her back to him when he asked the question (she was bending down to put away the sweater), but he is certain she grimaced. He is sure her shoulders lifted and stiffened. The movement was barely perceptible, but it was perceptible to him.

“Afraid?” she asks. There is a slight fluttering in her voice, but it disappears altogether and hardens when she asks the question again. “Afraid of what?”

“Of getting old. Dying. Is that what was happening to you?” He says
was
for he senses she wants him to think it is in the past, whatever it was that had troubled her. It is over now. She has resolved it.

“I
was
afraid,” she says. “Forty comes so suddenly. Suddenly you find yourself thinking that there is not much time left. You must use the time you have carefully, do the things that are important. You think of all you should do, could do, should have done.”

“And have you thought of those things?”

“At the ashram I got a chance to think of them and I realized I had it all. Giselle, my marriage.”

She does not look at him. She does not say his name. She says Giselle’s name. She says
my marriage
, as if it were an entity apart from him, apart from her.

He wants to tell her he has changed; they can start again. He knows he could lose her if they do not work this through.

“Before I was forty I never once thought of the person I could have been had I never left Trinidad,” he says. “Then cracks began to appear in the stories I told myself. I felt like you did when I was forty. Sometimes, even now, I am haunted by the person I might have been had I not stayed here.”

She frowns. “I do not have your regrets,” she says.

“Oh, no, I don’t have regrets.” He speaks quickly. It is not
his intent to hurt her. “If I had not stayed, I would not have met you. And that,” he adds, catching her eye, “would have been the biggest regret of all.”

She softens. “I know you miss it sometimes,” she says.

“Not as much anymore. I am living exactly where I want to be. In this house. In Brooklyn, with you, with Giselle.”

“Still, it must be hard for you.”

He takes the chance now. He wants a real wife, a real partner, a friend, a lover. “Are you living exactly where you want to be, Sally? Are you doing exactly what you want to do?”

“I want to be a teacher,” she says. “I want to be a wife, a mother.”

“A few days ago you said that was not enough.”

“That was before I went to the ashram.”

“And one weekend has made such a difference?”

“I thought this was what you wanted,” she says.

“I want you to be happy. I want you to do what makes you happy.”

She takes off her skirt and then her blouse. She puts on her bathrobe. She does not speak.

“I was wrong,” he says, “to suggest, to say—”

She stops him. “No. You were right. I have everything.”

He cringes.

“At the ashram I met a lot of women who would die for what I have.”

The words are exactly, almost to the letter, the words he said to her that day when he claimed she had no cause to be dissatisfied with her life. No cause to be dissatisfied with him.

“Is that what I said?” He knows it is.

“Most of the women there were raising children by themselves. They had to depend on relatives or friends. Some had been abused. Some had nowhere to live. I have this, this house.” She spreads out her arms. “I have a lot. Meditation calmed me. I was restless. Now I’m calm. Now I know all those things I said were just my fear of growing old speaking.” She walks into the bathroom. When she comes out, she is ready for bed. There is no chance for him to tell her now, to show her what he has done to the den.

She kisses him, but not on the lips. He touches her breasts and she moves his hand away. She is gentle, but she is firm. “Not now,” she says. “It’s been a long day.”

But it is not only her fear of growing old. She will not convince him of that. When she woke up that morning, the skin below her eyes jet black from lack of sleep, she said it was space. Space for Sally was what she wanted. It took another argument for her to define it.
I want to write poetry. I want to be a poet.

Why does writing poetry frighten her?

It was jealousy, he acknowledges, that made him take that leap to Jack, his fear that though it was he she married, Jack was the man she loved. That it was those floodgates she did not want reopened. That she had grown tired of scouring street walls night after night, in search of graffiti. So she compromised. So she settled for him.

But Anna says Sally loves him. And isn’t Anna right? Eight months ago, on Giselle’s half birthday, Sally said she saw her face in his. It had taken her a lifetime, but she had found her
love at last. He was her soul mate. He, Justin. He was that and more. So it cannot be Jack. If Jack, it cannot be all Jack, not after those sweet words.

Forty? That, too, is not the answer. Whatever it is that has lulled her into this state of—he struggles to find the word— compliance (an ugly word that causes him to grimace), it will not last and he does not want her this way.

He asks for grace. No words. He is not a praying man, not even a true believer. An apostate. For when he was a boy he used to pray, but nothing happened. His parents did not return, not when he needed them. Nine years later, it was too late. Still, deep in his heart a prayer comes:
Tell me why, Lord. Let me find the answer.

He knows the cost to Oedipus: this hubris, this disbelief, this reliance on reason, this insistence that it is limitless, that the human will is invincible. How many times has he pointed this out to his students? How many times has he said to them that reason, intelligence, or will alone cannot give us answers to the mysteries of human existence, cannot lead us to the truth?

And he remembers something else: a plane trip, the grinding noise that filled the cabin when the plane ascended. He was seated at the window. He could see the flaps on the wings shuddering, unable to close. It struck him then that though we had achieved what Daedalus could only dream of, we had arrived no further: We were still at the mercy of God. He could strike us down, or save us if He wished.

So he will take his own teaching. He will submit. He will let reason yield to that which it does not, cannot, comprehend.

On her deathbed, Sally’s mother told him it could happen— grace—the bestowing of a gift on the nonbeliever.

Let me put away my jealousy, Lord.

Then it happens. Out of nowhere, a number enters his head.

Four.
It comes to him, a soft tingling in his ear, a feather fanning his chin. Not a sound. He will not remember it as a sound. A revelation, a tiny epiphany. Not one that jars him, that forces his eyes to open, for not all is revealed. It is a clue he receives, a hint of the truth. A gift, but he must find his way.

Four.
He turns and pulls the covers to his neck.
Four.
He flicks his hand through the nothingness around his ear.

It is Sally’s face Justin sees first the next morning. It is dark. Gray. Tears are pooling in the corners of her eyes.

Justin!
Her lips form a word. His name. He rubs his eyes.

Justin, I know you can hear me.

She is in her bathrobe. Her hands are on her hips.

Justin!
she shouts again.

The bathrobe is open. Her fingers at her hips pull it further apart. Her nightie shimmers, a mesmerizing blue, and beneath it, brown breasts rise.

“How could you?”

Desire grips him. His eyes drop downward to the roundness of her belly, her navel sunk in the well he adores.

“How could you?” She is asking the question again.

He shakes himself alert. When he looks at her again, her lower lip is shaking. “How could I what?” He throws off the
layers of sheet, comforter, blanket piled on top of him and swings his legs over the side of the bed.

“Do such a thing,” she says.