Grace Read online

  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.

  3

  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.

  “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 wha
t 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.