by Calvin Baker
GRACE
CALVIN BAKER
All who go on journeys. You who guided me when I was lost
Each of us creates history. In the work we do and stories we tell. In the groups we join and games we play. The houses we build and gardens we raise. In the things we create and the impressions we leave on the lives of others. Our remembrance of the past. The names of our children.
Christiansen told me this one afternoon, embedded at the hotel bar, soon after I first arrived in the country, when I confessed I was there to bear witness to great events. Write the first draft of history. He snorted into his beer. One day, before I even knew it, he added, I would want nothing but the security of a home and family. Same as everyone else.
He had placed himself in more war zones than anyone I knew, including several generals, so I was surprised when he used that word. Security. I knew that was a myth, but did not have the confidence to question him outright. Still, I wondered if he believed it.
When he was killed a few weeks later, the first thing I thought was that he should have been at home with his family. I realized then the fearlessness I admired in him was nothing but his attempt to provide them security. That he was ordinary.
I believed firmly that lives lived without higher purpose were ill-steered and half-seized, and soon obliterated—by the hours themselves.
That was at the beginning when I was still green and full of ideas. I learned quickly none of it matters.
I had not thought of that brief conversation in years, but the words flooded to mind again the year after my return, at a wedding one morning, as I shared a table on the manicured lawn of a house on a lake with my friends and their fathers. My own father was dead.
“If I were a young man,” one of the old-timers said, watching the bridesmaids flit across the lawn in their beautiful summer dresses, “I would go right down there and figure out which of those golden little honeybees would make the sweetest life. And take her right back to the chapel.”
“Is that all there is to it?”
“It is at this age.”
“Why do young people need everything to be so complicated?”
“Do not listen, boys. There are five divorces between them.”
“You’re just jealous. Face it. Everyone sitting at this table knows all the women I’ve ever known look better than any woman you ever knew. On top of it my women are more faithful than your women. Wiser. More compassionate. Run their houses better. Throw better parties. Mother children better. Know more, and do more with it, any way you look.”
“If they’re so great why have there been so many?”
“There are only four women in a man’s life,” a tawny-skinned man I did not know, with carefully kept silver hair, said from the other side of our little circle, as the wind gusted the white edges of the tablecloth. “The one who gives birth to you. The one who first stirs and wakens the spirit of love inside you. The one you know is wrong for you, but try to make work anyway. The one who washes your body with her tears.
When you finally comprehend yourself, you will understand none of the others even knew your name.”
“For me there was only another,” one of the old ones said after a silence.
“The right one is blessing enough.”
The conversation was broken off suddenly by cries from down by the shore. A group of women were shouting and running toward the water, past a pile of tiny dress clothes, where a flock of children who had been playing Red Rover moments earlier, had disappeared laughing into the sapphire sea.
“Remember how that felt?” One of the old men recalled, watching the small heads bobbing above the surf. “All of us, every day, should be content as that.”
I realized, as the children scrambled back up the beach, how far removed I was from their translucent wonder. In the time I had been home I felt engulfed by a vast numbness, a black hole sucking down a ray of light, and thought the world was nothing but an irrational, hate-filled place I would be forced to suffer until I died. As I sat there that morning, though, buoyed by the well-being of friends, I knew it was only the life I had first chosen that made me different. Had hardened me to the world.
It was then Christiansen’s words echoed in my mind, and I began to wonder about starting a family. Hoping if I found someone to share my life with I might discover new joy and wholeness, free of all the claims of history, even if I was uncertain true happiness would be available to me.
When I mused on the idea aloud, the men at the table immediately began opining again. “You might as well marry a rich woman,” claimed a friend who had done so and been unhappily married seven years. “At least you won’t lose your money when you get divorced.” “Marry a young woman,” urged another. “Women are all the same,” said the old rakehell across the table, who I learned never had wed, smiling with just his eyes. “Like fruit the important thing is to gather them when they are ripe, before some worm has stolen the seed, leaving you nothing but flesh.”
Later that afternoon the women I knew added their share. “You should meet my best friend,” a married woman said, as we waited on line at the bar. “She’s just turned forty, and is dying to have a child. If you’re serious that’s all that matters.” “Marry an island girl,” said an island girl I first met under the eaves in a rainstorm, who later taught me what happens when a man does not know his own mind. “When they love you, they love you completely.”
When my sly old aunt, whom I always tried to spend holidays with, asked, as the reception ended, whether I would be bringing a guest that year, I quickly demurred. “Who knows, maybe next.” Besides her I had no other relatives, and I knew she wished nothing more than my happiness. But when I saw her engines firing I vowed to keep the decision to myself. It was, after all, the most serious and private of questions.
If I did not have much idea how to go about it then neither, I thought, watching the intrigue among the wedding guests as the waiters cleared the tables, did anyone else. I simply entrusted myself to the serendipity of the world.
BOOK I
1
“You are fucking insane,” the guard muttered under his breath at the television in his guardhouse, before peering out into the early morning darkness as I approached.
“Who’s there?” he called, looking up from the bank of monitors, as I reached the wrought-iron gate blocking the private street.
“Harper,” I answered.
He stuck his head out from the ghostly glow of the booth, glanced at his watch knowingly as he recognized me, and took a sip of coffee, before clanging open the gate.
I felt exposed by the hour as I made my way up the drive, in the thin blue darkness, before following an overgrown path through the garden at the side of the house that led out to the beach. Inside I could see some of the old people still sitting around the kitchen table, reminiscing and laughing, as I went out through the back fence to the stony shore, where I found my friends sprawled amid the rocks and sounding tide.
Ariel was architecting an elaborate spliff with great ceremony, which he twisted tight and sparked up as I folded myself against a boulder. An old mix tape, from a time before our generation had found its full voice, waxed nostalgic over the Bluetooth speaker, and it was clear they were already high, gazing distractedly into the stars and debating the abundance of life in the universe, between voicing the worries of their lives.
“You talk a lot of mess,” Nicola interrupted Ariel as he exhaled a stream of thick white smoke and passed the joint to Rowan. “Both of you. I don’t understand how you can smoke that stuff and have the careers you do.”
“If I’m going to do anything important I did it already,” Ariel replied with eternal innocence. “Being a mathematician is like being an athlete.”
“A mathlete,” Rowan nodded.
“Now can I prove what I just said? No, of course not. Science is limited by the questions it asks, and the tools available to measure them, but math shares a border with poetry, with mystery; and I am absolutely certain there is life out there, an abundant consciousness, carbon-based or not, made of the same stuff we are.” He drew on the vanishing joint as it cycled back to him. “Which is starlight.”
“So right now we are just starlight contemplating itself. Wow,” Rowan said, his eyes half open, as he looked up from the viewfinder of the Galileo to take the joint back from Ariel, noticing me for the first time. “Where were you?”
“He was with one of the bridesmaids,” Ariel answered, before I managed to say anything.
“Which one?” Rowan asked.
“The one in the blue dress.”
“Dude,” Rowan looked to him, high as the moon by then, “they were all wearing blue dresses.”
“The one from Miami.”
“Thanks,” I said, cutting him off before he could continue.
Ariel realized what he had done, and looked to Nicola. Rowan held the smoke in his lungs, stealing a glance as he waited to see whether she would react. I did not have to look. I already knew the expression on her face.
“Why is everyone staring at me?” Nicola countered, peering ahead to the starlit sea. “We were how long ago?”
“I just walked her home. Nothing else,” I snapped at Ariel, before changing the subject. “Where did you find the telescope?”
“I rescued it from a box of things my mother put out to be donated, after my father died.”
He had gotten the telescope the summer of Halley’s comet, when we all received telescopes and spent lazy, monotonous nights gazing up at the sky from our rooftops in the city, where the light pollution made it impossible to see anything, until we came out here late in the season. It felt for a moment, as we sat wrapped in the half-fist of darkness, that time had bent back to us, and we had never left this beach, or known any of the wrinkled years in between.
Nicola took advantage of Rowan’s wandering concern to steal a last glance through the lens of the telescope before it grew too light.
“I’m just saying,” Ariel returned to his previous topic, exhaling another stream of thick, white smoke. “The universe has not yet stopped creating. Imagine all the implications.”
“They might annihilate us,” Rowan said. “We might annihilate them.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Is this sativa . . . ,” inhale, “or indica . . . ,” exhale, “we’re smoking?”
“Cross . . . ,” inhale, “between Kali Mist and Northernlights . . . ,” exhale.
Nicola looked up and rolled her eyes with incredulity, pronouncing them too high to take at all seriously anymore.
“Am I the only one here with real responsibility?” she asked jokingly, but with enough call back to reality to break the spell of suspended time, so that the evening and long weekend began to disperse.
I stood slowly, looking at each of them, glad for the hijinks; glad I had taken the trouble to come out here, instead of sleeping the few remaining hours before my flight, to bid farewell to those friends from whom I first learned friendship.
“Hey, I have a license for this,” Rowan protested.
“I was just making an observation,” Ariel went on, packing the telescope into its case with the utmost care. “I find the idea invigorating.”
The sky was ablaze red-golden by then, banishing the final darkness like a jester’s robes on the stage, as we began back up the beach to the house, the water receding behind us.
By the time we reached the house the first joggers had appeared on the beach, and a few people practicing yoga and tai chi, making us feel decadent and expansive as we said goodbye.
“My car is back near the hotel,” Nicola said. “Harper, you can walk me, if you like. Since you’re all of a sudden the protector of helpless damsels.”
I went with her in silence through the early morning streets, until her SUV materialized ahead of us. The day was already warm by then, and her nipples were erect against the interior fabric of her dress, extending the material in taut, barely visible circles, like the new snow moon.
She caught my gaze, and a sly smile dashed across her face under the green leaves, until she allowed herself the beginning of a chuckle. She had been my first girlfriend, and we dated from the end of high school until just after college. She was the most substantial girl I had ever met at seventeen, and twenty, and twenty-four when we parted. She had grown into a beautiful woman, and I was a sterling fool. I saw in her smile that she knew she still had an effect on me, leaving me to wonder whether she was upset, and what it might mean if she were.
“I am sorry for how things ended,” I said. “I was not ready. I had things to learn.” I halted, afraid, like all men who hoard their emotions, that if I let her know how vulnerable I felt she would see I was all vulnerability.
“I know,” she answered briskly, her voice quivering with complex emotion. “You still do. It took me a few years, but I’m over any of that now.”
“I just wanted you to know.”
“And I just wanted you to know I am a husband, two children, a mortgage, and an entire decade over it.”
I did the math and did not speak again until we stopped at her car, where we hugged, and parted, then considered each other, and hugged again. Held tight, and did not part, only pulled deeper into the comfort of our embrace and the memory of others deeper still, so that I felt in my marrow what I had been told but never understood before: regret is illumination come too late.
I pulled her tighter and felt her chest heave in time against mine, as my throat clenched around my vocal chords, and remained silent. I did not try to kiss her, afraid what would happen if I did. We clenched each other, absorbing the minute movements of each other’s body and the feelings that flowed between us with each circular breath. And in the silence between—all the words we used to say.
2
I was embroiled in a shapeless relationship at the time with a woman named Devi, who worked as an emergency room doctor. A romance? A love affair? I no longer understood its form, only that it felt like an entanglement without a future, which disquieted my conscience. It had never been my intention for it to grow so amorphous or continue so long. We had merely slid into the thing after meeting at a party. I had been standing outside on the balcony and she came out to smoke a cigarette. “I thought you were a doctor,” I said. “You smoke?”
“We all have to die of something,” she answered, holding out the pack. She was attractive and poised, if a bit high-strung, but otherwise excellent in every way. When we’d gone back inside, so obviously drawn together, the other men in the room envied my monopoly on her time.
We went home together that night, and soon settled into a pattern of meeting each Thursday, whenever we were both in town. We went to the theater and to concerts, and afterward shared meals, wine, easy conversation, the splendor of each other’s bed. It was a civilized affair. But our affection never grew and was never transfigured into love.
Our Thursdays had grown familiar, though, chronicling the domestic ups and downs of daily life, and in this way we had gotten caught in a limbo between lust and bliss. If it had broken free of the clay of the affair it had been, it also lacked the breath of a deeper bond. I decided it was time to become more serious or else end things, as it dawned on me how much I was wasting time. I had never tried to imagine a future together, but I admired her and it frightened me to know how pleasant and easy it might be to keep sliding.
When the taxi reached my apartment, the night we first met, I still had not decided to kiss her. “Are you going to invite me in?” she asked.
In the morning when she left, I felt it had been a fine evening, but that would be the end of it. She was the kind of girl who went home with a man she had just met. I was the kind of man who had taken a strange woman home. There it ought to remain.
I call
ed the next day out of a sense of consideration, not intending to signal anything more than fondness, and to keep from adding to anyone’s negative experience of the world.
She was careful as well. Telling me she had had fun without regret. We chatted awhile, until she seemed confident again, as she had been the night before. As we talked my interest in her was rekindled. She was not as boring as most doctors, who, because of the way they are trained, usually develop only one part of the mind. Before the call ended I asked her to dinner the following Saturday.
She told me she had to work. “It’s not that I don’t want to see you. It’s just . . . that is when the world goes all to hell and people fall apart. Whatever holds them together during the week dematerializes, then they slip. They spill out of themselves. They crash. They burn. They overdose, or else go into withdrawal. They stab and shoot the people who love them, and generally rage and bleed and come undone all over the place. Afterwards they show up in the emergency room with their regrets, shame, anger, and sad confusion exposed for the whole goddamn world to see. If it wasn’t my job I would not look, but it is just as wrong not to do something, so I try to stitch them back together into some human shape as best I can, but what’s really the matter is always deeper than whatever wound I am suturing. But it is only an emergency room, so a temporary fix-up is all I can do.”
She was beginning to have what sounded like a panic attack, which she managed to prevent. I was not afflicted by them myself, but I was sympathetic to people who were. It was dinnertime by then, and neither of us wished to dine alone.
The next morning we made plans for the following week, setting the frequency to follow, although we were careful never to assume anything, and limited our communication, from one date to the next. Three months into what had become an unspoken understanding, we permitted ourselves to grow genuinely intimate in certain moments, but never beyond the moment itself. An animal baying in the nighttime, that never ventured any closer.