Grace (15 page)

“But perhaps you are right.” She puts the glass on the table and still holding it, she traces its circumference with the tip of her finger from her other hand. “Perhaps I am in a midlife crisis,” Sally says. “I look down the road of my life and I don’t like what I see. I am useless,” she says. “I am doing nothing useful, nothing meaningful.”

Giselle. What about Giselle? What about me? The children you
teach? Are we not meaningful to you.?
But he has asked her those questions already.

“At least my father had purpose to his life. He did something meaningful. He took a stand.”

He keeps his silence. She is on holy ground. She accused her father of recklessness when she told him the story of his murder. Her words were not much different from the ones her mother used when she lay dying in the hospital.

“He stood for something,” she is saying now. “He drew a line in the sand. He said, This is what I am willing to die for. My mother thought he should have protected us. She thought that was his responsibility. He should have assessed that we were outnumbered. He should not have gone out there and risked his life, our lives.” Her hands are still now. They are wrapped tightly around the glass.

“I thought so once, too, but now I think there are duties one has that are more important than protecting the lives of people we love. We have duties to ourselves, responsibilities to ourselves, that we must protect first.” She lowers her voice. “My father’s first responsibility was to guard his integrity, to live up to his convictions.” She releases the glass and clasps her hands over her mouth.

Justin thinks she is about to cry and he says, “Don’t, Sally.”

But she is not about to cry. She removes her hands from her mouth. “My dad had courage,” she says. “The courage of his convictions. He was not going to let those racist pigs make him crawl. He was not going to let them come in his yard without a
fight. He would not submit to them. My mother thought that if he had done that, he would have lived. But he would have been dead to her. He would have lost his manhood, his authority in our family. He would have lost her respect. A pity she did not know that.”

“She did, Sally.”

“And what is worse, she blamed him for what happened to Tony. She believed, up to the day she died, that Tony went on drugs because my father let those pigs kill him. But Dad stood up to them. That is what he did. He didn’t destroy Tony. Those pigs destroyed Tony. They destroyed him when they killed his father right in front of him. Tony was seven. He never forgot. It burned a hole in his head he tried fill with drugs.”

Justin holds her hand.

“My mother wanted to know why I couldn’t live in the same town with her. It was because of that, because she blamed my father for what happened. I couldn’t face her, knowing she thought that way. But she was the guilty one. She was the one who was not there for Tony.”

“I don’t think she could have helped it, Sally. She was not well.”

“Yes. Yes, she was not well.” She says this unconvincingly.

Justin wants to comfort her. “I am glad you are telling me this. I’m beginning to understand you, Sally.”

“Are you? I don’t know what my convictions are. I don’t know what I believe, what I would die for. That makes me useless, Justin. It makes my life meaningless.”

He aches for the sadness he sees in her eyes, but at the same time he feels a surge of happiness. They have not talked like this in months.

“You have convictions, Sally,” he tells her.

“What are they? Do you know what my convictions are? You ridicule me almost every day for having none.”

“Sally.” He tightens his hold on her hand.

“No. I had convictions once,” she says. “I used to write about them. Now I have no convictions, so I have nothing to write about.”

He remembers the poems that blinded him.

“I had passion then,” she says.

Jealousy closes in on him. “So what are you saying, Sally?”

“Once I knew what I wanted,” she says.

“And now?” He cannot believe she can be this cruel. He lets go of her hand. “And now you do not have what you want?”

She does not answer, so he presses her. “And now you have settled for a lesser life? Is that what you are saying to me, Sally?” The palms of his hands are damp with perspiration.

“It frightened me.”

“What?”

“All that passion,” she says.

“So you settled for me? Is that it, Sally?”

“I wanted a normal life.”

He had wanted that, too, when he married her, but not this, not what she is intimating. “And am I that normal, boring life?” he asks her.

“You are not boring, Justin.”

“But our marriage is. Is that it?”

“I told you I needed to find myself.”

His face is a canvas of contortions.

“I’ve used a cliché. I’ve used a platitude. Okay, okay, Justin, but I cannot hide from me anymore. I want to be me.”

I want to be me.
The song wafts through Justin’s head and the smile forms on his lips before he can control it.

“It may be funny to you, but I can’t be this way anymore.”

“No,” he says. “There is nothing funny about what you are saying.”

“I want to start writing poems again,” she says.

“Then do that, Sally.”

“You haven’t been listening, Justin. I can’t. I’m afraid.”

What he feels most of all at this moment is simply exhaustion. She has had him on a roller coaster and he has expended all his patience. “You want to be you. You want space. You want your life’s work,” he says, rattling off the list. “You want every goddamn cliché ever spoken on every goddamn soap opera. You want to write. You are afraid to write. Do I stop you from writing, Sally? No? Do I stop you from being a poet? No. But you will turn my life around. You will turn Giselle’s life around.”

She opens her mouth to say something, but he does not let her.

“Well, I will tell you now what I want, Sally. I will tell you specifically what my terms are.” His fingers drum the table but
he does not raise his voice. The man sitting next to them cannot hear him. He can speak logically, quietly, of terms and conditions even when his heart is breaking. He has had practice. In graduate school he had written about passion, he had developed logical theses on the world’s greatest love affairs penned by the masters.

“I will not have Giselle live in two places,” he says. “I will not have her sacrificed for her parents’ selfish interests.” He reaches for the glass of water in front of him and takes a long drink, buying time to slow down the thumping in his chest. “We wanted Giselle,” he says. “She did not ask to be born. We owe her. Whatever your gurus may say, I believe divorce hurts children irreparably. I believe children need to live under the same roof with parents who take care of them. I believe that even if all we are to them is white light—the motion, sound, and light of TV in the background while they play with their toys or talk to their friends—they’d still prefer that than nothing. I believe children need to feel safe, and at a minimum, white light makes them feel safe. These are my convictions, Sally. I will fight for them.”

Her face does not change when he stops. She stares at him with the same expression of sadness in her eyes that was there when she told him her life was meaningless.

“You may not care about me,” he says, turning away from her, unable to face those eyes much longer, “but I thought you cared about Giselle.”

“And what happens to Giselle when she has an unhappy mother?”

“Haven’t you told me enough times, Sally? Your graffiti. Remember your graffiti?” He wants her to feel his pain. “‘It takes strength to be happy.’ Remember? Then find the strength to be happy, Sally.”

He asked her here because he wants to try, because he wants to find out what is troubling her, what is causing her to be unhappy, but what he has gotten is a babbling about convictions, and he thinks that it is courage indeed she is struggling to find, courage to leave him. Not with Giselle, he says to himself. Not with my daughter.

They make it through dinner. In less than half an hour they are on their way to pick up Giselle at Anna’s. Sally brings the sleeping child to the car. They drive home in silence.

Lloyd Banks calls him late in the night. Mark Sandler is in the hospital. Something terrible, he says, has happened to him.

“Terrible?”

“Worse than you can imagine,” Banks says. “I didn’t know he would take it so hard.”

“What so hard?”

“She left him. His girlfriend left him and he tried to kill himself.”

The news floors Justin. “We were talking to him just the other day. He seemed fine.”

“Well, he wasn’t fine.”

“What did he do?”

“Turned on the gas in his oven.”

“And they found him alive?”

“His neighbor smelled the gas. And just in time. He was slumped over the kitchen table. He had been reading. Poetry,” he says.

Suddenly Justin remembers. “Sylvia Plath,” he says. Guilt forces him to sit down.

“Yes. How did you know? His neighbor said the doctor had to pry the book out of his hands. Mark didn’t want to let it go.”

He had let Mark borrow it. They were sitting in his office when Mark asked, What about poetry, Professor? Does a novelist have to read poetry, too?

Justin said yes. Anyone who is serious about becoming a novelist needs to have the poet’s sensitivity to the music of language.

Sylvia Plath’s collected poems
Ariel
was on his desk. Carol Taylor, a member of the Great Books committee, a buxom woman with fierce brown eyes and prematurely gray hair that hung down the sides of her face like sheets of metal, had given it to him. “We don’t all write about cooking and babies,” she said. “Educate yourself.” Her cheeks flushed red, the only betrayal of her vulnerability.

Mark reached for it and Justin tried, unsuccessfully, to stop him. “You’d prefer to read her husband, Ted Hughes,” he said. “She was a feminist who gassed herself.”

“Gassed herself?”

“I think she put her head in her oven. Something like that.”

“For love?”

Justin had not read the poems but he answered all the same. “For what else?”

How was he to know that love had already made its perilous inroads deep into Mark’s heart?

HE TELLS SALLY what has happened and goes with Banks to the hospital. Mark is lying on his back in a narrow bed in a small, darkened room in the crisis center. Encased in white sheets, his big shoulders seem shrunken, his body tiny. He turns and sees them through the glass partition that separates his room from the nurses’ station. He sits up. His face breaks into a wide smile. “Hi, Profs.” He extends his hand. His voice is weak, his handshake limp.

“Why’d you want to do something stupid like that?” Banks hugs him. “There are plenty of fish in the sea.”

But Mark does not want to hear this. “She was the one, Prof. My soul mate.”

“If she was your soul mate,” Banks says, “you wouldn’t have broken up.”

“She was the one.” He looks over at Justin. “You were right, Prof,” he says. “She did it for love. Her husband was fooling around.”

Justin winces. He knows Mark is speaking of Plath. “You’ll find someone else,” he says, forcing his voice to sound more confident than he feels.

“With a woman,” Mark says.

The two men do not understand him.

“I caught her in bed with a woman. Told you, Prof, if you don’t treat them right, they turn into lesbos.”

JUSTIN AND BANKS stop at the coffee shop afterward. “That has to be hard,” Banks says. “To find out your girlfriend turned into a lesbian.” He inflects the ending so it sounds more as if he is asking a question.

“That’s not possible,” Justin says. “There is nothing Mark could have done to have made Sandra sleep with a woman.”

“You know, I’m having women troubles of my own,” Banks says.

It is late, they are tired, the coffee shop is dark. With the exception of a man in his overcoat and hat, huddled over a newspaper, and the waiter, who has gone back to his post in the corner scribbling down notes on sheets of grease-stained paper, there is no one else there. It is the setting for the unburdening of the heart, the confessional. They do not look at each other. Justin stirs sugar in his tea and watches its movements. One of them has been struck down. It was love that took him there.

“It’s not easy, you know,” Banks says, “satisfying two women.”

“Tell me about it. I can’t do it with one.”

“Troubles?”

“Sally says she wants more.”

“A man?”

“No. Nothing like that.” He pauses. “A dead man, though.”

“A dead man?”

“Old boyfriend. I think she took me on the rebound. She settled for me.”
But not long ago, she said she felt fused into me. She said she loved me that much. We were soul mates.

“Why would you say something like that?”

“I read her poems.”

“Sally is a poet?”

“No. But I saw some of her poetry.”

“She writes poetry?”

“Wrote,” says Justin.

“Write or wrote, man, I think that makes her a poet, no?”

“What I meant to say is that before we were married she used to write poetry. She wrote them for her boyfriend.”