Grace (26 page)

The student had been absent for four weeks. When she finally showed up, it was not to class, but to his office. She came with a toddler straddled on her hip, a boy not more than three tugging her skirt, and his sister, perhaps a year older, lagging behind, her thumb in her mouth, her eyes rounded dark with sorrow.

Justin remembers that while she was reciting her litany of troubles, the multitude of reasons that had made it impossible for her to come to class, he was looking at her daughter. Giselle was all he could think of.

Go home, he said to the student. Take care of your children.
Don’t you know that what you do with them when they are young will affect them all their lives? You have to prioritize.

Later that night when he puts Giselle to bed, he thinks, Sally has prioritized. She is a good mother; she is a good wife.

But he is also forced to admit: Sally is not a happy mother. Sally is not a happy wife.

Banks calls Saturday night. Justin has already put Giselle to bed and is reading in the den. “Where ’ve you been? I’ve been trying to reach you all day.” “I took Giselle to the museum, then we went to the park, then there was a birthday party. I forgot to buy a gift, and so then—”

Banks does not let him finish. “Have you heard the latest?” “What?” Justin is tired, whipped from a day keeping up with Giselle. He is not ready for a long conversation with

Banks.

“Helen Clumly,” Banks says.

Justin perks up immediately. “Helen? What about Helen?”

“Rumor has it that she’s got an offer she can’t refuse.”

“A book deal? A fellowship?”

“Some say book deal, some say fellowship. I only know for certain she’s left the college.”

Good
, Justin thinks.

“In the middle of the semester. In the middle of the freaking semester.” Banks is shouting.

“Now?”

“She’s gone. She cleaned out her office yesterday.”

“Just like that?”

“That’s the problem with these white faculty. They don’t have the commitment. She just dropped everything, her classes, everything. Her students will be in an uproar come Monday.”

“Some,” Justin says.

“Some students?”

“Some of the white faculty,” Justin says. “Only some of the white faculty don’t have the commitment. And, for that matter, neither do some of the black faculty.”

“Freaking bullshit. There you go again, Justin, with your everybody’s-the-same bullcrap.”

“It must have been a real big offer,” Justin says, wanting to end his ranting.

Banks chastises him some more and when he cools down he says, “Well, there are people who are saying there was no offer at all. It’s a big sham.”

“Then why would she leave?”

“That’s the big mystery on campus. Of course, the feminists are blaming you.”

“Me?”

“They say you were having an affair with her. Everybody knows you two were an item.”

“Used to be,” Justin says.

“Couple of people heard you arguing in the faculty corridor the other day. They say she was shouting and you were whispering all intimate like, as if you had something to hide.”

She had something to hide.
“I’m not having an affair with her or with anybody else. You know that, Lloyd.”

“I know that, but you can’t convince the femininos. The phones are ringing. They have you down on two counts: one, for cheating on your wife, and two, for messing over Helen.”

“And what count do they have Helen down on?”

“Can’t say. She just left a note saying she was quitting. Nobody’s been able to reach her, I hear. She’s cut off her telephone and she doesn’t answer her doorbell.”

Justin feels vindicated. He feels at peace. The world has righted itself. Justice has been meted out. The punishment has fit the crime. Helen Clumly was not fired, of course, but not having a job is what she deserves. When he gets off the phone with Banks, he is filled with such a sense of satisfaction that he allows himself to think kindly of her: in the end she had a conscience. In the end, she did what was right.

He picks up his book and settles back down in his chair. He reads one page but cannot finish another. His mind drifts. He is thinking again of Helen, thinking how readily she surrendered the values he thought were so important to her. (More than once they discussed it: the professor is not merely conveyor of knowledge, but she is role model. She has an obligation at least to try to embody the values she espouses.) Could it be that Helen was able to delude herself into blaming him for Mark’s attempted suicide because her career was so important to her?

He tries to refocus again, but the words on the page blur, they merge into each other.

Her career mattered to her, his mother said. Being a nurse mattered to her. He had thought it was his father. He had thought her job was no more to her than a paycheck, and later, an occupation that filled the emptiness when his father was gone.

It was so unlike her, this confession, but she pointed to his father for her unhappiness, and, if not directly, to him by implication for Sally’s dissatisfaction.

He puts down his book and picks up the phone. It was her life’s work Sally said she wanted, and he responded with a sneer.

He dials Anna’s number.

“It’s the stick-in-the-mud shit who’s married to Sally,” he says when Anna answers.

She laughs, and he knows she has forgiven him. “At least the stick-in-the-mud shit had the sense to encourage her to go to the ashram.”

“It was your idea,” he says, then hesitates and offers a more substantial olive branch. “You probably saved my marriage.”

“Not so fast, Tonto. It takes more than an ashram to save a marriage.”

“I know. That’s why I am calling you.”

“Me?”

“Do you know anything about that small press where Sally was working?”

“Defunct. Closed down. Kaput.”

“Was she writing poetry when she was there?”

“What are you getting at, Justin?”

“Well, was she?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Look, Anna, I know all about the poetry Sally was writing when she was living with Jack.”

“You are wrong, you know. She did not marry you on the rebound.”

His back stiffens.

“She knows you think that,” Anna says.

“What did she tell you?” It is an effort to make sound leave his throat.

“She should have taken more time for herself. To recover. It was big blow she took from Jack.”

“So she said what I thought.”

“She didn’t say that. I am saying that.”

“Space,” Justin says. “She said she needed space for herself.”
That is what Sally told him.

“I don’t think people necessarily have to be in love when they marry,” Anna says. “The best marriages are those where two people fall in love with each other during the marriage.”

His heart lurches.

“I have learned a thing or two from my parents’ marriage,” she says. “Westerners scoff at arranged marriages. They think Asian husbands and wives don’t love each other. They think Africans don’t fall in love because someone arranges the marriage, but people fall in love with their partners if they are kind to them. My parents are happy. They love each other.”

“So Sally is not in love with me?” Justin manages to ask the question.

“You are the one who can help her.”

“She sees a therapist. But I suppose you know that.” Why hadn’t he asked Sally to tell him what she discussed with her therapist? The closest he had come was the night he felt her slipping away to that oblivion that swallowed up her mother. Was he afraid that if he asked she would say,
The therapist said it was too soon. I was still in love with Jack?

“The therapist does not love her,” Anna says.

“She seems to think he can help her.”

“He has. He has helped her understand why she gets depressed.”

“It’s only recently,” he says. “In the last few months. She was not depressed before.”

“There,” Anna says. “I told her that. I told her it’s a phase.”

“A phase?”

“Sally will get over it as soon as she starts doing something that is meaningful to her.”

He does not say,
Our marriage should be meaningful to her.
He says: “Like writing again?”

“She had started. She was trying,” Anna says.

He swallows the knot in his throat. “When?” he asks.

“About a year ago. I think she wrote for five, maybe six … She stopped completely about seven months ago.”

A month after Giselle’s half birthday.

“She wanted to surprise you,” Anna is saying. “You would have liked the poems she was writing.”

“So you have seen them?”

“I wasn’t supposed to tell you.”

No, he won’t be so foolish to say, I am Sally’s husband. What do you mean you are not supposed to tell me? If anyone is
supposed to
know, it is I, her husband.

“I think it’s important for me to read them,” he says.

“She loves you, Justin. In answer to the question you asked, Sally is in love with you.”

He is silent.

“I can’t say I like the things you do, or the foolish, overblown image you have of yourself,” she says, “but that apparently doesn’t bother Sally.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” he says.

“She loves you,” Anna says again.

“Like a wife in an arranged marriage?” he asks.

“I would have left you months ago. Especially after you threatened to take my child. Sally isn’t stupid. She knew she could have left you and taken Giselle with her. The law would have been on her side.”

It is not necessarily true. He could have gotten joint custody, but he cannot deny she could have left him and taken Giselle in spite of his threats. She could have made him a part-time father. He cannot deny that he had not forced her to stay. “Will you give me the poems?” he asks again.

“I’m not sure,” Anna says. “I don’t know if Sally would approve.”

“You said she wanted to give them to me.”

“That was before. You know, before you and she …”

“You said I am the one to help her.”

“Yes,” Anna says.

“I want her to help her. I want her to be happy.”

He senses her turning over his answer in her mind, weighing it, judging him. “When you read the poems, you’ll see how good she is,” she says at last.

“So can I have them?”

“I suppose I could give you the ones she had planned to show you.”

“Can you fax them?”

“Now?”

“Sally comes back tomorrow.”

“Can’t you wait?”

“No,” he says.

“I suppose …”

“So, now?” he asks.

“I want you to know, Justin,” she says, “I did not tell Sally to leave you.”

“Now, Anna?”

“I’ll fax them,” she says.

“You’re a good friend to Sally, Anna.”

“I would have left you, but all I said to Sally was that my apartment was open to her.”

It is an apology. Or Justin takes it as such, for he believes, he is convinced, Anna’s invitation, however well meant, had made it easier for Sally. Without that, without a place to go, somewhere for Giselle, Sally would not have said, as she said that evening when he came home with tulips and the intention to
save his marriage,
I think the best thing for me to do is to move out, don’t you think?

“It’s okay, Anna,” he says. “It’s in the past. Put it out of your mind.”

SHE FAXES TEN. He reads each one three times, changes for bed and then picks them up again. It is past midnight when he puts them down. They are poems of loss, of betrayal, of hidden selves. Of selves longing to be revealed. They are not poems about him, about their relationship. If at first, when he began to read them, he was disappointed to find that they are not, he is not now. They are poems of great power and beauty. They leave him speechless.

One poem, though, troubles him. It is not Sally’s, but Anna has faxed it along with the others. At the bottom of it is an inscription:
To Sally from Dennis Nurkse.
Either Anna has not realized that she has sent it, or Sally had placed it there between her poems and wants it to be read with hers. A married man, a planter of fruit trees, reflects on his love for his orchard:
I loved them best in winter / when I could see them all in one glance / no longer hidden by wind or each other, / as I could never see that woman / from start to finish.

The poem is dated at a time before they were married, before they ever met, when she was still with Jack. It is not a love poem written to her. Justin does not think this Dennis was her lover. A friend who cared for her, he thinks. So why then did she keep his poem with hers? Because it pointed to Jack accusingly? But if so, does it also point to him? He asks himself
the two questions the poem demands: Is it the wife’s fault that her husband cannot see her from start to finish? Or do the fruit trees he loves so much block his vision?

Then he remembers the night of Giselle’s half birthday. A clod. That was what he was not to have understood the depth of her expression of love for him. Was it too late? Had he so blocked her vision she no longer saw herself in him?

LET BE.
Afterward the stage is bloody. No, Justin says to himself when he turns off the light next to his bed. He will act. He will do something. He will not have a bloody stage.