Grace (27 page)

First he has to get the boxes. This means he has to be at the supermarket early, before they unpack the groceries.

Anna calls at seven. She has forgotten to tell him that Sally asked her to take Giselle to the movies. That’s perfect for him, he says. He needs a couple of hours. He will drop Giselle by her apartment after breakfast.

“Did you read the poems?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says.

“What do you think?”

“They are extraordinary,” he says. “I am at a loss for words.”

“You?”

“They are powerful. I didn’t know she was that good.”

“I told you. I tried to tell her, too.”

Was he so absorbed with his failure as a novelist, wallowing like a gluttonous pig in self-pity, that he could not see what a poet she was? Is.

HE WAKES GISELLE. She is irritable. “I want my Mommy,” she says.

“Mommy’ll be back tonight,” he tells her.

“I want Mommy
now.”

“Come, Giselle. Get up for Daddy.”

She gets off the bed. “When tonight?” she asks him. She is rubbing her eyes.

“After we’re finished with the things we have to do.”

“Like what things?”

“Come and be a big girl for Daddy. Daddy has to go to the grocery store early this morning.”

“Why?”

“To get boxes.”

“Why?”

“To pack my books.”

“Why?”

“I’m moving around some furniture,” he says.

“I want to help. Can I help you, Daddy? Can I?”

He tells her Aunt Anna is taking her to the movies. She can help when she comes back.

Her face brightens slightly. “When?” she asks.

“After breakfast. I’m going to drop you at her apartment.”

“But I want Aunt Anna to come
here.
I want her to see the plants.” She is whining. “They have leaves on them. I want Aunt Anna to see them
now.”

“Aunt Anna can see them when she brings you back from the movies.”

“But I want her to see them
now.”

This peevishness, Justin knows, is there because she is missing her mother. “We’ll go out for breakfast,” he says. “For pancakes?” “Yes,” he says. “After we pick up the boxes.”

Jim Grant is sitting on his stoop when Justin comes out with Giselle. “Told you,” he says. “Matter of time and the snow be gone.”

Justin laughs. “Jim Grant, the prophet,” he says.

“My daddy’s taking me out for breakfast,” Giselle announces. “Then after that, I’m going to the movies with Aunt Anna.”

Jim Grant pats her head. “Getting to be a big girl.”

“But before we go out for breakfast, my daddy’s taking me to the store to get boxes. My daddy’s moving furniture today.”

Jim Grant raises his eyebrows at Justin. “Moving?”

“Not a chance.”

“Good. Neighborhood’s changing fast. Hardly see one of us these days on the block.”

They get there on time for the boxes and are almost too early for the restaurant. It’s Sunday and they serve brunch, but not until ten. It’s nine-thirty when Justin and Giselle arrive, but the owners know them. He, Sally, and Giselle are frequent customers.

“Where’s Sally?” The wife unlocks the door.

“Taking a little vacation,” Justin says.

“What I wouldn’t do for one of those,” she says and rolls her eyes.

The ceiling at the restaurant is covered with drawings made on paper placement mats like the ones in front of them on the table. There is a container filled with different colored crayons there, too. Giselle reaches into it and pulls out five crayons. She draws a house and colors it red and blue. In the house she draws a brown man in black pants and a black shirt, and a brown woman in a yellow dress. It is the picture she often draws. This time, however, she adds another figure, a smaller version of the woman in yellow. She puts this tiny figure between the drawing of the man and the drawing of the woman.

“You, Mommy, and me,” she says.

Justin smiles at her, but he is saddened. Not long ago she reprimanded him for asking why she had not drawn herself into the picture of Sally and him. Has he made her feel insecure? “Always,” he tells her.

After breakfast, Justin drives her to Anna’s house. She makes the same announcement to Anna that she made to Jim Grant, but with a slight difference.

“We got boxes because Daddy’s moving,” she says.

“Oh?” Anna looks at him quizzically.

“Furniture,” he says. “I’m moving furniture.”

Anna does not interrogate him.

HE HAS PACKED one box when the phone rings. It is Mark. “Want company?”

“Sure,” he says. “Come.”

But before he is halfway through packing the second box, the doorbell rings.

“You must have been nearby.”

“On the pay phone at the corner,” Mark admits sheepishly.

“You look great.” Justin means it. Mark has shaved off his hair. Gone are the dyed blond tight curls that reminded Justin of a toga-clad attendant to Caesar, albeit a black one. Bereft of hair to frame his face, Mark’s features are more pronounced: his wide brow and abrupt chin, his proud nose that flares slightly at the end, his perfectly shaped full lips. But his eyes are sad. Justin thinks, as sad as they were when he last saw him at the hospital.

“I feel good,” Mark says. He smiles, but Justin detects he does so with difficulty. He takes off his coat. He seems smaller, his shoulders not as wide.

“You lost weight?” Justin asks.

“A pound or two. Plan to put it back on in a couple of days.”

“You can start now. Hungry?”

“Famished,” Mark says.

Justin pats him on the back. “Scrambled eggs okay? Or omelet?”

Mark says omelet and Justin leads the way to the kitchen. He takes cheese, tomatoes, and eggs from the refrigerator. He gives the cheese to Mark.

Mark takes a knife out of the butcher block on the counter. “You have it perfect here, Prof,” he says.

“I bought at the right time. When you graduate and start earning money, you can buy a place, too.”

“I didn’t mean that.” Mark begins to cut the cheese.

“Then what?”

“Not that you don’t have a great place. I mean look at this big kitchen.” He turns around. “The flowers in the pots on the window sill, the garden outside. Don’t get me started about the living room and dining room.” He points the knife to the orange Le Creuset pots hanging from the ceiling. “I wouldn’t dare to put my pots there, but these … French, right?”

“Mrs. Peters’s the decorator.” But Mark knows this. He has been here before. Sally has given him the tour.

“You have a beautiful house, Prof,” he says.

“But that was not what you wanted to tell me, was it, Mark?”

“I would give anything to have a family like yours,” he says.

Justin avoids his eyes. “You’ll have a family one day, too, Mark.”

“You have a beautiful wife and a beautiful child. The perfect marriage.”

“No marriage is perfect.”

“I’d want mine to be as good as yours.”

“It will be,” Justin says. He resists the temptation to say
I hope it will be better than mine.
His marriage is good. He plans to make it better. “Do you want to put something else in your omelet?”

“Like what?”

“Check the refrigerator.”

“What do you have in here?” Mark has his hands on the door of the refrigerator. “I’m the omelet meister, you know.”

Justin grins. “Take what you want.”

Mark opens the refrigerator, stops, turns. His eyes look pained, his mouth stiff at the corners.

“What?” Justin asks.

“I heard the rumor, Prof.”

“Oh, that.” Justin’s face relaxes. For a second he thought something more had happened to Mark.

“I was at the college on Friday,” Mark says.

“Professor Banks told me you’ve been back since Wednesday.”

“I came by your office but you weren’t there,” he says. He lowers his voice. “I don’t believe what they’re saying about you.”

Justin takes a bowl from the cupboard and throws the tomatoes he has just cubed in it. “Don’t worry, Mark,” he says. “It doesn’t bother me.”

“They’re just jealous because you have the perfect family,” Mark says.

“I don’t listen to that trash,” Justin says and reaches for the eggs.

“Most of them have nobody,” Mark says.

“Let’s forget it, okay? I think there’s some leftover chicken in there.” He cocks his head in the direction of the refrigerator. “It should be good in your omelet.”

Mark searches the refrigerator and pulls out a dish covered with clear plastic wrap. “Are you sure we can use this?” he asks.

“Absolutely,” Justin says. He cracks open four eggs. He has had too much to eat at the restaurant but he will sit with Mark.

“Does Mrs. Peters know?”

“Huh?”

“About the rumor they’re spreading,” Mark says.

“No,” Justin says. “But it won’t matter to her, either. She knows the truth.”
He will tell her later. She knows he is not having an affair. That is not their problem.

“I wouldn’t want Mrs. Peters to be upset,” Mark says.

“She won’t be.”

Mark has put the chicken on the counter but he has not yet unwrapped it.

“Are you going to use that, yes or no?” Justin asks.

Mark seems not to have heard the question. “I wanted you to know, Prof,” he says, “I know it’s all a pack of lies.”

The sincerity in his voice makes Justin uncomfortable. “There are some people who live for gossip,” he says. “I ignore them.” But his hand falters as he beats the eggs and he has troubling maintaining the brisk pace he started.

“I came to tell you that I know they are lying,” Mark says.

Justin clears his throat. “That was good of you,” he says.

“And to see how you’re doing.”

Finally, at last, shame washes over Justin. He puts down the egg whisk. “You must think I am an insensitive good-for-nothing, Mark.”

Mark looks at him, puzzled.

“I should be the one asking you how you are doing.”

“No,” Mark says quickly. “You came to see me in the hospital.”

But Justin knows that is not enough. It does not exonerate him. Banks told him that Mark had returned to the college, yet he had not gone in search of him. Sally, Giselle, his own troubles with finding a way to make them a family again had so absorbed him, he had not stopped to think, to bother to find out, if Mark needed him. Mark had lost the woman he loved, his soul mate. He had had a brush with death, but he is here, at his house, because of a rumor he thought could hurt him, the same Mark that days before tried to protect him from discovering that a woman he dated in the distant past was a lesbian.

Is this what professors do? They profess but do not believe? They have no obligation to be, only to say? He has spoken to Mark about shame and responsibility, about human decency, about the need in a civilized society for people to care for one another, but he has spoken about these things through the prism of literature, through characters in books. Banks had called these worlds make-believe and he defended their relevance. But does that relevance apply only to the students and not to the teachers? It is Mark who is decent here, who puts aside his own troubles to worry about his.

“Have you seen Sandra?” The question comes too late.

“We’re talking.”

“Good, good,” he says. “Thinking of getting back together?” His need at that moment to have things right for Mark, to see again that spark that no longer shines from his eyes, propels him to this fantasy.

“No. Not a chance. She’s gay for sure. Friends. That’s all we are now.” Mark grins. “Want to hear a joke, Prof?”

Justin returns his smile.

“You should see us. We are real pitiful. There is Sandra crying over Professor Clumly and there I am crying over Sandra.”

It is not a pretty picture. “You’ll get over it, Mark,” he says. “You’ll see. I guarantee that soon you’ll have someone.”

“Like you do, Prof?”

He decides to tell him, to air his dirty laundry. “Sally was thinking of leaving me,” he says. “I don’t have the perfect marriage.” Yet if he were truly honest, if the truth is what he really wants to face with Mark, he would have said
is.
Sally
is
thinking of leaving me.

“Nothing works anymore, does it, Professor? I mean, everybody’s getting divorced these days. Nobody stays together.”

“It’s a different world, Mark. We think we have so many more options. The grass is greener, but we end up snagging ourselves in all the choices we think we have. Can you guess how many types of toilet paper you get to choose from? We have exchanged the big things to be snarled in a quagmire of little things, a dizzying array of petty choices that can squish us. But all the while the big things are being taken away from us. Nobody knows who his neighbor is anymore. Fewer and fewer children live with both their biological parents. And we happily tell ourselves stepparents are just as good. The more the merrier. Children get to have two mothers and two fathers instead of one of each. I wonder who we think we ’re fooling? Not the children, I can tell you. Not the lonely men and women out there who would do anything for a history beyond a year or two
with someone they love. Dig deep, Mark, not wide. That is what I plan to do.”