Grace (30 page)

He is still not fully awake. He glances at the clock on the dresser. “It is five o’clock,” he says.

“What I want to know,” she says, “is why. Why have you removed my things?”

“Removed?” The word reaches his tongue and the fog clears in his head. It will be now, this morning, they will have their talk, not later, after work, after dinner, when Giselle is in bed. “Have you been downstairs?” he asks her.

“Yes, I have been downstairs.”

“I can explain,” he says.

She does not let him. “Why have you touched my photographs? I never touch anything of yours. Those were my personal photographs. Photographs of
my
family, of
my
mother,
my
father,
my
brother.”

“Sally. Sally, listen.” He stands up.

“Isn’t it enough you have a whole room to yourself? Must you control the other rooms, too?” The tears simmering in the canal of her lower eyelid are not tears of grief or pain or mere anger, but tears of indignation. They do not fall down. “You had to remove my books, too. My father’s books. They were mine, Justin, not yours. But, no, the great professor had to remove them. The great professor needs more space for his grand collection. No, the den alone wouldn’t do. Four bookcases that reach the ceiling won’t do. They are not enough for the Nobel laureate.”

He knows nothing he can say now, while she is in this state, will calm her. He puts on his robe and then reaches for her hand. “Stop. Stop, Sally,” he says. She pulls away. He reaches again and holds her firmly. He tightens his grip. He lowers his voice. “Stop,” he says.

She swings her free arm around her waist and clutches the small of her back.

“I can explain, Sally.”

She purses her lips.

“Come,” he says. “Come with me, Sally.” His hand encircles her wrist. “Come.” He says so gently.

“Where?” But she does not fight him.

“Come, and afterwards you may say whatever you want to me.”

They are standing close to each other now. He can, if he wants to, kiss her on her mouth, but it is a real kiss he wants. He believes, he is sure, that when she sees the changes he has made, she will want to kiss him back.

“Come.” He leads her to the den. He opens the door.

She sees her photographs immediately. “What? Why?” She breaks free from him and walks over to the desk.

“I didn’t adjust the chair,” he says, but she is not listening. “I didn’t know the height you’d like.”

She picks up a photograph, the one of her mother. “Why, Justin?” Her fingers trace lightly over it.

“I want you to begin to write again.”

She down puts the photograph and looks around. “Your books?” She gestures to the empty bookshelves.

“Space for yours,” he says. “I’ve already put some of them there.”

She presses her hand against her mouth.

“Not a journal,” Justin says. “Not lesson plans. I want you to write poetry.”

The canals at the bottom of her eyelids flood.

“You are a poet,” Justin says.

She shakes her head. Tears fall down her cheeks. She does not dry them. Justin puts his arm around her shoulders. “Sit,” he says. He sits with her, but her body is rigid next to him on the couch.

“Why?” Her hands are clasped tightly in her lap.

“Anna let me read the poems you gave her,” he says.

“Anna had no right,” she says.

“I asked to see them.”

“She shouldn’t have given them to you,” she says.

“Anna is your friend,” he says.

“I can’t.” She moves away from him, to the center of the couch. His arm falls limply to his side. “Anna was wrong,” she says.

“You can,” he says. “You should. Anna believes it, too. You should write again.”

“It’s too late,” she says. Her voice quivers.

“You are an incredible poet. I was a fool not to see that.”

“I can’t.” The tears fall heavily on the neck of her nightie. The fabric, thin, transparent, sticks to her skin, three brown wet splotches in the midst of a diaphanous blue.

Justin gets up and brings back a box of tissues. He wipes
her face. He blots the top of her nightie. “You can, Sally. You must,” he says. He does not try to embrace her. He waits.
He will wait.

“I told you. I told you, Justin. I can’t. I can’t deal with the grays.”

Why?
It is the question he must answer.

“Gray is all we have,” he says. For now, this is all he knows.

“I want the black and the white,” she says. The tears have stopped. “I want life to be simple. Life is easier when it’s simple. It’s better when it’s simple.”

“You don’t believe that, Sally.”

“Grays get me confused. Grays get me in trouble.”

“Not grays, Sally. Seeing only black and white will get you in trouble. It has gotten the world in trouble. But the truth is we are imperfect beings. We are flawed, and no one is absolutely beautiful or absolutely ugly, absolutely good or absolutely bad, absolutely right or absolutely wrong. There are no right choices, only better ones.”

He is conscious, as he speaks, of seeming to lecture, and he does not want to lecture, not to her. He is in his house, his home, not in his classroom. He is speaking to Sally, his wife, not to his students.

She sits up. “And yet you want to tell me what is best for me and Giselle.”

It is too late. The tone he used, the manner, was of man certain of himself, an opinionated man, an academic, who in spite of what he has just said, thinks and speaks in absolutes.

“You want to tell me that what is best for Giselle is for you and me to live together. You tell me
that
is the right choice.”

“No,” he says, making an effort to shift his tone, to speak with the voice of a husband, lovingly, with concern for her. “I think it is the better choice.”

“I don’t know how you can be so sure,” she says.

Do. Act
, he told himself. But it is not working.

“Are you still thinking of leaving me, Sally?” He is trying to keep his fear in check, but the words sound strained, artificial. Melodramatic.

“Giselle loves you so much,” she says.

“She loves you, too. Yesterday, when she woke up, the first thing she did was to ask for you. Anna says she talked about you all day.”

She looks down on her hands. “It’s these grays,” she says. “I hate these grays.”

“I should not have insisted. I should not have said what I said.” He is filled with remorse. “I saw how unhappy Giselle was that day you were crying in the bathroom.”

“I didn’t want her to know,” she says.

“She wasn’t fooled. She knew you were unhappy. I told her you were tired, but she knew something was wrong.” He berates himself for his stupidity, his insensitivity. “I know it will not be good for Giselle if you are unhappy staying here, Sally. I want you to be happy here.”

Her eyes remain cast down on her hands.

“That is why I put your things in the den,” he says. “I
want you to stay, Sally. I want you to write, here, in this den. It’s yours, Sally.”

“No.”

“I’ve fixed it for you. You can put your books here when you are ready.”

“No. It’s your office.”

“You can write here.”

“No.” But she looks up at him. “And what about you?” she asks. “Where will you work?”

“I have my office.”

“And your papers? Where will you grade your papers?”

“I can work in the kitchen. There’s a big table in the kitchen. Close the door, Sally, and write.”

“Write what?”

“Write what you feel.”

“It got me in trouble,” she says.

He takes a deep breath. “Passion is not an illusion. I was wrong to tell you that.”

“It
was
an illusion.”

“The man you created was the illusion. What you felt was not an illusion.” He breathes deeply again, down to a place it seems he has never been. It is not a sigh he emits. Nothing like a sigh. There is no sadness lurking in the air that pours out of him. If he could name it, he would say it is joy. It is a feeling, he would say, of reckless relief that propels this breath forward, out from his chest. “Four,” he says.

“Four?”

He, too, can make no sense of the number, the dream he had (was it a dream?).

“Four?” she asks again.

He connects it to the present. “Giselle is four,” he says.

The last time she said she loved him, the last time she said it from her heart, they were celebrating Giselle’s half birthday. Then the long spiral downward began. On Giselle’s fourth birthday, for the very first time, she turned away from him in their bed.

“Yes,” she says, puzzled at a statement so obvious to them both. Her eyebrows merge.

It was a clue. He can see that now. But a clue leading to what? Suddenly he remembers an argument he had with Lloyd Banks: You like to be in control too much, Banks had said. Loosen up. Go with the flow. The jockey won’t win the race if he holds on to the reins too hard, even if Secretariat is under him.

He loosens up. “You were four when your father died,” he says. More words come. “Giselle had just turned four when you began looking at those shows and reading those books.” He understands.

She never forgot that night in Alabama. The men in white hoods, her father’s blood curling into the dry dirt, red, then brown like manure. Her therapist was wrong. This loss she suffered, this hurt that has come back now and paralyzed her mind so that she will not, cannot, find her way through the grays of poetry, was not caused by Jack. It was caused by something more than Jack, something that had happened much, much earlier than Jack: her father’s murder. It was that that had left its mark on her.

“I think those are the grays that frightened you, Sally. That time when your father died and your mother had a breakdown.”

“No,” she says.

“You felt abandoned.”

“No,” she repeats.

“You said your father was reckless and when you changed your mind about that, you said you admired him. He had the courage of his convictions, you said. But you never acknowledged what he had done to you.”

“My father loved me,” she says quietly.

“Yes, Sally. But you were only four years old. You were a little child. To your little child’s mind, he had left you.”

“Not intentionally,” she says.

“No, not intentionally. But that is how it felt to you when you were four, Sally. You felt he had left you intentionally. That is what you were afraid to admit. You preferred to hide in your room.”

“I did not hide in my room.”

“You didn’t want to come out because you were afraid to be loved, to be hurt again.”

“I loved to read. That’s why I stayed in my room. I told you that.”

“If you spoke your feelings, if you admitted that you felt your father had abandoned you, left you alone to fend for yourself, you would have to condemn him, you would have to admit he was not a good father to you. You could not face that, Sally. You needed to have a father you could love, you could admire, even if that father was not physically there.”

“You’re wrong. I didn’t think of those times too often,” she says.

“How could you love a father who had abandoned you?”

“You’re wrong,” she says again.

“Jack Benson helped you not think of those times too often,” he says.

“Jack?”

“That’s why you stayed with him.”

“Jack was an evil man.”

“But he said he loved you and you believed him.”

“Jack was a bad man.”

“I think when you burned his letters
(Let me read the ashes, Lord.)
, you were not only burning his memories, but the memories he helped you forget.”

“When I was with Jack,” she says, “I thought Tony was happy. I thought he was getting better. Jack was talking to him. I thought Jack was helping him.”

“You needed to believe that, Sally. You wanted your brother to be happy. But I think all along you knew Jack was not the man he pretended to be.”

“Tony was trying. I know he was trying, but Jack was so evil.”

“You created the man you wanted, you needed, in the poems you wrote. You could not afford to be abandoned twice, once by your father and then by Jack, but that man in your poems was not the man you lived with. The man you lived with and that other man were two different persons.”

She is quiet, breathing softly next to him.
He too could not afford to be abandoned twice.
He tells her so now. “When my father died, I felt he had abandoned me.”

“He had a heart attack,” she murmurs.

“Yes, and I was much older than you were when your father died, yet I blamed my father for dying. If he had loved me enough he would have lived for me. It was an irrational thought, but that was how I felt.”

She looks away from him.

“I created an illusion, too, Sally. When my parents went away I pretended I was strong, but the truth is that many nights I cried myself to sleep. I swore I wouldn’t let anyone hurt me like that again. I clamped down. Look how old I was when I got married. I would not commit to anyone, could not, until you, Sally. But I loved you so much it didn’t matter that I was afraid you could leave me, too, that you loved Jack more than you would ever love me.”

It is taking him courage to admit this. But this courage that comes to him now is not of his making. Even as he speaks, he thinks of himself not as himself, but as some other person who has invaded his brain, put words in his mouth: a puppeteer with his puppet, a ventriloquist with his doll.

“That is not true,” Sally is saying. “I don’t know if I ever loved Jack. I don’t know if the Jack I knew ever existed.”

“It doesn’t matter. You have a right to love Jack as much as you want. I just want you to love me, too.”

“I stayed with Jack because he was there.”

He knows what she means. “I used to think that my parents didn’t have to live in the same house I did. Just in the same country. That would have been enough for me.”

“But I didn’t love Jack,” she says.

“He helped you.”

“Not in the right way,” she says.

“Not in the right way,” he concedes.

She bites her lip. Her eyes are teary when she releases it. “Dad had a choice,” she says.