Calvin Baker - Grace

“Why?”

“Why? Because you second-guessed your heart again. You say you want to be together, but you think there are rules for how to do everything. But there are not, only what we make. You were supposed to say, ‘Yes. Let’s elope to Tahiti.’ Then we would be married. You were not supposed to say, ‘Why?’ The prince never asks the princess why ? He knows why . She knows why . Little babies in their cribs know why . Everyone knows this when they are born, but they forget. You are supposed to remember that, not analyze it and be impossible. Your line should have been, ‘Genevieve, my true love, I am your knight at your service. I have my armor and my sword but I am lost without you, my grail, my purpose.’ Or else, she feigned swooning, ‘Let us gather up the threads of our affection and braid a rope to raise a sail on our little ship, to journey wherever we wish.’”

“Okay,” I said. “I am your knight.”

“Why are you my knight? See how it all goes away? Now, tell me again what you think of Tahiti?”

“I think we should go,” I said.

“To do what?”

“Become citizens?”

“I already am a citizen.”

“Then I suppose I will have to marry you.”

“No. That is entirely insufficient. Don’t you know anything? I thought you were my man.” She laughed.

“Okay,” I said, infected by the idea of doing something spontaneous, “why don’t we take a short trip this weekend?”

“A short trip? No one knows how long a voyage will be when it begins, only how far away the place is you are going.”

Our playing around turned into plans to spend a few days in Spain. I liked the spontaneity, but it was a spontaneity with which she approached everything, and found it liberating to give in to it.

“I am so happy,” she said, giving me a hug. “It will be wonderful. You will see. And, just so you are aware, we do not ever have to get married. It is old-fashioned, unless, one day it comes from inside you, when you have no doubt of your heart and future, and everything else belongs to your past.”

We spent two splendid days in Madrid, where all our meals were communal, the wine abundant, and the street music came from a time before their Civil War, when the people had killed each other, which they tried to forget and hear as songs of forgiveness, putting aside what they knew of history. When the heat from the meseta descended on the city, we took the train north to the emerald coast and periwinkle ocean for respite. The little towns of Galicia were inspirited by pilgrims on the Camino; the food was simple, and the wine tasted of sea grapes and loss. We drank our share, knowing we would overstay our tickets.

When the weather turned gray we fled to find the sun again in San Sebastián. There the locals were clever, leaving the crowded streets to tourists, to enjoy their own vacations by the shore. The wine was fresh and evanescent as we danced with the country folk and ate their offering, which was the best we could hope for.

In old Castile the people were taciturn, starchy as their food. The kind of realists who scoff at Quixotes, so we were out of there by the end of the afternoon.

In Barcelona the locals were self-protective and hard to fathom, but the art and architecture were fanciful, rich, and rebellious, telling us everything the people did not say. Seville was where the Arab gardens were cool, as the musicians played flamenco cautiously, for Catholic ears.

In Granada they fried everything unrepentantly, washing it down with wines sweet as revenge like Phoenician princesses.

On that island we visited last, every female creature except her was pregnant, and before we left the ewes gave birth; the mares in the ramshackle barn, the nannies in the fields, and in the distance, the she-wolves. Only a new bride in white, sitting on the sea wall every day, like a Cappadocian vase, mending her husband’s nets, had yet to complete her labors. After evening tide her imperiled husband returned from the wine-dark sea in the tiny boat he had named the Argo , or was it Arco ? The letters were faded. Fat little goddess, you called her. If only we had been as full. At night, climbing along the volcano, the ocean below shone like obsidian and the stars fused above us. We fought over what we always fought over. Fire from you calling to the fire in me, until the heat of our passion flagged, and we knew what the ancients did when they reached the end of primitive reckoning. Zero, nothing, was unfathomable. The same way we counted on increase. Believed ourselves indivisible.

What things we fought about seemed so minor that I thought of our relationship as faultless, and by the time we returned to Paris any doubts I may have had before had been banished from my mind. But as we dined in the open air the evening we returned, I realized how much I still did not know about her when we saw her family at a nearby table, and she called nervously for the check.

“Don’t you want to greet them?” I asked. “Or are you worried about introducing me?”

“No, I am not,” she said. “Let’s just go before they see us.”

She was adopted, and I knew she was not especially close to her parents, but the reasons she’d given were only the benign differences everyone has with their family. When the waiter next came to the table, though, he told us our bill had already been settled.

“We should at least thank them,” I said.

“Fine. We will just say hello, and leave.”

We gathered our belongings, and went over to their table, where her parents insisted we join them for coffee. They looked like a model family, genial and healthy, but as we sat with them I sensed a deep underlying tension.

Her two younger sisters talked excitedly about their summers. The youngest was just returned from camp and in the throes of her first crush. The middle sister was in her last year of college, weighing the future.

The mother was a cultured, attractive woman, poised in a manner that comes only with age, but clearly unhappy. The father did not seem to notice his wife’s unhappiness, or else did not wish to acknowledge it, though he made all the gestures of a caring spouse, in the old-fashioned way.

Despite the surface of achievement and mirth, as I sat there I kept sensing their deeper unhappiness — the crease of suffering in the mother’s brow, the overburdened slope of the father’s shoulders as he drained his glass, the nervous, fleeting joviality among the girls, as though performing their happiness for the world and themselves — until I was struck at length by the silent realization the father was having an affair, and not a passing one. Perhaps a whole other family. The effort of maintaining their masks of happiness in the face of their inner compromises strained them nearly to breaking.

Genevieve was eager to leave, and as we finally walked home I sensed her relief to be free of them.

“So what did you think?” she asked.

“They seem like fortunate people,” I lied.

“Don’t be blind. It is not as happy as it looks,” she shrugged. “It is only a pretense. My mother gave too much. My father controls them all with money.”

“They are from a different age.”

“She gave too much. She should have left long ago. Now it is too late. She will die miserable, and for what?”

“Maybe she thought she was making a sacrifice for her family.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “And perhaps it is only a lie we tell to make sense of another lie, in order to make a two-faced life seem less cruel.”

It was then I began to understand how little I knew.