Calvin Baker - Grace

“Fine.”

“You’re a terrible liar.”

“I know.” I was silent after that. There was nothing to say.

“You know it is impossible to be happy when you are with someone who is not well.”

“You are not suggesting I leave her when she has fallen on hard times? She will get better. She is ill, not crazy.”

“That is not what I said. I only mean sadness is contagious. You see, the educated classes can all be located on a graph, with the queen of England on one end and a renunciant monk on the other. For the creative, it goes from those willing to accommodate the world to those willing to follow art to the edge of the map. It is primarily a function of talent, but the y -axis is fear.” He took out a piece of paper and began to draw. “Genevieve is talented and unafraid. I respect my fear, which is why she dislikes me. She fears making the compromises I do. People with modest talent, and reasonable fears, stumble along the axis, there, doing what they can, according to formulas, and thinking the formulas are real. People with greater imagination and either lavish fear or lavish greed do the same, only they know better. People like her have a chance at making something brilliant and changing the world, then again they have a chance of getting lost. You I cannot plot yet, because you have not decided yourself. Worry the koan, it will help. But, what am I saying? I suppose we all fall for the wrong person once.”

“You don’t leave who you love because she is unwell. I am sure there are other ways of looking at it, but they are not ways to live.”

“You love that woman, don’t you?”

“Like a blues song I love her. Are you going to tell me to call your shaman?”

“It will not help.”

“I thought you said he was a real medicine man.”

“First class at fixing things when you get outside of yourself. For what comes to you from your own spirit, nobody can fix, only help you see.”

I did not want to discuss it further, and we talked shop instead, then had a glass of wine, but I did not have the taste for it, and went back to my hotel to rest.

The last days had been uncertain and exhausting, with me constantly checking to see she was taking her medication, which she sometimes did and sometimes resisted. She was there, but no longer present, not really, until slowly my faith that she would be well again was sapped, so I was there but not present as well.

I was responsible to her, though, and did not break with her. How could I? I had asked for a great love. They gave it to me.

When I arrived back at her place that evening, she was in a state of tranquility, and we were eating a quiet dinner, when she stared up from her plate all of a sudden. “I always knew you would leave me one day,” she said.

“Who said anything about leaving you? I care about you.”

“Do not be sorry,” she said, “and do not be a coward. Sometimes the people get married, and sometimes the people get divorced. I give you a divorce. You are free. But always remember we were married.”

“We still are.”

“We are not anymore. Non , I was not the right wife for you. It was not right.”

“You are the best wife anyone ever wanted. I can wait as long as it takes.”

“Yes, I will be better. But no, you cannot wait and see, so don’t make me love’s beggar. I am too proud.”

I felt worse after that, like a weak liar and coward and every mean, worthless thing there is. I did not leave her, though — not that night, or the next one, or the rest of the season.

The following month was September, and things had grown no better. Some days were up and some were volcanic, and I was due to return to New York to attend to my affairs and renew my visa.

“You will call when you arrive?” she asked. “Or you will let all of this fade into the past?”

“Do not say things like that.”

“As you wish. Since you are afraid and have doubt, I wish to let you go now, face to face.”

“We are still together.”

“ Non . We were. Not anymore.”

“Of course we are.”

“ Non, mon amour . Not anymore.”

“Don’t do this.”

“It is done. You wish to be the hero of the story, you tell yourself, but when people tell their own story it is so they can hide what kind of fool they are.”

“I’m a fool for you,” I said, letting the subject drop, and I returned to the hotel to pack.

When I returned the next morning to say goodbye before my flight, there was an ambulance picking its way down the hill. My heart sank, even before I reached her apartment, with fear of where it had come from. When I reached the top of the stairs, and opened her door, the apartment was empty and squalid. There was no answer when I called, and no note, and no music anywhere to be heard. I saw the neighbor in the hall, but he did not have to tell me anything.

She was a fine, beautiful girl. Luminous. Fragile. True. And she was my girl, and I was broken-spirited with grief to lose her, and our love that ignited all of a sudden to burn brighter than anything I ever knew. And I was hollow and sick with myself for how lowdown it was to give up on her like I did. Haunted every sunless day I crouched low around my own spirit, with no company but all the other ghosts behind my eyelids.

The film wrapped in early May and there was a cast party afterward in a club on East Broadway. The club was filled with beautiful people, who made media and fashion and nightlife, and knew, or thought they did, all there was to know about popular culture, and what people wanted, and how to give it to them. The air was clouded with weed smoke, which I never indulged in, but I took a hit from a joint passed to me by a beautiful girl, and had a sip of my cocktail, which I soon finished, and ordered another.

I wanted to abolish the past from my memory, and focus on what came next, which I could not fathom as I leaned against the bar, trying not to look too empty and centerless. Soon the festiveness and laughter washing through the room were enough to numb my worries, as the air began to buzz with electricity and an omnipresent desire — for sex, for money, for conquest — which the beautiful-looking people displayed in their gestures, in their clothes, in the ease of coded references laced through conversations that exuded confidence and spoke of belonging.

There were a smattering of famous faces scattered through the room, whom the regular people, the outsiders, watched surreptitiously. The famous people found each other, while the business people tried to circle next to the players, who manufactured and sold glory they themselves no longer believed in, as they but longed for something new they could hold to a while.

What was left for them was boredom, cynicism, self-deceit. They bullied, they schemed, they manipulated, they threw tantrums. They were broken narcissists who wished to be worshiped. Whatever the chink in anyone else’s armor, they looked for a way to exploit it. It was their value proposition. They thought like gangsters, and the only lasting value was survival itself. Whatever happened in the struggle for that, they kept moving forward and never mentioned those fallen by the wayside.

The rarest among them, who had reconciled how it was their world worked and who they themselves were, inhabited that apex of fear and insecurity and uncertainty, like gods walking through a dream. When they bullied and manipulated it was no longer for power or money but to serve some other, invisible truth they believed in absolutely. They were impressed by intelligence, talent, charisma, authenticity. If they could package those things up and sell them, so much the better. That was the game, but they had by then eyes on either side of their heads, one focused on the business at hand, the other turned inward to whatever kept them from losing themselves.