Calvin Baker - Grace

She had dedicated herself to the same long conversation I joined that night since the sixties, and had never wavered in her seriousness of purpose or way of being, even if that way of being was esteemed differently in the current moment. It was right, I thought, the one, true way, even if by the time I met her it was already clear New York was in the depths of a gilded nadir, from which her kind of questioning, or seeking, had been banished. She wanted to speak “truth to power.” It seemed quaint, now. And I saw her for the old hippie she was, the product of another time. Still I respected her as much as anyone I had ever met, because I had learned more from her than I had in my entire educational experience up until the moment we met, loved her in the unique way we love those we admire in our youth, when I thought if civilization ever needed to be remade from the first brick, hers was the hand I would want on the compass.

I knew she was dedicated to a cause she was too old to know had been vanquished, a fact that made me appreciate sitting there again that much more, because even if it was untenable it had been a beautiful, well-meaning vision, from a different time in America, and as a young man it had spoken to me as the only wisdom I needed. She was, I finally realized the day I quit and stunned her into a taciturn silence, my intellectual mother figure.

“So?” Bea asked, her gentle, unassuming voice carefully calibrated to a point midway between professional and personal familiarity. “How are you?”

“Everything is fine,” I said.

“Really and truly?” She looked appraisingly at the remnant signs of my hangover. I felt naked and ashamed.

“Yes. I just had a late night.”

“You should enjoy your youth.” She nodded and waved it off, as we eventually came to what was on her mind, an assignment somewhere awful I had once been before.

“Not on your life,” I answered, without thinking to soften it. I had kept abreast of the story, but I did not wish to go back. Witnessing such things did not prevent slavery, or the last war, or the next one; to say nothing of the genocides that did not affect the interests of anyone with the power to stop them. No one was interested in political murder, let alone the soul murder that happened every day. Nothing I had ever done and nothing I could ever do would prevent the massacre she wanted me to report from continuing. The only people who would read such a report in any case were those already constitutionally against such things, and they had no power. Nor did I, so it would only make me suffer, which is what I told her.

She was not the kind of person you refused lightly. I had never heard anyone tell her no, in fact, unless it was someone with something to hide. But she merely smiled at me indulgently so that I immediately understood my own foolishness.

“You’re in pain,” she nodded, “and world weary. I suppose I should have known. I feel horrible about what happened.”

“Things happen all the time. Life moves on,” I said.

“Yes and other platitudes.” She held me in her eye a moment, then closed her eyelids in sympathy, as a car passed on the street blasting music loud enough to come through the windows. “Why do people listen to that?” she asked.

“It connects with them,” I answered.

“Don’t they know they are just selling every kind of falsehood?”

“They would say they are winning at America.”

“A lie is a lie. All that talent, all that energy. People like that are supposed to be leaders, if I may comment on it. But maybe I’m too old to understand.” She turned her thoughts back to the assignment.

I wanted to say yes, and I needed the work, but I simply could not bring myself to agree. I respected her, but felt then she only saw a portion of what we were talking about, and because of that a chasm opened between us, and also another, between what I knew and what I could say.

“Why is it—?” I stopped, on the verge of saying what I should not. I still respected her, even if she didn’t understand how utterly narrow her worldview ultimately was. “Why is it—?” I began and stopped again. “Why have you only ever assigned me certain topics?” I broached it anyway.

She nodded, with a slow intake of breath. “I had never thought about it in that way. I thought you were doing what you were interested in.”

“Not to the exclusion of other concerns,” I replied. “At the moment I’m bored by politics. I’m bored explaining things to people who think they know everything, when all they’ve ever done is sit behind a desk in school or an office.” I stopped, realizing I was answering with a negative. Telling her what I didn’t want to do, because I knew only that satisfaction was not available to me in that realm.

“So what are you interested in?” she challenged.

“Art. If someone makes art of politics I will engage it. But only as art, not as some politically correct mission. What I need to know about politics I know. What I need to know about art seems bottomless.”

“How do you propose to go about that?”

“I realize it sounds foolish. But do you know why I’m sitting here right now? It’s because some teacher made me read Oedipus when I was twelve or thirteen, and first learning to read in that way that gives more complex pleasure than story. But the strange and liberating way of seeing that challenges you to look at something foreign beyond what you believe you already know, until it dawns on you: I am that .”

“You’re Oedipus?”

“No, but I read Sophocles: A man unknown to himself, bright, angry, outcast, and blessed gets singled out by the gods for a trial no one should endure, and others could not withstand, or think they could not. Abandonment. Guilt. Shame. Loss. Exile. Friendlessness. Poverty. Blindness. Yet he endures, he endures, through the devotion of the one person who loves him in this world. Not for what he is, but for who he is. That is the only thing between him and death. This is what the gods have devised as his challenge, to know and accept who he truly is — beyond mother, beyond father, beyond status or civilization. Only after he has proven he can endure such a journey do they allow him grace.

“I read that and thought, yes, yes. That’s the story of my life. All of it. And also how to live it. I accept.”

Bea had been nodding, but shook her head slowly. “Life finds us wherever we are, even those behind desks. It’s fine to close a chapter in your life, though. You are at the crossroads now, which I can see hurts in the way everything that makes us human hurts. So never mind work. You will come back to that or not. Tell me how you are in your life.”

I recounted the past few months, and she nodded empathetically, asking whether I was dating.

“No. I’m not ready for that.”

An inscrutable expression crossed her face. “No. You are not even within your own self again yet, which, of course, can never be the self that was.”

“I am moving ahead.”

“Good,” she replied, finishing her salad, “so long as you understand the contents of your heart, if you’ll forgive the advice.”

“Bea, I’m sorry. You know I take anything you say seriously. I’m fine.”

“Well, I’m sure you will find your sense of equipoise again.”

“The film went well at least,” I offered.

“I mean the kind of peace that comes from within. Managing pain is not the same as being free of it. Just because you don’t want to peer to the bottom of darkness doesn’t make it disappear. It only makes us unaware of our course through it, which everyone who would do anything, as you implied, has to thread. But there I go, giving advice again. ” Her voice trailed off. “I should get back to the office. Call if you change your mind, or if there is anything you need. You know that, I hope.”