Calvin Baker - Grace

Even if I had decided to leave with her, it would have been impossible, because I could not find my limbs. But as I lay there debating with myself, two other women approached, a tall, light one and a taller, dark one. Both looked like mutants from some further stage in human evolution as they sat down on either side of me.

“What language?” The taller one asked, as she took my head in her lap, while the other took my feet, stretching me out between them. The light one spoke Italian, Arabic, and Spanish; the dark one Japanese, German, Afrikaans, and Dutch. In the state I was in I spoke them all as we laughed and they asked if I wanted to go upstairs. Temptation was wearing me down, and I thought to go, telling myself it would be worthwhile if only for the experience. However, through a colossal and super-valiant effort of will, I declined.

They left and I was proud of my willpower, self-satisfied that I remained true to my discipline, as I watched the lights and color bend so that there were no longer angles in the room, only swooping curves of red and purple emotion until I locked eyes with a woman standing directly across from me, who I remembered seeing when I’d first entered, but had lost sight of amid the undifferentiated faces. When our eyes locked, though, she came to me right away, smiling enigmatically and asking what had taken me so long.

She was a large-eyed, big-bosomed country broad, no other term would do; there was something earthy and old-fashioned about her seductiveness. The kind of woman you hope to find on a lonesome night: apple-bottomed, quick-witted, bewitching, Old and Middle English words from the womb and the milk of the language.

Not beautiful, maybe even a little bit homely if you were slow and missed the point; when I looked at her, there was no explaining it, my dick signaled like a compass. A roost cock, keening and crowing to her soft heat as she sat down and took me in her lap, rocking me back to my first body.

“You work in entertainment,” she said perceptively, “but you were in the army before.”

“Close,” I answered, asking how she knew. She shrugged, and ordered herself a drink and put it on my tab. We began to talk and I poured out my tribulations, my conflicted desires, my whole damn life. She crooked her head to the side, looking down at me, and told me to wise up, I had a grand life if I looked the right way.

“Let me get you a spyglass, Watson,” she said. I still didn’t understand, and she didn’t answer again, only slid down and cradled herself against me to show me what she meant.

“Let’s go,” she said.

“I should not,” I answered. “It is against my code.”

“Your what?” she asked.

“My code.”

She laughed. “That is because you still do not know what is right for you, or what you want. If you did you wouldn’t say should . You would say will .”

“I don’t will anything from this place,” I said. “That’s not what I’m about.”

“Come with me, let me find out what you’re about,” she teased.

“I suppose you will help me know what I want, too,” I said.

“Yes,” she answered, turning serious. “The body has a knowledge of its own.”

“I do not sleep with odalisques.”

“You still do not understand, do you? That’s not what I am.”

“What are you doing here, then?”

“I am a professional lover.”

“What does that cost?”

“What is that worth?”

“What is the difference?” I looked up at her, but she was just a light among all the lights.

“The qualia of experience,” she answered.

“That’s a fine word.”

“I used to read in the library, when I dropped out of school and moved to the city to find a job.”

“You should have stayed in school.”

“If I would have had money.”

I had studied enough languages to appreciate the complexity of the verb tense she had constructed. “That took effort to master.”

“The compound subjunctive,” she said ruefully, “is the story of my life. If I would have known, if I could have done, if it should happen that. If it were up to me. Should it ever be. It’s not really the same in American as Brazilian, though. It’s the official verb tense of mad visions and inconsolable sorrows, and belongs to poor people and dreamers. This lifetime brought to you by the subjunctive tense.”

I laughed at her nerdy joke. At the same time I was touched and knew I was going to leave with her, despite my own rules. Smart girls turned me on.

“So,” she said, taking a sip of rum. “The physicalists believe all phenomena can be reduced to the material. The essential concern with all of these things is, of course, how consciousness arises from the body. Whether the consciousness, or soul that makes us human, is only another phenomenon of the body.”

I was too far gone to follow, and asked her to clarify.

“Take for example a hypothetical woman, named Maria, who is a brilliant scientist but has lived in a black-and-white room her entire life where her entire life’s work has been to study the red of flowers. She understands red is the longest wavelength visible to the naked eye, and she knows how the brain is excited by and reacts to red. She knows, in fact, all there is to know about red, without ever having seen it, or a flower.

“One day Maria decides to finally leave the black-and-white room. She steps out from her little box, and she sees the world for the first time, and she sees red for the first time, and she sees her first flower. Does Maria know what red is?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Does she?”

“It’s just a philosophical game,” she cooed, stroking me playfully. “Not real life. They like to ask questions like that because I think God does not talk to philosophers very much.”

“Why did you bring it up then?” I was confused, still burning to know the answer to the question.

“Because, baby, I know all there is to know about love.”

She may have said you . She may have said blue . I do not remember. I was high on opium, and she had me in her hands.

She led me through the halls of that ode to Dionysus, to a room carpeted in silk and exquisitely woven cushions, where she slipped off her dress, and led me to a marble bath. She undressed me and drew the water, then led me in, where she washed me and afterward toweled me dry, before massaging my entire body with rose-scented oil. We went to bed and she laced her legs, long as a country day, around me and I felt perfectly within my skin, undivided in a way I had not since I was a boy. We made love and it was as she said, she was a professional lover.

The next morning, as we sat in bed she kissed me before rising from the sheets, looking down at me still amid the pillows. My head hurt, and my cock, and my conscience as well. “We had something, meu amor ,” she said, rubbing my temples. “Maybe not what you’re looking for, but something all the same. You should drop me a postcard from time to time. Come back and see me when you can.”

“I do not think I will be back this way again,” I said, even as I warmed to the sound of her saying my love in the unguarded southern way. “So you don’t have to lie to me. I know it’s business. Me projecting a fantasy onto you, and you playing it back to get money. It’s okay.”

“No,” she said, smoothing my brow tenderly. “Sometimes I think when people say anything is only business that’s the lie. Maybe I didn’t choose the best work, but everything is real. I’m still a woman. You are still a man. This is still life. And I’m glad we met, even if you would never let yourself fall in love with a puta .”