Calvin Baker - Grace

“Come back to bed,” I reached for her. Sadly, tenderly. Full of pain and vulnerability that flashed the brighter amid the seediness.

“Just remember what we talked about.” She kissed me when she finally left a while later.

“Remind me.”

“Oh, amor ,” she smiled softly. “You will remember. It is what you are truly looking for.”

I tried to recall what we discussed the night before, but it was all as distant as yesterday’s dream. “I can’t remember anything,” I said.

She hugged herself to me warmly, and rested her hand on my chest briefly and just smiled, before leaving. When she walked away all I could think of was an hourglass.

I shambled back to the hotel, still unable to recall the details of the night before. I felt a tarnished, divided joy, sadness and liberation tempered by self-reproach. All I could remember was a feeling between us of pure physicality, an absolute freedom of being completely in the body and completely at ease. If there was no more truth to it than that, at least there was nothing false.

The only falseness was between me and myself.

It was eleven o’clock by the time I reached my room, where I discovered the maid vacuuming, and my luggage nowhere in sight. When I asked where my things were, she shrugged and pointed a finger toward the roof. I knew what she was talking about, and took the elevator up to Doc’s suite, where I found Schoeller and a couple of random guys splayed around the living room in various poses of sin-sickness and suffering. Schoeller was still bumping cocaine from a tiny spoon.

I went to the bathroom to shower and change, then crashed across the bed, where I was fast asleep when Doc showed up half an hour later. He was swaddled in a fresh linen suit, happy as a butter thief, and wide awake as the morning he was born.

He glanced around the room, shaking his head with dismay as he considered us. “Amateurs,” he pronounced, before shoving Schoeller aside on the sofa, to open his bag on the table.

“Where have you been all this time?” Schoeller asked.

“Up Corcovado way, to say confession.”

“There’s a church there?”

“No. I went to speak directly to O Cristo . What I did, no priest could comprehend.”

“Where did we lose Freddo?” I asked.

“In jail. Here. This will even you out.” He was passing out uppers to those who had gone too far down, and downers to those who had gotten too high.

When he reached me he opened my eyes wide with his fingers, before searching them with a penlight.

“First time?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“She gentle with you?”

I smiled.

“Kiss you on the mouth?”

I admitted to it.

“Wrap her legs around you, and rock you in her arms until you felt the heat from the center of the world?”

I laughed weakly.

“Say what you needed to hear? Make you forget your worries, and feel like she knew you? Laugh with you until the darkness shone like diamonds, and make you remember how bounteous loving can be?”

I closed my eyes in wistful reverie.

“Wish you met her under different circumstances?”

I winced.

“You give her all you had? You give her the jailhouse key?”

“I don’t want to play this game.”

“Circle well done. You found a saint in a cathouse.” He grinned at me, and placed a horse pill on my tongue. “Eat this.”

“What is it?”

“This one eases the conscience.”

He turned back to the room. “We need to get moving. We’re driving south to Ihla Grande to surf, and then a little surprise I’ve worked up.”

“No more surprises.”

“Mermaids.”

“Definitely not.”

“Wait till you get there before you decide. We also need to go spring Freddo from the pen, and buy him a new watch.”

“What’s he doing in jail?”

“He refused to give his girlfriend a present last night, like a good little boy, so she gifted herself his watch.”

“How did the police get involved?”

“When he realized it, he lost his cool, then she lost her cool, and security came. He still did not calm the fuck down, so they put him in the tank to chill him out.”

“Why didn’t you spring him last night?”

“And ruin the party? Besides, nobody told him to check his common sense at customs, and, because he is our dear brother, as all of you are my dear brothers, I decided to leave him in peace awhile to remember himself. Just as someday I will find new livers for each of you. Now, when we get him, he will be repentant, and no longer an adjective-defying asshole.”

“I’m fine bailing him out,” Schoeller said. “But let him get his own watch.”

“We have to,” Doc answered, “because he will not have time to do it before going home, and Doris gave him that dumb watch for their first wedding anniversary, when he had no bread and she was making cake. So if he shows up without it she will know something happened, and he will not be able to get himself out of it without lying to her. She will figure this out, of course, and send him to hell. They don’t have the kind of relationship where he can simply go home and say honestly: Sugarstack, I know you don’t want to hear this, and it’s not what I want to be telling you at all, but I was unfaithful to us and as a material consequence lost your watch to a ho in Rio.”

“Let her leave him. Who cares if they get divorced?”

“First off, there is no such thing as divorce after you’ve had children, only nonconjugal polygamy. Second of all, raise your hand if you want him sleeping on your couch. Better to do it this way.

“Why does Doc care so much?” I asked Schoeller.

“You don’t know? His father dropped him off in a place like that when he was fifteen, and never came back for him.”

“I don’t believe you. What kind of father does something like that?”

“His father was a politician.”

“How much did you pay her, Doc?” I asked.

He smiled. “You miss the point. It is not about money but her self-worth, and that each time she meets a man like Freddo, a tiny portion of that dissipates, until she has no illusions except what is permanent in the heart, and, she is too young to know this, but by the time she realizes it she will be on an unalterable course she does not control, and to which she has sacrificed herself. Who am I to say what it takes to compensate her for that? Even she will not fully know for years, when she comes to understand what each of you knows, which is the world is brutal and whores do not love anyone. Except, well, me and Harper here.”

“How much did it cost, Doc?”

“It does not matter, it was a gift. Not payment or substitute for human affection, but a genuine token of esteem, as she is a person and I am a person, and as our friend was not a person, and as the police, who are not people, became involved, and as she alone has it in her power to press charges or not, I, in the name of all our persons leaving this country come Monday, made a contribution to the scholarship fund for her children, who do not know their father, as well as to the retirement account her guild does not provide.”

“Why didn’t you get the watch back then?”

“Because, fool, the policeman kept the watch.”

It was Sunday, and the stores would only be open a little longer, so Doc, who was fluent in getting things done, went to the precinct to get Freddo, while Schoeller and I went to buy a new watch, which we could do in any language.

We spent two hours after that searching high and low for an engraver, until we were able to track one down to his house, where we paid him to open the shop.

When we met back at the hotel in the late afternoon Freddo was there, sheepish, unable to bring himself to say anything as we loaded into the car for the drive south.