Calvin Baker - Grace

“It’s not important to me.”

“That you win, or that I respect you?”

“Either.”

“So I see.” She laughed.

“What do you see?”

“You’re in a bad situation either way.”

“It is only a game.”

“That is what my ex-husband used to say, and he meant it. But I don’t believe you think anything is only a game.”

“You were married?”

“Yes. I thought I mentioned it last night. It was what you were supposed to do at the age I was then, which was also old enough to know better.”

“Who did you marry?”

“A man I thought was the right kind of man to marry.”

“He was not?”

“He was the right kind. He just was not the right man. Uncle Thiago is the only one who saw that, and questioned why I was doing it.”

“You didn’t know?”

“I didn’t listen. I was doing what I was supposed to do, because I did not know what I-me-myself wanted to do. And even if I had, I might not have known how to do it, let alone how to be in a real promise with someone else. I went ahead with it, and it was just right, except for the voice somewhere saying, are you sure? Are you sure ? Of course I wasn’t. How could I be? But the people had been invited. The hall was reserved. I walked down the aisle to the wrong prince, and the wrong castle. They all look the same from the outside . But once you get inside , oh boy little boy, that’s a whole other story.”

“How long since you divorced?”

“We separated three years ago. We just filed the final papers. I came here to get away from all of it. The papers had a meaning I didn’t expect, and the lawyers were a way I did not know.”

“But you’re a lawyer.”

“Not that kind. I know about hammering together constitutions, not chiseling apart marriages.”

“Sorry it was difficult.”

“No harder than it should be. But no one ever listens to that part of the fairy tale. They tell you all these little girl lies, and I’m sure they told you little boy lies too, and then you are living to fulfill the lie, not knowing what else there is, and so you are stuck in a relative life. I have this in relation to that. But still need that over there. Once I find my prince, my castle, my pot of gold everything will be fine. For men, it is probably just: be tough and work hard. That is the only thing you think is required of you. But you think I’m just justifying my mistake.”

“How do you know what I think?”

“I’m sorry. I should not assume. All I meant to say is if you have just a partway idea of yourself, how can you have a wholehearted relationship to anyone else? Does that make sense? It’s too hard to understand what another person goes through, if anyone ever really does, if you don’t know what you yourself have been through, so that was the hard part of it for me.”

“You think you know now?”

“I see the look in your eye. Maybe. I just hope someday, some wise kindergarten teacher will take all the boys and girls into the coatroom, right after they have heard their first fairy tale, and tell them the score: Okay, now forget everything you just heard about the end. You are going to keep hearing it in everything they tell you from now on — how beautiful the princess is, how rich and handsome the prince, all about the gold standard. Just listen to me, kids, and pay close attention. First you will get lost in the woods. Or waylaid by ogres who sell you out to the witch, who is going to put you in her pot. Or else you will spend the best hundred years of your life fast asleep. And for you poor coyotes who think you are clever, Acme has special traps they are going to use to fix you up like Ozymandias. If not that, it will be the dragon who catches up to you and singes you to within an inch of your life. You will have to spend years in psychotherapy explaining why you can’t go into the kitchen, because you are afraid of fire, and that’s why you’re so goddamned thin.”

She took a drink from my water bottle, before finishing her thought. “So you might as well do your own thing starting now, and live your own life in your own way, because I promise you this, whichever way you head, and whatever it is you’re after, if it is worth anything at all, sooner or later it’s going to hurt like hell.”

“Can’t we all just stay out of the woods?”

“What, and turn into the dragon one scale at a time?”

Our game was long since ended, and we were sitting on the red clay, next to the net posts, careless of anything else. I wanted to spend more time with her, and invited her to join me on the river later in the week.

“I return to the city tomorrow,” she said. “I can come back on the weekend, and we can go out together then.”

“I would like that,” I said.

“I see what you are thinking,” she smiled. “Don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry about what?”

“You are wondering whether I’m available.”

“I am?”

“That’s what I would wonder if I were a sensible man and had met a random girl I liked. But you should not. I have paperwork to take care of in the city that will dredge up old feelings, and I’ll be sad and probably cry. But that will be to clean it all out. Hopefully you won’t get insecure, or run away, because it will just be the sadness, complex but complete, you feel for what is vanished and gone. I will be better than new after that because I know something I did not before. Some of it I wish I did not, but I do, which makes me wiser and perfectly available. And if you play your cards right — who knows? So, second date?”

As I listened to her the idea lodged in my mind, and with it that joy of anticipation and new possibility. I was impressed again with her forthrightness and self-possession, and not anxious as I had been the night before, as I commanded myself to meet her steady gaze, and tried to observe what I was feeling, which was that perhaps it was not only my subconscious that was being snagged but my spirit.

Still I only did not know what our next meeting would hold.

A torrential rain was falling in Farodoro and predicted to sweep over the islands by evening, lasting through the weekend. Sylvie postponed, and I rowed to the main island in the afternoon for supplies to last through the storm. At the counter I asked Doña Iñes for batteries, but she had already run out, so I bought candles and extra matches, hoping if there was a blackout I would not burn the place down. There was only intermittent Internet on the island, and I had not read anything of the outside since arriving, so I put a stack of days-old newspapers in my basket as well. I scanned the headlines as I waited on line, saw the world was unchanged since I’d left, then put them back.

“ Oh, mi niño, ” Doña Iñes said, pushing me aside and packing my rucksack with the groceries, when she saw how ineptly I did it. She was from the Canaries, and had married a local man who died on her three years after she arrived. She never remarried or had children and called everyone “my child.” But I thought she was especially fond of me, because I knew her island and all about how the sea was there, and the fish and volcanoes and the light of first day in the middle of the Atlantic.

“ Buena suerte con la tormenta, ” she waved, as I took my supplies out to the dock.

“ Gracias. ”

Outside again I could see the pregnant, swollen clouds up river, and hurried to get back before they burst. As I loaded the boat the unmistakable sound of a child’s crying reached me, and I turned to see a nine-year-old girl, in a navy dress, bawling on the other side of the wharf.

“ ¿Por qué lloras? ” I asked, looking up from the boat. The child did not answer me, but kept bawling, and I was helpless of what to do until Doña Iñes ran out of her store to check on the commotion.