Calvin Baker: Grace

Each of us creates history. In the work we do and stories we tell. In the groups we join and games we play. The houses we build and gardens we raise. In the things we create and the impressions we leave on the lives of others. Our remembrance of the past. The names of our children.

Christiansen told me this one afternoon, embedded at the hotel bar, soon after I first arrived in the country, when I confessed I was there to bear witness to great events. Write the first draft of history. He snorted into his beer. One day, before I even knew it, he added, I would want nothing but the security of a home and family. Same as everyone else.

He had placed himself in more war zones than anyone I knew, including several generals, so I was surprised when he used that word. Security. I knew that was a myth, but did not have the confidence to question him outright. Still, I wondered if he believed it.

When he was killed a few weeks later, the first thing I thought was that he should have been at home with his family. I realized then the fearlessness I admired in him was nothing but his attempt to provide them security. That he was ordinary.

I believed firmly that lives lived without higher purpose were ill-steered and half-seized, and soon obliterated — by the hours themselves.

That was at the beginning when I was still green and full of ideas. I learned quickly none of it matters.

I had not thought of that brief conversation in years, but the words flooded to mind again the year after my return, at a wedding one morning, as I shared a table on the manicured lawn of a house on a lake with my friends and their fathers. My own father was dead.

“If I were a young man,” one of the old-timers said, watching the bridesmaids flit across the lawn in their beautiful summer dresses, “I would go right down there and figure out which of those golden little honeybees would make the sweetest life. And take her right back to the chapel.”

“Is that all there is to it?”

“It is at this age.”

“Why do young people need everything to be so complicated?”

“Do not listen, boys. There are five divorces between them.”

“You’re just jealous. Face it. Everyone sitting at this table knows all the women I’ve ever known look better than any woman you ever knew. On top of it my women are more faithful than your women. Wiser. More compassionate. Run their houses better. Throw better parties. Mother children better. Know more, and do more with it, any way you look.”

“If they’re so great why have there been so many?”

“There are only four women in a man’s life,” a tawny-skinned man I did not know, with carefully kept silver hair, said from the other side of our little circle, as the wind gusted the white edges of the tablecloth. “The one who gives birth to you. The one who first stirs and wakens the spirit of love inside you. The one you know is wrong for you, but try to make work anyway. The one who washes your body with her tears.

When you finally comprehend yourself, you will understand none of the others even knew your name.”

“For me there was only another,” one of the old ones said after a silence.

“The right one is blessing enough.”

The conversation was broken off suddenly by cries from down by the shore. A group of women were shouting and running toward the water, past a pile of tiny dress clothes, where a flock of children who had been playing Red Rover moments earlier, had disappeared laughing into the sapphire sea.

“Remember how that felt?” One of the old men recalled, watching the small heads bobbing above the surf. “All of us, every day, should be content as that.”

I realized, as the children scrambled back up the beach, how far removed I was from their translucent wonder. In the time I had been home I felt engulfed by a vast numbness, a black hole sucking down a ray of light, and thought the world was nothing but an irrational, hate-filled place I would be forced to suffer until I died. As I sat there that morning, though, buoyed by the well-being of friends, I knew it was only the life I had first chosen that made me different. Had hardened me to the world.

It was then Christiansen’s words echoed in my mind, and I began to wonder about starting a family. Hoping if I found someone to share my life with I might discover new joy and wholeness, free of all the claims of history, even if I was uncertain true happiness would be available to me.

When I mused on the idea aloud, the men at the table immediately began opining again. “You might as well marry a rich woman,” claimed a friend who had done so and been unhappily married seven years. “At least you won’t lose your money when you get divorced.” “Marry a young woman,” urged another. “Women are all the same,” said the old rakehell across the table, who I learned never had wed, smiling with just his eyes. “Like fruit the important thing is to gather them when they are ripe, before some worm has stolen the seed, leaving you nothing but flesh.”

Later that afternoon the women I knew added their share. “You should meet my best friend,” a married woman said, as we waited on line at the bar. “She’s just turned forty, and is dying to have a child. If you’re serious that’s all that matters.” “Marry an island girl,” said an island girl I first met under the eaves in a rainstorm, who later taught me what happens when a man does not know his own mind. “When they love you, they love you completely.”

When my sly old aunt, whom I always tried to spend holidays with, asked, as the reception ended, whether I would be bringing a guest that year, I quickly demurred. “Who knows, maybe next.” Besides her I had no other relatives, and I knew she wished nothing more than my happiness. But when I saw her engines firing I vowed to keep the decision to myself. It was, after all, the most serious and private of questions.

If I did not have much idea how to go about it then neither, I thought, watching the intrigue among the wedding guests as the waiters cleared the tables, did anyone else. I simply entrusted myself to the serendipity of the world.

“You are fucking insane,” the guard muttered under his breath at the television in his guardhouse, before peering out into the early morning darkness as I approached.

“Who’s there?” he called, looking up from the bank of monitors, as I reached the wrought-iron gate blocking the private street.

“Harper,” I answered.

He stuck his head out from the ghostly glow of the booth, glanced at his watch knowingly as he recognized me, and took a sip of coffee, before clanging open the gate.

I felt exposed by the hour as I made my way up the drive, in the thin blue darkness, before following an overgrown path through the garden at the side of the house that led out to the beach. Inside I could see some of the old people still sitting around the kitchen table, reminiscing and laughing, as I went out through the back fence to the stony shore, where I found my friends sprawled amid the rocks and sounding tide.

Ariel was architecting an elaborate spliff with great ceremony, which he twisted tight and sparked up as I folded myself against a boulder. An old mix tape, from a time before our generation had found its full voice, waxed nostalgic over the Bluetooth speaker, and it was clear they were already high, gazing distractedly into the stars and debating the abundance of life in the universe, between voicing the worries of their lives.

“You talk a lot of mess,” Nicola interrupted Ariel as he exhaled a stream of thick white smoke and passed the joint to Rowan. “Both of you. I don’t understand how you can smoke that stuff and have the careers you do.”