Grace (4 page)

They wouldn’t have a party. They agreed on that. Just a celebration with Mommy and Daddy. And of course there would be a present. Justin drove to Sally’s school and picked her up at her lunch hour and they bought the present together. A Barbie doll. It was what Giselle wanted.

In those days there was not much Sally and Justin didn’t do together. They shopped for furniture together, they bought the weekly groceries together, they did the unpleasant chores together: the laundry, the dishes, the bathroom. When Justin needed clothes, Sally went with him to the store. When she shopped, he accompanied her. Their friends said it was a recipe for disaster. Familiarity breeds contempt. Or boredom. Too much of anything is good for nothing. You’ll get tired of each other, they warned them.

But Sally and Justin could not imagine a time when they would be tired of each other.

It was a marriage that had come relatively late in life for them. He was thirty-nine when he met her, forty when they married. She was thirty-five. Both were experienced enough, smart enough, to know what they had. They treasured this marriage, safeguarded it.

They had met by accident. The heart, Sally said, will find its way, no matter the obstacles. And there were so many, it was a miracle they were together at all. Justin would have to travel almost four thousand miles to be where she was. Even with the scholarship to Harvard that took him from Port of Spain, Trinidad, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, something had to cause him to move to Brooklyn, and even then the fates had to intervene to put him on a bench in the Fort Greene Park at three o’clock, on a certain Wednesday afternoon when Sally, an American, black, born and raised in Harlem whose residents rarely, and if so, then reluctantly, journeyed across that strip of water, which to their way of thinking could be an ocean, to that
peninsula that began with Brooklyn, stretched out to Queens and then to that no man’s land in the Hamptons (no man’s land that is, except to rich white people), would walk past that exact same park bench, at the exact same time when he was sitting there. And though it may not have been unusual for Sally to be in the park at that time, since she was a primary school teacher and her day was already over, it was unusual for him to be there, for, except for the rare occurrence of a conversion day when Wednesday became Tuesday at his college for administrative reasons, he would have been in a classroom that Wednesday afternoon.

Every pot has a cover, Justin told her. Whether he was the pot and she the cover, or the other way around, he did not say, but what he meant was clear enough to Sally. They were a match.

Indeed they were. Justin was a professor of English literature. Sally had majored in comparative literature at Spelman. Justin liked to read. Sally’s bookshelves in her apartment were crammed with books. Justin wanted to be a novelist, Sally a poet. Justin had not succeeded in becoming a novelist, and neither had Sally become what she hoped. He believed, he convinced himself, that as he was reconciled to a career in teaching, so was she, content, since not writing poetry herself, to be helping little ones find the music in words, the image to express their feelings.

If Justin had to find a marker, a day he could point to when he was certain beyond any doubt that Sally loved him, it would have been the day he and Sally celebrated Giselle’s half birthday, that day after the cake and ice cream, after the opening of
the present which so delighted Giselle she would sleep with it curled into her tiny arms all night, it would have been that night, when they were in bed, in each other’s arms. The memory stayed with him not only for the perfection of those hours with Sally, but because, in his mind, after that night, their life together began a seemingly inexorable slide downward to this moment, now, when his head mocks him with words he cannot silence and he soothes himself with a lie:
Justin does not care.

They had just made love. Sex between them was always warm and comforting, passionate sometimes, but not the raw, unbridled passion Justin had known with women he hardly knew, women he never loved. What Justin had with Sally was love that was passionate. Passionate love. When they reached that point together—and more and more they had been arriving there at the same time, the climax of tension achieved and released almost simultaneously—he felt fused into her, not just his body, but his spirit also, his soul, his heart, his mind at one with her. She would say the same to him. Even the physical distance, she said, the space in which by nature humans are locked into themselves and from each other—the shell of our bodies—vanished, dissolved, when they made love to each other.

“I sometimes look in your face and I see mine,” she said, her fingers tracing the contours of his face, lingering on his forehead, his nose, the curve of his lips, the sweep of his chin.

“What you see on my face is the way I see you. The way I love you,” he said to her.

But that was not all she meant. “I see my real face, too,” she said.

“You are far more beautiful.”

She was not making a comparison. “I see
me”
she said. “When I look at you, it is
me
I see.”

“Yourself?”

“I’ve longed to see my face.”

“And don’t you see it? I mean when you look in the mirror?” Justin was an academic, a man who required the specific, the concrete, who was trained to deconstruct the obscure, examine its parts until he could define it, label it, own it.

“When I look in the mirror what I see is a reflection of me, not me. I cannot touch the me I see in a reflection.
You
can touch me.”

“And you can touch your face.”

Was he such a clod then? Justin would ask himself this question months later. Didn’t he know then she was trying to tell him how much she loved him?

“I cannot touch my face and see it at the same time,” she said, breaking the whole into its parts so the academic could understand her. “I think all my life I have longed for this,” she said.

“For what?” He was still puzzled.

“For this.” Her fingers returned to his lips. “To touch and feel my face. I think,” she said, “this is why we fall in love.”

Still the clod, he asked her: “We fall in love so we can touch and see our faces?”

“If sex were the only reason why men and women seek out
each other, we would not have such feelings. I would not feel as close to you as I do now. As if I were in you and you were in me.”

“I was,” he said. “I don’t know how it was possible for you, but I was in you.” It was a male response, a natural instinct to take cover when intimacy became too intense. It was a foolish response.

“No, no,” she said. “I don’t mean that. I wasn’t speaking only about the physical, though I mean that too. I feel as if I am actually in you. I feel so now. As if I am in your chest.” She poked her finger in the place where his heart lay. “As if I am there and in your head, in your soul, in all of you. I find myself in you,” she said.

He drew her to him. “And I in you,” he said.

“I was so lonely and unhappy,” she said. “Then I met you and saw my face in you.”

“And you saw me, too?” He asked the question nervously because sometimes, in those early days, it was not the inanity of graffiti that bothered him when she recited the words she had seen on a wall; it was what came afterward:
It helped me get over Jack
, she said.

“Yes, yes, I fell in love with you.” She eased away from him so she could face him. “Of course I fell in love with you.”

He made himself feel satisfied.

“But,” she said, “if we are truthful, we will admit that the first person we ever loved,
could ever love
, was ourselves, and that we long to see that self we love, not through a mirror, but through our own eyes. We long to know those lips, those eyes,
that skin. We long to touch and see that face in the flesh.” She smiled and stroked his mouth. “It is why we go searching for the cover to our pot.”

He realized she was saying that he was the cover, she the pot, but it did not matter to him. He loved her. He would be her cover.

“And when we find it,” she said, not yet done, “when we see ourselves in that person, it is then we know we are in love, and it is then the loneliness ends.”

He wanted to be sure. He took himself out of the question he asked her. “Then is it herself the woman falls in love with or with the man?”

“I fell in love with you because I can love me through you. And I can love me because I see in your eyes how lovable I am.”

“Yes,” he said. “We are soul mates.”

“Soul mates, but much more than that.”

He could not say he understood her fully. Perhaps it was because it seemed to him she spoke in the manner of the poet, with the elliptical phrasing he sometimes found tiresome. And perhaps then and there he should have known that whatever she had told him, before they were married, about no longer having interest in writing poetry, about being an anachronism, was not quite true. Perhaps he should have guessed then that it would only be a matter of time before that person she had wanted to be, who she had buried, would gnaw her way through her heart and resurface.

But those thoughts did not cross Justin’s mind. Nor did they cross his mind that morning when she said to him,
It’s space I
want, Justin. Space for Sally. I want to find Sally.
He would think of those times only as the last of those evenings he treasured when they talked sometimes until the early dawn. And he would think of Giselle’s fourth birthday, six months later, as the day when, for the first time in their otherwise happy marriage, Sally turned away from him in their bed.

Brooklyn turns ugly when it snows, but not immediately. Immediately it is a wonderland. Overnight a pristine carpet of white hides everything: the overstuffed garbage cans at street corners, dog excrement on pavements, broken banisters on front stoops, dirty paper and refuse caught in the cracks and crevices of broken buildings, trees bereft of leaves, moribund reminders of the passing of time, the absurdity of the busyness of cities: The rich will still die; nothing will change that. But by morning the magic the snow has woven disintegrates and the city is worse off than it was before. White monster trucks spew sand on streets to keep the snow from sticking. Buses trundle through, cars swish and slide. They pitch volleys of dirty snow onto sidewalks. Tempers flare, pedestrians scream at motorists, car wheels spin hopelessly in dirt and slush.

Justin does not want to be on these streets this morning. It is pride that forces him out. Sally beat him to the exit he had intended,
but he had announced he would go to the college, so to the college he must go.

He does not have to dig too far to free his car. Last week, after the third big snowfall, he parked his car on an angle so that the front was facing the street. Twice before he had cleared out a space near his house, but each time he returned the next morning he found his car buried under mounds of snow his neighbors had dumped when they dug out their own cars. It is winner take all on the streets of this half city, so he devised this foolproof plan. By the end of the week everyone on his block was parking at an angle. Soon the street was littered with cars and small hills of filthy snow pocketed with the deep imprints of rubber boots.

It takes him less than five minutes to scrape off the front and back windshields and windows of his car and drive clear over the hump of soft snow, piled against his front wheels, out into the street, no mean accomplishment on a day like today. But this brings Justin no satisfaction, no comfort. His mood does not change. It is his research day. He should not be here.

Justin has tenure at his college. Technically, if he never publishes another article or presents another paper at a conference, he cannot be fired.
Cannot
is perhaps too extreme a word. Technically, there are rules. Technically, the administration could terminate a faculty who has ceased to participate in the scholarly life of the university, but Justin has never heard of a case where that has been done in the university system where he teaches. He has never heard of a tenured faculty either being fired or even chastised for lack of publications, except of course
if that person wished to be promoted. But that is a matter of personal choice. A tenured faculty who applies for promotion exposes himself to scrutiny. Perhaps he cannot escape the gossip in the corridors, but he can escape scrutiny completely if, after he is tenured, he asks for nothing. Justin knows many more faculty than he would care to count who have taken this route, the route of least resistance.

He is using Sally’s words, the very same phrase that annoyed him this morning, and it bothers him that it has wormed its way into his thoughts.
No, not the route of least resistance
, he says to himself, the route to security and more alternatives, to mortgages secured with a job that is guaranteed, to vacations in the summer without worries—more roads to travel. Again, it is Sally’s phrase that pops into his head. He has trouble avoiding thoughts of her this morning and he wants to, which is why he is on the road on a nasty, gloomy morning instead of lying on his comfortable couch with his favorite book, in his comfortable den, wrapped in his comfortable quilt, or, (because he has not managed to quell his irritation, this more likely scenario comes crashing through the fantasy he is orchestrating) sloshing through the mounds of essays he must grade by Monday.