Grace

In all my time in airports and railway terminals, the sentimental junctions of the world, I have seen only one parting that moved me. It was a July afternoon in Northern Italy, at a small train station ornate as a wedding cake. Two gay men stood in a pocket of stillness, formed where the crowd's current divided and eddied around them. Young fingers parted grey hair, muscled body holding the lank body firm in an embrace that wandered as if to take in every limb and hollow of the other. They kissed occasionally, exchanged a phrase or two, but it was that embrace that drew the eye and arrested the heart. If it was scandalous, it was the scandal of defiant tenderness, contra naturam that the young should love the old this freely and without compromise. It was like the clean strokes of the swimmer, that caress--reaching forward for the portion of water he must enter and occupy next, pulling it towards him, cupping its substantiality, even as he must move through it and beyond. The loved body is always, moment by moment, being left behind, like water one parts and penetrates. So we dance most gracefully through the fluids of love and time.
      I am standing on the deck of a ferry, moving northward as if to accelerate the season, from the warm abundance of Indian summer in the south of France to the perpetual dusk of a British autumn. The seagulls follow us from the port at Caen, wheeling and gibbering, their elegant, black-tipped span of wings rising on each skirl of wind. A man beside me, cleaning his camera lenses, says they must be worshipping the boat, like an enormous bird-colored god. I disagree. I think they would like to eat it, and are only contemplating how to get their beaks around such a huge and delectable thing.
      I am following my lover to this grey island, defying a parting whose moment seems premature. Scheherezade-like, I want to continue a conversation begun between us, of words and not of words, that over the weeks together has felt like a deep gear shifting--as when two people at a party somehow find they have shifted in their talk from pleasantries into intimacies so deep that when they look up to find everyone else gone and their hosts yawning, they have no choice but to move themselves to an all-night diner to continue the talk, hold onto the thread of that beginning, grow red-eyed and eat eggs together at dawn. England is our diner, appropriately steel-countered and spiritually fluorescent, in my mind a land of smeared sunrises and evelation.
      What is it I want to reveal to him? He has not had many women, has drifted in solitude for much of his life, like a vessel fragile but clean-lined, deep-keeled. Perhaps I want to tell him what a strange and wild shore he is now approaching, one that may harbor or wreck that buoyant, singular peace. Unlike him, I feel my life rise huge behind me like a frothing wake, churning, peeling back black uncharted waters, the enormous question always having been not how to follow or reverence, but how to get my wheeling, noisy hunger around it all.
      Twice in our time together he has made me ashamed--once in a dream and once in that life we call real. In my dream he takes me to a house he is building and wants desperately to show me, as if it were a symbol of himself, of his integrity. It is a construction site, half-built, a huge skeletal structure with a lovely view on all sides--mountains, sky, pines. There is a party going on amid the bare rafters and beams; elegant people on patio chairs and tuxedoed waiters. I wander through the open floor plan of the house and as I drift, I am aware that I am wonderfully, coolly, radiantly naked. I move among the clothed guests, free, feeling the soft air on my skin. At the far side of the house I catch sight of a cliff, a ridge on the distant mountain. It compels me and I study it, tracing its ascent in my mind. But in the middle of my reverie he comes up beside me with a cloak, attempting to fasten it around me, saying "put this on, you're getting cold." His tone is what is chilling, falsely solicitous. I turn to him and know it is a lie: he is simply concerned about what his guests might think about a naked woman in their midst. I push him off, struggling against the shame he wants to drape me with, saying angrily, "Why do you call attention to what is natural in me?"
      The second time was perhaps no more or less his fault than were his actions in the dream. We were discussing a man I'd known for twenty years whose love I felt might now be going wrong. It was hard to talk about because it was so important to me, something I needed to know and didn't yet, was struggling with and putting off, trying to unskein and protect, keep it from me and hold it close all at the same time. It was a story I felt would have to be talked again and again to get at truly, yet I wanted my lover to hear and know it. His questions were quiet and probing. He listened, responded with an almost palpable care. We were lying in bed, in a cabin on the lip of an island in a dark, northern sea, and the pinprick of our bedroom light felt indescribably small against the starless night that pressed like a tide against the window. I was listening to his comments, not just as they came through his voice but in the alertness of his body, the feel of his thigh tensing against mine, the brush of his forearm--and suddenly I had the feeling that he was not so much trying to understand as to dismantle something, like a reasonable husband might try to dismantle the one-time infidelity of a wife he still wanted to go on being married to. In that one instant I felt that he was trying to talk something away--my need of this man, perhaps, or my own mistakes and illusions, or the gnarled desires of two decades of relationship--and suddenly I felt deeply exposed, as if I should be ashamed of these imperfect intimacies, the errors and struggles of loving and being loved by another. You see, I wasn't talking to entomb that other love or renounce it, but in order to find a way to reanimate and move it forward, and somehow, lying in bed feeling the perfect fit of my head valleyed against my lover's shoulder, I felt it was of that desire that I should be most ashamed.
      How easily the phrase "being true" splits into paradox: between being loyal and being honest. How difficult revelation when one must choose between telling facts and telling truths. Fact: I made love to such-and-such a man at one time. Truth: His body was lean and white as stripped beechwood, and his black hair smelled like the sea. Fact: I am not sleeping with him anymore. Truth: The feel of his sex between my legs is inerasable, rises inseparable from the abundance I bring to my lover now when he touches and draws me, taut and arching with pleasure like a bow.
      Still, I fear that when I tell him about others his eyes might at some point darken with hurt. I will stand before him and he will pass judgement on my life as some calculated traffic in hearts, faithless and impure. About impurity he may be right. Nothing is that clean. I look down at his loved body, the gold and white of him that shakes my heart, and know that every kiss is somewhat of a leaving, every fidelity between us something of a lie. And yet we caress and promise and unveil our coded honesties, our complicated truths. The bedroom light does hold the dark outside.
      If shame were a god, would icons depict him concealing or revealing his face? Would his visage be grotesque or gorgeous, or would it merely mirror back bland normalcy, the enigma of ourselves and our imagined horrors?
      I knew a man once, a psychologist whose specialty was helping trauma patients recover from disfiguring wounds. He spoke to me of a client he had had, a dancer whose face had been crushed when her sportscar tripped an embankment, throwing her into the freeway guardrail. She had been beautiful, he said, he had seen pictures--but the plastic surgery was a botched job. It had taken thirty hours altogether to reconstruct the glass-like bones of her face from sections of her ribs. On the last day they were to meet in therapy, she offered him an unusual gift. Lowering the shades in his office, she slipped off her dress, her nylons, her lingerie and danced for him in that small and sterile office, wordless and naked, holding a veil over her face to make her scars invisible, moving for his gaze only the parts of her body that remained whole. It was a breakthrough, like a celebration, he recalled, albeit sad. "Lovely," he said, "the way she offered me the beauty in her that remained."
      For a moment he was silent, savoring the ghostly erotics of that encounter. Then I told a story of my own.
      It was the summer I'd undergone breast surgery--a rushed, frightening operation but whose outcome was benign. When the pressure bandages came off I moved into a friend's vacant apartment in the city to heal, away from the well-meaning but overbearing sympathy of friends. Although one fear was past, I was still too swollen for the surgeons to tell whether the operation would leave my breast misshapen. We would simply have to see.
      I couldn't exercise during those days, but I spent time sitting in the park watching the runners sprint along the sawdust oval of the track. One afternoon a young man on his fifth lap stopped, sat down with me, and we began to talk. He was young, not much older than my students, but he had a lively thoughtfulness I liked. When he invited me to dinner at his apartment that night I was pleased to go.
      We sat at the folding table in his linoleumed kitchen after the meal, talking offhandedly about books and film. When he asked what brought me to the city, I found myself telling him the truth, easy in his company, laughing slightly at my own anxieties. He listened, watching me with an odd, soft seriousness, then leaned very close to me and whispered "Let me see."
      I must have been so startled I was motionless until I felt the cool air on my breast, followed his eyes as they left mine and travelled down. The whole side of my chest, from ribcage to shoulder, was still the mangled purple and sick olive green of healing bruises. The sutures on my breast were large and black, like the zippered scars on Frankenstein's cinderblock forehead, and a dark crust of blood had formed around my nipple where the pull of my shirt had made the stitches leak.
      When he leaned down and put his lips around the wound the salt on his tongue stung me like a wasp; the gentlest pressure of his mouth sent an ache of pain as far back as my collarbone. But it was the shame that made me gasp, first the feel of it, then the feel of it burning away like ash as he made love to me with a pitiless tenderness, a clean, uncompromised desire.
      I finished my story and looked at the psychologist, hard. "You should have torn that veil in two. You should have kissed her ruined face. That woman's shame," I said, "was nothing next to yours." The night my lover and I first touched I wanted to tell him that choice is the important thing.
      As his hand travelled over my belly for the first time I could feel the resistance in him. He whispered about fears of inadequacy, explained the need for his body to learn to respond to mine. I knew this was a lie, even though he may have believed it. It was simply that he hadn't yet chosen--instead, he had let his hands fall into this preliminary exploration, his fingers begin an aimless conversation with my skin, as if their own dumb wisdom could bring him to a choice, make some decision for him.
      My own body answered his resistance, my desire like an ache held back and cloistered. I knew there was a place in the heart where justifications are manufactured, by which we try to force our circumstances to fit and fill our hungers. I had long since shut down that factory. Now the truth was all I wanted, although my body still shivered and stretched toward its needs, like a cat flexing on the bed beside me kneading the sheets with retracted claws. The untamed body I live not so much inside of as with.
      The truth I wanted from him was choice. The act was only a ceremony, beautifully superfluous, a celebration of event but not the event itself.
      The choice is an immersion: the feel of the body penetrating the cold skin of a mountain pool, throbbing in the ache of the water's grip, the current rilling around the waist like iced satin. On the trail, deep in the mountains, he still watches me swim, a little envious perhaps, trying to comprehend what only blood and nerves can know, what only the shock of entry can teach.
      As I stand, thigh-deep in water cold as melted sky, he doesn't know that I am forever washing myself clean of that first hesitation, even of the pleasure of his imagined gaze. He knows that I have chosen him, but he is unaware that the choice, even unexpressed, is itself a perfect satisfaction.
      The certainty of desire is its own completion.
      When I was a child, the nuns tried to explain to us the concept of falling from grace. It was a perplexing subject, and when we moved on to the resurrection everyone forgot about it with relief, except one little girl. The idea of some unplanned, precipitous fall had somehow terrified her, so that for a week she refused to play during recess, as if she expected the pavement to open up under her any moment like cracks in cheesecake. Finally Sister Hurley took her aside and scolded her with brusque kindness, "You mustn't linger over the negative, dear. God wants you to dwell on the goodness in things."
      My lover dwells on the goodness in things. We spent part of a summer in Venice, mornings lounging at a cafe by the Grand Canal watching the rose-colored stucco of the palazzi bloom above the green water. Sun at first soft, then becoming keen as a blade. Sea air caressing. The lap and ripple of canals. Lingering over the various flavors of the city.
      One morning we watched a family of tourists at a nearby table--a youngish man and his blonde wife and their little girl breakfasting on biscotti and jam, the child playing with the little cappucino spoons like doll-house silverware. The spoons and the child's hay-colored hair and the woman's wedding ring glinted in the sunlight, and the man was leaning back casually reading his paper and bringing his coffee to his lips slowly, without taking his eyes off the print. They looked quietly content, like a tableau of a perfect Italian summer morning, and my lover smiled as he turned back to me.
      At that moment I saw the man reach out and strike the child. The gesture was quick, private and familiar, and almost nothing changed in the scene, except the little girl's hands dove into her lap like startled birds and she sat very still, looking at the table edge. The water in the Grand Canal flowed on, the milky morning sun continued to caress, more softly than they deserved, a bank of geraniums the color of cheap lipstick, and my lover was still smiling, unaware of the sudden fissure that moment had just disappeared into.
      Yet when I linger over memories of Venice I remember only being fed by love. Afternoons wandering dim, shaded alleys, a warren of streets, the jewel-box surprise of Santa Maria de Miracoli--veined marble, cool as a mountain pool, the gloom of holiness a balm to the midday glare. Sweat, touch, and a surfeit of love back in the still, shuttered room overlooking the garden with its statue of some tranquil saint we nicknamed Sepulchra. I felt walleyed with serenity. Sweetness thick as the moist Adriatic air. The sky cooling, paling to evening. The goodness of things.
      A week later, back in the mountains, one night I gave him my life and he let it fall. Confessional, close, touching foreheads over a cafe table in the dusk, I suddenly opened to him utterly, told him my deepest need. That he love me in my particularity, as no emblem of anything else, no attribution or passion to elevate me. Love me, I said, humanly, without guarantee or conclusion. Then I can be free, knowing this ultimate acceptance, this complete being-known.
      Isn't it a shame, he replied wistfully, that women need such permission to live from men.
      I felt my heart freeze, my hand pull from his. Something deep gaped, then closed over. Sitting for a long, numb moment as he continued talking, I realized with what clarity I could hear my own inner voice amid the wash of foreign languages, Italian and German, coming from the tables all around us. His too, I thought icily; an alien tongue, continuing its speech-dance oblivious to what it had just knocked out of its way.
      But in Venice, city of pale gold and rose, none of this has happened yet. One moment has not yet followed another in its downward dive. The sky cools, paling to evening, and the shadows deepen in the folds of Saint Sepulchra's vestments as if she were drawing them close around her against the burnished, lingering light. Behind me my lover is sleeping as I stand against the long window that looks out over the garden, absorbing the stillness, wanting the honeyed light to capture us like amber.