State of Grace (6 page)

“I think he was down by the water. He was probably following a bird and went into the water and the current took him down.”

“Well, Daddy,” I say uneasily, “that seems as good a way as any other. Actually it could be considered nicer than most.”

“You invested in this camera, did you? You’ve become interested in such things?”

“I know the terms,” I confess modestly. He puts his arm around my waist and ushers me forward. The hotel is ahead of us. Decorative boulders. Restful sago palms. Three men are playing bocce on the beach. They wear snug stretch trousers in Easter-egg colors.

THE VOICE SAID CRY. WHAT SHALL I CRY? ALL FLESH IS GRASS
.

“It’s all a question of chemicals,” I say. “Potassium hydroxide, sodium sulphite, phenidone. It’s a matter of accelerators, preservatives, restrainers and water.”

“I can’t imagine why you waste your time on such things,” Father says. “I find it most depressing. I have heard that film can be developed naturally in certain highly polluted bodies of water. I have seen the results. The eye of God enraged. A camera is simply not relevant.”

“No,” I say sadly,
AND WHEN THEY AROSE EARLY IN THE MORNING BEHOLD THEY WERE ALL DEAD CORPSES
. My Camera teeters on his fingertips but he doesn’t let it go.

“Let’s dispose of it,” he says, “this poor substitution of resurrection.” He puts it in a planter of succulents. There is a red wasp in one of the yellow flowers of a succulent. The camera appears all pocked with scale. It is a piece of junk.

“Yes,” I say. I seem somewhat heavier than before and my hands are uncertain as to how they should handle themselves. We enter the lobby of the hotel. It is spacious and cool. The desk clerk gives a key to Father. Beside him is an extravagant bird chained to a perch. Below the bird is a drink tray with a circle of newpaper cut to fit. On the newspaper are flashy compotes of half-digested fruit.

“If you get too close to Thalassophilia and she bites you, which she may,” the clerk begins in a bored voice, “don’t …”

“Thalassophilia, that’s wonderful,” I say, rousing myself. I must make the attempt to keep witness. Daddy and I are here and that’s all there is to it. Tomorrow will be different but as for yesterday we have been other places and as for now we are here. My womb turns to face its star.

“How can it be wonderful?” the clerk says without surprise. “It is part of the hotel’s policy. The owner has other properties in Puerto Rico and Nassau and they too include birds named Thalassophilia. Now if I may continue? If you get too close to her and she bites you, pretend you haven’t noticed. Then she will stop.”

The clerk and I look at each other with distaste. “Shall we go up to our room and freshen up?” I ask Father primly.

We ascend to our room. It is on the third floor and soars out over the beach, which is empty except for the men playing bocce. All three seem to have achieved an identical degree of skill at the game. No one is winning. They yell at each other without passion in Spanish. There’s a knock at the door and Father opens it. “Would you care for luncheon or a
beverage?” The tone is intense, funereal. An old man stands in the hall in dyed black hair and milkman-white.

“Yes,” Father says. “A bottle of gin and a bottle of lime juice. Water biscuits, paté and a good Brie.” He closes the door. “Do you find those young men attractive?” He walks out to the balcony.

“I was watching the porpoises.” I point to the water. Between the long sandbar and the shore, shadows move in a complex rhythm. Two rise, rolling their wise sweet heads.

“I wish I had been a very young man for you. I wish you had known me then.”

“I have known you always, Daddy,” I say dully.

“Why don’t you go for a swim? The water looks so inviting. I’ll watch you from here. When you were small, I would watch you enjoying yourself and it gave me great pleasure. The water looks so refreshing.”

“I don’t have a bathing suit.” One of the bocce players paws at the beach with his foot like a horse. He throws the dark ball beautifully and it lands dead in the sand.

“You go for a swim and when you come back our refreshments will be here. The towels here are extraordinary. Did you notice them? Like rugs. Do you remember the poor towels we had at home? Your mother was always mending them. And the sheets as well. Tiny stitches. Starbursts of thread. Roses and faces of colored thread. You made up a story for each one and you would tell them to me. But these towels look brand new. And so white. No stories there.”

I go out of the room and down the stairs into the lobby. The clerk is standing beside his desk, bouncing on the balls of his feet. The bird is sleeping, folded up on its purple talons. I walk onto the beach, past the young men. Two are standing close together. One is standing farther away, measuring distances with a cloth ruler. I hear a voice, speaking in perfect, musical English.

“John, I saw a muscle of yours on that last shot that I swear I have never seen before.”

I walk into the water and continue until the sandbar. I walk over the sandbar and instantly into water up to my neck. My clothes expire. I turn and face the hotel but do not try to find Daddy on the balcony. I stand there for a while. The nice porpoises have vanished. I wallow back to shore. The young men never glance at me. I take a turn around the desk.

“We prefer that swimmers use the service elevator at the rear,” the clerk says. I go to the rear. The elevator obediently exposes itself.

“Hey,” the clerk says. He has a borrowed, uneasy face as though he chose it off the television. “This bird can shit seven feet flat across the room.”

I return to Daddy. Our snack is laid out nicely. Daddy is fixing the drinks.

“That’s fine,” he says, “that’s fine. I want you to have a good time.” He calls for someone to pick up my clothes for cleaning and pressing. He rubs me dry and wraps me in one of the sumptuous towels.

“You certainly have developed a way about you, Daddy,” I say.

“I want everything to be pleasant for you, darling. I can control it all if you allow me to.” He hands me a drink, expertly prepared, gorgeous with crushed ice.

“Drinketh damage,” he says, smiling. His jaw twitches. His jaw is clenched. He wears a handsome, expensive jersey. His face and thin arms are hard and white like marble. “It’s pleasant here but not for us. You can see that, darling. The sun is bright with malice.”

We sit on the balcony. The sun sprawls scarlet across the Gulf. The sea birds are going home. The plovers, the pelicans, sanderlings, terns and ibis stream across the sky. He
slips his hand inside the towel. It falls from my shoulders. A breeze swims across me and stops.

“This is not my favorite time of day,” I say. “Speaking only for myself, I prefer dawn. Birds drop their eggs at dawn. It is generally more a time of hope and promise.”

“All the promises have been kept,” Daddy says.

I am swinging in the dreadful hammock of a dream. Whatever woke me has stopped but it will come back again if I am still. It is the sound of birds, beyond the board and metal, in the woods. And my foot aches terribly. In the dark, I reach beneath the blanket and touch it. It is hot and spavined, the toes spread out in a cramp. For some reason, the baby needs something that is in that foot. The baby makes strange demands. It is stronger than I am.
I
am being housed by
it
. I am being fashioned in the nights that will bring it to term. And it is I who feel the exhaustion of journey. Not it. What would it know? It is myself who lives in darkness, slowly becoming aware, and it is the child who moves resplendent in the sunlight, beyond restitution in the sunlight.

The child is my dream of life. I harbor its progress and am victim to its whims. Gestating is like being witness to a crime. And I am furtive, I must admit. We all look furtive. My suggestion is to confess to everything. Once, on the street here, shortly after I arrived, the FBI spotted me in a laundromat. I thought the manager was giving me the eye because his machine was acting oddly. Clanging and banging and taxiing around its filthy slot. I tried to ignore his mean and greedy eye. He thought the reward was his. I maintained my
poise by reading an agricultural bulletin that was available for patrons. The article I was engrossed in concerned the rat

Eat—hide—gnaw—scatter filth—start fires—gnaw—eat—breed–hide! THAT’S THE LIFE OF A RAT!

And then these fellows slipped around me, crisp as pudding. Smith their names were, and Smith. When Smith showed me his card, he exposed the weighted exercise belt around his middle. Smith, on the other hand, was not a vain man. He conducted the questioning. “Howdjew find Jessup the last time you was there,” he said. “They sure changed that town some.”

“Jessup?” I say.

“You let your hair grow out,” he said. “I gotta say it ain’t becoming. But a girl like you. I can’t imagine you traveling alone. Where’d your boy friend be? The boy what done the carving? I’m sure a little thing like yourself wouldn’t have done that carving.”

“Sheeit,” Smith said, “I bet a little girl like you can’t be aware even of the enormity of her crime.”

Unfortunately, something or other had run in SOAK. My clothes were the color of gasoline.

“Whyn’t we just check up on your little niceties here,” Smith said. “Blood’s harder’n tar to get off your clothes.”

Smith tugs a bit at his crotch. “We might add that your boy’s caught now. It was him that told us where you was. He’s up there in Tampa spilling the beans and he don’t give a pig’s piss for you at this point.”

“Wrong girl,” I say. And of course I was. They wandered away. The manager said that he wasn’t responsible for clothes left in the machine and if I didn’t get them away he wouldn’t be responsible. Of course I knew what Smith had been referring to. A dreadful story. Chopped up someone’s lover and sent him to Coconut Grove in a casserole dish.

But that was when I first arrived. I am sought after, accosted, but never found. Is that not how you find it?

In any case, now I am here rubbing my foot, twisting my toes and wearing a spotted nightie. I can see nothing in the room, but outside the birds are singing and so it must be morning. Or perhaps it is the afternoon of the day before for I can’t place falling asleep. I can make out shadows in the room. There’s a small window over an easy chair but it is stuffed across with webs, hives, cocoons and silky sacks. There is also a large X taped on the window with adhesive as though the window were condemned. Almost no light enters, but there is enough, for the moment, for me to see Grady in the easy chair, sitting with both feet on the floor, his knees apart. I like seeing him there and perhaps the knowledge of Grady being there is what woke me. The first time we met, I woke up and he was there. Most people that later one discovers are significant to one’s living are met through glimpse and carelessness, through stumbling brush and grope. They expose themselves gradually in serial form. Not so with Grady, my groom. He rose beyond reproach in the stink of the old movie house, his voice in my ear an overcurrent to the thud and pound of repair within the walls (for they were renovating the old movie house, redesigning it for a more sophisticated and lucid audience) and his hand on my shoulder was strong …

I want to have him love me. The fact that he does already troubles both of us. I prop the pillow behind my back and begin a conversation. The room is close. I’ve spilled some scent and it’s in the carpet. I open my lips and the words enter my furred mouth.

I begin to tell him a story. Many times I have talked but I have never finished what I wanted to say. To be frank, I have never begun what I wanted to say. I have discussed something else. But now it is as though my whole life has fashioned itself for this moment which is, of course, true. It
is as though my whole life is dependent upon the reply to this moment, upon the recognition of it, its application and success. When I complete not telling this story, my life will begin.

“An annal of crime,” I say and curl up within my stained nightgown, comforting myself as though it is I who am being told the tale rather than being the taleteller. There is a glass of cold coffee on the floor. I hear it fall as the bed, on its casters, grinds against it. The child redistributes itself, opening and closing itself like a butterfly. I say,

“In the French mountains in the sixteenth century, an eleven-year-old girl was married and some years later the wedding was consummated and she had a baby boy. She was very much in love …” I stop and inquire about the hound, whether there are any indications that it’s returned. I fall asleep but in no time I am up, pummeling my foot. I mention a party we went to at the home of one of Grady’s friends. There were twenty people there, the same little band that are always present at the parties we attend. Expecting little from these gatherings, it nevertheless gives us no pleasure when our suspicions continually prove correct. Some of the people are students at the college but they do not recognize me for I’ve removed my sorority pin. All that remain are two tiny holes on the right side of every blouse. They don’t know that I am pregnant and they don’t know that I am married to Grady. At one of the parties, a man fell against me and knocked me flat. I had hoped that something might come of it, that the baby would be expelled. Nothing came of it except that now the man comes to me at every party and speaks to me earnestly. He wears tight jerseys with alligators on them. Tiny alligators like jewels. At the party most recently, he came to me in the kitchen where I was drinking gin and eating from a shallow dish of hamburger relish. He was an older man from the college, possibly even an instructor. He had sweat on his hairline, above his lip. He embraced me and I turned rigid. A camouflage. I became part
of the sink and tiles. He pressed his mouth against me and wedged the plastic glass of martini between. Beyond his head, on rough drawing paper, I saw crayon renditions of a child’s moon, house and railroad train. I pushed him fretfully away. He was the host. He pushed me back, slightly.

“Well, kiss my coccyx,” he said. He left with dignity, his ass high up his back, like many basketball players I have seen, playing in their prime.