Read Online Grace by Calvin Baker - Free Book Online

drained his glass, the nervous, fleeting joviality among the girls, as though performing their happiness for the world and themselves—until I was struck at length by the silent realization the father was having an affair, and not a passing one. Perhaps a whole other family. The effort of maintaining their masks of happiness in the face of their inner compromises strained them nearly to breaking.
    Genevieve was eager to leave, and as we finally walked home I sensed her relief to be free of them.
    â€œSo what did you think?” she asked.
    â€œThey seem like fortunate people,” I lied.
    â€œDon’t be blind. It is not as happy as it looks,” she shrugged. “It is only a pretense. My mother gave too much. My father controls them all with money.”
    â€œThey are from a different age.”
    â€œShe gave too much. She should have left long ago. Now it is too late. She will die miserable, and for what?”
    â€œMaybe she thought she was making a sacrifice for her family.”
    â€œPerhaps,” she said. “And perhaps it is only a lie we tell to make sense of another lie, in order to make a two-faced life seem less cruel.”
    It was then I began to understand how little I knew.

10
    When I went to meet Davidson that Monday I was anxious again about work, and found things had only taken a downward turn. He looked as though he had not slept for days, and he was pressing me for a rewrite of the draft I had shown him. It was beginning to seem like the project would never be done, even if the rewrite would trigger clauses Westhaven, my lawyer, had written into the contract, that improved my terms.
    â€œForget Paris. Let’s move the action to New York,” Davidson argued when we met. “A famous young director is burned out, and flees to Europe, only to find it a cultural museum. Comfortable, because he has money, but creatively exhausted. What he wants is not there, and perhaps no longer exists in the world. He returns to New York deflated, and decides to make one last movie, then find a new form. It is about a guy from the projects, who has killed a cop in Georgia by mistake. He hightails it home, haunted by the murder, trying and failing to escape his own conscience. One night he meets a beautiful girl in a nightclub and falls truly madly deeply for her. She is his emotional equal and mate, but social opposite: a wealthy liberal, who works for a leftist newspaper. The affair plays out as the cops close in.”
    â€œScene two, I will agree to do another revision,” I said, “because it is in the contract, but, scene one, you have to explain to me why the director wants to make this particular movie, instead of the one we already wrote, or the one before that.”
    â€œBecause this one is true.”
    â€œHow? What’s the mirror to life in this version?”
    â€œWhat mirror?”
    â€œThe one that suggests to us, at each point, another possible reality, and, in that slippery depth, challenges what we think we know about ourselves and the world.”
    â€œThere isn’t one,” he said. “It is not about making meaning. It is about when there is no meaning, and just trying to hear and follow what comes from the gut so you can find meaning again. It’s finding a way forward, when we lose ourselves or get divorced from the meaning in our lives.”
    â€œBut the way forward has a meaning too,” I argued.
    â€œWhy? Isn’t forward meaning enough?” He tapped his finger impatiently. “Forward because you cannot go back.”
    â€œYou’re using a postmodern device, so you have to consider its implications whether you want to or not.”
    â€œWhat does that mean? Besides theories I buried in the desert.”
    â€œNothing, I suppose. But what if we do it in four panels? He’s rich, she’s poor, the country is poor. He’s rich, she’s poor, the country is rich. He’s poor, she’s