'No, it doesn't.'
She had glanced at me, but now she kept her eyes averted as she drained her cup. The woman arrived with Gracia's eggs.
'Felicity's materialistic,' I said. 'She's full of wrong ideas about me.
All I wanted to do after we split up was get away somewhere on my own, and try to work things out.'
I stopped talking because I had suddenly been distracted by the kind of stray thought that had come so often in the last few weeks. I knew that I was not telling Gracia the whole story; somehow that kind of wholeness had been sucked out of me by my manuscript. Only there lay the truth. Would I one day have to show it to her?
I waited while Gracia finished her meal--she ate the first egg quickly, then picked at the second; she had never had a long attention span for food---and then I ordered two more coffees. Gracia lit a cigarette. I had been waiting for that, wondering if she still smoked.
I said then: 'Why couldn't you have seen me last year? After the row?'
'Because I couldn't, that's all. I'd had enough and it was still too soon. I wanted to see you but you were always so critical of me. I was just demoralized. I needed time to put things right.'
'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I shouldn't have said those things.'
Gracia shook her head. 'They don't mean anything now.'
'Is that why you're here?'
'I've sorted things out. I told you, I'm feeling a lot better.'
'Have you been with another guy?'
'Why?'
'Because it matters. I mean, it would have mattered.' I sensed myself heading into danger, disrupting something.
'I was with someone for a while. It was all last year.'
Last year: the words made it sound as if it was a long time ago, but last year was still only three weeks ago. Now it was I who looked away. She knew the irrationality of my possessiveness.
'He was just a friend, Peter. A good friend. Someone I met who's been looking after me.'
'Is that who you're still living with?'
'Yes, but I'm moving out. Don't be jealous, please don't he jealous. I was on my own, and I had to go into hospital, and when I came out you weren't there, and Steve came along just when I needed him.'
I wanted to ask her about him, but at the same time I knew I wanted to ask to stake territory, not to hear answers. It was stupid and unfair, but I resented this Steve for being who he was, for being a friend. I resented him more for arousing in me an emotion, jealousy, that I had tried to rid myself of. Leaving Gracia had purged me of that, I thought, because only with her had it been so acute. Steve became in my mind everything I was not, everything that I could never he.
Gracia must have seen it in my eyes. She said: 'You're being unreasonable about this.'
'I know, but I can't help it.'
She put down her cigarette and took my hand again.
'Look, this isn't about Steve,' she said. 'Why do you think I've come here today? I want _you_, Peter, because I still love you in spite of everything. I want to try again.'
'I do too,' I said. 'But would it go wrong again?'
'No. I'll do anything to make it work. When we split up, I realized that we had to go through all that to be sure. It was me that was wrong before. You made all that effort, trying to repair things, and all I did was destroy. I knew what was happening, I could feel it inside me, but I was obsessed with myself, so miserable. I started to loathe you because you were trying so hard, because you couldn't see how awful I was being. I hated you because you wouldn't hate me.'
'I never hated you,' I said. 'It just went wrong, again and again.'
'And now I know why. All those things that caused tension before, they're gone. I've got a job, somewhere to live, I'm back in touch with my own friends. I was dependent on you for everything before. Now it really is different.'
More different than she knew, because I had changed too. It seemed she possessed all the things that once were mine. My only possession now was self-knowledge, and that was on paper.
'Let me think,' I said. 'I want to try again, but . . .'
But I had lived for so long with uncertainty that I had grown used to it; I rejected Felicity's normality, James's security. I welcomed the unreliability of the next meal, the morbid fascinations of solitude, the introspective life. Uncertainty and loneliness drove me inwards, revealed me to myself. There would be an imbalance between Gracia and myself again, of the same type but weighted the opposite way. Would I cope with it any better than she had?
I loved Gracia; I knew it as I sat with her. I loved her more than I had ever loved anyone, including myself. Especially myself, because I was explicable only on paper, only by fictionalization and faulty memory. There was a perfection to myself as shaped by the manuscript, but it was the product of artifice. I had needed to re-invent myself, but I could never have invented Gracia. I remembered my faltering attempts to describe her through the girl, Seri. I had left out so much, and in making up for the omissions I had made her merely convenient. Such a word could never be applied to Gracia, and no other would describe her exactly. Gracia resisted description, whereas I had defined myself with ease.
Even so, making the attempt had served its purpose. In creating Seri I had failed, but then I had discovered something else. Gracia was affirmed.
