Grace
Stephen Greco
Newly single again, I found myself cleaning the apartment and the things in it more often than before—twice or three times a week. I have always liked cleaning, and now the process was giving me something domestic to hang to. I also found it satisfying when one of the guys I began meeting through Grindr would remark on the tidiness of the place.
Sariel remarked on it, the first time we hooked up, though he was different from the others. Eagerly, before we got down to business, he poked around in all the places in my apartment where I’ve gathered objects, curios, books, and such into artsy arrangements. I invited him to do this, after he complimented me on a group of Japanese pots I keep in the foyer; and I invite my friends to do the same, hoping that people that will be entertained by recognizing the little themes I use to curate these arrangements. “Feel free to open drawers,” I said, amused to see him notice tiny nothings that happen to mean a lot to me, like ticket stubs from Aïda, pinned to the refrigerator door. No Grindr guy had ever investigated these things quite as thoroughly as Sariel did, and what kept me from thinking he might be a psycho was the good feeling I got about him the moment he walked in the door—that easy smile, those intelligent eyes, the musical way he pronounced his name, which I was too polite to ask about, since one shouldn’t go bashing into personal questions too soon. I thought, “I’ll ask about the name when I know him better.”
On his second visit he mentioned the post card that’s stuck like a bookmark in the hundred-year-old copy of The Odyssey that sits on my dresser. Apparently, without my noticing, he’d examined the card, which my grandmother sent me from a cruise ship when I was a kid. And he got the connection.
“I love that they're both about ships and the journey home,” he said.
“Clever boy,” I said.
But I thought the guy seemed a little lost. I gathered he was in his early 30s, like me, yet never referred to a job, or a home, or a boyfriend or girlfriend; and I didn’t ask about those things, either. We fell into a pattern of meeting once or twice a week, always at my place and always via Grindr, and though the sex was never poundingly hot, it always left me feeling happy, refreshed. His body was almost entirely smooth, and of the little body hair he did have, each strand seemed individual and perfectly placed. Even as our connections became routine, our conversations never seemed to touch on the season’s cultural offerings, as I would expect for two New York gay guys getting to know each other. Rather, talk was mostly about what was going on between our bodies: positions, rhythms, pressures, tensions. Once, he spoke poetically about the nature of eros—“Every day you play with the light of the universe…”—but he never brought up the idea of us becoming friends or getting to some next level, romantically; and frankly, I was OK with that. For me, these hook-ups were only about recreation, distraction.
More importantly, I didn’t think Sariel was my type intellectually, or that someone I was hooking up with needed to be. What I did think I’d eventually need, after the stressful end of a two-year relationship, was a new partner just like my previous partners, a guy who was my type— though Lord knows, the my-type strategy hasn’t worked out for me yet. This break-up was my love life’s third strike out, and I was beginning to wonder what I was doing wrong.
It was one afternoon in the kitchen, while we were making tea, when I finally asked Sariel about the origin of his name.
“It’s Aramaic,” he said.
“Oh, like the Bible?” I said.
“Yeah— some parts of the Bible.”
“Is it a family name?”
“Not exactly.”
“It reminds me of Ariel and Uriel and names like that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So what are you then, some kind of angel?”
I meant the question as light banter, and at first I thought that Sariel’s casual, instant response was his way of keeping the mood going.
“Yes,” he said, “now that you mention it.”
“Right,” I said. But there was some deeper kind of amusement behind his smile. “Wait— what?”
“You asked if I were an angel, and I said yes.”
“Sure, but… I meant as in actually coming from Heaven. You know— it was a joke.”
“I just wouldn’t frame it that way.”
“What way?”
“English words don’t quite apply to any of this stuff.”
I paused a second.
“Any of what stuff?”
We brought the mugs into the living room and sank into armchairs. Then, instead of telling me about these creatures, angels—where they live, how they travel, how old they are, why they might be drinking things like jasmine green tea— Sariel launched into a surprisingly lyrical exegesis on the balance between Good and Evil, reframing those forces as more palpable and influential throughout the universe than gravity; “dominions and virtues and powers and principalities,” he said, all functioning synchronously in some grand, unified system of metaphysics. The universe he described was so marvelously constructed that I found it easy to defer, for the moment, the question that was rising unavoidably in my mind, about Sariel’s sanity.
Or was he just trying to entertain me?
“You think I’m crazy,” he said. “I can see it in your eyes.”
“Well, I… no,” I said.
“It’s just that I have to tell the truth.”
I decided to build on his story, this being the era of improv, when all cool people under thirty seem to have adopted the “yes and…” approach to interactions.
“Let me ask you this,” I said. ”What would an angel doing here? Are you on some kind of mission? Were you banished? That is, if I you’re allowed to say.”
“No, no, I’m allowed—though only if I’m asked.”
“So I’m asking!”
He took my hand.
“The thing is, I’m here for your protection.”
The word was unexpected.
“My protection.”
“Yeah.”
I’d always believed in the possibility of creatures from beyond. I have never ruled out other dimensions or alternate universes, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that explorers from other planets or other time periods are walking around among us today. Yet there was something chilling in Sariel’s words.
“Tell me,” I said, “why would I need protection? Am I in some kind of danger?”
His smile flattened.
“Everybody’s always in danger. Everybody always receives help.”
It took a moment for that to sink in, before I responded.
“OK, wait….”
“I don’t know what the danger is. That’s not how it works.”
“Oh, great. Look, Sariel….”
“And you will almost certainly never know. All I know is that I’m here now, for a while, and then I will go away.”
He seemed so sincere.
“You’ll just… go away.” I said. “Having protected me from some unknown danger…?! At which point I’ll be fine? Just what am I supposed to do with this knowledge?”
Sariel shrugged.
“It’s up to you,” he said. He explained—again, in an oddly compelling way— that over the millennia many have individuals been given such information when they asked, and their revelations have made absolutely no difference to the history of the world. Though sometimes, he said, the revelations did make a difference to those individuals.
I let the matter drop, and he volunteered nothing more about it. I had either lot to think about or something to ignore. At the top of my mind was the question of whether I’d want to hook up with him again. And right beneath that was the new fear that somewhere in midtown, just possibly, by some glitch in the matrix, a construction crane might be poised to crash down on my head and rob me of the future that Some Higher Power had apparently foreordained for me.
We finished our tea and parted, making sounds about keeping an eye out for each other on Grindr. Yet the next two times I saw him there I didn’t text, since I was still trying to figure what, if anything, was going on between us. Then one night, after a few drinks, I did text, and he was at my door within an hour. What can I tell you? I was horny and missed that smooth skin.
Two-and-a-half hours later, after erotic play that this time was poundingly hot, we were putting our clothes back on.
“I’m glad we connected tonight,” I said.
“It was nice, wasn’t it?” said Sariel.
The experience left me feeling elated. It also made me realize how much I missed the unbalancing curiosity that his quirkiness required of me. I wasn’t sure if I had decided one way or another about the angel thing, but I was beginning to think that I could be open to exploring the romantic scenario with someone who was not my type—someone so different, in fact, like Sariel, that we’d always be negotiating adventurously across the space between us.
“A gift,” he said, almost to himself, “to be able to give such a gift.”
I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but I noticed he seemed a bit distant, so I put my arms around him.
“Do you want to stay the night?” I asked.
He shook his head slowly.
“I wish I could, I really do, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because, my dear friend, I have fucked up.”
He gently freed himself from my embrace.
“I should go,” he said.
“How did you fuck up?” I said. “I thought angels were perfect.”
I was pleased with myself for re-entering his world, but he looked grave.
“Oh, no. Not perfect,” he said, with a gentle laugh. “Only good.”
“How’s that?”
“Look at Lucifer. He was an angel.”
“Oh, him….”
“We all can make poor choices, fall for temptations, become less good.”
He took up his jacket and seemed ready to leave.
“Wait—Sariel, hear me out,” I said. ”I think I might be beginning to feel….”
He shook his head sadly and put a finger to my lips.
“I know,” he said, looking at me with infinite tenderness. “Me too.”
“OK, then….”
“How about we just see what happens?”
And he left, without responding to my question about us talking the following day. I immediately went on Grindr, to see if I could message him, but I didn’t see him there, nor did I ever see him there, or indeed anywhere, ever again.
At first, the disappearance was wrenching. For weeks afterward, with “me too” ringing in my brain, I nursed feelings of sadness and regret, mixed with the usual “what ifs?”— though I can’t say I felt grief, exactly, since the whole thing hadn’t lasted more than three months. After another three months, the affair was behind me, and the sad memory of an almost love was mitigated by the possibility that humans should be grateful for unseen gifts whose magnitude they are constitutionally unable to grasp.
Then one day, while dusting the dresser, I noticed an odd thing when I happened to take a look at the postcard tucked into The Odyssey. The card features a photo of the ship on which my grandmother and grandfather sailed around the Caribbean in 1994, the Monarch of the Sea; the cruise was to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. The message, in my grandmother’s handwriting, reads:
Darling—
We are having a wonderful time in this grand floating hotel! There are lots of activities—not just shuffleboard and swimming but a big fitness center and even rock climbing (ha ha—Grandpa tried it but not me— we’ve always been so different!) Landing in Cozumel tomorrow.
Lots of love,
Gammy
I hadn’t looked at the message closely since the day I received it, as a boy, and this time I saw that five words of the message, written in ballpoint pen, had been circled in pencil: “we’ve always been so different.” Why would my grandmother have circled those words like that, and why didn’t I remember that aspect of the card?
I went back to dusting, since someone I’d met on Grindr would be coming by, later in the evening. The first few encounters with this guy had been really good, though he is anything but my type. For one thing, he’s in his early 50s, which is totally new for me, but suddenly somehow interesting. And I have been amused to find myself not pondering the cultural compatibility questions that used to preoccupy me, which have led me wrong three times. It’s as if by some grace I had not been shielded from a falling crane but nudged, adrift in my battered ship, toward a heading that was better suited to my own journey home….
___________
Stephen Greco is the author of the novels Now and Yesterday, Dreadnought, The Culling, and Other People’s Prayers. His short stories have appeared in Chelsea Station, Boyfriends From Hell, Queer and Catholic, and several other anthologies, including volumes of the Men On Men and Flesh and the Word series. His first book, a collection of erotic fiction and non-fiction entitled The Sperm Engine was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.