The Bones of Grace Read Free Page A

thing, the one that went down in legend and song and was anointed with passion that lasted beyond beauty and youth, was something that only happened to other people, people that came before me or were born into magical, troubled times. I didn’t believe that I was immune – of course I would love, and be loved – but I had proposed to myself a life that respected its historical moment and demanded something less, something tamer than those deeper furrows and interruptions of the heart.
    As for you, if you had asked me, I wouldn’t have been able to give you a single reason for your interest in me. I told myself this: (a) I would make an amusing anecdote for you later. Hey, you would tell yourself, I met this Bangladeshi palaeontologist and we listened to Shostakovich and thenNina Simone and she loves Anna Karenina . What’re the odds? Or, (b) you felt sorry for me. Or, (c) you were actually a social outcast, totally unlikable and in desperate need of company, and I just couldn’t see it. There was, of course, another option, which was that your interest in me was genuine – but I couldn’t really fathom that, because I would have had to change my own understanding of myself and admit that I was what you were looking for, and that would have been beyond my imagination.
    Now that my estimation of myself has taken a significant battering, I can say this: you did love me. You loved me from the very start. It could have been because you found me beautiful, or interesting, but more than that, it was because, although you bore none of the outward signs of being anything like me, we were, in fact, very similar. In me you saw embodied all the things you had felt about yourself: that you had been born into the wrong family, that there were things within you that had yet to be voiced and you might, if you were lucky, find yourself uttering them in my presence. In other words: we were nothing, yet everything alike. And you had the wisdom to see that from the start, even if I didn’t.

    As I approached the apartment, I could hear music spilling out onto the street, and then I remembered my goodbye party. I called Bettina, the anthropologist I had lived with since my first year, and my closest friend in Cambridge. ‘Sorry.’
    â€˜You’re late,’ she said.
    â€˜I met someone.’
    â€˜An Amphibian?’ ‘Amphibian’ was our code word for people like us. Bettina was Argentinian, born in Queens, had grown up in Buenos Aires when her parents had decidedto un-immigrate themselves, gone to college in Paris, taken several years off and backpacked through China, where she had been bitten by monkeys, and landed up here, in Cambridge, by which time her parents had returned to their place in Astoria, chastened by the more exciting side of the planet. ‘Amphibian’ signalled people in between, people who lived with some part of themselves in perpetual elsewhere. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Waspish, by all accounts.’
    â€˜Honey, if you’re going to cheat, at least put some colour in it.’
    I tried to conjure Rashid’s face in my mind, stoking my memories for a feeling of tenderness, arousal, something – but nothing came, so I said, ‘It’s not like Rashid and I are married.’
    â€˜Where are you? I can hear music.’
    â€˜I’m on the porch.’
    â€˜We can unpack this later. Hang up and come inside.’
    Bettina had installed an air conditioner in the living room the summer before, and, though the apartment was crowded, it was cooler than the street. I scanned the room and saw my lab partner, Kyung-Ju, and a few other graduate students from my department, but it was mostly anthropologists, the coolest and most depressed social scientists, huddled together in small clusters. I caught fragments of their conversation, complaints about the new department chair, a journal article one of them had failed to get published, a new