Grace, Marjorie and me.
Who would have thought it, when we were young.
Grace, so talented, so bold and desperate, now lives off men. Well, it is the way the world was arranged, most women do, and we all have to live somehow.
Grace complains of debt and recalcitrant lovers, but always seems to have a house to sell, a Rembrandt print to pawn, someone to take her out to dinner or fill her bed for the night. The rest of us fear poverty, deprivation, abandonment, separation, death. Grace fears the lack of a good hairdresser. She has no doubt been trained to this end, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, by a series of unpleasant experiences, but she was, I suspect, a more than willing victim in the experiment.
Grace is beautiful and frequently disagreeable and it is the latter quality, I sometimes think, which is more of an attraction than the former.
Grace remains beautiful as she grows older – it is as if she gains nourishment from her temper tantrums and her tears. She looks dreadful when she cries. I have seen her many times, her eyes red and swollen and ugly: her mouth swollen by blows, her neck marked not with love bites but the strangle marks she no doubt provokes. See her the next day, and who would have thought it. All is smooth and glossy again: a necklace round the firm white neck, the eyes clear, mocking and indifferent.
Grace wounds easily, but heals suspiciously quickly.