DANCE WITH DESTINY A Love Story Written in Shadows

The night swallows some men. Some men are saved by love. William was neither. He was the warning fair between.   PROLOGUE The Devil does not come in red. he comes in as all you've ever wanted. It is said that any love story starts with a meeting. But this one starts off with a funeral, the kind that is not really a person but an option. The final good decision that a youthful man named William ever came close to making. It is not a tale of a villain. It is not one of those stories of a hero. It is a story of a man who stood squarely in the middle of the two, on the roof of his own life, looking down into the eyes of everything that ever mattered - and made the wrong choice. And yet in the Garden, we had Grace. Always there is Grace.   Part One: The Boy Before the Fall. William James was brought up in the type of neighborhood that the city intentionally forgot. The tower blocks were growing out of the concrete like crooked teeth and the streets between them were like veins that pumped everything out of one broken end to the other gossip, grief, ambition, poison and all. The first time he realized that love was not a promise was when he was thirteen. His mother, Sandra, had eight months of clean time. Eight months of early mornings of burnt toast and strong coffee of her humming old gospel songs in the kitchen as the sun slowly and orange rose over the rooftops. It was almost normal for eight months. Then, she followed the night when she failed to show up at home. William sat at the window until two in the morning, making bargains with a God whom he was not certain existed. He vowed to do good. He vowed to quit robbing candy at the bodega of Mr. Okafor. Everything he had to give to a thirteen-year-old boy had little to offer and everything, all at the same time. It was 2:17 a.m. when Sandra came home. She smelled like a world that William did not wish to know about. She didn't look at him. He had ceased to make bargains with God since then. William had come to know by the age of fifteen that the streets had something that church and school could never have: instant confirmation that you exist. All heads bobbed, all the "yo, that's Will" screaming across a parking lot, all the money that was going through his hands - it was evidence. I am here. I matter. I am real. He was witty, in the sense that only boys who have had to survive are witty-fast-eyed, fast-thinking, able to read a room like a map. It was seen by his teachers. Two of them attempted to say so. But William had already settled it that their world was not his, and he constructed his walls on this principle. What he desired, above money, above respect, was to be solid. Permanent. As though it was something that the world just could not just wash away. He did not yet know that it was love he was describing. Part Two: The Girl with Rain in Her Eyes Thursday evenings, she was in the library on Clement Street, returning to the shelves books nobody came to borrow. William had no motive to be in a library. He said to himself, I came in because it was raining. He said to himself, that during three weeks, once a week, on a Thursday, before he finally confessed, to no one, privately, in the darkness of his own breast, that he walked in because of her. She was not the prettiest girl he had ever laid his eyes on. But she was the most ubiquitous. It was no other word. When Grace gazed at you, she gazed at every one of you, the visible parts of you that you revealed to the world, and the hidden parts of you that you buried. There was something about the way she listened that enabled a silence to be a conversation. You never bother to check anything out. You see, I never look up at the cart I am sorting. You just sit at the window by the table and watch the rain. Well, maybe I like rain, "said William. She looked up then. Her eyes were black and gentle, as deep water without any movement. 1: Perhaps you prefer not to be out of doors in it, she said, and returned to her books. Then on the next Thursday he returned. And the next and the next. They were falling into each other like people do when they both, secretly, desperately lonely, and too proud to admit it. Slowly. There were numerous false halts and wary withdrawals. Grace was studying to be a social worker. She thought--with a ferocity which William found disorienting and attractive at the same time--that people could change. Those circumstances shaped behavior but didn't determine destiny. That such a difference between what you were and what you could be was, most of the time, a single decision made in the right direction. You talk like a pamphlet, William once said to her, smiling. You are talking as though you were afraid the pamphlet might be right, I said. He didn't have an answer for that. Instead, he laughed, and the laugh startled him--it came out of a long, forgotten country. During seven months, William had experienced two worlds. In one, he was forging a reputation, ascending the unspoken hierarchy of the streets, making himself useful to men who would never be his friends. In the other, he sat opposite Grace in a library or in a diner or in a park bench, and fancied (temporarily, threateningly) that it was he who were not what they might have been. Grace didn't know about the first world. He kept them closed off to one another, as you would keep a wound bandaged so that people could not see the extent of the wound. But injuries, neglected, never heal. They spread.   Part Three: The Choice The men who made the call in the neighborhood that William lived in were not cartoon villains. It was that which made them dangerous. Good coats they wore. They spoke quietly. They could make you feel that, when they were in your presence, that they were offering you something that was rare, that they were offering you membership in something that mattered. In the fall of his seventeenth year, they came to William with an offer enwrapped in the words of fidelity and affection. There were conditions. There were tests. In the midst of it all, there was in place a demand that William demonstrate his dedication in a manner that could not be reversed. He was aware of what they wanted. He knew at some animal level what it would cost him to accept. The evening before he was to give them his reply, he saw Grace on their favorite bench in the park. The foliage was now of a golden and rusty hue. She had a red coat on. She seemed, William thought, as painted, bright, and impossible in the grey of the evening. Something wrong, something wrong, she said as she immediately thought. She always knew. I have been given a means of ascending, he said cautiously. Grace remained silent a little. Then: "Up out of what? He didn't answer. She turned and looked at him full, and in the failing light, her eyes possessed that quality which he had come to rely upon, that stillness, that readiness to see. Whatever they are offering you money, status, or belonging-- I need you to listen to me. She paused. You have something worth more than any of that. You just have to decide to keep it. What have I, he said; and his voice was ruder than he wished. She held his gaze. The choice, she said. "You still have a choice." That night, he's walked her home. She looked up at him with that steady gaze of hers, and he thought--not the first time he had thought it--that she was the bravest person he had ever known. Not so much brave in the sense the streets created it, but brave in the deeper sense: capable of experiencing the world in all its variety; capable of saying what seemed true to her; of standing in the middle of a broken world and refusing to be broken by it. He wanted to inform her that she had brought something in him. That the seven months of Thursday evenings and silent conversations had silently readjusted the furniture of his interior life and had shifted things around in ways which he was only just beginning to understand. He had a desire to say to her that he loved her. I will see you next week, he said. and then walked off out of her door towards the solution that would put an end to everything.