The Curse: A Love Story

Nobody calls their bank because they’re having a good day. This was the chief reason that I hated my job as much as I did. Eight hours each day, Monday through Friday, is a lot of time out of one’s life to be screamed at by irate clients who somehow had the idea that I possessed enough power to undo their late fees and bounced checks. And it was one of the reasons why, on the morning I first heard your voice, I was so startled by it.

“Hi, Violet, this is sort of a long story and I don’t even know if I’m in the right place,” you began. You sounded tired, sad; despite this, your friendly alto went directly through my headset and into the center of my chest where it curled like a stray cat that had sauntered in to get warm, sure of welcome.

I cleared my throat. “No problem! Why don’t you start at the beginning and I’ll see what I can do to help. And if I can’t, I’ll be more than happy to direct you to someone who can.” I paused, unusually embarrassed by my chipper customer service voice that abruptly seemed to lack the type of care that you deserved, and squinted at the screen that blinked your name. “Ms. Gonzalez, right?”

“Please, call me Elena. And sure, I’ll just jump right in.” You took a deep breath and I felt myself holding mine a little. I shifted in my desk chair as the world of my cubicle fell away and your voice took me to a different time and place.

We were on the phone for an hour. I’d given up on trying to respond to the increasingly angry messages from my supervisor demanding to know why I’d been on the same call for so long. Every part of me was hyper-focused on you - the story you were telling had quickly become the most necessary piece of my reality, and without really understanding why, I needed more than anything to know how it ended.

Your grandfather, William Henry Percival III, was born to a wealthy East Coast family in 1925. His father and grandfather (Williams II and I, respectively) had been decorated officers in the United States Navy, and he had always known that he would join them. Will barely had time to discover his talent for painting before his boots hit the deck of a battleship heading straight for the most dangerous campaign in the Pacific. It was on that ship in the hell of the Second World War that he met Maxwell Lewis, the youngest son of a coal miner and union organizer from Alabama, and the love of Will’s life.

Most of what you knew about Max and Will’s relationship was through the letters, written to your grandfather by a passionate Max, when they had both returned to the States. The letters ranged from sweetly nostalgic to furtively sexual; from haunted recollections of war and its resulting trauma to hilarious retellings of the antics of friends in the middle of that trauma. Max called your grandfather darling friend, brother, beloved. He wrote of the tapestry of stars they’d seen together on clear nights from the deck of the ship, and he wrote of his nightmares of fire during battle that had seemed so deliriously improbable, springing from that same sea.

“They were really in love,” you told me, your voice taking on a dreamy, sepulchral quality that made me shiver, looking with you into the past like this, into the lives of dead forefathers, looking through the eyes of Max at silent constellations, at human cruelty, at nightmares both present and remembered, at eternity, with his lover at his side. “And Violet - reading these letters, I knew why my grandfather had fallen in love. Max was an extraordinary person, a poet with this… Sharp, critical, empathetic way of looking at the world with such rage and such hope. He hated that they were there - he wanted to fight the Nazis, but he hated the military with this thorough, intellectual passion. He taught my rich-kid, old-money grandfather that to ignore political theory is a privilege that he couldn’t indulge in anymore. He changed him. I think Max is why he didn’t go back there, to Boston, but I think he was worried that Max would be disappointed in him. Because he wanted to make art more than he wanted to change the world, and even more than that, he just wanted to survive. I think that maybe he was ashamed of that, and Max thought he left him because he wanted a conventional life, but I think actually he was most afraid of not being worthy of Max.”

I was most afraid that you would stop talking, or have to go. That I wouldn’t hear the end of the story. I cleared my throat and said what I was thinking, before the spell ended and either of us remembered some kind of professional etiquette that would change the course of the conversation, and also before I lost my nerve. “I get it though, that loving a person entirely. Like Morrison - ‘I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind.’”

You laughed like a pleased, sun-warmed bell made human. “Which is sort of a weird thing to say, for someone named Violet.” Oh my god, she’s read Jazz. Shut up Violet, shut up and get yourself together before you say something irredeemably inappropriate and she asks for a different representative. You cannot ‘rise into love’ with someone over the phone.

They’d married soon after their separation: Will to your grandmother, Alexandra, and Max to a paralegal named Louise. Will became a successful artist whose sculptures were displayed around the world, and he and Alexandra, an art dealer, made a home in northern California and began a family. Max became a lawyer and bought a townhouse in Boston near his practice, and although he and his wife Louise wanted children, they would never conceive.

Will and Max met a handful of times in the mid-60s, always at the same bed-and-breakfast in Lincoln, Nebraska - something of a midpoint between their homes - where they would pay for two separate rooms and only use one of them. At some point in 1967, Louise found out about the affair, and Max’s next letter to Will detailed their fight and begged Will to leave Alexandra and come away with him- where, he didn’t know, but he knew that no matter the consequences, he needed Will and nothing else. Beloved, we will be alright as long as we are together, and we will never be alright again if we are not. After that letter it seemed as though Will stopped responding. Max’s letters were written into an echo chamber. He grew more and more desperate, angry, pleading; in 1971, he stopped writing altogether.

“As strange as it may seem, my grandparents loved each other. I mean really, deeply loved each other. I think she knew - how could she not have known, at some point? - but you know, she was always this very progressive woman with this huge capacity and talent for love, and I think that maybe they had some arrangement of mutual respect and co-parenting. Even so, I never got the chance to talk to her about it, and I wonder if she was sad - she must have been - but I hope she wasn’t, I hope they just loved each other like best friends and raised wonderful children together and understood each other completely,” you explained. “And I wonder if she talked to him about that last letter from Max. If she asked him to stay and help raise my mother and my uncle. And I wonder if that was a fight, or if he just… Decided to stay and live a life without this great love, because he’d found a different love. You know?”

You brought your first girlfriend home from college over four decades later, as your grandfather prepared to breathe his last. Her name was Mariah, and you gripped her hand tightly, looking your semi-awkward parents in the eye, as his bedside. You’d remember his face in that moment for the rest of your life. How his brilliant blue eyes softened, how he took your hand and then reached his long, beautiful hand out slowly to grasp the fingers of Mariah’s other hand so that you were all three contained in a circle, how he looked at you and smiled contentedly. How the only thing he said was, “You are most welcome here, my dears.”

You stayed up with him that night, because he said he had something to tell you. He didn’t take his pain management medication in the evening so that he could stay alert for the whole story. By midnight, you knew about Max. By 1am, you were bringing him the tattered shoebox in the back of his closet so he could show you the letters, along with the one picture he had of Max when they were young: a military photograph, taken on an island, with four other young men. But you knew your grandfather for the brightness of his eyes, and you knew Max for the way your grandfather traced his ring finger over the lines of the stocky, handsome young soldier’s face and hair and torso, with a grief and a tenderness that made your eyes fill with tears.

The other part of your knowledge came from the small notebook that Will had kept in his bedside table til the day he died. It was leatherbound, very worn, and filled with miniscule handwriting that made little sense to anyone but Will. He’d told you that he’d had this notebook since his first days on the ship, and kept short journal entries of his months, as well as names and addresses of his shipmates’ families. This gave way to lists of possible names for children, contact information for artist friends in different states, and travel logs from art exhibitions. Max was rarely mentioned by name in this volume, but toward the end of the pages, there was a tucked piece of paper with a wide, looping scrawl of numbers along with the address of a bank in Boston - someone else’s handwriting entirely. You’d matched this hand to Max’s letters, and the address had brought you to me, at the East Bay Credit Union. Will had died the previous year, and you, the beloved grandchild, the fellow artist, had been left to sort out the remainder of the estate. And there was only one thing left to do - track down the contents of the safe deposit box, held by the bank and under two names, now both deceased: Louise Victoria Lewis and William Henry Percival III.

“So, I have all these questions and so many mysteries left to solve, and I don’t even know if I’ll get to all of them, or if I should. But I really want to know what’s in that box. I don’t know what at all it might be but I think it was important to them in some way.”

The words were rushing out of me before I knew exactly what I was going to say. “How far away are you? I can find it before you get here.”

You made it just before the vault had to be locked for the weekend, shaking the April rain from your long dark hair, hurrying in with your hands in the pockets of your leather jacket, meeting my eyes with your kind blue gaze. I knew who you were the minute I saw you, amid the small throng of latecomers in the lobby, without having to be told. Only you could wear a voice like that. I felt I knew you as surely as I knew my own blood, and I put a hand on the edge of the desk to steady myself as my heartbeat sang in my ears.

I led you into the vault and watched as you carefully keyed in the code from the notebook. The box made its brisk chirp of acceptance and popped open; from it, you slowly drew the necklace. It was elaborate, heavy, dripping from your hands, black opal and diamonds and emeralds. And a note, on thick cardstock, in a slanting cursive:

Darling Max- To hell with your guilt. Neither I nor God will ever forgive you. Keep your jewels and know that you & your abominable lover are doomed to an eternity of suffering. Nothing, no gifts and no fine words, can make right what you have done- can make right what you are. Forever yours - Louise.

It was worse than I’d thought it might be. Not because of the words, but because I could feel her there with us like an uninvited guest (no- we were the voyeurs here)- her grief, her betrayal, her anger. And why not? I don’t know what I wanted her to be, but this was the love story crashing to the ground, the harm spiraling endlessly outward, no end to the curse, no person unscathed. The world’s refusal to allow beauty, and now- the consequence of that refusal. I realized in a rush of shame that this pain was happening in a person, in a part of this story, whom til now I had given essentially no thought. It would have been easier, I suppose, if Louise hadn’t loved Max. But here was the cold, priceless proof of that love, there in front of us. Her humiliation, her rage, and yes: her broken heart.

I looked at you and saw that your tears were mine also. We were holding each other in the next instant, sinking down onto the floor of the vault, sobbing unrestrainedly onto each other’s shoulders, the necklace still clutched in your numb fingers the way you had held Mariah’s hand at the deathbed of your ancestor.

It’s been three years since the day I quit my job, two years after our first trip overseas, and one year since we moved to the bay, where the ocean is the color of yours and Will’s eyes and the sun rises joyous and stubborn each day. The jeweler appraised the necklace at more than enough for a down payment on the beautiful old cottage overlooking the water. We have dogs, and you turned the garage into your studio, and we bought a cafe ten minutes from the house that hosts poetry readings and local music; I’m finishing my second book. In this way we manage, even in Max’s rageful, hopeful world, to grow alongside each other like the weeds and wildflowers ranging up the side of the dune by the house. To hold the stories and the hearts and the dreams of others like us in the cafe, in our home, to be safe and seen and wild together. I'm so proud of what we made together, and I'm so aware of the work that stretches out in front of us- all the systems to dismantle, all the secrets to paint boldly, the world we must build. The beauty of our family that we will fight to protect and whose voices we will nurture, til the day we die and after. Every year, on the anniversary of the day they met, we climb to the top of the dune and sit together, looking over the ocean, remembering the two men who brought you to me. You and I, Elena, my love- we are the broken curse, the mended heart, the eyes looking out to sea and into the future.