Sea Lovers

by Valerie Martin

  “I need to get away from you,” she said. “Not cocaine.”

  “Sylvia.” He sighed.

  The vial gave way and she tapped a thin line of the white powder across her forearm.

  “Sylvia,” he said again. “I love you.”

  At this moment Gino stood up and began to stretch his back legs. Sylvia gathered him up. “No one loves me but Gino,” she crooned to the indifferent animal. “Gino’s going with me. I promised him a yard, I always promised him a yard, and now he’ll have one.”

  The “yard” was, in fact, one thousand acres of Virginia pine forest. Sylvia was running away, but her destination was her husband’s summer place, a building designed to house nine or ten male aristocrats intent on a return to nature. It looked rough, but it wasn’t. There were servants, a wine cellar, a kitchen created to serve banquets. Here Sylvia proposed to spend a week alone, because, as she told her sympathetic spouse, the chatter and confusion of city life were wearing her down. She told Chester Melville that on her return she would give him the answer to his proposal that she leave her husband. At that moment in the bedroom, she determined to take Gino with her, nor could she be dissuaded from this resolution by any appeal, not about the impracticality of the plan or the unnecessary strain to the animal’s health. No, Gino must go, and so he went. He was tranquilized, shoved into a box, and loaded into the airplane with Mrs. Bucks’s suitcases. One can only imagine the horrors of the three hours spent in the howling blackness of the airplane, the strange ride along the conveyor belts to his impatient mistress, who pulled him out of the box at once and, cooing and chattering, carried him to the car. When they arrived at the estate, Gino was given an enormous meal, which he could scarcely eat, and then Sylvia carried him to the back terrace, overlooking a wilderness of breathtaking beauty, and set him free. “Here’s your yard,” she said.

  In the week that followed, Gino took advantage of the outdoors, but Sylvia did not. She moved about restlessly from room to room, annoying whomever she encountered. She made a particular enemy of Tom Mann, the caretaker of the estate. Most of the year he lived alone on the property; he had a small cottage a hundred yards from the house, and he exhibited the silent humorlessness that comes of too much solitude. He loved the property and probably knew it better than its owner ever would. Sylvia’s unexpected presence was an annoyance to him, and he couldn’t disguise his personal distaste for her. She made the great mistake of offering him some cocaine, and the expression on his face as he declined to join her told her clearly what he thought of her.

  She was miserable, but she tried to amuse herself. She made desperate late-night phone calls. She forced the cook to prepare elaborate meals she didn’t eat. She played rock records loud enough to be heard on the terrace, where she danced by herself, or with Gino in her arms, until she collapsed in tears of frustration. She took three or four baths a day, watched whatever was on television, and tried, without success, to read a book about a woman who, like herself, was torn between her rich husband and her lover. At the end of a week, she had decided only that she must have a change. She packed her bags and inspected Gino’s traveling box. An hour before she was to leave, she went to the back door and called her beloved pet.

  But he didn’t respond. She called and called, and she made the cook call. Then she enlisted Tom Mann in the search, and together they scoured the house and the grounds, but the cat was not to be found. At last she was forced to go without him. He would show up for dinner, they all agreed, and he could be sent on alone the next day. So she went to the airport, anxious but not hysterical. The hysteria started that night, when Tom Mann called to say Gino had not shown up for supper.

  Sylvia’s first response was to inform Tom Mann that he was fired, an action that brought down on her for the first time in their marriage the clear disapproval of her husband. “The man has worked for me for twenty years,” he told her petulantly. “He’s completely trustworthy and he can’t be replaced.”

  “He finds Gino, he goes, or I go,” she responded. “It’s that simple.”

  But it wasn’t that simple. Billy Bucks was forced to call his employee and apologize for his wife’s behavior. “She’s not herself,” he explained, though he had begun to suspect the unhappy truth, which was that Sylvia was, at last, entirely herself. “She’s so fond of that cat,” he concluded limply. Tom Mann, who knew his own worth, told his employer that he would continue in his post on the condition that he be spared any future communication with Mrs. Bucks. Billy, humiliated and chagrined, agreed.

  The staff at the estate was instructed to make the search for Gino their first priority. Two days after Sylvia’s departure, the big house was searched, but since Gino was not found and no one was staying in it, Tom Mann closed it up, as was his custom, and retired to his own cottage. He was of the opinion that Gino had taken to the woods, and the only consolation he could offer his employer was the probability that, as the animal had not turned up dead, he might yet be alive.

  Sylvia spent the next three weeks in a constant state of panic, and she poured out her bitterness upon the two men who, in her myopic view, were the authors of her woe. Chester Melville knew what Billy Bucks suffered, and though he could not openly sympathize with him, he found himself curiously drawn to his employer. The two men worked closely, like men under fire, bound together by the camaraderie of terror. Every evening Billy called Tom Mann and received his monosyllabic report while his wife stood nearby, her eyes filled with bitter tears, her cocaine vial clenched in her angry fist.

  Then Gino was found. Tom Mann was bothered by a leak in his roof, and a cursory inspection revealed that a large section needed to be reshingled. He remembered that there were a number of shingles in the attic of the house, though how they had arrived there he didn’t know. He walked hurriedly through the cold empty rooms, hardly looking about him, for there was nothing indoors that he really cared for. Up the stairs he climbed, his heavy steps echoing hollowly in the still, cool air. When he opened the attic door, the sick, sweet smell of death rushed over him, chilling him like a blast of cold air, and he remembered, all at once and clearly, that just three weeks ago he had come up here to store an awning he’d taken down for the winter, that he’d left the door open for a while, and now he knew that Gino, whose emaciated corpse lay before him, the death-frozen jaws coated with the plaster he’d chewed out of the wall in his futile struggle for life, must have come in without his knowledge. Tom Mann was not a man easily moved, but the pitiful condition of the once powerful animal brought a low moan to his lips.

  Gino was buried within the hour. The caretaker chose a spot near his own house, at the foot of a weeping willow tree he himself had planted twenty years earlier. He marked the grave with a flat stone to keep the body from being disinterred by passing animals. When this was done, he phoned his employer and told him of Gino’s fate.

  Chester Melville was sitting in Billy Bucks’s office when the call came through. He knew the substance of the message at once, simply by observing the sudden pallor of Bucks’s complexion and the feebleness with which he concluded the call. “I’ll tell Mrs. Bucks at once,” he said. “I appreciate your call, Tom.” He placed the receiver carefully into its cradle and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

  “Gino’s dead,” Chester said.

  Billy lowered his hands slowly and stared at his employee. He had heard everything in those two words, and he knew, though he had never suspected it for a moment, that he was addressing his wife’s lover. The two men looked at each other disconsolately. “I can’t tell her over the phone,” Billy said at last. “I’ll have to go home. Will you come with me?”

  “Sure,” Chester said, “if you think it will help.”

  “I think it will help me,” Billy replied.

  So the two men left the safety of their office building and trudged wearily through the snowy streets to Bucks’s palatial flat. Sylvia was drinking coffee and perusing a magazine when they came in, and the sight of their grim
faces so unnerved her that she let the magazine slip to the floor.

  “Tom Mann called,” Billy said. “I’m afraid it’s bad news.”

  The scene that followed went on for a long time. Gino, who had been in reality a hearty, handsome, greedy, and independent beast, who had probably not spent one moment of his intensely feline life longing for anything that might come to him in human form, who had tolerated his mistress as cats do, was now resurrected as the only real love Sylvia had ever known. In the midst of her furious accusations, Chester realized that he had been willing to put his happiness, his job, and his entire future on the line for a woman who, because she knew herself so well, could only scorn any man who was mad enough to love her. He also observed that Billy Bucks knew this as well, but had married her anyway. As the two men beat their retreat down the stairway, Chester, overcome by his sense of his own foolishness, shouted back to her, “You killed that cat yourself, Sylvia, as surely as if you had strangled him with your own hands.”

  When they were gone, Sylvia smashed her husband’s heirloom crystal, but that, she thought, could be replaced. She took a large knife from the kitchen and slashed a small Corot landscape, a particular favorite of her husband’s, until it hung from the frame in strips. Then she went to the bedroom and ripped his down pillow until the feathers rose about her like a snowstorm. All she could hear was her lover’s parting remark. She began to stab and stab her marriage bed itself, calling out to Gino as she drove the knife deeper and deeper, but nothing she could do would bring poor Gino back to her, nothing she could ever do.

  THE CONSOLATION OF NATURE

  Lily’s hair was her mother’s pride. In the afternoons, when she came home from school, she sat at the kitchen table, her head resting on the back of her chair, while her mother dragged the wooden brush through the long strands. Lily told her mother what had happened at school that day, or she talked of her many ambitions. Her mother, preoccupied with her work, holding up a thick lock and pulling out with her fingers a particularly tenacious knot, responded laconically. She looked upon this ritual of her daughter’s hair as a solemn duty, like the duties of feeding and clothing.

  One afternoon they sat so engaged, conversing softly while outside the rain beat against the house. Lily’s mother observed that she couldn’t take much more rain, that it would surely rot her small, carefully tended vegetable garden, that it seemed to be rotting her own imagination. Lily agreed. It had rained steadily for three days. Her head rose and fell, like a flower on its stalk, with each stroke of her mother’s care, and each time it did she lifted her eyes a bit, taking in a larger section of the tiled floor before her.

  Her mother shouted and threw the brush at the stove.

  Lily sat up and looked after the brush. She was quick enough to see the disappearing tail and hindquarters of a rat as he scurried beneath the refrigerator. These parts, Lily thought, were unusually large, and this notion was quickly confirmed by her mother’s cry as she clung momentarily to the edge of the table. “Good Christ,” her mother said. “That’s the biggest rat I’ve ever seen.”

  Lily drew her legs up under her and watched the spot where the rat had been. Her mother was already on the telephone to her father’s secretary. “No,” she said, “don’t bother him. Just tell him there’s a rat as big as a cat in the kitchen and he needs to stop at the K&B on the way home for a trap. Tell him to get the biggest trap they make.” When she got off the phone, she suggested that they move to the dining room to finish Lily’s hair. “It’s the rain,” her mother said as she closed the kitchen door carefully behind them. “The river is so high it’s driving them out.”

  Lily sat at the dining table and pulled her long hair up over the back of her chair. Her mother resumed her vigorous brushing. It was strange, Lily thought, to sit at the big dining table in the dull afternoon light. The steady beating of the rain against the windows made her drowsy, and her mind wandered. She thought of how the river must look, swollen with brown water, swirling along hurriedly toward the Gulf of Mexico. She had never been to the mouth of the river, though she had gone down as far as Barataria once with her father. It had not been, as she had imagined, a neat little breaking-up of water fingers, the way it looked on the map. Instead, it was a great marsh with a road through it. There were fishing shacks on piers, wood, and other odd debris scattered in the shallow areas. She remembered that trip clearly, though two years had passed and she had been, she thought, only nine at the time. They had stopped to buy shrimp and her father had laughed at her impatience to have hers peeled. That was when she had learned to peel shrimp, and she did it so well that the job now regularly fell to her.

  Her mother had not stopped thinking of the rat. “I can’t get over his coming out in broad daylight like that,” she remarked as she pulled the loose hairs from the brush.

  “Who?” Lily asked.

  “That rat,” her mother replied. “I don’t even want to cook dinner with that thing in there.”

  Lily could think of no response, so she stood up, turning to her mother and fluffing her hair out past her shoulders.

  “That looks lovely,” her mother said, touching Lily’s hair at the temple. Then, as if she were shy of her daughter’s beauty, she drew her hand away. “Do you have a lot of homework?” she asked.

  “Plenty,” Lily said. “I guess I’d better get to it.”

  When her father arrived that evening at his usual time, it was with chagrin that his wife and daughter learned he hadn’t gotten their message and had come home trapless to his family.

  “Well, go out and get one now,” her mother complained. “I don’t want to spend a night in the house with that thing alive.”

  “It’s pouring down rain,” Lily’s father protested. “I’ll get one tomorrow. He’s probably moved on already anyway.”

  “Give me the keys,” she said. “I’ll get it myself.”

  Lily stood in the kitchen doorway during this argument, and she stepped aside as her mother came storming past her, the keys clutched in her angry fist. Her father sat down at the kitchen table and smiled after his affronted mate.

  “Did you see this giant rat?” he asked Lily.

  “Sort of,” she said.

  “Are you sure he wasn’t a mouse?”

  “I think it was a rat,” Lily speculated. “His back was kind of high, not flat like a mouse.”

  “When have you ever seen a rat?” her father asked impatiently.

  Lily looked away. She had, she realized, never seen a rat, except in pictures, and she knew that if she said, “In pictures,” her father would consider her to have less authority than she had already. “He was big, Dad,” she said at last, turning away.

  When her mother pulled the trap from its purple bag, Lily felt a twinge of sympathy for the rat. The board was large; the bar, which snapped closed when it was set, was wide enough to accommodate Lily’s hand; the spring was devilishly strong and so tight that her father forced the bar back with difficulty. He tested it with a wooden spoon, and the bar snapped closed, lifting the board well off the floor. Her father baited it with a slice of potato, and the family turned out the lights and settled in their beds. Lily lay with her eyes open, listening for the snap of the bar, but she didn’t hear it, and while she was listening she fell asleep.

  The next morning the trap was discovered just as it had been left. Lily’s father gave her mother a cold, skeptical look and sprang the trap again with a spoon. Her mother concentrated on cooking the breakfast, allowing the matter to drop. When he was gone to work, she turned to Lily as if to a conspirator and said, “I’ll get some poison today and we can try again tonight.”

  Lily didn’t think of the rat again during the day. Her schoolwork was oppressive, but at lunch break, for the first time that week, the students were turned out of doors. The clouds had cleared off, leaving a sky of hectic blue, a sun that beat down on the wet ground with the thoroughness of a shower. Lily and her best friend sat on the breezeway, watching the braver students,
who sloshed through the puddles in search of exercise. They discussed their summer plans and confided in each other their mutual fear that they would be separated the following fall.

  “If I get that grouch Miss Bambula,” Lily’s friend said, “I think I’ll die. She looks just like a horse.”

  Lily wondered which would be worse, to be with her friend and have Miss Bambula or to be without her friend and Miss Bambula. One of the boys in the yard hailed the two girls, holding up for their long-distance inspection the squirming green body of an anole. Lily stood up and went out to him. She liked anoles and this one, she saw at once, was of a good size.

  That afternoon, when her mother brushed her hair, the rat didn’t appear. “Maybe your father’s right,” her mother said hopefully. Later, after she had practiced piano, Lily rejoined her mother in the kitchen to help with dinner. She sat at the table with a large bowl of green beans, which she proceeded to snap, throwing the ends into a small bowl, the fat centers into another. Her mother stood at the counter, peeling potatoes. They worked without speaking, and it was so quiet in the room that they heard the scratching of the rat’s claws against the floor before they saw him. They both turned, looking in shocked silence at the refrigerator. His ugly face appeared first; then he took a few timid steps forward and stood before them. Lily saw that his black lips were drawn back over his teeth and his cheeks pulsated with his nervous breathing. She sucked in her own breath and dropped the bean she was holding.