Sea Lovers

by Valerie Martin

  Maria sent me a guarded look, then raised her weary eyes to Anspach, who was sunk deep in the couch with his arms out over the cushions, his head dropped back, watching her closely through lowered lids. “I would never do that,” she said. “I would be too shy.”

  Anspach made a mock smile, stretching his lips tight and flat over his teeth. “She’s too shy,” he said softly. Then he closed his eyes and whined, “Oh, please, Miss Mah-ree, don’t be shy, oh, don’t be too shy, oh pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease, my Miss Mah-ree, don’t be shy to dance for us boys here to dat nice music, and take your shirt off, oh, pleasepleasepleaseplease, I know you can, I know you’re not too shy, oh, pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease.”

  “For God’s sake, Anspach,” I said. “Would you leave it alone.”

  Anspach addressed the ceiling. “Oh, Mr. Jack-and-Mac, look at that, he don’t want to see Miss Mah-ree dance, he has no interest at all in Miss Mah-ree’s pretty breasts, can you believe that? I don’t believe that.”

  Paul groaned and set his empty glass down on one of the crates. “I’ve got to be going,” he said. “It’s late.”

  Anspach leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Pile has to scurry home,” he said. “It’s much too late for Pile.”

  “Yeah, me too,” said Mike. “I’ve got to be downtown early.”

  I looked at Maria, who was standing with her back to the record player. She hadn’t moved during Anspach’s tiresome monologue. She looked pale, ghostly, her eyes were focused on empty space, and as I watched her she raised one hand and pressed her fingertips against her forehead, as if pushing back something that was trying to get out. I too maintained that I was tired, that it was late, and pulled myself out of my lawn chair while Paul and Mike, exchanging the blandest of farewell pleasantries, followed Maria to the door. I stood looking down at Anspach, who was slumped over his knees muttering something largely unintelligible, though the words “too late” were repeated at close intervals. I was disgusted and angry enough to speak my mind, and I thought of half a dozen things to say to him, but as I was sorting through them Maria, turning from the doorway, caught my eye, and her expression so clearly entreated me to say nothing that I held my tongue and walked past the couch to join her at the door.

  “I’m sorry,” she said when I was near her.

  “Don’t be,” I said. “You didn’t do anything.”

  “He’s just drunk,” she said.

  I took her hands and looked into her sad face. She kept her eyes down and her body turned away, toward Anspach, back to Anspach. “You look tired,” I said. “You should get some sleep.”

  She smiled dimly, still averting her eyes from mine, and I thought, he won’t let her sleep. As I walked through the quiet streets to my studio I blamed myself for what had happened. I should not have stared at her so openly, so admiringly. But couldn’t a man admire his friend’s girlfriend, was that such a crime? Wouldn’t any ordinary man be pleased to see his choice confirmed in his friend’s eyes? Of course the fact that Anspach was not, in any meaningful sense of the word, my or anyone else’s friend gave the lie to my self-serving protest. That and the fact that what I felt for Maria was much more than admiration and I had no doubt it showed, that Anspach had seen it. He knew I wanted to take Maria away from him. He also knew I couldn’t do it.

  After that night I saw less and less of Maria. Sometimes she still came by in the afternoons when Anspach was in town, but she never stayed long and seemed anxious to be back in their loft before he got home. She had picked up a third grueling, thankless job, three days a week at an art supply house in Soho. The pay was minimum wage, but she got a discount on paint, which had become the lion’s share of her monthly budget. Anspach was turning out paintings at an astounding rate, and the cadmium yellow that went into his blue was ten dollars a tube. The discount went to his head, and more and more paint went onto each canvas. He was cavalier about the expense, passing on his nearly empty tubes to Paul because he couldn’t be bothered to finish them. Paul had invented a special device, a kind of press, to squeeze the last dabs of color from his paint tubes.

  It was about that time that I met Yvonne Remy, Paul’s sister, who had come down from Vermont to study art history at NYU. She was staying with Paul until she could find a place of her own, and the three of us soon fell into a routine of dinners together several nights a week, taking turns on the cooking. Yvonne was quick-witted and energetic, and she loved to talk about painting. Gradually we all noticed that she was spending more time at my place than at her brother’s, and gradually we all came to feel that this was as it should be.

  Yvonne was there that afternoon when I last saw Maria. She hadn’t visited me in three weeks. She looked exhausted, which wasn’t surprising, but there was something more than that, something worse than that, a listlessness beyond fatigue. The rabbits came running as they always did when Maria arrived, and she brightened momentarily as she bent down to caress them, but I noticed she had forgotten to bring a carrot.

  Yvonne responded to her with that sudden affinity of kindness women sometimes show each other for reasons that are inexplicable to men. She warmed the milk for the coffee, which she did not always bother with for herself, and set out some fruit, cheese, and bread. When Maria showed no interest in this offering, Yvonne got up, put a few cookies on a plate, and seemed relieved when Maria took one and laid it on the saucer of her cup. Maria leaned over her chair to scratch a rabbit’s ears, then sat up and took a bite of the cookie. “John,” she said, her eyes still on the docile creatures at her feet. “You’ll always take care of these rabbits, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” I assured her. “These rabbits and I are in this together.”

  When she was gone, Yvonne sat at the table idly turning her empty cup.

  “She seems so tired,” I said.

  “She’s in despair,” Yvonne observed.

  Then a few things happened very quickly. I didn’t find out about any of it until it was all over and Maria was gone. Anspach was offered a space in a three-man show with two up-and-coming painters at the Rite gallery. This coup, Paul told me later, with a grimace of pain at the pun, was the result of Anspach’s fucking Mrs. Rite on the floor of her office and suggesting to her, postcoitus, that she was the only woman in New York who could understand his work. I didn’t entirely believe this story; it didn’t sound like Anspach to me, but evidently it was true, for within three months Mrs. Rite had left Mr. Rite and Anspach was the star of her new gallery, Rivage, which was one of the first to move south into Tribeca.

  Paul maintained that Anspach told Maria about his new alliance, omitting none of the details, though it is possible that she heard about it somewhere else. Mrs. Rite was not bothered by the gossip; in fact she was rumored to have been the source of much of it. As far as Anspach was concerned, he had seized an opportunity, as what self-respecting artist would not, faced with the hypocrisy and callousness of the art scene in the city. He had decided early on to enter the fray, by bombast or seduction, or whatever it took, marketing himself as an artist who would not be denied.

  Maria had narrowed her life to thankless drudgery and Anspach. She had given up her dance classes, she had few friends, and she had never been much given to confiding her difficulties to others. She was, as Yvonne had observed, already in despair. However she heard it, the truth about Anspach’s golden opportunity was more than she could bear. Anspach told the police that they’d had an argument, that she had gone out the door in a rage, that he assumed she was going to weep to one of her friends. Instead she climbed the interior fire ladder to the roof, walked across the litter of exhaust vents and peeling water pipes, pulled aside the low, rickety, wire-mesh partition that protected the gutters, and dived headfirst into the street. It was a chilly day in October; the windows were closed in the loft. Anspach didn’t know what had happened until the Sicilian who owned the coffee bar on the street level rushed up the stairs and banged on his door, shouting something Anspach didn’t at
first understand.

  There was no funeral in New York. Maria’s father came out from Wisconsin and arranged to have her body shipped back home. It was as if she had simply disappeared. I didn’t see Anspach; I purposely avoided him. I knew if I saw him I would try to hit him. Anspach is a big man; he outweighs me by sixty pounds, I’d guess, and he’s powerfully built. So I may have avoided him because I was afraid of what would happen to me.

  Paul told me that a few weeks after Maria’s death, Anspach moved in with Mrs. Rite, and that he’d sold two of the nine paintings in the group show. At his one-man show the following year he sold everything but the four biggest, proving his theory that the public was intent on hanging their pictures over the couch. Paul Remy saw the show and reported that Anspach’s blue period was definitely over. The predominant hue was a shell pink, and the repeated image was a billowing parachute. This irritated me. Everything I heard about Anspach irritated me, but I couldn’t keep myself from following his career, stung with frustration, anger, and envy at each new success.

  In the spring Yvonne and I moved a few blocks south, where we had more room for the same money and a small walled-in yard, which soon became the rabbits’ domain. They undertook amazing excavation projects, after which they spent hours cleaning their paws and sleeping in the sun, or in the shade of an ornamental beech. I kept my promise to Maria; I took good care of the rabbits for many years. They lived to be old by rabbit standards, nearly fourteen, and they died within a few weeks of each other, as secretly as they could, in a den they’d dug behind the shed I’d put up for Yvonne’s gardening tools and our daughter’s outdoor toys. After Yvonne finished school she moved from job to job for a few years until she settled in the ceramics division at the Brooklyn Museum. I took what work I could find and kept painting. Occasionally, always through friends, I got a few pictures in a group show, but nothing sold. Storage was a continual and vexing problem. My canvases got smaller and smaller.

  Paul and I were offered a joint show at a new gallery on the edge of Tribeca, an unpromising location at best. The opening was not a fashionable scene: very cheap wine, plastic cups, a few plates strewn with wedges of rubbery cheese. The meager crowd of celebrants was made up largely of the artists’ friends and relatives. The artists themselves, dressed in their best jeans and T-shirts, huddled together near the back, keeping up a pointless conversation in order to avoid overhearing any chance remarks about the paintings. I was naturally surprised when there appeared above the chattering heads of this inelegant crowd the expensively coiffed, unnaturally tan, and generally prosperous-looking head of Meyer Anspach.

  “Slumming,” Paul said to me when he spotted Anspach.

  I smiled. David Hines, the gallery owner, had come to riveted attention and flashed Paul and me a look of triumph as he stepped out to welcome Anspach. Greta, a friend of Paul’s who painted canvases that were too big for most gallery walls and who was, I knew, a great admirer of Anspach, set down her plastic cup on the drinks table and rubbed her eyes hard with her knuckles.

  David was ushering Anspach past the paintings, which he scarcely glanced at, to the corner where Paul and I stood openmouthed. Anspach launched into a monologue about how we had all been poor painters together, poor artists in Brooklyn, doing our best work, because we were unknown and had only ourselves to please. This was during his blue period, a long time ago, those paintings were some of his favorites, a turning point, the suffering of that time had liberated him, he couldn’t afford to buy back those paintings himself, that’s how valuable they had become.

  This was the first time I heard Anspach’s litany about his blue period.

  It was awful standing there, with David practically rubbing his hands together for glee and Paul emanating hostility, while Anspach went on and on about the brave comrade painters of long ago. Cheap wine, free love. La vie de bohème, I thought, only Maria didn’t die of tuberculosis. I couldn’t think of anything to say, or rather my thoughts came in such a rush I couldn’t sort one out for delivery, but Paul came to my rescue by pointing out with quiet dignity that he and I still lived in Brooklyn. Then David got the idea of taking a photograph of Anspach, and Anspach said he’d come to see the pictures, which nobody believed, but we all encouraged him to have a look while David ran to his office for his camera. Paul and I stood there for what seemed a long time watching Anspach stand before each painting with his mouth pursed and his eyebrows slightly lifted, thinking God knows what. In spite of my valid personal reasons for despising him, I understood that I still admired Anspach as a painter, and I wanted to know, once and for all, what he saw when he looked at my work. Paul eased his way to the drinks table and tossed back a full glass of the red wine. David appeared with his camera, and after a brief conversation with Anspach, he called Paul and me over to flank Anspach in front of my painting titled Welfare. Welfare had an office building in the foreground, from the windows of which floated heavenward a dozen figures of bureaucrats in coats and ties, all wearing shiny black shoes that pointed down as they went up, resembling the wings of black crows. In David’s photograph, two of these figures appear to be rising out of Anspach’s head, another issues from one of Paul’s ears. Anspach is smiling broadly, showing all his teeth. Paul looks diffident, and I look wide-eyed, surprised. When she saw this photo, Yvonne said, “You look like a sheep standing next to a wolf.”

  After the photograph session, Anspach stepped away from Paul and me and walked off with David, complaining that he had another important engagement. He did not so much as glance back at the door. He had appeared unexpectedly; now he disappeared in the same way. David returned to us with the bemused, wondering expression of one who has met up with a natural force and miraculously survived. He took from his coat pocket a sheet of red adhesive dots and went around the room carefully affixing them to the frames of various pictures. Anspach had bought four of mine and three of Paul’s.

  I don’t attribute my modest success to Anspach, but I guess there are people who do. I attribute it to the paintings, to the quality of the work. I have to do that or I’d just give up. Still, there’s always that nagging anxiety for any artist who actually begins to sell, that he’s compromised something, that he’s imitating the fashion. I’m not making a fortune, but I like selling a painting; I like the enthusiasm of the new owner, and I particularly like handing the check to Yvonne. It makes me lazy, though, and complacent. Some days I don’t paint at all. I go downtown and check out the competition at the various galleries, drink a few espressos, talk with Paul, who isn’t doing as well as I am but seems incapable of envy, of wishing me anything but good.

  I sometimes wonder what van Gogh’s paintings would have been like if he had been unable to turn them out fast enough to satisfy an eager, approving public. Suppose he’d been treated, as Picasso was, as such a consummate master that any little scribble on a notepad was worth enough to buy the hospital where he died. Would that ear still have had to go?

  Yesterday, as I walked out of a café in Chelsea, I ran straight into Anspach, who was coming in. I greeted him politely enough, I always do, but I haven’t exchanged more than a few words with him since Maria’s death. He pretends not to notice this, or perhaps he thinks it’s the inevitable fate of the great artist to be tirelessly snubbed by his inferiors. He asked me to go back in with him, to have an espresso. “You know, I just sold a painting of yours I’ve had for five years,” he said. “Your stock is going up.”

  It was chilly out, threatening rain, and I’d had an argument with Yvonne that morning. She’d told me that I was lazy, that all I did was sleep and drink coffee, which isn’t true, but I had defended myself poorly by accusing her of being obsessed with work, money, getting ahead, and we’d parted heatedly, she to work, I to the café. I was not in the mood to have an espresso with Meyer Anspach. He looked prosperous, expansive, pleased with himself. His breath was warm on my face, and it smelled bitter, as if he’d been chewing some bitter root.

  “It must be nice to have an ey
e for investments,” I said. “It keeps you from having to buy anything you actually care about.”

  He laughed. “The only paintings I ever want to keep are my own,” he said. “I’m always trying to find a way around having to sell them.”

  “I get it,” I said, trying to push past him. “Happy to be of service.”

  “Looks like I’m the one in service,” he observed. “When I sell a painting of yours, it makes everything you do worth more.”

  This was an intolerable assertion. “Don’t do me any favors, okay, Anspach?” I snapped. I had made it to the sidewalk. “I know perfectly well why you bought my paintings.”

  Anspach came out on the sidewalk with me. He looked eager for a fight. “And why is that?” he said. “What is your theory about that?”

  “You want me to forgive you for Maria,” I said. “But I never will.”

  “You forgive me!” he said. “I think it’s the other way around.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “You led her on, Jack, don’t tell me you didn’t. I was wearing her out and there you were, always ready with the coffee and the bunnies, and trying to feel her up on the subway.”

  “That’s not true,” I protested.

  “She told me,” he said. “She said you were in love with her, and I said, Okay, then go, but by the time she got around to making the decision, you were shut up with Yvonne. You closed her out and she gave up. That’s why she went off the roof.”

  “If you’d treated her decently, she wouldn’t have needed to turn to me,” I said.

  “But she did,” he shot back. “You made her think she could, and she did. But you couldn’t wait for her. You had to have Yvonne. Well, that’s fine, Jack. Maria wouldn’t have made you happy. She was always depressed; she was always tired. She was never going to do better than waitressing, and sooner or later she was going to go off the roof. Yvonne is a hard worker, and she makes good money. You made the right choice.”