Sea Lovers

by Valerie Martin

  “Yes. It was the day after she called me, looking for you.”

  “And when was that?”

  “It was after you left.”

  “So, a few days later.”

  “No. I guess it had to be the next day. She knew you were gone, though. She said she’d seen you the night before and you’d forgotten to give her the address. I figured she made that up.”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t see her. I was out with you that night.”

  “I knew that. I knew she was lying. She lied all the time, but it didn’t do her any good.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “So, what’s in the boxes? Love letters?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t opened them yet.”

  “I thought about throwing them out with the rest of the junk, but Jack said we should respect the wishes of the dead. That doesn’t mean you can’t throw them out. Maybe you should. Maybe you don’t want to know what’s in them.”

  But I knew what was in them. In my study I stood with my toe pressed against the boxes. I pushed against them, but they didn’t budge. “You pushed me,” I heard Rita say.

  I was painfully conscious that I had lied to Malcolm. I wasn’t afraid of being caught in the lie; no one was interested in Rita’s last night on earth. The coroner’s verdict, natural causes, meant no mysteriously ruptured organs, no suspicious bruises or contusions, and Rita was ill, anyone could see that; she’d said as much herself. I discounted the possibility that the fall Rita had taken at my apartment had contributed to her demise. What bothered me about the lie I’d told Malcolm was that I couldn’t take it back without appearing suspicious. I was stuck with it.

  Just as I was stuck with the boxes. I backed away, to my chair, where I sat regarding them steadily, as if I expected them to move. I considered my options, assessed the ebb and flow of curiosity. Once I opened them, I thought, Rita would be back in my life with a vengeance. Did I have a moral obligation to allow this to happen? They contained, I could not doubt it, her life’s work, all she had to show for herself, and she had directed them to me as the person most likely to vindicate that life, which had ended in ignominy. She was right to choose me; I was situated to be of use. I could send the manuscript to my agent, or directly to my editor, and it would receive a fair reading. Neither of them would be delighted to receive a thousand loose pages typed on various machines with no backup, by an author who was unknown and dead, but they would look at it and, if it was as good as Rita said it was, consider the risk.

  And what if Rita’s novel was a success? It wasn’t unprecedented. Virgil, Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, Fernando Pessoa, John Kennedy Toole, to name a few, had left the business arrangements to their friends and relatives. Pessoa’s chest contained thousands of loose pages. Kafka had outdone everyone by extracting a promise from his friend Max Brod to burn everything at his death, burn The Castle, burn The Trial, but Brod, to the relief of posterity, had broken that promise. I’d visited Kafka’s grave in Prague and laid the requisite pebble on the slab to hold the wispy Czech in place, and another on the loyal Brod’s tablet nearby. What kind of friend made such a request? Kafka was dying for years. He had plenty of time to burn whatever he wanted burned. Didn’t he possess a stove, a box of Czech matches?

  If Rita’s book was published, my part in that process would be a feature of the packaging. Like Brod’s, my celebrity might rest upon it. I would be the generous writer of little note who went to bat for a work of genius by an artist who had died precipitately, crushed by the indifference of a heartless industry. The public eats that stuff up: the fantasy that artists—unlike, say, businessmen—are driven by warm fellow feeling. In their devotion to the religion of art, they are ever seeking, without self-interest or crude competitiveness, to celebrate genius, wherever it can be found. There wouldn’t be any money in it for me. To maintain my status as a selfless benefactor, I’d have to give all the proceeds to a worthy cause—the Zuni might be a good choice, whoever they were, or some lesbian-gay alliance. I might get some interviews out of it. Who was this fascinating author? How did the manuscript come into my possession? I’d be free to reinvent Rita any way I chose: a courageous adventuress, a seductress, a poète maudit, a helpless victim of her own integrity and her impossibly high standards, a self-serving user, a tramp, a liar, a thief. Rita would belong entirely to me.

  This scenario amused me, though it was doubtless far-fetched. The fact that twenty years earlier everyone in a small writing program in Vermont had agreed that Rita was gifted didn’t mean she had parlayed her gift into a masterpiece that would take the publishing world by storm. It was more likely that the novel was a disjointed, flawed narrative, an overblown, self-absorbed chronicle of Rita’s battle with the world. There might be flashes of brilliance, but no discipline.

  One way to find out. All I had to do was open a box.

  How close to finished was it? Was there, in its pages, some exaggerated version of myself, of those few months, so long ago, when Rita and I gave up on sleep in favor of drinking and sex? Would I find myself dissected, a squirming, quivering creature, flayed and pinned open on a page, my panicked heart throbbing for all to see?

  I got up and took a closer look at the boxes. In the top corner of each one was a number, one through four, an effort at order. She had, I knew, written my address sometime between her return home in the taxi that night and her death, a period of not more than forty-eight hours. There might be a note to me with a more precise description of her wishes, perhaps an apology for having insulted me and some mollifying language designed to make me feel guilty if I failed to comply. Wouldn’t that be just like Rita?

  I slipped my fingers under the edge of the top box and eased the lid up with the care and trepidation of an expert trained in munitions disarmament.

  Twenty years ago, for a poor graduate student on a stipend of four thousand dollars a year, two hundred dollars was a lot of money. I bought my clothes at secondhand stores, attended college functions for the free food, otherwise subsisted on vegetables, and drank draft beer with my peers at the local pool hall for a dollar a pitcher. My father was long dead, and my mother, who lived on a small pension from the U.S. postal system, didn’t approve of my decision to leave Louisiana in search of an unlikely career. Even if she’d had the money, I was too proud to ask her for help. Within a few days everyone knew Rita had left not only me but the town, and I was the subject of pitying looks and kind remarks, which galled me. I certainly wasn’t going to augment my image as the local cuckold by revealing that Rita had robbed me as well. As I straddled Rita’s novel, the recollection of that humiliation assailed me, stayed my fingers, straightened my spine. I stood there, drinking it in, a bracing, bitter potion from the past. How had I made up the loss?

  I’d gone to the real estate office and arranged to pay twenty-five dollars for that month and an extra twenty-five on the regular rent for the next seven months. I searched the local paper for part-time work, but there wasn’t much. Because I was teaching and taking classes, my hours were limited; the town’s economy was depressed, and I didn’t have a car. Eventually I found a minimum-wage weekend job selling tickets at the movie theater in the mall out on the highway. There was a bus that let me off in the parking lot. It wasn’t bad. I got all the popcorn I could eat and I could see the movies for free. I cleared about twenty dollars a week, which made a big difference in my lifestyle. I bought a good pair of duck boots, and because I could pay for the pitchers more often, my entrance at the pub was greeted with hearty enthusiasm.

  I wrote a story about a guy who works at a movie theater. He becomes obsessed by a beautiful young woman who comes in alone every Saturday night, buys two tickets, and sits through two films, the seven and nine features, whatever they are. He starts to make up a life for her, a reason why she has to be away from home and off the street from seven to eleven every Saturday. It can’t be because she loves the movies; most of them are idiotic. He starts following her after the shows. He knows wh
ere she lives, where she buys her groceries, what café she meets a girlfriend in, where she buys her clothes. Finally she has him arrested for stalking. He loses his job. It turns out she’s a freelance movie critic. It was called “The Flicks,” and it was the first story I placed in a reputable quarterly, The Oliphant Review. I was paid ten dollars, plus copies.

  I never told anyone Rita had robbed me. It was one of those secrets I kept because it was pleasurable to keep it; I have a few. Years later, in a novel, I had a male character steal money from a lover in a similar fashion. My character pauses in the midst of the heist and considers taking only half the money—he knows how poor his lover is—but I doubted that Rita had given me that much consideration. It was a failure on my part to imagine a character as heartless as Rita.

  The phone rang; it was Pamela. Did I want coffee? I wanted to get away from those boxes, but I didn’t tell Pam that, perhaps didn’t know it myself until I was safe in her kitchen. The windows were open, there was a vase of bright zinnias on the ledge, the light was lambent, the air fragrant and cool. Pamela in her man’s shirt spattered with paint, her hair mussed, her eyes unfocused from the hours of close work at her easel, leaned over me with the coffeepot and pressed her lips against my neck. “Have you been working?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I lied. After the coffee I lured her into her bedroom, where we passed a few amiable hours. Then we were hungry and decided to go out for sushi. We were pleased with ourselves for wasting the afternoon on sex. We ate a lot of raw fish and drank several bottles of sake. After that we walked around the town, looking in the shop windows, greeting neighbors out with their dogs, and stopped at the bar for a nightcap. It was midnight when I left Pamela at her kitchen door and crossed the lawn to my own. In the course of the evening I’d forgotten about Rita’s novel. But when I turned on the light in my study, there it was, a reproachful cardboard cairn near the trashcan. I considered the possibility that sake and whiskey were incompatible substances, that in some sense this explained the difference between East and West. If mixed in a glass, would they separate? I put this question in the same to-be-explored category as the contents of Rita’s boxes. My desk didn’t send out even a beckoning vibration as I wandered past it on my way to my bed.

  In my dream Rita was young again, but I was as I am now. It was a snowy scene and she was teasing me to race her to a fence post across a field. She didn’t have a chance, I told her, she was wearing open-toed shoes with high heels and I had on sturdy boots. But she insisted. She was lovely, her eyes bright, cheeks flushed. Her hair, stuffed under a fur hat, burst out over her forehead in golden ringlets. “Come on, Maxwell,” she said. “If you’re so sure of yourself, what have you got to lose?” At length I agreed. She took off, surprisingly quick in those impossible shoes, and I followed. My feet were heavy. I ran in dream slo-mo while Rita dashed ahead. As I hobbled along I came across one of her shoes, then the other, abandoned in the snow. When I looked up she was sitting on the fence, laughing. I clutched her shoes to my chest. It was snowing hard; I could barely see, but I could hear her, laughing, and calling out to me, “I win, Maxwell. I win.”

  The telephone was blaring. I fought my way free of Rita’s taunting and snatched the receiver, pressing it to my ear, distracted by a sudden sharp pain in my groin. “Maxwell,” Rita said. “Did you get my novel?” In the process of throwing the phone away from me, I lost my balance and slid off the edge of the bed to the floor. When I opened my eyes, I was flat on my back, looking up at the red point of the phone charging light, which went on only when the receiver was firmly lodged in its cradle. I looked down at my erection, fading fast after having been squashed when I rolled over on it to answer the call. “Rita,” I said. “God damn you.”

  In the morning my mood was blacker than my coffee. Rita was stomping around in my head like a devil with a pitchfork, and not Rita lite, but Rita as she was on the last night of her life, with her harsh breath, her forearms like hams, her petulance, her frank, flamboyant destitution, Rita who had suffered and lived and stolen large machinery, Rita the accuser, the avenger.

  I could hear the boxes chortling on the floor.

  I was twenty-five that year. Rita was just twenty-one, but she was way ahead of me, erotically speaking. My experience had been that some women liked sex, others endured it, and others were looking to make some kind of deal. Rita was avid, rapacious; it was sport to her, yet I never doubted for a second that she was in deadly earnest, in it to prove to herself that she was the gold medalist. Now it strikes me that she was suicidal, trying to get some man to kill her, but I didn’t have a clue about the dark side of anything then. I was an innocent, and Rita knew it.

  So did Danny Grunwald, the scary little dyke Rita left me for, who reigned in an unofficial way over a pool table at Cues, the bar we frequented, daring “suckers” to play a game with her, swilling cheap bourbon and probably shooting something besides pool. Now and then she picked fights with tough men twice her size, went out in the alley and came back bloody, pleased with herself. She liked to tease Rita about me. “Hey, gorgeous, what are you doing with that loser?” “What has he got that I don’t have, honey? I’m sure it ain’t that big.” That sort of thing. I thought that Rita’s laughter was embarrassment, that she was as appalled as I was.

  That night we’d been drinking for hours. Rita was tense and, before I knew it, furious at me for joking with a fellow student at the table next to ours. The fight went on back at my apartment, all night and into the next morning, when I took a shower and went to the college to teach my class. I knew Rita had a class in the afternoon, so I didn’t expect to see her until evening, by which time we would both have been sober for more than twelve hours and in a condition to patch up our quarrel over a plate of vegetables and a pot of strong coffee. But the hours slid by and Rita didn’t appear. I read all twenty of my students’ writing exercises—describe a situation in which you regretted your behavior. There were always a few who had no regrets; invariably these were boys. Why were girls so full of regret? One, a clever one, regretted taking my class.

  At length I was hungry. I chopped and steamed the vegetables, made the coffee, ate at the table while reading a Chekhov story for my Modern Masters class. Finally it was 10:00 p.m. and no Rita. I put on my boots, coat, hat, scarf, gloves, and went out into the icy world in search of her. I figured she would be at Cues; if not, I could drink with friends.

  She had been there, but she was gone, no one knew where. Things I failed to notice: sympathetic looks on the faces of my friends, absence of Danny Grunwald. Hours later I slogged back to the apartment, certain she would be there—she had an early class in the morning—but she wasn’t. I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke, the sun was up and Rita was passing through the room on her way to the shower.

  “Where were you?” I inquired from the cushions.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” said Rita.

  I got up and we argued a little more over breakfast, but we were both too tired to keep at it. She offered some obvious lies, she’d been at the library, time slipped away, she’d met up with friends, gone out until it was too late and she was too drunk to walk home. We went to the college together, parted amiably enough, agreed to meet at the diner for dinner; it was payday. I waited there for an hour before I ate a grilled cheese and went out to find her. It was snowing. I tried the library, which was bloody unlikely, and then Cues. As I came into the block, I spotted Rita leaving the bar, walking briskly away from me. She looked so purposeful I didn’t call out to her. I wanted to know where she was going. I scurried along, close to the wall in true detective style. She turned into an alley halfway down the block. Stealthily I followed. It was a narrow street of one-room cottages with half-closed porches, lined up one against the other. They had been built for factory workers long ago, when there was a factory. Now they were run-down, derelict, but occupied. The residents stowed their wood on the porches, and the smoke from the stovepipes hung over the narrow passageway, coating th
e walls, the trashcans, the banked snow, the passersby with grime. Rita stamped her feet at the entrance to one of these, stepped up to the porch, opened the door without knocking, and went inside.

  I stood in the snow for several moments, unable to make up my mind to move. I had a fair idea of what I would find if I followed Rita, if I knocked on that door, and I wasn’t up to it. I made my way back to Cues and joined a table of aspiring writers, most of whom would eventually find employment in the tech industry. I drank half a pitcher of beer, glowering at the pool table, where a cordial game was under way, absent the belligerent heckling of Danny Grunwald. One among us pointed out that our professor’s new novel had gotten a lackluster review in the daily Times. It was generally agreed that his books were boring.

  I was thinking about the stovepipes on the shabby houses in the alley. My apartment, which I’d rented in blissful August ignorance, had a fireplace that warmed an area of about four cubic feet in front of it. I knew now, too late, that a woodstove was the indispensable appliance in this climate; one could sooner go without a refrigerator. Whenever Rita and I visited friends who had a stove, we stayed late. At home we sat at our typewriters wrapped in blankets; at night we took our clothes off after we were under the covers in bed. In the morning, against the advice of the authorities, we warmed the kitchen by leaving the oven door open. If I had a woodstove, I concluded, Rita might be with me now.

  Maybe that was it. Maybe Rita had just gone to the little house to warm up. I finished my beer. Energized by this crackbrained theory, I bid farewell to my friends and stumbled out into the snow, around the corner to the smoking cottage. I wanted to tell Rita that we would move right away, as soon as I could find a place with a woodstove.