Sea Lovers

by Valerie Martin

  And then she fell in love with Madeleine, the brainy editor of the student literary magazine, and then it became possible to be a feminist, to stand with other women against the oppressive maleness that made history one long description of the battle for territory, and then she began to write poems of her own, and the black ink flowed like the black nights of her childhood, replete with nightmares, terror, and blinding flashes of light. The poems were edgy, shocking; they took on the world she hated and reduced it to rubble. The first professor she showed them to called her into his office and sat looking at her incredulously for a moment before he said, “I can’t believe you wrote these, Edith. You seem so mild-mannered.”

  Edith smiled at this recollection as she stood at the mirror combing her hair back and gathering it into the twist she had taken to wearing because Isabel said it made her look like a French aristocrat. Poetry made manners possible. It was her vengeance; she needed no other. She applied a gloss to her lips and darkened her eyebrows, which had gone nearly white in the last year. She felt a quiver of anxiety about the evening ahead. She had skipped a talk at the conference so that she and Isabel could have dinner alone together in a place where no one knew a thing about them.

  At the restaurant Isabel enthused about the pleasures of Rome, how beautiful, exciting, and charming it was, how lively the populace, how stunning the women and fashionable the men, how she felt she had come home at last, and Connecticut was some other planet where she had been taken hostage and forced to pursue her art among aliens.

  “Is there much of a dance scene here?” Edith asked, pouring out another glass of the excellent wine the waiter had recommended.

  Isabel pursed her lips. Of course it wasn’t New York, but yes, there was. She had spent the afternoon at a studio run by an old school friend, and she could report that everything was highly professional. The company had just come back from a successful tour of Japan.

  Italian dancers in Japan, Edith thought. That would be worth seeing.

  “The Romans know how to live,” Isabel continued, “sensibly and well. Yet it’s remarkably inexpensive. Our apartment, for example; nothing remotely comparable could be found in New York, Paris, or London for the price.”

  This was true, Edith admitted. All the Americans who had accepted the lodgings arranged by the conference were jealous. They were stuck in an ugly modern building in an uglier suburb, an hour from the university by a crowded and unreliable bus. Isabel had taken one look at the address on the conference brochure, pronounced it impossible, and gotten on the phone to her various Italian connections, some of whom, Edith knew, were former lovers. The apartment belonged to the sister of a man Isabel had seduced when she was in school, many years ago, as she pointed out, and now safely married to a Milanese. He visited Rome only a few weeks a year; there was no possibility that she would even see him. They had the place for a month, staying on two weeks after the conference ended. It was in a six-story art deco building near the Vatican, complete with marble floors, tall windows, and surprisingly modern plumbing. It even had a sunny study, which opened onto the courtyard, where Edith sat with her espresso each morning drawing pictures of flowers in the margin of her blank page.

  “The apartment is great,” Edith agreed. “Though I couldn’t live with the street racket for much more than a month.”

  Isabel rolled her eyes up to show her impatience, then spoke to the waiter who had arrived with a platter of fried vegetables. He was a cherubic young man, all curls and chubbiness, with an expression of solicitous serenity that Edith envied. He listened to Isabel’s chatter, nodding agreement while his eyes wandered over the table, checking the levels of the wine and water bottles, then settling on Edith’s face. He knew that she was an American, that she didn’t speak Italian. At the start of the meal, he had enjoyed a brief exchange with Isabel in which she had told him they were from New York. It was easier, Isabel explained when he had gone; no Roman had heard of Connecticut. Now, as Edith allowed herself to be examined by the mild-eyed young man, Isabel asked, “Do you want grilled fish?”

  “No,” she said. “I want pasta.”

  “La pasta,” the waiter exclaimed, evidently pleased. He ran down the list of offerings, most of which Edith understood: with peas, with shrimp, with salmon, with tomatoes and garlic, with porcini mushrooms.

  “Funghi porcini,” Edith said, and Isabel too looked gratified.

  When the waiter left them, Isabel reached out and patted her hand. “Isn’t this a great restaurant? I haven’t been here in twelve years, but nothing has changed.”

  “It’s very nice,” Edith agreed. She knew this was an inadequate response, but she felt oppressed by Isabel’s hard-sell campaign to make her agree that everything in Rome was superior to everything in America. It was an interesting place to visit, certainly, but there was much that Edith found horrific: the packs of thieving children who would take the shirt off one’s back if they could get it; the kiosks displaying walls of the vilest pornography; the embarrassing television shows where even the news announcers wore low-cut tops with push-up bras and seemed intent on seducing their audience; the ceaseless roar of the traffic; the young men on motor scooters cruising through even the narrowest streets, so that one had to be prepared to press against the wall at every moment; the ubiquitous cell phones, often two or three at a restaurant table, with the diners all shouting into them; the monuments to tyranny and superstition every twenty feet or so.

  And then there was the strain of watching Isabel, who was practicing denial with the terrified concentration of a fiddler in a burning building. She was glancing appreciatively around the room; it was cavelike but bright, because the walls were white. There were racks of wine bottles cleverly stored in various alcoves. “It’s lovely,” Isabel said, soaking in the agreeable atmosphere. “And the food is excellent. I could eat here every night.”

  But you can’t, Edith thought. And when you can’t, what happens then?

  Isabel and Edith had lived together for ten years, sometimes harmoniously, but sometimes not. They met at a party given by one of Edith’s colleagues at the college where they were employed, a painter who flattered herself that her wide range of acquaintance made her parties newsworthy events, though in fact she invited only people from the college who were connected to the arts and had some small professional standing as well as endless opinions with which they had long ago succeeded in boring one another past rage. Edith had just won a prize for her second collection of poems, Sullen Vixens, and she was being congratulated by a Victorian scholar whose insincerity was a marvel to see, as Edith knew he had tried mightily to block her tenure. As she accepted his fake enthusiasm, she saw Isabel smiling up at her from a wicker couch in the sunroom. Isabel in the sunroom! She was wearing something diaphanous, a dark blood-red, billowy in the skirt but fitted in tight folds across the bodice, leaving her shoulders and neck exposed. She had one arm stretched across the back of the couch, and she was leaning forward to fish a few nuts from the bowl on the coffee table. There were a lot of big plants ranged around the room and several of the painter’s brightly colored canvases on the walls, so Isabel appeared to be sitting in a tropical jungle. She had her dark hair pulled back tightly; her lipstick was blood-red, like her dress. Edith thought of a Frida Kahlo self-portrait she had seen once, but this picture of a woman she did not yet know was free of the heavy neurosis of that portrait: It was as if Frida had taken a look at herself and been actually delighted by what she saw.

  Later Edith asked her hostess who the woman in red was. The painter raised her eyebrows as high as she could get them and pressed her lips together in a bizarre grimace, which she evidently thought proved she knew Edith well and understood the erotic significance of her question. “Wouldn’t you like to know,” she announced joyfully. “Well, I will tell you. She is the new instructor in the Dance Department, Isabel Perez. She’s from Costa Rica originally, I think, or maybe Paraguay. I can’t remember. Come along and I’ll introduce you.”

>   And so they met. The painter introduced Edith as “our wonderful poet who has just won a very important prize. We are so proud of her.” Edith, made miserable by the idiotic falsity of this introduction, could only nod and stretch out her hand, which Isabel took gingerly, saying that unfortunately, she knew nothing about poetry. There was just a trace of an accent, not much more than the odd incorrect stress. Edith could think of no response to this observation, so she smiled and nodded her head, hating the painter from the bottom of her heart. As soon as she could, she slipped away to the drinks table and poured out a full glass of bourbon.

  When she looked back into the other room, she saw that Isabel had gotten up from the couch and was talking animatedly to a tall black man in a white suit, Mabu Adu of the French Department. She could tell by the way Isabel was working her mouth that they were speaking in French.

  Edith shivered. She had not hoped to meet anyone even mildly interesting at this party; she had certainly not expected to fall in love. She found it difficult to stop looking at Isabel. Michael Mellon, her fellow poet, a nonentity from nowhere, rushed up to her and confessed that he had been thrilled by the news of her prize because it was so rare these days for work one actually admired to receive any recognition at all. He felt positively vindicated. “In fact,” he said, “Ellen told me to calm down. She said I was acting as if I’d won the prize myself!”

  Edith accepted her colleague’s praise at face value. The poor man had been instrumental in bringing her to the college, taught her book in his classes, and, as she knew from various sources, had made an impassioned speech at her tenure review meeting, calling her one of the best poets of her generation. She did not doubt that he was the only person in the department who had not actually writhed in pain at the news of her selection. “What a generous man you are, Michael,” she said. “Your friendship is as good as a prize to me.” He blushed, and glanced about to see who was witnessing this acknowledgment of his worth. Edith followed his look and saw Isabel very near, her head tilted to listen to some pleasantry from Mabu, her eyes resting on Edith, the slyest of smiles lifting the corners of her mouth. I wonder what she looks like having an orgasm, Edith shocked herself by thinking. She returned her attention sharply to her well-wisher, who was asking her a question about a promising student whose honors thesis he was directing.

  They talked a few minutes more; then, when Michael spotted his wife arriving—she had dropped the children off at the soccer clinic—he excused himself and hurried away. Edith took a swallow of her bourbon and watched in amazement as Isabel disengaged herself from Mabu and made straight for her side. When she got there, she said in a silky voice just above a whisper, “What thought were you having about me just now?”

  Had Edith heard correctly? Isabel’s perfume, spicy and warm, wrapped around her like a sensual embrace, and Edith held her glass still only with an effort. “I was thinking,” she said, “that I would like to take you to lunch.”

  Isabel frowned. “But where? Everything in this town is so dull.”

  “We could drive to the city.”

  “Yes,” Isabel agreed. “I know some wonderful places there.”

  Much later, in very different circumstances, it occurred to Edith that this brief and magical exchange only proved how absurdly easy Isabel was.

  Edith stood glowering at the books on the English bookshop table. How was it possible? Two collections by her archenemies, Lulu and Mark Zinnia; one by her former girlfriend Lydia, whose poetry was always described as lyrical, though Lydia actually had the sensitivity to language of a baseball bat; and one by Malva Plume, a mawkish sentimentalist who “celebrated the body.” There was also a small stack of The Monk’s Alarm Clock, the surrealist J. P. Green’s newest, which Edith had read and liked. That was it for contemporary American poetry. On the fiction table nearby, Edith spotted the Marilyn Monroe book and the new one in which Mussolini visits New York. She picked up Lulu’s book and opened it to the picture on the back flap, taken, of course, by Mark. Lulu was sitting on what looked like a swing; there was a heavy chain next to her face. Her slightly protruding eyes were focused entirely on the camera. Beneath it was a list of the prizes she had won. Edith opened to a poem at random and scanned a few lines. Lulu was anxious about Mark’s bad cold. Edith laughed and snapped the book closed.

  The Zinnias were a golden couple, astonishingly successful given the meagerness of their talents and the tedium of their lives. They never stopped congratulating themselves. Whenever they took a little trip, like this one, there was a whole spate of poems about the trip. They wrote poems about their spoiled, mean children as if they were visiting deities. Edith recalled the last time she’d seen the vicious daughter, a dumpy, overweight child who sat down on the ottoman next to Edith, balancing a plate of brownies and a plastic glass of punch, and asked with an insinuating smirk, “Are you and Isabel going to get married?”

  Before the rift the Zinnias had been friendly to Edith, inviting her to their crowded parties, where the wine was cheap and the flower arrangements were large and composed of weeds. Edith politely attended their readings, keeping her mind firmly on something else—a novel she had read or a mental image of Isabel’s naked back. What she knew about their personal lives she learned from their poems.

  Edith placed Lulu’s book back on the stack next to her husband’s. She really had not thought when she wrote “Tame Poems” that Lulu would recognize herself as the subject. “Tame poems, docile, bleating lambs, / no threats, no surprises.” Edith thought it harmless enough, and general as well, though there was one line near the end that clearly referred to Lulu’s poem “You Protect Me.”

  But as soon as the poem was published in an obscure journal, everyone at the college seemed to know about it. Michael Mellon took her aside after a department meeting and told her that Lulu was devastated. There were no more party invitations. Mark cut her at the graduation; Lulu was too sick to attend.

  Publishing “Tame Poems” proved that Edith was angry and rash. Michael told her that Mark announced at a dinner party that Edith was eaten up with jealousy, because he and Lulu were devoted to each other, whereas Isabel was flagrantly unfaithful to her. The Zinnias were powerful in poetry circles; they edited anthologies and sat on prize committees. That year Mark edited a big anthology. Edith was conspicuously absent from this collection.

  Isabel laughed at the whole business. “Wonderful,” she said. “There are never any chairs at those awful parties, and the food is always fish paste on white bread.”

  One summer night shortly after the anthology snub, Isabel and Edith sat on their front porch splitting a bottle of champagne to celebrate Isabel’s return from a course of master classes in the city. Isabel was in high spirits. “Let’s walk,” she said, pulling Edith up by both arms. “Let’s stroll past the Zinnias’ and see if they’re having a party.” It seemed an amusing idea, and Edith slipped her arm through Isabel’s thinking that Mark and Lulu had never known a single moment as joyful as this one, strolling out into the quiet, tree-lined street, giddy from champagne, the warm night air, and each other’s company. What if there was a party and the guests standing on the porch looked out to see Edith and Isabel, indifferent to their feast, nocturnal and svelte, like panthers slinking past a gathering of stupid, yelping hyenas? Who would envy whom?

  But when they got to the house, there was only one dim light on near the back. “What is it, ten o’clock?” Isabel said. “And the Zinnias are snug in their beds.” This was funny too. Edith pictured Lulu and Mark in matching flannel pajamas, plaid, or with pictures of teddy bears on them, curled up under the covers in their narrow four-poster. Long ago Lulu had insisted that Edith and Isabel take themselves on a tour of the house, and Isabel had snorted at their rickety antique bed with its thin pillows and grandmotherly quilt. “The scene of a grand passion,” Isabel said, even going so far as to sit on the edge, pronouncing it “rock hard, completely unforgiving.”

  “Wake up, Mark and Lulu,” Isabel san
g out as they stood looking up at the dark house. “Your house is not on fire.” Edith chuckled, then said, “Hush. They might wake up.” Isabel drew her closer to the house while she laughed and made a mock struggle. “No, no, be careful, be quiet,” she said, stumbling over a yard hose. “We don’t want to wake the great American poets.” When they were past the porch, Isabel said, “I have such a great idea,” and she pulled Edith behind a bush so that they were hidden from the street and right up against the wall of the house. “What is it?” Edith said. “What are we doing here?” Then Isabel put her arms around Edith’s waist and held her close, kissing her neck and shoulder. “My Edith,” she said. “You are so adorable when you are tipsy.”

  “Me?” Edith protested. “You drank much more than I did.”

  “But I am never drunk,” Isabel said, kissing her on the mouth. Edith closed her eyes and gave in to the embrace. It was true, she thought, Isabel was never drunk.

  Edith’s blouse was unbuttoned and Isabel’s halter top was around her waist when the light went on and Mark stepped out onto the porch. “What’s going on out here?” he said in the tough voice of the outraged homeowner protecting his domain. Did Mark have a gun? Edith thought. Isabel took her hand and whispered, “Run!” They burst past the bushes, clutching their clothes to their breasts and running hard until they got to their own porch. Then they staggered inside and fell on the couch, laughing like bad children.