Sea Lovers (13 page)

That night we brought my fan up to Phil's apartment, but it was still too hot to sleep. I tossed and turned. Phil left my side without speaking and climbed out the window to smoke a cigarette on the roof. Anxiety was my bedfellow, a many-headed hydra snapping at me with undisguised fury. My future unfolded before me, a black hole of thankless, boring work. What are you going to do? I asked myself repeatedly, urgently. At length I got up and went to the kitchen. The moon was full; there was a shaft of creamy white across the ugly floor, lighting my way to the refrigerator. I poured a glass of water and sat naked at the kitchen table, looking about in a panic. There was more room without the wallpaper books, and Phil had cleared off his easel, which struck me as suspicious and portentous. What would happen next? What was Phil going to paint on now? Doubtless Sid was right and Phil had been using the wallpaper not for the interesting creative possibilities it afforded but because the books were free and he was too poor to buy canvas, or even cheap board. My eyes rested on the mottled linoleum at my feet. Would Phil take Sid's suggestion and start prying the tiles up off the floor?

This thought cast me down very low. I had left school because I wanted to live in the real world, and now I was doing just that and I didn't like it at all. My childish fantasy of an untroubled and companionable relationship with a man who valued me was clearly the worst sort of naïveté, though oddly enough I'd gotten what I wanted. Phil was easy, kind, and I did not doubt that he cared for me. But in the gallery that day I had seen him unmanned by an unrequited and impossible passion for a woman who cared nothing for him. It wasn't his weakness that had shocked me; it was the invincibility of his ardor, which clearly could brook no dissembling, even in public, even in front of me. To be either the subject or the object of such a humiliating, destructive force was not a condition I could ever tolerate. “There's just no future in it,” I said to myself, purposefully vague about the pronoun reference. Was “it” my life with Phil? Or was “it” the whole catastrophic enterprise of romantic love?

Eventually Phil climbed back in the window and found me there, naked, clutching my water glass and staring into the blackness between us. He went to the refrigerator and looked inside. “I've got a cold beer we could split,” he said.

“That sounds good,” I said.

He brought the beer to the table and sat down across from me, opening the can with a can opener. I finished my water and held out the glass for my share.

“You can't sleep,” Phil observed.

“It's too hot,” I said.

“Do you want to go out?”

“No.”

“Okay,” Phil said. We sipped our beer.

“I just don't see what you're going to do now,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, with the self-portraits, and no more wallpaper and no more Beethoven. I don't see how you'll make a living.”

“I'll think of something,” he said.

“Maybe Sid has the right idea. You could get some part-time work. That might take the pressure off.”

He smiled. “I don't want to take the pressure off,” he said. “The pressure is part of it.”

“Part of what?” I said. “Being miserable?”

“I'm not miserable.”

I considered this.

“But you are,” he said.

“I hate my job,” I said.

“Then you should quit.”

“And do what?”

For answer, Phil finished his beer, got up, and took the empty can to the sink. He came behind me and began rubbing my shoulders. “You're very tense,” he said.

I let myself go limp beneath his hands. “I know,” I said. He worked my neck between his fingers and his palm, up and down until I let my head fall back against his chest. He leaned down to kiss me languidly. “Is it too hot to do this?” he asked, sliding his hand around my back and over my breast.

“No,” I said. “I want to.” Then, as I followed him to the rumpled mattress, I felt, in spite of everything, of the heat, of my disillusionment and frustration, of my fear of the future, in which, we both knew, Phil would no longer figure, a perverse but unmistakable throb of dark desire.

“Rita's back,” Malcolm said. We were drinking iced coffee at a café on Esplanade, watching the traffic ooze through the heat haze. “She's living near here.”

Rita. My God, Rita. She came at me from the past, from that first winter in Vermont, her thin woolen coat blowing open over a short cotton skirt, bare legs, picking her way across a snowbank in her high-heeled, open-toed shoes. She won't last a year here, I thought then, and I was right.

“Is she alone?” I asked.

“Oh, I think so. She's changed a lot. I didn't recognize her.”

“In what way?”

“She's gained a lot of weight. She looks pasty, not healthy.”

This surprised me. Rita had been thin, willowy, long limbs, big hands, boyish hips.

“What's she doing?”

“It's hard to tell. She was pretty vague. She wanted me to believe she was involved in some top-secret mission for the Pueblo Indians.”

“Wow,” I said. The waiter appeared with our check, which I snatched away from Malcolm.

“Thanks,” he said.

“My pleasure.”

“You haven't changed,” he observed.

I come back to New Orleans every few years and stay only long enough to convince myself it's time to leave, which takes between two weeks and three months. Whenever I return, my friends are always quick to observe that I haven't changed, which I take to mean I still have most of my hair. Malcolm, who once sported a full crop of coarse black thatch, has lost most of his, save a monkish tonsure he has the good sense to trim close. He has a well-kept beard, compensation for what's gone on top, and he's developed the beard-stroking habit, which annoys me. As a young man he was dissolute, a womanizer, heavy drinker, chain smoker, not promising, but to everyone's surprise, including his own, he prospered. He has a successful furniture business, a devoted wife, several children, an expensive car, and a large, tastefully appointed house near City Park. Having never read a novel, he has no opinion about the ones I've written, and since he has no curiosity about my private life, his success has allowed us to remain friends. He neither resents nor envies me.

I paid the bill while Malcolm swatted at a fly grazing on the remains of his brioche. “She asked about you,” he said.

“What did she want to know?”

“If I was in touch with you. If I knew where you were.”

“I hope you didn't tell her.”

“Well, I did. But you're bound to run into her sooner or later, so it doesn't matter. If women want to find you, they always know how to go about it.”

“How much weight would you say she's gained?” I asked.

“A lot.” Malcolm laughed. “But she still has beautiful hair.”

Not a week passed before I walked into the post office and got in line behind Rita Richard. I didn't recognize her. What I saw was the wide back of an overweight woman, not a sight to provoke my interest, but there was something about this one that seemed familiar. Her curling, golden hair resisted the confines of an oversized clip. A cheap flowered blouse, stretched tight across her shoulders, was tucked haphazardly into the straining waistband of a differently flowered, voluminous skirt. Her ankles bulged around the thin straps of cruel, high-heeled sandals. Perhaps it was the shoes. Did some molecule floating around in my brain remember caressing those ankles, long ago, when there was a tantalizing space between the strap and the smooth bone of the instep? Whatever it was, I knew it was Rita, and my first instinct—if only I had succeeded in following it—was flight.

I took a few cautious steps backward; at the same moment the line moved forward and a teenager who had just come in, his view obscured by the large package he intended to entrust to the U.S. mail, collided with me. The ensuing apologies, excuses, and reassurances naturally engaged the attention of everyone in the place. As I helped the boy regain control of his package, I was aware that Rita had turned to see what the fuss was about, that she had recognized me, and that she was waiting for the matter to be settled, which, no matter how I tried to extend it, was quickly accomplished. The boy went ahead; Rita stepped behind, smiling at me confidently. I was at pains to disguise a complex of emotions: consternation, shock, anxiety, and through it all the pang of recognition—this unappealing creature was certainly Rita, but how altered!

“Hello, Maxwell,” Rita said. “I heard you were in town.”

“Rita?” I said. “Is it really you? I thought you'd gone out West and become a stranger.”

She laughed at this weak joke, and it was Rita's laugh, knowing, intimate, flirtatious. “I did,” she said. “But now I'm back.”

“How amazing to run into you,” I faltered.

“Not really,” she said. “It's a small town. Sooner or later we all come back.”

“But to stay? Are you here to stay?”

“Oh, yes. I won't be leaving again. What about you?”

“It's just a visit for me.”

“Of course. You're too famous to live here.”

This was the kind of dismissive remark I get a lot in my hometown. I'm not famous by any means, but I have a small reputation, or so I flatter myself, and I am able to live in modest comfort on the proceeds of my books. “Oh, I'm not famous,” I said, but Rita wasn't interested in my answer. From somewhere within her skirt she had produced a purse, much too small for a woman her size, and she proceeded to dig in it, talking all the while, until she pulled out a battered checkbook from which she tore off a page. “I live a few blocks from here, on St. Ann,” she said. “Here's the address. I'd like to talk to you about something—it's a sort of proposition.” Here she gave me her raised-eyebrows, compressed-lips expression, suggesting the stifling of a naughty thought. “A business proposition. Will you come see me? Here's the address.”

She held out the paper, which I eyed warily. “It's a deposit slip,” she said. “It has my address on it. If you don't want to come see me, you can just make a deposit.”

And be done with it, I thought. If only it were that simple. I took the flimsy paper; I couldn't see any way not to.

“It's not far from here,” she said again.

“I suppose I could come by,” I said.

She brought her hand up to her neck, pulling her fingers through the curls that were loose there, her light eyes fixed on me. It was a gesture so familiar and, in the new context, so perverse, it unsettled my reason. I had the sense that this woman was an impostor, that she had studied Rita, the real Rita, who was at that moment perfectly alive in my memory, as palpable as my own tongue in my mouth.

“How about tomorrow?” she said.

“No, I've got appointments all day.” This was in fact true.

“Thursday?” Now she was amused, watching me squirm. I decided to limit her pleasure and my own suffering. “Thursday would be fine,” I said. “In the afternoon, around three.”

“I'll be there,” she said.

Yes, I thought. I don't doubt you are there most of the time. “I'll see you then,” I said, consulting my watch.

She looked concerned. “Don't you want to mail your letter, Maxwell?”

I gestured at the line, which was now down to one. Rita stepped aside, suggesting that she would generously yield her place to my urgent necessity, but I had only one thought and that was to terminate this interview. “I'll do it later,” I said, and I fled like one pursued. Indeed, Rita did pursue me. As I was pulling out of the parking lot, I saw her standing at the plate-glass window, watching me stolidly as I drove away.

Among the dark strands of my dismay at having been so smoothly apprehended by Rita was a glittering thread of vindicated spite, for she had once made me very unhappy. I gloated over the details of her appearance, her run-down shoes, the missing top button of her blouse, her general air of shabbiness, failure. I had done well, and Rita decidedly had not. Who would have predicted such an outcome twenty years ago, on a certain freezing night in Vermont, when I shadowed Rita along a windswept alley, desperate to stop her from going in at a certain door?

I'd first met Rita in college. She was a year behind me; perhaps we had a class together, but she was not part of my group. She passed as an exotic when she got to Vermont, but in our sultry, provincial hometown she was just another tall, pretty waitress who slept around, drank too much, and never stopped smoking. She was rumored to write poetry, and once, at an open reading, I'd seen her read half a dozen perfectly forgettable lines, pausing to take a drag on a cigarette midway through. I had a girlfriend, the winsome Rachel Paige, who was entirely devoted to me and to my burning ambition to leave New Orleans and become a writer. It wasn't until I got my acceptance to the graduate writing program in Vermont that Rachel realized she had courteously helped me right out of her life, but to her credit, she was not resentful. Perhaps by then she was sick of me.

I spent the summer before I left working as a bartender and pointing out to anyone in earshot that I couldn't wait to leave town. My conversation was tiresome. I hated the whole gestalt of the southern storyteller, the homespun crank who populated his stories with characters named Joleen, Angina, and Bubba-Joe-Henry, all of whom drove pickup trucks, drank Dixie beer, and knew everything there was to know about pigs. I was eager to shrug off my southernness like a reptile's skin and ascend to the realms of Transcendental bliss. I intoxicated myself reading Emerson and Thoreau; I wanted what they had, all of it, the self-reliance, the days as gods, the different drummer, the excitement about ideas, the passionate love of nature, of writing, and of books. I wanted to write with the force Thoreau, reading Aeschylus, called “naked speech, the standing aside of words to make room for thoughts.” I affirmed with Emerson the maxim that “to think is to act.” Southerners, in my view, substituted stories for ideas, and it was to me like offering marshmallow to a starving tiger. I was sick of it.

Of course, when I got to Vermont, I settled down and wrote stories like everyone else. Even if “naked speech” had been within my capabilities, it wasn't likely to sell, and I was, above all, a realist about the requirements of the market. But my characters had names like Winston and Edna, they worked at bookstores, they concerned themselves with ethical questions. By my second year their inquiries were impeded by blizzards or locals who spoke in monosyllables. I let my beard grow out, discovered the virtues of flannel shirts, wool socks, lined rubber boots. My accent, never strong, faded; my hands were chapped. I enjoyed the not inconsequential pleasures of chopping wood. I had left the South behind, purposefully and finally, and I rejoiced in my new identity.

This was why I experienced a shudder down to my duck boots when, on the first day of the spring semester—which was a long, long way from spring—I walked into my workshop classroom to find Rita Richard bent over in her chair, trying to dry her feet with a handkerchief. She looked up at me through a flutter of thickly painted eyelashes and said, “Are you surprised to see me, Maxwell?”

I was so thoroughly taken aback that my response was an unchivalrous “What are you doing here?”

Rita finished her foot care and pulled her shoes back on with a grimace. Brendan Graves, with whom I drank beer most weekends, shot me a look of exaggerated inquiry. Did I know this singular creature? “I'm in the program,” Rita said. “I applied too late for fall, so they let me come in now.”

“I didn't know you wrote,” I said.

“Well, I don't talk about it. But I do.”

Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of our professor, a writer of small reputation who is probably still laboring in the merciless groves of academe. I excused myself and took my seat across the table from Rita, next to Brendan, who quickly wrote,
Who is she??
on his notebook and pushed it toward me.

From New Orleans,
I wrote back.
An acquaintance, no more.

Before the professor had finished the roll call, everyone in the class had this information. Rita's southern shtick was on full display. When he called her name, she lifted her palm and pulled her head back as if he'd offered her something distasteful. “It's Ree-shard,” she said. He nodded, tried it, came out with “Ray-chard,” and she corrected him, sweetly, patiently, until he got it right. “I'm from New Orleans,” she said. “That's how we say it there, but only if it's your family name.”

He paused, giving her a long look over the top of his reading glasses. He was a handsome man, weathered, lots of curly gray hair, tweedy jacket over a sweater embroidered with cat fur. “New Orleans,” he said. “You're a long way from home.”

“I am just a little anxious about the snow,” she said with a chirpy insouciance that sent a chuckle rippling around the table. “I wish I could just grow a beard, like Maxwell has.” All eyes turned briefly upon me. In that moment, I hated Rita.

“That's right,” the professor said. “You're from New Orleans too, aren't you, Max? I'd forgotten. And you two know each other?”

“Yes,” Rita said. “Maxwell and I go way back.”

“It's Max, Rita,” I said. “Not Maxwell. Just Max.”

Rita laughed. “Will I have to change my name too?”

“Well,” the professor said, “you'll have to work that out with Max.” He cast me the nervous smile of a man who avoids even the outskirts of a quarrel and continued the roll call.

That spring, every Tuesday from four until six-thirty, I sat across the table from Rita in a steadily intensifying state of mystification. After the first day my expectations were naturally minimal. I was prepared to spend my time in class alternating between outrage and humiliation. I was determined to keep my distance from her. The first discussions in these venues are necessarily tentative and anxious, the air laden with portentous questions: Is the professor competent, hostile, does someone talk too much or not at all, is there a peer whose writing one actively despises, do we take a break, is coffee allowed, is the room over- or underheated?