Sea Lovers Read online

  “What a swine you are,” I said.

  He laughed. “You hate me to ease your own conscience,” he said. “I was never fooled by you.”

  “Shut up,” I said. I started walking away as fast as I could. I looked back over my shoulder and saw him standing there, smiling at me, as if we were the best of friends. “Shut up,” I shouted, and two young women walking toward me paused in their conversation to look me over warily.

  I went straight home, but it took nearly two hours. The subway was backed up; a train had caught fire between Fourteenth Street and Astor Place. I kept thinking of what Anspach had said, and it made my blood pressure soar. What a self-serving bastard, I thought. As crude as a caveman. I particularly hated his remark about feeling Maria up on the subway. I never did. I never would have. He would have done it, certainly, if he had been with her on those long, cold trips across the river, when she rested her head innocently against his arm; he would have taken advantage of that opportunity, so he assumed I had.

  I tortured my memory for any recollection of having brushed carelessly against Maria’s breasts. It made me anxious to reach in this way, after so many years, for Maria, and to discover that she was not alive in my memory. I couldn’t see her face, remember her perfume. I kept having a vision of a skeleton, which was surely all Maria was now, of sitting on the subway next to a skeleton, and of rubbing my arm against the hard, flat blade of her breastbone.

  I spent the rest of the morning trying to paint, but I got nowhere. I could see the painting of Maria’s hands clutching the edge of a chute, and behind her, that ominous blue, Anspach’s blue period, waiting to swallow her up forever. In the afternoon I picked up my daughter, Bridget, from her school, and we spent an hour at the corner library. When we got back home, Yvonne was there, standing at the kitchen counter, chopping something. Was she still mad at me from the morning? I went up beside her on the pretense of washing my hands. “Day okay?” I said.

  “Not bad,” she said, pleasantly enough. “How about you?”

  I sat down at the table and started turning an apple from the fruit bowl round and round in my hands. “I ran into Meyer Anspach today,” I said. “He said he sold one of my paintings.”

  “That’s good,” she said. She wasn’t listening.

  “He said Maria was in love with me. He said she thought I would wait for her to leave him, but I didn’t, and that’s why she killed herself.”

  Yvonne ran some water over her hands, then turned to me, drying them off with a towel. “Maria was in love with you,” she said. “Are you saying you didn’t know that?”

  “Of course I didn’t know that,” I exclaimed. “I still don’t know that.”

  Yvonne gave me a sad smile, such as she sometimes gives Bridget when she gets frustrated by math problems. Then she turned back to the sink. “How could you not have known that?” was all she said.

  BEETHOVEN

  “There’s something Oriental about you,” Philip said as I got out of the bed. This was in the sixties, before Oriental became the wrong word for Asian. As there is nothing remotely Asian about my appearance—I’m blond, blue-eyed—I concluded that Philip was referring to some perception he had about my character.

  Philip was desperate, but I didn’t know it yet. As I passed the easel and the paint truck on my way to the bathroom, I had to step over a stack of wallpaper books. This was Phil’s latest innovation, painting on wallpaper samples. His friend Sid couldn’t stop ridiculing him about the wallpaper, but Philip said Sid was just jealous. Though they appeared to dislike each other, Phil and Sid went out drinking regularly, and these evenings inevitably degenerated into bitter arguments that left Philip muttering until dawn. “Why do you go with him?” I asked once, to which he responded, with no hint of irony, “We’re friends.”

  Phil was thirty; I was barely twenty. Everything about him interested me. He was a man, not a boy; he was my introduction to the adult world I longed to enter, the real world, apart from college, which I’d left after one year, feeling the need to throw myself, if not upon thorns, at least upon something that would leave an impression. My parents, at first furious, then disappointed, had become resigned. I was required to visit them once a week, Sunday dinner, which was fine with me as I was eating poorly on my own and I enjoyed being idolized by my two younger brothers, who thought having a job and an apartment in the French Quarter was the absolute limit of sophistication. The fact that my job was waiting tables and my apartment a dark, roach-infested hole did not dampen their enthusiasm. After dinner they walked me to the bus stop, regaling me with stories about the trials of high school, which they made me promise never to tell my parents. When the bus came, I hugged them as if I was going off into a perilous adventure instead of just across town to meet Philip at a smoke-filled bar, to watch Philip work his way down one more rung of the ladder that stretched between desperation and despair.

  I had begun to understand that my expectations of the world were unrealistic. I had imagined that, as a working single woman, I would attract the attention of a working single man, we would fall in love, and he would ask me to throw my lot in with him. Then I would leave my apartment and move into his. I wasn’t picturing anything palatial; two rooms would have been acceptable, especially if there were windows. Philip’s friend Sid lived with his girlfriend, Wendy, in two rooms. They had a tiny kitchen, a decent bath, and their bedroom opened onto a seedy patio. I assumed, for no reason, that the place had been Sid’s first; that Wendy had come to him there. Later, of course, I found out the reverse was true. Now it strikes me that the most touching thing about myself in that period was this pathetic assumption, which must have come from reading fairy tales about princesses who, like rabbits, are always taken to their husbands’ abodes for breeding purposes.

  Philip’s apartment constituted a serious obstacle to the maintenance of my supposition. We lived in the same run-down building. He was in the hot, stuffy attic at the top; I was at the bottom, near the narrow side alley where the perpetually overflowing garbage cans were lined up, lovingly attended by swarms of flies and the occasional rat. That was where I met Phil, struggling to drag his can out to the street. “I’ll help you if you’ll help me,” I said. He started; he hadn’t noticed my approach, and set his can down hard on the concrete, regarding me reproachfully. I stepped toward him into a thin slice of light that filtered through the wrought-iron gate from the street. “I don’t need help,” he said. Then, with the flicker of an apologetic smile—he’d been rude and now regretted it—he added, “But I’ll help you when I come back.”

  After we got the garbage out, we went for coffee. We talked about what a jerk our landlord was, and I told Phil about my job. When we got back to the building, he asked me if I’d like to go up and see his paintings.

  As I stepped across the threshold of Philip’s attic apartment, I was conscious of entering a world where chaos was the rule; I glanced over my shoulder with a sense of bidding sweet reason goodbye. Phil leaned toward me as he pulled in the door, his expression mildly expectant, and I understood that he found nothing appalling in the broiling havoc of his domestic arrangements. The heat, freighted with turpentine fumes, assaulted me, as fierce as a roomful of tigers, but Philip brushed past me easily on his way to the air conditioner, an ancient, rusty metal box perched on a rotted sill, the wall beneath it permanently stained by a bloom of mildew. It came on with a gasp, a metallic groan, and settled down to a roar. Philip turned to me, gesturing to the machine. “It doesn’t work too good,” he said. “And it leaks on the guy’s balcony downstairs, so he gets pissed off when I run it.”

  “Tell him to put a plant under it,” I suggested.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” he said. “That’s actually a good idea.”

  I had taken one, then another step into the room and could now be said to be inside it. Because the windows were all dormers, the light lay in thick swaths, leaving the rest in deep shadow. It was twice as big as my apartment, but there was half as muc
h space. As my eyes adjusted to the combination of brightness and gloom, I saw that there was a pattern to the disorder. Everything having to do with painting was in the light, with living in the shadow. There was also a difference in the quality of unidentifiable stuff lining the walls; some was in piles, some in neat stacks.

  Philip disappeared behind a wooden screen draped with clothing. “Would you like something to drink?”

  “Just water,” I said, advancing another step. Near the screen was a card table with two metal folding chairs, which looked like a safe destination. The table was littered with newspapers, a plate of cigarette butts, a mug with coffee dregs in the bottom, and, incongruously, a bright orange satsuma. I took a seat facing the imposing easel in the brightest spot near the windows. There were canvases stacked about, only a few facing out. Their subjects were street scenes, buildings; there was a watercolor sketch of a stand of crape myrtles that looked highly competent to me. The unfinished canvas on the easel was a moody study of rooftops.

  Philip appeared with two glasses of tap water. “No ice,” he said. “The freezer doesn’t work.”

  I took the glass, nodding toward the window. “Those are good,” I said. To my relief, Philip showed no artistic prickliness or vanity, no skepticism about my critical expertise. “That’s the view from the roof,” he said of the work in progress. “When it gets too hot at night I go out there.”

  We sat and talked. After a while Philip put a record on the phonograph—it was the popular After Bathing at Baxter’s—and I ate the satsuma. When the time came for me to leave for my shift, he escorted me downstairs to my apartment. On the staircase he rested a hand on my shoulder, in the shady patio he brushed my hair back with his fingertips, at the door he passed his arm around my waist and kissed me. It was a slow kiss, unlike any I had previously experienced, more tentative than exploratory, serious and courteous. “What time do you get off?” he said.

  The venues for professional artists in our city were limited, and though I was not a student of the subject, I knew Philip didn’t fit into any of them. He was not sufficiently avant-garde to show in the uptown galleries, where there were openings with wine and cheese and where the buyers were called “clients” and the paintings “investments.” He wasn’t bad enough to please the tourists who fluttered along with the pigeons on Jackson Square, having their portraits done in chalk or dickering over the prices of ghastly renditions of patios and bizarre bayou scenes in which the sky was an unnatural shade of green. He might have done commercial art; he had the technical skill, but he disdained such employment. He had learned his craft at the Neil McMurtry School of Art, a private academy run by the eponymous painter, who was occasionally commissioned to do large public works. I had whiled away many a Sunday morning in my childhood gazing up at four enormous toes which protruded from beneath the tablecloth at the Last Supper, part of an altar fresco executed by the esteemed McMurtry. The provenance of those toes was the subject of my earliest attempts at art appreciation. Were they attached to the Savior or the fellow next to him? My parents seemed to think McMurtry was the Louisiana equivalent of Caravaggio, but Philip said his work was overrated. Still, he recalled his time at the school with a romantic nostalgia. The sentence that began “When we were at McMurtry’s…” generally ended with a sigh. He had met Sid at McMurtry’s; the standoff that was their friendship had begun there, when they were both promising.

  I knew, everyone knew at a glance, that Philip was very poor, but I believed, as I assumed he did, that this was a temporary condition. What money he had came from a small gallery on Decatur Street where the paintings were not so much displayed as crammed, often without frames, on every available inch of wall space. We were standing in this air-conditioned refuge one steaming afternoon in July when I first heard about Ingrid.

  Philip was looking at a mawkish rendition of a sad clown, a woman wearing a white costume with puffy black pom-poms for buttons, white face, red down-turned mouth, pointy white hat. The background was solid red, the same shade as the mouth. I’ve never liked anything about clowns, and this painting seemed designed to confirm my distaste. “This is Ingrid’s,” Phil said to the owner, Walter Stack, who looked up from a bin of canvases he was arranging according to size and said, “Sure.”

  “She still with Hazel?”

  “Sure,” Walter said. He returned his attention to the pictures.

  Philip frowned at the frowning clown. “Hazel is all wrong for her,” he said.

  Walter abandoned the canvases and gave Philip a look I took to be sympathetic, though there was an edge of pity in it that made me anxious. He leaned a painting of a flowerpot—the paint was laid on like butter—against the counter and, nodding at the heavy cardboard portfolio Philip had pressed against his side, said, “What have you got for me? More wallpaper?”

  Philip lifted the portfolio to the counter and opened it diffidently; his shoulders slumped forward in a way I had not seen before. He lacks confidence, I thought. “I have a few on the wallpaper,” he said. “I’m finding that an interesting medium.”

  Walter began pulling out the various sheets, laying them side by side. “I sold the Beethoven,” he said. “Do you have any more Beethovens?”

  “Not this time,” Philip said. “I could do another one.”

  “Do a few,” Walter said. “I could sell maybe three or four.”

  “I can do that,” Philip said. He turned to me, taking the small canvas he had wrapped in a pillowcase, which I held against my chest. He placed it carefully on the counter and pulled away the cloth. It was a painting of the rooftops outside his studio window. I thought it the best thing he had. Walter leaned over it skeptically, working his lips as if he were chewing something sour. “You see, I can’t sell this,” he said. “It could be anywhere. If you put the church in it, maybe. Tourists want stuff that says, ‘This is New Orleans. I was there.’ And they don’t want anything dark. This is too dark.”

  Philip nodded, folding the pillowcase back over the canvas. I had the sense that this scene of crude rejection had taken place many times before, that he had, in fact, expected it, but it was new to me and it sickened me. “What about Beethoven?” I piped up, to my own surprise. “Beethoven doesn’t say, ‘This is New Orleans,’ but you sold that.”

  Both men shifted their attention to me with the combination of interest and incredulity a cat might expect should it suddenly express an opinion. It pleased me to see that the balance in Philip’s expression was weighted toward interest, whereas incredulity tipped the scales in Walter’s alarmed and thorough regard. “Beethoven,” he sputtered. “Beethoven says Beethoven. Everyone knows him, everyone loves him. He’s like Einstein, or Marilyn Monroe.” He dismissed me with a wave of his fleshy hand, adding to Philip, “Bring me Einstein or Marilyn and I’ll sell the pants off of ’em.”

  As we staggered out into the blinding light on the street, Philip mumbled, “I can do a few more Beethovens.”

  “Who is Ingrid?” I asked.

  Ingrid was Philip’s former girlfriend, who had shared an apartment with him—not the current attic but a larger space in a building close to Jackson Square. This was convenient, as they were both doing portraits for tourists, pushing out their paint carts early in the morning, sharing the street with the horse carriages rather than risking the flood of refuse swirling across the sidewalks and the water curtains pouring off the balconies as the hose-bearing residents washed down their terrain in preparation for another sun-scorched day. It surprised me to learn that Philip had plied his art on the square, and he admitted that he had done it in desperation, and not for long, because he had no knack for pleasing tourists; they did not like his portraits or his person and haggled over the agreed-upon price or even refused to pay. “Ingrid is good at it,” he said. “She has a real professional patter down. They eat it up.”

  “So she’s still out there?”

  “Sure,” Philip says. “She has a license—the space right across from the Cabildo.”

&n
bsp; It didn’t take much probing to learn that Ingrid, after two years of cohabitation, during which, Philip confessed, they had “fought all the time,” had left Philip for a woman, a bartender at the Anchor, a sleazy establishment frequented by divers. This was Hazel, who was, in Philip’s view, “all wrong” for Ingrid. He was perfectly candid in his assessment of this failed relationship and seemed relieved to talk about it. I felt hardly a twinge of jealousy, but I was curious to see this woman who had rejected Phil, and as it was easily done—I had only to alter my usual walk to the restaurant by a few blocks—the next morning I slipped from the alley into the cool shade of the Cabildo portico and, half hidden by a column, observed my predecessor in Phil’s affections.

  Or rather I observed her back, for she was facing the square, seated on a fold-up stool before her easel, her tray of pastels on a plastic cart next to her, one hand lazily conveying a cigarette back and forth between the tin ashtray on the shelf and her mouth. She wore a halter dress; her back, bony and tan, was bare. Her thick blond hair, poorly cut and none too clean, fell about her shoulders in clumps. On her easel, hung on the iron fence, propped against plastic cartons on the pavement near her feet, were samples of her wares, garish pastel portraits of famous personalities: Barbra Streisand, Einstein, Mick Jagger, Sophia Loren. Her specialty was a bizarre twinkling in the eye and a Mona Lisa serenity at the corners of the mouth. The backgrounds were all the same, a hasty scrawl of sky-blue chalk. As I watched, three tourists, a young man and two teenage girls, paused to examine Barbra Streisand. The artist ignored them for one last drag on the cigarette, then stubbed it out in the ashtray and addressed a remark to the group. I couldn’t hear what she said, but she had shifted on her stool, and I could see her profile, which was all planes and angles, the cheekbones jutting over deep hollows, the nose bladelike, the chin a sharp wedge of bone. Her eyes, like those of her celebrities, had a chilling glitter to them. The tourists were not dismayed; in fact they lingered for some moments talking to her. The taller of the girls laughed twice; the young man appeared fascinated and ill at ease. Were they considering a portrait?