Sea Lovers (15 page)

It was always games with her, I thought, and I was sick of playing already. There was a time when she could have baited me in this way for an hour or so and I would have gone along, reassuring her of my good intentions toward her, driven by lust to excessive civility, but those days were gone. What I really wanted now was to get as far away from her as I could. “What is it you want from me, Rita?” I said.

“I want to show you something.”

“The novel,” I said, keeping my voice interest-free.

She laughed. “No, Maxwell, not the novel. It's not finished yet.” She pushed her chair back noisily and stood up, leaning on the table with the care of someone who expects to suffer in the process. I noticed a hectic flush rising from the fold of her neck to her cheeks, and a rough exhalation escaped her, not a groan but harsher than a sigh. “It's in here,” she said, leading the way to the darkened, cluttered room. I followed her, consoling myself with the observation that this brought me closer to the street. Rita switched on a floor lamp, which shed a dull light over a table laden with pottery. She took up a piece and held it out to me. “It's this,” she said.

I accepted it, as I was evidently intended to, and turned it over in my hands. It was a section of a bowl, poorly made of hard, red clay, the rim imprinted with uneven scoring, such as might be made with a stick. The clay was of uneven thickness, but smooth and cool to the touch. There was something about it, a lack of artifice, a naïveté that was not without charm. “What is it?” I asked.

“It's a thousand years old,” Rita said, taking it from me. She took up another piece, a flat disk, chipped at one corner, scored at the edges like the other. “Look at this one.”

“Really?” I said. “How do you come by it?”

She smiled her it's-a-secret smile, her wouldn't-you-like-to-know smile, which had always infuriated me. “I'm the agent for it,” she said. “It's extremely valuable. This stuff here is worth a million dollars, and there's more to be had when I go back to New Mexico.”

I laid the disk on the table, careful to place it well away from the edge. So Rita, lovely Rita, hadn't just gained a lot of weight, she'd also lost her mind. Did she really think I would believe a million dollars' worth of antiquities had somehow made its way through history to a rickety table in this mildewed shack in the City That Care Forgot? Actually one could hardly find a better place to hide it—her neighbors were doubtless criminals, but they weren't likely to steal a bunch of broken crockery. I ransacked my brain for something to say, something that would release me from this suffocating room.

Rita picked up another bit, a platelike piece, and raised it toward the lamp. “This is my favorite,” she said.

I was struck by the alteration in her profile, which had once been very fine, though she'd always had a weak chin. Now she had no chin. Malcolm was right: Her skin was sallow, unhealthy; the crescents beneath her eyes looked bruised. Time had gone hard on her, worn her down,
her
, who had been so rebellious, so uncompromising. As she set the plate back among the curious rubble, my irritation turned to sadness, and I resigned myself to accepting whatever story she had to tell. It wouldn't be true, any of it, but it would be revealing. “Where did you get this stuff, Rita?”

“From the Zuni,” she said. “I was out there with them for a long time. They're a matriarchal culture, you know, they don't much trust men. I got pretty involved, trying to help them deal with the Bureau. I'm the only white woman they trust. The museums are wild to buy this stuff, but the council is afraid they'll get cheated, so I agreed to handle it for them.”

“Is that where you went when you left Vermont?”

“No,” she said. “Not right away.” She turned to me with an absurdly coquettish smile that suggested she detected the subtext of my question—when you left me in Vermont, when you ran away from me.

“Danny and I went to Alaska first. You can make a lot of money up there. We worked in a fish canning factory.”

“Good lord,” I said. “I hope you finally bought a pair of practical shoes.”

She laughed. “I did. I had to. It was very strange up there. It's light all the time. The factory runs in twelve-hour shifts, everyone drinks a lot of coffee. In an odd way I liked it, but maybe it was because Danny was happy there.” She waved her hand across the room. “It's all in there,” she said, “in the novel.”

I followed her gesture through the gloom to a table strewn with debris: piles of audiotapes, a Walkman, envelopes stuffed with paper, several bags of chips—did she live on potato chips?—crumpled tissues, a stapler, a coffee cup, and in the midst of it all, with a narrow space cleared all around like a castle brooding over a moat, a stack of four white stationery boxes with a pair of reading glasses neatly folded on top. On the floor, leaning against one of the table legs, was the battered typewriter case I recognized across the expanse of twenty years. It had spent a month of its mechanical life on the kitchen table in my cramped apartment in Vermont. I'd written a brief note on it once, which came back to me in its entirety:
Back at 10. adore you. M
. “So you're still using the Olivetti,” I observed.

“It's a real problem with the novel,” she said. “I was in Arizona for a few years, and my landlady there let me use her computer, so some of it's on a disk. But most of it is typed. Somebody told me editors don't even look at typed manuscripts anymore, they want everything in an e-mail. Is that true?”

I considered Rita's question. The old anecdote about Thomas Wolfe's manuscript arriving at Max Perkins's office in an orange crate came to mind. “They'll still look at manuscripts, but they don't like it,” I said. “And it goes against you, right at the gate—it proves you're out of touch.”

This amused Rita. “Out of touch!” she said. “That could be the title of my book. That's the point, isn't it?”

“Is the title still
Dark Witness
?” I said.

“You've got a good memory, Maxwell.”

“I know,” I said.

She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead. “It doesn't have a title right now.” A thousand pages, I thought, and no title. Her forehead and upper lip were damp. It was stifling in the room, and she was rubbing the palm of one hand with the thumb of the other, an odd habit I attributed to nervousness.

“So when you left Alaska, you went to New Mexico,” I said.

“Not directly. We went down to Spokane and stayed there for a while, downtown in this old hotel, until we ran out of money. Danny went off the deep end; she really lost it in Spokane, and she wound up in the rehab center, so I was broke and they threw me out of the hotel. I didn't like Spokane. Spokane is really America. That's where they test products to see if Americans will buy them. One day I just packed up the backpack and the Olivetti and hitchhiked to Arizona. That was tough. I almost got killed doing that. Truckers should pretty much all be rounded up and shot. Except the women.”

I imagined Rita, the real Rita, standing on a highway in the rain, somewhere out there, out West, with her backpack and her typewriter case, dropping her raised thumb to her side as the eighteen-wheeler fastens her in its blinding headlights and she hears the rapid downshift of the gears. It would come to a stop well past her; she'd have to run to meet it, clamber up through the steam rising from the tires into the dark interior of the cab. “Women truckers?” I said.

“Sure,” Rita replied. “There are women truckers, Maxwell. It's a real subculture. They're mostly farm girls who couldn't take the abuse and got out. A woman trucker saved my life. She loaned me the deposit on a little place in Tucson. She tried to talk me into being a trucker too. They make good money and you're really on your own, but that life didn't appeal to me.”

“No,” I said.

“I mean, I could have done it, but it just seemed so pointless. So I found this place in Tucson, a little house on a ranch, and the landlady, Katixa Twintree, she said I could work on the ranch for part of the rent. I got a job waitressing down the road, so I was okay there for a while. Katy is half Basque, half Indian, quite a fierce individual. She had a girlfriend, Mathilde, French, a real bitch. Katy is fantastic. I was completely in love with her, and Mathilde was completely jealous of me, so it was a mess. I couldn't sleep at all. I was writing a lot. Katy asked to read it; she was very excited by it, that's when she loaned me her computer, which made Mathilde insane. There was a huge scene. Katy just let Mathilde and me fight it out, she is so wise, and Mathilde left. So then I moved in with Katy, and I guess that's the happiest I've ever been. Katixa Twintree was it for me, the love of my life.”

As Rita told me this ridiculous story, my eyes wandered around the dim room, trying, without much success, to make out what was actually in some of the stacks of rubble on the various tables. At her concluding remark—which I took to be rather pointedly directed at me, as if she imagined she still had the power to wound me—my attention returned to her, and I saw that she was so moved by her own history there were tears standing in her eyes. This irked me. “So why aren't you still with her?” I asked coldly.

She gave me a wan smile. “I guess she was too good for me, Maxwell,” she said. “Just like you.” She brought her hand to her chest and the color drained from her face; even her lips turned greenish. She took a few steps toward the bedroom. “I have to lie down,” she said.

I followed, my irritation replaced by a flutter of panic. “Are you all right?” She gained the bed, falling across it with a groan, facedown. I stood in the doorway gazing at the unappealing bulk of her. Her sandals, slipping from her feet, made two sharp raps on the floor. Her skirt was pulled askew, revealing the network of broken veins inside her knees. Her ankles were bruised, swollen, and the soles of her feet were filthy. As I watched, she rolled heavily onto her side so that she was looking back at me. “Would you get me a glass of water?” she said.

I went to the kitchen, relieved to have a mission, poured out the remains of Rita's lemonade, rinsed the glass, and filled it with water. “I've got to get out of here,” I said softly. There was a back door; I could easily have snuck out that way, but it was a dishonorable course. As she always had, Rita was putting me through a moral exigency. I thought of my cozy house in Vermont, and of Pamela, my neighbor, my friend, and my lover, who would know exactly how to preserve her integrity and still get the hell out of Rita's kitchen. I longed for her, not to hold her close but to be in her kitchen, to sit at her polished oak table while she prepared our afternoon coffee, to hear her aimless conversation as I watched the slanting sun flicker among the bright leaves of the geraniums blooming lavishly in the window. Light, light, I thought. Not this shuttered obfuscation, not this universe of lies. I turned off the faucet and carried the dripping glass through the sweltering gloom to Rita's bed.

She had turned onto her back and propped herself against the pillow, her skirt neatly spread over her legs. She was breathing slowly, consciously, her hand still open across her heart. She took the water without comment and drank half the glass, then motioned for me to set it on the table at the foot of the bed. This allowed me a close view of the clutter around the television, which included a plate of desiccated cottage cheese peppered with something that looked suspiciously like mouse droppings.

“Thank you,” Rita said.

“Are you better now?”

“I'm not getting any better,” she said.

I made no response to this self-dramatizing statement. It occurred to me that the whole thing, from the invaluable pottery through the unfinished novel to her physical frailty, was a lie. She was making it up as she went along. There was no “business proposition,” she had just wanted to get me into her wretched life and see if she could make me feel responsible for it. Outside a catfight flared up, a brief interlude of yowling, then it was quiet and the only sound was Rita's measured, phlegmy breathing.

My eyes settled on a stack of paperbacks next to the disturbing cheese plate. They were cheap romance novels, their lurid covers featuring women in distress, barely constrained bosoms, swollen lips, streaming hair. “How can you read this stuff?” I said.

Rita sniffed. “I just read it to pass the time. It's harmless. It's better than television.” I picked up the book on top, anxious to avoid the vision of Rita, sprawled before me, defending her intellectual pursuits. The passionate but terrified damsel on the cover had pale eyes and a mass of golden curls, very like Rita. I wondered if this had influenced her choice. The title was something absurd.

“Will you do something for me, Maxwell?” Rita said.

I put the book down, careful not to upset the stack. “Is it the business proposition?”

“Yes,” she said. “There might be something in it for you.”

“I'm really fairly busy, Rita,” I said.

“It wouldn't take much of your time.”

“Is it to do with the pottery?”

“Yes. It is. There's a gallery uptown that deals in pre-Columbian stuff. I wrote to the guy and sent him some photos, but I don't have a phone so I had to ask him to write back, but he hasn't done it. He's probably suspicious because I don't have a phone. I'm not well enough to go clear up there—I don't have a car, and the bus stop is nearly a mile. Besides, if someone like you went to talk to him, well, he'd take it seriously.”

“But I don't know anything about pre-Columbian art,” I protested.

“You don't need to know anything. You just have to tell him you've seen the stuff in the photos and you know me and it's not a hoax or a scam. He'll be excited about it; he'll be over here like a shot trying to get it for nothing. It might be good if you were here when he comes, so he won't try to take advantage of me. I know what this stuff is worth.”