Sea Lovers (20 page)

The snow stopped, the sun came out. I had a few student conferences, all about their regrets or the lack of them. In the afternoon I walked across the campus, pondering Rita. What was she? Did she know herself? When I got to the apartment, I flung my bag on the couch and called her name. Just once. That's when I noticed the Olivetti was gone.

I took my coffee into my study and stood at the desk, looking down at Rita's boxes. In some bizarre, chimerical fashion, she was in them, impatient for me to make up my mind and get to her. “Come on, Maxwell. You know you're dying to.” Not just yet, I thought. I grabbed my notebook and went out to the screen porch. It was a strategy. When it was sunny out and the desk did not entice me, sometimes it worked. I laid out my arsenal—pen, notebook, coffee—and sat looking out at my yard. Birds were chirping; the air was warm and damp; my geraniums, the only flower I can grow successfully, sparkled in the early morning light. Pamela's deep purple clematis, cared for on her side of the fence, billowed over and made a lush display on mine. My eyes rested upon an oblong flagstone half hidden by a spirea bush, the grave of Joey, my late companion, dead, by my reckoning, three years now, felled in his youth by a cancerous growth resulting from injections the vet said he needed to keep him alive. He was a big cat, fourteen pounds, powerful but shy and goofy, not much of a hunter; his prey slipped through his paws. Sometimes when he tried to jump up on a chair or when he was tearing up the stairs, he missed his mark and landed on his side or his butt, always with an expression of discombobulation that made me laugh. His last months were hard. The tumor grew so large it pushed up into his neck, making it difficult for him to turn his head. Still, the vet said, he wasn't in pain, he was eating, cleaning himself. Occasionally he tried to catch a bug or stalked a squirrel. He tired easily but didn't sleep much. In the afternoons he searched me out and leaned against my leg until I took him up and held him in my arms. Then he would sleep for a few minutes, always waking with a start, as if he'd been dreaming and waked into an unfamiliar world.

His death was sudden and awful. The tumor, evidently full of fluid, collapsed, sending a blood clot to his brain, or so the vet speculated when it was too late. For perhaps fifteen minutes he screamed in agony, crashing against the walls, tearing at the air; I couldn't get near him. Then he was still but breathing hard, the air rasping in his throat, his eyes wide, swarming with terror. By the time I got him to the vet, he was gone.

I was angry about it all, angry at the vet, angry at myself, angry at death. I brought Joey home, got out my shovel, and dug his grave. I wanted it big and deep, and I dug for a long time, until I was standing in a hole above my knees. At the start I wept, but as I worked I began to take an interest in doing a good job. One could do worse than be a gravedigger, I thought. I wrapped his body in an old pillowcase, laid it in the hole, down in the earth where nothing could disturb him. Then I shoved all the dirt back in on top of him. Pamela gave me the stone; she had it left over from a path she'd made in her own garden. Later she planted the spirea, which required no maintenance.

Down in the earth. The phrase arrested me. I took up my pen to write it down, feeling it might be the start of something. To my chagrin, the pen was dry. “For God's sake,” I said. I pitched the pen in the trash as I passed through the kitchen on my way to the desk. The boxes were waiting, quoting Rita: “Among other writers, I was good. I was doing good work.” It struck me anew as an uncharacteristically modest remark for Rita to have made, but she was in her conciliatory mode, trying to convince me that I should care what happened to her, now that no one else did. I chewed the end of my pen. It was sad, Rita's life, especially the end, dragged off in a sack by the police, her corrupted body disposed of at the public expense. Did they bury her somewhere, in some paupers' field, or was she incinerated along with other undesirables, the vagrants no one claimed, shoved promiscuously into a furnace, like the doomed dogs and cats at the pound? And then what? Did they scrape the ashes into plastic bags and cart them off to the landfill?

Whatever they'd done, that corporeal substance, once beautiful, later unlovely, containing the turbulence that was Rita, was no more. For twenty years she'd been a dim figure from my personal past, and there had been moments—not many—when I wondered what had become of her. Now I knew. She had entered the historical past, that densely populated terminus for which we all hold a ticket. She wasn't going to call, she wouldn't turn up at my door, she couldn't know what I did with the heap of cardboard and paper she had directed to me in an effort to entangle me further in her miserable fate. What, after all, did I owe her?

Pursuing this question, I went back to the porch. I was thinking of Franz Kafka and Max Brod. I'd heard somewhere that when Kafka read his dark stories to the very small group of his admirers in Prague, he was so convulsed by laughter he could hardly get through a sentence. It occurred to me that Brod had disregarded Kafka's wish that his work be consigned to ashes not because he couldn't bear to deprive the world of the complete works of his friend but because Kafka was just that, his friend, someone with whom he had shared pleasant hours of camaraderie, conversations, laughter, someone he missed. Publishing the manuscripts was a way to extend the friendship he had enjoyed, to keep his brilliant, quirky, ironic friend alive.

Though we had briefly been lovers, there was no sense in which Rita and I were friends. She had seldom been even routinely kind to me. I didn't miss her. If offered the opportunity to call back to life Rita or Joey, I knew I would choose, without hesitation, the cat.

Sound thinking, salubrious, this was the way to go at it, out in the warm, clear light of day, without sentimentality or superstition. I sat down to the notebook, calling up the phrase that had tantalized me earlier: down in the earth.

I'd been mistaken. It wasn't the beginning of something new; it was the end of this story. I looked out over my property; I'd want a spot as far from Joey as possible. There was a mass of invincible pachysandra thriving in the sandy soil near the fence. I could pull it aside and lay it back on top when I was done. It would grow in by fall.

I was calm; I wasn't vengeful. I'd give Rita a chance. I would put the boxes in a hard plastic case—I had a number of them I used to store my own manuscripts—space-age stuff that would withstand a century or two of the old diurnal roll. I swallowed the last of my cold coffee. Then, with a sense of purpose and well-being, I went out to the shed to get my shovel.

At breakfast Isabel said, “You hate men because you want to be one.”

“Oh please,” Edith replied, buttering her toast so hard it broke. The only sliced bread the baker had was the equivalent of zwieback, unless you wanted salted pizza dough. “Spare me the deep psychology.”

Isabel shrugged. “I don't mind,” she said. “I like men too.”

Edith poured hot milk into her coffee, thinking how pleasant it would be to throttle Isabel. “You're just lucky I'm not one,” she said.

Isabel turned her attention to the newspaper, folding and flattening it next to her plate. As she read, she stroked her thick forelock back against her temple, a gesture that sometimes filled Edith with desire, but this morning it was just one more irritating thing about Isabel. This trip was a mistake. Edith should absolutely have refused the invitation, but there was nothing to be done about it now. She must just get through it somehow.

Last night's reading had been a fiasco. The audience was made up of women who had come to flirt with one another and couldn't be bothered listening to the poet they had paid to hear. When she looked up from her text, Edith saw Isabel whispering into the ear of a voluptuous blonde dressed in red elastic and stiletto heels. At the reception Edith was trapped by a tweedy Italian academic who confessed herself to be a passionate lover of Emily Deek-in-son. “Wild-a nights, Wild-a nights,” she intoned, closing her eyes tight and holding her glass of prosecco out before her like a microphone. Edith looked past her to see Isabel and the blonde clutching one another's forearms to keep from collapsing with laughter. Afterward, in the taxi, Isabel opened the window, which she knew Edith hated. “It's so warm,” she said, rosy and flushed from the wine and the attention, leaning her head back against the seat; she was practically purring. Edith looked out the other window and saw the Colosseum whirl into view like a murderer leaping from the shadows. Isabel saw it too, and regarded the monstrous rubble dreamily. “How I love Rome,” she said. “Couldn't we live here someday?”

Not on your life, Edith thought as she watched Isabel brush her toast crumbs off the newspaper onto the carpet.

“I see the government is dissolving again,” Isabel observed without looking up.

Twice in two days Isabel had accused Edith of hating men. Did this mean she was thinking of leaving Edith for a man? An Italian, no doubt, one of these swaggering babies who Isabel would claim understood her because they were both Latins. While Edith had to spend the morning at the university talking with students who had read her poems in bad translations, Isabel was lounging in some piazza with this man, chattering about how wonderful Rome was and how impossible it was to live in a college town in godforsaken Connecticut, what a word, and of course the man would try to say
Connecticut,
fail miserably, and they would both laugh until they wept.

Edith answered another question about Emily Deek-in-son. Yes, she was an early influence. All American poets had to address that astonishing gift sooner or later; and then a young woman raised her hand and asked a very specific question about a translation of one of Edith's poems, which this student thought was inaccurate. It was the word
choke
in a poem titled “Artichoke,” which the Italian translator had rendered
cuore,
“heart.” Edith found this an entirely interesting and appropriate question. She explained that the word
choke
meant the tough, matted center of the vegetable, an inedible part, not the heart, which was soft and delicious. The English word had a verb form as well,
to choke,
which meant “to strangle.” Edith grasped her neck between her hands, pretending to choke herself.

“
Strozzare,”
the student said. “We have a pasta called
strozzaprete
.” The audience laughed while Edith waited for the translation. “Priest strangler,” the student said. Edith beamed at her. “Exactly,” she said. “You could say ‘priest choker.' ”

At the reception Edith kept an eye out for this young linguist, and when she made her shy approach, sipping nervously at her cup of Coca-Cola, Edith motioned her in, cutting short a conversation with one of the organizers of the event, who was explaining how important it was to promote the free exchange of culture. “Your question was interesting,” Edith said. “What is your name?”

“Amelia,” the girl said. She was thin and awkward, her dark hair cropped short and her myopic eyes made large by the thick lenses of her glasses. “I am an admirer of your poems for many years now.”

“I wish you were a translator,” Edith said. “You have obviously given more thought to the difficulties than some professionals.”

“It is difficult,” Amelia agreed. “Especially poetry like yours, which is so passionate.”

Edith patted the young woman's bony shoulder. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for saying that, Amelia.”

It was what Isabel had said, years ago, when she finally read a manuscript of Edith's poems. Well, it was almost what she said. “It's surprising,” she said. “I think of you as cold, but these poems are passionate.”

Edith had mulled over this qualified praise for some time. To Isabel a person who did not act upon every impulse was cold, and it didn't occur to her that the systematic repression of powerful emotions resulted in a hard surface that contained a core of molten lava. She had no interest in the Victorians, whom she dismissed as prudes. Edith's reticence was a source of amusement to her. She liked to parade around the house in scanty gowns; after her bath she sat naked on the chair in the bedroom, rubbing scented oils lovingly into every inch of her flesh, as serene and rapt as a child in its mother's arms. She was affectionate in an overpowering, leonine way, grabbing Edith by the waist or arm or even by the neck and hauling her in for unexpected hugs and kisses, and if she detected any flinch or tremor of reluctance, she would push her captive away, saying, “Oh, you are so cold. What will it take to warm you up?”

Better she should ask, Edith thought, what it took to make me so cold. She knew all about Isabel's happy childhood; she was the darling of her Italo-Spanish parents, who traveled widely, always moving in bohemian circles, the mother a painter, the father a successful photojournalist. But when Isabel politely asked about her childhood, Edith knew she had no real interest in the subject, so she said only, “It was a farm in the Midwest, completely boring.” She didn't describe the poverty, both spiritual and physical, the bone-aching work which was her lot from the time she could lift a plate, the battle zone of the shabby domestic scene, the parents whose hatred for one another found expression in rage at their children for being born, the strong possibility that when she was grabbed by the arm, the waist, the neck, what she was about to receive was not an expression of affection.

“I didn't come to life at all until I went to college,” Edith said, and left it at that, sparing Isabel the details of those painful years as well: the paralyzing social awkwardness, the repulsive sexual encounters with young men whose sole desire was to insert their penises into a woman's, any woman's, mouth, the yearning after beauty, the discovery of poetry, of a world so utterly exotic and exciting that she had to take it in slowly, like a starving child who longs to gorge but can barely manage a spoon of gruel. She entered the classroom too awed to speak and sat quietly in the back, her heart racing as the professor elucidated what was to her the syntax of flight. She still remembered the night, alone in her dorm room, when she read an Elizabeth Bishop poem and collapsed across her bed in tears of such agony and joy that she could hardly get her breath. This was life! This was light! This was hope, even for her!

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.”