Sea Lovers (11 page)

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.”

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?

As I watched this scene, it occurred to me that Ingrid had no idea who I was and that there was no necessity for stealth. I stepped out from behind my column and sat down on the wide step next to an elderly black man who was tenderly unpacking a saxophone. This square was the most public of spaces, designed in order that strangers might eye one another at their leisure. The tourists had evidently asked for directions. Ingrid raised her arm and pointed toward the river. After a brief exchange, they walked away, the taller girl looking back with a shy wave as they went. I got up and wandered toward the square, pausing to smile upon a child emptying a bag of popcorn over the bobbing heads of an aggressive flock of pigeons. I turned back at the gate to the square, pretending an interest in the façade of the cathedral.

This put me very close to Ingrid, who was occupied in lighting another cigarette. Clearly a heavy smoker. She had the pinched skin around the nose, the bloodless lips. Probably a serious drinker too, judging by the glassiness of her eyes, the slight tremor in her hands. I pictured her kissing Philip, but it was difficult; she was so coarse, and she was several inches taller than he was. Two plumes of smoke issued from her nose. She's like some dreadful harpy, I thought. Waving the smoke away with one hand, she said clearly, “That's a nice skirt.” Who was she talking to? I followed her eyes, which left the easel in front of her and turned with surprising force upon me, moving swiftly up from my skirt, over my waist, my breasts, to my astonished face. Her thin lips pulled back into a ghastly smile full of amusement at my discomposure, which was complete. I was so flummoxed I took a step backward and collided with the fence. “It fits you well,” she added.

“Thanks,” I said lamely, then recovered my footing and fled into the square. I didn't run, but I made directly for the opposite gate. I crossed the street quickly and threw myself down at the furthest table in the Café Du Monde.

So this was Ingrid.

Though I never actually saw Philip pick up a brush or pencil, in the next week his apartment sprouted a crop of Beethovens. There he was glowering from behind a chair, propped atop a stack of books, face-to-face with himself across the kitchen table. Phil had gotten a new supply of wallpaper sample books, which were scattered about the easel, splayed open to his various selections. Sometimes, when we were having coffee, he hauled one of these books into his lap and thumbed through it as we talked. The samples provided the atmosphere of each portrait, swirling paisley, pointillist, pastoral; Philip worked the designs right into his subject's coat sleeves and collar. But the face remained the same, instantly recognizable, the lunatic's thinning, unkempt hair, the overgrown brows, the pugilistic glare, the scowling lips, the brutish jaw, reminding his audience that this was the son of a drunken thug, the epitome of the Romantic, the scourge of the drawing room, the enemy of livery, the doom of the aristocracy, the death of manners.

“What is it you like about Beethoven?” I asked Phil one night when we were perched on the roof smoking cigarettes.

“The later quartets,” he said. “Some of the symphonies. The Fifth, the Seventh, and the Ninth. Everybody likes those.”

“No,” I said. “Not the music. What is it about his face that you like?”

Phil considered my question. A mosquito landed on his arm, and he brushed it off with the back of his hand. “It's easy to draw,” he said.

As the summer burned on, I began to hate my job. I wasn't good at it, and my boss had noticed. I could never remember who had ordered what, and I could carry only two cups of coffee at a time, whereas Betty, who had worked there for years, could carry four. Once I set a tray of sandwiches and drinks down on a portable serving table and the whole thing tipped over onto the floor. I sometimes forgot to squirt the ersatz whipped cream on the bread pudding. If the diners were impatient or rude, as, because of my ineptitude, they often were, I became sullen. I worked for tips, we all did, and I wasn't doing very well.

One night, after a particularly miserable shift, during which I had knocked over a water glass while serving a bowl of gumbo to a miserly spinster, a regular who disliked me, Phil and I were sitting on the roof batting our hands at the humid, bug-laden air and drinking lukewarm beer. I complained about my job, about my boss and the harridans in the kitchen, about my dislike of the customers and my refusal to curry favor to get bigger tips. “It doesn't work anyway,” I said. “They know I'm faking it, and they hate me for it.”

“You should never fake it,” he said. “If you can't be authentic doing whatever you're doing, you should do something else.”

“I'm sure that's true,” I said, though I wasn't sure at all. “But this is the job I have.”

“You should read Sartre,” he said. “Inauthenticity is a fatal disease. It kills you, one day at a time.”

“So you think I should quit my job.”

“The option is to take it seriously, engage in it, become it. While you're a waitress, become a waitress and nothing else.”

This was the first and probably the only advice Phil ever gave me. I drank my beer and mulled it over. It didn't occur to me that Phil was unlikely to be the source of a recipe for successful living, and there was something in his formula—be engaged or be damned—that struck me as eminently reasonable. It still does. I had not, until that moment, identified myself simply as what I was, a waitress, and not a very good one. “It's not easy,” I said, meaning my job.

“It's odd, isn't it?” Phil said. “You'd think it would be hard to fake it, but evidently it isn't.” He held out his hand to the rooftops spread like open books all around us. “Sometimes when I sit out here,” he said, “I think about what's really going on under every one of these roofs. That's the reason I like to paint this view, it's the lid of the problem. Look how close together they are. It wouldn't take much to burn the whole Quarter down; it's happened before.” He extracted a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket, his lighter from his pants. “There's a flashpoint down there somewhere. Sometimes I think if I just dropped a match in the right place…” He lit the cigarette and exhaled a mouthful of smoke. I considered the vision, flames leaping from the windows, bursting through the rooftops, the screams of the desperate residents clinging to the rickety staircases, jumping from their wrought-iron balconies to the stone courtyards below.

“Then you'd see some authentic behavior,” Phil concluded.

I tried taking Phil's advice, but my efforts to become a waitress only made me more disgusted with myself at the end of my shift, when I counted out the paltry bills in my apron pocket. Phil was poor too, but at least he was doing what he wanted to do. Except for the weekly visits to my family, I spent my spare time with him, and I was comfortable with him, as I had never been with the high-spirited college boys who were like thoughtless children spinning about in circles on the lawn, intent on disorienting their senses. Phil was frugal, modest, and he seemed to personally like me. When I arrived at his door, he was genuinely pleased by the sight of me. When we went out together, he was attentive; his eyes did not wander the room looking for something more interesting.