Sea Lovers (18 page)

No one knew exactly when or how Rita had died; her neighbors had nosed her out. By the time Malcolm arrived, the police were zipping her into a body bag; they were wearing gauze masks and had brought in blowers to air out the rooms. They had found her, face up, on the floor in the second room, between the pottery shards and her novel. Malcolm explained that he was little more than an acquaintance, which provoked the detective. Why would she have your phone number in her purse? he wanted to know, and when Malcolm said she had called looking for a friend's address, he repeated the question. The landlord arrived, visibly flustered. Rita had failed to pay the rent for two months and he had sent her an eviction notice. The police came through, dragging Rita in the bag like an unwieldy carpet. The landlord turned white, rushed out to the porch, and vomited into the azalea bush. This made the detective suspicious. How well did the landlord know Rita? he wanted to know. In fact he'd never even seen her, he insisted. He'd inherited the house at his mother's death a year previous; Rita was already in it. Usually she paid her rent on time. The landlord was shaky, so they all went into the kitchen for a glass of water. There they discovered the garbage, alive with maggots. The landlord had to go outside and sit on the back steps, his head between his knees. “I don't see why you're so upset if you didn't know this lady,” the detective observed.

“It's my house,” the landlord protested. “There's a corpse rotting here, who knows how long, the place is crawling with maggots. Of course I'm upset!”

“You're mighty sensitive for a landlord,” the detective said.

After some conversation it was discovered that Malcolm and the landlord had both gone to Jesuit, two years apart. Malcolm had played football with the landlord's brother. “Dickie Vega,” Malcolm said. “You remember him. This guy is his older brother, Jack Vega.”

The detective took their names and addresses and told them he would be in touch. The police were sealing off the house until the results of the autopsy came in. Malcolm and Jack Vega agreed to walk over to Matuzza's and have a beer.

The autopsy report said that Rita had died of natural causes; therefore, the detective told Malcolm, he was closing the case. He had determined that Rita had no living relatives, so the city would undertake the disposal of her remains. He had also learned that Rita had a criminal record: She'd stolen a truck in Nevada.

“What kind of truck?” I asked Malcolm.

“Big. A semi. They found it in Texas.”

Jack Vega had a Dumpster dropped off at the house, and he and Malcolm went through Rita's possessions. “Just junk,” Malcolm said. “There was a checkbook with about twenty dollars in it and a fifty-dollar bill on the table by the bed; that was it. No insurance policy, no personal mail, just bills, clothes, a bunch of broken pottery, some books, and those boxes I sent you. I had to do the garbage—Jack couldn't go in there.”

“So you threw all the pots out,” I said.

“It was junk. It was all broken.”

“She thought it was valuable,” I said.

“Right,” Malcolm said.

When I got off the phone, I sat at the kitchen table drumming my fingers. So that was it, the end of Rita. A bloated corpse rotting on the floor of a dilapidated shack. Total worth: seventy dollars and some broken pots. How long did she lie there, in the sweltering heat with the slatted light creeping in across her body, later withdrawing, leaving her in the dark, with the skittery night creatures, the roaches, the mice, her unfinished novel? I called Malcolm again. “Did they estimate when she died?” I asked.

“Yes. It was the day after she called me, looking for you.”

“And when was that?”

“It was after you left.”

“So, a few days later.”

“No. I guess it had to be the next day. She knew you were gone, though. She said she'd seen you the night before and you'd forgotten to give her the address. I figured she made that up.”

“No,” I said. “I didn't see her. I was out with you that night.”

“I knew that. I knew she was lying. She lied all the time, but it didn't do her any good.”

“No,” I agreed.

“So, what's in the boxes? Love letters?”

“I don't know. I haven't opened them yet.”

“I thought about throwing them out with the rest of the junk, but Jack said we should respect the wishes of the dead. That doesn't mean you can't throw them out. Maybe you should. Maybe you don't want to know what's in them.”

But I knew what was in them. In my study I stood with my toe pressed against the boxes. I pushed against them, but they didn't budge. “You pushed me,” I heard Rita say.

I was painfully conscious that I had lied to Malcolm. I wasn't afraid of being caught in the lie; no one was interested in Rita's last night on earth. The coroner's verdict, natural causes, meant no mysteriously ruptured organs, no suspicious bruises or contusions, and Rita was ill, anyone could see that; she'd said as much herself. I discounted the possibility that the fall Rita had taken at my apartment had contributed to her demise. What bothered me about the lie I'd told Malcolm was that I couldn't take it back without appearing suspicious. I was stuck with it.

Just as I was stuck with the boxes. I backed away, to my chair, where I sat regarding them steadily, as if I expected them to move. I considered my options, assessed the ebb and flow of curiosity. Once I opened them, I thought, Rita would be back in my life with a vengeance. Did I have a moral obligation to allow this to happen? They contained, I could not doubt it, her life's work, all she had to show for herself, and she had directed them to me as the person most likely to vindicate that life, which had ended in ignominy. She was right to choose me; I was situated to be of use. I could send the manuscript to my agent, or directly to my editor, and it would receive a fair reading. Neither of them would be delighted to receive a thousand loose pages typed on various machines with no backup, by an author who was unknown and dead, but they would look at it and, if it was as good as Rita said it was, consider the risk.

And what if Rita's novel was a success? It wasn't unprecedented. Virgil, Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, Fernando Pessoa, John Kennedy Toole, to name a few, had left the business arrangements to their friends and relatives. Pessoa's chest contained thousands of loose pages. Kafka had outdone everyone by extracting a promise from his friend Max Brod to burn everything at his death, burn
The Castle
, burn
The Trial
, but Brod, to the relief of posterity, had broken that promise. I'd visited Kafka's grave in Prague and laid the requisite pebble on the slab to hold the wispy Czech in place, and another on the loyal Brod's tablet nearby. What kind of friend made such a request? Kafka was dying for years. He had plenty of time to burn whatever he wanted burned. Didn't he possess a stove, a box of Czech matches?

If Rita's book was published, my part in that process would be a feature of the packaging. Like Brod's, my celebrity might rest upon it. I would be the generous writer of little note who went to bat for a work of genius by an artist who had died precipitately, crushed by the indifference of a heartless industry. The public eats that stuff up: the fantasy that artists—unlike, say, businessmen—are driven by warm fellow feeling. In their devotion to the religion of art, they are ever seeking, without self-interest or crude competitiveness, to celebrate genius, wherever it can be found. There wouldn't be any money in it for me. To maintain my status as a selfless benefactor, I'd have to give all the proceeds to a worthy cause—the Zuni might be a good choice, whoever they were, or some lesbian-gay alliance. I might get some interviews out of it. Who was this fascinating author? How did the manuscript come into my possession? I'd be free to reinvent Rita any way I chose: a courageous adventuress, a seductress, a poète maudit, a helpless victim of her own integrity and her impossibly high standards, a self-serving user, a tramp, a liar, a thief. Rita would belong entirely to me.

This scenario amused me, though it was doubtless far-fetched. The fact that twenty years earlier everyone in a small writing program in Vermont had agreed that Rita was gifted didn't mean she had parlayed her gift into a masterpiece that would take the publishing world by storm. It was more likely that the novel was a disjointed, flawed narrative, an overblown, self-absorbed chronicle of Rita's battle with the world. There might be flashes of brilliance, but no discipline.

One way to find out. All I had to do was open a box.

How close to finished was it? Was there, in its pages, some exaggerated version of myself, of those few months, so long ago, when Rita and I gave up on sleep in favor of drinking and sex? Would I find myself dissected, a squirming, quivering creature, flayed and pinned open on a page, my panicked heart throbbing for all to see?

I got up and took a closer look at the boxes. In the top corner of each one was a number, one through four, an effort at order. She had, I knew, written my address sometime between her return home in the taxi that night and her death, a period of not more than forty-eight hours. There might be a note to me with a more precise description of her wishes, perhaps an apology for having insulted me and some mollifying language designed to make me feel guilty if I failed to comply. Wouldn't that be just like Rita?

I slipped my fingers under the edge of the top box and eased the lid up with the care and trepidation of an expert trained in munitions disarmament.

Twenty years ago, for a poor graduate student on a stipend of four thousand dollars a year, two hundred dollars was a lot of money. I bought my clothes at secondhand stores, attended college functions for the free food, otherwise subsisted on vegetables, and drank draft beer with my peers at the local pool hall for a dollar a pitcher. My father was long dead, and my mother, who lived on a small pension from the U.S. postal system, didn't approve of my decision to leave Louisiana in search of an unlikely career. Even if she'd had the money, I was too proud to ask her for help. Within a few days everyone knew Rita had left not only me but the town, and I was the subject of pitying looks and kind remarks, which galled me. I certainly wasn't going to augment my image as the local cuckold by revealing that Rita had robbed me as well. As I straddled Rita's novel, the recollection of that humiliation assailed me, stayed my fingers, straightened my spine. I stood there, drinking it in, a bracing, bitter potion from the past. How had I made up the loss?

I'd gone to the real estate office and arranged to pay twenty-five dollars for that month and an extra twenty-five on the regular rent for the next seven months. I searched the local paper for part-time work, but there wasn't much. Because I was teaching and taking classes, my hours were limited; the town's economy was depressed, and I didn't have a car. Eventually I found a minimum-wage weekend job selling tickets at the movie theater in the mall out on the highway. There was a bus that let me off in the parking lot. It wasn't bad. I got all the popcorn I could eat and I could see the movies for free. I cleared about twenty dollars a week, which made a big difference in my lifestyle. I bought a good pair of duck boots, and because I could pay for the pitchers more often, my entrance at the pub was greeted with hearty enthusiasm.

I wrote a story about a guy who works at a movie theater. He becomes obsessed by a beautiful young woman who comes in alone every Saturday night, buys two tickets, and sits through two films, the seven and nine features, whatever they are. He starts to make up a life for her, a reason why she has to be away from home and off the street from seven to eleven every Saturday. It can't be because she loves the movies; most of them are idiotic. He starts following her after the shows. He knows where she lives, where she buys her groceries, what café she meets a girlfriend in, where she buys her clothes. Finally she has him arrested for stalking. He loses his job. It turns out she's a freelance movie critic. It was called “The Flicks,” and it was the first story I placed in a reputable quarterly,
The Oliphant Review
. I was paid ten dollars, plus copies.

I never told anyone Rita had robbed me. It was one of those secrets I kept because it was pleasurable to keep it; I have a few. Years later, in a novel, I had a male character steal money from a lover in a similar fashion. My character pauses in the midst of the heist and considers taking only half the money—he knows how poor his lover is—but I doubted that Rita had given me that much consideration. It was a failure on my part to imagine a character as heartless as Rita.

The phone rang; it was Pamela. Did I want coffee? I wanted to get away from those boxes, but I didn't tell Pam that, perhaps didn't know it myself until I was safe in her kitchen. The windows were open, there was a vase of bright zinnias on the ledge, the light was lambent, the air fragrant and cool. Pamela in her man's shirt spattered with paint, her hair mussed, her eyes unfocused from the hours of close work at her easel, leaned over me with the coffeepot and pressed her lips against my neck. “Have you been working?” she asked.

“Yes,” I lied. After the coffee I lured her into her bedroom, where we passed a few amiable hours. Then we were hungry and decided to go out for sushi. We were pleased with ourselves for wasting the afternoon on sex. We ate a lot of raw fish and drank several bottles of sake. After that we walked around the town, looking in the shop windows, greeting neighbors out with their dogs, and stopped at the bar for a nightcap. It was midnight when I left Pamela at her kitchen door and crossed the lawn to my own. In the course of the evening I'd forgotten about Rita's novel. But when I turned on the light in my study, there it was, a reproachful cardboard cairn near the trashcan. I considered the possibility that sake and whiskey were incompatible substances, that in some sense this explained the difference between East and West. If mixed in a glass, would they separate? I put this question in the same to-be-explored category as the contents of Rita's boxes. My desk didn't send out even a beckoning vibration as I wandered past it on my way to my bed.