Sea Lovers (19 page)

In my dream Rita was young again, but I was as I am now. It was a snowy scene and she was teasing me to race her to a fence post across a field. She didn't have a chance, I told her, she was wearing open-toed shoes with high heels and I had on sturdy boots. But she insisted. She was lovely, her eyes bright, cheeks flushed. Her hair, stuffed under a fur hat, burst out over her forehead in golden ringlets. “Come on, Maxwell,” she said. “If you're so sure of yourself, what have you got to lose?” At length I agreed. She took off, surprisingly quick in those impossible shoes, and I followed. My feet were heavy. I ran in dream slo-mo while Rita dashed ahead. As I hobbled along I came across one of her shoes, then the other, abandoned in the snow. When I looked up she was sitting on the fence, laughing. I clutched her shoes to my chest. It was snowing hard; I could barely see, but I could hear her, laughing, and calling out to me, “I win, Maxwell. I win.”

The telephone was blaring. I fought my way free of Rita's taunting and snatched the receiver, pressing it to my ear, distracted by a sudden sharp pain in my groin. “Maxwell,” Rita said. “Did you get my novel?” In the process of throwing the phone away from me, I lost my balance and slid off the edge of the bed to the floor. When I opened my eyes, I was flat on my back, looking up at the red point of the phone charging light, which went on only when the receiver was firmly lodged in its cradle. I looked down at my erection, fading fast after having been squashed when I rolled over on it to answer the call. “Rita,” I said. “God damn you.”

In the morning my mood was blacker than my coffee. Rita was stomping around in my head like a devil with a pitchfork, and not Rita lite, but Rita as she was on the last night of her life, with her harsh breath, her forearms like hams, her petulance, her frank, flamboyant destitution, Rita who had suffered and lived and stolen large machinery, Rita the accuser, the avenger.

I could hear the boxes chortling on the floor.

I was twenty-five that year. Rita was just twenty-one, but she was way ahead of me, erotically speaking. My experience had been that some women liked sex, others endured it, and others were looking to make some kind of deal. Rita was avid, rapacious; it was sport to her, yet I never doubted for a second that she was in deadly earnest, in it to prove to herself that she was the gold medalist. Now it strikes me that she was suicidal, trying to get some man to kill her, but I didn't have a clue about the dark side of anything then. I was an innocent, and Rita knew it.

So did Danny Grunwald, the scary little dyke Rita left me for, who reigned in an unofficial way over a pool table at Cues, the bar we frequented, daring “suckers” to play a game with her, swilling cheap bourbon and probably shooting something besides pool. Now and then she picked fights with tough men twice her size, went out in the alley and came back bloody, pleased with herself. She liked to tease Rita about me. “Hey, gorgeous, what are you doing with that loser?” “What has he got that I don't have, honey? I'm sure it ain't that big.” That sort of thing. I thought that Rita's laughter was embarrassment, that she was as appalled as I was.

That night we'd been drinking for hours. Rita was tense and, before I knew it, furious at me for joking with a fellow student at the table next to ours. The fight went on back at my apartment, all night and into the next morning, when I took a shower and went to the college to teach my class. I knew Rita had a class in the afternoon, so I didn't expect to see her until evening, by which time we would both have been sober for more than twelve hours and in a condition to patch up our quarrel over a plate of vegetables and a pot of strong coffee. But the hours slid by and Rita didn't appear. I read all twenty of my students' writing exercises—describe a situation in which you regretted your behavior. There were always a few who had no regrets; invariably these were boys. Why were girls so full of regret? One, a clever one, regretted taking my class.

At length I was hungry. I chopped and steamed the vegetables, made the coffee, ate at the table while reading a Chekhov story for my Modern Masters class. Finally it was 10:00 p.m. and no Rita. I put on my boots, coat, hat, scarf, gloves, and went out into the icy world in search of her. I figured she would be at Cues; if not, I could drink with friends.

She had been there, but she was gone, no one knew where. Things I failed to notice: sympathetic looks on the faces of my friends, absence of Danny Grunwald. Hours later I slogged back to the apartment, certain she would be there—she had an early class in the morning—but she wasn't. I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke, the sun was up and Rita was passing through the room on her way to the shower.

“Where were you?” I inquired from the cushions.

“Wouldn't you like to know,” said Rita.

I got up and we argued a little more over breakfast, but we were both too tired to keep at it. She offered some obvious lies, she'd been at the library, time slipped away, she'd met up with friends, gone out until it was too late and she was too drunk to walk home. We went to the college together, parted amiably enough, agreed to meet at the diner for dinner; it was payday. I waited there for an hour before I ate a grilled cheese and went out to find her. It was snowing. I tried the library, which was bloody unlikely, and then Cues. As I came into the block, I spotted Rita leaving the bar, walking briskly away from me. She looked so purposeful I didn't call out to her. I wanted to know where she was going. I scurried along, close to the wall in true detective style. She turned into an alley halfway down the block. Stealthily I followed. It was a narrow street of one-room cottages with half-closed porches, lined up one against the other. They had been built for factory workers long ago, when there was a factory. Now they were run-down, derelict, but occupied. The residents stowed their wood on the porches, and the smoke from the stovepipes hung over the narrow passageway, coating the walls, the trashcans, the banked snow, the passersby with grime. Rita stamped her feet at the entrance to one of these, stepped up to the porch, opened the door without knocking, and went inside.

I stood in the snow for several moments, unable to make up my mind to move. I had a fair idea of what I would find if I followed Rita, if I knocked on that door, and I wasn't up to it. I made my way back to Cues and joined a table of aspiring writers, most of whom would eventually find employment in the tech industry. I drank half a pitcher of beer, glowering at the pool table, where a cordial game was under way, absent the belligerent heckling of Danny Grunwald. One among us pointed out that our professor's new novel had gotten a lackluster review in the daily
Times
. It was generally agreed that his books were boring.

I was thinking about the stovepipes on the shabby houses in the alley. My apartment, which I'd rented in blissful August ignorance, had a fireplace that warmed an area of about four cubic feet in front of it. I knew now, too late, that a woodstove was the indispensable appliance in this climate; one could sooner go without a refrigerator. Whenever Rita and I visited friends who had a stove, we stayed late. At home we sat at our typewriters wrapped in blankets; at night we took our clothes off after we were under the covers in bed. In the morning, against the advice of the authorities, we warmed the kitchen by leaving the oven door open. If I had a woodstove, I concluded, Rita might be with me now.

Maybe that was it. Maybe Rita had just gone to the little house to warm up. I finished my beer. Energized by this crackbrained theory, I bid farewell to my friends and stumbled out into the snow, around the corner to the smoking cottage. I wanted to tell Rita that we would move right away, as soon as I could find a place with a woodstove.

The porch was piled with carefully stacked, evenly split wood, a professional job. The ax hanging from a nail on the wall had an edge that gleamed. I didn't doubt that Danny could swing it. The wood filled the space; only an area in front of the door was clear. This door, obligingly, had a curtainless window in it. Heedless as a fish biting down on a lure, I stepped up to it and looked inside.

It was a scene out of Bosch, complete with demons and, belching from the cast-iron stove that squatted in one corner, the flames of hell. The furnishings were meager: a card table, two metal folding chairs, a sagging sofa the color of dried blood, and a side table with a red-shaded lamp that partially obscured my view of the main event. This was going forward on a bare mattress in front of the stove. Rita was naked, on her hands and knees, back arched, hair wild, features contorted in the ecstasy that so often resembles pain. Behind her, equally naked, Danny Grunwald was gleefully occupied, ramming something cylindrical into Rita's delicate parts. She laughed and talked as she worked. Mercifully, I couldn't make out what she was saying, but I could imagine it, which may have been worse, though I doubt it. Her eyes, which had always struck me as piggish, glittered like burning coals, and her tongue flicked sprays of saliva into the air. She was built in square blocks, with large, sagging breasts attached at the front. Her skin, in that diabolical light, looked like meat. They were both turned away from me, so I was free to look as long as I wanted. What exactly was that instrument Danny was using on Rita? Which orifice was she penetrating with it? I pressed my face against the glass. Rita dropped her head forward and made a bucking movement with her hips. Danny leaned over her back and grasped one of her breasts.

The voyeur spying on lesbians, who is detected and invited to join in the fun, is a stock feature of pornography. Men would pay to watch a man in my position; I knew that, but the last place I wanted to be was on the other side of that door. I don't deny that the sight of Rita disporting herself excited in me feelings hitherto unknown. It was hot, all right, but the heat, which became every moment more unendurable, wasn't in my cock, it was in my brain.

I stepped back, clutching my head. Wiring was shorting out in there; I could hear it, sputtering and popping. I had to sit on the step because my knees were rubbery. A pile of snow, dislodged from the eaves by my collapse, dropped down on my neck. Great, I thought, and then, who cares? I didn't bother to brush it away. I was busy experiencing, for the first time, the bracing shock of total betrayal; there really is nothing so cleansing. Born alone, die alone, love a mirage, life a cruel joke, death standing in the wings, the one who really wants you, the only one who cares. I was in pain, but I didn't feel like crying. I had the sense that something hidden had been revealed, not about Rita, who was clearly, from here on out, the “other,” the “not me,” but about myself. My expectations had been banal. I was stupid.

Eventually I got up and walked back to my apartment. I tried to read Chekhov, who had a lot to tell me about betrayal, but I couldn't concentrate. I turned out the light and sat in the dark, fell asleep on the couch again. Sometime before dawn Rita came in. I didn't ask her where she'd been, which provoked her to trot out a veritable circus of lies. “Rita,” I said, “I was on the porch tonight, watching you through the window.”

This was a hammer blow, and she staggered beneath it. Come on, I thought, tell me I didn't see what I saw. After a moment she said, “Danny thought someone was out there.”

“Well, Danny was right.”

Then we had tears, apologies, protestations, vows; it went on for a long time. She wanted me to go to bed with her, which I told her was impossible; I was fresh out of anything hard enough to satisfy her. More tears, buckets of tears, suicide threats. When she was exhausted we got into bed and fell asleep with our clothes on. Toward morning I woke up, found her straddling me, thought, What the hell, and did it. We got up, wary as cats, ate breakfast, minimal, polite conversation, and I went off to my class. At the door Rita kissed my cheek and said in her most earnest manner, “Maxwell, you have to forgive me.”

I didn't forgive her, but I thought of her during the day, and that part of me that had hardened toward her thawed around the edges. Simon, the handsome professor, stopped me in the hall to say he was hosting a dinner party for a visiting writer, just a few faculty, selected students. “We thought of you and Rita.” This cheered me up. Real food, I thought, probably meat, wine from regular-sized bottles. “That would be great,” I said. “I'll tell Rita.”