Sea Lovers (7 page)

His body lay in the corner of the patio. In her first glance she knew so much about him, so much about his death, that she closed her eyes as if she could close out what she knew. He lay on his side, his legs stretched out unnaturally. His fur was wet and covered with bits of leaves and dirt. She couldn't see his face, for it was hidden by a tin can, a one-pound salmon can. Anne remembered having thrown it away a few days earlier. The can completely covered the animal's face, and even from a distance she could see that it was wedged on tightly.

“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Oh, Christ.”

Anne put the laundry in the washing machine and went back to the yard for a close look. She crouched over the dead animal, pulling her sweater in tightly against the cold. He was a large cat; his fur was white with patches of gray and black. Anne recognized him as one of several neighborhood cats. Someone might feed him regularly and might look for him; she had no way of knowing. The can over his face made him look ludicrous. It would have been funny had she not listened for so many hours to his struggles to free himself. If I'd gone out, she thought, I could have pulled it off. Now she had to deal with the corpse.

When she went inside, she found Nell stretched out on her bed with her favorite comic books arranged all about her.

“There's a dead cat in the yard,” Anne said.

The child looked up. “There is?”

“He got his face stuck in a salmon can.”

Nell sat up and strained to look out the window.

“You can't see him from here. He's in the corner. I don't think you want to see him.”

“I want to see him,” she said, getting out of bed. “Where is he? Come show me.”

“Put your robe on, put your slippers on,” Anne said. “It's freezing out there.”

Nell pulled on her slippers, hurriedly wrapped herself in her robe, and went to the door. Anne followed her disconsolately. They went out and stood side by side, looking down at the dead cat.

“What a way to go,” Anne remarked.

Nell was quiet a moment; then she said in a voice filled with pity, “Mama, can't you take that can off his face?”

Anne hesitated. She was not anxious to see the expression such a death might leave on its victim's face. But she understood the justice of the request. She grasped the can, thinking it would fall away easily, but instead she found she had lifted the animal's head and shoulders from the concrete. The stiffness that was communicated to her fingertips shocked her; it was like lifting a board, and she laid the can back down gingerly. “It's stuck,” she said. “It won't come off.”

They stood quietly a few moments more. “Should we bury him?” Nell asked.

“No. Dogs would come and dig him up.”

“What can we do, then?”

“I'll call the city. They have a special number. They'll come pick him up.”

“The city?” the child said.

“Well, the Sanitation Department.”

They went inside. “That's like the garbage men,” the child observed. “You're not going to put him in the garbage can?”

“No. I'll put him in a plastic bag.”

Nell considered this. “That will be good,” she said. “Then some baby won't come along and see him and be upset.”

Later Anne called the Sanitation Department. The man she spoke with was courteous. “Just get it to the curb,” he said, “and I'll have someone pick it up. But he won't be there till this afternoon.” He paused, consulting a schedule Anne imagined. “He won't be there until after three.”

Anne appreciated the man's precision, and as it was still drizzling, she left the cat where he was until afternoon. Nell would be off visiting her father. Anne wanted to spare her the sight of the impersonal bagging of the creature, though she had noticed with some satisfaction that the child was neither squeamish nor overimaginative when it came to death. She understood it already as in the nature of things.

At noon the rain stopped and the sun appeared, but it was still bitterly cold and windy. Anne drove her daughter to her ex-husband's and stayed to fill in the parts of the dead cat story that the child neglected. It was hard not to make a joke of the absurdity of the accident. Even Nell saw the humor of it when her father observed that the salmon can would become a new object for dread and suicide threats.

“I can't take it anymore,” Anne suggested. “I'm going to get the salmon can.”

They laughed over it and then she went home. She didn't take off her coat and stopped only in the kitchen to pick up a plastic trash bag. She proceeded directly to the patio. Now when she opened the door there was no shock in the sight. She went straight to the body as if it had beckoned her.

She knelt down beside the cat. The pavement nearby was dry—the sun had taken care of that—but a ring of moisture like a shadow outlined the corpse. She slipped the bag over the animal's back feet and carefully, without touching him, pulled it up to his hips. But there it stuck, and she knew that she would have to lift him to get him into the bag.

She had a sensation of repugnance mixed with confidence. It wouldn't be pleasant, but she didn't doubt that she could do it. Five years ago she would have called on a man to do it and stayed in the house until the corpse was gone. Now there was no one to call, and no need to call anyone, for she could certainly put this dead body in a bag and transfer it to the curb. She was different now and better now. As a young woman she had been in constant fear, but that fear was gone. It was true that her loneliness was hard to bear; it made her foolish and because of it she imagined that rich, idle young men might be in love with her. It was time to face it, she told herself. Her own youth was gone; it was permanently, irretrievably gone. But it was worth that confession to be rid of the fear that had been for her the by-product of dependence. She shrugged against the dreariness of this revelation and bent her will to the task before her.

She touched the cat's side, brushing away some bits of wood that were stuck there. Beneath the wet, soft, dead fur was a wall of flesh as hard as stone. This unpromising rigidity was the cruelest of death's jokes on the living. She imagined that rough treatment might snap the corpse in half, like a thin tube of glass. She lifted the back a little and pulled the bag up to the animal's middle. As she did this she became aware of her own voice in the cold air, addressing the dead cat. “Well, my friend,” she was saying, “I wish I'd known; I could have saved you this.”

He was a pathetic sight, with his stiff, wet limbs, half in a plastic bag, the red-and-black label with a great surging silver fish across it all that distinguished his head. It was sad, she thought, such a silly, useless death, though he was certainly not the first creature ever to lose his life in an effort to avoid starvation. She touched his hard, cold side at the place where she thought his heart might be; she patted him softly there. “Poor cat,” she said. “While I was tossing around in there worrying about my little heartbreak, you were out here with this.”

And she thought of the wall of her bedroom and how she had fretted on one side of it while death stalked on the other side. Tomorrow his prey might be something big; it might be a man or a child. That night it had just been a cat. But he had stalked all the same and waited and watched. It had taken the cat hours to die, with death cold and patient nearby, waiting for what he could claim; man or beast, it was the same to him.

But that was absurd, she thought. The unyielding flesh beneath her hand told her it was not so. The great fluidity, the sinuousness that was in the nature of these animals, had simply gone out of this one. Death had come from the inside and life had gone out. So that's it, she thought. She lifted her hand, held it before her, and gazed down into her own palm. “It comes from the inside,” she said.

Anne pushed the bag aside and lifted the dead cat in her arms. She held him in her arms like a dead child and then she laid him in the bag and pulled the sides up over him. She carried him through the yard to the street. Later two men came by in a truck and took the bag away. The cat was gone. It began to rain again and grow colder still. That night, in that city, there was the hardest freeze in fifty years. Pipes burst, houses flooded, and the water pressure was so low that several buildings burned to the ground while the firemen stood about, cursing the empty hoses they held in their cold and helpless hands.

For anyone who has met Meyer Anspach since his success, his occasional lyrical outbursts on the subject of his blue period may be merely tedious, but for those of us who actually remember the ceaseless whine of paranoia that constituted his utterances at that time, Anspach's rhapsodies on the character-building properties of poverty are infuriating. Most of what he says about those days is sheer fabrication, but two things are true: He was poor—we all were—and he was painting all the time. He never mentions, perhaps he doesn't know, a detail I find most salient, which is that his painting actually was better then than it is now. Like so many famous artists, these days Anspach does an excellent imitation of Anspach. He's in control, nothing slips by him, he has spent the past twenty years attending to Anspach's painting, and he has no desire ever to attend to anything else. But when he was young, when he was with Maria, no one, including Anspach, had any idea what an Anspach was. He was brash, intense, never satisfied, feeling his way into a wilderness. He had no character to speak of, or rather he had already the character he has now, which is entirely self-absorbed and egotistical. He cared for no one, certainly not for Maria, though he liked to proclaim that he could not live without her, that she was his inspiration, his muse, that she was absolutely essential to his life as an artist. Pursuing every other woman who caught his attention was also essential, and making no effort to conceal those often sleazy and heartless affairs was, well, part of his character.

If struggle, poverty, and rejection actually did build character, Maria should have been an Everest in the mountain range of character, unassailable, white-peaked, towering above us in the unbreathably thin air. But of course she wasn't. She was devoted to Anspach and so she never stopped weeping. She wept for years. Often she appeared at the door of my studio tucking her sodden handkerchief into her skirt pocket, smoothing back the thick, damp strands of her remarkable black hair, a carrot clutched in her small white fist. I knew she was there even if I had my back to her because the rabbits came clattering out from wherever they were sleeping and made a dash for the door. Then I would turn and see her kneeling on the floor with the two rabbits pressing against her, patting her skirt with their delicate paws and lifting their soft, twitching muzzles to her hands to encourage her tender caresses, which they appeared to enjoy as much as the carrot they knew was coming their way. My rabbits were wild about Maria. Later, when we sat at the old metal table drinking coffee, the rabbits curled up at her feet, and later still, when she got up to make her way back to Anspach, they followed her to the door and I had to herd them back into the studio after she was gone.

I was in love with Maria and we all knew it. Anspach treated it as a joke, he was that sure of himself. There could be no serious rival to a genius such as his, and no woman in her right mind would choose warmth, companionship, affection, and support over service at the high altar of Anspach. Maria tried not to encourage me, but she was so beaten down, so starved for a kind word, that occasionally she couldn't resist a few moments of rest. On weekends we worked together at a popular restaurant on Spring Street, so we rode the train together, over and back. Sometimes, coming home just before dawn on the D train, when the cars came out of the black tunnel and climbed slowly up into the pale blush of morning light over the East River, Maria went so far as to lean her weary head against my arm. I didn't have the heart, or was it the courage, ever to say the words that rattled in my brain, repeated over and over in time to the metallic clanking of the wheels: “Leave him, come to me.” Maria, I judged, perhaps wrongly, didn't need her life complicated by another artist who couldn't make a living.

I had the restaurant job, which paid almost nothing, though the tips were good, and one day a week I built stretchers for an art supply house near the Bowery, where I was paid in canvas and paint. That was it. But I lived so frugally I was able to pay the rent and keep myself and the rabbits in vegetables, which was what we ate. Maria had another job, two nights a week at a Greek restaurant on Atlantic Avenue. Because she worked at night she usually slept late; so did Anspach. When they got up, she cooked him a big meal, did the shopping, housekeeping, bill paying, enthused over his latest production, and listened to his latest tirade about the art establishment. In the afternoon Anspach went out for an espresso, followed by a trip downtown to various galleries, where he berated the owners if he could get near them or the hired help if he couldn't. Anspach said painting was his vocation, this carping at the galleries was his business, and he was probably right. In my romantic view of myself as an artist, contact with the commercial world was humiliating and demeaning; I couldn't bear to do it in the flesh. I contented myself with sending out pages of slides every few months, then, when they came back, adding a few new ones, switching them around, and sending them out again.

On those afternoons when Anspach was advancing his career, Maria came to visit me. We drank coffee, talked, smoked cigarettes. Sometimes I took out a pad and did quick sketches of her, drowsy over her cigarette, the rabbits dozing at her feet. I listened to her soft voice, looked into her dark eyes, and tried to hold up my end of the conversation without betraying the sore and aching state of my heart. We were both readers, though where Maria found time to read I don't know. We talked about books. We liked cheerful, optimistic authors—Kafka, Céline, Beckett. Maria introduced me to their lighthearted predecessors, Hardy and Gissing. Her favorite novel was
Jude the Obscure
.

She had come to the city when she was seventeen with the idea that she would become a dancer. She spent six years burying this dream beneath a mountain of rejection, though she did once get as close as the classrooms of the ABT. At last she concluded that it was not her will or even her ability that held her back, it was her body. She wasn't tall enough and her breasts were too large. She had begun to accept this as the simple fact it was when she met Anspach and dancing became not her ambition but her refuge. She continued to attend classes a few times a week. The scratchy recordings of Chopin, the polished wooden floors, the heft of the barre, the sharp jabs and rebukes of the martinet teachers, the cunning little wooden blocks that disfigured her toes, the smooth, tight skin of the leotard, the strains, pains, the sweat, all of it was restorative to Maria; it was the reliable world of routine, secure and predictable, as different from the never-ending uproar of life with Anspach as a warm bath is from a plunge into an ice storm at sea.

Anspach had special names for everyone, always designed to be mildly insulting. He called Maria Mah-ree, or Miss Poppincockulous, a perversion of her real surname, which was Greek. Fidel, the owner of a gallery Anspach browbeat into showing his paintings, was Fido. Paul, an abstract painter who counted himself among Anspach's associates, was Pile. My name is John, but Anspach always called me Jack; he still does. He says it with a sharp punch to it, as if it is part of a formula, like “Watch out, Jack” or “You won't get Jack if you keep that up.” Even my rabbits were not rabbits to Anspach but “Jack's-bun-buns,” pronounced as one word with the stress on the last syllable. If he returned from the city before Maria got home, he came straight to my studio and launched into a long, snide monologue, oily with sexual insinuation, on the subject of how hard it was to be a poor artist who couldn't keep his woman at home because whenever he went out to attend to his business she was sure to sneak away to visit Jack's-bun-buns, and he didn't know what was so appealing about those bun-buns, but his Miss Poppincockulous just couldn't seem to get enough of them. That was the way Anspach talked. Maria didn't try to defend herself, and I was no help. I generally offered Anspach a beer, which he never refused, and tried to change the subject to the only one I knew he couldn't resist, the state of his career. Then he sat down at the table and indulged himself in a flood of vitriol against whatever galleries he'd been in that day. His most frequent complaint was that they were all looking for pictures to hang “over the couch,” in the awful living rooms of “Long Island Jane and Joe” or “Fire Island Joe and Joey.” He pronounced Joey “jo-
ee
.” Sometimes if he suspected I had another beer in the refrigerator, Anspach would ask to see what I was painting. Then and only then, as we stood looking at my most recent canvas, did he have anything to say worth hearing.

I don't know what he really thought of me as a painter, but given his inflated opinion of his own worth, any interest he showed in someone else was an astonishing compliment. I know he thought I was facile, but that was because he was himself a very poor draftsman, he still is, and I draw with ease. Anspach's gift was his sense of color, which even then was astounding. It was what ultimately made him famous; then Anspach's passion for color was all that made him bearable. It was the reason I forgave him for being Anspach.

His blue period started in the upper right-hand corner of a painting titled
Napalm
, which featured images from the Vietnam War. A deep purple silhouette of the famous photograph of a young girl fleeing her burning village was repeated around the edges like a frame. The center was a blush of scarlet, gold, and black, like the inside of a poppy. In the upper corner was a mini-landscape: marsh grass, strange, exotic trees, a few birds in flight against an eerie, unearthly sky. The sky was not really blue but a rich blue-green with coppery undertones, a Renaissance color, like the sky in a painting by Bellini.

“How did you get this?” I asked, pointing at the shimmery patch of sky.

“Glazes,” he said. “It took a while, but I can do it again.” He gazed at the color with his upper teeth pressed into his lower lip, a speculative, anxious expression in his open, innocent eyes. Anspach fell in love with a color the way most men fall in love with a beautiful, mysterious, fascinating, unattainable woman. He gave himself over to his passion without self-pity, without vanity or envy, without hope really. It wasn't the cold spirit of rage and competitiveness that he showed for everything and everyone else in his world. It was unselfish admiration, a helpless opening of the heart. This blue-green patch, which he'd labored over patiently and lovingly, was in the background now, like a lovely, shy young woman just entering a crowded ballroom by a side door, but she had captured Anspach's imagination, and it would not be long before he demanded that all the energy in the scene revolve around her and her alone.

In the weeks that followed, as that blue moved to the foreground of Anspach's pictures, it sometimes seemed to me that it was draining the life out of Maria, as if it were actually the color of her blood and Anspach had found some way to drain it directly from her veins onto his canvas.

One summer evening, after Anspach had drunk all my beers and Maria declared herself too tired and hot to cook, we treated ourselves to dinner at the Italian restaurant underneath my loft. There we ran into Paul Remy and a shy, nearsighted sculptor named Mike Brock, whom Anspach immediately christened Mac. Jack-and-Mac became the all-purpose name for Mike and myself, which Anspach used for the rest of the evening whenever he addressed one of us. After the meal Anspach invited us all to his loft to drink cheap wine and have a look at his latest work. It was Maria's night off; I could see that she was tired, but she encouraged us to come. She had, she explained, a fresh baklava from the restaurant we should finish up, as it wouldn't keep. So up we all went, grateful to pass an evening at no expense, and I, at least, was curious to see what Anspach was up to.

The loft had once been a bank building. Anspach and Maria had the whole second floor, which was wide open from front to back with long double-sashed windows at either end. The kitchen was minimal: a small refrigerator, a two-burner stove, an old, stained sink that looked as though it should be attached to a washing machine, and a low counter with a few stools gathered around it. Their bedroom was a mattress half hidden by some curtains Maria had sewn together from the inevitable Indian bedspreads of that period. The bathroom was in pieces, three closets along one wall. One contained a sink and mirror, one only a toilet, and the third opened directly into a cheap shower unit, the kind with the flimsy plastic door and painted enamel interior, such as one sees in summer camps for children. In the center of the big room was a battered brick-red couch, three lawn chairs, and two tables made of old crates. Anspach's big easel and paint cart were in the front of the long room facing the street windows. The best thing about the place was the line of ceiling fans down the middle, left over from the bank incarnation. It was hellish outside that night, and we all sighed with relief at how much cooler the loft was than the claustrophobic, tomato-laced atmosphere of the restaurant.

Maria put on a record, Brazilian music, I think, which made the seediness of the place seem less threatening, more exotic, and she poured out tumblers of wine for us all. The paintings Anspach showed us fascinated me. He was quoting bits from other painters, whom he referred to as “the Massas,” but the color combinations were unexpected and everywhere there was a marvelous balance of refined technique and sheer serendipity. These days he fakes the surprise element, but his technical skill has never failed him. When Anspach talked about paint, it was like a chemist talking about drugs. He knew what was in every color, what it would do in combination with other mediums, with oil, with thinner, on canvas, on pasteboard. He could give a quick rundown on all the possible side effects. Even then he didn't use much in the way of premixed colors; he made his own. His blue was underpainted with cadmium yellow, covered with a mix of phthalo green and Prussian blue and a few opalescent glazes that he called his “secret recipe.” The images were recondite, personal. I was pleased to see that he was leaving the Vietnam subject matter behind with the cadmium red he'd given up in favor of the blue. The blue allowed him to be less strident, more interior. He pointed at a section of one large canvas in which a woman's hands were grasping the rim of a dark blue hole—was she pulling herself out or slipping in? The hands were carefully, lovingly painted, extraordinarily lifelike. “That,” Anspach said, “is what I call painterly.”