Sea Lovers (16 page)

“So, basically, you just want me to vouch for your character, is that it?”

“Sure,” she said. “That's it.”

I had not thus far looked Rita in the eye, but at this point I did. She held my gaze in that icy, still, calculating way I remembered, which had once so unnerved me that I gave in, looked away, agreed to whatever she wanted. There, disguised by puffy flesh, were the same limpid windows to her mercenary heart. Did she remember how she had reduced me to shadowing her, to crouching in the snow outside a window, too mortified to move? Did the two hundred dollars, a full month's rent, that she took from the envelope in my sock drawer weigh more than a feather on her conscience? Even now, in desperate straits, alone, unloved, and unlovable, she looked upon me with thinly disguised contempt. A hint of a smile lifted the corners of her mouth. What was I going to do? Let her down? Wouldn't that just be typical.

“How recklessly you've lived,” I said.

“Well, Maxwell,” she said, disengaging her eyes from mine, “we can't all be successful.”

I sneered. “Is that your best shot?”

“I could give you maybe five percent of the deal,” she said.

I laughed. “You really are incorrigible, Rita. Do you seriously imagine you have anything I want?”

She brought her hand back to her heart. The color in her face drained again, but not because she was struck by my irrefutable assertion. Her voice was confident. “You'd give your soul to have written my novel,” she said.

I glanced away, to the room where the boxes gathered dust in the gloom. It occurred to me that they might be empty.

“Go ahead,” Rita said. “Have a look. You know you're dying to.”

I turned back, regarding Rita narrowly. Another suspicion had come to mind, that I would find myself in those pages, or Rita's version of me. Of what happened between us. She raised her head from the pillow, her lips parted in a menacing smile.

“I really don't have the time,” I said, consulting my watch.

She dropped back onto the pillow. “You always were such a coward.”

“Right,” I said. “Let's leave it at that. Great seeing you, Rita.” I headed for the door, fully expecting some further indictment of my character, some final cut, but she was silent. As I unlatched the screen and stepped into the blinding wall of heat, she moaned, turning ponderously toward the wall. I closed the screen behind me and went out to the street, scattering cats in my wake.

I had lied to Rita. I wasn't particularly busy; in fact I was at loose ends that day, as I had been for weeks. My work wasn't going well; I was avoiding the desk. As I wandered about my rented apartment, the confrontation in that depressing house began to take on color and depth, until I was convinced something had happened. I called Malcolm, who agreed to meet me for drinks near his store. I was eager to talk about Rita with someone who had known her when she was what I now thought of as the “real” Rita, the bewitching Rita, who had disappeared for twenty years and reappeared as a slovenly harridan to reproach me with the desert that was her life. Her parting remark, a continuation of an argument we'd had long ago, rankled me. Clearly, in Rita's view, my success only proved the justice of her charge: As a writer I was eager to please, as a man I was afraid to live.

“Well, look where it got you,” I said to the specter of Rita, hovering about me as I changed my shirt. I caught sight of my torso in the wardrobe mirror; was there a thickening at the waist? Pamela had been after me to join the local gym. “Exercise,” I said. “Healthy food, hygiene, air, light, life.”

“How well did you know Rita?” I asked Malcolm. We were conveying our full martini glasses to a toadstool-sized table in the bar.

“You mean when we were in college?” he said. We sat down and pulled our chairs in close. “I guess I knew her about as well as I could.” His smile was wry; of course he'd slept with her.

“Did you ever read any of her writing?”

“No,” he said. “We weren't that intimate. I didn't know she was interested in that sort of thing until she left to go up there…where you went.”

“So she was secretive about it.”

“She was.” Malcolm speared an olive. “Was it any good?”

“It was different,” I said.

“In what way?”

In what way? In a way that made us all sick with envy. Even the professor was torn between his excitement to have such a student and his despair at his own turgid prose. Rita's plot was simple enough, a love triangle, a tale of abandonment and revenge. But it wasn't the plot that took the reader by storm; it was the style. “Brutal yet elegant,” the professor suggested, which was about right, about as close as I could get. Rita sat there, placid and opaque as a cat, while we heaped on the praise. “It's the speed that gets me,” one of us opined, “it's like lightning.” “The world is so sensual,” another exclaimed. “It's lush and hot, but somehow it's invigorating.” My turn came around. What did I say? “Original, intriguing.” Something like that. After class Rita came up to me and asked if I'd go have a drink with her and say a bit more. “Yours is the only opinion I really value, Maxwell,” she said. “Just between us, you're the only one up here who can write worth a damn, including Simon.” Simon was the handsome professor; Rita was rumored to be having an affair with him. I took her arm, gratified. Later, when I cared, she would retract this statement. When it suited her, Rita would tell me that I was, in her opinion, just another talentless hack.

“So, did she ever get anything published?” Malcolm asked.

“No, I don't think so.”

“Then it couldn't be too good, right?” he concluded.

“Right,” I agreed.

After our third round of martinis, Malcolm called home to say he wasn't coming for dinner and we walked over to Galatoire's, where I switched to whiskey and ate a piece of fish. Several old acquaintances stopped by our table to tell me I hadn't changed. One, a pretty, vapid realtor who had sung in a band in college, enthusiastically informed me that she had seen one of my novels in a bookstore. Malcolm told me about his children: One was doing well, another had stolen a car from a priest. Well, borrowed; he took it back the next morning. We left the restaurant and went to several bars. It felt good, drinking, exchanging witticisms about the scene, laughing, eventually shouting. At the end I left Malcolm on the phone, begging his wife for a ride home, and stumbled across Esplanade to my apartment in the Faubourg. I'd forgotten about Rita, my novel, Pamela, my waistline. I burst into Donna Elvira's aria about how much she wants to tear out Don Giovanni's heart. A dog, investigating a garbage can, paused, offered himself as an audience
. Sì,
I sang.
Gli vo' cavare il cor. Sì.
The dog, evidently impressed, sat down. “That's Donna Elvira,” I confided, moving on. “She's been betrayed.”

I turned the corner to my street. The door was, I reminded myself, the third on the right. It was dark, but I could make out the concrete steps and flimsy iron rails, what my neighbors called “the stoop,” on which, in pleasant weather, they were inclined to sit and chat with the passersby. Sociable town, I thought. It really wasn't a bad place at all. Gradually it dawned on me that there was something on my stoop. It appeared to be an enormous cloth bag, stuffed and drooping over the rail. To my horror it moved, it rose, it came at me out of the darkness. “Maxwell,” Rita said. “You've been drinking.”

“Exactly right,” I said, veering past her. “Exactly right, and now I'm going to sleep.” I pulled my keys from my pocket, but too eagerly; they slipped through my fingers and clattered to the pavement. Rita, for such a large person, was quick. She snatched them up and went ahead to the door. “Poor Maxwell,” she said, “you need help.” In a moment the door was open and she stood inside looking out at me.

“I need help,” I agreed. I waved my arms and stamped my feet. “Help! Help!” I shouted. “A woman has broken into my house.”

Rita came down quickly, shushing me. “Stop, Maxwell. You'll wake your neighbors.” She tried to take my arm, but I brushed her away. “You really shouldn't drink,” she said. “You never could hold it.”

“Get away,” I said. “Stay away from me.” She had placed herself between me and the stoop.

“Stop it, Maxwell,” she said. “You're acting like you don't know me.”

“I
don't
know you,” I cried. “You're not Rita. You've killed her somehow, out there, out West. You studied her and you know a lot about her, but you're not Rita. You're an impostor.” I dodged around her, reached the steps, but somehow when I got inside she was so close behind me I couldn't shut the door. I plunged into the dark interior. Rita followed, closing the door and flicking on the light switch. “I need a drink,” I said.

She leaned against the bookcase, watching me, breathing heavily, her lips parted and her tongue protruding. Panting, I thought. Like a dog. I availed myself of the whiskey bottle on the sideboard and poured out a glass. How was I going to get rid of her now that she was inside, blocking all the space between me and the door? “Why are you here, Rita?” I said, keeping my voice calm.

“I felt so bad after you left today,” she said. “I didn't mean what I said. I was angry at you because you didn't want to help me.” Her voice was shaky, edgy. If she started crying I would never get rid of her.

“Okay,” I said. “Apology accepted.”

“I didn't think you would come, and I wasn't ready for how it made me feel to see you again, so I said stupid things. And you were so cold, Maxwell. You never used to be so cold.”

“I've changed,” I said.

“And now you tell me you think I'm an impostor, that somehow I've killed myself.”

“I didn't mean it. I'm drunk. And I'm tired. I want to sleep.”

“I need to sit down,” she said. She advanced to the couch and collapsed among the cushions. It was an uncomfortable product of the folded-futon school with a decidedly backward pitch, which she accommodated by leaning forward and planting her feet wide apart. Her big skirt billowed over her ankles so that only the pink toenails peeked out. She patted her hair down absently. “Could I have a glass of water, Maxwell?”

I sipped my whiskey, contemplating my options. Should I drink more in the hopes of becoming comatose, or try to sober up and devise a plan to get her out of my living room? I was drunk enough to be stupid, I was sure of that. Rita was looking around the room, appraising the furnishings. “It's nice in here,” she said. “It's cool, too.” Her eyes came back to me, settling upon me with a proprietary complacency that sent a warning chill through my circuitry. “You've really done well for yourself, Maxwell. I knew you would.”

I poured water from the seltzer bottle into a glass and handed it to her. “No ice,” I said. “Sorry.”

Rita took the glass and drank half of it. “Seltzer,” she said. “I haven't had that in a long time. Do you have any vodka to put in it?”

“No vodka,” I said. “Only whiskey.”

Rita held out the glass. “That would be fine,” she said. “Whiskey and soda is a good drink.”

I poured a thimbleful into her glass, keeping my eye on my own hand, which seemed detached from me, a long way out there. “Just a little more, if you don't mind,” Rita said. I poured in enough to turn the water golden. Rita took the glass and sipped at it, making a sucking sound that was loud in the stillness of the room.

“The thing is,” she said, “what I told you wasn't true. I felt bad about that. I wanted you to know the truth.”

“Why does it matter?” I said.

“I think it matters,” she said. “I think of myself as an honest person. The truth is, Katixa wasn't the love of my life. I thought she might be for a while. I was pretty worn out after Danny, and Katy was strong and quiet, and she was excited about the novel. Danny never read any of it; she wasn't much into reading.”