Sea Lovers (25 page)

Their son, Edward, called. Gina answered the phone. Evan stood by waiting for his turn; he was fond of his son and looked forward to these weekly calls. Gina was smiling. She laughed at some witticism and said, “Watch out for that.” Then for several minutes she fell silent. Her eyes wandered around the room, never settling, and she shifted her weight from foot to foot restlessly. At last she said, distantly, “That's really great, dear. Here's your father. I'll talk to you next week,” and held out the phone to Evan.

While he stood talking to Edward, Gina sat down at the table and pulled off her sweater. Then, as Edward went on about his psychology class, she stripped off her shirt and bra. She stretched her arms out across the table and rested her head upon them. Evan turned away from her and tried to concentrate on his son's description of his daily life. When he hung up the phone she was sitting up, blotting her forehead with her sweater.

“You were a little abrupt with him,” Evan said. “He asked if you were okay.”

“Of course I'm okay,” she said.

Evan took a seat next to her and watched as she pulled her shirt back over her head. “Did he tell you about his psychology professor?”

“Yes,” she said. “He talks too much.”

Evan ran his hand through his thinning hair, trying to stroke down his impatience. “You're not the only one who's getting older, you know.”

She pushed back her chair, dismissing him. She was on her way to her studio. “It's not the same,” she said in parting. “It's different.”

It was always different, he thought. They wanted to be treated the same, but only with the understanding that they deserved special treatment because they were different. It was true that they had been treated as if they were different for a long time, but they had been treated as different in the wrong way, they were not different in that way. What was different was the deal they got, the way they were treated, which was never fair. He loosened his collar; his face felt hot. But oh no, it wasn't anything that wasn't his fault. It wasn't hormones surging uncontrollably like guerrilla fighters, it was just his lousy blood pressure, which was elevated by his annoyance with his wife's suffering, and if he was uncomfortable, if he felt a little snappish, well, it was all his fault, because her bad temper was a symptom, and his was just plain old garden-variety bad temper, typical in the male. He got up and staggered into his study, where his article accosted him, demanding what he could not, because of Gina, seem to give it: his undivided attention. He turned away and went into the kitchen to make coffee.

Gina had gone out to have lunch with a friend. Evan was alone in the apartment with his article. He sat at his desk reading over his notes, listening to the taped interview he had done with a teenage girl who, he recalled, had been dressed in something that resembled two pieces of bicycle tubing. It depressed him to listen to her agitated, rage-filled monologue. She had a vocabulary of twenty-five words or so, insufficient to express any but the most basic threats and complaints. She was the current girlfriend of a gang member named Smak; Evan's article was about these girls, the attendants of brutal young men, about their precarious, angry, voluptuous, and mindless daily lives. On the tape she was trying to explain to Evan that she did not get up at the same time every day, which was why school was not a possibility for her.

He switched off the tape machine and stared at his bright computer screen for several minutes, but nothing came to him so he switched that off too. Then he got up and wandered through the apartment to Gina's studio.

The lunch was a kind of celebration; she'd finished all the work scheduled for a show next month. There were two new engravings on the drying rack; the rest were stacked away in two big portfolios, ready to go. As Evan stood looking at one on the rack, a line from one of her catalogs ran through his head: “She is a woman who has never stopped loving the forest.” They had a joke about it, a follow-up line: “And she is a woman who has never stopped living in Brooklyn.”

For twenty years her subject had been the same, but this didn't mean her work had not changed. In Evan's opinion the change had been gradual and persistent. She was more patient, saw more clearly, though the prints were progressively darker. That was the odd, wonderful thing about the newer prints; though they seemed to be covered with ink, they were full of an odd kind of light, an almost subterranean glow. In this one, for instance, he could see through a tangle of vegetation to the ground beneath, and on that dark ground he could make out the tracks of some small animal, a mouse or a chipmunk. In both prints on the rack, the viewpoint was high, as if the viewer were above it all, in a tree perhaps, looking down. Evan studied the second one. He seemed to be falling into it; it was truly an exhilarating angle. There, as he looked deeper and deeper through the accumulation of lines, he made out something extraordinary. He crouched down, close to the paper. It was the small hind foot of a rabbit, no bigger than his fingernail, but perfectly clear. In the next second, he knew, it would be gone.

He went to the portfolio, opened it, lifted the first print. Again the odd feeling of vertigo seized him as he looked down upon the teeming world of branches and vines. He could almost hear the dull buzz of insect life, breathe the oxygen-laden air. “These are terrific,” he said aloud. No wonder she had been so absorbed, so distracted, so uninterested in the daily course of her life. He felt a little stab of jealousy. His own work did not claim him; he had to drag himself to it. But that feeling passed quickly. He sat down on her cot, flushing with excitement, imagining how the room would look filled with his wife's strange vision. He heard her key in the door, her footsteps in the hall, then she was standing in the doorway looking in at him.

“What are you doing in here?” she said, just an edge of territorial challenge in her tone.

“I was looking at the new work,” he said.

She leaned against the doorframe, pushed her hair off her forehead. She'd had a few drinks at lunch, celebrating. “Well, what do you think?” she said.

“I think it's just amazing,” he said. “It's so good I had to sit down here and mull it over.”

She sagged a little more in the doorway, smiling now but anxious. “Do you really think so? I've been almost afraid for you to see it.”

“Oh, my dear,” he said.

Tears filled her eyes. She brushed them away with the back of one hand. “I'm so happy,” she said. She came into the room and sat beside him, still wiping away tears. “These stupid tears,” she said impatiently.

Evan put his arm around her, muttered into her shoulder, “I'm so proud of you.” There they sat for some time, contented, holding on to each other as if they were actually in the forest of her dreams.

There was always a letdown after she'd finished a block of work, Evan told himself in the difficult days that followed. She was petulant and weepy, angry with the gallery owner, who had been her friend and supporter for years, complaining about every detail of the installation. She hardly slept at night, though what she did in her studio Evan couldn't figure out. She wasn't working, and she hadn't, as she usually did between showings, cleaned the place up. But night after night he woke just long enough to watch her get up, pull on her robe, and go out, then he saw the light from her studio. During the day she lay about the apartment, napping or reading, getting nothing done and snapping at him if he so much as suggested a trip to the grocery. He tried to ignore her, spent his days struggling with his article, which resisted his efforts so stubbornly he sometimes sat at his desk for hours, literally pulling at what he called the remains of his hair. Finally he began to have trouble sleeping too. He lay on his back in the darkness, unable to move or to rest, while panic gripped his heart. When he did sleep, he had strange, unsettling dreams in which he was lost, pursued by something terrifying, powerful, something silent and brooding, something with wings.

One night, waking in terror from such a dream, he found himself, as he often did, alone in the bed. Once his heart slowed down and strength returned to his legs, he resolved to get up. His throat was parched; he felt dehydrated, as if he had been wandering in a desert. Pursued by what? he thought as he sat up and fumbled around for his slippers. Some desert creature? A creature with claws and wings and the face of a woman who would pose some unanswerable riddle before tearing him to bits? The idea amused him as he stumbled to the kitchen and switched on the lights, which made him recoil so violently he switched them back off. He poured himself a glass of water and stood, still sleep-shocked, gazing out the kitchen window at the back of the building across the alley. Above it he could see the milky luminescence of the half-moon. He finished his water, feeling quiet now, and friendly. The light from Gina's studio made a pool across the kitchen floor. He put his glass in the sink and followed this light to her room. The double doors had glass insets, but the glass was mottled so as not to be transparent. They were closed, but not tightly—in fact, one stood free of the latch and could be opened noiselessly with a push. He didn't want to startle her, but if she was asleep he didn't want to wake her, either. “Gina?” he said softly once, then again. Carefully he pushed the door open a few inches. He could see the cot from where he was; she wasn't in it. He opened the door a little further, then all the way. The window stood open, the room was bright and cold; Gina was not in it.

It took him a moment to apprehend this information. He looked around anxiously, as if he could make her materialize by his determination to find her there. He went to the living room; perhaps she was sleeping on the couch. He looked in the bathroom and then the bedroom, though of course he knew she was not there. He glanced at the clock, 3:00 a.m. He went back to the studio.

What did it mean? How often in the past months when he had believed her to be here in this room had she been…wherever she was? His heart ached in his chest; he laid his hand upon it. She had a lover, there could be no doubt of it. That was why she was so tired all the time, why she slept all day, and why she was so cold and bitter.