Sea Lovers

by Valerie Martin

  ALSO BY VALERIE MARTIN

  The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

  The Confessions of Edward Day

  Trespass

  The Unfinished Novel

  Property

  Salvation: Scenes from the Life of St. Francis

  Italian Fever

  The Great Divorce

  Mary Reilly

  The Consolation of Nature: Short Stories

  A Recent Martyr

  Alexandra

  Set in Motion

  Love: Short Stories

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Valerie Martin

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2012.

  www.nanatalese.com

  DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The following stories first appeared in these publications: Black Warrior Review: “Sea Lovers” (volume II, number 2, Spring 1985); Conjunctions: “His Blue Period” (Spring 2001); The Consolation of Nature and Other Stories: “The Cat in the Attic,” “The Freeze,” and “Spats” (Vintage Contemporaries, 1989); The Massachusetts Review: “The Incident at Villedeau” (volume 55, number 1, 2014) and “The Open Door” (Summer 2002); New Orleans Review: “The Consolation of Nature” (volume 9, number 2, Fall 1982); Ploughshares: “The Change” (Spring 1998); The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories: “Beethoven” and “The Unfinished Novel” (Vintage Contemporaries, 2006); Web Conjunctions: “Et in Acadiana Ego” (July 2011).

  eBook design adapted from book design by Maria Carella

  Cover design by Emily Mahon

  Cover illustration by Eleftheria Alexandri

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Martin, Valerie, 1948–

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Sea lovers : selected stories / Valerie Martin. — First edition.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-53352-2 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-385-53353-9 (eBook)

  I. Title.

  PS3563.A7295A6 2015

  813'.54—dc23 2015003401

  eBook ISBN 9780385533539

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Valerie Martin

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Among the Animals

  Spats

  The Cat in the Attic

  The Consolation of Nature

  The Freeze

  Among the Artists

  His Blue Period

  Beethoven

  The Unfinished Novel

  The Open Door

  Metamorphoses

  The Change

  Sea Lovers

  The Incident at Villedeau

  Et in Acadiana Ego

  A Note About the Author

  For Dr. Kenneth Holditch, who got me started

  And for my students, who keep me going

  Introduction

  The stories in this volume are selected from work published over a period of thirty years. As I read them chronologically, I had the sensation of falling through my life in writing. Though I was never consciously trying to change the way I write, on looking back I note a distinct evolution.

  My early stories have a young writer’s excitement about formal innovation, as well as a young woman’s preoccupation with personal relationships. They appear unsophisticated to me now, innocent, unguarded, and sometimes uncouth. My lifelong preoccupation with nature and with death as the debt we owe to nature makes these stories severe and lyrical. Many of the characters are animals going about their animal lives while the human characters, vexed and tormented by their personal dramas, turn their backs on the natural world. I’ve gathered four of these stories here, under the title “Among the Animals.”

  Sometime in the ’90s, after living in Rome for a few years and reading Chekhov’s stories avidly and for the first time, I consciously raised the ante of the conversation I’d been having with myself about the short story. First by accident and then with intent, I undertook a series of stories about the lives of artists. My mental description of these excursions into the daily ordeals of painters, novelists, dancers, poets, and actors was “Art saves your life, art ruins your life.” The four stories included here under the title “Among the Artists” are enlivened by an element somewhat dampened in the earlier work, namely humor. There’s still plenty of darkness, death is hanging over the scene, animals are getting the worst of it, the humans are competitive, mean-spirited, and engaged in a struggle that should be ennobling but is often degrading, yet the distant eye upon the dismal doings is lighthearted and amused.

  The final grouping, “Metamorphoses,” includes stories that hark back to my childhood fascination with a magical world in which animals and humans changed forms or merged. The last two stories, the only ones previously uncollected, are set in an imagined past that is both mythical and historical.

  Acadia is the name given to the eighteenth-century French settlement in Nova Scotia by the residents thereof. It is a variant of the word Arcadia: the paradise of Greek myth inhabited by fantastic creatures, the playground of the gods. When the French were driven out of Acadia by the British, they made a long and difficult journey to Louisiana. The bayous and swamps where they settled, surviving by fishing and trapping, became known as Acadiana. This is the world, fantastical, atmospheric, and tragic, of the two final stories in this collection. The question “Are we animals, or are we something else?” has engaged my imagination throughout my writing career, and I have addressed it most particularly in short stories. These Acadiana stories offer an answer at once whimsical and disturbing: We are neither, and we are both.

  SPATS

  The dogs are scratching at the kitchen door. How long, Lydia thinks, has she been lost in the thought of her rival dead? She passes her hand over her eyes, an unconscious effort to push the hot red edge off everything she sees, and goes to the door to let them in.

  When Ivan confessed that he was in love with another woman, Lydia thought she could ride it out. She told him what she had so often told him in the turbulent course of their marriage, that he was a fool, that he would be sorry. Even as she watched his friends loading his possessions into the truck, even when she stood alone in the silent half-empty house contemplating a pale patch on the wall where one of his pictures had been, even then she didn’t believe he was gone. Now she has only one hope to hold on to: He has left the dogs with her, and this must mean he will be coming back.

  At the door Gretta hangs back, as she always does, but Spats pushes his way in as soon as she has turned the knob, knocking the door back against her shins and barreling past her, his heavy tail slapping the wood repeatedly. No sooner is he inside than he turns to block the door so that Gretta can’t get past him. He lowers his big head and nips at her forelegs; it’s play, it’s all in fun, but Gretta only edges past him, pressing close to Lydia, who pushes at the bigger dog with her foot. “Spats,” she says, “leave her alone.” Spats backs away, but he is only waiting until she is gone; then he will try again. Lydia is struck with the inevitability of this scene. It happens every day, several times a day, and it is always the same. Th
e dogs gambol into the kitchen, knocking against the table legs, turning about in ever-narrowing circles, until they throw themselves down a few feet apart and settle for their naps. Gretta always sleeps curled tightly in a semicircle, her only defense against attacks from her mate, who sleeps on his side, his long legs extended, his neck stretched out, the open, deep sleep of the innocent or the oppressor.

  Lydia stands at the door looking back at the dogs. Sometimes Ivan got right down on the floor with Spats, lay beside him holding his big black head against his chest and talking to him. “Did you have a good time at the park today?” he’d croon. “Did you swim? Are you really tired now? Are you happy?” This memory causes Lydia’s upper lip to pull back from her teeth. How often had she wanted to kick him right in his handsome face when he did that, crooning over the dog as if it were his child or his mistress? What about me? she thought. What about my day? But she never said that; instead she turned away, biting back her anger and confusion, for she couldn’t admit even to herself that she was jealous of a dog.

  Spats is asleep immediately, his jaw slack and his tongue lolling out over his black lips. As Lydia looks at him she has an unexpected thought: She could kill him. It is certainly in her power. No one would do anything about it, and it would hurt Ivan as nothing else could. She could poison him, or shoot him, or she could take him to a vet and say he was vicious and have him put down.

  She lights a match against the grout in the countertop and turns the stove burner on. It is too cold, and she is so numb with the loss of her husband that she watches the flame wearily, hopelessly; it can do so little for her. She could plunge her hand into it and burn it, or she could stand close to it and still be cold. Then she puts the kettle over the flame and turns away.

  She had argued with Ivan about everything for years, so often and so intensely that it seemed natural to her. She held him responsible for the hot flush that rose to her cheeks, the bitter taste that flooded her mouth at the very thought of him. She believed that she was ill; sometimes she believed her life was nearly over and she hated Ivan for this too, that he was killing her with these arguments and that he didn’t care.

  When the water is boiling she pours it over the coffee in the filter and takes her mug to the table. She sits quietly in the still house; the only sound is the clink of the ceramic mug against the bare wood as she sets it down. She goes through a cycle of resolutions. The first is a simple one: She will make her husband come back. It is inconceivable that she will fail. They always had these arguments, they even separated a few times, but he always came back and so he always would. He would tire of this other woman in a few weeks and then he would be back. After all, she asked herself, what did this woman have that she didn’t have? An education? And what good was that? If Ivan loved this woman for her education, it wasn’t really as if he loved her for herself. He loved her for something she had acquired. And Lydia was certain that Ivan had loved her, had married her, and must still love her, only for herself, because she was so apparent, so undisguised; there wasn’t anything else to love her for.

  She takes a swallow of the bitter coffee. This first resolution is a calm one: She will wait for her husband and he will return and she will take him back.

  She sets the mug down roughly on the table, for the inevitable question is upon her: How long can she wait? This has been going on for two months, and she is sick of waiting. There must be something she can do. The thought of action stiffens her spine, and her jaw clenches involuntarily. Now comes the terrible vision of her revenge, which never fails to take her so by surprise that she sighs as she lays herself open to it; revenge is her only lover now. She will see a lawyer, sue Ivan for adultery, and get every cent she can out of him, everything, for the rest of his life. But this is unsatisfactory, promising, as it does, nothing better than a long life without him, a life in which he continues to love someone else. She would do better to buy a gun and shoot him. She could call him late at night, when the other woman is asleep, and beg him to come over. He will come; she can scare him into it. And then when he lets himself in with his key, she will shoot him in the living room. He left her, she will tell the court. She bought the gun to protect herself because she was alone. How was she to know he would let himself in so late at night? He told her he was never coming back and she had assumed the footsteps in the living room came from the man every lonely woman lies in bed at night listening for, the man who has found out her secret, who knows she is alone, whose mission, which is sanctioned by the male world, is to break the spirit if not the bones of those rebellious women who have the temerity to sleep at night without a man. So she shot him. She wasn’t going to ask any questions and live to see him get off in court. How could she have known the intruder was her husband, who had abandoned her?

  Yes, yes, that would work. It would be easily accomplished, but wouldn’t she only end up as she was now? Better to murder the other woman, who was, after all, the cause of all this intolerable pain. She knew her name, knew where she lived, where she worked. She had called her several times just to hear her voice, her cheerful hello, in which Lydia always heard Ivan’s presence, as if he were standing right next to the woman and she had turned away from kissing him to answer the insistent phone. Lydia had heard of a man who killed people for money. She could pay this man, and then the woman would be gone.

  The kettle is screaming; she has forgotten to turn off the flame. She could drink another cup of coffee, then take a bath. But that would take only an hour or so and she has to get through the whole day. The silence in the house is intense, though she knows it is no more quiet than usual. Ivan was never home much in the daytime. What did she do before? It seems to her that that life was another life, one she will never know again, the life in which each day ended with the appearance of her husband. Sometimes, she admits, she had not been happy to see him, but her certainty that she would see him made the question of whether she was happy or sad a matter of indifference to her. Often she didn’t see him until late at night, when he appeared at one of the clubs where she was singing. He took a place in the audience, and when she saw him she always sang for him. Then they were both happy. He knew she was admired, and that pleased him, as if she was his reflection and what others saw when they looked at her was more of him. Sometimes he gave her that same affectionate look he gave himself in mirrors, and when he did it made her lightheaded, and she would sing, holding her hands out a little before her, one index finger stretched out as if she were pointing at something, and she would wait until the inevitable line about how it was “you” she loved, wanted, hated, couldn’t get free of, couldn’t live without, and at that “you” she would make her moving hands be still and with her eyes as well as her hands she would point to her husband in the crowd. Those were the happiest moments they had, though neither of them was really conscious of them, nor did they ever speak of this happiness. When, during the break, they did speak, it was usually to argue about something.

  She thinks of this as she stares dully at the dogs, Ivan’s dogs. Later she will drive through the cold afternoon light to Larry’s cold garage, where they will rehearse. They will have dinner together; Larry and Simon will try to cheer her up, and Kenneth, the drummer, will sit looking on in his usual daze. They will take drugs if anyone has any, cocaine or marijuana, and Simon will drink a six-pack of beer.

  Then they will go to the club and she will sing as best she can. She will sing and sing, into the drunken faces of the audience, over the bobbing heads of the frenzied dancers; she will sing like some blinded bird lost in a dark forest trying to find her way out by listening to the echo of her own voice. The truth is that she sings better than she ever has. Everyone tells her so. Her voice is so full of suffering that hearing it would move a stone, though it will not move her husband, because he won’t be there. Yet she can’t stop looking for him in the audience, as she always has. And as she sings and looks for him she will remember exactly what it was like to find herself in his eyes. That was how she ha
d first seen him, sitting at a table on the edge of the floor, watching her closely. He was carrying on a conversation with a tired-looking woman across from him, but he watched Lydia so closely that she could feel his eyes on her. She smiled. She was aware of herself as the surprising creation she really was, a woman who was beautiful to look at and beautiful to hear. She was, at that moment, so self-conscious and so contented that she didn’t notice what an oddity he was, a man who was both beautiful and masculine. Her attachment to his appearance, to his gestures, the suddenness of his smile, the coldness of his eyes, came later. At that moment it was herself in his eyes that she loved—as fatal a love match as she would ever know.

  The phone rings. She hesitates, then gets up and crosses to the counter. She picks up the receiver and holds it to her ear.

  “Hello,” Ivan says. “Lydia?”

  She says nothing.

  “Talk to me!” he exclaims.

  “Why should I?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “No.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Why are you calling me?”

  “About the dogs.”

  “What about them?”

  “Are they OK?”

  She sighs. “Yes.” Then, patiently, “When are you coming to get them?”

  “I can’t,” he says. “I can’t take them. I can’t keep them here.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s no fenced yard. Vivian’s landlord doesn’t allow dogs.”

  At the mention of her rival’s name, Lydia feels a sudden rush of blood to her face. “You bastard,” she hisses.

  “Baby, please,” he says, “try to understand.”

  She slams the receiver down into the cradle. “Bastard,” she says again. Her fingers tighten on the edge of the counter until the knuckles are white. He doesn’t want the dogs. He doesn’t want her. He isn’t coming back. “I really can’t stand it,” she says into the empty kitchen. “I don’t think I will be able to stand it.”