Sea Lovers

by Valerie Martin

  As I watched this scene, it occurred to me that Ingrid had no idea who I was and that there was no necessity for stealth. I stepped out from behind my column and sat down on the wide step next to an elderly black man who was tenderly unpacking a saxophone. This square was the most public of spaces, designed in order that strangers might eye one another at their leisure. The tourists had evidently asked for directions. Ingrid raised her arm and pointed toward the river. After a brief exchange, they walked away, the taller girl looking back with a shy wave as they went. I got up and wandered toward the square, pausing to smile upon a child emptying a bag of popcorn over the bobbing heads of an aggressive flock of pigeons. I turned back at the gate to the square, pretending an interest in the façade of the cathedral.

  This put me very close to Ingrid, who was occupied in lighting another cigarette. Clearly a heavy smoker. She had the pinched skin around the nose, the bloodless lips. Probably a serious drinker too, judging by the glassiness of her eyes, the slight tremor in her hands. I pictured her kissing Philip, but it was difficult; she was so coarse, and she was several inches taller than he was. Two plumes of smoke issued from her nose. She’s like some dreadful harpy, I thought. Waving the smoke away with one hand, she said clearly, “That’s a nice skirt.” Who was she talking to? I followed her eyes, which left the easel in front of her and turned with surprising force upon me, moving swiftly up from my skirt, over my waist, my breasts, to my astonished face. Her thin lips pulled back into a ghastly smile full of amusement at my discomposure, which was complete. I was so flummoxed I took a step backward and collided with the fence. “It fits you well,” she added.

  “Thanks,” I said lamely, then recovered my footing and fled into the square. I didn’t run, but I made directly for the opposite gate. I crossed the street quickly and threw myself down at the furthest table in the Café Du Monde.

  So this was Ingrid.

  Though I never actually saw Philip pick up a brush or pencil, in the next week his apartment sprouted a crop of Beethovens. There he was glowering from behind a chair, propped atop a stack of books, face-to-face with himself across the kitchen table. Phil had gotten a new supply of wallpaper sample books, which were scattered about the easel, splayed open to his various selections. Sometimes, when we were having coffee, he hauled one of these books into his lap and thumbed through it as we talked. The samples provided the atmosphere of each portrait, swirling paisley, pointillist, pastoral; Philip worked the designs right into his subject’s coat sleeves and collar. But the face remained the same, instantly recognizable, the lunatic’s thinning, unkempt hair, the overgrown brows, the pugilistic glare, the scowling lips, the brutish jaw, reminding his audience that this was the son of a drunken thug, the epitome of the Romantic, the scourge of the drawing room, the enemy of livery, the doom of the aristocracy, the death of manners.

  “What is it you like about Beethoven?” I asked Phil one night when we were perched on the roof smoking cigarettes.

  “The later quartets,” he said. “Some of the symphonies. The Fifth, the Seventh, and the Ninth. Everybody likes those.”

  “No,” I said. “Not the music. What is it about his face that you like?”

  Phil considered my question. A mosquito landed on his arm, and he brushed it off with the back of his hand. “It’s easy to draw,” he said.

  As the summer burned on, I began to hate my job. I wasn’t good at it, and my boss had noticed. I could never remember who had ordered what, and I could carry only two cups of coffee at a time, whereas Betty, who had worked there for years, could carry four. Once I set a tray of sandwiches and drinks down on a portable serving table and the whole thing tipped over onto the floor. I sometimes forgot to squirt the ersatz whipped cream on the bread pudding. If the diners were impatient or rude, as, because of my ineptitude, they often were, I became sullen. I worked for tips, we all did, and I wasn’t doing very well.

  One night, after a particularly miserable shift, during which I had knocked over a water glass while serving a bowl of gumbo to a miserly spinster, a regular who disliked me, Phil and I were sitting on the roof batting our hands at the humid, bug-laden air and drinking lukewarm beer. I complained about my job, about my boss and the harridans in the kitchen, about my dislike of the customers and my refusal to curry favor to get bigger tips. “It doesn’t work anyway,” I said. “They know I’m faking it, and they hate me for it.”

  “You should never fake it,” he said. “If you can’t be authentic doing whatever you’re doing, you should do something else.”

  “I’m sure that’s true,” I said, though I wasn’t sure at all. “But this is the job I have.”

  “You should read Sartre,” he said. “Inauthenticity is a fatal disease. It kills you, one day at a time.”

  “So you think I should quit my job.”

  “The option is to take it seriously, engage in it, become it. While you’re a waitress, become a waitress and nothing else.”

  This was the first and probably the only advice Phil ever gave me. I drank my beer and mulled it over. It didn’t occur to me that Phil was unlikely to be the source of a recipe for successful living, and there was something in his formula—be engaged or be damned—that struck me as eminently reasonable. It still does. I had not, until that moment, identified myself simply as what I was, a waitress, and not a very good one. “It’s not easy,” I said, meaning my job.

  “It’s odd, isn’t it?” Phil said. “You’d think it would be hard to fake it, but evidently it isn’t.” He held out his hand to the rooftops spread like open books all around us. “Sometimes when I sit out here,” he said, “I think about what’s really going on under every one of these roofs. That’s the reason I like to paint this view, it’s the lid of the problem. Look how close together they are. It wouldn’t take much to burn the whole Quarter down; it’s happened before.” He extracted a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket, his lighter from his pants. “There’s a flashpoint down there somewhere. Sometimes I think if I just dropped a match in the right place…” He lit the cigarette and exhaled a mouthful of smoke. I considered the vision, flames leaping from the windows, bursting through the rooftops, the screams of the desperate residents clinging to the rickety staircases, jumping from their wrought-iron balconies to the stone courtyards below.

  “Then you’d see some authentic behavior,” Phil concluded.

  I tried taking Phil’s advice, but my efforts to become a waitress only made me more disgusted with myself at the end of my shift, when I counted out the paltry bills in my apron pocket. Phil was poor too, but at least he was doing what he wanted to do. Except for the weekly visits to my family, I spent my spare time with him, and I was comfortable with him, as I had never been with the high-spirited college boys who were like thoughtless children spinning about in circles on the lawn, intent on disorienting their senses. Phil was frugal, modest, and he seemed to personally like me. When I arrived at his door, he was genuinely pleased by the sight of me. When we went out together, he was attentive; his eyes did not wander the room looking for something more interesting.

  Walter Stack took five of the Beethovens, and in the next few weeks he sold three, which constituted a windfall for Philip. He was relieved to have the money; it was enough to pay his back rent and splurge on a bottle of wine, which we drank with the undercooked chicken cacciatore I whipped up in my gloomy kitchen. But something about this very limited success made Phil irritable and anxious. The fact that only three had sold was evidence that he need do no more, the craze was over. However, if the two remaining sold, as Walter expected they would, then he would be condemned to produce more, and the truth was, he was already sick of Beethoven. If he weren’t careful he would be the guy who did Beethoven, which evidently struck him as an appalling fate.

  “You don’t have to do nothing but Beethoven,” I protested. “Beethoven could be a sideline.”

  “I’m not a printmaker,” Phil snapped. “I don’t do editions. Every painting is different
. It has to be. One leads to the other.”

  “Didn’t Monet do a lot of water lilies?” I suggested hopefully. “And a series of Chartres Cathedral too. That was the same subject over and over.”

  Phil gave me a guarded look, which encouraged me. “Don’t artists always do a lot of studies before they finish a big project? Maybe all the Beethovens are just the warm-up for the big one.”

  Phil drained his glass and poured out another full one. “That’s ridiculous,” he said.

  “You like to paint the rooftops again and again,” I persisted. “You’ve said yourself you don’t tire of that.”

  “Well, that’s the point, isn’t it,” he said. “Every time I look out the window, it’s different. The light has changed; it’s cloudy or clear, or raining. It’s alive. Beethoven is dead.”

  That shut me up. I pushed the chicken around with my fork, sipped my wine, keeping my eyes down.

  “And I’m not Monet.” He said this resignedly, as if he didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

  I’ve never been much interested, as some women are, in trying to make something out of a man, in seeing his promise and compelling him to live up to it. I figured Phil was an artist and I wasn’t, so he probably knew more about being one than I did. Everyone agreed that artists were, by their nature, difficult people. Maybe Phil’s problem was that he wasn’t difficult enough. He certainly wasn’t egotistical, but he was stubborn. He did no more Beethovens that summer, and I said nothing more about it. He started doing self-portraits on the wallpaper samples, choosing some of the ugliest designs in the books, dark swirls and metallic stripes, paper for a child’s room with romping pink elephants chasing beach balls. There was something sinister about these pictures. The likeness was good, but the eyes were wrong, unfocused and as lightless as a blind man’s. As soon as they were done, Phil put them away in an old cardboard portfolio.

  One evening when we were drinking beer with Sid and Wendy, Sid asked Phil what he was working on. “I’m in transition,” Phil said. This answer struck me as unnecessarily vague; it wasn’t as if Phil was not working. “He’s doing self-portraits,” I said. Sid stroked his well-kept beard, an irritating habit he had. “On the wallpaper,” he said.

  “Sure,” Phil said. I started turning my coaster around on the table, waiting for Sid’s pronouncement, which would provoke the usual argument, but Sid said nothing. When I looked up, he was signaling the waitress. “I’ll buy a round,” he said.

  Phil drained the glass he’d been lingering over, his eyes fixed coldly on Sid’s back. If Sid was buying, it meant we were in for a lecture.

  “Thanks,” I said to Wendy, who smiled.

  “We’re celebrating,” she said. “We have good news.”

  Sid turned to us, his face radiating self-importance, but he left it to Wendy to satisfy our curiosity.

  “Sid’s taken a job at Dave Gravier’s agency.”

  Even I had heard of the Gravier agency, which had produced the stylish Jazz and Crawfish festival posters that hung in upscale restaurants and shops all over town. “That’s great,” I said.

  “It’s just part-time,” Sid said.

  Phil fumbled a cigarette from his pack, his mouth fixed in a lopsided smile. The waitress arrived with our beers and a basket of tortilla chips, which Sid pulled closer to himself.

  “So you sold out,” Phil said softly.

  Sid took a chip, bit it, chewed ruminatively as he rolled his eyes heavenward.

  “And I knew you would,” Phil added.

  Sid swallowed his chip while Wendy and I exchanged speculative glances. “It’s just part-time,” Sid repeated.

  “For now,” Phil said.

  “No, not just for now, Philip,” Sid insisted. “I made it very clear to Dave that I am only willing to work for him three days a week because I’m planning a new series of paintings, large canvases, bigger than anything I’ve done before, and they’ll be expensive to produce. So I’m willing to work part-time in order to increase my creative options, not, as you imply, to limit them, which means I’m not selling out. It’s the opposite of selling out. I’m interested in doing important work, lasting work, and I can’t do that by painting on grocery bags or feed sacks, or linoleum tiles I pull up from the kitchen floor. I need canvas and lots of it, big, sturdy frames, a lot of paint, and that stuff, as you may not know these days, my friend, because you are living in a dream, is expensive.”

  “Tell yourself that lie,” Phil said, giving me a sidelong glance that presupposed my agreement.

  “No,” I said. “I see your point.”

  “An artist has to live in the real world,” Sid informed us.

  “Right,” Phil snapped, stubbing his cigarette out in the ashtray. “And the real world has got to be a lot more comfortable than the one I’m living in. Which is what, would you say, some kind of antireality? A counterworld?”

  “Money is freedom,” Sid replied, ignoring, I thought, Phil’s excellent point, which was that everything is reality—suffering, success, poverty, wealth, a rat-infested hovel or a mansion, it’s all the same stuff. “And I need freedom to work. I’m not stymied. I’m not making excuses for myself, I’m not ‘in transition,’ I’m not afraid to work, and I’m not selling out to the establishment. I’m grateful for the establishment. I need money, and now I won’t have to worry about getting it and I can work in peace.”

  We were all quiet for a moment, listening to the fact that Sid had used Phil’s expression “in transition” as the locus of his general contempt. I expected Phil to fire back forcefully, but he just swallowed half his beer, set the glass down carefully, and said, “You’re clueless, Sid.”

  On the walk home, Phil was quiet. I chattered on about my visit with my parents, who were pressing me to go back to school, my dissatisfaction with my job, the roach problem in my kitchen, which boric acid wasn’t touching. We trudged up the stairs to Phil’s apartment, where the heat was packed in so tight it hurt to breathe. “For God’s sake,” I said, “turn on the air conditioner.”

  “It’s broken,” he said.

  I leaned against the table feeling my pores flush out across my forehead and back. “When did that happen?”

  “This morning.” Phil had stripped his shirt off and was bending over a stack of wallpaper sample books.

  “We can’t stay here,” I said. “Let’s go to my place. At least I have a fan.”

  “You go,” he said pleasantly. “There’s something I need to do here.”

  “Are you going to paint?”

  He gathered up a few of the sample books and carried them, weaving slightly, to the kitchen table. Then he pulled one of the jumbo garbage bags from the roll under the sink. “I’m getting rid of these,” he said.

  “Tonight?” I said. “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

  “No,” he said.

  I took up a dish towel and wiped it across my forehead. “It’s too hot, Phil,” I complained. “And I’m too tired.”

  “I don’t need help,” he said. “Just go to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  The thought of the comfortable bed in my clammy room off the alley was appealing. I rarely slept there because it was too narrow for both of us. The sheets were clean; the tick-tick of the oscillating fan always reminded me of sleeping at my grandmother’s house when I was a child. “I’m going,” I said.

  Phil scarcely looked up from the bagging of the sample books. “Goodnight,” he said. “Sleep well.”

  A few days later Phil and I stopped by Walter Stack’s gallery to see if the remaining Beethovens had sold. Phil had nothing new to offer; as far as I could tell, he had stopped painting and he was running out of money. “What is this? You’re coming here empty-handed?” Walter complained as soon as we were inside the door.

  “I’m working,” Phil replied. “I’ll have something in a few days.”

  I scanned the crowded walls and spotted Beethoven scowling out beneath a charcoal rendering of Charlie Chaplin. The famous-dead are
a, I presumed.

  “I was wondering if you’d sold any of the Beethovens,” Phil asked. Something in Walter brought out a diffidence in Phil that made my stomach turn.

  “I did sell one,” Walter said. “A lady from Oregon who plays the piano.” He turned to the cash register and punched the buttons until the drawer sprang open. I smiled at Phil; surely this was good news, but he was looking past me, out at the street, with an expression of such excitement mixed with fear that I turned to see what he saw. Two women were maneuvering an oversized portfolio through the heavy glass door. The one at the back was a tall, muscular redhead; the other, pushing in determinedly, was Ingrid.

  “Look,” Walter said. “Now here’s a working artist. What have you got for me, beautiful?”

  Ingrid’s hawkish eyes raked the room, drawing a bead on Phil, who was pocketing the single bill Walter had pulled from the register. “Hi, Phil,” she said, pleasantly enough.

  “Hello, Ingrid,” Phil replied. He stepped away from the counter, close to me, and I assumed he was about to introduce me. Having cleared the door, the two women passed us and lifted the portfolio to the counter. While Ingrid unfastened the ribbons along the side, her friend engaged Walter in light banter about another dealer. I craned my neck, hoping to get a look at Ingrid’s offering, but the counter was narrow and she was forced to hold the cover upright, blocking my view. Walter looked down doubtfully at whatever was displayed, working his jaw. I turned to Phil, thinking he must be as curious as I was.

  He was leaning away from me, his weight all on one leg, his shoulders oddly hunched, and as I watched, he raised one hand and pressed the knuckles lightly against his lips. The color had drained from his face, and he swayed as if he might collapse, yet there was a vibration of energy around him, a kind of heat. His dark eyes were fixed with a febrile intensity on Ingrid’s back, bathing her with such a combination of sweetness, longing, and terror that I thought she must feel it. Or hear it. Indeed, his expression aroused in me sensations similar to those evoked by the commencement of certain melancholy music: a shiver along the spine, the silencing of the inner colloquy, all the senses arrested by an unwelcome yet irresistible revelation of suffering.