Sea Lovers

by Valerie Martin

  Wild-a nights, Edith thought. The bookstore clerk approached and asked if he could be of assistance.

  “I’m looking for a book of poetry,” Edith said. “Unnatural Disasters, by Edith Sharpe.”

  “We don’t have that,” the boy said indifferently. He had a long face, pockmarked skin, and a prissy British accent. “We don’t carry much American poetry.” He walked away to another customer, who was going through a stack of travel books.

  Edith went out into the street, still so absorbed in her thoughts about the Zinnias that she nearly collided with a motorino parked on the thin strip of cobblestone that passed for a sidewalk. When the awful business with Isabel’s student Melanie blew up, Mark was as hateful and stupid as the rest of them. But one afternoon Lulu had come into Edith’s office, closing the door behind her and leaning against it. “I just want to tell you,” she said, “that I don’t think these charges against Isabel are entirely fair.”

  “Of course they aren’t,” Edith said. “But no one really cares about that much, do they?”

  “Melanie Pringle was my student last year.”

  “Did she make a pass at you?”

  Lulu’s eyes widened at this thought. “No. But she’s no innocent.” Then, clearly horrified by what she had just said, she pulled the door open and slipped out into the hall.

  “Turn it off, turn it off,” Edith said, rising from her chair in desperation. “I can’t look at any more breasts.”

  Isabel scowled. “You are so puritanical,” she observed. She changed the channel to a panel show in which three women were perched on a narrow couch gibbering into one another’s cleavage. Edith stalked toward the kitchen. “It’s not puritanical to detest seeing women degraded to nothing but mammary glands on stilts, which appears to be the highest goal of the female in this ridiculous country.”

  Isabel studied the television screen. “You’re jealous because they are so beautiful and they enjoy being beautiful.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Edith said to the stove. “I am not jealous of women who choose to be bimbos.” She pulled the coffeepot from the rack and poured water into the base. “Do you want coffee?” she shouted.

  Isabel clicked off the television. “Yes,” she called back.

  Edith struggled with the espresso packet, attempting to open it with a dull knife. “There are scissors in the drawer,” Isabel advised her from the doorway. Edith looked at her, scowling as the knife pulled free of the packet and the coffee exploded across the counter. “Surely you can see these women are just cows in need of milking?” she said, reaching for the sponge.

  Isabel smiled. “They do love their breasts,” she said. “And why shouldn’t they? They’re lovely. I’ve never wanted large breasts myself; that’s impossible for a dancer. It just doesn’t work to have anything bouncing around. But if I had breasts as pretty as Giovanna Bottini’s, I certainly wouldn’t wear mannish suits like the news announcers in America.”

  “Who is Giovanna Bottini?”

  “The one with the talk show.”

  Edith tightened the top of the caffettiera as hard as she could, set it on the burner, and lit the flame with the sparker. So Giovanna Bottini was not the woman at the reading. “How can you have a talk show if everyone is preoccupied with presenting her breasts and no one listens?” she said gloomily. “It’s depressing. It’s like the poetry reading. Why have a poetry reading if no one is going to listen? Why not just have a party and spend the money on food?”

  “Oh yes,” Isabel replied. “It’s so much better to sit in an icy little room reading to dreary overweight women in parkas who tell you how liberating it is for them to think about how much you despise men.”

  “I don’t despise men, Isabel, as you well know. I have many friends who are men. I hate the patriarchy and with good cause, as a purely cursory reading of history will prove.”

  The coffeepot began to hiss. “I’ll heat the milk,” Isabel said.

  When they had carried their cups to the table, Isabel pursued the subject. “Why do these Italian women bother you so much?” she asked seriously. “You don’t mind it when I wear almost nothing and leap about on the stage. Why isn’t that depressing?”

  “It’s completely different,” Edith said. “You’re an artist. It’s not your body you put on display, it’s your art. You’ve made your body into something sublime with which you express an ideal of beauty that has nothing to do with tits on parade.”

  Isabel considered this for a moment. “No, that’s not true,” she concluded. “For me, dance is entirely sensual and erotic. I don’t care about ethereal ideals of beauty. I use my body as a medium for the expression of extreme states of desire.”

  Right, Edith thought. She set her cup down carefully in the saucer. “How can you say that to me?” she said, glaring at her own hand. She was never able to look at Isabel when she was angry.

  Isabel allowed the harshness of this question to darken the air between them. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  Edith kept her eyes lowered, running through the menu of cutting replies that appeared behind her eyes.

  Isabel answered her own question. “You’re talking about Melanie Pringle,” she said. “All this is about Melanie Pringle, isn’t it? All this hostility toward sexuality and beauty. I thought if we came here we could get away from all that and have a pleasant time together, but I see you’ve packed Melanie up and brought her along.”

  “Just don’t tell me about your extreme states of desire,” Edith said, “and maybe I won’t be reminded of what they cost us.”

  “There was nothing extreme about it,” Isabel protested. “She waited in the dressing room until the others were gone and she put her arms around me and kissed me.”

  “What made her think she could do that?” Edith asked coldly. “She must have been pretty confident about what your response would be.”

  “She’s a beautiful, rich young woman,” Isabel replied. “No one tells her no. She’s made out of confidence, that’s all she is. And when she realized I didn’t care for her, she got angry and decided to destroy me.”

  “Was that the reason?” Edith sniffed. “That’s reassuring.”

  “It’s a stupid mess, she’s a stupid girl, but it has nothing to do with us. We can’t let her drive us apart. Now that would be folly.”

  Edith felt something in her chest contracting, as if her heart had turned into a fist. “I guess it just doesn’t occur to you that I might feel humiliated,” she said. “That having my colleagues all fall silent when I enter a room because they’ve been talking about you, because they feel sorry for me, that having Lulu Zinnia, for God’s sake, look at me with pity because I live with you, that I find that humiliating, and that this stupid mess, as you call it, has everything to do with us. It will probably be the end of us, especially if you lose your job.”

  “You care what Lulu Zinnia thinks more than what I think!” Isabel exclaimed. “How can you possibly care what a tedious, bourgeois housewife like Lulu Zinnia thinks of you? You despise Lulu; you’ve insulted her publicly. You despise most of your colleagues, and rightfully so, they’re a pack of hypocrites. What does it matter what they think of us? They already have so many horrible thoughts about us just because we’re together, what will a cunning new twist add? Do you want to be like them, Edith? Tell me now, because I need to know. Do you want us to bind ourselves to their narrow, empty morality so that you can hold up your head and not feel humiliated by people you despise?”

  “I don’t despise Lulu. I despise her poetry,” Edith corrected.

  “All the more reason to dismiss her cheap sympathy.”

  Edith drank her coffee, though she didn’t taste it. “It’s not that I care what they think. I’m afraid of what they can do. You know what’s in the works; you know what’s going to happen when we get back. If you get sacked for harassing a student, you won’t be able to find a job anywhere.”

  “I’m not going back,” Isabel said abruptly.
Edith shrugged and blew out her breath. “I’m not,” Isabel insisted. “I’m not going to go on trial and be judged by those lifeless puppets. And anyway, I can’t go back now. I’ve accepted a position here, starting in the fall.”

  Edith was so astounded she clutched her head between her hands. “What have you done?” she whispered.

  This is what Isabel had done. While Edith had been absorbed in the conference activities, Isabel had been talking, talking, talking, and making plans for them both. Her college friend had offered her a position at his academy, which operated partly for students but was also the studio of a professional company. “I won’t be teaching overweight girls who lurch around like frightened sheep,” she said. “These are real dancers.” She had also made inquiries at the university, where Edith’s appearances had been wildly popular. A new program in feminist studies was being planned for the advanced English students, and Isabel’s informants assured her that if Edith showed an inclination to accept a position, one would be offered.

  “It’s not that simple,” Edith said. “I’ve been at the college for fifteen years. I have tenure, a good retirement plan. I can’t just throw all that over for a job that may have no future.”

  “You’re in a job that has no future now!” Isabel exclaimed. “If you stay there you’ll end up like the rest of them, with their policies and their committees and their horror of sex and joy and life. You’ll dry up like a prune. Think how happy we could be here. We’ll find an apartment with a terrazzo. No snow, no disgusting galoshes and parkas! You’ll be like a flower opening in the sun.”

  “There’s more to life than good weather and coffee,” Edith said drily. “And I don’t want to be a flower.”

  “You’re being impossible,” Isabel said, getting up from the table. She went to the window, where she stood looking out into the noisy street. Overhead they heard the screech of furniture being dragged across the floor; they had heard the same sound every evening of their stay, though they never heard anything dragged back. Edith sat at the table, hunched forward, her hands folded before her, and she thought, I’m sitting like an old woman. She straightened her spine and looked at Isabel.

  It all felt dismally familiar. They were at the middle point of an argument they had been through a thousand times: reason versus passion, vitality versus stability. Sometimes, when Isabel was so frustrated and stymied by her career that she became depressed and Edith had to buck her up, they had even switched sides. But this time a resolution of these irreconcilable differences would have to be found, because it was not just philosophies that were at odds but material possibilities.

  Edith observed the sad tilt of Isabel’s still firm chin, the downcast eyes, the line of her elegant nose casting a shadow like a blade across her cheek. She was forty-one years old, and she was panicked. Edith herself was a threat to her, being part and parcel of the intolerable status quo. Now she’ll tell me America is killing her, Edith thought.

  Isabel came from the window and rested her hands on the table, leaning into them. “I can’t live in that place,” she said. “It’s like being slowly asphyxiated. I feel alive here. Rome is full of disorder and messiness, all the things Americans are terrified of because they prefer death to life. That’s why they are so in love with machines, which are dead, and why they prefer communicating with one another using code names so they can’t be identified.”

  Even as she was annoyed by this argument, which she had heard before, the sideline about technology amused Edith; it was so like Isabel to deploy her grievances in squadrons.

  “If you care for me at all, you won’t ask me to go back there,” Isabel concluded.

  “Wait,” Edith said. “I wasn’t aware I had any choice in the matter. Would you go back if I asked you?”

  Isabel looked into her eyes with such desperation that it hurt Edith to see it. “I don’t know,” she said.

  Edith pictured Isabel sitting at the end of a long table as a group of men somberly considered the charges against her. It crossed her mind that Melanie Pringle was not entirely an accident, that Isabel had, in some unconscious way, been looking for Melanie. “I don’t think you should go back,” Edith said. “I think you’ve done the right thing.”

  “Then you’ll stay with me here?”

  “I hate it here, Isabel.”

  “I’ve lived ten years in a place I hate for you,” Isabel retorted.

  “That’s just not true. You’ve been trying to leave the college since the day you got there. You didn’t stay for me, you stayed because the only other position you were offered was in Arizona.”

  “I would have gone to Arizona if it hadn’t been for you,” Isabel said. “That’s how much I hate it there.”

  “I just don’t think I can work here,” Edith said. “I haven’t written a word since we’ve been here.”

  “That’s all you really care about,” Isabel snapped. “Your bitter, hateful poems.” Then she burst into tears.

  Edith was unmoved by Isabel’s tears. Her head was aching and she was nauseated. “So the poetry has to go too,” she said. “What do you think will be left of me?”

  “I didn’t say you shouldn’t write it,” Isabel whimpered. “I said you shouldn’t care about it so much.”

  Edith thought her head would burst at this remark. “Suppose I tell you to stop caring about dance,” she said.

  “I didn’t say you should give it up!” Isabel protested, drying her eyes on her sleeve.

  “There’s nothing you won’t say when you’re not getting what you want,” Edith said. She pushed her chair back and staggered away from the table.

  “Where are you going?” Isabel asked coldly.

  “To get some aspirin,” Edith said. “My head is killing me.”

  Your bitter, hateful poems, Edith thought. She was sitting at a table in the small, whitewashed anteroom of the lecture hall, attaching strips of sticky paper to the pages of her books. There were four books, plus a loose manuscript of uncollected work. She was putting off looking at the date of the most recent poem.

  She had more and more difficulty writing, and she knew it was not entirely the fault of European travel. Perhaps, she told herself, she was going through a transition, and exciting, original work lay ahead. She need only be patient and alert, waiting to hear the new voice, to recognize the new path. Poems that came less easily would be more telling.

  Or perhaps the truth was that she had exhausted the vein of her poetry and there was nothing left to draw from it, neither blood nor gold. There had been a time when her head was always filled with phrases and lines, presenting themselves wantonly for her inspection like contestants in a beauty pageant, and she went to her desk with a strange, nearly erotic excitement. Were these poems hateful? It was true that the metaphors reviewers used to describe them frequently included sharp edges: knives, razor blades, a surgeon’s scalpel. Here, in fact, was a sonnet titled “Incision,” which was ostensibly about their cat Jasper’s neutering, though there was some play with the word incisive, and the wounding, emasculating power of language. She would read that one; it would remind Isabel of Jasper, whom she missed.

  They had argued late into the night. For the first time in ten years they had gone to sleep in anger, though Edith thought she remembered Isabel’s hand seeking her own, perhaps in sleep. In the morning they hardly spoke, both puffy-eyed and bleary over their coffee. It was the last day of the conference and Edith had a full schedule. Isabel planned to lunch with a friend, then arrive at the university in time for the reception before the reading. As she was packing up her books, Edith said, “You don’t have to come, you know. You’ve heard it all before.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Isabel said. “Of course I’m coming.”

  Edith turned a few pages, scanning titles, looking over the compact display each poem made on the page. The window next to her table was open, and the warm air was damp, musty, with a torpid movement that was more like an exhalation than a breeze. August must be an inferno,
Edith thought, and smiled as the legend The Divine Comedy passed across her brain. Outside someone shouted a greeting to someone else, and there was a burst of laughter. The students were affectionate with one another and almost absurdly respectful of their professors. One of the coordinators had told Edith that all exams were oral; the students had to sit before a group of their professors and answer questions. Like the Inquisition, Edith thought. Italy had a lot to offer.

  She patted her upper lip, where a few drops of moisture had gathered. Here was the poem “Icescapes.” She had written it after a terrific storm when she and Isabel had not been able to get out of the house because the doors froze shut. It was a poem about jealousy; Isabel had flirted outrageously with a visiting poet at a dinner the night before. The dinner, then the storm. All night they had listened to the trees cracking, branches hurtling down like ice swords, and in the morning, when they looked out the window, it was as if the world was made of glass. She would definitely read this poem, which would seem exotic to her Roman audience. Carefully she laid a strip of paper against the margin of the page and wrote the title on the list for Amelia, who would be reading the translations with her. Wouldn’t the double entendre on the words ice pick get lost in translation? This seemed amusing, the idea that richness, nuance, got lost in translation. Where did it go? She imagined the land of what was lost in translation, imagined herself in it.

  She was happy doing this, making these choices, browsing through this world of her own making; she felt at ease, at rest. Tonight’s audience, Amelia had told her, would be larger than on the first night, and a greater proportion of it would be serious students of English who were familiar with her work. She felt the pleasant excitement she often had before a reading, hoping her delivery of the poems would be illuminating, giving her audience a sense of greater intimacy with the words on the page.