Sea Lovers by Valerie Martin

self-serving protest. That and the fact that what I felt for Maria was much more than admiration and I had no doubt it showed, that Anspach had seen it. He knew I wanted to take Maria away from him. He also knew I couldn’t do it.
    After that night I saw less and less of Maria. Sometimes she still came by in the afternoons when Anspach was in town, but she never stayed long and seemed anxious to be back in their loft before he got home. She had picked up a third grueling, thankless job, three days a week at an art supply house in Soho. The pay was minimum wage, but she got a discount on paint, which had become the lion’s share of her monthly budget. Anspach was turning out paintings at an astounding rate, and the cadmium yellow that went into his blue was ten dollars a tube. The discount went to his head, and more and more paint went onto each canvas. He was cavalier about the expense, passing on his nearly empty tubes to Paul because he couldn’t be bothered to finish them. Paul had invented a special device, a kind of press, to squeeze the last dabs of color from his paint tubes.
    It was about that time that I met Yvonne Remy, Paul’s sister, who had come down from Vermont to study art history at NYU. She was staying with Paul until she could find a place of her own, and the three of us soon fell into a routine of dinners together several nights a week, taking turns on the cooking. Yvonne was quick-witted and energetic, and she loved to talk about painting. Gradually we all noticed that she was spending more time at my place than at her brother’s, and gradually we all came to feel that this was as it should be.
    Yvonne was there that afternoon when I last saw Maria. She hadn’t visited me in three weeks. She looked exhausted, which wasn’t surprising, but there was something more than that, something worse than that, a listlessness beyond fatigue. The rabbits came running as they always did when Maria arrived, and she brightened momentarily as she bent down to caress them, but I noticed she had forgotten to bring a carrot.
    Yvonne responded to her with that sudden affinity of kindness women sometimes show each other for reasons that are inexplicable to men. She warmed the milk for the coffee, which she did not always bother with for herself, and set out some fruit, cheese, and bread. When Maria showed no interest in this offering, Yvonne got up, put a few cookies on a plate, and seemed relieved when Maria took one and laid it on the saucer of her cup. Maria leaned over her chair to scratch a rabbit’s ears, then sat up and took a bite of the cookie. “John,” she said, her eyes still on the docile creatures at her feet. “You’ll always take care of these rabbits, won’t you?”
    “Of course,” I assured her. “These rabbits and I are in this together.”
    When she was gone, Yvonne sat at the table idly turning her empty cup.
    “She seems so tired,” I said.
    “She’s in despair,” Yvonne observed.

    Then a few things happened very quickly. I didn’t find out about any of it until it was all over and Maria was gone. Anspach was offered a space in a three-man show with two up-and-coming painters at the Rite gallery. This coup, Paul told me later, with a grimace of pain at the pun, was the result of Anspach’s fucking Mrs. Rite on the floor of her office and suggesting to her, postcoitus, that she was the only woman in New York who could understand his work. I didn’t entirely believe this story; it didn’t sound like Anspach to me, but evidently it was true, for within three months Mrs. Rite had left Mr. Rite and Anspach was the star of her new gallery, Rivage, which was one of the first to move south into Tribeca.
    Paul maintained that Anspach told Maria about his new alliance, omitting none of the details, though it is possible that she heard about it somewhere else. Mrs. Rite was not bothered by the gossip; in fact she was rumored to have been the source of much of it. As far as Anspach was