Sea Lovers by Valerie Martin

be pleasant, but she didn’t doubt that she could do it. Five years ago she would have called on a man to do it and stayed in the house until the corpse was gone. Now there was no one to call, and no need to call anyone, for she could certainly put this dead body in a bag and transfer it to the curb. She was different now and better now. As a young woman she had been in constant fear, but that fear was gone. It was true that her loneliness was hard to bear; it made her foolish and because of it she imagined that rich, idle young men might be in love with her. It was time to face it, she told herself. Her own youth was gone; it was permanently, irretrievably gone. But it was worth that confession to be rid of the fear that had been for her the by-product of dependence. She shrugged against the dreariness of this revelation and bent her will to the task before her.
    She touched the cat’s side, brushing away some bits of wood that were stuck there. Beneath the wet, soft, dead fur was a wall of flesh as hard as stone. This unpromising rigidity was the cruelest of death’s jokes on the living. She imagined that rough treatment might snap the corpse in half, like a thin tube of glass. She lifted the back a little and pulled the bag up to the animal’s middle. As she did this she became aware of her own voice in the cold air, addressing the dead cat. “Well, my friend,” she was saying, “I wish I’d known; I could have saved you this.”
    He was a pathetic sight, with his stiff, wet limbs, half in a plastic bag, the red-and-black label with a great surging silver fish across it all that distinguished his head. It was sad, she thought, such a silly, useless death, though he was certainly not the first creature ever to lose his life in an effort to avoid starvation. She touched his hard, cold side at the place where she thought his heart might be; she patted him softly there. “Poor cat,” she said. “While I was tossing around in there worrying about my little heartbreak, you were out here with this.”
    And she thought of the wall of her bedroom and how she had fretted on one side of it while death stalked on the other side. Tomorrow his prey might be something big; it might be a man or a child. That night it had just been a cat. But he had stalked all the same and waited and watched. It had taken the cat hours to die, with death cold and patient nearby, waiting for what he could claim; man or beast, it was the same to him.
    But that was absurd, she thought. The unyielding flesh beneath her hand told her it was not so. The great fluidity, the sinuousness that was in the nature of these animals, had simply gone out of this one. Death had come from the inside and life had gone out. So that’s it, she thought. She lifted her hand, held it before her, and gazed down into her own palm. “It comes from the inside,” she said.
    Anne pushed the bag aside and lifted the dead cat in her arms. She held him in her arms like a dead child and then she laid him in the bag and pulled the sides up over him. She carried him through the yard to the street. Later two men came by in a truck and took the bag away. The cat was gone. It began to rain again and grow colder still. That night, in that city, there was the hardest freeze in fifty years. Pipes burst, houses flooded, and the water pressure was so low that several buildings burned to the ground while the firemen stood about, cursing the empty hoses they held in their cold and helpless hands.



HIS BLUE PERIOD
    For anyone who has met Meyer Anspach since his success, his occasional lyrical outbursts on the subject of his blue period may be merely tedious, but for those of us who actually remember the ceaseless whine of paranoia that constituted his utterances at that time, Anspach’s rhapsodies on the character-building properties of poverty are infuriating. Most of what he says about those days is sheer fabrication, but two things are true: He was poor—we all were—and he was