Constance (17 page)

—Come in, Constance.

I was stretched out on my daybed, fully clothed, one hand behind my head, spectacles sliding down my nose, my other hand flat on the incomplete manuscript of
The Conservative Heart
that was lying on my chest. She thought I loved it more than I loved her. What she didn’t know was that I’d started to hate it. But I couldn’t leave it alone. I couldn’t finish it but I couldn’t abandon it either. It was like my marriage, that damn book.

—Am I disturbing you?

When had she ever asked me that before? When had she knocked on my door? Before, when she wanted to talk to me she just marched right in.

—Sit down. What is it?

—Are you going to throw me out?

She sat on the edge of the armchair. Her robe fell open. I saw her long bare legs, a faint tracery of blue veins visible under the pale flesh of her thigh. In that moment I desired her. She was unfamiliar to me and despite everything she fascinated me. She covered herself. She felt desperate, she said. I told her Howard needed a mother.

—Iris needed a mother once, she said.

—I’m talking about Howard.

—You’ve never spoken to me about this before, she said.

—You like the boy. He seems to like you. Where else can he go?

I gazed at her over my spectacles.

—That’s it? she said.

—What else do you want to know?

—Where are you going to sleep?

—In the spare room.

—How clipped and tidy it all is, she said.

I desired her, yes, but I wanted to sleep in the spare room. She wasn’t ready to fight me then and I was glad of it. I’d had enough of her. I wanted her to leave me alone. She stood up and examined the papers on my desk. She saw a mock-up of a book cover I’d been idly sketching,
The Conservative Heart
in block capitals, my name in smaller letters beneath, all superimposed on a drawing of an eagle perched on a crag. There was lightning in the sky and copious black storm clouds rolling in.

—You knew it would turn out this way, she said. You’ve always known it.

—What way did it turn out?

—You knew you’d find yourself married to a slut. It’s what you wanted.

—I haven’t got anything else to say to you.

—I’m serious, she said. You adored me once. Then you realized I was damaged goods and you despise me for it just like Daddy.

—In which case the answer’s no, I didn’t think I’d find myself married to a slut.

—You thought I was a good woman.

—Yes, Constance, I did, and I still do.

It cost me something to say this but she pretended not to hear it. Instead she stood up and stretched. Now she felt feline: I knew that mood. Cats are flighty, amoral. Promiscuous.

—That’s something, she said. I’m going to bed.

She paused by the desk and picked up my sketch.

—What’s the opposite of a conservative heart? she said.

What a strange question. I thought about it.

—A fatherless child.

That stung her, as it was supposed to. The fatherless child is the radical, the revolutionary: the one who tears down the institutions that conservatism reveres. For Constance of course it meant something quite different. She left the room, and as she closed the door behind her she said: You should have put a fucking vulture.

Constance was in a state of moral collapse at this time. Her father had wreaked havoc with her fragile identity and in her distress she’d run not to me but to a stranger. In the account she later gave me of those days, certain words recur.
Release. Escape.
Defended. Trap. Facade. Terror.
When she thought about her life and the problems she faced both upstate and in Manhattan, she believed it was all connected to her childhood. To be confronted with evidence of betrayal from an early age, and to then reflect on the breakdown of her marriage, this was to recognize
determinism
at work, she said. I have little time for determinists. I saw her behavior as another of her increasingly desperate attempts to displace responsibility for what she was doing, and what she was doing was punishing her father by punishing me. I was aware that in Constance’s mind I represented a patriarchal principle she felt she must attack. This didn’t change even after Iris died, when everything else did change.

For two days after our conversation in Central Park I said nothing. Then one afternoon I asked her to join me in the sitting room. She came quietly enough. She asked me if I had any cigarettes. I didn’t. She walked to the window and stared out, drumming her fingers on the sill. She flung herself into an armchair and crossed her legs. She picked at the hem of her dress. I waited a few seconds until the tiny telltale flecks of red began to appear along her cheekbones. Then I asked her to tell me about it.

—What do you want me to tell you?

—The truth.

—The truth! What truth?

I wanted the truth but without having to force it out of her. I think now that I was wrong to do this, because she then told me she’d give me any truth I wanted. I said no, I wanted
the
truth and she said, Fine. She gazed at the ceiling. Her lips moved silently as they had in the motel in Montauk. She then described how this man Eddie Castrol came to her office one afternoon,
this was after she returned from Ravenswood the last time. She said she left the building with him and they took a cab to the Dunmore Hotel. I said she must have known him well for him to come to her office like that but she denied it. She then described pacing around his room as he lay on the bed. I asked her when she’d first met him. Why hadn’t she said anything about him?

—You were away.

—But when I returned.

—It didn’t seem important.

The first time was when Iris took her to the hotel. Constance thought they were just going for a drink but when they went through to the cocktail lounge Eddie was there. He was playing the piano. Iris told her that he was her lover and that this time it was the real thing. Then as they stood in the doorway, watching him, Iris asked her if he reminded her of Daddy.

—And did he? I said.

—No. It was all in her mind.

There’d been some conversation in the cocktail lounge and then the three of them went to a bar in the Village to hear jazz. They’d made a night of it. She smiled a little at the memory of it. Three swells on a bender, she said, but I had no time for that sort of talk. I asked her how the night ended.

—Iris got drunk, Eddie kissed her good night, and I took her home in a cab.

—Who was he looking at?

—What?

—Who was he looking at while he was kissing Iris?

I needed to know this. Constance regarded me as though I were mad. Then she realized what I was after.

—Who do you think?

—Was he looking at you?

—Yes, Sidney, he was. He was looking straight at me.

There was disdain in her tone now. I pressed on. I made her tell me about their next encounter. She’d met him by chance in the subway. They’d gone to a coffee shop near Union Square. What did they talk about?

—We talked about him and Iris.

—What did he say?

—He said it was hard on Iris. She was just a kid. She took everything too seriously.

—What else did he say?

—He asked me if I was faithful.

I’d thought this would be difficult for her. I was discovering it was far more difficult for me.

—What did he say exactly?

—He said: You faithful?

—What did you say?

—Mind your own business.

—You mean you said that to him.

—No. Yes.

They’d agreed to meet in the coffee shop the next day for lunch. She didn’t show up. She didn’t feel strong enough, she said. I asked her to please continue. Now a few months had passed and they were in his room in the hotel. What happened next?

She told him she couldn’t do it.

So why was she there?

—Just come lie beside me, he said.

She lay beside him for a little while but she was very uneasy,
she said. He leaned across her to crush out his cigarette in the ashtray. As he hung over her she touched his face.

—You think I’m a fool, she said.

—No, I don’t think that.

Again she fell silent.

—Go on, Constance, I said.

He tried to kiss her but she turned her head aside. But she didn’t get up off the bed. He still hung over her, his face a few inches from hers. She smelled liquor and tobacco on his breath.

—Then what? I said.

She stared at me and her face was for a moment full of pity. She said she asked him to say something. He said her name. He kissed her.

—Who are you, Eddie? she said.

But it was only the mind giving up the ghost, she said, the last convulsion before it died and anything resembling thinking simply ceased to be. Whatever takes over, she said, it took over. This was why she was there. She wanted to
stop thinking.
She wanted to
stop feeling.
What followed was angry and passive at the same time, she said, and she wept throughout. Later, exhausted, but feeling empty at last, all rage discharged, she lay beside him in silence. She said she’d never known it like that before. She’d only known it with me.

She gazed at me with a pleasant expression, as though to say: So there’s nothing to worry about.

—Go on.

—Are you sure?

She then said she understood the immensity of what she was telling me. She doubted that any man could take it.

—Not even you, Sidney.

She laughed, then she said that I’d never be able to forgive her. But hadn’t she given me what I wanted? Her tone was casual. She was lighting a cigarette.

—Go on, damn you, I cried.

But when he became aroused again she panicked. She pulled clear of him and sat up with one arm thrust out, palm open and fingers spread, and told him no, it was enough, but he didn’t hear her! He turned her on her front and held her down—

A long silence here.

—And then?

—He put it in me.

—Where?

—In my ass.

I felt sick. Constance blew smoke at the ceiling.

—All right, I said, that’s enough.

It was more than enough. I’d asked for the truth, was that it? Or was that a story she’d just invented so as to cause me pain? If that’s what she intended she’d succeeded. I tried once more. I was nothing if not a glutton. I asked her how often.

—How often? she said.

—Yes, how often!

She told me they’d had sex seventeen times altogether and each time she wept, she didn’t know why.

—Did he give you that ring? I said.

—Mind your own business.

So much for candor. Of course he did. Who else would have given it to her?

Was it only the sex?

Eddie Castrol wasn’t the type of man ever to speak of his feelings, but he seemed to want her and it was enough.

So it was only the sex, and the sex occurred because she was in shock after discovering what had happened to the man she believed to be her father.

Afterward he’d go back downstairs to the cocktail lounge. She’d follow him a few minutes later. She’d watch him from a dark booth as he played songs of loss and heartbreak.

I told her I had one last question.

—Shoot, she said with placid composure.

—What about Iris?

—What about her?

—Does she know?

—She doesn’t know unless you told her.

—I haven’t told her.

I was in Iris’s apartment in Chinatown. The Bowery seemed more depressing every time I went to visit her. I felt dread there, a sense of imminent violence. The voices in the street were angry. The gestures were threatening. A woman alone down there wasn’t safe. I told Sidney that Iris should move uptown, at least to the Village. Better to be among bohemians than psychopaths. One day I had to step over a dirty bum lying asleep in the lobby of her tenement and it was so dark I almost trod on his head. I tried to give Iris money but she wouldn’t take it. Too proud. Too stubborn. Stupid girl, I thought. She needed a man in her life but ever since it ended with Eddie there’d been a few one-night stands, nothing more, she said. She didn’t confide in me anymore. I suspected she knew I’d had a hand in the breakup.

It was five in the afternoon and I’d come down on the subway after work. Her door was open when I got upstairs and she was in her bathrobe still. Her hair was tied up in a messy knot and she was wearing her black-framed spectacles. She’d gained weight. She looked older. She’d lost that buoyant, girlish bloom. I must have said something because she started to tell me about
her new plan. She was spending the last of her savings on a six-week course in bartending. Through some operation of her own bizarre logic she thought that if she worked around alcohol she’d drink less of it. I told her she was insane. She said maybe I was right. Then she asked me how it was going with Sidney. I didn’t tell her he was about to throw me out on the street for what I did with Eddie Castrol. Instead I said he was worried about his book. He couldn’t finish it. She listened with lowered eyes. I’d never seen her so cast down and I was disturbed. Iris didn’t bottle up her feelings. Then she told me about a rumor she’d heard.

—They’re closing the Dunmore.

—Eddie’s out of a job then.

I thought, Say the man’s name or you’ll make her suspicious.

—Don’t you care? she said quietly. I’ve seen you there, you know.

I asked her what she was talking about. More than once, she said. Then I had my head in my hands. For weeks she’d been going to the hotel just to watch him pass through the lobby. She often talked to him, she liked to make her presence known. She’d seen me go upstairs with him and again in the lobby on my way out.

—Got a cigarette?

She flung a pack on the table. I asked her if she’d talked to him about me and she said, Oh yes. Eddie hadn’t told me any of this. She went over to the window and looked down at the street for a while.

—How could you do that to me?

—I know.

—You had no
right
to do that! Not without asking.

—I know.

—You’re supposed to be on my side.