“The room is a success? It pleases you?”
He had not meant to make the remark a question. The fact that he did seemed to irritate Constance more. She was very thin-skinned about criticism.
“I like it. It suits … me.”
Her tone was defiant. Stern looked out the window: a winter dusk; snow was falling. He turned back to his wife, who was now fiddling with pens, paper, envelopes, as if impatient he should leave.
Constance’s head was bent. The lamp on the table made a circle about her. In its light, her black hair shone. It was cut in an angular way, across her forehead, flaring out in a wedge shape either side of her delicate jaw. It gave her an Egyptian look, a look much admired, much copied. Stern, who could see that the effect was beautiful, missed the old hairstyle. He had preferred the suggestivity of that long and abundant hair, which, when the pins and combs were removed, could tumble about bared shoulders. This, he knew, was the Edwardian in him. His tastes were old-fashioned.
Constance fiddled with one of the many bracelets she wore. She smoothed the skirt of her dress. Stern’s gaze seemed to make her uncomfortable. The dress, made for her by one of her French designer friends, was a dramatic, an electric blue—a color few women could wear. Its skirt was short, the cut of the shoulders somewhat mannish. Stern, able to see that the effect was elegant, disliked the dress. He still could not accustom himself to high heels, bared legs, the seams of stockings, the assertiveness of a painted face. He felt a moment’s regret for the fashions of the past, for clothes that revealed less and promised more. He was, he thought, growing old.
“You’re going out?” Constance put her notebook in a drawer.
“My dear, yes. That was what I came in to say. Not for long. An hour or so. You remember the South African I mentioned—the one from De Beers? He’s staying at the Plaza. Just passing through. I have to see him.”
“Oh, there’s always someone you have to see.” She made another face. She rose. “You know what I wish sometimes? I wish you had lost all your money last year—like other people. I wish you had gone phut! in the crash. Then we could have gone away, just the two of us, and lived somewhere very simply.”
“My dear. You would dislike that very much, I think. I apologize for not going phut, as you put it. I was always prudent, as you know.”
“Oh, prudence. I hate prudence—”
“I did make some losses, in any case. Everyone did.”
“Did you, Montague?” She gave him an odd, fixed look. “I can’t imagine that somehow. Making gains, yes. Losses—no.”
“We all make them occasionally, Constance.”
Something in the way Stern said this seemed to disconcert her. She gave a toss of her head.
“Maybe so. Maybe so. Well, if you’re going, go—I don’t want to make you late. For your South African.”
“I’ll be back around seven, Constance.”
“Fine. Fine.” She sat down again at her writing table. “We should leave for the party at eight—you hadn’t forgotten?”
“No. I shall be back in good time.”
“I’m sure you will. You were always punctual.” She consulted her small wristwatch. “Two hours, for your South African? He must be important. On a Saturday too.”
“It may not take so long. I’ll be back as soon as possible.”
“Oh, don’t rush on my account. I have plenty to do. You must give him your full attention.”
Stern went out. He ignored the edge in her voice. He closed the door. He paused. As he had expected, Constance at once picked up the telephone.
A small click as she raised the receiver. She spoke in lowered tones; Stern did not stay to eavesdrop. He knew who it was she would be calling—his wife, that self-appointed spy in the house of love. She would be calling the latest firm of private investigators.
Outside the house—which was located close to the apartment building on Fifth Avenue where I later lived with Constance—Stern paused. To reach the Plaza Hotel, and a nonexistent appointment with a South African useful to him the previous year but now safely in Johannesburg, Stern would have turned left and walked south. Instead, glancing up and down the avenue, he turned right and headed north.
He walked at a leisurely pace. The sidewalks were crowded; people had begun their Christmas shopping. Women with shopping bags, and children in tow, pushed past. The sidewalks were slushy. Dirty snow lay in the gutters. It made him think of Scotland, and of his honeymoon, thirteen years before. Shall we walk to the wilderness? Stern braced himself, turned his face to the cold wind blowing down Fifth. He had the sensation, though alone, that his wife walked with him.
The apartment he visited was some ten minutes’ walk away. Located on Park Avenue, on the fifth floor of a new building, it was the apartment he spoke of to me shortly before he died; the same apartment I would visit all those years later, in my search for Constance. It had been purchased by Stern in a false name, through one of his companies. Stern had been careful to make the trail that connected the apartment to him a devious one, but one it was not impossible to disentangle.
The investigators his wife employed would have traced the connections by now, he knew; they had had over a year in which to do so. They had followed him to the apartment from the first, of course. Considerate to their needs, he had selected one whose windows overlooked the avenue. With the lights left on and the shades raised, the man who followed him—who always took up his position on the far side of Park—had an excellent view.
Stern had become fond of these investigators. These spies reassured him of Constance’s jealousy; their presence reaffirmed the possibility of her love.
Stern, considerate to these hard-working men, did not hurry. The man usually fell into step behind him around the junction of Park and Seventy-second. Only when the man assigned for that day did so, at precisely this place, did Stern quicken his pace.
The apartment had been purchased in the name Rothstein. The porter greeted him by this name, as he always did. Stern took the elevator to the fifth floor. He let himself in. He switched on the lights in the living room, which overlooked Park Avenue, and moved once or twice in front of the window. When he was sure he had given the watcher sufficient encouragement, he sat down, out of sight.
The woman he awaited would be punctual; he paid her, among other things, to be so. There would be, as there always was, fifteen minutes of solitude before she arrived. On this, from the first, Stern insisted.
When Stern first bought this apartment, he had for several months left it unfurnished. He relished its emptiness and its anonymity. In those days, when the deception first began, an empty apartment had been enough; he had felt no need for furnishings, or for the woman. To begin with, his visits there had been brief, intermittent; then, as the weeks passed, more frequent. In this apartment Stern sought release that he could not always find at work, in his office building on Wall Street. He certainly could not find it at home. Here, in empty rooms, he did.
After some months it occurred to him that the investigators, eager to earn their employ, might not content themselves with watching. They might secure entry to this love nest—it would not be difficult. Porters, after all, could be bribed.
Thinking that the investigators might find a love nest without carpets, chairs, or bed somewhat odd, Stern had furnished it. He had done so, to his own surprise, with great care. He constructed that environment I would see, unchanged, almost forty years later; he constructed an environment without memories.
The rooms had a bleached look: white walls, white furniture, white carpets. Snowy rooms, pristine, their contents the height of modernity. You remember? Bauhaus brutalism, an apartment in which nothing was older than yesterday: an environment made for the machine age. Stern, looking around him, knew that he had achieved what he set out to achieve: a place devoid of memories, an urban empty space.
Several months after he first came here, realizing that as far as the investigators were concerned, there was one element still miss
ing, he had hired the woman.
The woman, he felt, matched the room. Her real name he was about to discover that afternoon; her stage name, the one she always used, was Blanche Langrishe. An absurd and artificial name, a name only an innocent could ever have selected: Blanche. Yes, this girl fitted this white apartment.
She was a singer. The first time Stern ever saw her, she was in the front line of the chorus of the Metropolitan Opera. The second time, at a friend’s house, she sang lieder after supper. She had a high, clear soprano voice, still needing further training but possessed of an extraordinary purity and range. Stern, drawn by the voice, had spoken to her. He discovered something else: Blanche might have an angel’s voice; her instincts were those of a showgirl.
She came from Queens. She had made it to the Metropolitan, which she despised, and to Manhattan, which she did not. She was taking dance lessons. She saw herself moving on from opera to the Broadway musical. One day, she would say, her name would be there on the Great White Way, up in lights.
Stern thought this possible; the girl had drive, surprising common sense. When, some weeks after that first meeting, he had outlined his proposal, Blanche considered, then, without argument, agreed to his request.
She did not ask questions, but she liked to talk. She had short platinum-blond hair, a pert and pretty face. The antithesis of his wife. She fitted this apartment. Sometimes Stern, looking at her lying back on the sofa, long legs against white leather and chrome, felt he had chosen the furnishings for her before he met her.
He paid her, for two visits, two hundred dollars a week.
Five minutes to go. Stern did not need to look at his watch. He could compute time as it passed, without the aid of instruments.
Rising, he crossed to the window. He adjusted the shade; he gave his watcher hope. He returned to the white leather chair. He sat down. He thought.
About his marriage, as he usually did. Once, he had been able to divert himself from this topic. The ramifications of his business dealings, the intricacies of finance, the consideration of music or art—all these subjects had had the power to banish thoughts of his wife. That was less true now. At work, at the opera perhaps, sometimes in a gallery, Constance could be drowned out still, but these occasions became rarer as time passed. Constance invaded his mind’s space; she took up a vantage point there. Stern hated and resisted this. Often, he disliked his wife; he could not understand why he continued to love a woman he did not respect.
He considered her duplicities: the smaller betrayals, then the larger ones. He considered her lovers, a long list of them. He considered a baby, lost in a miscarriage—Constance claimed—the previous year. He was not convinced that all of the lovers existed. He was not even convinced that the baby had existed or, if it had, whether an abortion or a miscarriage had taken place.
“Hold me, hold me, hold me,” Constance had said, lying in bed, her face waxen and strained. “I’ve been trying to tell myself it was for the best. I wasn’t sure if you were the father…. Oh, Montague, don’t be angry. I know I’ve been careless. I’ll never be careless again.”
Stern rested his face in his hands. He saw that he had forgotten to remove his fine leather gloves, that he still wore his overcoat. He removed them. He folded the coat on an aggressive chair. He sat down again. I shall never have a son. We shall never have children. He said this to himself; he knew it was true, and he wondered, in a distant way, when it was that he had accepted this fact.
He looked around the brightness and cleanliness of the room; he found it thronged with figures, all of them men. Some of the lovers were men he knew; others were merely names to which he attached shadowy faces. Constance did not like this; she wanted her lovers to be very clear to him. She wanted Stern to know them.
“But, Montague,” she would say, clinging to his arm, “I only obey you. I stay within the limits you set! You said sexual fidelity did not matter. You said that as long as I told you everything, and there were no secrets between us—”
“Constance, my dear. Keep the details to a minimum. By all means say when you begin an affair, and with whom. Feel free to tell me when it ends or when you embark on another. But I really have no interest in what you do in bed.”
“Don’t you? Don’t you?” She clung tighter to his arm. “You sound very sure, Montague—and I don’t believe you at all. I think you want to know, very much. This new young man of mine—well, he is a great deal younger than you, so I can’t help but make certain comparisons.”
Her animation, at such moments, was always very great. She would look up at him with the confiding air of a child, her lovely face flushed, her eyes bright. Stern might try to stop her; once or twice, when the anger and pain were intense, he came close to violence—which delighted her. Sometimes he would leave the room, telling himself he would also leave his wife. At other times, despising himself, he listened—because, of course, his wife was right. He did want to know: every painful detail.
There was a part of his mind that insisted on knowing—all the gyrations, all the cries and exertions. Was this voyeurism on his part? Sometimes, when he found the accounts arousing—and that happened—Stern feared that it was. At other times he felt no perversion was involved. It was simply that he had to understand the geography of betrayal; he wanted to chart the terrain of the worst.
Did these events his wife described truly occur? Stern was never sure. But, real or imagined, he watched these lovers. He saw their sweat. He saw also (she insisted he see) the degree of his wife’s response: greater, she claimed, than with him. That was the next, and inevitable, wound. He had expected it; he had awaited it. When it came he was calm; he wondered, in a distant way, how she would contrive to torture him next.
There was always a new twist. The previous year, a child which might or might not have existed, which might or might not have been his. This year, he thought: Acland. Acland, a weapon kept so long in reserve, would be the next.
The lovely ambiguities of lies; the unfailing seduction of the half-truth; the allure of an enigma, of a riddle without a solution—these were the things he loved. He retaliated with deceptions, with riddles of his own, with a secret apartment and a hired woman. Stern grasped the chrome arms of his chair. His hands felt dry and cool, yet some residual dampness in the skin left the print of his fingers on the metal. He lifted his hands. He looked at a pattern, the unique whorls of his identity, printed on the arm of a chair. The air dried them; even as he looked, they evaporated.
Destruction was a great absorber of energy, he thought in a tired way. So much time, so much agonizing, yet he began to see that both he and Constance were imprisoned by their marriage.
He thought: The only way we can reach each other now is through pain. There is a conspiracy between us, the complicity of the tortured and the torturer. The hostage and the hostage-taker need each other. No closeness, he thought, is closer than that.
He picked up his overcoat, half intending to leave. He heard a punctual key turn in a hired lock. This is what I have allowed myself to become, he said to himself. Was change possible, even now? He laid the coat down, then, as the singer came into the room, rose to his feet.
Blanche Langrishe wore a pert hat. A small spotted veil disguised the serene china-blue of her eyes. Her high heels tapped on the parquet floor. She moved straight to the window.
“Poor guy. He’s there. Right across the street. He looks as miserable as sin. It’s freezing out there.”
She removed her hat in a businesslike way. She tossed her coat across a chair, shook her blond curls into place.
“He’s got a notebook, I’ll bet. At least, I’ve never seen it, but I’m sure it’s there. You know what? I think it’s time we gave him something to write in it. A new development. What d’you say?”
“What had you in mind?”
“Oh—you can smile.” Blanche gave him a sideways glance. “I was beginning to wonder, you know?” She sighed. “Well, what about a kiss? We could give him a kiss—for a
start.”
“You think a kiss would encourage him?”
“Sure. I can think of a few other things as well, since you ask—but a kiss would do for openers.” She looked back at Stern again. She gave him a considering glance. “I like you, you know. You’re handsome. I like the way you dress. How old are you, anyway?”
“My dear.” Stern was not listening. He moved to the window. He adjusted the shade. “My dear, I am ancient beyond belief. I think of myself as very old, especially when I am in the company of such a charming young woman as yourself—”
“How old?”
“I am … fifty-seven,” Stern replied.
This was the truth, and it surprised him.
“You don’t look it.” Blanche took his arm. “You could pass for forty-eight, any day of the week. Come on, don’t look so sad. Cheer up.” She paused. “Wouldn’t you like to kiss me—after all these weeks? You never have.”
“I suppose I could.”
Stern moved forward. He took Blanche Langrishe in his arms. Her height was surprising to him after the tiny stature of his wife. Her skin smelled milky, powdery, sweet.
“You don’t mind the lipstick?”
“No. I don’t mind the lipstick.”
“Flamingo pink. That’s what they call it. I ask you—what jerk thinks up those names?” She took a step to the side. “Come a little closer. He can’t see us there. That’s it.”
Stern kissed her. It was fourteen years since he had kissed any woman other than his wife; the kiss felt odd, unorthodox, a matter of mechanics. He put his arms here, his lips there. Blanche Langrishe tasted cosmetic, a not unpleasant taste.
“Well, I don’t know about him”—Blanche gestured to the window; she smiled—“but I liked that. I knew I would. Want to do it again?”
“Perhaps not. We don’t want to overexcite him.”
“How about me?” Blanche made a face. She moved away from the window. She threw herself down, in a decorative way, on the white leather couch. She kicked off her high-heeled shoes. She examined the symmetry of her stocking seams. She flexed her small pink toes. She gave him a measuring look.
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