Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

by Margaret Atwood

  Along with these literary attractions there was a lot of vigorous and impromptu sex.

  Once she’d become linked to Ewan, Constance had known better than to reveal the details of her early life. Though what was there to worry about? Although Gavin had been intense, he‘d also been a shit; so he was clearly no competition for Ewan, a knight in shining armour by comparison. And that particular early life experience had ended badly, with sorrow and mortification for Constance. So why bring Gavin up? It would have served no purpose. Ewan had never asked her about any other men in her life, so Constance had never told. She certainly hopes Ewan has no access to Gavin now, through her unspoken thoughts or in any other way.

  One of the good things about Alphinland is that she can move the more disturbing items from her past in through its stone gateway and store them in there on the memory palace model much in use in, when was it? The eighteenth century? You associate the things you want to remember with imaginary rooms, and when you want total recall you go into that room.

  Thus she keeps a deserted winery in Alphinland, on the grounds of the stronghold currently held by Zymri of the Adamant Fist – an ally of hers – for the sole purpose of Gavin. And since it’s one of the rules about Alphinland that Ewan has never been allowed through the stone gateway, he’ll never find that winery or discover who she’s got stashed inside it.

  So Gavin’s in an oak cask in the winery. He’s not suffering, although objectively he might deserve to suffer. But Constance has worked at forgiving Gavin, so he’s not allowed to be tortured. Instead he’s preserved in a state of suspended animation. Every once in a while she stops by the winery and presents Zymri with a gift intended to cement their alliance – an alabaster jar of honeyed Xnamic urchins, a collar of Cyanoreen claws – and says the charm that unlocks the top of the cask and has a look. Gavin is slumbering peacefully. He was always handsome with his eyes closed. He doesn’t look a day older than the last time she saw him. It still hurts her to remember that day. Then she replaces the top of the cask and says the charm backwards, sealing Gavin inside until she feels like dropping in for another peek at him.

  In real life, Gavin won a few prizes for his poetry and then got a tenured position teaching Creative Writing at a university in Manitoba, though since retiring he’s decamped to Victoria, British Columbia, with a lovely view of the Pacific sunset. Constance receives a Christmas card from him every year; actually, from him and his third and much younger wife, Reynolds. Reynolds, what a dumb name! It sounds like a cigarette brand of the ’40s, back when cigarettes took themselves seriously.

  Reynolds signs the cards for both of them – Gav and Rey, they go by – and encloses chirpy, irritating annual letters about their vacations (Morocco! So lucky they’d packed the Imodium! Though, more recently: Florida! So good to be out of the drizzle!). She also sends an annual account of their local Literary Fiction reading group – only important books, only intelligent books! Right now they’re tackling Bolaño, hard work but so worth it if you persist! The club members prepare themed snacks to go with the books they’re reading, so Rey is learning to make tortillas, from scratch. Such fun!

  Constance suspects that Reynolds takes an unhealthy interest in Gavin’s bohemian youth, and most especially in Constance herself. How could she not? Constance had been Gavin’s first live-in, at a time in his life when he’d been so horny he could barely keep his jeans zipped when Constance was within half a mile of him. It was as if she radiated a ring of magic particles; as if she cast an irresistible spell, like Pheromonya of the Sapphire Tresses in Aphinland. There’s no way Reynolds can compete with that. She probably has to use a sex aid on Gavin, considering his age. If she bothers at all.

  “Who are Gavin and Reynolds?” Ewan would say, every year.

  “I knew him at college,” Constance would reply. It was a partial truth: she had in fact quit college in order to be with Gavin, so entranced had she been by him and the combination of aloofness and avidity. But Ewan would not welcome such a piece of information. It could make him sad, or jealous, or even angry. Why unsettle him?

  Gavin’s fellow poets – and the folksingers and jazz musicians and actors who were part of an amorphous, ever-shifting group of artistic risktakers – spent a lot of their time at a coffee house called the Riverboat, in the Yorkville area of Toronto, morphing then from whitebread quasislum to cool prehippie hangout. Nothing’s left of the Riverboat but one of those depressing historical castiron signs marking the spot, out in front of the chi-chi hotel that occupies its former space. Everything will be swept away, those signs declare, and a lot sooner than you think.

  None of the poets and folksingers and jazz musicians and actors had a bean, and Constance didn’t have a bean either, but she was young enough to find poverty glamorous. La Bohème, that was her. She started writing the Alphinland stories to make enough money to support Gavin, who viewed that kind of support as part of a truelove’s function. She cranked out those early stories on the rickety manual typewriter she had then, improvising as she went; then she managed – to her own surprise, at first – to sell them, though not for very much money, to one of the subcultural magazines in New York that went in for that brand of cheesy fantasy. People with diaphanous wings on the covers, weird manyheaded animals, bronze helmets and leather jerkins, bows and arrows.

  She was good at writing those stories, or good enough for the magazines. As a child she’d had fairytale books with pictures by Arthur Rackham and his peers – gnarled trees, trolls, mystic maidens with flowing robes, swords, baldrics, golden apples of the sun. So Alphinland was just a matter of expanding that landscape, altering the costumes, and making up the names.

  She was waiting tables at the time as well, at a place called Snuffy’s, named after a hillbilly cartoon character and specializing in corn bread and fried chicken; part of the pay was all the fried chicken you could eat, and Constance used to smuggle out extra pieces for Gavin and watch with pleasure while he gobbled them down. The job was exhausting and the manager was a letch, though the tips weren’t too bad, and you could up your pay packet if you did overtime, as Constance did.

  Girls did that then – knocked themselves out to support some man’s notion of his own genius. What was Gavin doing to help pay the rent? Not much, though she suspected him of dealing pot on the side. Once in a while they even smoked some of that, though not often, because it made Constance cough. It was all very romantic.

  The poets and folksingers made fun of her Alphinland stories, naturally. Why not? She made fun of them herself. The subliterary fiction she was churning out was many decades away from being in any way respectable. There was a small group that confessed to reading The Lord of the Rings, though you had to justify it through an interest in Old Norse. But the poets considered Constance’s productions to be far below the Tolkien standard, which – to be fair – they were. They’d tease her by saying she was writing about garden gnomes, and she’d laugh and say yes, but today the gnomes had dug up their crock of golden coins and would buy them all a beer. They liked the free beer part of it, and would make toasts: “Here’s to the gnomes! Long may they roam! A gnome in every home!”

  The poets frowned on writing for money, but Constance was granted an exemption because, unlike their poetry, Alphinland was intended to be commercial trash, and anyway she was doing it for Gavin as a Lady should, and in addition she was not so stupid as to take this drivel seriously.

  What they didn’t understand was that – increasingly – she did take it seriously. Alphinland was hers alone. It was her refuge, it was her stronghold; it was where she could go when things with Gavin weren’t working out. She could walk in spirit through the invisible portal and wander through the darkling forests, over the shimmering fields, making alliances and defeating enemies, and no one else could come in unless she said they could because there was a five-dimensional spell guarding the entranceway.

  She started spending more and more time in there, especially after it became semievident t
o her that not every “Lady” in Gavin’s new poems referred to her. Unless, that is, he was remarkably confused about the colour of his Lady’s eyes, once described as “blue as witches” and/or “distant stars,” now said to be of an inky darkness. “My Lady’s Ass Is Nothing Like the Moon” was a tribute to Shakespeare – that’s what Gavin said. Had he forgotten that there was an earlier poem – a little coarse, but heartfelt – that claimed his Lady’s ass was like the moon: white, round, softly shining in the dark, alluring? But this other one was tight and muscular; it was active rather than passive, gripping rather than enticing; more like a boa constrictor, though of course not the same shape. With the aid of a hand-held mirror, Constance examined her back view. No way to rationalize it: there was just no comparison. Could it be that when Constance was working her formerly poeticized ass off waiting tables at Snuffy’s – which wore her out so much that she wanted sleep more than she wanted sex – Gavin was rolling around on their lumpy mattress with a fresh and sprightly new truelove? One with a gripping ass?

  In the past Gavin had always taken a certain pleasure in humiliating Constance in public, with the sardonic, ironic remarks that were one of his poetic specialties: it was a form of compliment, she felt, since it made her the focus of his attention. He was showing her off in a sense, and since that turned him on, she meekly let the humiliation wash over her. But now he stopped humiliating her. Instead, he was ignoring her, which was much worse. When they were alone in their two rented rooms, he no longer kissed her neck and tore off her clothes and threw her onto their mattress in a flamboyant display of uncontrollable lust. Instead he’d complain of a back spasm, and suggest – more than that, demand – that she compensate for his pain and immobility by giving him a blowjob.

  This was not her favourite form of activity. She was unpractised at it, in addition to which there was a long list of other things she would rather put into her mouth.

  By contract, no one in Alphinland ever demanded a blowjob. But then, no one in Alphinland had a toilet either. Toilets weren’t necessary. Why waste time on that kind of routine bodily function when there were giant scorpions invading the castle? They did have bathtubs there, or rather square pools sunk in jasmine-scented gardens and heated by underground springs. Some of the more depraved Alphinlanders bathed in the blood of their captives, who were chained to stakes around the pool to watch as their life drained slowly away into the scarlet bubbles.

  Constance stopped going to the group gatherings at the Riverboat because the others were giving her pitying looks; also asking leading questions, such as “Where did Gavin get to? He was here just a minute ago.” They knew more than she did. They could see that things were coming to a head.

  The new Lady’s name turned out to be Marjorie. A name, thinks Constance now, that has all but disappeared: the Marjories are going extinct, and not a moment too soon for her. Marjorie was the darkhaired, dark-eyed, lanky-legged part-time volunteer bookkeeper at the Riverboat, given to vibrant African textiles wound around her waist, and to dangling handmade bead earrings, and to a braying guffaw that suggested a mule with bronchitis.

  Or suggested it to Constance; though obviously not to Gavin. Constance walked in on Gavin and Marjorie while they were in full hump, with no back spasm anywhere on view. Wineglasses littered the table, clothes littered the floor, and Marjorie’s hair littered the pillow: the pillow of Constance. Gavin had groaned, either in orgasm or in disgust at Constance’s bad timing. Marjorie, on the other hand, had brayed, at Constance or Gavin or else the general situation. It was a derisive bray. It was not kindly, and it rankled.

  What was left for Constance to say except, You owe me half the rent? She never got it, though; Gavin was nothing if not cheap, a feature of the poets then. Shortly after she’d moved out, taking her electric kettle with her, she’d signed her first Alphinland book contract. Once the rumours of her gnome-generated affluence – her comparative affluence – had spread around the Riverboat, Gavin had appeared at her new three-room apartment – an apartment sporting a genuine bed, shared with one of the folksingers, though that didn’t last long either – and had tried to make up with her. Marjorie was a fluke, he said. An accident. Nothing serious. It wouldn’t happen again. His real truelove was Constance: surely she too realized that they belonged together!

  That move was more than tawdry on the part of Gavin, and Constance told him so. Did he have no sense of shame, no honour? Did he grasp what a leech he was, how lacking in initiative, how selfish? In return for which Gavin, astonished at first by the scrappiness displayed by his erstwhile mild moonmaid, gathered his sarcasm together and told her that she was a flake, that her poems were worthless, that her blowjobs were inept, that her idiotic Alphinland was juvenile pablum, and that he had more talent in his bumhole than she had in her entire tiny powder-puff of a brain.

  So much for true and love.

  But Gavin had never grasped the inner significance of Alphinland. It was a dangerous place, and – granted – preposterous in some ways, but it was not sordid. The denizens of it had standards. They understood gallantry, and courage, and also revenge.

  Therefore Marjorie is not stored in the deserted winery where Gavin has been parked. Instead she’s immobilized by runic spells inside a stone beehive belonging to Frenosia of the Fragrant Antennae. This demigoddess is eight feet tall and covered with tiny golden hairs, and has compound eyes. Luckily she’s a close friend of Constance and is thus happy to assist in her plans and devices in return for the insect-related charms that Constance has the ability to bestow. So every day at twelve noon sharp, Marjorie is stung by a hundred emerald and indigo bees. Their stings are like white-hot needles combined with redhot chili sauce, and the pain is beyond excruciating.

  In the world outside Alphinland, Marjorie parted ways both with Gavin and with the Riverboat, and went to business college, and then became something in an advertising company. So said the grapevine. She was last seen by Constance striding along Bloor Street in a beige power suit with big shoulder pads, during the ’80s. That suit was amazingly ugly, and so were the clunky shitkicking shoes that went with it.

  Marjorie didn’t see Constance, though. Or she pretended not to. Just as well.

  There’s an alternate version stashed in Constance’s inner filing cabinet, in which Constance and Marjorie recognized each other that day with cries of delight, and went for a coffee, and had a big bray over Gavin and his poems and his yen for blowjobs. But that never happened.

  Constance descends the path, crosses the bridge with the dim, eggshaped lamps, and enters the dark wood. Hush! It’s important to go quietly. There’s the trail of ashes, up ahead. Now for the charm. Constance types:

  It mashes, it smashes

  And sometimes it gnashes;

  The dread tooth of Time

  Will turn all to ashes.

  But that’s a description, she decides; it’s not a charm. Something more like an incantation is needed:

  Norg, Smithert, Zurpash,

  Bright Teldarine,

  Let light be seen,

  Avaunt the evil in this ash.

  By the Mauve Blood of …

  The phone rings. It’s one of the boys, the one who lives in Paris; or rather, it’s his wife. They’ve seen the ice storm on television, they were concerned about Constance, they wanted to make sure she’s all right.

  What time is it there? she asks them. What are they doing up so late? Of course she’s all right! It’s only a little ice! Nothing to get into a twist about. Love to the kids, now you get some sleep. Everything’s fine.

  She hangs up as quickly as she can: she resents the interruption. Now she’s forgotten the name of the god whose Mauve Blood is so efficacious. Luckily, on her computer, she has a list of all the Alphinland deities and their attributes and oath words, alphabetized for easy reference. There are a lot of deities by now; they’ve accumulated over the years, and she had to make up some extra ones for the animated series of a decade ago, and then even more of t
hem – bigger, scarier, with enhanced violence – for the video game they’re currently putting the final touches on. If she’d foreseen that Alphinland was going to last so long and be so successful, she would have planned it better. It would have had a shape, a more defined structure; it would have had boundaries. As it is, it’s grown like urban sprawl.

  Not only that, she wouldn’t have called it Aphinland. The name sounds too much like Elfinland, when what she’d really had at the back of her mind was Alph the sacred river, out of the Coleridge poem, with its measureless caverns. That, and Alpha, the first letter of the alphabet. A smart-alecky young interviewer had once asked her if her “constructed world” was called Alphinland because it was so full of alpha males. She’d responded with the slightly fey laugh she’d cultivated for defensive purposes once that smarty-pants kind of journalist had decided she was worth an interview. That was around the time all the books they were now lumping together as genre were getting some attention from the press. Or at least the big sellers were.

  “Oh no,” she’d said to him. “I don’t think so. Not alpha males. It just sort of happened that way. Maybe … I always loved that breakfast cereal. Alpine?”

  She comes across as fatuous in every interview she’s ever given, which is why she no longer gives them. Nor does she attend conventions any more: she’s seen enough kids dressed up like vampires and bunnies and Star Trek, and especially like the nastier villains of Alphinland. She really can’t bear one more inept impersonation of Milzreth of the Red Hand – yet another applecheeked innocent in quest of his inner wickedness.

  She also declines to engage in social media, despite her publisher’s constant urging. It does no good for them to tell her she’ll increase the sales of Alphinland and extend the reach of its franchise. She doesn’t need any more money, because what would she use it for? Money had not saved Ewan. She’ll leave it all to the boys, as their wives expect her to. And she has no wish to interact with her devoted readers: she knows too much about them already, them and their body piercings and tattoos and dragon fetishes. Above all, she doesn’t wish to disappoint them. They’d be expecting a raven-haired sorceress with a snake bracelet on her upper arm and a stiletto hair ornament, instead of a wispy, softspoken, paperthin exblonde.