Constance

by Patrick Mcgrath

  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.

  Chapter 8

  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.

  I heard her resentment but no real rage yet. Then she sat down and started to cry. She turned her head aside and tried to stifle her tears. Her hair was coming loose and falling over her face. My forehead was clamped in my palm and I was smoking. I wished she’d just scream at me and be done with it, this was like the Chinese water torture, drip drip drip. I could have mentioned what she’d done to me, that for years she’d known who my father was and never told me. But none of it seemed to matter anymore.

  —I won’t survive this, she said. She stared at the floor, shaking her head.

  Oh, enough!

  —Okay, I’m sorry!

  —Don’t you get mad at me, Constance, you’re the one who screwed up here!

  I rose to my feet. I opened my arms. Again she turned her head away. I told her that if it was any consolation he’d fired me too. It was over. Sidney found out. There was a long silence. Then she spoke.

  —He did the same to me, she said quietly.

  The atmosphere shifted and I saw at once what was happening. She was saying Eddie used her too. Used her, then fired her. She wanted him for a scapegoat. She couldn’t lose us both. It would be too much to bear. She wanted to see what I’d done in the light of her new understanding of Eddie’s character. It was just another piece of his cold black heart. I’d have agreed to anything right then.

  —I guess so.

  —You didn’t stand a chance, she said.

  —Nor did you.

  —I do now, she said.

  —What?

  —Constance, she cried, I didn’t want to tell you I knew! I thought you had enough to deal with. He was through with me, so why shouldn’t you have him? I honestly tried not to care. But you should have asked—

  We were shoring it up, or Iris was, she was clutching at the first narrative that came to hand that made some sense of the whole sorry mess. It was a brave, desperate, generous impulse and I made no attempt to contradict what I knew to be a skewed version of events. Iris wanted to save me and I wanted to be saved, at least from her misery, so Eddie took the fall. Despite what she still felt for him, despite her conviction that her love obeyed some kind of predestined imperative to grow like a tree, an essential go
odness in her nature dictated not that she panic and become hysterical that her own sister, her own sister, had jeopardized her very shaky prospects but instead that she show sympathy with that sister and find common cause with her, the woman she’d watched more than once as she emerged from the room—from the bed!—of the man she loved.

  So it would have to do. We were rebuilding here before the thing had even been demolished. Our position now was that he’d had us both, one right after the other, serial conquests, the Sisters Schuyler. At last she allowed me to embrace her, and we clung to each other. We were more liquid than solid by this time. But I was sufficiently detached to wonder at my good fortune, I mean that having done possibly the worst thing a woman could do to her sister that I’d been so swiftly absolved.

  Later we went to a bar and I told her how it happened. She was like Sidney, she had to know. I didn’t tell her I went to the Dunmore to hear him play, I told her I’d met him by chance on the subway. It was sort of true. I had met him on the subway but nothing happened. He was as I remembered him, cheerful, sardonic. Droll. He’d caused Iris a lot of pain but I didn’t hold that against him: If you’re not on the receiving end it’s easy, and I sure as hell felt no indignation on her behalf. I didn’t say this. We’d had coffee in a diner, I said, and that was also true, then I said we’d had lunch and that was a lie although he did at least ask me to have lunch with him. I didn’t show, of course, I was sure it would end badly if I did. But he did make me feel good, that man. When I was with him a sort of muted sexual uproar was distinctly audible, to my ears at least. I didn’t say any of this either. Instead I told her that after lunch I’d gone to the hotel with him. He wanted to play me something he’d written.

  —Yeah sure, said Iris.

  She was taking a savage satisfaction in hearing this account, it was better than having to create it in her own imagination. She’d become drunk quickly and her spirits had lifted, she was finding it funny now, how the Sisters Schuyler had been waylaid by the same black-hearted rogue.

  —Okay, don’t tell me, she said. He played you a song then suggested you come up to his room and look at his press cuttings.

  —Something like that.

  In fact I’d asked him to take me up to his room, or the room the hotel allowed him to use. When I saw the bed I’d lost my nerve but I wasn’t going to say that to Iris. There was only so much truth I’d allow her.

  —So you get to his room and he lies down on the bed and he asks you to lie down beside him.

  That’s clearly what he’d said to Iris.

  —Yes.

  —Then he sits up on one elbow, right? And he pushes your hair off your face and tells you what a lovely creature you are—

  I nodded. Iris was weeping a little now. She flung back a shot of bourbon, not her first, gave a quick brief shake of the head, and wiped her eyes. Ha, she said, the cunt. We were in the Lower East Side for this conversation, in a basement bar a few steps down from the street, a long low narrow room with a wall of exposed brick. At the far end beer crates were stacked next to a toilet and that’s where Iris wanted to sit.

  —Auden used to drink here, she said. He undress you?

  —Auden?

  —Eddie.

  —Yes.

  —What a cunt.

  —You said it.

  That first time we hadn’t done anything in his room except some kissing. He’d tried to get a hand up my skirt but I wouldn’t let him and when he persisted I scrambled off the bed and told him to just cool it or I was leaving. Be nice, I said. I walked up and down the room for a while without removing so much as a shoe, my heart racing but my step as firm as ever, my back as straight. I thought I was in control of the situation. He lay on the bed and smoked a cigarette, just as Iris described it, but he made no further attempt on me. He seemed unsurprised to find himself with a woman who willingly accompanied him to his hotel room and then wanted only to talk. I told him again that I couldn’t do it.

  So why was I there?

  —Just come lie beside me.

  I lay beside him for a while but I wasn’t comfortable. He leaned across me to crush out his cigarette in the ashtray. As he hung over me I lifted a hand and touched his face.

  —You must think me such a fool.

  —No Constance, I don’t think that.

  He made to kiss me but I turned my head aside. But I didn’t get up off the bed. He still hung over me, his face a few inches from mine, his lank, oily hair falling over his forehead. I smelled liquor and tobacco on his breath. Something seemed to break inside me. My breathing was very shallow. I didn’t recognize him so close up.

  —Say something, I whispered.

  I wanted to know it was him. He said my name. He kissed me.

  —Who are you, Eddie?

  Oh, it was only the mind giving up the ghost, the last convulsion before it went quiet and closed down and anything resembling thinking simply ceased to be. Iris wouldn’t understand anything of this. She’d always known what she was there for. Whatever it is that takes over at such times, it took over, that’s how it was with Iris. But me, I wanted to stop thinking, yes, and I wanted to stop feeling, but then when I realized how aroused he was I panicked. I 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 me. He didn’t hear me! He turned me on my front and held me down and it was only after I started screaming that he released me and sat back on his knees, and I scrambled up and away from him and fled to the bathroom and locked myself in. I stood with my back to the door for several seconds.

  —Hey, babe? Constance?

  I said nothing. I straightened myself up. I stared at myself in the mirror.

  —Constance, are you okay?

  When I emerged I was calm. We were both calm.

  —Christ, Eddie, you scared the life out of me.

  He sat on the side of the bed, pushing his fingers through his hair as he stared at the floor. Then he lifted his head and grinned at me. He shrugged, as though to say: It’s only sex. It wasn’t only sex to me, it was a very complicated act of sublimation and that’s why I’d been unable to go through with it. I sat down beside him. I put my arm around his shoulder. I pulled him to me.

  —Eddie, sweetheart, I murmured, we have to make some rules.

  Then I got up off the bed. I collected my purse and my hat and coat and went out of the room and down the stairs. Like a drowning woman I was making a last clutch at sanity. I wanted to get back to my office. I’d stood at the edge of an abyss, I’d even looked in, but all at once I had to get to a place of safety. I sat in a cab in a blank state of numbness. In the elevator of the American Electric Building I examined my face in my compact then ran my hands over my blouse and skirt. I was sure there was a stain visible somewhere on my person. But going through to my office everything seemed reassuringly normal. I caught no glances that then darted away, no half smiles that were quickly suppressed. No hint of a suggestion that it was shatteringly obvious where I’d just been. Later I realized I was the last woman in New York of whom such activity would be suspected.

  Iris was rambling and smoking and I sat beside her on a lumpy barstool, nodding from time to time, remembering this fiasco, this pathetic display of pusillanimous sexual timidity.

  —So when you were with Eddie, I said, in his room—

  She had been growing maudlin with the bourbon, but now she brightened.

  —Yeah?

  —Who fucked who?

  She gave a shout of ribald glee. She slapped the counter.

  —Me!

  I’d gone back the next afternoon determined not to be timid and I wasn’t. What followed was angry and passive at the same time, and I wept throughout. Later, exhausted, but feeling clean at last, all rage discharged, I lay beside him in silence. I’d never known it like this. I’d only known it with Sidney.

  That afternoon I’d stayed at my desk later than usual as though to convince my colleagues, who in reality
suspected nothing, that I was exactly what they thought me, a fastidious and virtuous woman. I arrived home to find Sidney in the sitting room with Ed Kaplan.

  —Come and join us, he said, we’re just talking faculty politics.

  —We’d prefer to hear publishing gossip, said Ed. We’ve heard about your moral turpitude.

  I was standing in the doorway removing my hat.

  —We’re all as pure as the driven snow, I said.

  Later Sidney asked me if I was okay. He said I’d seemed upset. What could he do?

  —There’s nothing you can do.

  I was a little disgusted with myself. I put it down to emotional exhaustion. I’d never have gone back to the hotel if I hadn’t been so angry. I was oddly restless, I remember, and drinking more than usual, but after a few days, after a few gins, I found I was no longer repressing, instead I was starting to indulge the memory of that second afternoon in Eddie’s hotel room, and without feeling any revulsion or shame. It excited me now. I found myself pacing around the apartment like some feline creature and I felt dangerous. I knew what was happening. While I was with Eddie I forgot Daddy, I forgot Sidney, I forgot my anger, and my grief, I even forgot my poor sister; instead I felt careless, clean, released in a way. It was disloyal, of course, worse than disloyal, but did Sidney care, if he knew nothing about it? Was he hurt by it? Did it matter, in the scheme of things? It could have ended after I left the hotel that second afternoon, and probably it should have done, but being suspected of nothing I realized that if I wanted more I could have it.

  So I went back. This time I was clear about what I wanted. I stood in the doorway of the cocktail lounge. Without hesitation Eddie stood up from the piano and took me upstairs. There was no panic now.

  After that the thing developed fast. The next day he waited for me in the street when I left work. I walked right by him and he followed me. We had sex five times in all, and every time I wept. I couldn’t tell him why. But I found I could edit manuscripts and think about him, and I could attend meetings with my mind focused on the business at hand, and at the same time sustain a quiet fever of anticipation at the prospect of our next encounter. At home I was attentive to Howard and Sidney both, and Sidney was gratified by the attention I paid his son. But on the few occasions I was able to slip away from the apartment, or from my office, I went to the Dunmore Hotel, or I joined him in a bar on the West Side where we wouldn’t be recognized. He knew a doorway in an alley nearby where I opened my coat for him.