Constance by Patrick McGrath Read Free Book Online Page A

watch me in the mirror.
    Here she pretended to be her mother and spoke in a languid, singsong voice.
    —That’s lovely, darling, please don’t stop. A little harder. I shouldn’t come to you like this but there’s nobody else I can talk to. It’s all right. He’s tired. He doesn’t mean it.
    Constance looked at me as if to say: You see what he did to her? Outside in the street some madman was cursing Jesus Christ. She then remarked in an offhand manner that of course Harriet was English. So I was right. I understood then that the mother had transmitted something of her Englishness to Constance, and it partly accounted for the attraction she’d aroused in me. Not that I made a fetish of it, being English, I mean, but I did own an English car, a Jaguar. A black Mark VIII four-door sedan with a straight-six engine and twin carburetors. They’re quite rare. Barb hated it. She said it was like riding in a hearse.
    But Harriet would apparently make Constance stand very straight and inspect her. She’d trace the line of her eyebrow with her finger. Sometimes she told her to undress, then examined her as though she were a specimen of some kind. She never told her why. All this I learned that first night, in these brief bursts of revelation. Meanwhile it took some effort on her part to learn anything about me. But when she found out what I did for a living she was surprised.
    —All the smart women at that party and you came after me?
    I lifted my hands, palms outspread. I told her I couldn’t figure out what she was. That made her laugh.
    —You and me both, she said.
    We found a cab and I let her out in front of a small apartment building on East Fifty-sixth Street near the intersection with First Avenue. I had the cab wait until she was in the door. Then I went on uptown to this big gloomy place of mine on the West Side. Same thing the next time we met, meaning that after more talk largely concerning her family we parted with some kisses in the back of a cab before I left her, inflamed and abandoned in the lobby of her building, or so she told me later. That wasn’t how I remember it–I’d have taken her home with me that first night, if she’d let me– but here was the point, she said she was warming to me and it was a “not unpleasant sensation.” I was growing accustomed to her ironic, not to say caustic, not to say occasionally foulmouthed turns of phrase and “a not unpleasant sensation” was I suppose the best I could hope for then. But it did disturb me, the aloofness she communicated at times, the bland detachment, although it never put me off her: the reverse. I wanted to know where it came from. What damage had caused it? How could I make her warm again? She was far more bitter than she had any right to be at her age.
    A few days later I took her to the seafood place in Grand Central. It was crowded. At a table littered with empty chowder bowls and clamshells and beer bottles, amid a clamor of voices, and beneath a timbrel-vaulted ceiling of Guastavino tiles, I asked Constance to tell me more about her father. I consider ita mark of an advanced urban civilization when one’s private life can be conducted in public.
    —Daddy sounds like a depressive, I said. How did your mother deal with that?
    She didn’t mind my intrusive curiosity now. She willingly offered her experience. She said I made her feel interesting.
    —She ignored him. He was always working anyway.
    She then told me something she said she hadn’t told anybody, not even Iris. She told me she thought Harriet was really a very lonely woman, and that Daddy didn’t understand this until she was dying, by which time of course it was too late. Then he was overcome with guilt. He’d been eaten up with guilt ever since. That was why he was such a sour man.
    My own thoughts were running on different lines.
    —I still don’t understand this anger of his, I said.
    —What anger?
    —At you.
    But she hadn’t said he was angry at her! I’d