Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

by Margaret Atwood

  She’s wearing her hair in a bun, like a ballerina’s. Buns are so sexy. They used to be a treat to take apart: it was like opening a gift. Heads with the hair pulled back into buns are so elegant and confined, so maidenish; then the undoing, the dishevelment, the wildness of the freed hair, spilling down the shoulders, over the breasts, over the pillow. He enumerates in his head: Buns I have known.

  Constance did not have a bun. She didn’t need one. She more or less was a bun: neat and contained, and then so tumultuous when unleashed. His first live-in, Eve to his Adam. Nothing could ever replace that. He remembers the ache of waiting for her in their cramped, stuffy Eden with the hotplate and the electric kettle. She would come in through the door with that supple but luscious body of hers and the remote, contradictory head on top, her face pale as a waning moon, with the floss of her light hair escaping from around it like rays, and he would enfold her in his arms and sink his teeth into her neck.

  Not into, not in actuality; but he’d feel like doing that. Partly because he was always hungry then, and she’d smell of Snuffy’s fried chicken. And because she adored him, she would melt like warm honey. She was so pliable. He could do anything with her, arrange her as he pleased, and she would say yes. Not just yes. Oh yes!

  Has he ever been adored like that since, purely adored, with no ulterior motives? Because he wasn’t famous then, not even famous with the moderate ingroup fame accorded to poets. He hadn’t won anything, any prizes; he hadn’t published any thin, meritorious, envied collections. He had the freedom of a nobody, with a blank future unrolling before him on which anything at all might be written. She’d adored him only for himself. His inner core.

  “I could eat you all up,” he’d say to her. Mmm, mmm. Rrrr, rrrr. Oh yes!

  “Excuse me?” says Naveena.

  He snaps back into the present. Was he making a noise? A yum-yummy noise, a growling noise? And if so, so what? He’s earned his noises. He’ll make all the noises he wants.

  But soft you, the fair Naveena. Nymph, in thy glossaries be all my puns remembered. Some more practical remark is called for.

  “Are those boots comfortable?” he says cordially. Best to ease into this: let her talk about something she knows, such as boots, because pretty soon she’ll be in over her depth.

  “What?” says Naveena, startled. “Boots?” Is that a blush?

  “Don’t they pinch your toes?” he says. “They look very fashionable, but how can you walk?” He would like to ask her to get up and prance across the room – it’s one of the functions of high heels to tilt the woman’s pelvis so that her butt curves out behind and her tits thrust forward, lending her the serpentine curve of beauty – but he won’t ask her to do that. She is after all a total stranger.

  “Oh,” says Naveena. “These. Yes, they’re comfortable, though maybe I shouldn’t wear them when there’s ice on the sidewalks.”

  “There isn’t any ice on the sidewalks,” says Gavin. Not too bright, this nymph.

  “Oh no, not here,” she says. “I mean, it’s Florida, right? I meant back home.” She giggles nervously. “Ice.”

  Gavin, watching the television weather, has noted with interest the polar vortex gripping the north, the east, the centre. He’s seen the pictures of the blizzards, the ice storms, the overturned cars and broken trees. That’s where Constance must be right now: in the eye of the storm. He imagines her holding out her arms to him, clothed in nothing but snow, with an unearthly radiance streaming out from around her. His lady of the moonglow. He’s forgotten why they broke up. It was a trivial thing; nothing that should have mattered to her. Some other woman he’d gone to bed with. Melanie, Megan, Marjorie? It wasn’t really anything, the woman had practically jumped on him out of a tree. He’d tried to explain that to Constance, but she hadn’t understood his predicament.

  Why couldn’t the two of them have gone on and on forever? Himself and Constance, sun and moon, each one of them shining, though in different ways. Instead of which he’s here, forsaken by her, abandoned. In time, which fails to sustain him. In space, which fails to cradle him.

  “Florida. Yes? What’s your point?” he says, too sharply. What was this Naveena nattering on about?

  “There isn’t any ice here,” she says in a small voice.

  “Right, of course, but you’re going back soon,” he says. He must show her that he isn’t drifting away, losing the plot. “Back to – where is it? Indiana? Idaho? Iowa? Lots of ice there! So if you do fall, don’t put out your hand,” he says, assuming an instructive and fatherly tone. “Try to hit with your shoulder. That way you won’t break your wrist.”

  “Oh,” says Naveena again. “Thank you.” There’s an awkward pause. “Could we maybe talk about you?” she says. “And, you know, your, well, your work – when you were doing your early work. I’ve got my tape recorder; can I turn it on? And I brought some video clips we could maybe watch, and you could tell me about the, about who, about the context. If you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Fire away,” he says, settling back. Where the crap is Reynolds? Where’s his tea? And the cookie: he’s earned it.

  “Okay, so, what I’m working on is, well, kind of the Riverboat years. The mid’60s. When you wrote that sequence called Sonnets for My Lady.” She’s setting up some other technical doodad now: one of those tablets. Reynolds has just bought a green one. Naveena’s is red, with a cunning triangular stand.

  Gavin puts his hand in front of his eyes in mock embarrassment. “Don’t remind me,” he says. “Sonnets – that was apprentice work. Flabby, amateur garbage. I was only twenty-six. Can’t we move on to something more substantial?” In point of fact those sonnets were noteworthy, first of all because they were sonnets in name only – how daring of him! – and secondly because they broke new ground and pushed the boundaries of language. Or so it said on the back of the book. In any case, that book snagged his first-ever prize. He’d pretended to view it with indifference, even disdain – what were prizes but one more level of control imposed on Art by the establishment? – but he’d cashed the cheque.

  “Keats died when he was twenty-six,” Naveena says severely, “and look what he accomplished!” A rebuke, a palpable rebuke! How dare she? He was already middle-aged when she was born! He could have been her father! He could have been her child molester!

  “Byron called Keats’s stuff ‘Johnny-wet-your-bed poetry,’ ” he says.

  “I know, right?” says Naveena. “I guess he was jealous. Anyway, those sonnets are great! ‘My lady’s mouth on me’ … It’s so simple, it’s so sweet and direct.” She doesn’t seem to realize that the subject is a blowjob. Very different from “My lady’s mouth on mine”: back then, “me” in such a context was a disguised reference to “cock.” The first time Reynolds read that mouth line she laughed out loud: no such pure-mindedness in his very own festering lily.

  “So you’re working on the ‘Lady’ sonnets,” he says. “Let me know if there are any points you’d like me to elucidate for you. Something from the horse’s mouth, to flesh out your thesis. As it were.”

  “Well, it’s not exactly them I’m working on,” she says. “They’ve been done quite a lot.” She looks down at the coffee table; now she’s blushing in earnest. “As a matter of fact, I’m doing my thesis on C. W. Starr. You know, Constance Starr, though I realize that Starr wasn’t her real name – on her Alphinland series, and, well, you knew her at that time. At the Riverboat, and all of that.”

  Gavin feels as if cold mercury has been poured through his veins. Who let this creature in? This defacer, this violator! Reynolds, that’s who. Was treacherous Reynolds aware of the harpy’s true mission? If so, he’ll pull out her molars.

  But he’s cornered. He can’t pretend this matters to him – to be cast as a mere secondary source in the main action, the main action being Constance. Constance the fluffball, with her idiotic gnome stories. Constance the flake. Constance the bubblehead. To show anger would be to reveal his soft underbelly, to pile mo
re humiliation upon the primary humiliation. “Oh yes.” He laughs indulgently, as if recalling a joke. “And all of that is right! So much all, and so much that! It was all and that from morning to night! But I had the stamina for it then.”

  “Excuse me?” says Naveena. Her eyes are shining: she’s getting some of the blood she came for. But she won’t get all of it.

  “My dear child,” says Gavin. “Constance and I lived together. We shacked up. It was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. And though that age hadn’t fully dawned, we were very busy all the same. We spent a lot more time taking our clothes off than putting them on. She was … amazing.” He allows himself a reminiscent smile. “But don’t tell me you’re doing serious academic work on Constance! What she wrote wasn’t in any way …”

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact I am,” says Naveena. “It’s an in-depth examination of the function of symbolism versus neo-representationalism in the process of world-building, which can be studied so much more effectively through the fantasy genres than in its more disguised forms in so-called realistic fiction. Wouldn’t you say?”

  Reynolds clacks in, carrying a tray. “Here’s our tea!” she announces, in the nick of time. Gavin can feel the blood pounding in his temples. What the fuck was Naveena just talking about?

  “What kind of cookies?” he says, to put neo-representationalism in its place.

  “Chocolate chip,” says Reynolds. “Did Naveena show you the video clips yet? They’re fascinating! She sent them to me in a Dropbox.” She sits down beside him and begins to pour out the tea.

  Dropbox. What is it? Nothing comes to mind but an indoor catpoo station. But he won’t ask.

  “This is the first one,” says Naveena. “It’s the Riverboat, around 1965.”

  It’s an ambush, it’s a betrayal. However, Gavin cannot choose but look. It’s like being drawn into a time tunnel: the centrifugal force is irresistible.

  The film is grainy, black and white; there’s no sound. The camera pans around the room: some amateur starfucker, or was this shot for an early documentary? That must be Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee onstage, and is that Sylvia Tyson? A couple of his fellow poets of those days, hanging out at one of the tables, in their period haircuts, their downy, defiant, optimistic beards. So many of them dead by now.

  And there he is himself, with Constance beside him. No beard, but he’s got a cigarette dangling out of his mouth and an arm casually draped around Constance. He isn’t looking at her, he’s looking at the stage. She’s looking at him, though. She was always looking at him. They’re so sweet, the two of them; so unscarred, so filled with energy then, and hope; like children. So unaware of the winds of fate that were soon to sweep them apart. He wants to cry.

  “She must be tired,” says Reynolds, with satisfaction. “Check out those bags under her eyes. Big dark circles. She must be really whipped.”

  “Tired?” says Gavin. He never thought of Constance as being tired.

  “Well, I guess she would be tired,” says Naveena. “Think of all she was writing then! It was epic! She practically created the whole Alphinland ground plan, in such a short time! Plus she had that job, with the fried-chicken place.”

  “She never said she was tired,” says Gavin, because the two of them are staring at him with what might possibly be reproach. “She had a lot of stamina.”

  “She wrote to you about it,” says Naveena. “About being tired. Though she said she was never too tired for you! She said you should always wake her up, no matter how late you came in. She wrote that down! I guess she was really in love with you. It’s so endearing.”

  Gavin’s confused. Wrote to him? He doesn’t remember that. “Why would she write me letters?” he says. “We were living in the same place.”

  “She wrote notes to you in this journal she had,” says Naveena, “and she’d leave it for you on the table because you always slept in, but she had to go to her job, and then you would read the notes. And then you would write notes back to her that way, underneath hers. It had a black cover, it’s the same sort of journal she used for the Alphinland lists and maps. There’s a different page for every day. Don’t you remember?”

  “Oh, that,” says Gavin. He has a dim recollection. Mostly he can remember the radiance of those mornings, after a night with Constance. The first coffee, the first cigarette, the first lines of the first poem, appearing as if by magic. Most of those poems were keepers. “Yes, vaguely. How did you get hold of that?”

  “It was in your papers,” says Naveena. “The journal. The University of Austin has the papers. You sold them. Remember?”

  “I sold my papers?” says Gavin. “Which papers?” He’s drawn a blank, one of those gaps that appears in his memory from time to time like a tear in a spiderweb. He can’t recall doing any such thing.

  “Well, technically I sold them,” says Reynolds. “I made the arrangements. You asked me to take care of it for you. It was when you were working on the Odyssey translation. He gets so immersed,” she says to Naveena. “When he’s working. He’d even forget to eat if I didn’t feed him!”

  “I know, right?” says Naveena. The two of them exchange a conspiratorial look: Genius must be humoured. That, thinks Gavin, is the kindlier translation: Old poops must be lied to would be the other.

  “Now let’s see the other clip,” says Rey, leaning forward. Mercy, Gavin pleads with her silently. I’m on the ropes. This teen princess is wearing me down. I don’t know what she’s talking about! Bring it to an end!

  “I’m tired,” he says, but not loudly enough, it seems: the two of them have their agenda.

  “It’s an interview,” says Naveena. “From a few years ago. It’s up on YouTube.” She clicks on the arrow and the video starts to play, this time with colour and sound. “It’s at the World Fantasy Convention in Toronto.”

  Gavin watches with mounting horror. A wispy old woman is being interviewed by a man dressed in a Star Trek outfit: a purple complexion, a gigantic veined skull. A Klingon, Gavin supposes. Though he doesn’t know much about this cluster of memes, his poetry workshop students used to attempt to enlighten him when the subject came up in their poems. There’s a woman onscreen too, with a glistening, plasticized face. “That’s the Borg Queen,” Naveena whispers. The wispy oldster is supposed to be Constance, says the YouTube title line, but he can’t credit it.

  “We’re thrilled to have with us today someone who, you could say, is the grandmother of twentieth-century world-building fantasy,” says the Borg Queen. “C. W. Starr herself, the creator of the worldfamous Alphinland series. Should I call you Constance, or Ms. Starr? Or how about C. W.?”

  “Whatever you like,” says Constance. For it is indeed Constance, though much diminished. She’s wearing a silverthreaded cardigan that hangs on her loosely; her hair’s like disordered egret plumage, her neck’s a Popsicle stick. She peers around her as if dazzled by the noise and lights. “I don’t care about the name or any of that,” she says. “I only ever cared about what I was doing, with Alphinland.” Her skin is oddly luminous, like a phosphorescent mushroom.

  “Didn’t you feel brave, writing what you did, back when you started?” says the Klingon. “That whole genre was a man’s world then, yes?”

  Constance throws back her head and laughs. This laugh – this airy, feathery laugh – was once charming, but now it strikes Gavin as grotesque. Misplaced friskiness. “Oh, nobody was paying any attention to me then,” she says. “So you couldn’t really call it brave. Anyway, I used initials. Nobody knew at first that I wasn’t a man.”

  “Like the Brontë sisters,” says the Klingon.

  “Hardly that,” says Constance, with a sideways glance and a selfdeprecating giggle. Is she flirting with the purple-skinned, veiny-skulled guy? Gavin winces.

  “Now she really does look tired,” says Reynolds. “I wonder who put that awful makeup on her? They shouldn’t have used the mineral powder. How exactly old is she, anyway?”

  “So, how do you go a
bout creating an alternate world?” says the Borg Queen. “Do you make it up out of nothing?”

  “Oh, I never make anything up out of nothing,” says Constance. Now she’s being serious, in that ditzy way she had. This is me being serious. It had never convinced Gavin at the time: it was like a little girl wearing her mother’s high heels. That seriousness, too, he had found charming; now he finds it bogus. What right has she to be serious? “You see,” she continues, “everything in Alphinland is based on something in real life. How could it be different?”

  “Does that go for the characters too?” says the Klingon.

  “Well, yes,” she says, “but I sometimes take parts of them from here and there and put them together.”

  “Like Mr. Potato Head,” says the Borg Queen.

  “Mr. Potato Head?” says Constance. She looks bewildered. “I don’t have anyone of that name in Alphinland!”

  “It’s a toy for children,” says the Borg Queen. “You stick different eyes and noses onto a potato.”

  “Oh,” says Constance. “That was after my time. Of being a child,” she adds.

  The Klingon fills the pause. “There’s a big bunch of villains in Alphinland! Do you get those from real life too?” He chuckles. “Lots to choose from!”

  “Oh yes,” says Constance. “Especially the villains.”

  “So for instance,” says the Borg Queen, “Milzreth of the Red Hand is someone we might meet walking along the street?”

  Constance does the thrownbackhead laugh again; it sets Gavin’s teeth on edge. Someone needs to tell her not to open her mouth so wide; it’s no longer becoming; you can see that she has some back teeth missing. “Oh my goodness, I hope not!” she says. “Not in that outfit. But I did base Milzreth on a man in real life.” She stares pensively out of the screen, right into the eyes of Gavin.