—We didn’t, Constance. Don’t judge the rest of us by your own—
—My own what? I don’t care where you sleep.
She was in a rage now. She stood up and went to the door. She turned and said: Or who with.
That was it. Something snapped. I couldn’t let it go now. We would have to have it out. We had so much work to do, she and I.
The next morning she went back to Cooper Wilder. I knew I’d been a fool to go to Montauk. I said this to Ed Kaplan when I saw him for lunch. He disagreed. He said she’d gone to Montauk for one reason only, because she wanted me to come after her. If she’d wanted to hide she’d have gone someplace else.
Why did she go there if she thought I’d come and get her?
Because the game wasn’t over.
What game?
You hadn’t suffered enough. You had to be punished for loving her. When you’d paid in full for that she’d stop mistreating you.
You think she was conscious of any of this?
I doubt it.
This conversation I conducted not with Ed Kaplan but myself.
The next day she came in around five. I followed her into the sitting room and closed the door. I asked her how her day had been.
—Fine.
—You want to talk about it?
—I don’t think so.
Once we’d talked about everything, or she had. She told me I was more selective, that I concealed things from her. She said that was how spontaneity went out the back door while suspicion came in the front.
—You’re nervous.
She turned from the window. Why this intrusiveness suddenly? She felt alarmed, I saw it.
—You know the problems I’m having. Maybe you don’t.
—I think you better tell me.
The question seemed to hang in the air like a gas. She went on the offensive.
—Why are you looking at me like that?
—You’re having an affair.
I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t so, not any longer, not after what she’d said the night before.
—No, Sidney, I’m not. That’s the last thing I need right now.
—So he finished it? Or did you?
—Don’t do this again. I’m sick of you doing this.
She left the room at once and I followed her. She took her coat and walked out of the apartment. I followed her. We descended in the elevator in silence. I gazed at her steadily and she stared at the numbers in the illuminated panel above the elevator doors. She left the building and walked east along the block in the direction of Central Park. I followed her.
Still in silence we entered the park. It wasn’t a safe thing to do, this time of the day. Any time of the day. It was March and snow still lay drifted on the balustrades and stonework. The high buildings on the East Side stood stark in outline against the late-afternoon sky. She refused to answer my questions. She demanded to know why I was harassing her like this. We walked beside the lake. It was still frozen. A cold breeze came up. We saw nobody and it felt sinister to me, the emptiness. The ice on the lake was pocked and striated with here and there animal prints, dead sticks and leaves, small heaps of earth: Nature’s detritus that in another season would have sunk to the bottom. But all the muck was on the surface now, exposed in plain view.
I saw the sun, a pale, diffuse orb of light low in the sky over Central Park South. I saw moving figures in the distance but I heard only the faintest roar of the city beyond. Here by the ice it was still. But the afternoon was far advanced and the light was fading fast. Dead leaves began to rustle and shift in the wind. At last she turned to face me. She was angry. Again she demanded to know why I was behaving like this. I made an impatient gesture as though to brush away her protestations like so much chaff.
—It doesn’t matter how I know and it doesn’t matter how I feel, what matters is that it stops.
—What are you talking about?
I became impatient. She was treating me like a fool.
—It’s no good, what you’re doing. It’ll hurt Howard and I won’t allow you to do that. I’m protecting my son.
—I’m not Howard’s mother.
—You will be. His mother’s dying.
I was as angry as she’d ever seen me but I kept it in check so I could make her understand what I wanted. I hadn’t told her that Barb was dying, nor had I consulted her on being her replacement. But I’d heard her talking to a man on the phone. The daylight was nearly gone now. We weren’t supposed to be there, it was asking for trouble, it was way too dangerous. She sank onto a bench. Her hair was coming loose and spilling about her face. She looked older, there was a kind of fullness to her now, she seemed sexually replete. I couldn’t bear to think there was another man. It made me crazy. She lit a cigarette. A chill, damp mist was rising from the ice. Nobody about, we were alone. She later told me she thought I might murder her there. She said she didn’t care so long as it didn’t hurt.
—What time is it? she said.
—Six.
—I want to go back.
—Constance, don’t ever see him again, do you understand me? If you do I’ll divorce you and you won’t see Howard anymore.
She didn’t want to think about that.
—It’s he who decides when I see him, she said quietly.
—What are you saying? I shouted.
She seemed to wake up. What was going on? She laughed a little.
—You heard me talking to Eddie on the phone, she said. You jumped to conclusions.
—I knew already.
She didn’t know how I’d found out. I hadn’t, of course. She wondered if Iris had told me. Did Iris know? Was it possible? Wasn’t there anyone she could trust? This was her thought, I saw her thinking it. She rose from the bench and at once felt dizzy. She reached out and I held her. She wasn’t thinking straight anymore.
—You shouldn’t smoke, I said. I wish you’d tell me how I’ve failed you.
—Don’t start that again. What happens this time?
—We go on.
We walked back across the park, our hands in our pockets and our collars turned up, side by side and a thousand miles apart. I think she was impressed with me. There was none of the eagerness for the lurid details of the thing that men are supposed to display on discovering they’ve been betrayed. It came later. Did she remember what I’d said to her in London an eternity ago, when I decided we were going to be married: I’m a fascinating thinker and I love you. What’s not to love back? I was fascinating then, it was true. When did I stop being fascinating to her? Was it my fault? Or had she failed to sustain a willingness to be fascinated? I feared at that moment she might be lost to me. She seemed not to have whatever it is that guides us across deserts, the pole star. She had no moral pole star. It was a function of her mother’s promiscuity and her father’s neglect. I also realized she wanted this crisis. She wasn’t aware of it yet, but she wanted it all to fall apart. That was also her mother’s fault. The responsibility of marriage was too much for either of them. I would have to carry it for both of us.
She allowed me to take her home. Later, when Howard was in bed, she sat at the kitchen table exhausted. I’d been calm and sensible in the park earlier, I hadn’t raged at her as another man would have done. I knew she was frail. She liked me for that. She was weak and I was wise. I understood why she’d done it. She felt as if she was drowning and had clung to the first warm body that came her way. But it should have been mine.
—Sidney.
I was clearing the table.
—I’m sorry, she said. If that helps.
I nodded my head. It was the best she could do. She was thinking about what I’d said earlier: We go on.
—Are we all right now? she said.
I was astonished. I sat down. I put my hands on the table and stared at her.
—Do you know what you’ve done? I said at last.
—What?
—You’ve smashed it to bits. It’s gone, Constance. You’ve de
stroyed it.
—What have I destroyed?
—Whatever you want to call it. Our covenant. Didn’t you realize there’d be consequences?
—I haven’t destroyed anything! Can’t we go on as we were?
She heard the desperation in her voice and wondered if it helped her cause or hurt it. I saw her thinking this. I could read her thoughts. I remained clinical.
—Then no, we can’t go on, not as we were before. I’ll say it again, there are consequences. I don’t want to talk to you right now. I’m going out.
—Oh please don’t leave me—
I was very angry. I untied my apron and threw it on a chair and left the kitchen, then I left the apartment. I hadn’t finished clearing the table but I had to talk to someone.
She told me later she lay in the silent darkness unable to sleep. She said she tried to control the anxiety rising in waves and flooding her, and felt as though she were flattened and gasping on some shoreline with her mouth full of weeds and salt. There were scraps and fragments of content involving scenarios of abandonment, but the real force of it was an overwhelming visceral sensation of loss and despair and aloneness. Of course she felt alone, I told her, she’d driven away the one person in the world who only wanted to help her. When I got home sometime after eleven I didn’t go to the bedroom. She waited for me, then she couldn’t wait any longer. She came looking for me. Howard’s door was open a crack and the night-light glowed inside. From force of habit she looked in on him and he was asleep. At times it stabbed her to the heart to see this child safe and warm because we kept him so. He was about to lose his mother. The light was on in my study. The door was closed. She tapped at it.
—Come in, Constance.
I was stretched out on my daybed, fully clothed, one hand behind my head, spectacles sliding down my nose, my other hand flat on the incomplete manuscript of The Conservative Heart that was lying on my chest. She thought I loved it more than I loved her. What she didn’t know was that I’d started to hate it. But I couldn’t leave it alone. I couldn’t finish it but I couldn’t abandon it either. It was like my marriage, that damn book.
—Am I disturbing you?
When had she ever asked me that before? When had she knocked on my door? Before, when she wanted to talk to me she just marched right in.
—Sit down. What is it?
—Are you going to throw me out?
She sat on the edge of the armchair. Her robe fell open. I saw her long bare legs, a faint tracery of blue veins visible under the pale flesh of her thigh. In that moment I desired her. She was unfamiliar to me and despite everything she fascinated me. She covered herself. She felt desperate, she said. I told her Howard needed a mother.
—Iris needed a mother once, she said.
—I’m talking about Howard.
—You’ve never spoken to me about this before, she said.
—You like the boy. He seems to like you. Where else can he go?
I gazed at her over my spectacles.
—That’s it? she said.
—What else do you want to know?
—Where are you going to sleep?
—In the spare room.
—How clipped and tidy it all is, she said.
I desired her, yes, but I wanted to sleep in the spare room. She wasn’t ready to fight me then and I was glad of it. I’d had enough of her. I wanted her to leave me alone. She stood up and examined the papers on my desk. She saw a mock-up of a book cover I’d been idly sketching, The Conservative Heart in block capitals, my name in smaller letters beneath, all superimposed on a drawing of an eagle perched on a crag. There was lightning in the sky and copious black storm clouds rolling in.
—You knew it would turn out this way, she said. You’ve always known it.
—What way did it turn out?
—You knew you’d find yourself married to a slut. It’s what you wanted.
—I haven’t got anything else to say to you.
—I’m serious, she said. You adored me once. Then you realized I was damaged goods and you despise me for it just like Daddy.
—In which case the answer’s no, I didn’t think I’d find myself married to a slut.
—You thought I was a good woman.
—Yes, Constance, I did, and I still do.
It cost me something to say this but she pretended not to hear it. Instead she stood up and stretched. Now she felt feline: I knew that mood. Cats are flighty, amoral. Promiscuous.
—That’s something, she said. I’m going to bed.
She paused by the desk and picked up my sketch.
—What’s the opposite of a conservative heart? she said.
What a strange question. I thought about it.
—A fatherless child.
That stung her, as it was supposed to. The fatherless child is the radical, the revolutionary: the one who tears down the institutions that conservatism reveres. For Constance of course it meant something quite different. She left the room, and as she closed the door behind her she said: You should have put a fucking vulture.
Constance was in a state of moral collapse at this time. Her father had wreaked havoc with her fragile identity and in her distress she’d run not to me but to a stranger. In the account she later gave me of those days, certain words recur. Release. Escape. Defended. Trap. Facade. Terror. When she thought about her life and the problems she faced both upstate and in Manhattan, she believed it was all connected to her childhood. To be confronted with evidence of betrayal from an early age, and to then reflect on the breakdown of her marriage, this was to recognize determinism at work, she said. I have little time for determinists. I saw her behavior as another of her increasingly desperate attempts to displace responsibility for what she was doing, and what she was doing was punishing her father by punishing me. I was aware that in Constance’s mind I represented a patriarchal principle she felt she must attack. This didn’t change even after Iris died, when everything else did change.
For two days after our conversation in Central Park I said nothing. Then one afternoon I asked her to join me in the sitting room. She came quietly enough. She asked me if I had any cigarettes. I didn’t. She walked to the window and stared out, drumming her fingers on the sill. She flung herself into an armchair and crossed her legs. She picked at the hem of her dress. I waited a few seconds until the tiny telltale flecks of red began to appear along her cheekbones. Then I asked her to tell me about it.
—What do you want me to tell you?
—The truth.
—The truth! What truth?
I wanted the truth but without having to force it out of her. I think now that I was wrong to do this, because she then told me she’d give me any truth I wanted. I said no, I wanted the truth and she said, Fine. She gazed at the ceiling. Her lips moved silently as they had in the motel in Montauk. She then described how this man Eddie Castrol came to her office one afternoon, this was after she returned from Ravenswood the last time. She said she left the building with him and they took a cab to the Dunmore Hotel. I said she must have known him well for him to come to her office like that but she denied it. She then described pacing around his room as he lay on the bed. I asked her when she’d first met him. Why hadn’t she said anything about him?
—You were away.
—But when I returned.
—It didn’t seem important.
The first time was when Iris took her to the hotel. Constance thought they were just going for a drink but when they went through to the cocktail lounge Eddie was there. He was playing the piano. Iris told her that he was her lover and that this time it was the real thing. Then as they stood in the doorway, watching him, Iris asked her if he reminded her of Daddy.
—And did he? I said.
—No. It was all in her mind.
There’d been some conversation in the cocktail lounge and then the three of them went to a bar in the Village to hear jazz. They’d made a night of it. She smiled a little at the memory of it. Three swel
ls on a bender, she said, but I had no time for that sort of talk. I asked her how the night ended.
—Iris got drunk, Eddie kissed her good night, and I took her home in a cab.
—Who was he looking at?
—What?
—Who was he looking at while he was kissing Iris?
I needed to know this. Constance regarded me as though I were mad. Then she realized what I was after.
—Who do you think?
—Was he looking at you?
—Yes, Sidney, he was. He was looking straight at me.
There was disdain in her tone now. I pressed on. I made her tell me about their next encounter. She’d met him by chance in the subway. They’d gone to a coffee shop near Union Square. What did they talk about?
—We talked about him and Iris.
—What did he say?
—He said it was hard on Iris. She was just a kid. She took everything too seriously.
—What else did he say?
—He asked me if I was faithful.
I’d thought this would be difficult for her. I was discovering it was far more difficult for me.
—What did he say exactly?
—He said: You faithful?
—What did you say?
—Mind your own business.
—You mean you said that to him.
—No. Yes.
They’d agreed to meet in the coffee shop the next day for lunch. She didn’t show up. She didn’t feel strong enough, she said. I asked her to please continue. Now a few months had passed and they were in his room in the hotel. What happened next?
She told him she couldn’t do it.
So why was she there?
—Just come lie beside me, he said.
She lay beside him for a little while but she was very uneasy, she said. He leaned across her to crush out his cigarette in the ashtray. As he hung over her she touched his face.
—You think I’m a fool, she said.
—No, I don’t think that.
Again she fell silent.
—Go on, Constance, I said.
He tried to kiss her but she turned her head aside. But she didn’t get up off the bed. He still hung over her, his face a few inches from hers. She smelled liquor and tobacco on his breath.
—Then what? I said.
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