Whatever specific words I might have used, I made it plain to Constance I did not wish to discuss Amanda.
“She was a painter, too,” Constance said, as though she hadn’t heard me. And it wasn’t a question, but presented as a statement of fact.
“Not exactly,” I said, wishing like hell that I had a cigarette, but I was out, and I wasn’t about to bum one off Constance.
“How do you mean?” she asked, and took another step into the room. The paranoid woman sitting at the foot of my bed noted both the physical incursion being made and Constance’s refusal to drop the obviously prickly matter of Amanda. “She didn’t paint?”
“Not with brushes,” I said. “Not with tubes of paint. At least, not usually. She used computers.”
“Graphic design?”
“She called it photo-montage,” I told Constance, who nodded and glanced at the typewriter on the dressing table. “She created composite images from photographs.”
“Oh,” Constance said. “Photoshopping,” and whether or not she’d meant to attach any sort of derisory connotation, that’s how the paranoid woman at the foot of the bed received the comment. And it triggered in me something that had not been triggered for quite some time, and I found myself needing to defend Amanda.“It was amazing, what she did,” I said, sitting up straighter, keeping my eyes on Constance. “She made photographs of things that couldn’t be photographed.”“Right,” Constance nodded, looking at me again. There was no trace of malice in her distant sangría eyes. “I had a course on photo manipulation in college. But I’m not a photographer, I’m a painter.”
“I think Amanda might have told you she was both.”
“Do you have any of her work here?” Constance asked, and I shook my head. I don’t. Everything of Amanda’s that I still own (including her artwork) is back in Atlanta, in the storage unit there. I almost brought a scrapbook with me, printouts of fifty or sixty of her favorite pieces. She referred to them as “giclées”—what she sold to her clients and from her website.
“There’s still some stuff online, I think,” I said. “Unless her agent or someone else has had it taken down.”
“That seems unlikely,” Constance said very softly.
“Does it?”
She didn’t reply, but sat, uninvited, on the floor a few feet away from me. She offered me a cigarette, and, having one offered, that’s not the same as bumming. She also offered me a light, but I had a book of matches in the pocket of my robe. I smoked and stared at the rain streaking the south-facing window.
“I’m scared,” I said, and the paranoid woman curled up inside my skin cringed, and cursed, and called me a traitor.
“We’re both scared,” Constance said. “I’m not ashamed to admit that. I only work the way that I’ve been working when I’m hiding from something, Sarah.”
“So, you’ve been hiding from something since you arrived,” I said, and laughed. Thinking back, I wish that I hadn’t, but it slipped out, like the smoke slipping across my lips and out of my nostrils. And it pleased the paranoid woman. Maybe she’s the one who laughed, and it wasn’t me, at all.
“Haven’t we both been hiding?” Constance countered. “You think the only baggage I brought back from LA was the crap you helped me carry in? Fucking shitstorm out there,” she said. “I’ve been trying to forget about it, just live my life and forget things best forgotten.”
“I never said that Amanda was something best forgotten,” the paranoid woman muttered, all but whispering, and kept her eyes on the window. Constance sighed loudly, and apologized. It made me want to hit her; I’d not asked for an apology, and I didn’t expect one.
“That’s really not what I meant,” she said. “It just came out wrong. I know there’s not a one-to-one correspondence going on here, Sarah. We both got bad shit in our immediate pasts, that’s all I mean. And then we come here, and what do we get? Chuck Harvey’s pet fucking obsession. That goddamn tree. . ” And I’ll say she trailed off here, because I got the distinct impression that there was something else she wanted to say, but didn’t.
And now the paranoid woman was yammering from someplace inside my head, intimations of seduction and guile, insincerity and head games. I silently told her to shut the hell up and leave me alone, but, I admit, I also hung on every word she said. Constance wanted something. Probably, Constance had wanted something all along, and I was getting tired of waiting to find out what it might be.
“I know that I shouldn’t be shutting myself away up there,” she said and pointed a finger towards the bedroom ceiling and the attic. “But it wasn’t so bad. . I mean, maybe I didn’t quite realize what I was doing, until you shut yourself up in here.”
“Not room enough in one house for two reclusive mad-women?” I asked, and she didn’t laugh.
“Is that what you think, Sarah? That we’re insane?”
“Don’t you? I mean, isn’t it preferable to the alternative?” And I stopped staring at the window, then, and stared at her, instead. “Oh, wait. You’re the one who opened a wormhole to 1901 and reached through space and time to stop that woman from shooting herself. I nearly forgot that part. So, for you, I guess this isn’t so strange at all, is it?”
Constance stared back at me for a second or two, then let her eyes stray to the floorboards. She laid both her paint-stained hands palms down on the varnished wood and took a very deep breath. The paranoid woman smiled with my mouth, no doubt quite entirely pleased with herself.
“We can be cunts about this,” Constance said, and it sounded as though she were choosing her words now with great deliberation. “If it’s what you want, we can each retreat to our respective corners of the cage, and cower there in our own private misery and fear. We can be alone while we wait to see what happens next, if that’s how you think it ought to be. But it’s not what I want, and you need to know that.”
“What do you want?” I asked, crushing my cigarette out on the floor. “What do you expect me to do? I’ve already told you I don’t have the money to leave this place, to find somewhere else to live. So, will it really be so much better if we cower in the same corner? Is that what you want, Constance, someone to hold your hand while we wait for whatever came for Charles Harvey, and all those other people, to come for us? Or is it just the sex? Is the fear starting to make you horny?”
Constance shook her head very slowly and licked anxiously at her lips, which I noticed were very raw, chapped, like she’d been gnawing at them.
“You won’t even try to listen,” she said. “I can leave here, Sarah. If I’m willing to leave you alone with that. .” and she glanced towards the north wall, but I understood that she was really glancing towards the red tree. “All I have to do is pack my shit and make a phone call or two, and I could be somewhere else.”
“Then that’s what you should do,” I told her, and used an index finger to wipe at the ashy gray-black smear I’d left on the floor. “In fact, that would probably be for the best, don’t you think?” And I said those things. I know perfectly well I said those things, or something similar. There seemed no possibility of reaching all the way down to the solid bottom of my anger, the bedrock bottom of the well of spite and bitterness and resignation that’s opened up in me after my last visit to the oak. It just goes on and on, that great invisible wound, like the cavern below this house goes on and on. It didn’t matter one iota that what I wanted was to put my arms around Constance, to beg her not to leave, to tell her how much it terrified me even to think of being alone. The paranoid woman spoke from the wound the tree has left in me, and I simply could not summon the will to silence her and deny her and permit the day to take some other, less self-destructive, route.