Free Constance by Patrick McGrath Page B

population of New York City she wouldn’t see a psychiatrist. She said she already knew what was wrong with her. So how was she going to get better? She’d get better, she said, when Daddy wasn’t in the picture anymore.
    —You’re waiting for your father to
die?
    —He can’t go on forever.
    Constance and I have been over this material in depth and in detail. At the time I said to her that her anger toward her father was childish. It was too easy to blame the father. Everyone blamed the father. It was lazy liberal thinking, I told her. I didn’t see him as a monster, I said. He and I got along fine. I liked the man.
    But Constance was indifferent to my opinion. Instead she said that from the moment she’d met me she’d wanted
me
for her father, so that she could start over. So that she could
make good
, by which she meant repair whatever it was she’d got wrong with Daddy. She said it was a
repetition compulsion complex.
    She peered at me anxiously. My first reaction was one of amused disbelief, but I showed her nothing of this. Instead I nodded as though I took the idea seriously.
    —A
repetition compulsion complex?
    But she was never at her best in theoretical discussion. She didn’t have that kind of a mind. What kind of a mind she
did
have, this I hadn’t yet discovered.
    —Yes.
    —And it means the marriage won’t work?
    —Please don’t look at me like that.
I can’t be your wife! I can’t be anyone’s wife!
    —Why not?
    —I don’t know!
    —You want me to explain it to you?
    She regarded me with suspicion. I remembered Iris’s remark: It’s important to wind her up regularly, otherwise she runs down. She was run-down now. She had to be run-down to tell me I was her father. She sat there in her bathrobe, her hair tousled, her skin very clear, her lips moving just a little as though in silent colloquy with some unseen being. She was bewildered by the turn the conversation had taken. I was warm, gentle, solicitous.
    —Constance, honey, I’m not your father.
    —I know that—
    —
I’m not your father.
I’m your husband. Your father abandoned you emotionally because he was grieving. It’s not so unusual. But I’m not him. I’ve made a commitment to you and I won’t let you down.
    —You let Barb down.
    —All the more reason.
    —You let Howard down.
    Fortunately she knew nothing about my first wife, about whom the less said the better. But as long as she wanted to hurt me I felt I had something to work with. It was indifference I dreaded, and I knew she was capable of it.
    —Why won’t you let me introduce you to Howard? I said.
    —He already has a mother. Don’t change the subject. You treat me like I’m one of your students. Have you got any cigarettes?
    By this time she was pacing the floor. It was early October and still warm outside. The window was open and the mayhem on the street was getting started, a few random screams, a burst of manic laughter. There was a pack of cigarettes on top of the refrigerator, Ed Kaplan had left them. I gave her one and threw the rest in the trash.
    —I try not to treat you like a student but if I do it’s only because I want to teach you what I know. There was a time you liked that.
    —I’ve been educated already.
    I may have made a brief display of the mildest skepticism, some tiny reflex of an eyebrow, perhaps. But she saw it. She stopped pacing and glared at me. Her eyes filled with tears. I was on my feet at once, then she was trembling in my arms. Then she pushed me away.
    —I won’t back down! she screamed. You like students who argue with you and then back down but I won’t!
    There was more of this. She was angry, first, that I was an unsatisfactory father, and second, that I was an overbearing professor. She told me I had no interest in who she was, only in how she conformed to the image of her I’d constructed in my mind. Only in what I could make her
into.
    —You’re too old for me! You were
selfish
to make me marry you and I