The Sunken Woman

One December day--Constantine remembers it clearly: a bright, cold, metal-sharp afternoon not long before his 37th birthday--Lisel summoned him to her.

He had been expecting--no, he had not dared expect--her to telephone him. Sometime. On a whim. Very late one night. D'you remember me? My name is Lisel.... But when the telephone rang that afternoon, he was not prepared for her faint, shy voice. He had to ask her to repeat herself. Who was it? What was wrong? An emergency--?

Her words were nearly inaudible. She sounded out of breath. Yes, she needed help. Yes, she was alone. Someone was hurt--a friend of hers was hurt. No, she hadn't called anyone else. No. Not the police.

Constantine asked where she was. At first she seemed not to have heard and repeated what she had said. She was alone, someone was hurt, it wasn't her fault. She hadn't been the one to open the door. Then she paused and gave Constantine the address. Her voice was dim and muffled, as if undersea. Constantine could imagine her long hair floating about her face.

He ran down the five flights of steps to the street, his pulse racing. His hair in his face, his fingers fumbling with the buttons of his overcoat--the very picture of alarm, distress, exhilaration--for, surely, nothing quite like this had ever happened to Constantine Reinhart before. Lisel drifted into lives--Lisel intruded herself into lives--and nothing was the same again. That morning, Constantine had resigned himself to another day in which very little would be accomplished and much regretted: and already the day was transformed. He had not dared hope---- (continued overleaf)

He would never have expected----

Years later, Constantine sees himself running into the street, a tall, self-important man in a camel's-hair coat, shouting for a taxi. He can't know what he is blundering into--he knows only that he must go through with it. And he sees, too, the girl who is awaiting him a mile away (though she is not awaiting him consciously, she has forgotten him--of course: Having dialed his number, having pleaded with him to come, she has forgotten him) in a stranger's apartment, half-dressed, sitting on the floor a few yards from the injured man. Lisel on the bare floor boards, cross-legged, in her white-cotton underpants and cheap white crocheted sweater, rocking from side to side. The Venetian blind, partly closed against the afternoon sun, has slatted the light and given to the room an undersea look, in which things--the sofa, the man sprawled on the sofa, Lisel herself--have lost their distinctive outlines and have begun to blur, to bleed. Lisel stares at the wounded man, but her face is expressionless. She sees him, but she sees nothing. Her face is small and narrow and angular and not pretty. Her pale red hair falls straight past her thin shoulders. She grips her ankles, hunching her shoulders, rocking from side to side in an attitude of grief. But she does not feel grief: She does not feel anything. Had she an articulate wish, she might wish that the man, her lover--one of her lovers--would not die; but she hasn't an articulate wish; she has no wish at all.

The coarse white sweater, made of a synthetic fabric; the whitecotton pants, a schoolgirl's pants, with their tight elastic band. Her small pointed breasts loose inside the sweater, the nipples hard with cold. Not fear, not terror: just cold. The man on the sofa (who is also partly undressed--in shorts and black-silk socks that come smartly to mid-calf) is bleeding from a head wound and some of the blood is on the sofa and some of it is on Lisel--on the sweater, even on the pants--but she has not noticed. She does notice that he is still breathing. And breathing noisily, raspily, as if in anger.

Yes, Lisel had told Constantine, yes, she needed help. No, she hadn't called the police. It wasn't her fault--she had told him not to open the door--he was so jealous--but then, for a while, they were getting along--they had a few drinks--they had been very friendly--the three of them very friendly--then something went wrong--it happened so fast, she couldn't understand. They were taking off their clothes----

"Is someone badly hurt?" Constantine asked. "Should I call an ambulance?"

She had to hang up, she whispered. Could he come here right away--?

In the taxi, Constantine chattered (continued on page 223) Sunken Woman (continued from page 199) nervously with the driver. He was making a mistake, one of the serious mistakes of his life, yet he had to obey her--he was immensely flattered that she had called him, that she had even remembered him. Beautiful "Lisel," who had been so absurdly famous, locally, for a few months. Lisel the underground film star, Lisel the model, the party girl, the victim.... . She had been the most prominent member of Myron Falk's entourage at a time when Falk's fame was at its height. And although Constantine certainly scorned these people, he could not help but be impressed by them.

Constantine had seen her at one of Falk's notorious parties, but he had not met her at that time; he hadn't met her until some time later, when the circumstances of her life were much changed. She had been ill, she was recovering slowly, staying with a friend of his--Rachel Schiller--who vowed that she would "save" Lisel from the people who were destroying her. They gave her amphetamines, they gave her barbiturates. They filmed her in the most outrageous--the most pathetic--activities. Pornography with style, Falk stated, was no longer pornography but art.

Lisel had gone to stay with Rachel when very weak from an abortion forced on her (so it was said) by a wealthy Peruvian, some time after Falk had dropped her. Constantine had seen them together one evening at a party in a midtown gallery. Then she had looked simply intimidating: tall and bony and arrogant in her posture (shoulders slumped, pelvis lifted) as a fashion model, dressed in something sleekly plain and obviously very expensive. Constantine had watched her for a long time, threading his way through the crowd. The Peruvian was dark-skinned and quite handsome; easily 30 years her senior; he had a habit, which did not fail to exite Constantine, of gripping Lisel's upper arm and squeezing it as he spoke, as if for emphasis. (Lisel, light-boned as a bird, the coloring of her face all bled into her pale red hair, simply stood beside him in her very high heels, mute as always. Her face might have registered something--might even have registered pain--but the emotion did no more than ripple across the surface of her flawless skin, as if rippling across water.)

The Peruvian owned millions of acres of forest in South America. So people said. He was married--naturally--and had children Lisel's age; he certainly would not marry her: So people said, with both anger and gratification. Constantine had not known her then, not even to say hello and shake her hand. Not even to thrust himself upon her. (For he was a "collector" of oddities--a playwright, he liked to say, and therefore an acquisitive man--eager to hear and to appropriate any voice. Lisel's intimidating silence had made a more profound impression on him than the voices--even the unrehearsed, unself-conscious voices--of his most intimate friends.) He had watched her that evening as closely as he dared, and he had thought quite calmly that he might fall in love with her: She was more than beautiful; she was soulless. It had always been women's souls that had interfered with Constantine's virility--even when the "virility" was prodigiously challenged.

Lisel with her downcast gray gaze, listening to no one and yet clearly hearing everything. Hearing his name--hearing something in his voice. While Rachel and Kirk and Meredith and the others chattered importantly (they were trying to get Lisel a job as an art-school model when she felt stronger--it would be less demanding than fashion modeling--and Kirk had a close friend at the Lexington School of Fine Arts, a friend who owed him a favor), Constantine had spoken gently to her, as one might speak to a frightened child. He learned from her that she was from Nebraska--but she hadn't any family there now. Was she lonely in New York? She had been introduced to so many hundreds of people, at so many parties, how could she fail to be lonely ... ? Constantine knew what those people were like. He knew what those parties were like.

He touched her small, cold, limp hand. In a low voice, he said impulsively, "Will you let me see you sometime, Lisel? When you're well, when you've moved out of Rachel's apartment? I promise I won't---- I promise.... ." But his voice trailed off, to his extreme embarrassment.

Lisel stared at him for a long moment. She said nothing. But very faintly, almost imperceptibly, she smiled.

•

Now the taxi pulled up to the curb. Constantine paid the driver with a five-dollar bill--he was that wildly nervous, that rushed.

He hurried into the foyer of the brownstone and pushed the inner door open and, of course, it was not locked. The lock had been broken. Inside, the stairwell smelled of urine. No one was around. He heard nothing. She had told him the second floor--they were on the second floor--he paused to listen, but there was no sound----

Lisel?

Why on earth had he come here----

He was nearly sick with apprehension. He ascended the stairs, gripping the railing; he knew he was making a mistake. If there had been a murder---- If the police----

He tried the doorknob; the door wasn't locked. His heart was hammering fiercely. It was a mistake, and yet he couldn't turn back--this must be what he had wanted.

"Hello--? Is anyone--?"

He shoved the door roughly open and stepped inside and saw a man lying on a sofa, half-dressed, evidently unconscious; and a girl seated cross-legged on the floor in front of him. No one moved. There was no sound except the man's labored breath. The slatted light--the light of a December afternoon when the sun begins to swerve away at three o'clock--gave to the scene an extraordinary dreamlike quality. Constantine saw shapes but not their precise outlines. He felt presences but could not, in his alarm, identify them.

He would not have identified Lisel, in fact. He would not have known her at all.

The unconscious man was bleeding from a head wound. He looked deathly pale: His skin was leaden and bluish. The girl on the floor in front of him sat in a half-lotus position, cupping her bare feet in her hands. She did not look at Constantine directly. But he saw how her eyes slanted toward him. She almost acknowledged him.... .

Oh, God, Constantine thought. His heartbeat was overwhelming.

•

He slammed the door behind him. So that no one could look in.

The scene will always replay itself. Fluid, gone wild, indecipherable. A lifetime of images--hurried scenes--faces--words--with what meaning? One moment he was hurrying from a taxi (paying with a five-dollar bill--clearly an act of bravado he would cherish all his life), the next saw him pushing open a door to a stranger's apartment.

A man who might be dead, or dying. A blood-soaked sofa.

Lisel rocking dreamily from side to side on the floor in front of the sofa.

Constantine stared, too astonished to speak. He saw odd, distracting details: the pale red-blonde hairs on the girl's legs, the almost invisible silky down; an overturned ashtray on the floor beside (continued on page 340) Sunken Woman (continued from page 223) the sofa; the man's rather thick, bluish fingernails.

His eyes darted from place to place, as if searching for the weapon. But the weapon--whatever it was--and he wouldn't ever learn precisely what it was--had been taken away.

He slammed the door behind him, panicked. No one must be a witness.

"Lisel--?" he said.

He must telephone the police. Or an ambulance.

He must get her out of here.

She was sitting tranquilly enough in a crosshatching of sunlight. Her skin stretched tight across her face, her eyes overlarge and curiously sightless. Bars of hazy sunshine fell across her face and shoulders and chest, alternating with bars of hazy shadow. He could not see her clearly--he could not see anything in that room clearly. His vision wavered and blotched. A wave of faintness rose in him, from the very pit of his belly.

He must telephone----

He must get help----

The room stank of alcohol and vomit. He shook his head to clear it and the walls and ceiling began to spin.

Was the man dying? He must telephone the police----

"Lisel----"

Her lover. One of her lovers.

He should have telephoned the police, but he did not.

Instead, he telephoned a friend--an old, intimate friend--someone who knew Lisel and knew, or could guess, what the situation might be. In a low, rapid voice he explained.... He tried to make clear.... Convey the sense of....

Then he dressed her. Quickly and clumsily. As one might dress a sleep-groggy child. Scolding her under his breath, forcing her arms through the sleeves of her jacket.... She did not resist him, but she did not cooperate, either. Her body gave off a powerful rank odor of sheer animal fright; he wanted to hold his breath against it.

He dressed her in a long shapeless black skirt with a waistband several inches too large for her. Yet it had to be hers--there was no other piece of women's clothing in the room. And a red belt, an inappropriately bright belt--cheap simulated leather--14th Street quality. A line of saliva ran across her chin. She looked drunken, drugged. When he tried to pull on her stockings--they were really knee-high socks, made of black wool--she whimpered and drew back from him. "Stop. Don't fight me. Don't be ridiculous," he whispered angrily. But she pushed at him, frightened, and even struck him--struck him on the side of the face with the flat of her hand--a stinging blow--and he found himself shaking her violently. "What do you think you're doing? What the hell--!" he panted. For a moment he wanted very badly to hurt her.

Then she gave in. She acquiesced suddenly and leaned against him as he pulled on the other sock. It was stiff with dirt.

Like a dream, the events of that afternoon: Constantine will remember it all his life. He is remembering it even now. His-movements quick and jerky and uncoordinated ... the slats of light blinding him ... the odor of Lisel's body close in his nostrils. A few yards away, a stranger lay on a soiled couch, moaning. Trying to regain consciousness. It was a matter of curious but extreme relief that Constantine did not know the man--had never seen him before.

Like a dream, his struggle with Lisel. Forcing her shoes on her feet.

And her fur jacket----

Dyed rabbit fur. Inexpensive, as far as furs go. But smart. The auburn fur contrasting with Lisel's pale red hair. Had her lover, the injured man, bought her this jacket? Constantine ran his fingers quickly along one of the sleeves. So soft.

She staggered and nearly fell against him.

"Don't," he said sharply.

It was only afterward, hours afterward, that he realized how terrified he was. Not that the man would die but that he would regain consciousness while Constantine was in the room.

•

And the weapon? Where was the weapon? What had been used?

Constantine undressed Lisel gently and lowered her into the steaming hot water in his bathtub. They were safe now, in his apartment. She began at once to babble. She clung to him, whimpering, giggling, saying that it wasn't her fault ... it was her fault ... he had forced his way in ... he knew where they were ... it was her fault because she told him too much ... she really knew better. Then there was the key. Something about a key. She had, or perhaps had not, given him a key. To which apartment? One of the apartments. He would have followed her anyway. He hated her, he wanted to kill her. She should have known that.

Constantine asked who had done the beating--what weapon had he used?

"He wouldn't stop hitting him," Lisel said in a small, high voice, still holding Constantine's arm. "I screamed and screamed, but he wouldn't stop. He said he would kill us both. He said.... I couldn't help...."

She squirmed and her white body looked iridescent in the water; her small breasts appeared to be floating.

"He said...."

"But who was it?" Constantine asked.

His face was damp from the steam. His shirt front and trousers were wet. "What happened to the weapon?" he asked.

He was crouching over her, his face locked in a grimace of--of what?--tenderness and pity--paternal affection--alarm--lust. Her odor, her writhing naked body, her distress greatly excited him.

"He said he would kill us both...."

She looked up at Constantine, dryeyed. The pupils of her eyes were perceptibly dilated.

Constantine brushed her hair out of her face. He stroked her forehead, noting the hard bone beneath the skin; noting the ridge of bone at the eyebrows. He told her that everything was under control. She was safe. Whoever had attacked her friend, he couldn't find her here. He had telephoned Kirk Rodman (did she remember Kirk? Yes?) and by now, Kirk would have telephoned the police; an ambulance would have been sent; everything was under control.

"I won't let anyone hurt you," Constantine said in triumph.

•

On the pinewood table Constantine used as a desk, there was a heavy brass paperweight in the shape of an art nouveau sphinx. It was charmingly ugly, a fist-sized monster; feline and womanly and grotesque; with absurd staring eyes and scalloped bat wings. Constantine had noticed it in the window of a Lafayette Street antique shop and had had to buy it, though its price--$35--had seemed to him high. It was, after all, nothing more than a piece of junk.

Still, he liked it. He had grown fond of it. Sometimes he woke to find it in his hand--he was weighing it in his hand--his mind gone blank.

The ugly little female lion with the silly wings and the wide staring "supernatural" eyes. The jutting conical breasts with their gemlike nipples. Uncanny, isn't it? Constantine murmured when visitors appraised it. Art nouveau. Or, I should say, a reproduction of art nouveau--I don't think it's a genuine antique.

He was willing to laugh at his paperweight if others laughed, but secretly he found it rather charming. Even the tail--a forked dragon's tail, curved stiffly upward--was delightful. His half-conscious caresses had made the thing glow in certain areas (the wings, the curved back), but the rest of it was badly tarnished; and he would never clean it. He sat at his desk and wrote a few words and raised his head to stare out the window and his left hand groped for the sphinx ... groped for it and fondled it ... weighed it ... turned it about ... pushed it aside. The morning after Lisel left, Constantine was to sit at his desk, sighing, a pot of coffee at his right hand, and within ten minutes he was to grope for the paperweight ... his fingers stretching for it ... and gradually his attention was drawn ... his attention was drawn to the fact that something was wrong, something was missing ... and he was to discover, to his astonishment (for of course the thing had no value) that the sphinx was gone.

Lisel had taken it, evidently.

Lisel had taken it, though she might have taken--she might have stolen--something of value. She might even have taken cash if she had troubled to look for it.

•

"I would have given her the ugly thing, of course," Constantine complained to his friend. "I would have given her almost anything. If she had asked."

Kirk was silent for a moment, as if in commiseration. Then he said, "But of course Lisel knew that."

•

She had been famous as Lisel--simply "Lisel"--for a period of about 18 months. And then her fame had been primarily a downtown phenomenon: She had done some modeling, she had been interviewed, she had been featured in a number of Myron Falk's "experimental" films. Beyond Manhattan, it was doubtful that anyone had ever heard of her--or that her name was remembered for more than those quick 18 months.

Still, to be "famous" even on those terms--to have been simply Lisel for those months----

Constantine, who knew better, whose entire career (as a playwright, a poet, a critic, a hopeful man of letters) was predicated on his knowing better, nevertheless felt the power of her queer near-mute impassivity. The first time he saw her, at a crowded party in Myron Falk's studio-loft, he had been much taken; and he hadn't even known her name at that time; in fact, she had had no name. She wasn't Lisel yet--she was simply another of Falk's freaks, a discovery he had made off the street (in Lisel's case, it had been Seventh Avenue down around Houston--and although one of the nastier tales made her out to have been soliciting, her activity had really been quite innocent: She had been lost). There was the sweet-faced and highly verbose homosexual dancer Gary; the 6'5? giantess Martha Blount, with her gift for improvised comedy; the street kid Win (who, like Lisel, had drifted to New York from the Midwest but seemed the very quintessence of the Village--and who, like Lisel, had come close to killing himself with drugs): these "stars," these "names," were all discoveries of Myron Falk's. He attracted them. He collected them. They were his "chicks." He did not enlist them for his films so much as he improvised films to contain them. Working quickly and with a disdain for technical proficiency (for Falk, of course, claimed to have no interest at all in commercial success), Falk and his assistants could turn out a 16-millimeter film every week--with no sound, no editing, no fussy camerawork and only the most frenetically improvised of scripts. The films were all in black and white; sometimes they were, surprisingly, very beautiful.

Lisel's first film was called The Victim--18 minutes of a girl's beautiful empty face while the camera moves slowly back and it becomes increasingly clear--though never graphically or visually clear--that something very strange is being done to her. Dear God, Constantine had thought, staring at that face. He had never, he liked to say, he had never sat through anything so excruciating.

Within a few weeks, Lisel's face was known to everyone in the city with pretensions of keeping up with avantgarde art--which is to say, many thousands. There were interviews with Falk in respectable middle-class publications. He was on television, accompanied by a mute--and starkly beautiful--"Lisel." The face was beautiful enough, but not very human; it was acclaimed as beautiful, perhaps, because it wasn't human. The sharp cheekbones and the prominent ridge of bone above the eyes ... the unplucked eyebrows ... the impassive, almost babyish mouth ... the childlike gaze that absorbed everything but did not judge. This was Lisel, Falk's chick.

Later, when Falk had dropped her and Lisel was taken up (though only for a few months; she hadn't the discipline or the ambition) by a modeling agency, she had struck Constantine as far more conventionally beautiful. Tall and near emaciated, her long red hair alternately frizzed and braided and worn loose, dressed in the most fashionable of clothes, her eyes meticulously painted, her three-inch fingernails polished bronze--even her mood (bright, quick, nervous from amphetamines, but usually wordless) stylish and programed--Lisel had seemed to Constantine a creature of the media, a manufactured product. She made a great deal of money modeling for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, but even in those magazines, the emphasis (and Constantine, who studied the chic lurid tableaux with extreme interest, saw this clearly) was on her fragility, her deathly pallor, her exalted status as victim. Lisel--simply Lisel--with no last name and no history. And no future.

•

Constantine was between lovers--he self-pityingly considered himself purged of love--when he first saw Myron Falk's Lisel. She was close beside Falk, who was usually touching her; it was quite clear that she was his prize of the season, and while he was willing to exhibit her to others (and that was one of the points, surely, of the party--Lisel's "coming out" in Soho), he was not willing that anyone draw her away and speak to her in private. She looked, people thought, like a freaky daughter of his: at 5'9?, taller than Myron, docile, obedient, tranquil, skinny, a high school girl to whom things are done--and the delicious part was, of course, that she appeared to be too young, too innocent, perhaps even too stupid, to know the names of these things, or to care greatly.

Constantine was between lovers. Although he had made up his mind--the poor man, at the age of 35, he was forever making up his mind--not to open himself again to humiliation, even to the most exciting kind of humiliation.

When he saw Lisel--who was not yet Lisel--standing with Falk that night some years ago, he had thought immediately: That one isn't for me--she's entirely out of reach. And the insight had warmed him, had made him feel positively cheerful.

Then, later, having seen her on film--in The Victim, in Street, in Lisel itself--having seen her in the company of lesser members of Falk's entourage, he had discovered himself contemplating strategies of approaching her. Not her--not the girl herself--but the trashy phenomenon she represented. Lisel who was only Lisel, after all; a girl who had to have come from somewhere, just as Myron Falk had come from a not-extraordinary background: born in Buffalo, New York--attended public schools--and then a state teachers' college in Buffalo, where he had taken art courses before transferring to a commercial art school. Constantine knew all about Falk and the rise of trash art in the Sixties and Seventies, he certainly knew the bankruptcy of spirit that informed all that Falk or his imitators (and he had many imitators--he has them still) attempted--and yet, still--and yet--there was this peculiar fascination--there was this arresting of attention by the most foolish of images: the 17-foot-high lime Popsicle Falk had fashioned out of real Popsicle sugar-ice, for example; and the most degrading of "events" (the tireless copulations of Falk's later films, which were languid and self-mocking and never normal--as if normal were a word with any significance!--the artwork, in an expensive midtown gallery, that consisted of a girl--had it been Lisel? It surely might have been Lisel--wallowing in white plasterish muck, naked, in a trough a foot or so beneath the level of the floor, a living sculpture of Falk's called The Sunken Woman about which innumerable jokes were made, not all of them angry or even unsympathetic). Like many writers and artists who imagine themselves experimentalists, and even among the avant-garde, Constantine Reinhart deeply resented the wildly disproportionate media attention two or three or four of his contemporaries enjoyed; he deeply resented (and was he envious as well?) Myron Falk's notoriety and the fact that Falk, after a few weeks of interest, of fairly intense interest, had seemed to forget all about Constantine Reinhart.

"The man who broke into that apartment--the man who did the beating--was he a friend of Falk's?" Constantine was to ask Lisel, as she lay shivering in his bed, in his stained cashmere robe. She did not reply; she was too exhausted even to pretend not to hear. But Constantine knew the probable answer--she did not remember.

"Was he an enemy?" Constantine asked.

And then, finally, raising his voice: "Did he have a name?"

Lisel's face tightened in sleep. She did not turn away from him, but she did not respond.

•

After Lisel disappeared from his apartment (he had been out shopping in the Grand Union at the time--foolish and eager as a young husband), Constantine learned from Rachel Schiller that she had been, for a brief while, but only for a brief while, a kind of prostitute when she first came to New York.

A kind of prostitute--! Constantine said.

The girl had been talked into coming East by two men who had something to do, or claimed to have something to do, with television. She was 17 years old at the time and had not graduated from high school. She had, in fact, stopped attending school--her mother (who had been divorced from her father for a decade) had a new baby and had been forced to move for the third time in a year, so it wasn't clear which school district Lisel belonged in; and not very important.

She wanted to be a television actress? Constantine asked.

She wanted to be anything, Rachel said.

An actress ... or maybe a "night-club performer" ... or a dancer ... or a model. (She did get jobs fairly quickly as an art school model. But the jobs paid poorly and she had to sit, nude, for long periods at a time, her large vacant eyes fixed upon a distant corner of the room. Rachel, who had been, as she was finally to admit, rather obsessed with Lisel for a while, did some inquiring and learned that Lisel was extraordinary as a model: She could sit motionless for as long as 45 minutes, staring off into space, sunken into a kind of trance from which she would have to be awakened. In life she had taken on some of the characteristics of an artwork. And the nature of her beauty--pallid, eccentric, unnerving--was wonderfully contemporary. Perhaps it was not beauty at all: It did not speak of anything beyond itself, it had nothing to do with the species, everything to do with the idiosyncrasy of the individual; it alarmed and intimidated rather than gratified the senses. From "Lisel" one could not deduce a single workaday truth.)

It was incorrect to say that Lisel as a girl of 17 had come to New York City, or even that she had left home. She was simply carried away from home--if "home" existed--and brought to New York. Her friends' names were Mack and Steve. They had "something to do with television." Or perhaps they had "something to do with a night club" on West 38th Street.

And so they exploited her, Constantine said.

(He could not have explained his curious resentment. A dull unfocused anger. Mack and Steve, whom no one remembered--certainly not Lisel herself.)

They exploited her--? Constantine asked.

With her long untidy red hair and her solemn gray eyes (which hadn't the capacity for fear, or for the registering of fear) and her 13-year-old's body--with her sleepwalker's uncanny grace--and her eloquent silence: How might it have been possible for her not to be exploited? Simply feeding the girl, Rachel said, embarrassed, changing her bedclothes, offering her a fresh towel, inquiring about her health; all this felt like exploitation; certainly it was a kind of violation.

Certainly one could not resist.

•

Later, of course, she was to become quite dangerous. But that day she had been helpless as a small child. Lying against him in the taxi, allowing him to undress her for her bath, sleeping in his bed, in his robe, for 15 hours.

Constantine stood in the doorway, watching as she slept. Her small pale face expressed more emotion in sleep than it did while she was awake. Her eyelids fluttered, her nose twitched, she appeared to be mouthing words, she squirmed and twisted beneath the covers, and kicked, and rolled her head from side to side. Yet she never woke: She slept sunken deep beneath the surface of the waves of consciousness, where no one could touch her.

How easy, Constantine thought, to become sentimental over Lisel.

Over Lisel--who felt no sentiment for herself.

She slept while Constantine watched. He might have embraced her--might have slipped beneath the covers and made love to her--certainly she would not have resisted, would probably not even have troubled to wake. They had done such things to her, such wild extravagant whimsical deadpan things, down in Myron Falk's Spring Street studio--! Some of the antics had been filmed; some had not been filmed. Constantine had heard rumors, of course. But as he watched Lisel sleep, he found it difficult to believe that she, that girl, had actually participated; he found it difficult to believe that she had been involved in violence of any kind, though he had, only a few hours previously, walked into a room in which one of her lovers lay unconscious. It was so easy to forget. To let things slip through one's mind. Lisel was not burdened by memory, and so, perhaps, in her presence, besotted with love for her, one ought to forget everything ... everything that was not immediately visible.

He walked quietly about the apartment. He was a bridegroom, an eager young husband. He was not in love, but the symptoms of love distracted him: an irrational fear that someone would run upstairs and pound on his door and demand that he surrender Lisel. He had no right to her, after all.

And wasn't she now wanted by the police? As a witness to an attempted murder? Or would it be called aggravated assault?

Constantine made telephone calls, speaking softly. He listened to the radio. He hurried down to the corner to buy a newspaper. But the beating on 13th Street was not very important, evidently. The victim's name was not available. And, of course, no one knew about Lisel--no one except a few people, who would never give her name to the police.

•

The wealthy Peruvian with his dark skin, his handsome face, his dandyish expensive clothes. (Or was the fact of his wealth--his "millions" of acres of land--an exaggeration?) Myron Falk and his entourage. Mack and Steve. And the dozens--might there have been hundreds?--of others. Constantine doodled on sheets of yellow scrap paper, waiting for Lisel to call to him, too nervous to work, too distracted to think. There had been so many men; and probably women, too. Why would it matter, another man? It would not matter to her. He could crawl beneath the covers of his bed ... for, after all, it was his bed ... and he could undress her and make love to her ... gently ... or not so gently ... and she would awake, possibly a little startled ... she would resist ... or would not trouble to resist ... she would murmur his name ... or accept him in silence. She would, or would not, slip her arms around him. Part her slender legs for him. And entering her he would slip, he would fall ... sink ... lose himself in that undersea cave in which all men were the same man to her: in which all men were the same man.

Lisel--?

But she was still sleeping. Small fists resting on either side of her head, on the twisted pillow. Slack mouth open. Faint hoarse breath. A thread of saliva on her chin.

Lisel--?

Sleeping.

•

A year later, after the attempted murder of Myron Falk, Constantine will discover, quite by accident, the brass sphinx--or one exactly like it--in a Hudson Street antique shop.

How much--? That brass paperweight in the corner.

Fifty-five dollars.

Fifty-five dollars!

He will peer at the squat little thing. He will stoop and pick it up and weigh it in his hand. Yes, it's his--the very same thing. The batlike wings, the staring eyes, the silly pert breasts. Yes? No? It is badly tarnished except across the back, where he used to stroke it.

Constantine will ask the storekeeper where the paperweight came from, but, of course, the storekeeper won't know. He will consider telling the man that the paperweight is his--he recognizes it--it really belongs to him. But he will decide against this: Constantine isn't the kind to make a scene.

How much did you say? he will ask sullenly.

•

Lisel was sleeping. So he slipped out to do some shopping.

Raspberry popovers. Real cream. Butter. Eggs. Bacon. Orange juice. Queensbury Marmalade (imported from England). He hurried along the aisles, freshly shaved and shining, a hopeful young lover. While in his apartment sleepy-eyed Lisel woke at last and stretched and called out his name. And when he did not reply--when she saw that she was alone--she shook her head, and brushed her hair out of her eyes, and sat up in bed, visited by a thought.

Lisel on the bare floor boards, cross-legged, in her white-cotton underpants and cheap white crocheted sweater. Rocking from side to side. In the clumsy rhythms of grief. Is he dead? Her lover, dead? Or was the other one her lover--the one who began shouting so suddenly and would not be quieted?

Constantine is gloating over the fact that Lisel eluded Rachel. One afternoon she simply--walked out.

"She didn't listen to me!" Rachel shouted. "She didn't give me a chance."

•

But even as he wheeled his cart to the cashier, Lisel, three blocks away, was stepping into her long soiled black skirt, adjusting the cheap red belt around her waist, stepping into her shoes. The heels were quite high; she sometimes staggered in them. But they gave her a startling modish look.

She found her rabbit-fur jacket in Constantine's clothes closet.

She prowled about the apartment--an apartment she had never seen before--humming under her breath. After 15 hours' sleep, she felt wonderfully refreshed. Her soul had been given back to her--she was eager to return to the street.

But she did want a memento. She was superstitious about such things.

The sphinx caught her eye. It was rather large, and heavy, and fit only with difficulty in her pocket. Nevertheless, she had to have it. And she wouldn't pawn it--she would keep it forever, in memory of Constantine Reinhart, who had risked so much for her.

And so she slipped away--hurrying downstairs in her high heels--leaning on the railing. She was very weak; she hadn't eaten for two days. Her bridegroom was gaily paying for a hefty shopping bag of groceries, but Lisel hadn't any interest in food. Her eyes were slightly puffy from so many hours of sleep--it was time, it was more than time, for her to escape.

She was a child, Rachel told Constantine afterward. When his hurt wasn't so fresh. When it might even be interpreted as bemusement.

Which makes us--? Constantine said.

•

Lisel disappeared from Constantine's life and he heard nothing of her for many months. Then there were rumors: She had surfaced again in the city, far downtown, as a kind of "wife" to two homosexual men, one of whom ran a fairly well-known bookstore in the Village called Peddlers. Constantine visited the store one mild April day, out of curiosity, and observed closely what there was to observe: But there was very little to observe and he came away only with an armful of books he would probably never read but could not resist. The bookseller was a fussy, gabby, unprepossessing man in his 30s; he had seemed--almost--to recognize Constantine, which was always flattering though sometimes misleading; in any case, Constantine could not bring himself to ask him about Lisel. How on earth could he bring the subject up--! And then, and then--probably--the rumor was false.

Other rumors, from time to time, surfacing in casual conversations or relayed to him through his tight little network of friends: that Lisel had been seen once again in the company of Myron Falk, at a wild day-and-a-night-and-a-day party on Fire Island; she had been glimpsed in a limousine (though a rather second-rate sort of limousine) hurtling along lower Fifth Avenue, seated beside a person (whether male or female was unclear) in a tuxedo; she had sat for a life-drawing class at NYU but after 20 minutes rose from her seat and retired behind the screen and dressed and walked out, giving no explanation, hardly listening to the instructor's surprised questions; she had tried to commit suicide in a typically inept manner--having swallowed two dozen barbiturates, she descended into the subway to ride about but soon collapsed and was discovered and taken to a hospital far, far away in Queens. There was a rumor that she had left New York City and returned to Omaha; there was a rumor, which Constantine found dismayingly credible, that she had gone on the street again--she was living with a man, a pimp, on the Lower East Side.

Constantine surrendered her, more or less. It wouldn't be at all accurate to suggest that he thought about her frequently, let alone brooded over her, though he had started a play--a surrealist play that had lurched swiftly into graphic naturalism--called The Sunken Woman. He worked on it from time to time, always with enthusiasm that quickly drained away--as he wrote in a frenzy of composition, inventing (or remembering) a young woman's voice, he grew very excited, and then suddenly very depressed, and by the end of an hour's work, he felt simply hollow: even frightened, as if the voice was a forbidden one. Only at such times did Constantine really remember Lisel, though he was curious about "Lisel" and told himself that someday--when he had more time--someday soon--perhaps in the company of a young actress whom he now believed he loved--he would visit Falk's studio and ask to poke about in the films of several years back. (These "underground" films were now history. And very dated. Occasionally one came across references to them and to Myron Falk in lengthy, heavily footnoted essays on avant-garde cinema, in such journals as Partisan Review and The New York Review, but the films were not shown any longer, and many of them were probably lost.) He would tell Falk that he intended to do a critical study of experimental film making and Falk would possibly be flattered and open his "archives" to him.... But months passed, and Constantine never got around to it; he had better things to do with his time.

•

And then one morning in midsummer, he saw in the paper a headline on page three: "Myron Falk attacked, in critical condition."

Martha Blount had had the weapon; the two others--Lisel and "Marcus"--had merely tried to hold him down. Eleven stab wounds, with an ice pick. Surprised in his studio on Spring Street. Nine-thirty at night. No warning. Falk had answered the door and three "former members of his entourage" had attacked him, throwing him to the floor. A 37-year-old woman, Martha Blount, had stabbed him repeatedly with an ice pick, and had even tried--a gesture Constantine winced at, it was so Falkish, so fey and allusive--to pierce his forehead with the point of the pick, leaning on it with both hands, throwing her considerable weight on it--! But the point slipped. And by then, Falk's terrified screams had brought help.

Constantine skimmed the story. And reread it. His fingers had gone cold--there was a faint ringing in his ears--but he didn't feel any real emotion: He didn't feel anything at all. Myron Falk, who lived a mile south of him, had nearly been murdered in an outrageously brutal way; he had nearly been murdered by someone Constantine knew, or imagined he knew; imagined he had even, for a brief while, loved. But he felt little emotion. Only curiosity. The assailants were identified as Martha Blount, 37; Lisel Bier, 22; and Marcus or The Angel, in his late 20s, of no fixed address. All three were under psychiatric observation at Bellevue and Falk was in the intensive-care unit at St. Vincent's Hospital.

Constantine read and reread the story. It took up about six inches of newsprint. The telephone was ringing--that would be Rachel, or Kirk--the telephone might have been ringing for some time--but Constantine couldn't bring himself to answer. He was sitting at his table with the paper opened before him, staring at a "story," a reasonably compact presentation of certain "facts." Why Blount and Bier and Marcus had tried to kill Falk--why they had tried to kill him that particular night--why Blount had chosen an ice pick--what Falk had said when he opened the door and saw them--what Falk had felt when the stabbing began--when it actually began and he must have realized that something very real was happening to him: None of this was explained and, given the terse, perfunctory nature of the language, none of it could be inferred. There was only the "story," the "facts," and Constantine felt too weak, too stricken, to stumble the several yards to his telephone, though the voice on the other end (there would be a "voice," surely) might be of aid to him.

The next day, a follow-up story on the assault would include a quote from Martha Blount (her co-assailants having remained mute): "It was his time."

•

As the years pass, Constantine will allude to his "brief acquaintance with violence and madness," but his anecdotes (he is a consummate teller of anecdotes--sometimes he believes it is his single talent) will focus not upon Lisel Bier but upon Myron Falk. (For Falk, after all, is "famous." People are interested in Falk.) Only with very close friends will Constantine speak of Lisel, and then with an air of sardonic bemusement. Whatever became of her after Bellevue--whatever became of the three of them, those three maniacs!--is it even worth while to imagine likely fates? (She is probably institutionalized somewhere, Rachel says flatly. She couldn't have survived otherwise.)

Constantine will work on The Sunken Woman from time to time, always with the same initial burst of inspiration. And then the sudden drop, the sudden exhaustion.... He is too gifted a writer, too devoted to his subject, to approach the question of Lisel in a coolly professional manner: He cannot force himself to transform her into a conventional dramatic experience, and so he cannot complete a play about her. He has more than 100 pages of notes and dialog and outlines, and long descriptive passages in which he tries to see himself from the outside as a way of seeing her.... Constantine in his camel's-hair coat, hurrying into the street. Calling for a taxi. Embarked upon what is to be one of the most dangerous adventures of his life, though he can't know it at the time; and, of course, it will not turn out to be really dangerous: No one will try to pierce his skull with an ice pick.

Everyone was a little crazy then, he says, alluding to that era--that span of time in his life and in the life of the city. Not everyone survived.

But you survived, Constantine--? he is asked.

Oh, yes, he says, laughing, running his hand through his hair as if embarrassed, oh, yes--in a manner of speaking.

•

One May afternoon, far uptown at West 155th Street, Constantine is threading his way through an immense chattering crowd, in search of Myron Falk.

Years have passed. Myron Falk has just been inducted, along with 15 other persons (artists, composers, writers), into the American Academy-Institute. The ceremony lasted two and a half hours, and now everyone--members of the Academy-Institute and their guests and journalists and photographers and innumerable hangers-on--is crowding onto the terrace beneath the canopy, for cocktails. Constantine Reinhart, with his major work still (still!) before him, has not yet been invited to join the Academy-Institute; he is only a guest this afternoon, of Kirk Rodman's. He is vain enough to fantasize declining his own election--yet boyish enough to anticipate it with a sinking, sickish, exuberant dread--and he cannot decide whether to be pleased or insulted when, in this jovial crowd, he is mistaken as a member. (For Constantine Reinhart the playwright, oddly enough, is better known locally than a number of the older members of the academy. And if photographers insist upon taking his picture, it must mean that he is, however minimally, photogenic.)

However, Constantine is interested in only one thing at the present moment: hunting down Myron Falk.

Of course, there is something amusing and melancholy about Falk's induction into the academy. For it certainly means--it all but insists--that the avantgarde is dead; the outrageous "underground" art of Falk's prime is dead. Though Falk himself did not die eight years ago, a death of some kind did occur. The rebel, the bad boy, the criminal poseur, the mock dandy, the controversial Myron Falk has now become another establishment artist ... just another aging bore. He even dresses normally now. Or almost normally. It has been years since he smeared suntan make-up on his face, or wore yellow-and-black-checked sports coats, or oxford shoes; it has been years since he released his last film--a clumsy attempt at a "real" feature film that failed to acquire national distribution, and that no one, not even the most scholarly experts of the cinema, felt obliged to see.

Constantine moves gracefully through the crowd, which consists of tight little knots of celebrities talking earnestly to one another, while others gaze upon them hopefully, or edge toward them; it is deathly to be stuck with the wrong people at such a gathering, as Constantine well knows; so he keeps in motion.

There is Myron Falk, at the very end of the bar. Half-hidden behind a small group of well-wishers whom, in ordinary circumstances, Constantine would make every effort to avoid.

But Falk has seen him approaching. And, after a moment's hesitation (is he trying to place Constantine? or does he remember him all too clearly?), he steps forward to meet him, extending his beefy hand.

Constantine congratulates him on his election. Falk shrugs and grimaces, as if embarrassed, or suspecting mockery. He cannot fail to understand the symbolic meaning of his election, but, at the same time, he cannot fail to feel pride: Now that his years of "artistic" adventuring are behind him, what can remain apart from such rewards, falling like overripe plums .... ? One need only survive.

It has been a while since Constantine has seen Myron Falk in person. His jowls are now prominent, there are deep unsmiling creases on either side of his mouth, a network of frail bluish veins has worked its way to the surface of his perfectly smooth bald head. He certainly looks his 56 years, and more; he looks like a man who has almost died--who has stepped back just in time. The scar high on his pale forehead is clearly visible. It has a purplish cast, it appears to be winking as Falk speaks. Constantine cannot help glancing at it despite his effort to keep his gaze fixed courteously on Falk's.

So you didn't die, Constantine thinks, sipping at his drink. Though it was your time.

They fall silent. Constantine has decided that Falk doesn't know who he is, when Falk says, abruptly, "You have a new play opening--? Is it Broadway, or--?"

"Not Broadway," Constantine says quickly. Though he feels constrained to tell Falk the name of the theater, which is an excellent one.

Falk nods. For a long moment he contemplates the flagstone terrace at their feet, as if it were an abyss Constantine cannot see; he even--avuncularly, paternally--touches Constantine's arm, as if in warning. But the half-conscious gesture is over in a moment, and Constantine wonders if he has imagined it.

"I wish you all the success you can bear," Falk says slowly.

Constantine laughs, startled. "Well--thank you," he says.

Then Falk smiles his famous smile. It is bright and wide and clearly insincere--a chilling parody of a smile.

"All you can bear. But not a drop more," he whispers.

His porcelain teeth flash briefly. Then the smile is over, and he raises his plastic cup to his lips.

Constantine blushes. He has become quite warm. Autograph seekers have surrounded them--they are polite enough to await Falk's acknowledgment before coming forward--but Falk, though clearly aware of them, does not look around. In fact, he edges closer to Constantine, as if he has something to say.

But he does not speak. He raises his cup again and finishes his drink.

Finally, Constantine says, in a voice not nearly so level as he would like:

"That girl----You know----The one who----"

Falk makes a hissing sound, as if laughing.

"Lisel," he says flatly.

"Yes--her--the one who----" Constantine murmurs.

"You know her name perfectly well, so say it," Falk says. His head is lowered; his gaze is fixed at their feet. Constantine cannot avoid looking at the scar on his forehead. A tiny purple worm that shifts and writhes, as if with the strain of Falk's thinking.

"I've been wondering----It's been so long since----Do you know if she's still hospitalized? Or where she is?" Constantine asks quickly.

"Still hospitalized? Of course not," Falk says. He pauses, edging still nearer to Constantine. Is it possible that he fears the autograph seekers, or is he merely toying with them? He stares at the terrace and will not raise his eyes. They are hovering a few yards away, not knowing what to do. "Lisel. You want to know about Lisel. Well, she was in Bellevue for a while, and then I arranged to have her transferred to a private hospital out on Long Island. Don't look surprised: It was only Lisel I did that for. As for the others--I didn't care whether they lived or died, whether they rotted in Bellevue or somewhere else. But Lisel was different. You and I know she was different. She spent a year out on Long Island and by then an aunt of hers had come forward, a very nice middle-aged woman who was a high school principal somewhere out in the Midwest--not Nebraska, it wasn't Nebraska--maybe Iowa--Davenport, Iowa--and my lawyer dealt with her--I talked with her only once, myself--and Lisel went out there to live and met someone and got married. And that is what happened to Lisel."

Constantine opened his mouth to protest. But it was a moment before he said, "Well--but----Do you mean----Lisel is married?"

"Married."

"But who is her husband? Who would marry her?" Constantine asks.

"Someone in Davenport, Iowa. A doctor, maybe. I don't know. The aunt told me--sent me a snapshot, even--Lisel and her husband and their baby, but I misplaced it. I forget the details."

"But who would marry Lisel--?" Constantine says numbly.

Falk grunts. He makes a gesture Constantine cannot interpret, and turns roughly aside, as if to greet the autograph hunters--and rebuff them at the same time.

"But who would marry----"

The atmosphere beneath the canopy is humid and euphoric, the noise level has been steadily rising. Constantine feels alarmed, intoxicated--the crowd's gaiety is infectious--he finds himself clutching at Falk's arm. He cannot give up the moment. He is too stunned, too moved: What on earth has happened?

Falk turns back to him, raising his eyebrows. There is a local legend, a tale, that Falk is color-blind; and, indeed, his eyes look colorless.

"I don't understand," Constantine says, "I mean--you've seen a snapshot--Lisel is married and has had a baby? She's living in Iowa--she isn't dead, or hospitalized----"

Falk laughs softly, and closes his fingers over Constantine's hand as it grips his arm. He says, in a voice so low and intimate Constantine must lean forward to hear: "Yes, she escaped us after all."

"He touched her small, cold, limp hand. 'Will you let me see you sometime, Lisel?'"

"She pushed at him and even struck him--and he found himself shaking her violently."