CHAPTER THREE
Constance Hopkins was born not far to the south of here, born and raised in some little slip of a once-was town called Greene that I might well have driven through two or three times now, but I’ll be damned if I can recall the place. She says it was originally named Coffin Corner, until the paternal grandfather of H. P. Lovecraft, Whipple Phillips, bought pretty much the whole village back in the 1850s and renamed it after Nathaniel Greene, the Revolutionary War hero. In the Nineteenth Century, Greene was an important stopping point along the railroad, but then Henry Ford showed up and fixed that good and proper. Now I gather it’s hardly even a town at all. I didn’t ask her why the place had originally been named Coffin Corner, and she didn’t volunteer the information, so maybe she doesn’t know, either. Maybe it’s one of those things that nobody remembers. Maybe it’s a memory that’s been entrusted to a crumbling bit of paper in a library book somewhere.
She showed up around two, driving a rented PT Cruiser, and the car was almost the same color as the summer sky. Almost that exact same shade of blue. I walked down to meet her at the footbridge that fords the creek from Ramswool Pond, and, I’ll admit, at the time, I wasn’t thinking about much more than how maybe I should at least make an effort not to be a bitch. Fake it. Affect a neighborly attitude, because it wouldn’t kill me, and the last thing I need right now is Squire Blanchard deciding I’m more trouble than I’m worth. For all I know, this woman can actually pay her rent on time, and maybe she’ll up and decide she wants to lease the whole damn house out from under me. So, yeah, stuff a cork in it and play nice.
She had a bunch of cardboard boxes and some mismatched suitcases, along with an assortment of stuff you’d expect the artist who’s going to take up residence above your head to arrive with. Two huge wooden easels, for example. I introduced myself, and then helped her lug some of her things back to the house, things she didn’t want sitting out in the hot car — paints and art supplies, several rolled canvases, a plastic milk crate of old LPs. I quickly showed her around the first floor, including the bathroom we will now be sharing, and ended up at the steep, narrow flight of stairs leading to the attic.
“Bet it’s hot as fuck all up there,” she said, squinting into the gloom gathered at the top of the staircase, the gloom and the heat crouched so thickly you could almost see it, and I think I just nodded.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got beer?” she asked me. “A coldbeer?”
“I think I probably can fix you up,” I said, and we left her things at the foot of the stairs and backtracked to the kitchen. I’m trying to develop a taste for Narragansett, and there was a whole six-pack in the icebox and two bottles left over from another. I opened one for her, and a second bottle for myself, and pointed at the table and chairs by the window.
“Try to excuse the mess. Try hard,” I said, and she laughed.
I don’t exactly recall now what it was I’d expected from this woman, whatever preconceptions and images I might have formed of her in my mind’s eye. But whatever it was, Constance Hopkins entirely defied and negated my expectations. I think I’d call her striking even if I weren’ta lesbian. And I think I’d call her beautiful, too. Not the sort of beauty you see these days, touted in magazines and on television. That calculated, cookie-cutter glamour of the dull that so many people seem, increasingly, to gravitate towards. Hers is not the sort of face that would ever get lost in a crowd, and sitting here now, I’m not at all confident I can explain what it is about her that leaves me with this impression. Her eyes have some odd, drowsy quality about them — unfocused, distant — but it’s nothing that suggests a lack of alertness. They’re a very particular shade of reddish brown. Maybe I’d call it cinnamon. Or rust. I don’t think I’ve ever seen eyes like hers before. That color, I mean. Her complexion is pale, but not at all pasty. Her hair is jet black and straight, and she was wearing it pulled back in a long ponytail. Sitting there, drinking beer with her, talking, I noticed there’s a very small chip out of one of her upper incisors. I wanted to ask her how that had happened, but I didn’t. Maybe later.
“You smoke?” she asked, and nodded at the ashtray on the table, near Dr. Harvey’s typewriter. It was half-full of butts and ash, because I hadn’t emptied it in a couple of days.
“Yeah, well. I wasquit, you know, but now it seems like I’m not so quit anymore.”
“So you don’t mind if I smoke?”
“No, I don’t mind in the least,” I replied, and she fished a pack of Camels out of the bulging leather shoulder bag she carries for a purse. The Camels and a pink disposable Bic lighter, and she offered me one of the cigarettes, which I gladly accepted. She lit it for me, and then sat staring silently out the kitchen window for a minute or so. It was a silence that was beginning to grow uncomfortable, when she said, “I like your books. The novels. Your short stories are better written, though. But, I never would have guessed that you wrote any thingon something like that,” and, with her cigarette, she pointed at the antique typewriter. Suddenly, I was flustered, disarmed, whatever you want to call it, left feeling as though I ought be simultaneously thanking her for the compliment (as it happens, I like my short fiction better, too), apologizing for the old dreadnaught of a typewriter, andexplaining that I normally work on a laptop. Instead, I just nodded and took another long drag on my own cigarette.
“We don’t have to talk about it, Sarah, not if you would prefer not to,” she said.
“Well, then,” I replied. “In that case, I would prefer not to, thank you.”
“I know how it goes,” she told me, and sort of half smiled. “Or, how it doesn’t come,as the case may be.”
“So, you drove all the way from Los Angeles?” I asked, changing the subject, though I’d already asked her that same question outside, and she’d already answered it. And never mind that Blanchard had told me she was driving; it was something to say, words to fill in empty space, misdirection, and the only thing I could think of.
“I like to drive,” she said. “I hate planes. Even before 9/11 and all this security crap, I hated planes. When I go somewhere, I want to seewhere it is I’m going, all the places I pass through on the way there. You know what I mean?”
I told her that I did, even though I suspected I actually didn’t understand, at all. I’ve always despised long drives, ever since I was a kid and it was my father’s idea of Sunday afternoon recreation. Just driving. Driving nowhere at all. Back before the oil crisis in ’73, when gas was, what, thirty or forty cents a gallon. Constance Hopkins smoked her cigarette and watched the window, watched the bright, shimmering summer day outsidethe window, and I smoked mine and watched her, trying hard not to be too obvious about it. Trying not to stare. Trying hard. I asked her how it had gone, the drive from LA, and she shrugged and smoke leaked from her nostrils.
“Fine, except for the fucking breakdown in Gary.”
“Indiana?” I asked, immediately wishing that I’d said nothing at all, becoming all too acutely aware that my questions and replies were suffering from my unexpected fascination with this woman whom I’d expected would be nothing but an inconvenience.
“Yeah, Indiana. Only Gary I’ve ever had the misfortune to be stuck in. Car blew a head gasket or cracked a cylinder or something of the sort, and there was a mix-up getting a replacement. Added an extra day, waiting around while they sorted it out.”
“But otherwise?”
Constance looked away from the window, those drowsy red-brown eyes shifting towards me, and she nodded. “Fourteen states in less than a week. My second grand tour of Flyover Country. May I never, ever have to do it again.” She crossed herself, then smiled and took another sip of her beer, before setting the bottle down on the table. And, turning back to the window, as though the unexpected had become the order of the day, she said the very last thing I was prepared to hear.