She began Alphinland a long time ago, years before she met Ewan. She was living with another man then, in a two-room walk-up with a lumpy mattress on the floor and a shared toilet in the hallway, and an electric kettle (hers) and a hotplate (his) they were not officially supposed to have. There was no refrigerator so they put their food containers out on the windowsill, where the food froze in winter and spoiled in summer, though it wasn’t too bad in spring and fall, except for the squirrels.
This man she lived with was one of the poets she used to hang around with under the sweet, youthful belief that she too was a poet. He was called Gavin, an unusual name then, though not unusual now: the Gavins have multiplied. Young Constance felt very lucky to have been taken up by Gavin, who was four years older than she was and knew a lot of other poets, and was lean and ironic and indifferent to the norms of society and grimly satirical, as poets were then. Perhaps they’re still like that: Constance is too old to know.
Even to be the object of one of Gavin’s ironic or grimly satirical remarks – to the effect that her hypnotic ass was a much more significant part of Constance than her frankly forgettable poetry, for instance – was obscurely thrilling to her. She was also accorded the privilege of appearing in Gavin’s poems. Not by name, of course: female objects of desire were addressed in poems as “Lady” then, or else as “my truelove,” in a gesture to chivalry and folk songs – but it was enormously seductive for Constance to read Gavin’s more erotic poems and know that every time he wrote Lady – or, even better, “my truelove” – it meant her. “My Lady Reclines on a Pillow,” “My Lady’s First Morning Coffee,” and “My Lady Licks My Plate” were heartwarming, but “My Lady Bends Over” was her favourite. Whenever she felt that Gavin was being terse with her, she would get out that poem and reread it.
Along with these literary attractions there was a lot of vigorous and impromptu sex.
Once she’d become linked to Ewan, Constance had known better than to reveal the details of her earlier life. Though what was there to worry about? Although Gavin had been intense, he’d also been a shit; so he was clearly no competition for Ewan, a knight in shining armour by comparison. And that particular early life experience had ended badly, with sorrow and mortification for Constance. So why bring Gavin up? It would have served no purpose. Ewan had never asked her about any other men in her life, so Constance had never told. She certainly hopes Ewan has no access to Gavin now, through her unspoken thoughts or in any other way.
One of the good things about Alphinland is that she can move the more disturbing items from her past through its stone gateway and store them in there on the memory palace model much in use in, when was it? The eighteenth century? You associate the things you want to remember with imaginary rooms, and when you want total recall you go into that room.
Thus she keeps a deserted winery in Alphinland, on the grounds of the stronghold currently held by Zymri of the Adamant Fist – an ally of hers – for the sole purpose of Gavin. And since it’s one of the rules about Alphinland that Ewan has never been allowed through the stone gateway, he’ll never find that winery or discover who she’s got stashed inside it.
So Gavin’s in an oak cask in the winery. He’s not suffering, although objectively he might deserve to suffer. But Constance has worked at forgiving Gavin, so he’s not allowed to be tortured. Instead he’s preserved in a state of suspended animation. Every once in a while she stops by the winery and presents Zymri with a gift intended to cement their alliance – an alabaster jar of honeyed Xnamic urchins, a collar of Cyanoreen claws – and says the charm that unlocks the top of the cask and has a look. Gavin is slumbering peacefully. He was always handsome with his eyes closed. He doesn’t look a day older than the last time she saw him. It still hurts her to remember that day. Then she replaces the top of the cask and says the charm backwards, sealing Gavin inside until she feels like dropping in for another peek at him.
In real life, Gavin won a few prizes for his poetry and then got a tenured position teaching Creative Writing at a university in Manitoba, though since retiring he’s decamped to Victoria, British Columbia, with a lovely view of the Pacific sunset. Constance receives a Christmas card from him every year; actually, from him and his third and much younger wife, Reynolds. Reynolds, what a dumb name! It sounds like a cigarette brand of the ’40s, back when cigarettes took themselves seriously.
Reynolds signs the cards for both of them – Gav and Rey, they go by – and encloses chirpy, irritating annual letters about their vacations (Morocco! So lucky they’d packed the Imodium! Though, more recently: Florida! So good to be out of the drizzle!). She also sends an annual account of their local Literary Fiction reading group – only important books, only intelligent books! Right now they’re tackling Bola?o, hard work but so worth it if you persist! The club members prepare themed snacks to go with the books they’re reading, so Rey is learning to make tortillas, from scratch. Such fun!
Constance suspects that Reynolds takes an unhealthy interest in Gavin’s bohemian youth, and most especially in Constance herself. How could she not? Constance had been Gavin’s first live-in, at a time in his life when he’d been so horny he could barely keep his jeans zipped when Constance was within half a mile of him. It was as if she radiated a ring of magic particles; as if she cast an irresistible spell, like Pheromonya of the Sapphire Tresses in Aphinland. There’s no way Reynolds can compete with that. She probably has to use a sex aid on Gavin, considering his age. If she bothers at all.
“Who are Gavin and Reynolds?” Ewan would say, every year.
“I knew him at college,” Constance would reply. It was a partial truth: she had in fact quit college in order to be with Gavin, so entranced had she been by him and the combination of aloofness and avidity. But Ewan would not welcome such a piece of information. It could make him sad, or jealous, or even angry. Why unsettle him?
Gavin’s fellow poets – and the folksingers and jazz musicians and actors who were part of an amorphous, ever-shifting group of artistic risk-takers – spent a lot of their time at a coffee house called the Riverboat, in the Yorkville area of Toronto, morphing then from white-bread quasi-slum to cool pre-hippie hangout. Nothing’s left of the Riverboat but one of those depressing historical cast-iron signs marking the spot, out in front of the chi-chi hotel that occupies its former space. Everything will be swept away, those signs declare, and a lot sooner than you think.
None of the poets and folksingers and jazz musicians and actors had a bean, and Constance didn’t have a bean either, but she was young enough to find poverty glamorous. La Bohème, that was her. She started writing the Alphinland stories to make enough money to support Gavin, who viewed that kind of support as part of a truelove’s function. She cranked out those early stories on her rickety manual typewriter, improvising as she went; then she managed – to her own surprise, at first – to sell them, though not for very much money, to one of the subcultural magazines in New York that went in for that brand of cheesy fantasy. People with diaphanous wings on the covers, many-headed animals, bronze helmets and leather jerkins, bows and arrows.
She was good at writing those stories, or good enough for the magazines. As a child she’d had fairytale books with pictures by Arthur Rackham and his peers – gnarled trees, trolls, mystic maidens with flowing robes, swords, baldrics, golden apples of the sun. So Alphinland was just a matter of expanding that landscape, altering the costumes, and making up the names.
She was waiting tables at the time as well, at a place called Snuffy’s, named after a hillbilly cartoon character and specializing in corn bread and fried chicken; part of the pay was all the fried chicken you could eat, and Constance used to smuggle out extra pieces for Gavin and watch with pleasure while he gobbled them down. The job was exhausting and the manager was a letch, though the tips weren’t too bad, and you could up your pay packet if you did overtime, like Constance did.
Girls did that then – knocked themselves out to support some man’s notion of his own genius. What was Gavin doing to help pay the rent? Not much, though she suspected him of dealing pot on the side. Once in a while they even smoked some of that, though not often, because it made Constance cough. It was all very romantic.
The poets and folksingers made fun of her Alphinland stories, naturally. Why not? She made fun of them herself. The subliterary fiction she was churning out was many decades away from being in any way respectable. There was a small group that confessed to reading The Lord of the Rings, though you had to justify it through an interest in Old Norse. But the poets considered Constance’s productions to be far below the Tolkien standard, which – to be fair – they were. They’d tease her by saying she was writing about garden gnomes, and she’d laugh and say yes, but today the gnomes had dug up their crock of golden coins and would buy them all a beer. They liked the free beer part of it, and would make toasts: “Here’s to the gnomes! Long may they roam! A gnome in every home!”
The poets frowned on writing for money, but Constance was granted an exemption because, unlike their poetry, Alphinland was intended to be commercial trash, and anyway she was doing it for Gavin as a Lady should, and in addition she was not so stupid as to take this drivel seriously.
What they didn’t understand was that – increasingly – she did take it seriously. Alphinland was hers alone. It was her refuge, it was her stronghold; it was where she could go when things with Gavin weren’t working out. She could walk in spirit through the invisible portal and wander through the darkling forests and over the shimmering fields, making alliances and defeating enemies, and no one else could come in unless she said they could because there was a five-dimensional spell guarding the entranceway.
She started spending more and more time in there, especially after it became semi-evident to her that not every “Lady” in Gavin’s new poems referred to her. Unless, that is, he was remarkably confused about the colour of his Lady’s eyes, once described as “blue as witches” and/or “distant stars,” now said to be of an inky darkness. “My Lady’s Ass Is Nothing Like the Moon” was a tribute to Shakespeare – that’s what Gavin said. Had he forgotten that there was an earlier poem – a little coarse, but heartfelt – that claimed his Lady’s ass was like the moon: white, round, softly shining in the dark, alluring? But this other one was tight and muscular; it was active rather than passive, gripping rather than enticing; more like a boa constrictor, though of course not the same shape. With the aid of a hand-held mirror, Constance examined her back view. No way to rationalize it: there was just no comparison. Could it be that when Constance was working her formerly poeticized ass off waiting tables at Snuffy’s – which wore her out so much that she wanted sleep more than she wanted sex – Gavin was rolling around on their lumpy mattress with a fresh and sprightly new truelove? One with a gripping ass?
In the past Gavin had always taken a certain pleasure in humiliating Constance in public, with the sardonic, ironic remarks that were one of his poetic specialties: it was a form of compliment, she felt, since it made her the focus of his attention. He was showing her off in a sense, and since that turned him on, she meekly let the humiliation wash over her. But now he stopped humiliating her. Instead, he was ignoring her, which was much worse. When they were alone in their two rented rooms, he no longer kissed her neck and tore off her clothes and threw her onto their mattress in a flamboyant display of uncontrollable lust. Instead he’d complain of a back spasm, and suggest – more than that, demand – that she compensate for his pain and immobility by giving him a blowjob.
This was not her favourite form of activity. She was unpractised at it, in addition to which there was a long list of other things she would rather put into her mouth.
By contrast, no one in Alphinland ever demanded a blowjob. But then, no one in Alphinland had a toilet either. Toilets weren’t necessary. Why waste time on that kind of routine bodily function when there were giant scorpions invading the castle? Alphinland did have bathtubs though, or rather, square pools sunk in jasmine-scented gardens and heated by underground springs. Some of the more depraved Alphinlanders bathed in the blood of their captives, who were chained to stakes around the pool to watch as their life drained slowly away into the scarlet bubbles.