Constance

Constance by Joseph Zigmond

At once the carriage was filled with perfect little scenes. He almost summoned the effort to remove the lens cap, but again the booze slackened him in his chair. A string of girls filed on and chatted, tourists pointed on a map, a uniformed Tube worker picked his way through to slump into a seat and hug his rucksack. A near-identical mother and daughter stepped on and exchanged uncomfortable glances as the girls began to sing loudly, sniggering between choruses. And finally, just as the doors were closing, a young couple jumped on. A girl and a boy, his age. The girl was smiling. A private smile, but impossible to ignore – a smile for herself.

Ali opened the book to read the top paragraph once more. He read it twice. Three times. Then he slowly sat up. He had to look. Had to. He knew he was a cliché, and she was just a face, one of millions. And hadn’t he fallen for faces on the train before? Or cherished the screen of hair that hid their features, sparing him the heavy blows of longing? Probably on this carriage, even.

Crushes, Ali knew, were simply the snap decisions of biology, the speculative creation of a perfect whole from a few parts. But still he watched, putting his headphones over his ears as though they could hide him. Was there anything so different about her? He pressed shuffle a few times, and finally a slur of strings poured into his ears. A solo violin circling two cellos as they plucked, searching for its cadence. He hadn’t missed the stonewashed green of her eyes, the muscles of her neck, but there was something about the smile. The lips. Ovate, absently bitten, they parted as if they could taste the air, and approved of it. Here, he finally saw charisma for what it was: the conscious possession of confidence.

It fascinated him, immobilized him. Her confidence. It was lightning in a bottle; he knew because he was a bottle with no lightning. He knew only how to recognize it, never how to have it.

He weighed the book in his hands, turned it over and inspected the barcode. Anything not to read. It wasn’t clear to him why he was this way. Perhaps because he was an only child. Not the isolation, but the cause – he carried the guilt for his mother’s infertility, which had been a consequence of his birth. If, in the immediate aftermath, the relief of his delivery had outweighed the distress over her damage, then that balance slowly changed over the next few years. And by the time he was nine or ten, a grief had taken hold of his parents. A grief for siblings never made.

It wasn’t punitive in any way, his parents’ resentment, merely present. A discernible lack, borne out under the stress of a failing marriage. Any pet cat or hamster might carry the name of the hopes he had dashed in his wake. Any domestic argument would circle the void he had created, their frustrated voices rising in the absence of a younger infant to protect. They loved him, but he wasn’t enough. He simply wasn’t the whole plan, never had been. And with no sibling to confide in, he found big brothers in friends who were outsized characters. He read books. He hid on trains. And once in a while he would catch sight of a confidence he would never have.

It almost scared him how exhilarating it was to look; every glimpse was an erosion of willpower. Unlike the rest of their peers, she seemed so genuinely happy that he winced at the promises he would make if she were to turn and talk to him. More beautiful people must have more beautiful thoughts. For him, a crush, the random and absolute ring around the heart, was never so tight as this. He wondered if he would pass out.