A Story about Listening
When Carrots was eighteen years old, she left her peaceful countryside home for the first time and struck out for the big city.
In her younger, more innocent days of a year or two earlier, she had imagined herself doing this with only the clothes on her back and having a series of delightful adventures that ended in either an advantageous marriage or an exciting career on the stage.
She was older now, though, and harder, and less full of faith in the truth of stories.
She had also read a few novels that delicately hinted at the very bleak fate awaiting young women alone in the big city and at the mercy of its less-than-chivalrous male inhabitants.
The details were left to the imagination, but Carrots’s imagination had always been a powerful one.
She decided that it might be a good idea to find a job first.
The job she found was as an oyster shucker in a little restaurant owned by her aunt’s best friend’s sister-in-law.
This was the sort of connection that was close enough to create a crushing sense of obligation but still distant enough to make venturing out of her little room and down into the shared kitchen almost painfully uncomfortable.
Also uncomfortable was the job itself, which involved lots of salty ice water sloshing into the cuts that the rough shells made in her hands, even when she managed not to slice herself with her oyster knife.
Still, she had the little room they’d given her and three free meals a day.
Though her earnings were modest, they allowed her to spend her weekly half day off enjoying the big city the best way she knew how: by wandering the streets and watching other people.
There was a bit of an art to being a really good wanderer.
One needed sturdy, sensible shoes, an umbrella in case of pouring rain or blazing sun, and comfortable clothes with a secret pocket for concealing money.
One needed the ability to look, by turns, cold and hardened or fragile and innocent.
One needed to be alert and attentive and very, very interested.
As Carrots discovered, she had this ability to feel interested in what the people around her were up to.
It wasn’t a bighearted, empathetic sort of interest. She wasn’t listening in on the conversations of strangers so that she could sweep in like a fairy godmother and solve their problems. She was interested in people the way a bird-watcher was interested in birds, if the bird-watcher had at one point been treated with casual cruelty by a handsome young finch.
She watched other people like a punter watched a Grand Guignol.
Her long walks around the city were ideal for observing people at large, for creating a personal catalog of all the types of humans she encountered: the roguish young man and the winking, red-nosed old man he would one day become; the chorus girl who came yawning out of her boardinghouse in the early afternoon; the drawn young mother selling flowers on the corner; the sober clerk hurrying home to his wife and children.
Then, when she grew tired, she would find a place to examine her subjects more closely.
One of these was at the little bar she’d found about three blocks from the oyster house.
Tucked into a dark corner and halfway hidden behind a pillar was a little table where she could sit and listen in on other people’s conversations.
She learned a lot from all of that listening.
She listened to men who told the truth to their friends while drunk and then told outrageous lies to women while sober.
She listened to girls who started out bright and optimistic but, as time passed, grew increasingly bitter and covetous.
She listened to couples split up and get back together again.
She listened to criminals discussing their crimes.
She listened to it all and took careful note of everything.
After a while, she started to become familiar with individual characters, regulars like herself.
She followed their lives as if they were plotlines in the serialized novels she used to enjoy in magazines.
Sometimes, while she was shucking oysters, she’d daydream about what might happen to them next.
Would Josie’s young man finally propose?
Would Old Mr. Gattersby finally be caught out as the source of all those bad pennies?
Certain storylines presented themselves as more interesting than others.
Then, very slowly and gradually, it occurred to Carrots that with all she’d learned about these people—and about people in general—it might be trivially easy for her to influence the courses of their lives in reality instead of just in her imagination.
She started off with what she thought would be a pair of particularly easy targets: a spinster named—unfortunately—Ermengarde Snip, and a poet several years her junior named Robert Crewe. Carrots had spent many long hours observing them both.
Miss Snip, an attractive-enough blond woman of forty or so, sometimes managed to claim Carrots’s preferred corner when Carrots hadn’t gotten there first. She liked to bring a book with her when she came, and often lingered for hours over a single glass of wine.
At first glance, she might have been mistaken for a schoolteacher coming to the bar to pass a few inexpensive hours reading, but Carrots never stopped at the first glance.
The wine Miss Snip sipped was the most expensive that the bar offered, her clothes were plain but made of fine material, and half the time, when she pretended to be reading her book, she was actually watching Mr. Crewe.
Mr. Crewe was about thirty, and had spent his entire youth writing poems that no one wanted to read.
When he came to the bar, it was to scribble away furiously at his latest poem, to chat with the other young romantics who cluttered up the place, and to drink whatever someone else bought for him.
What he lacked in talent, he made up for in having the dark hair and dreamy eyes that one expected from a poet, as well as a mind that thought high-minded concepts arranged into pleasant-sounding words were realer and truer than anything that had ever actually happened to him.
It didn’t take much. Carrots started with Mr. Crewe, the easier target of the two.
She began by expressing admiration for the (terrible) poem she’d just heard him recite to a long-suffering friend, then engaged him in more conversation about his craft—he was almost pathetically pleased to have his poems apparently taken seriously by a discerning reader—before segueing smoothly into the next phase of attack: telling him, more or less, the truth.
“I always think it’s so interesting how when you live in the city, you might walk past a thousand people every day who have their own wonderful stories to tell that you’ll likely never know about. So many people you see seem like such fascinating characters.”
“Oh, you think so too?” Mr. Crewe asked, smiling at her.
“I’ve always thought that you are a very interesting character.
I’ve been noticing you hiding in that little corner, watching everyone and looking like the light of sunrise reflecting in the morning dew.
I’ve always thought that you could be either a young forest witch or a milkmaid: just the pure fresh spirit of the countryside, in either case. ”
This was a moment when the whole trajectory of Carrots’s life easily might have been set off in a different direction.
It might have been such a moment for the even younger Carrots of just a few short years earlier.
That Carrots might have still been willing to see herself as the protagonist, to see the sort of romance she’d once dreamed of spreading out in front of her.
This Carrots, though, was different. She’d recast herself from leading lady to playwright, and didn’t even notice the opportunity to take a starring role.
Instead, she said, “Oh, not me. I’m extremely dull. I was thinking about Miss Snip.”
“Miss Snip?” Mr. Crewe asked in the polite but detached tone of someone prepared to listen to a story about a person whom they neither knew nor cared about.
“Yes,” Carrots said. “The slender lady with the sad blue eyes who always sits in that corner reading poetry. No, don’t look!” she added at the end, which was, of course, exactly the thing to say to prompt Mr. Crewe to take a quick look. She saw him frown.
“Oh,” he said. “I’ve seen her sitting there before, but I never took a closer look. I thought she was…well, she just looked like any old spinster in that old-fashioned dress with the high neck.”
Something inside Carrots gave a little snarl at that.
It didn’t show on her face. Instead, she said, earnestly, “But she’s not at all!
I’ve been paying attention to her. I’m quite sure she was a real society beauty just a few years ago, but she must have had her heart broken by some scoundrel and never married.
You can see her breeding in the quality of her dresses and hear it in her voice when she speaks, and you can tell by the books she reads, and by how attentively she listens whenever you recite your poetry, that she’s a woman of real sensibility. ”
“I see,” Mr. Crewe said, and turned his gaze toward Miss Snip. “Yes, I see. She does have a noble look about her, doesn’t she? And even from this far away, you can still see the bright blue of her eyes.”
In the sort of novel that Carrots read in those days, as a sophisticated young woman, Mr. Crewe’s own eyes would harden and grow cold and calculating as he weighed this woman’s worth.
Instead, there at the bar, his gaze went soft and abstracted.
He wasn’t the kind of man who was capable of setting out to seduce a woman for her money.
When he prepared himself to seduce this shy, lonely older lady, he did so thinking that he was acting with the heart of a poet recognizing a fellow traveler.
And if there were other reasons lurking just beneath the level of conscious thought, did they matter in the moments when their eyes first met, when their hands first touched, when years later they sat together in the sitting room of their cozy, well-appointed country house and he read her poems he’d written for her that were filled with more sincere feeling than anything else he’d ever put to paper?
These weren’t questions that entered Carrots’s mind: neither during that conversation, when she prompted Mr. Crewe to look at his future wife for the first time, nor during any of the moments that followed, when she shepherded the two of them toward a union that caused a minor scandal in the more genteel neighborhoods of the capital.
What she cared about was power—and the sheer, intoxicating, syrup-sweet joy of wielding it.
She slunk around the edges of the ballroom at their wedding, eavesdropping on other people’s secrets and feeling a smug sense of self-satisfaction that was better, she thought, than anything she’d ever felt.
It was the first major manipulation of a long and fruitful career.