"The Edible Woman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Atwood Margaret)

11

Peter left early. He said he needed to get some more sleep and he advised me to do the same. However I wasn’t at all tired. I was filled with a nervous energy which refused to dissipate itself in the restless forages I made through the apartment. This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I’ve connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.

I finished the dishes, sorted the knives and forks and spoons into their compartments in the kitchen drawer, though I knew they wouldn’t stay put for long, scanned the magazines in the living room for the seventh time, my attention snagging briefly but with new significance on such titles as “ADOPTION: YES OR NO?,” “YOU’RE IN LOVE – IS IT REAL?A TWENTY-QUESTION quiz,” and “HONEYMOON TENSIONS,” and fiddled with the controls of the toaster, which had been burning things. When the telephone rang I jumped for it eagerly: it was a wrong number. I suppose I could have talked with Ainsley, who was still in her bedroom; but somehow I didn’t think it would be much help. I wanted to do something that could be finished, accomplished, though I didn’t know what. Finally I resolved to spend the evening at the laundromat.

We do not, of course, use the lady down below’s laundry facilities. If she has any. She never allows anything as plebeian as washing to desecrate the well-kept expanse of her back lawn. Maybe it’s that she and the child just never get their clothes dirty; perhaps they have an invisible plastic coating. Neither of us has been in her cellar or even heard her acknowledge the existence of one. It’s possible that washing is, in her hierarchy of the proprieties, one of those things that everyone knows about but nobody who is at all respectable discusses.

So when the mounds of unwearable clothes become intolerable and the drawersful of wearable ones are all but empty, we go to the laundromat. Or, usually, I go alone: I can’t hold out as long as Ainsley can. Sunday evening is a better time to go than any of the rest of the weekend. There are fewer elderly gentlemen tying up and de-aphidizing their rose bushes, and fewer elderly ladies, flowery-hatted and white-gloved, driving or being driven up to the houses of other elderly ladies for tea. The nearest laundromat is a subway stop away, and Saturdays are bad because of the shoppers on the bus, again elderly ladies hatted and gloved, though not as immaculately; and Saturday evenings bring out the young moviegoers. I prefer Sunday evenings; they are emptier. I don’t like being stared at, and my laundry bag is too obviously a laundry bag.

That evening I looked forward to the trip. I was anxious to get out of the apartment. I warmed up and ate a frozen dinner, then changed to my laundromat clothes – denims, sweatshirt, and a pair of plaid running shoes I’d picked up once on impulse and never wore anywhere else – and checked my purse for quarters. I was stuffing the pertinent garments into my laundry bag when Ainsley wandered in. She’d been closeted in her bedroom most of the day, engaging in heaven-knows-what black-magic practices: brewing up an aphrodisiac, no doubt, or making wax dolls of Leonard and transfixing them with hatpins at the appropriate points. Now some intuition had alerted her.

“Hi, going to the laundromat?” she said with careful nonchalance.

“No,” I said, “I’ve chopped Peter up into little bits. I’m camouflaging him as laundry and taking him down to bury him in the ravine.”

She must have thought this remark in bad taste. She did not smile. “Look, would you mind very much throwing in a few of my things while you’re there? Just essentials.”

“Fine,” I said, resigned. “Bring them along.” This is standard procedure. It’s one of the reasons Ainsley never has to go to the laundromat.

She disappeared, and came back in a few minutes with both arms around a huge heap of multicoloured lingerie.

“Ainsley. Just essentials.”

“They’re all essentials,” she said sulkily; but when I insisted I couldn’t get it all into the bag she divided the pile in half.

“Thanks a lot, that’s a real lifesaver,” she said. “See you later.”

I trailed the sack behind me down the stairs, picked it up, slung it over my shoulder and staggered out the door, intercepting a frigid look in passing from the lady down below as she glided out from behind one of the velvet curtains that hung at the entrance to the parlour. She meant, I knew, to convey her disapproval of this flagrant exhibition of soilage. We are all, I silently quoted at her, utterly unclean.

Once I had settled myself on the bus I propped the laundry bag beside me on the seat, hoping it looked from a distance enough like a small child to fend off the righteous indignation of those who might object to working on the Lord’s Day. I was remembering a previous incident, a black-silk-swathed old lady with a mauve hat who had clutched at me one Sunday as I was getting off the bus. She was disturbed not only because I was breaking the fourth commandment, but also because of the impious way I had dressed in order to do it: Jesus, she implied, would never forgive my plaid running shoes. Then I concentrated on one of the posters above the windows, a colourful one of a young woman with three pairs of legs skipping about in her girdle. I must admit to being, against my will, slightly scandalized by those advertisements. They are so public. I wondered for the first few blocks what sort of person would have enough response to that advertisement to go and buy the object in question, and whether there had ever been a survey done on it. The female form, I thought, is supposed to appeal to men, not to women, and men don’t usually buy girdles. Though perhaps the lithe young woman was a self-image; perhaps the purchasers thought they were getting their own youth and slenderness back in the package. For the next few blocks I thought about the dictum I’d read somewhere that no well-dressed woman is ever without her girdle. I considered the possibilities suggested by the word “ever.” Then for the rest of the journey I thought about middle-aged spread: when would I get it? – maybe I already had it. You have to be careful about things like that, I reflected; they have a way of creeping up on you before you know it.

The laundromat was just along the street from the entrance to the subway station. When I was actually standing in front of one of the large machines I discovered I had forgotten the soap.

“Oh fiddlesticks!” I said out loud.

The person stuffing clothes into the machine next to mine turned towards me.

He looked at me without expression. “You can have some of mine,” he said, handing me the box.

“Thank you. I wish they’d put in a vending machine, you’d think they’d have the sense to.” Then I recognized him: it was the young man from the beer interview. I stood there holding the box. How had he known I’d forgotten my soap? I hadn’t said it out loud.

He was scrutinizing me more closely. “Oh,” he said, “now I know who you are. I didn’t place you at first. Without that official shell you look sort of – exposed.” He bent over his machine again.

Exposed. Was that good or bad? I checked quickly to make sure no seams were split or zippers undone; then I began to cram the clothes hastily into the machines, putting darks in one and lights in the other. I didn’t want him to be finished before I was so that he would be able to watch me, but he was done in time to observe several of Ainsley’s lacy frivolities being flung through the door.

“Those yours?” he asked with interest.

“No,” I said, flushing.

“Didn’t think so. They didn’t look like you.”

Had that been a compliment or an insult? Judging by his uninflected voice it had been merely a comment; and as a comment it was accurate enough, I thought wryly.

I shut the two thick glass doors and put the quarters in the slots, paused till the familiar sloshing sound informed me that all was well, then went over to the line of chairs provided by the management and sat down in one of them. I’d have to wait it out, I realized; there was nothing else to do in that area on Sundays. I could have gone to a movie, but I didn’t have enough money with me. I’d even forgotten to bring a paperback to read. What could I have been thinking of when I left the apartment? I don’t usually forget things.

He sat down next to me. “The only thing about laundromats,” he said, “is that you’re always finding other people’s pubic hairs in the washers. Not that I mind particularly. I’m not picky about germs or anything. It’s just rather gross. Have some chocolate?”

I glanced around to see if anyone had heard, but we were alone in the laundromat. “No thanks,” I said.

“I don’t like it much either but I’m trying to quit smoking.” He peeled the chocolate bar and slowly devoured it. We both stared at the long line of gleaming white machines, and especially at those three glass windows, like portholes or aquaria, where our clothes were going round and around, different shapes and colours appearing, mingling, disappearing, appearing again out of a fog of suds. He finished his chocolate bar, licked his fingers, smoothed and folded the silver wrapper neatly and put it in one of his pockets, and took out a cigarette.

“I sort of like watching them,” he said; “I watch laundromat washers the way other people watch television, it’s soothing because you always know what to expect and you don’t have to think about it. Except I can vary my programmes a little; if I get tired of watching the same stuff I can always put in a pair of green socks or something colourful like that.” He was talking in a monotone, sitting hunched forward, his elbows on his knees, his head drawn down into the neck of his dark sweater like a turtle’s into its shell. “I come here quite a lot; sometimes I just have to get out of that apartment. It’s all right as long as I have something to iron; I like flattening things out, getting rid of the wrinkles, it gives me something to do with my hands, but when I run out of things to iron, well, I have to come here. To get some more.”

He wasn’t even looking at me. He might have been talking to himself. I leaned forward too, so I could see his face. In the blue-tinged fluorescent lighting of the laundromat, a light that seems to allow no tones and no shadows, his skin was even more unearthly. “I have to get out, it’s that apartment. In the summer it’s like a hot, dark oven, and when it’s that hot you don’t even want to turn on the iron. There isn’t enough space anyway but the heat makes it shrink, the others get too close. I can feel them even in my own room with the door closed; I can tell what they’re doing. Fish barricades himself into that chair and hardly moves, even when he’s writing, and then he tears it all up and says it’s no good and sits there for days staring at the pieces of paper on the floor; once he got down on his hands and knees and tried to put them together again with scotch-tape, and failed of course, and threw a real scene and accused both of us of trying to use his ideas to publish first and stealing some of the pieces. And Trevor, when he isn’t away at summer school or heating the apartment up cooking twelve-course dinners, I’d just as soon eat canned salmon, practises his fifteenth-century Italian calligraphy, scrollwork and flourishes, and goes on and on about the quattrocento. He has an amazing memory for detail. I guess it’s interesting but somehow it isn’t the answer, at least not for me, and I don’t think it really is for him either. The thing is, they repeat themselves and repeat themselves but they never get anywhere, they never seem to finish anything. Of course I’m no better, I’m just the same, I’m stuck on that wretched term paper. Once I went to the zoo and there was a cage with a frenzied armadillo in it going around in figure-eights, just around and around in the same path. I can still remember the funny metallic sound its feet made on the bottom of the cage. They say all caged animals get that way when they’re caged, it’s a form of psychosis, and even if you set the animals free after they go like that they’ll just run around in the same pattern. You read and read the material and after you’ve read the twentieth article you can’t make any sense out of it anymore, and then you start thinking about the number of books that are published in any given year, in any given month, in any given week, and that’s just too much. Words,” he said, looking in my direction finally but with his eyes strangely unfocussed, as though he was really looking at a point several inches beneath my skin, “are beginning to lose their meanings.”

The machines were switching into one of their rinsing cycles, whirling the clothes around faster and faster; then there was more running water, and more churning and sloshing. He lit another cigarette.

“I gather you’re all students, then,” I said.

“Of course,” he said mournfully, “couldn’t you tell? We’re all graduate students. In English. All of us. I thought everyone in the whole city was; we’re so totally inbred that we never see anyone else. It was quite strange when you walked in the other day and turned out not to be.”

“I always thought that would be sort of exciting.” I didn’t really, I was trying to be responsive, but I was conscious as soon as I’d closed my mouth of the schoolgirl gushiness of the remark.

“Exciting.” He snickered briefly. “I used to think that. It looks exciting when you’re an eager brilliant undergraduate. They all say, Go on to graduate studies, and they give you a bit of money; and so you do, and you think, Now I’m going to find out the real truth. But you don’t find out, exactly, and things get pickier and pickier and more and more stale, and it all collapses in a welter of commas and shredded footnotes, and after a while it’s like anything else: you’ve got stuck in it and you can’t get out, and you wonder how you got there in the first place. If this were the States I could excuse myself by saying I’m avoiding the draft, but, as it is, there’s no good reason. And besides that, everything’s being done, it’s been done already, fished out, and you yourself wallowing around in the dregs at the bottom of the barrel, one of those ninth-year graduate students, poor bastards, scrabbling through manuscripts for new material or slaving away on the definitive edition of Ruskin’s dinner invitations and theatre stubs or trying to squeeze the last pimple of significance out of some fraudulent literary nonentity they dug up somewhere. Poor old Fischer is writing his thesis now, he wanted to do it on Womb Symbols in D. H. Lawrence but they all told him that had been done. So now he’s got some impossible theory that gets more and more incoherent as he goes along.” He stopped.

“Oh, what is it?” I said, to joggle him out of silence.

“I don’t really know. He won’t even talk about it any more except when he’s loaded, and then no one can understand him. That’s why he keeps tearing it up – he reads it over and he can’t understand any of it himself.”

“And what are you doing yours on?” I couldn’t quite imagine.

“I haven’t got to that point yet. I don’t know when I ever will or what will happen then. I try not to think about it. Right now I’m supposed to be writing an overdue term paper from the year before last. I write a sentence a day. On good days, that is.” The machines clicked into their spin-dry cycle. He stared at them, morosely.

“Well, what’s your term paper on then?” I was intrigued; as much, I decided, by the changing contours of his face as by what he was saying. At any rate I didn’t want him to stop talking.

“You don’t really want to know,” he said. “Pre-Raphaelite pornography. I’m trying to do something with Beardsley, too.”

“Oh.” We both considered in silence the possible hopelessness of this task. “Maybe,” I suggested somewhat hesitantly, “you’re in the wrong business. Maybe you might be happier doing something else.”

He snickered again, then coughed. “I should stop smoking,” he said. “What else can I do? Once you’ve gone this far you aren’t fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You’re overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn’t even make a good ditch-digger, I’d start tearing apart the sewer system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols – pipes, valves, cloacal conduits… No, no. I’ll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.”

I had no answer. I looked at him and tried to picture him working at a place like Seymour Surveys; even upstairs with the intelligence men; but without success. He definitely wouldn’t fit.

“Are you from out of town?” I asked finally. The subject of graduate school seemed to have been exhausted.

“Of course, we all are; nobody really comes from here, do they? That’s why we’ve got that apartment, god knows we can’t afford it but there aren’t any graduate residences. Unless you count that new pseudo-British joint with the coat of arms and the monastery wall. But they’d never let me in and it would be just as bad as living with Trevor anyway. Trevor’s from Montreal, the family is sort of Westmount and well off; but they had to go into trade after the war. They own a coconut-cookie factory but we aren’t supposed to refer to it around the apartment; it’s awkward though, these mounds of coconut cookies keep appearing and you have to eat them while pretending you don’t know where they come from. I don’t like coconut. Fish was from Vancouver, he keeps missing the sea. He goes down to the lakeshore and wades through the pollution and tries to turn himself on with seagulls and floating grapefruit peels, but it doesn’t work. Both of them used to have accents but now you can’t tell anything from listening to them; after you’ve been in that braingrinder for a while you don’t sound as though you’re from anywhere.”

“Where are you from?”

“You’ve never heard of it,” he said curtly.

The machines clicked off. We both got wire laundry-carts and transferred our clothes to the dryers. Then we sat down in the chairs again. Now there wasn’t anything to watch; just the humming and thumping of the dryers to listen to. He lit another cigarette.

A seedy old man shuffled through the door, saw us, and shuffled out again. He was probably looking for a place to sleep.

“The thing is,” he said at last, “it’s the inertia. You never feel you’re getting anywhere; you get bogged down in things, waterlogged. Last week I set fire to the apartment, partly on purpose. I think I wanted to see what they would do. Maybe I wanted to see what I would do. Mostly though I just got interested in seeing a few flames and some smoke, for a change. But they just put it out, and then they ran around in frenzied figure-eights like a couple of armadillos, talking about how I was ‘sick’ and why did I do it, and maybe my inner tensions were getting too much for me and I’d better go see a shrink. That wouldn’t do any good. I know about all of that and none of it does any good. Those types can’t convince me any more, I know too much about it, I’ve been through that already, I’m immune. Setting fire to the apartment didn’t change anything, except now I can’t flex my nostrils without having Trevor squeal and leap a yard and Fischer look me up in his leftover freshman Psych. textbook. They think I’m mad.” He dropped his cigarette stub on the floor and ground it underfoot. “I think they’re mad,” he added.

“Maybe,” I said cautiously, “you should move out.”

He smiled his crooked smile.

“Where could I go? I couldn’t afford it. I’m stuck. Besides, they sort of take care of me, you know.” He hunched his shoulders further up around his neck.

I looked at the side of his thin face, the high stark ridge of his cheekbone, the dark hollow of his eye, marvelling: all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn’t think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle. But sitting there with the plug of a fresh cigarette stoppering his mouth he didn’t appear to be sensing any danger of that kind.

Thinking about it later, I’m surprised at my own detachment. My restlessness of the afternoon had vanished; I felt calm, serene as a stone moon, in control of the whole white space of the laundromat. I could have reached out effortlessly and put my arms around that huddled awkward body and consoled it, rocked it gently. Still, there was something most unchildlike about him, something that suggested rather an unnaturally old man, old far beyond consolation. I thought too, remembering his duplicity about the beer interview, that he was no doubt capable of making it all up. It may have been real enough; but then again, it may have been calculated to evoke just such a mothering reaction, so that he could smile cleverly at the gesture and retreat further into the sanctuary of his sweater, refusing to be reached or touched.

He must have been equipped with a kind of science-fiction extra sense, a third eye or an antenna. Although his face was turned away so that he couldn’t see mine, he said in a soft dry voice, “I can tell you’re admiring my febrility. I know it’s appealing, I practise at it; every woman loves an invalid. I bring out the Florence Nightingale in them. But be careful.” He was looking at me now, cunningly, sideways. “You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal, you know.”

My calmness was shattered. I felt mice-feet of apprehension scurrying over my skin. What exactly was I being accused of? Was I exposed?

I could think of nothing to say.

The dryers whirred to a standstill. I got up. “Thanks for the soap,” I said with formal politeness.

He got up too. He seemed again quite indifferent to my presence. “That’s all right,” he said.

We stood side by side without speaking, pulling the clothes out of the dryers and wadding them into our laundry bags. We shouldered our laundry and walked to the door together, I a little ahead. I paused for an instant at the entrance, but he made no move to open the door for me so I opened it myself.

When we were outside the laundromat we turned, both at once so that we almost collided. We stood facing each other irresolutely for a minute; we both started to say something, and both stopped. Then, as though someone had pulled a switch, we dropped our laundry bags to the sidewalk and took a step forward. I found myself kissing him, or being kissed by him, I still don’t know which. His mouth tasted like cigarettes. Apart from that taste, and an impression of thinness and dryness, as though the body I had my arms around and the face touching mine were really made of tissue paper or parchment stretched on a frame of wire coathangers, I can remember no sensation at all.

We both stopped kissing at the same time, and stepped back. We looked at each other for another minute. Then we picked up our laundry bags, slung them over our shoulders, turned around, and marched away in opposite directions. The whole incident had been ridiculously like the jerky attractions and repulsions of those plastic dogs with magnets on the bottoms I remembered getting as prizes at birthday parties.

I can’t recall anything about the trip back to the apartment, except that on the bus I stared for a long time at an advertisement with a picture of a nurse in a white cap and dress. She had a wholesome, competent face and she was holding a bottle and smiling. The caption said: GIVE THE GIFT OF LIFE.