The Edible Woman (11 page)

Ainsley was no help. I saw she was going to keep up her little-girls-should-be-seen-and-not-heard act, as the safest course to follow. She had settled into a round wicker basket-chair, like the one in Clara’s back yard except that this one had a quilted corduroy cover in egg-yolk yellow. I’d experienced those covers before. They’re kept on by elastic, and they have a habit of slipping off the edges of the chair if you wiggle around too much and closing up around you. Ainsley sat quite still though, holding her Coca-Cola glass in her lap and contemplating her own reflection on the brown surface inside it. She registered neither pleasure nor boredom; her inert patience was that of a pitcher-plant in a swamp with its hollow bulbous leaves half-filled with water, waiting for some insect to be attracted, drowned, and digested.

I was leaning back against the wall, sipping at my cognac, the noise of voices and music slapping against me like waves. I suppose the pressure of my body had pushed the bed out a little; at any rate, without thinking much about anything I turned my head away from the room and looked down. I began to find something very attractive about the dark cool space between the bed and the wall.

It would be quiet down there, I thought; and less humid. I set my glass down on the telephone table beside the bed and glanced quickly around the room. They were all engrossed: no one would notice.

A minute later I was wedged sideways between the bed and the wall, out of sight but not at all comfortable. This will never do, I thought; I’ll have to go right underneath. It will be like a tent. It didn’t occur to me to scramble back up. I eased the bed out from the wall as noiselessly as I could, using my whole body as a lever, lifted the fringed border of the bedspread, and slid myself in like a letter
through a slot. It was a tight fit: the slats were unusually low for a bed, and I was forced to lie absolutely flat against the floor. I inched the bed back flush with the wall.

It was quite cramped. Also, there were large rolls and clusters of dust strewn thickly over the floor like chunks of mouldy bread (I thought indignantly, What a pig Len is! Doesn’t sweep under his bed, then re-considered: he hadn’t been living there long and some of the dust may have been left over from whoever lived there before). But the semi-darkness, tinted orange by the filter of the bedspread that curtained me on all four sides, and the coolness and the solitude were pleasant. The raucous music and staccato laughter and the droning voices reached me muffled by the mattress. In spite of the narrowness and dust I was glad I didn’t have to sit up there in the reverberating hot glare of the room. Though I was only two or three feet lower than the rest of them, I was thinking of the room as “up there.” I myself was underground, I had dug myself a private burrow. I felt smug.

One male voice, Peter’s I think, said loudly, “Hey, where’s Marian?” and the other one answered, “Oh, probably in the can.” I smiled to myself. It was satisfying to be the only one who knew where I really was.

The position, however, was becoming more and more of a strain. The muscles in my neck were hurting; I wanted to stretch; I was going to sneeze. I began to wish they would hurry up and realize I had disappeared, so they could search for me. I could no longer recall what good reasons had led me to cram myself under Len’s bed in the first place. It was ridiculous: I would be all covered with fluff when I came out.

But having taken the step I refused to turn back. There would be no dignity at all in crawling out from under the bedspread, trailing dust, like a weevil coming out of a flour barrel. It would be admitting I had done the wrong thing. There I was, and there I would stay until forcibly removed.

My resentment at Peter for letting me remain crushed under the bed while he moved up there in the open, in the free air, jabbering away about exposure times, started me thinking about the past four months. All summer we had been moving in a certain direction, though it hadn’t felt like movement: we had deluded ourselves into thinking we were static. Ainsley had warned me that Peter was monopolizing me; she saw no reason why I shouldn’t, as she termed it, “branch out.” This was all very well for her but I couldn’t get over the subjective feeling that more than one at a time was unethical. However it had left me in a sort of vacuum. Peter and I had avoided talking about the future because we knew it didn’t matter: we weren’t really involved. Now, though, something in me had decided we were involved: surely that was the explanation for the powder-room collapse and the flight. I was evading reality. Now, this very moment, I would have to face it. I would have to decide what I wanted to do.

Someone sat down heavily on the bed, mashing me against the floor. I gave a dusty squawk.

“What-the-hell!” whoever it was exclaimed, and stood up. “Someone’s under the bed.”

I could hear them conferring in low tones, and then Peter called, much louder than necessary, “Marian, are you under the bed?”

“Yes,” I answered in a neutral voice. I had decided to be noncommittal about the whole thing.

“Well, you’d better come out now,” he said carefully. “I think it’s time for us to go home.”

They were treating me like a sulking child who has locked itself in a cupboard and has to be coaxed. I was amused, and indignant. I considered saying, “I don’t want to,” but decided that it might be the last straw for Peter, and Len was quite capable of saying, “Aw, let her stay under there all night, Christ
I
don’t mind. That’s the way to handle them. Whatever’s eating her, that’ll cool her off.” So instead I said, “I can’t! I’m stuck!”

I tried to move: I
was
stuck.

Up above, they had another policy meeting. “We’re going to lift up the bed,” Peter called, “and then you come out, got that?” I heard them giving orders to each other. It was going to be a major feat of engineering skill. There was a scuffling of shoes as they took their positions and got purchase. Then Peter said “Hike!” and the bed rose into the air, and I scuttled out backwards like a crayfish when its rock has been upset.

Peter stood me up. Every inch of my dress was furred and tufted with dust. They both started to brush me off, laughing.

“What the hell were you doing under there?” Peter asked. I could tell by the way they were picking off the larger pieces of dust, slowly and making an effort to concentrate, that they’d put away a lot of brandy while I was below ground.

“It was quieter,” I said sullenly.

“You should have told me you were stuck!” he said with magnanimous gallantry. “Then I would have got you out. You look a sight.” He was superior and amused.

“Oh,” I said, “I didn’t want to interrupt you.” I had realized by this time what my prevailing emotion was: it was rage.

The hot needle of anger in my voice must have penetrated the cuticle of Peter’s euphoria. He stepped back a pace; his eyes seemed to measure me coldly. He took me by the upper arm as though he was arresting me for jaywalking, and turned to Len. “I really think we’d better be pushing along now,” he said. “It’s been awfully pleasant. I hope we can get together again sometime soon. I’d really like to see what you think of my tripod.” Across the room Ainsley disengaged herself from the corduroy chair-cover and stood up.

I wrenched my arm away from Peter’s hand. I said frigidly, “I’m not going back with you. I’ll walk home,” and bolted out the door.

“Do whatever the hell you like,” Peter said; but he began to
stride after me, abandoning Ainsley to her fate. As I pelted down the narrow stairs I could hear Len saying, “Why don’t we have another drink, Ainsley? I’ll see that you get home safely; better let the two love-birds settle their own affairs,” and Ainsley protesting with alarm, “Oh, I don’t think I should.…”

Once I was outside I felt considerably better. I had broken out; from what, or into what, I didn’t know. Though I wasn’t at all certain why I had been acting this way, I had at least acted. Some kind of decision had been made, something had been finished. After that violence, that overt and suddenly to me embarrassing display, there could be no reconciliation; though now that I was moving away I felt no irritation at all towards Peter. It crossed my mind, absurdly, that it had been such a peaceful relationship: until that day we had never fought. There had been nothing to fight about.

I looked behind me: Peter was nowhere in sight. I walked along the deserted streets, past the rows of old apartment buildings, towards the nearest main street where I could get a bus. At this hour though (what hour was it?) I’d have to wait a long time. The thought made me uneasy: the wind was now stronger and colder and the lightning seemed to be moving closer by the minute. In the distance the thunder was beginning. I was wearing only a flimsy summer dress. I wondered whether I had enough money to take a taxi, stopped to count it, and found I hadn’t.

I had been walking north for about ten minutes, past the closed icily lighted stores, when I saw Peter’s car draw up to the curb about a hundred yards ahead of me. He got out and stood on the empty sidewalk, waiting. I walked on steadily, neither slackening my pace nor changing direction. Surely there was no longer any reason to run. I was no longer involved.

When I was level with him he stepped in front of me. “Would you kindly permit me,” he said with iron-clad politeness, “to drive
you home? I wouldn’t want to see you get drenched to the skin.” As he spoke, a few heavy preliminary drops were already coming down.

I hesitated. Why was he doing this? It might be only the same formal motive that prompted him to open car doors – almost an automatic reflex – in which case I could accept the favour just as formally, with no danger; but what would it really involve if I got into the car? I studied him: he had clearly had too much to drink, though clearly also he was in near-perfect control of himself. His eyes were a little glazed, it was true, but he was holding his body stiffly upright.

“Well,” I said doubtfully, “really I’d rather walk. Though thank you just the same.”

“Oh come along Marian, don’t be childish,” he said brusquely, and took my arm.

I allowed myself to be led to the car and inserted into the front seat. I was, I think, reluctant; but I did not particularly want to get wet.

He got in and slammed his own door and started the motor. “Now perhaps you’ll tell me what all that nonsense was about,” he said angrily.

We turned a corner and the rain hit, blown against the windshield by sharp gusts of wind. At any moment we were going to have, as one of my great-aunts used to say, a trash-mover and a gully-washer.

“I didn’t request to be driven home,” I said, hedging. I was convinced that it hadn’t been nonsense, but also acutely aware that it would look very much like nonsense to any outside observer. I didn’t want to discuss it; in that direction there could only be a dead end. I sat up straight in the front seat, staring through a window out of which I could see little or nothing.

“Why the hell you had to ruin a perfectly good evening I’ll never know,” he said, ignoring my remark. There was a crack of thunder.

“I don’t seem to have ruined it much for you,” I said. “You were enjoying
your
self enough.”

“Oh so that’s it. We weren’t entertaining you enough. Our conversation bored you, we weren’t paying enough attention to you. Well, next time we’ll know enough to save you the trouble of coming with us.”

This seemed to me quite unfair. After all, Len was my friend. “Len’s
my
friend, you know,” I said. My voice was beginning to quiver. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t want to talk with him a little myself when he’s just got back from England.” I knew even as I said it that Len was quite beside the point.

“Ainsley behaved herself properly, why couldn’t you? The trouble with
you
is,” he said savagely, “you’re just rejecting your femininity.”

His approval of Ainsley was a vicious goad. “Oh,
SCREW
my femininity,” I shouted. “Femininity has nothing to do with it. You were just being plain ordinary
rude
!” Unintentional bad manners was something Peter couldn’t stand to be accused of, and I knew it. It put him in the class of the people in the deodorant ads.

He glanced quickly over at me, his eyes narrowed as though he was taking aim. Then he gritted his teeth together and stepped murderously hard on the accelerator. By that time the rain was coming down in torrents: the road ahead, when it could be seen at all, looked like a solid sheet of water. When I made my thrust we’d been going down a hill, and at the suddenly increased speed the car skidded, turned two-and-a-quarter times round, slithered backwards down over someone’s inclined lawn, and came to a bone-jolting stop. I heard something snap.

“You maniac!” I wailed, when I had ricocheted off the glove-compartment and realized I wasn’t dead. “You’ll get us all killed!” I must have been thinking of myself as plural.

Peter rolled down the window and stuck his head out. Then he began to laugh. “I’ve trimmed their hedge a bit for them,” he said. He stepped on the gas. The wheels spun for an instant, churning up the mud of the lawn and leaving (as I later saw) two deep gouges, and with a grinding of gears we moved up over the edge of the lawn and back onto the road.

I was trembling now from a combination of fright, cold, and fury. “First you drag me into your car,” I chittered, “and brow-beat me because of your own feelings of guilt, and then you try to
kill
me!”

Peter was still laughing. His head was soaking wet, even from that brief exposure to the rain, and the hair was plastered down on his head, the water trickling from it over his face. “They’re going to see an alteration in their landscape gardening when they get up in the morning,” he chuckled. He seemed to find wilfully ruining other people’s property immensely funny.

“You seem to find wilfully ruining other people’s property immensely funny,” I said, with sarcasm.

“Oh, don’t be such a killjoy,” he replied pleasantly. His satisfaction with what he considered a forceful display of muscle was obvious. It irritated me that he should appropriate as his own the credit due to the back wheels of his car.