The Edible Woman (8 page)

He jerked forward and listened tensely, then leaned back against the wall. “It’s only Fish and Trevor. They’re my roommates,” he said, “the other two bores. Trevor’s the mother bore: he’s going to be shocked when finds me with my shirt off and a capital-G girl in the room.”

There was a brown-paper crunkle of grocery bags being set down in the kitchen, and a deep voice said, “Christ, it’s hot out there!”

“I think I’d better go now,” I said. If the others were at all like this one I didn’t think I would be able to cope. I gathered my questionnaires together and stood up, at the same time as the voice said “Hey Duncan, want a beer?” and a furry bearded head appeared in the doorway.

I gasped. “So you do drink beer after all!”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. Sorry. I didn’t want to finish, that’s all. The rest of it sounded like a drag, and I’d said all I wanted to say about it anyway. Fish,” he said to the beard, “this is Goldilocks.” I smiled rigidly. I am not a blonde.

Another head now appeared above the first: a white-skinned face with receding lightish hair, sky-blue eyes, and an admirably chiselled nose. His jaw dropped when he saw me.

It was time to leave. “Thank you,” I said coolly but graciously to the one on the bed. “You’ve been most helpful.”

He actually grinned as I marched to the doorway and as the heads retreated in alarm to let me pass he called, “Hey, why do you have a crummy job like this? I thought only fat sloppy housewives did that sort of thing.”

“Oh,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster, and not intending to justify myself by explaining the high – well, higher –
status of my real job, “we all have to eat. Besides, what else can you do with a
B.A
. these days?”

When I was outside I looked at the questionnaire. The notes I had made of his answers were almost indecipherable in the glare of the sunlight; all I could see on the page was a blur of grey scribbling.

T
echnically I was still one and a half interviews short, but I had enough for the necessary report and the questionnaire changes. Besides, I wanted to have a bath and change before going to Peter’s and the interviewing had taken longer than I expected.

I got back to the apartment and threw the questionnaires on the bed. Then I looked around for Ainsley, but she was out. I gathered together my washcloth, soap, toothbrush and toothpaste, put on my dressing gown, and went downstairs. Our apartment has no bathroom of its own, which helps to account for the low rent. Perhaps the house was built before they had them, or perhaps it was felt that servants didn’t need bathrooms; at any rate, we have to use the second-floor bathroom, which makes life difficult at times. Ainsley is always leaving rings, which the lady down below regards as a violation of her shrine. She leaves deodorants and cleansers and brushes and sponges in conspicuous places, which has no effect on Ainsley but makes me feel uneasy. Sometimes I go downstairs after Ainsley has taken a bath and clean out the tub.

I had wanted to soak for a while, but I had barely scrubbed away the afternoon’s film of dust and bus fumes when the lady down below began making rustling and throat-clearing noises outside the door. This is her way of suggesting that she wants to get in: she never knocks and asks. I clambered upstairs again, dressed, had a cup of tea, and set out for Peter’s. The ancestors watched me with their fading daguerrotyped eyes as I went down the stairs, their mouths bleak above their stiff collars.

Usually we went out for dinner, but when we didn’t the pattern was that I would walk over to Peter’s and get something to cook at a store on the way – one of those small grubby stores you sometimes find in the older residential districts. Of course he could have picked me up at the house in his Volkswagen, but he is made irritable by errands; also I don’t like to give the lady down below too much food for speculation. I didn’t know whether we were going out for dinner or not – Peter had said nothing about it – so I dropped in at the store just to be on the safe side. He would probably have a hangover from the celebration of the night before and wouldn’t feel like a full-scale dinner.

Peter’s apartment building is just far enough away to make getting there by transportation system more bother than it’s worth. It’s south of our district and east of the university, in a rundown area, nearly a slum, that is scheduled to be transformed over the next few years by high-rise apartments. Several have been completed but Peter’s is still under construction. Peter is the only person who lives there; he does so temporarily, at only a third of the price they’ll charge when the building is finished. He was able to make this deal through a connection he acquired during a piece of contract manipulating. Peter’s in his articling year as a lawyer and doesn’t have extravagant amounts of money yet – for instance he couldn’t have afforded the apartment at its list price – but his is a small firm and he’s rising in it like a balloon.

All summer whenever I went to the apartment I had to thread my way through piles of concrete blocks near the entrance to the lobby, around shapes covered with dusty tarpaulins on the floor inside, and sometimes over troughs for plaster and ladders and stacks of pipes on the stairway going up; the elevators aren’t in working order yet. Occasionally I would be stopped by workmen who didn’t know about Peter and who would insist that I couldn’t go in because nobody lived there. We would then have arguments about the existence or non-existence of Mr. Wollander, and once I’d had to take some of them up to the seventh floor with me and produce Peter in the flesh. I knew there wouldn’t be any men working as late as five on Saturday though; and they probably had the whole long weekend off anyway. Generally they seem to go about things in a leisurely manner, which suits Peter. There’s been a strike or a layoff too which has held things up. Peter hopes it will go on: the longer they take, the longer his rent will be low.

Structurally the building was complete, except for the finishing touches. They had all the windows in and had scrawled them with white soap hieroglyphics to keep people from walking through them. The glass doors had been installed several weeks before, and Peter had got an extra set of keys made for me: a necessity rather than just a convenience, since the buzzer-system for letting people in had not yet been connected. Inside, the shiny surfaces – tiled floors, painted walls, mirrors, light fixtures – which would later give the building its expensive gloss, its beetle-hard internal shell, had not yet begun to secrete themselves. The rough grey underskin of subflooring and unplastered wall-surface was still showing, and raw wires dangled like loose nerves from most of the sockets. I went up the stairs carefully, avoiding the dirty bannister, thinking how much I had come to associate weekends with this new-building smell of sawn boards and cement dust. On the floors I passed, the doorways of the future apartments gaped emptily, their doors as yet unhung. It
was a long climb up; as I reached Peter’s floor I was breathing hard. I would be glad when the elevators were running.

Peter’s apartment, of course, has been largely finished; he’d never live in a place without proper floors and electricity, no matter how low the rent. His connection uses it as a model of what the rest of the apartments will be like, and shows it to the occasional prospective tenant, always phoning Peter before he arrives. It doesn’t inconvenience Peter much: he’s out a lot and doesn’t mind people looking through his place.

I opened the door, went in, and took the groceries to the refrigerator in the kitchenette. I could tell by the sound of running water that Peter was taking a shower: he often is. I strolled into the living room and looked out of the window. The apartment isn’t far enough up for a good view of the lake or the city – you can only see a mosaic of dingy little streets and narrow backyards, and you aren’t low enough to see clearly what the people are doing in them. Peter hasn’t put much in the living room yet. He’s got a Danish Modern sofa and a chair to match and a hi-fi set, but nothing else. He says he’d rather wait and get good things than clutter the place up with cheap things he doesn’t like. I suppose he is right, but still it will help when he gets more: his two pieces of furniture are made to look very spindly and isolated by the large empty space that surrounds them.

I get restless when I’m waiting for anyone, I tend to pace. I wandered into the bedroom and looked out the window there, though it’s much the same view. Peter has the bedroom nearly done, he’s told me, though for some tastes it might be slightly sparse. He has a good-sized sheepskin on the floor and a plain, solid bed, also good sized, second-hand but in perfect condition, which is always neatly made. Then an austere square desk, dark wood, and one of those leather-cushioned office swivel-chairs that he picked up second-hand too; he says it’s very comfortable for working. The desk has a
reading lamp on it, a blotter, an assortment of pens and pencils, and Peter’s graduation portrait in a stand-up frame. On the wall above there’s a small bookcase – his law books on the bottom shelf, his hoard of paperback detective novels on the top shelf, and miscellaneous books and magazines in between. To one side of the bookcase is a pegboard with hooks that holds Peter’s collection of weapons: two rifles, a pistol, and several wicked-looking knives. I’ve been told all the names, but I can never remember them. I’ve never seen Peter use any of them, though of course in the city he wouldn’t have many opportunities. Apparently he used to go hunting a lot with his oldest friends. Peter’s cameras hang there too, their glass eyes covered by leather cases. There’s a full-length mirror on the outside of the cupboard door, and inside the cupboard are all of Peter’s clothes.

Peter must have heard me prowling. He called from inside the bathroom, “Marian? That you?”

“I’m here,” I called back. “Hi.”

“Hi. Fix yourself a drink. And one for me too – gin and tonic, okay? I’ll be out in a minute.”

I knew where everything was. Peter has a cupboard shelf well-stocked with liquor, and he never forgets to re-fill the ice-cube trays. I went to the kitchen, and carefully assembled the drinks, remembering not to leave out the twist of lemon peel Peter likes. It takes me longer than average to make drinks: I have to measure.

I heard the shower stop and the sound of feet, and when I turned around Peter was standing in the kitchen doorway, dripping wet, wearing a tasteful navy-blue towel.

“Hi,” I said. “Your drink’s on the counter.”

He stepped forward silently, took my glass from my hand, swallowed a third of its contents and set it on the table behind me. Then he put both of his arms round me.

“You’re getting me all wet,” I said softly. I put my hand, cold from holding the icy glass, on the small of his back, but he didn’t flinch. His flesh was warm and resilient after the shower.

He kissed my ear. “Come into the bathroom,” he said.

I gazed up at Peter’s shower curtain, a silver plastic ground covered with curve-necked swans in pink swimming in groups of three among albino lily pads; it wasn’t Peter’s taste at all, he’d bought it in a hurry because the water kept running over the floor when he showered, he hadn’t had time to look properly and this one had been the least garish. I was wondering why he had insisted that we get into the bathtub. I hadn’t thought it was a good idea, I much prefer the bed and I knew the tub would be too small and uncomfortably hard and ridgy, but I hadn’t objected: I felt I should be sympathetic because of Trigger. However I had taken the bath mat in with me, which softened the ridges.

I had expected Peter to be depressed, but though he wasn’t his usual self he certainly wasn’t depressed. I couldn’t quite figure out the bathtub. I thought back to the other two unfortunate marriages. After the first, it had been the sheepskin on his bedroom floor, and after the second a scratchy blanket in a field we’d driven four hours to get to, and where I was made uneasy by thoughts of farmers and cows. I supposed this was part of the same pattern, whatever the pattern was. Perhaps an attempt to assert youthfulness and spontaneity, a revolt against the stale doom of stockings in the sink and bacon fat congealed in pans evoked for him by his friends’ marriages. Peter’s abstraction on these occasions gave me the feeling that he liked doing them because he had read about them somewhere, but I could never locate the quotations. The field was, I guessed, a hunting story from one of the outdoorsy male magazines; I remembered he had worn a plaid jacket. The sheepskin I placed in one of the men’s
glossies, the kind with lust in penthouses. But the bathtub? Possibly one of the murder mysteries he read as what he called “escape literature”; but wouldn’t that rather be someone drowned in the bathtub? A woman. That would give them a perfect bit to illustrate on the cover: a completely naked woman with a thin covering of water and maybe a bar of soap or a rubber duck or a bloodstain to get her past the censors, floating with her hair spread out on the water, the cold purity of the bathtub surrounding her body, chaste as ice only because dead, her open eyes staring up into those of the reader. The bathtub as a coffin. I had a fleeting vision: what if we both fell asleep and the tap got turned on accidentally, lukewarm so we wouldn’t notice, and the water slowly rose and killed us? That would be a surprise for the connection when he came to show his next batch of apartment renters around: water all over the floor and two naked corpses clasped in a last embrace. “Suicide,” they’d all say. “Died for love.” And on summer nights our ghosts would be seen gliding along the halls of the Brentview Apartments, Bachelor, Two Bedroom and Luxury, clad only in bath towels.…

I shifted my head, tired of the swans, and looked instead at the curving silver nozzle of the shower. I could smell Peter’s hair, a clean soap smell. He smelled of soap all the time, not only when he had recently taken a shower. It was a smell I associated with dentists’ chairs and medicine, but on him I found it attractive. He never wore sickly-sweet shaving lotion or the other male substitutes for perfume.

I could see his arm where it lay across me, the hairs arranged in rows. The arm was like the bathroom: clean and white and new, the skin unusually smooth for a man’s. I couldn’t see his face, which was resting against my shoulder, but I tried to visualize it. He was, as Clara had said, “good-looking”; that was probably what had first attracted me to him. People noticed him, not because he had forceful or peculiar features, but because he was ordinariness raised to
perfection, like the youngish well-groomed faces of cigarette ads. But sometimes I wanted a reassuring wart or mole, or patch of roughness, something the touch could fix on instead of gliding over.