The Robber Bride (46 page)

She goes back to sleep, dreams about her father standing on a black mountain, a mountain of coal or of something burnt, hears Mitch’s alarm go off, hears it go off again, wakes finally. The space beside her is empty. She climbs out of bed, out of the king-sized bed
with the brass bedstead in a curving art nouveau design and the raspberry-coloured sheets and duvet cover, onto the aubergine carpet, in the bedroom with its salmon walls and the priceless twenties dresser and mirror,
faux
Egyptian, and slips into her cream satin robe and pads barefoot into the bathroom. She loves this bathroom! It has everything: shower cubicle, Jacuzzi, bidet, a heated towel rack, His and Hers sinks so the hairs from Roz’s head won’t get mixed up with the stubble from Mitch’s chin. She could live in this bathroom! So could several Southeast Asian families, come to that, she reflects morosely. Guilt sets in.

Mitch is already in here, taking a shower. His pink silhouette looms dimly through the steam and the pebble glass. Years ago – how many? – Roz would have scampered playfully into the shower, too; she would have soaped him all over, rubbed herself against his slippery body, pulled him down onto the tiled bathroom floor; back in the days when his skin fit him exactly, no sags, no bulges, and hers did too, and when he tasted like hazelnuts, a delicious roasted smell; but she doesn’t do such things now, now that she has become more reluctant to be viewed by daylight.

Anyway, if what she suspects is true, this is the wrong time to be putting herself on display. In Mitch’s cosmology Roz’s body represents possessions, solidity, the domestic virtues, hearth and home, long usage. Mother-of-his-children. The den. Whereas whatever other body may currently be occupying his field of vision will have other nouns attached to it: adventure, youth, freedom, the unknown, sex without strings. When the pendulum swings back – when that other body starts representing complications, decisions, demands, sulkiness, and weepy scenes – then it will be Roz’s turn again. This has been the pattern.

Intuition is not one of Roz’s strong suits, but she has intuitions about the onset of Mitch’s attacks. She thinks of them as attacks, as in attacks of malaria; or else as attacks of a different nature, for isn’t
Mitch a predator, doesn’t he take advantage of these poor women, who are surely becoming younger and younger as Mitch gets older and older, isn’t it really more like a bear attack, a shark attack, aren’t these women savaged by him? Judging from some of the tearful phone calls Roz has fielded, some of the shoulders she’s patted in her hypocritical, maternal, there-there-ing way, they are.

It’s amazing the way Mitch can just write these women off. Sink his teeth into them, spit them out, and Roz is expected to clean up the mess. Fire of his loins and then
wipe
, like a blackboard, and after that he can barely remember their names. Roz is the one who remembers. Their names, and everything else about them.

The beginnings of Mitch’s flings are never obvious. He never says blatant things such as “I’m working late at the office”; when he says that, he really is working late at the office. Instead, his habits undergo a subtle change. The numbers of conferences he goes to, the numbers of showers he takes, the amount he whistles in them, the quantity and kind of aftershave he uses and the places where he splashes it – the groin is a sure giveaway – such things are minutely observed by Roz, looking pleasantly out of her indulgent eyes, bristling like a bottle-brush within. He stands up straighter, pulls in his stomach more; she catches him glaring at himself, at his profile, in hall mirrors, in store windows, his eyes narrowing as if for a leonine pounce.

He’s more considerate of her, more attentive; he’s alert to her, watching her to see if she’s watching. He gives her little kisses on the back of her neck, on her fingertips – little homage kisses, little forgive-me kisses, but nothing that might be construed as foreplay, because in bed he becomes inert, he turns his back, he pleads minor illnesses, he takes up the jackknife position, oystering himself against her stroking fingers. His prick is a serial monogamist; a sure sign of a dyed-in-the-wool romantic, in Roz’s books. No cynical polygamy for
it! One more, it wants. Just one more woman, because a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, and Mitch is afraid of dying, and if he were ever to pause, to see himself as a man married to Roz, married only to Roz, married to Roz forever, in that instant his hair would fall out, his face would wrinkle up like a thousand-year-old mummy’s, his heart would stop. Or that is how Roz explains him, to herself.

She asks him if he’s seeing someone.

He says no. He says he’s just tired. He’s under a lot of pressure, he says, a lot of stress, and to prove it he gets up in the middle of the night and goes into his study, where he shuts the door and works until dawn. Sometimes there is the murmur of his voice: dictating letters, or so he claims, offering unasked-for explanations at breakfast.

And thus it goes, until Mitch gets tired of whoever it is he really has been seeing. Then he becomes deliberately careless, then he starts to leave clues. The match folder from the restaurant where he and Roz have never been, the unknown-number long-distance phone-call entries on their home phone bill. Roz knows that at this point she is supposed to call him on it. She’s supposed to confront him, to rave and scream, to cry and accuse and grovel, to ask him if he still loves her and whether the children mean anything to him at all. She’s supposed to behave the way she did the first time (the second time, the fifth time), so he will be able to wriggle off the hook, so he can tell the other woman, the one with the haggard lines appearing around her eyes, the one with the pieces of love bitten out of her, that he will always adore her but he can’t bear to leave the kids; and so he will be able to tell Roz – magnanimously, and with a heroic air of self-sacrifice – that she is the most important woman in his life, no matter how badly and foolishly he may behave from time to time, and he’s given the other woman up for her, so how can she refuse to forgive him? The other women are just trivial adventures, he will imply: she’s the one he comes home
to. Then he will throw himself into her as into a warm bath, as into a deep feather bed, and exhaust himself, and sink again into connubial torpor. Until the next time.

Lately, however, Roz has been refusing her move. She’s learned to keep her big fat mouth shut. She ignores the phone bills and the match covers, and after the midnight conversations she tells him sweetly that she hopes he’s not overdoing it with too much work. During his conference absences she finds other things to do. She has meetings to go to, she has plays to attend, she has detective novels to read, tucked up in bed with her night cream; she has friends, she has her business to keep up; her time is fully occupied with items other than him. She adopts absent-mindedness: she forgets to send his shirts to the cleaners, and when he speaks to her she says, “What did you just say, sweetie?” She buys new dresses and new perfumes, and smiles at herself in mirrors when he can be supposed not to be looking, but is, and Mitch begins to sweat.

Roz knows why: his little piece of cotton candy is growing claws, she’s saying she doesn’t understand what’s going on with him, she’s whining, she’s babbling about commitment and divorce, both of them things he is now supposed to be doing, after all he’s promised. The net is closing around him and he’s not being rescued. He’s being thrown from the troika, thrown to the wolves, to the hordes of ravening bimbos snapping at his heels.

In desperation he resorts to more and more open ploys. He leaves private letters lying around – the women’s letters to him, and, worse, his letters to the women – he actually makes copies! – and Roz reads them and fumes, and goes to the gym to work out, and eats chocolate mud cake afterwards, and puts the letters back where she found them and does not mention them at all. He announces a separate vacation – maybe he will take the boat on a short trip around Georgian Bay, by himself, he needs some time to
unwind – and Roz pictures some loose-mouthed slut spread out on the deck of the
Rosalind II
, and mentally rips up the snapshot, and tells him she thinks that’s a wonderful idea because each of them could use a little space.

God only knows how much she bites her tongue. She waits until the last minute, just before he really has to elope, or else get caught screwing his latest
thing
in Roz’s raspberry-coloured bed in order to get Roz’s attention. Only then will she reach out a helping hand, only then will she haul him back from the brink, only then will she throw the expected tantrum. The tears Mitch sheds then are not tears of repentance. They are tears of relief.

Does Roz secretly enjoy all this? She didn’t at first. The very first time it happened she felt scooped out, disjointed, scorned and betrayed, crushed by bulldozers. She felt worthless, useless, sexless. She thought she would die. But she’s developed a knack, and therefore a taste. It’s the same as a business negotiation or a poker game. She’s always been a whiz at poker. You have to know when to up the stakes, when to call a bluff, when to fold. So she does enjoy it, some. It’s hard not to enjoy something you’re good at.

But does her enjoyment make it all right? On the contrary. It’s her enjoyment that makes it all wrong. Any old nun could tell you that, and many of them did tell Roz, once, in the earlier part of her life. If she could suffer through Mitch’s attacks like a martyr, weeping and flagellating herself – if she could let them be imposed on her, without participating at all, without colluding, without lying and concealing and smiling and playing Mitch like an oversized carp, how right it would be. She’d be suffering for love, suffering passively, instead of fighting. Fighting for herself, for her idea of who she is. The right kind of love should be selfless, for women at any rate, or so said the Sisters. The Self should be scrubbed like a floor: on both knees, with a harsh wire brush, until nothing is left of it at all.

Roz can’t do that. She can’t be selfless, she never could. Anyway her way is better. It’s harder on Mitch, perhaps, but it’s easier on her. She’s had to give up some love, of course; some of her once-boundless love for Mitch. You can’t keep a cool head when you’re drowning in love. You just thrash around a lot, and scream, and wear yourself out.

The May sunlight comes in through the window, and Mitch whistles “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” and Roz flosses her teeth quickly so Mitch won’t see her doing it when he gets out of the shower. There is nothing so dampening to lust as dental floss, in Roz’s opinion: a wide-open mouth with a piece of gooey string being manoeuvred around in it. She has always had good teeth, they are one of her features. Only recently has she begun to think they may not always be where they are right now, namely inside her mouth.

Mitch steps out of the shower and comes up behind her and encircles her with his arms, and presses her against himself, and nuzzles her hair aside and kisses her on the neck. If they hadn’t made love last night she would find this neck kiss conclusive: surely it is too courtly to be innocent! But at this preliminary stage, you never know.

“Good shower, honey?” she says. Mitch makes the noise he makes when he thinks Roz has asked a question so meaningless it doesn’t require an answer, not knowing that what she said wasn’t a question anyway but an inverted wish: translation,
I
hope you had a good shower, and here is your opening to complain about any little physical problems you may be having so I can offer sympathy
.

“I thought we could have lunch,” says Mitch. Roz notes the formulation: not
Would you like to have lunch or I am inviting you to lunch
. No room here for a yes or no from her, no room for a rejection: Mitch is nothing if not directive. But at the same time her heart turns over, because she doesn’t get invitations like this from him
very often. She looks at his face in the mirror, and he smiles at her. She always finds his mirror reflection disconcerting. Lopsided, because she isn’t used to seeing him that way around and he looks reversed. But nobody’s symmetrical.

She suppresses the desire to say,
Judas Priest, how come I rate all of a sudden? Is hell freezing over, or what?
Instead she says, “Honey, that would be great! I’d love it!”

Roz sits on the bath stool, a converted Victorian commode, and watches Mitch while he shaves. She adores watching him shave! All that wild white foam, a sort of caveman beard, and the way he contorts his face to get at the hidden stubble. She has to admit he’s not only distinguished, he’s still what you’d call handsome, though his skin is getting redder and his blue eyes are paling.
Ruggedly handsome
, they might say in a men’s clothing ad, though they’d be talking about the sheepskin coat. The sheepskin coat, the sheepskin gloves, the calfskin briefcase: that’s Mitch’s style. He has many items of good-taste expensive leather. He’s not going bald yet, praise the Lord, not that Roz would mind but men seem to, and she hopes if he does start to shed that he won’t get his armpit transplanted to the top of his head. Though he’s showing some pepper and salt in the sideburns. Roz checks him over for rust spots, the way she would a car.

What she’s really waiting for though is the aftershave. Which one will he pick, and where will he put it? Ah! Nothing too seductive, just some stuff he got in England, heather or something. The outdoor mode. And nothing below the neck. Roz sighs with relief.

She does love him. She loves him still. She can’t afford to go overboard, is all.

But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it’s her excessive love that pushes him away.

After Mitch is out of the bathroom Roz continues with her own preparations, the creams and lotions and perfumes that should never
be seen by Mitch. They belong behind the scenes, as at theatres. Roz collects perfumes the way other people collect stamps, she’s a sucker for anything new that comes out. She has three rows of them, three rows of cunning little bottles, sorted into categories that she thinks of as Flower Arranging, Executive Briskness, and Heavy Petting. Today, in honour of her lunch with Mitch, she chooses Shalimar, from the Heavy Petting section. But it’s a bit too sultry for the middle of the day so she cuts it with something from Flower Arranging. Then, suited and made up but wearing her bedroom slippers and carrying her high heels, she descends to do her mother routine in the kitchen. Mitch, needless to say, is already out the door. He has a breakfast meeting.