The Edible Woman

1

I know I was all right on Friday when I got up; if anything I was feeling more stolid than usual. When I went out to the kitchen to get breakfast Ainsley was there, moping: she said she had been to a bad party the night before. She swore there had been nothing but dentistry students, which depressed her so much she had consoled herself by getting drunk.

“You have no idea how soggy it is,” she said, “having to go through twenty conversations about the insides of peoples’ mouths. The most reaction I got out of them was when I described an abscess I once had. They positively drooled. And most men look at something besides your teeth, for god’s sake.”

She had a hangover, which put me in a cheerful mood – it made me feel so healthy – and I poured her a glass of tomato juice and briskly fixed her an Alka-Seltzer, listening and making sympathetic noises while she complained.

“As if I didn’t get enough of that at work,” she said. Ainsley has a job as a tester of defective electric toothbrushes for an electric toothbrush company: a temporary job. What she is waiting for is an opening in one of those little art galleries, even though they don’t pay well: she wants to meet the artists. Last year, she told me, it was actors, but then she actually met some. “It’s an absolute fixation. I expect they all carry those bent mirrors around in their coat pockets and peer into their own mouths every time they go to the john to make sure they’re still cavity-free.” She ran one hand reflectively through her hair, which is long and red, or rather auburn. “Could you imagine kissing one? He’d say ‘Open wide’ beforehand. They’re so bloody one-track.”

“It must have been awful,” I said, refilling her glass. “Couldn’t you have changed the topic?”

Ainsley raised her almost non-existent eyebrows, which hadn’t been coloured in yet that morning. “Of course not,” she said. “I pretended to be terribly interested. And naturally I didn’t let on what my job was: those professional men get so huffy if you know anything about their subject. You know, like Peter.”

Ainsley tends to make jabs at Peter, especially when she isn’t feeling well. I was magnanimous and didn’t respond. “You’d better eat something before you go to work,” I said, “it’s better when you’ve got something on your stomach.”

“Oh god,” said Ainsley, “I can’t face it. Another day of machines and mouths. I haven’t had an interesting one since last month, when that lady sent back her toothbrush because the bristles were falling off. We found out she’d been using Ajax.”

I got so caught up in being efficient for Ainsley’s benefit while complimenting myself on my moral superiority to her that I didn’t realize how late it was until she reminded me. At the electric toothbrush company they don’t care what time you breeze in, but my company thinks of itself as punctual. I had to skip the egg and wash down a glass of milk and a bowl of cold cereal which I knew would leave me hungry long before lunchtime. I chewed through a piece of bread while Ainsley watched me in nauseated silence and grabbed up my purse, leaving Ainsley to close the apartment door behind me.

We live on the top floor of a large house in one of the older and more genteel districts, in what I suppose used to be the servants’ quarters. This means there are two flights of stairs between us and the front door, the higher flight narrow and slippery, the lower one wide and carpeted but with stair rods that come loose. In the high heels expected by the office I have to go down sideways, clutching the bannister. That morning I made it safely past the line of pioneer brass warming-pans strung on the wall of our stairway, avoided catching myself on the many-pronged spinning wheel on the second-floor landing, and sidestepped quickly down past the ragged regimental flag behind glass and the row of oval-framed ancestors that guard the first stairway. I was relieved to see there was no one in the downstairs hall. On level ground I strode towards the door, swerving to avoid the rubber plant on one side and the hall table with the écru doily and the round brass tray on the other. Behind the velvet curtain to the right I could hear the child performing her morning penance at the piano. I thought I was safe.

But before I reached the door it swung silently inward upon its hinges, and I knew I was trapped. It was the lady down below. She was wearing a pair of spotless gardening gloves and carrying a trowel. I wondered who she’d been burying in the garden.

“Good morning, Miss MacAlpin,” she said.

“Good morning.” I nodded and smiled. I can never remember her name, and neither can Ainsley; I suppose we have what they call a mental block about it. I looked past her towards the street, but she didn’t move out of the doorway.

“I was out last night,” she said. “At a meeting.” She has an indirect way of going about things. I shifted from one foot to the other and smiled again, hoping she would realize I was in a hurry. “The child tells me there was another fire.”

“Well, it wasn’t exactly a fire,” I said. The child had taken this mention of her name as an excuse to stop practising, and was standing now in the velvet doorway of the parlour, staring at me. She is a hulking creature of fifteen or so who is being sent to an exclusive private girls’ school, and she has to wear a green tunic with knee-socks to match. I’m sure she’s really quite normal, but there’s something cretinous about the hair-ribbon perched up on top of her gigantic body.

The lady down below took off one of her gloves and patted her chignon. “Ah,” she said sweetly. “The child says there was a lot of smoke.”

“Everything was under control,” I said, not smiling this time. “It was just the pork chops.”

“Oh, I see,” she said. “Well, I do wish you would tell Miss Tewce to try not to make quite so much smoke in future. I’m afraid it upsets the child.” She holds Ainsley alone responsible for the smoke, and seems to think she sends it out of her nostrils like a dragon. But she never stops Ainsley in the hall to talk about it: only me. I suspect she’s decided Ainsley isn’t respectable, whereas I am. It’s probably the way we dress: Ainsley says I choose clothes as though they’re a camouflage or a protective colouration, though I can’t see anything wrong with that. She herself goes in for neon pink.

Of course I missed the bus: as I crossed the lawn I could see it disappearing across the bridge in a cloud of air pollution. While I was standing under the tree – our street has many trees, all of them enormous – waiting for the next bus, Ainsley came out of the house and joined me. She’s a quick-change artist; I could never put myself together in such a short time. She was looking a lot healthier – possibly the effects of makeup, though you can never tell with Ainsley – and she had her red hair piled up on top of her head, as she always does when she goes to work. The rest of the time she wears it down in straggles. She had on her orange and pink sleeveless dress, which I judged was too tight across the hips. The day was going to be hot and humid; already I could feel a private atmosphere condensing around me like a plastic bag. Maybe I should have worn a sleeveless dress too.

“She got me in the hall,” I said. “About the smoke.”

“The old bitch,” said Ainsley. “Why can’t she mind her own business?” Ainsley doesn’t come from a small town as I do, so she’s not as used to people being snoopy; on the other hand she’s not as afraid of it either. She has no idea about the consequences.

“She’s not that old,” I said, glancing over at the curtained windows of the house; though I knew she couldn’t hear us. “Besides, it wasn’t her who noticed the smoke, it was the child. She was at a meeting.”

“Probably the W.C.T.U.,” Ainsley said. “Or the I.O.D.E. I’ll bet she wasn’t at a meeting at all; she was hiding behind that damn velvet curtain, wanting us to think she was at a meeting so we’d really do something. What she wants is an orgy.”

“Now Ainsley,” I said, “you’re being paranoid.” Ainsley is convinced that the lady down below comes upstairs when we aren’t there and looks round our apartment and is silently horrified, and even suspects her of ruminating over our mail, though not of going so far as to open it. It’s a fact that she sometimes answers the front door for our visitors before they ring the bell. She must think she’s within her rights to take precautions: when we first considered renting the apartment she made it clear to us, by discreet allusions to previous tenants, that whatever happened the child’s innocence must not be corrupted, and that two young ladies were surely more to be depended upon than two young men.

“I’m doing my best,” she had said, sighing and shaking her head. She had intimated that her husband, whose portrait in oils hung above the piano, had not left as much money as he should have. “Of course you realize your apartment has no private entrance?” She had been stressing the drawbacks rather than the advantages, almost as though she didn’t want us to rent. I said we did realize it; Ainsley said nothing. We had agreed I would do the talking and Ainsley would sit and look innocent, something she can do very well when she wants to – she has a pink-and-white blunt baby’s face, a bump for a nose, and large blue eyes she can make as round as ping-pong balls. On this occasion I had even got her to wear gloves.

The lady down below shook her head again. “If it weren’t for the child,” she said, “I would sell the house. But I want the child to grow up in a good district.”

I said I understood, and she said that of course the district wasn’t as good as it used to be: some of the larger houses were too expensive to keep up and the owners had been forced to sell them to immigrants (the corners of her mouth turned gently down) who had divided them up into rooming houses. “But that hasn’t reached our street yet,” she said. “And I tell the child exactly which streets she can walk on and which she can’t.” I said I thought that was wise. She had seemed much easier to deal with before we had signed the lease. And the rent was so low, and the house was so close to the bus stop. For this city it was a real find.

“Besides,” I added to Ainsley, “they have a right to be worried about the smoke. What if the house was on fire? And she’s never mentioned the other things.”

“What other things? We’ve never done any other things.”

“Well…” I said. I suspected the lady down below had taken note of all the bottle-shaped objects we had carried upstairs, though I tried my best to disguise them as groceries. It was true she had never specifically forbidden us to do anything – that would be too crude a violation of her law of nuance – but this only makes me feel I am actually forbidden to do everything.

“On still nights,” said Ainsley as the bus drew up, “I can hear her burrowing through the woodwork.”

We didn’t talk on the bus; I don’t like talking on buses, I would rather look at the advertisements. Besides, Ainsley and I don’t have much in common except the lady down below. I’ve only known her since just before we moved in: she was a friend of a friend, looking for a room mate at the same time I was, which is the way these things are usually done. Maybe I should have tried a computer; though on the whole it’s worked out fairly well. We get along by a symbiotic adjustment of habits and with a minimum of that pale-mauve hostility you often find among women. Our apartment is never exactly clean, but we keep it from gathering more than a fine plum-bloom of dust by an unspoken agreement: if I do the breakfast dishes, Ainsley does the supper ones; if I sweep the living-room floor, Ainsley wipes the kitchen table. It’s a see-saw arrangement and we both know that if one beat is missed the whole thing will collapse. Of course we each have our own bedroom and what goes on in there is strictly the owner’s concern. For instance Ainsley’s floor is covered by a treacherous muskeg of used clothes with ashtrays scattered here and there on it like stepping-stones, but though I consider it a fire hazard I never speak to her about it. By such mutual refrainings – I assume they are mutual since there must be things I do that she doesn’t like – we manage to preserve a reasonably frictionless equilibrium.

We reached the subway station, where I bought a package of peanuts. I was beginning to feel hungry already. I offered some to Ainsley, but she refused, so I ate them all on the way downtown.

We got off at the second-last stop south and walked a block together; our office buildings are in the same district.

“By the way,” said Ainsley as I was turning off at my street, “have you got three dollars? We’re out of scotch.” I rummaged in my purse and handed over, not without a sense of injustice: we split the cost but rarely the contents. At the age of ten I wrote a temperance essay for a United Church Sunday-school competition, illustrating it with pictures of car crashes, diagrams of diseased livers, and charts showing the effects of alcohol upon the circulatory system; I expect that’s why I can never take a second drink without a mental image of a warning sign printed in coloured crayons and connected with the taste of tepid communion grape juice. This puts me at a disadvantage with Peter; he likes me to try and keep up with him.

As I hurried towards my office building, I found myself envying Ainsley her job. Though mine was better-paying and more interesting, hers was more temporary: she had an idea of what she wanted to do next. She could work in a shiny new air-conditioned office building, whereas mine was dingy brick with small windows. Also, her job was unusual. When she meets people at parties they are always surprised when she tells them she’s a tester of defective electric toothbrushes, and she always says, “What else do you do with a B.A. these days?” Whereas my kind of job is only to be expected. I was thinking too that really I was better equipped to handle her job than she is. From what I see around the apartment, I’m sure I have much more mechanical ability than Ainsley.

By the time I finally reached the office I was three-quarters of an hour late. None commented but all took note.

2

The humidity was worse inside. I waded among the ladies’ desks to my own corner and had scarcely settled in behind the typewriter before the backs of my legs were stuck to the black leatherette of the chair. The air-conditioning system, I saw, had failed again, though since it is merely a fan which revolves in the centre of the ceiling, stirring the air around like a spoon in soup, it makes little difference whether it is going or not. But it was evidently bad for the ladies’ morale to see the blades dangling up there unmoving: it created the impression that nothing was being done, spurring their inertia on to even greater stasis. They squatted at their desks, toad-like and sluggish, blinking and opening and closing their mouths. Friday is always a bad day at the office.

I had begun to peck languidly at my damp typewriter when Mrs. Withers, the dietician, marched in through the back door, drew up, and scanned the room. She wore her usual Betty Grable hairdo and open-toed pumps, and her shoulders had an aura of shoulder pads even in a sleeveless dress. “Ah, Marian,” she said, “you’re just in time. I need another pre-test taster for the canned rice pudding study, and none of the ladies seem very hungry this morning.”

She wheeled and headed briskly for the kitchen. There is something unwiltable about dieticians. I unstuck myself from my chair, feeling like a volunteer singled out from the ranks; but I reminded myself that my stomach could use the extra breakfast.

In the tiny immaculate kitchen she explained her problem while spooning equal portions of canned rice pudding into three glass bowls. “You work on questionnaires, Marian, maybe you can help us. We can’t decide whether to have them taste all three flavours at the same meal, or each flavour separately at subsequent meals. Or perhaps we could have them taste in pairs – say, Vanilla and Orange at one meal, and Vanilla and Caramel at another. Of course we want to get as unbiased a sampling as possible, and so much depends on what else has been served – the colours of the vegetables for instance, and the tablecloth.”

I sampled the Vanilla.

“How would you rate the colour on that?” she asked anxiously, pencil poised. “Natural, Somewhat Artificial, or Definitely Unnatural?”

“Have you thought about putting raisins in it?” I said, turning to the Caramel. I didn’t wish to offend her.

“Raisins are too risky,” she said. “Many don’t like them.”

I set down the Caramel and tried the Orange. “Are you going to have them serve it hot?” I asked. “Or maybe with cream?”

“Well, it’s intended primarily for the time-saver market,” she said. “They naturally would want to serve it cold. They can add cream if they like, later, I mean we’ve nothing really against it though it’s not nutritionally necessary, it’s fortified with vitamins already, but right now we want a pure taste test.”

“I think subsequent meals would be best,” I said.

“If we could only do it in the middle of the afternoon. But we need a family reaction…” She tapped her pencil thoughtfully on the edge of the stainless-steel sink.

“Yes, well,” I said, “I’d better be getting back.” Deciding for them what they wanted to know wasn’t part of my job.

Sometimes I wonder just which things are part of my job, especially when I find myself calling up garage mechanics to ask them about their pistons and gaskets or handing out pretzels to suspicious old ladies on street corners. I know what Seymour Surveys hired me as – I’m supposed to spend my time revising the questionnaires, turning the convoluted and overly-subtle prose of the psychologists who write them into simple questions which can be understood by the people who ask them as well as the people who answer them. A question like “In what percentile would you place the visual impact value?” is not useful. When I got the job after graduation I considered myself lucky – it was better than many – but after four months its limits are still vaguely defined.

At times I’m certain I’m being groomed for something higher up, but as I have only hazy notions of the organizational structure of Seymour Surveys I can’t imagine what. The company is layered like an ice-cream sandwich, with three floors: the upper crust, the lower crust, and our department, the gooey layer in the middle. On the floor above are the executives and the psychologists – referred to as the men upstairs, since they are all men – who arrange things with the clients; I’ve caught glimpses of their offices, which have carpets and expensive furniture and silk-screen reprints of Group of Seven paintings on the walls. Below us are the machines – mimeo machines, I.B.M. machines for counting and sorting and tabulating the information; I’ve been down there too, into that factory-like clatter where the operatives seem frayed and overworked and have ink on their fingers. Our department is the link between the two: we are supposed to take care of the human element, the interviewers themselves. As market research is a sort of cottage industry, like a hand-knit sock company, these are all housewives working in their spare time and paid by the piece. They don’t make much, but they like to get out of the house. Those who answer the questions don’t get paid at all; I often wonder why they do it. Perhaps it’s the come-on blurb in which they’re told they can help to improve the products they use right in their own homes, something like a scientist. Or maybe they like to have someone to talk to. But I suppose most people are flattered by having their opinions asked.

Because our department deals primarily with housewives, everyone in it, except the unfortunate office-boy, is female. We are spread out in a large institutional-green room with an opaque glassed cubicle at one end for Mrs. Bogue, the head of the department, and a number of wooden tables at the other end for the motherly-looking women who sit deciphering the interviewers’ handwriting and making crosses and checkmarks on the completed questionnaires with coloured crayons, looking with their scissors and glue and stacks of paper like a superannuated kindergarten class. The rest of us in the department sit at miscellaneous desks in the space between. We have a comfortable chintz-curtained lunchroom for those who bring paper bags, and a tea and coffee machine, though some of the ladies have their own teapots; we also have a pink washroom with a sign over the mirrors asking us not to leave our hairs or tea leaves in the sink.

What, then, could I expect to turn into at Seymour Surveys? I couldn’t become one of the men upstairs; I couldn’t become a machine person or one of the questionnaire-marking ladies, as that would be a step down. I might conceivably turn into Mrs. Bogue or her assistant, but as far as I could see that would take a long time, and I wasn’t sure I would like it anyway.

I was just finishing the scouring-pad questionnaire, a rush job, when Mrs. Grot of Accounting came through the door. Her business was with Mrs. Bogue, but on her way out she stopped at my desk. She’s a short tight woman with hair the colour of a metal refrigerator-tray.

“Well, Miss MacAlpin,” she grated, “you’ve been with us four months now, and that means you’re eligible for the Pension Plan.”

“Pension Plan?” I had been told about the Pension Plan when I joined the company but I had forgotten about it. “Isn’t it too soon for me to join the Pension Plan? I mean – don’t you think I’m too young?”

“Well, it’s just as well to start early, isn’t it,” Mrs. Grot said. Her eyes behind their rimless spectacles were glittering: she would relish the chance of making yet another deduction from my paycheque.

“I don’t think I’d like to join the Pension Plan,” I said. “Thank you anyway.”

“Yes, well, but it’s obligatory, you see,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice.

“Obligatory? You mean even if I don’t want it?”

“Yes, you see if nobody paid into it, nobody would be able to get anything out of it, would they? Now I’ve brought the necessary documents; all you have to do is sign here.”

I signed, but after Mrs. Grot had left I was suddenly quite depressed; it bothered me more than it should have. It wasn’t only the feeling of being subject to rules I had no interest in and no part in making: you get adjusted to that at school. It was a kind of superstitious panic about the fact that I had actually signed my name, had put my signature to a magic document which seemed to bind me to a future so far ahead I couldn’t think about it. Somewhere in front of me a self was waiting, pre-formed, a self who had worked during innumerable years for Seymour Surveys and was now receiving her reward. A pension. I foresaw a bleak room with a plug-in electric heater. Perhaps I would have a hearing aid, like one of my great-aunts who had never married. I would talk to myself; children would throw snowballs at me. I told myself not to be silly, the world would probably blow up between now and then; I reminded myself I could walk out of there the next day and get a different job if I wanted to, but that didn’t help. I thought of my signature going into a file and the file going into a cabinet and the cabinet being shut away in a vault somewhere and locked.

I welcomed the coffee break at ten-thirty. I knew I ought to have skipped it and stayed to expiate my morning’s lateness, but I needed the distraction.

I go for coffee with the only three people in the department who are almost my own age. Sometimes Ainsley walks over from her office to join us, when she is tired of the other toothbrush-testers. Not that she’s especially fond of the three from my office, whom she calls collectively the office virgins. They aren’t really very much alike, except that they are all artificial blondes – Emmy, the typist, whisk-tinted and straggly; Lucy, who has a kind of public-relations job, platinum and elegantly coiffured, and Millie, Mrs. Bogue’s Australian assistant, brassy from the sun and cropped – and, as they have confessed at various times over coffee grounds and the gnawed crusts of toasted Danishes, all virgins – Millie from a solid girl-guide practicality (“I think in the long run it’s better to wait until you’re married, don’t you? Less bother.”), Lucy from social quailing (“What would people say?”), which seems to be rooted in a conviction that all bedrooms are wired for sound, with society gathered at the other end tuning its earphones; and Emmy, who is the office hypochondriac, from the belief that it would make her sick, which it probably would. They are all interested in travelling: Millie has lived in England, Lucy has been twice to New York, and Emmy wants to go to Florida. After they have travelled enough they would like to get married and settle down.

“Did you hear the laxative survey in Quebec has been cancelled?” Millie said when we were seated at our usual table at the wretched, but closest, restaurant across the street. “Great big job it was going to be, too – a product test in their own home and thirty-two pages of questions.” Millie always gets the news first.

“Well I must say that’s a good thing,” Emmy sniffed. “I don’t see how they could ask anybody thirty-two pages about that.” She went back to peeling the nail polish off her thumbnail. Emmy always looks as though she is coming unravelled. Stray threads trail from her hems, her lipstick sloughs off in dry scales, she sheds wispy blonde hairs and flakes of scalp on her shoulders and back; everywhere she goes she leaves a trail of assorted shreds.

I saw Ainsley come in and waved to her. She squeezed into the booth, saying “Hi” all round, then pinned up a strand of hair that had come down. The office virgins responded, but without marked enthusiasm.

“They’ve done it before,” Millie said. She’s been at the company longer than any of us. “And it works. They figure anybody you could take past page three would be a sort of laxative addict, if you see what I mean, and they’d go right on through.”

“Done what before?” said Ainsley.

“What do you want to bet she doesn’t wipe the table?” Lucy said, loudly enough so the waitress would overhear. She carries on a running battle with the waitress, who wears Woolworth earrings and a sullen scowl and is blatantly not an office virgin.

“The laxative study in Quebec,” I said privately to Ainsley.

The waitress arrived, wiped the table savagely, and took our orders. Lucy made an issue of the toasted Danish – she definitely wanted one without raisins this time. “Last time she brought me one with raisins,” she informed us, “and I told her I just couldn’t stand them. I’ve never been able to stand raisins. Ugh.”

“Why only Quebec?” Ainsley said, breathing smoke out through her nostrils. “Is there some psychological reason?” Ainsley majored in psychology at college.

“Gosh, I don’t know,” said Millie, “I guess people are just more constipated there. Don’t they eat a lot of potatoes?”

“Would potatoes make you that constipated?” asked Emmy, leaning forward across the table. She pushed several straws of hair back from her forehead and a cloud of tiny motes detached themselves from her and settled gently down through the air.

“It can’t be only the potatoes,” Ainsley pronounced. “It must be their collective guilt complex. Or maybe the strain of the language problem; they must be horribly repressed.”

The others looked at her with hostility: I could tell they thought she was showing off. “It’s awfully hot out today,” said Millie, “the office is like a furnace.”

“Anything happening at your office?” I asked Ainsley, to break the tension.

Ainsley ground out her cigarette. “Oh yes, we’ve had quite a bit of excitement,” she said. “Some woman tried to bump off her husband by short-circuiting his electric toothbrush, and one of our boys has to be at the trial as a witness; testify that the thing couldn’t possibly short-circuit under normal circumstances. He wants me to go along as a sort of special assistant, but he’s such a bore. I can tell he’d be rotten in bed.”

I suspected Ainsley of making this story up, but her eyes were at their bluest and roundest. The office virgins squirmed. Ainsley has an offhand way of alluding to the various men in her life that makes them uncomfortable.

Luckily our orders arrived. “That bitch brought me one with raisins again,” Lucy wailed, and began picking them out with her long perfectly shaped iridescent fingernails and piling them at the side of her plate.

As we were walking back to the office I complained to Millie about the Pension Plan. “I didn’t realize it was obligatory,” I said. “I don’t see why I should have to pay into their Pension Plan and have all those old crones like Mrs. Grot retire and feed off my salary.”

“Oh yes, it bothered me too at first,” Millie said without interest. “You’ll get over it. Gosh, I hope they’ve fixed the air conditioning.”

3

I had returned from lunch and was licking and stamping envelopes for the coast-to-coast instant-pudding-sauce study, behind schedule because someone in mimeo had run one of the question sheets backwards, when Mrs. Bogue came out of her cubicle.

“Marian,” she said with a sigh of resignation, “I’m afraid Mrs. Dodge in Kamloops will have to be removed. She’s pregnant.” Mrs. Bogue frowned slightly: she regards pregnancy as an act of disloyalty to the company.

“That’s too bad,” I said. The huge wall map of the country, sprinkled with red thumbtacks like measles, is directly above my desk, which means that the subtraction and addition of interviewers seems to have become part of my job. I climbed up on the desk, located Kamloops, and took out the thumbtack with the paper flag marked DODGE.

“While you’re up there,” Mrs. Bogue said, “could you just take off Mrs. Ellis in Blind River? I hope it’s only temporary, she’s always done good work, but she writes that some lady chased her out of the house with a meat cleaver and she fell on the steps and broke her leg. Oh, and add this new one – a Mrs. Gauthier in Charlottetown. I certainly hope she’s better than the last one there; Charlottetown is always so difficult.”

When I had climbed down she smiled at me pleasantly, which put me on guard. Mrs. Bogue has a friendly, almost cosy manner that equips her perfectly for dealing with the interviewers, and she is at her most genial when she wants something. “Marian,” she said, “we have a little problem. We’re running a beer study next week – you know which one, it’s the telephone-thing one – and they’ve decided upstairs that we need to do a pre-test this weekend. They’re worried about the questionnaire. Now, we could get Mrs. Pilcher, she’s a dependable interviewer, but it is the long weekend and we don’t like to ask her. You’re going to be in town, aren’t you?”

“Does it have to be this weekend?” I asked, somewhat pointlessly.

“Well, we absolutely have to have the results Tuesday. You only need to get seven or eight men.”

My lateness that morning had given her leverage. “Fine,” I said, “I’ll do them tomorrow.”

“You’ll get overtime, of course,” Mrs. Bogue said as she walked away, leaving me wondering whether that had been a snide remark. Her voice is always so bland it’s hard to tell.

I finished licking the envelopes, then got the beer questionnaires from Millie and went through the questions, looking for trouble-spots. The initial selection questions were standard enough. After that, the questions were designed to test listener response to a radio jingle, part of the advertising campaign for a new brand of beer one of the large companies was about to launch on the market. At a certain point the interviewer had to ask the respondent to pick up the telephone and dial a given number, whereupon the jingle would play itself to him over the phone. Then there were a number of questions asking the man how he liked the commercial, whether he thought it might influence his buying habits, and so on.

I dialled the phone number. Since the survey wasn’t actually being conducted till the next week, someone might have forgotten to hook up the record, and I didn’t want to make an idiot of myself.

After a preliminary ringing, buzzing and clicking a deep bass voice, accompanied by what sounded like an electric guitar, sang:

Moose, Moose,

From the land of pine and spruce,

Tingly, heady, rough-and-ready….

Then a speaking voice, almost as deep as the singer’s, intoned persuasively to background music,

Any real man, on a real man’s holiday – hunting, fishing, or just plain old-fashioned relaxing – needs a beer with a healthy, hearty taste, a deep-down manly flavour. The first long cool swallow will tell you that Moose Beer is just what you’ve always wanted for true beer enjoyment. Put the tang of the wilderness in YOUR life today with a big satisfying glass of sturdy Moose Beer.

The singer resumed:

Tingly, heady,

Rough-and-ready,

Moose, Moose, Moose, Moose, BEER!!!

and after a climax of sound the record clicked off. It was in satisfactory working order.

I remembered the sketches I’d seen of the visual presentation, scheduled to appear in magazines and on posters: the label was to have a pair of antlers with a gun and a fishing rod crossed beneath them. The singing commercial was a reinforcement of this theme; I didn’t think it was very original but I admired the subtlety of “just plain old-fashioned relaxing.” That was so the average beer-drinker, the slope-shouldered pot-bellied kind, would be able to feel a mystical identity with the plaid-jacketed sportsman shown in the pictures with his foot on a deer or scooping a trout into his net.

I had got to the last page when the telephone rang. It was Peter. I could tell from the sound of his voice that something was wrong.

“Listen, Marian, I can’t make it for dinner tonight.”

“Oh?” I said, wanting further explanation. I was disappointed, I had been looking forward to dinner with Peter to cheer me up. Also I was hungry again. I had been eating in bits and pieces all day and I had been counting on something nourishing and substantial. This meant another of the T. V. dinners Ainsley and I kept for emergencies. “Has something happened?”

“I know you’ll understand. Trigger” – his voice choked – “Trigger’s getting married.”

“Oh,” I said. I thought of saying “That’s too bad,” but it didn’t seem adequate. There was no use in sympathizing as though for a minor mishap when it was really a national disaster. “Would you like me to come with you?” I asked, offering support.

“God no,” he said, “that would be even worse. I’ll see you tomorrow. Okay?”

When he had hung up I reflected upon the consequences. The most obvious one was that Peter would need careful handling the next evening. Trigger was one of Peter’s oldest friends; in fact, he had been the last of Peter’s group of oldest friends still left unmarried. It had been like an epidemic. Just before I’d met him two had succumbed, and in the four months since that another two had gone under without much warning. He and Trigger had found themselves more and more alone on their bachelor drinking sessions during the summer, and when the others did take an evening off from their wives to go along, I gathered from Peter’s gloomy accounts that the flavour of the evening was a synthetic substitute for the irresponsible gaiety of the past. He and Trigger had clutched each other like drowning men, each trying to make the other the reassuring reflection of himself that he needed. Now Trigger had sunk and the mirror would be empty. There were the other law students of course, but most of them were married too. Besides, they belonged to Peter’s post-university silver age rather than to his earlier golden one.

I felt sorry for him, but I knew I would have to be wary. If the other two marriages had been any indication, he’d start seeing me after two or three drinks as a version of the designing siren who had carried off Trigger. I didn’t dare ask how she had done it: he might think I was getting ideas. The best plan would be to distract him.

While I was meditating Lucy came over to my desk. “Do you think you can write a letter to this lady for me?” she asked. “I’m getting a splitting headache and I really can’t think of a thing to say.” She pressed one elegant hand to her forehead; with the other she handed me a note written in pencil on a piece of cardboard. I read it:

Dear Sir, The cereal was fine but I found this in with the raisins. Yours Truly, (Mrs.) Ramona Baldwin.

A squashed housefly was scotch-taped to the bottom of the letter.

“It was that raisin-cereal study,” Lucy said faintly. She was playing on my sympathies.

“Oh, all right,” I said; “have you got her address?”

I made several trial drafts:

Dear Mrs. Baldwin; We are extremely sorry about the object in your cereal but these little mistakes will happen. Dear Mrs. Baldwin; We are so sorry to have inconvenienced you; we assure you however that the entire contents of the package was absolutely sterile. Dear Mrs. Baldwin; We are grateful to you for calling this matter to our attention as we always like to know about any errors we may have made.

The main thing, I knew, was to avoid calling the housefly by its actual name.

The phone rang again; this time it was an unexpected voice.

“Clara!” I exclaimed, conscious of having neglected her. “How are you?”

“Shitty, thanks,” Clara said. “But I wonder if you can come to dinner. I’d really like to see an outside face.”

“I’d love to,” I said, my enthusiasm half genuine: it would be better than a T. V. dinner. “About what time?”

“Oh, you know,” Clara said. “Whenever you come. We aren’t what you’d call punctual around here.” She sounded bitter.

Now I was committed I was thinking rapidly of what this would involve: I was being invited as an entertainer and confidante, someone who would listen to a recital of Clara’s problems, and I didn’t feel like it. “Do you think I could bring Ainsley too?” I said. “That is, if she isn’t doing anything.” I told myself it would be good for Ainsley to have a wholesome dinner – she had only had a coffee at the coffee break – but secretly I wanted her along to take off a bit of the pressure. She and Clara could talk about child psychology.

“Sure, why not?” Clara said. “The more the merrier, that’s our motto.”

I called Ainsley at work, carefully asking her whether she was doing anything for dinner and listening to her accounts of the two invitations she had received and turned down – one from the toothbrush murder trial witness, the other from the dentistry student of the night before. To the latter she had been quite rude: she was never going out with him again. She claimed he had told her there would be artists at the party.

“So you aren’t doing anything then,” I said, establishing the fact.

“Well, no,” said Ainsley, “unless something comes along.”

“Then why don’t you come with me to Clara’s for dinner?” I was expecting a protest, but she accepted calmly. I arranged to meet her at the subway station.

I left the desk at five and headed for the cool pink Ladies’ Room. I wanted a few minutes of isolation to prepare myself for coping before I set out for Clara’s. But Emmy, Lucy and Millie were all there, combing their yellow hair and retouching their makeup. Their six eyes glittered in the mirrors.

“Going out tonight, Marian?” Lucy asked, too casually. She shared my telephone line and naturally knew about Peter.

“Yes,” I said, without volunteering information. Their wistful curiosity made me nervous.

4

I walked down towards the subway station along the late-afternoon sidewalk through a thick golden haze of heat and dust. It was almost like moving underwater. From a distance I saw Ainsley shimmering beside a telephone pole, and when I had reached her she turned and we joined the lines of office workers who were tunnelling down the stairs into the cool underground caverns below. By quick manoeuvring we got seats, though on the opposite sides of the car, and I sat reading the advertisements as well as I could through the screen of lurching bodies. When we got off again and went out through the pastel corridors the air felt less humid.

Clara’s house was a few blocks further north. We walked in silence; I thought about mentioning the Pension Plan, but decided not to. Ainsley wouldn’t understand why I found it disturbing: she’d see no reason why I couldn’t leave my job and get another one, and why this wouldn’t be a final solution. Then I thought about Peter and what had happened to him; Ainsley, however, would only be amused if I told her. Finally I asked her if she was feeling better.

“Don’t be so concerned, Marian,” she said, “you make me feel like an invalid.”

I was hurt and didn’t answer.

We were going uphill at a slight angle. The city slopes upwards from the lake in a series of gentle undulations, though at any given point it seems flat. This accounted for the cooler air. It was quieter here too; I thought Clara was lucky, especially in her condition, to be living so far away from the heat and noise of downtown. Though she herself thought of it as a kind of exile: they had started out in an apartment near the university, but the need for space had forced them further north, although they had not yet reached the real suburbia of modern bungalows and station wagons. The street itself was old but not as attractive as our street: the houses were duplexes, long and narrow, with wooden porches and thin back gardens.

“Christ it’s hot,” Ainsley said as we turned up the walk that led to Clara’s house. The grass on the doormat-sized lawn had not been cut for some time. On the steps lay a neatly decapitated doll and inside the baby carriage was a large teddy bear with the stuffing coming out. I knocked, and after several minutes Joe appeared behind the screen door, harried and uncombed, doing up the buttons on his shirt.

“Hi Joe,” I said, “here we are. How’s Clara feeling?”

“Hi, come on through,” he said, stepping aside to let us past. “Clara’s out back.”

We walked the length of the house, which was arranged in the way such houses usually are – living room in front, then dining room with doors that can be slid shut, then kitchen – stepping over some of the scattered obstacles and around the others. We negotiated the stairs of the back porch, which were overgrown with empty bottles of all kinds, beer bottles, milk bottles, wine and scotch bottles, and baby bottles, and found Clara in the garden, sitting in a round wicker basket-chair with metal legs. She had her feet up on another chair and was holding her latest baby somewhere in the vicinity of what had once been her lap. Clara’s body is so thin that her pregnancies are always bulgingly obvious, and now in her seventh month she looked like a boa constrictor that has swallowed a watermelon. Her head, with its aureole of pale hair, was made to seem smaller and even more fragile by the contrast.

“Oh hi,” she said wearily as we came down the back steps. “Hello Ainsley, nice to see you again. Christ it’s hot.”

We agreed, and sat down on the grass near her, since there were no chairs. Ainsley and I took off our shoes; Clara was already barefoot. We found it difficult to talk: everyone’s attention was necessarily focussed on the baby, which was whimpering, and for some time it was the only person who said anything.

When she telephoned Clara had seemed to be calling me to some sort of rescue, but I felt now that there was nothing much I could do, and nothing she had even expected me to do. I was to be only a witness, or perhaps a kind of blotter, my mere physical presence absorbing a little of the boredom.

The baby had ceased to whine and was now gurgling. Ainsley was plucking bits of grass.

“Marian,” Clara said at last, “could you take Elaine for a while? She doesn’t like going on the ground and my arms are just about falling off.”

“I’ll take her,” said Ainsley unexpectedly.

Clara pried the baby away from her body and transferred it to Ainsley, saying “Come on, you little leech. I sometimes think she’s all covered with suckers, like an octopus.” She lay back in her chair and closed her eyes, looking like a strange vegetable growth, a bulbous tuber that had sent out four thin white roots and a tiny pale-yellow flower. A cicada was singing in a tree nearby, its monotonous vibration like a hot needle of sunlight between the ears.

Ainsley held the baby awkwardly, gazing with curiosity into its face. I thought how closely the two faces resembled each other. The baby stared back up with eyes as round and blue as Ainsley’s own; the pink mouth was drooling slightly.

Clara raised her head and opened her eyes. “Is there anything I can get you?” she asked, remembering she was the hostess.

“Oh no, we’re fine,” I said hastily, alarmed by the image of her struggling up out of the chair. “Is there anything I can get you?” I would have felt better doing something positive.

“Joe will come out soon,” she said as if explaining. “Well, talk to me. What’s new?”

“Nothing much,” I said. I sat trying to think of things that would entertain her, but anything I could mention, the office or places I had been or the furnishings of the apartment, would only remind Clara of her own inertia, her lack of room and time, her days made claustrophobic with small necessary details.

“Are you still going out with that nice boy? The good-looking one. What’s-his-name. I remember he came by once to get you.”

“You mean Peter?”

“Yes she is,” said Ainsley, with a hint of disapproval. “He’s monopolized her.” She was sitting cross-legged, and now she put the baby down in her lap so she could light a cigarette.

“That sounds hopeful,” Clara said gloomily. “By the way, guess who’s back in town? Len Slank. He called up the other day.”

“Oh really? When did he get in?” I was annoyed that he hadn’t called me too.

“About a week ago, he said. He said he’d tried to phone you but couldn’t get hold of your number.”

“He might have tried Information,” I said drily. “But I’d love to see him. How did he seem? How long is he staying?”

“Who is he?” Ainsley asked.

“Oh, no one you’d be interested in,” I said quickly. I couldn’t think of two people who would be worse for each other. “He’s just an old friend of ours from college.”

“He went to England and got into television,” said Clara. “I’m not just sure what he does. A nice type though, but he’s horrible with women, sort of a seducer of young girls. He says anything over seventeen is too old.”

“Oh, one of those,” Ainsley said. “They’re such a bore.” She stubbed out her cigarette in the grass.

“You know, I got the feeling that’s why he’s back,” Clara said, with something like vivacity. “Some kind of a mess with a girl; like the one that made him go over in the first place.”

“Ah,” I said, not surprised.

Ainsley gave a little cry and deposited the baby on the lawn. “It’s wet on my dress,” she said accusingly.

“Well, they do, you know,” said Clara. The baby began to howl, and I picked her up gingerly and handed her over to Clara. I was prepared to be helpful, but only up to a point.

Clara joggled the baby. “Well, you goddamned fire hydrant,” she said soothingly. “You spouted on mummy’s friend, didn’t you? It’ll wash out, Ainsley. But we didn’t want to put rubber pants on you in all this heat, did we, you stinking little geyser? Never believe what they tell you about maternal instinct,” she added grimly to us. “I don’t see how anyone can love their children till they start to be human beings.”

Joe appeared on the back porch, a dishtowel tucked apron-like into the belt of his trousers. “Anybody for a beer before dinner?”

Ainsley and I said Yes eagerly, and Clara said, “A little vermouth for me, darling. I can’t drink anything else these days, it upsets my bloody stomach. Joe, can you just take Elaine in and change her?”

Joe came down the steps and picked up the baby. “By the way,” he said, “you haven’t seen Arthur around anywhere, have you?”

“Oh god, now where has the little bugger got to now?” Clara asked as Joe disappeared into the house; it seemed a rhetorical question. “I think he’s found out how to open the back gate. The little bastard. Arthur! Come here, darling,” she called languidly.

Down at the end of the narrow garden the line of washing that hung almost brushing the ground was parted by two small grubby hands, and Clara’s firstborn emerged. Like the baby he was naked except for a pair of diapers. He hesitated, peering at us dubiously.

“Come here love, and let mummy see what you’ve been up to,” Clara said. “Take your hands off the clean sheets,” she added without conviction.

Arthur picked his way over the grass towards us, lifting his bare feet high with every step. The grass must have been ticklish. His diaper was loose, suspended as though by willpower alone below the bulge of his stomach with its protruding navel. His face was puckered in a serious frown.

Joe returned carrying a tray. “I stuck her in the laundry basket,” he said. “She’s playing with the clothespins.”

Arthur had reached us and stood beside his mother’s chair, still frowning, and Clara said to him, “Why have you got that funny look, you little demon?” She reached down behind him and felt his diaper. “I should have known,” she sighed, “he was so quiet. Husband, your son has shat again. I don’t know where, it isn’t in his diaper.”

Joe handed round the drinks, then knelt and said to Arthur firmly but kindly, “Show Daddy where you put it.” Arthur gazed up at him, not sure whether to whimper or smile. Finally he stalked portentously to the side of the garden, where he squatted down near a clump of dusty red chrysanthemums and stared with concentration at a patch of ground.

“That’s a good boy,” Joe said, and went back into the house.

“He’s a real nature-child, he just loves to shit in the garden,” Clara said to us. “He thinks he’s a fertility-god. If we didn’t clean it up this place would be one big manure field. I don’t know what he’s going to do when it snows.” She closed her eyes. “We’ve been trying to toilet-train him, though according to some of the books it’s too early, and we got him one of those plastic potties. He hasn’t the least idea what it’s for; he goes around wearing it on his head. I guess he thinks it’s a crash helmet.”

We watched, sipping our beer, as Joe crossed the garden and returned with a folded piece of newspaper. “After this one I’m going on the pill,” said Clara.

When Joe had finally finished cooking the dinner we went into the house and ate it, seated around the heavy table in the dining room. The baby had been fed and exiled to the carriage on the front porch, but Arthur sat in a high chair, where he evaded with spastic contortions of his body the spoonfuls of food Clara poked in the direction of his mouth. Dinner was wizened meat balls and noodles from a noodle mix, with lettuce. For dessert we had something I recognized.

“This is that new canned rice pudding; it saves a lot of time,” Clara said defensively. “It’s not too bad with cream, and Arthur loves it.”

“Yes,” I said. “Pretty soon they’ll be having Orange and Caramel too.”

“Oh?” Clara deftly intercepted a long drool of pudding and returned it to Arthur’s mouth.

Ainsley got out a cigarette and held it for Joe to light. “Tell me,” she said to him, “do you know this friend of theirs – Leonard Slank? They’re being so mysterious about him.”

Joe had been up and down all during the meal, taking off the plates and tending things in the kitchen. He looked dizzy. “Oh yes, I remember him,” he said, “though he’s really a friend of Clara’s.” He finished his pudding quickly and asked Clara whether she needed any help, but she didn’t hear him. Arthur had just thrown his bowl on the floor.

“But what do you think of him?” Ainsley asked, as though appealing to his superior intelligence.

Joe stared at the wall, thinking. He didn’t like giving negative judgments, I knew, but I also knew he wasn’t fond of Len. “He’s not ethical,” he said at last. Joe is an Instructor in Philosophy.

“Oh, that’s not quite fair,” I said. Len had never been unethical towards me.

Joe frowned at me. He doesn’t know Ainsley very well, and tends anyway to think of all unmarried girls as easily victimized and needing protection. He had several times volunteered fatherly advice to me, and now he emphasized his point. “He’s not someone to get… mixed up with,” he said sternly. Ainsley gave a short laugh and blew out smoke, unperturbed.

“That reminds me,” I said, “you’d better give me his phone number.”

After dinner we went to sit in the littered living room while Joe cleared the table. I offered to help, but Joe said that was all right, he would rather I talked to Clara. Clara had settled herself on the chesterfield in a nest of crumpled newspapers with her eyes closed; again I could think of little to say. I sat staring up at the centre of the ceiling where there was an elaborately-scrolled plaster decoration, once perhaps the setting for a chandelier, remembering Clara at high school: a tall fragile girl who was always getting exempted from Physical Education. She’d sit on the sidelines watching the rest of us in our blue-bloomered gymsuits as though anything so sweaty and ungainly was foreign enough to her to be a mildly amusing entertainment. In that classroom full of oily potato-chip-fattened adolescents she was everyone’s ideal of translucent perfume-advertisement femininity. At university she had been a little healthier, but had grown her blonde hair long, which made her look more medieval than ever: I had thought of her in connection with the ladies sitting in rose gardens on tapestries. Of course her mind wasn’t like that, but I’ve always been influenced by appearances.

She married Joe Bates in May at the end of our second year, and at first I thought it was an ideal match. Joe was then a graduate student, almost seven years older than she was, a tall shaggy man with a slight stoop and a protective attitude towards Clara. Their worship of each other before the wedding was sometimes ridiculously idealistic; one kept expecting Joe to spread his overcoat on mud puddles or drop to his knees to kiss Clara’s rubber boots. The babies had been unplanned: Clara greeted her first pregnancy with astonishment that such a thing could happen to her, and her second with dismay; now, during her third, she had subsided into a grim but inert fatalism. Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.

I looked at her, feeling a wave of embarrassed pity sweep over me; what could I do? Perhaps I could offer to come over some day and clean up the house. Clara simply had no practicality, she wasn’t able to control the more mundane aspects of life, like money or getting to lectures on time. When we lived in residence together she used to become hopelessly entangled in her room at intervals, unable to find matching shoes or enough clean clothes to wear, and I would have to dig her out of the junk pile she had allowed to accumulate around her. Her messiness wasn’t actively creative like Ainsley’s, who could devastate a room in five minutes if she was feeling chaotic; it was passive. She simply stood helpless while the tide of dirt rose round her, unable to stop it or evade it. The babies were like that too; her own body seemed somehow beyond her, going its own way without reference to any directions of hers. I studied the pattern of bright flowers on the maternity smock she was wearing; the stylized petals and tendrils moved with her breathing, as though they were coming alive.

We left early, after Arthur had been carried off to bed screaming after what Joe called “an accident” behind the living-room door.

“It was no accident,” Clara remarked, opening her eyes. “He just loves peeing behind doors. I wonder what it is. He’s going to be secretive when he grows up, an undercover agent or a diplomat or something. The furtive little bastard.”

Joe saw us to the door, a pile of dirty laundry in his arms. “You must come and see us again soon,” he said, “Clara has so few people she can really talk to.”

5

We walked down towards the subway in the semi-dusk, through the sound of crickets and muffled television sets (in some of the houses we could see them flickering blue through the open windows) and a smell of warm tar. My skin felt stifled, as though I was enclosed in a layer of moist dough. I was afraid Ainsley hadn’t enjoyed herself: her silence was negative.

“Dinner wasn’t bad,” I said, wanting to be loyal to Clara, who was after all an older friend than Ainsley; “Joe’s turning into quite a good cook.”

“How can she stand it?” Ainsley said with more vehemence than usual. “She just lies there and that man does all the work! She lets herself be treated like a thing!”

“Well, she is seven months pregnant,” I said. “And she’s never been well.”

“She’s not well!” Ainsley said indignantly. “She’s flourishing; it’s him that’s not well. He’s aged even since I’ve known him and that’s less than four months. She’s draining all his energy.”

“What do you suggest?” I said. I was annoyed with Ainsley: she couldn’t see Clara’s position.

“Well, she should do something; if only a token gesture. She never finished her degree, did she? Wouldn’t this be a perfect time for her to work on it? Lots of pregnant women finish their degrees.”

I remembered poor Clara’s resolutions after the first baby: she had thought of it as only a temporary absence. After the second she had wailed, “I don’t know what we’re doing wrong! I always try to be so careful.” She had always been against the pill – she thought it might change her personality – but gradually she had become less adamant. She had read a French novel (in translation) and a book about archaeological expeditions in Peru and had talked about night school. Lately she had taken to making bitter remarks about being “just a housewife.” “But Ainsley,” I said, “you’re always saying that a degree is no real indication of anything.”

“Of course the degree in itself isn’t,” Ainsley said, “it’s what it stands for. She should get organized.”

When we were back at the apartment I thought of Len, and decided it wasn’t too late to call him. He was in, and after we’d exchanged greetings I told him I would love to see him.

“Great,” he said, “when and where? Make it some place cool. I didn’t remember it was so bloody hot in the summers over here.”

“Then you shouldn’t have come back,” I said, hinting that I knew why he had and giving him an opening.

“It was safer,” he said with a touch of smugness. “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.” He had acquired a slight English accent. “By the way, Clara tells me you’ve got a new roommate.”

“She isn’t your type,” I said. Ainsley had gone into the living room and was sitting on the chesterfield with her back to me.

“Oh, you mean too old, like you, eh?” My being too old was one of his jokes.

I laughed. “Let’s say tomorrow night,” I said. It had suddenly struck me that Len would be a perfect distraction for Peter. “About eight-thirty at the Park Plaza. I’ll bring a friend along to meet you.”

“Aha,” said Len, “this fellow Clara told me about. Not serious, are you?”

“Oh no, not at all,” I said to reassure him.

When I had hung up Ainsley said, “Was that Len Slank you were talking to?”

I said yes.

“What does he look like?” she asked casually.

I couldn’t refuse to tell her. “Oh, sort of ordinary. I don’t think you’d find him attractive. He has blond curly hair and horn-rimmed glasses. Why?”

“I just wondered.” She got up and went into the kitchen. “Want a drink?” she called.

“No thanks,” I said, “but you could bring me a glass of water.” I moved into the living room and went to the window seat where there was a breeze.

She came back in with a scotch on the rocks for herself and handed me my glass of water. Then she sat down on the floor. “Marian,” she said, “I have something I need to tell you.”

Her voice was so serious that I was immediately worried. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m going to have a baby,” she said quietly.

I took a quick drink of water. I couldn’t imagine Ainsley making a miscalculation like that. “I don’t believe you.”

She laughed. “Oh, I don’t mean I’m already pregnant. I mean I’m going to get pregnant.”

I was relieved, but puzzled. “You mean you’re going to get married?” I asked, thinking of Trigger’s misfortune. I tried to guess which of them Ainsley could be interested in, without success; ever since I’d known her she had been decidedly anti-marriage.

“I knew you’d say that,” she said with amused contempt. “No, I’m not going to get married. That’s what’s wrong with most children, they have too many parents. You can’t say the sort of household Clara and Joe are running is an ideal situation for a child. Think of how confused their mother-image and their father-image will be; they’re riddled with complexes already. And it’s mostly because of the father.”

“But Joe is marvellous!” I cried. “He does just about everything for her! Where would Clara be without him?”

“Precisely,” said Ainsley. “She would have to cope by herself. And she would cope, and their total upbringing would be much more consistent. The thing that ruins families these days is the husbands. Have you noticed she isn’t even breast-feeding the baby?”

“But it’s got teeth,” I protested. “Most people wean them when they get teeth.”

“Nonsense,” Ainsley said darkly, “I bet Joe put her up to it. In South America they breast-feed them much longer than that. North American men hate watching the basic mother-child unit functioning naturally, it makes them feel not needed. This way Joe can give it the bottle just as easily. Any woman left to her own devices would automatically breast-feed as long as possible: I’m certainly going to.”

It seemed to me that the discussion had got off the track: we were talking theory about a practical matter. I tried a personal attack: “Ainsley, you don’t know anything at all about babies. You don’t even like them much, I’ve heard you say they’re too dirty and noisy.”

“Not liking other people’s babies,” said Ainsley, “isn’t the same as not liking your own.”

I couldn’t deny this. I was baffled: I didn’t even know how to justify my own opposition to her plan. The worst of it was that she would probably do it. She can go about getting what she wants with a great deal of efficiency, though in my opinion some of the things she wants – and this was a case in point – are unreasonable. I decided to take a down-to-earth approach.

“All right,” I said. “Granted. But why do you want a baby, Ainsley? What are you going to do with it?”

She gave me a disgusted look. “Every woman should have at least one baby.” She sounded like a voice on the radio saying that every woman should have at least one electric hair dryer. “It’s even more important than sex. It fulfills your deepest femininity.” Ainsley is fond of paperback books by anthropologists about primitive cultures: there are several of them bogged down among the clothes on her floor. At her college they make you take courses in it.

“But why now?” I said, searching my mind for objections. “What about the job at the art gallery? And meeting the artists?” I held them out to her like a carrot to a donkey.

Ainsley widened her eyes at me. “What has having a baby got to do with getting a job at an art gallery? You’re always thinking in terms of either/or. The thing is wholeness. As for why now, well, I’ve been considering this for some time. Don’t you feel you need a sense of purpose? And wouldn’t you rather have your children while you’re young? While you can enjoy them. Besides, they’ve proved they’re likely to be healthier if you have them between twenty and thirty.”

“And you’re going to keep it,” I said. I looked around the living room, calculating already how much time, energy and money it would take to pack and move the furniture. I had contributed most of the solider items: the heavy round coffee table donated from a relative’s attic back home, the walnut drop-leaf we used for company, also a donation, the stuffed easy chair and the chesterfield I had picked up at the Salvation Army and re-covered. The outsize poster of Theda Bara and the bright paper flowers were Ainsley’s; so were the ashtrays and the inflatable plastic cushions with geometric designs. Peter said our living-room lacked unity. I had never thought of it as a permanent arrangement, but now it was threatened it took on a desirable stability for me. The tables planted their legs more firmly on the floor; it was inconceivable that the round coffee table could ever be manipulated down those narrow stairs, that the poster of Theda Bara could be rolled up, revealing the crack in the plaster, that the plastic cushions could allow themselves to be deflated and stowed away in a trunk. I wondered whether the lady down below would consider Ainsley’s pregnancy a breach of contract and take legal action.

Ainsley was getting sulky. “Of course I’m going to keep it. What’s the good of going through all that trouble if you don’t keep it?”

“So what it boils down to,” I said, finishing my water, “is that you’ve decided to have an illegitimate child in cold blood and bring it up yourself.”

“Oh, it’s such a bore to explain. Why use that horrible bourgeois word? Birth is legitimate, isn’t it? You’re a prude, Marian, and that’s what’s wrong with this whole society.”

“Okay, I’m a prude,” I said, secretly hurt: I thought I was being more understanding than most. “But since the society is the way it is, aren’t you being selfish? Won’t the child suffer? How are you going to support it and deal with other people’s prejudices and so on?”

“How is the society ever going to change,” said Ainsley with the dignity of a crusader, “if some individuals in it don’t lead the way? I will simply tell the truth. I know I’ll have trouble here and there, but some people will be quite tolerant about it, I’m sure, even here. I mean, it won’t be as though I’ve gotten pregnant by accident or anything.”

We sat in silence for several minutes. The main point seemed to have been established. “All right,” I said finally, “I see you’ve thought of everything. But what about a father for it? I know it’s a small technical detail, but you will need one of those, you know, if only for a short time. You can’t just send out a bud.”

“Well,” she said, taking me seriously, “actually I have been thinking about it. He’ll have to have a decent heredity and be fairly good-looking; and it will help if I can get someone co-operative who will understand and not make a fuss about marrying me.”

She reminded me more than I liked of a farmer discussing cattle-breeding. “Anyone in mind? What about that dentistry student?”

“Good god no,” she said, “he has a receding chin.”

“Or the electric toothbrush murder-witness man?”

She puckered her brow. “I don’t think he’s very bright. I’d prefer an artist of course, but that’s too risky genetically; by this time they must all have chromosome breaks from l.s.d. I suppose I could unearth Freddy from last year, he wouldn’t mind in the least, though he’s too fat and he has an awfully stubbly five o’clock shadow. I wouldn’t want a fat child.”

“Nor one with heavy stubble either,” I said, trying to be helpful.

Ainsley looked at me with annoyance. “You’re being sarcastic,” she said. “But if only people would give more thought to the characteristics they pass on to their children maybe they wouldn’t rush blindly into things. We know the human race is degenerating and it’s all because people pass on their weak genes without thinking about it, and medical science means they aren’t naturally selected out the way they used to be.”

I was beginning to feel fuzzy in the brain. I knew Ainsley was wrong, but she sounded so rational. I thought I’d better go to bed before she had convinced me against my better judgment.

In my room, I sat on the bed with my back against the wall, thinking. At first I tried to concentrate on ways to stop her, but then I became resigned. Her mind was made up, and though I could hope this was just a whim she would get over, was it any of my business? I would simply have to adjust to the situation. Perhaps when we had to move I should get another roommate; but would it be right to leave Ainsley on her own? I didn’t want to behave irresponsibly.

I got into bed, feeling unsettled.

6

The alarm clock startled me out of a dream in which I had looked down and seen my feet beginning to dissolve, like melting jelly, and had put on a pair of rubber boots just in time only to find that the ends of my fingers were turning transparent. I had started towards the mirror to see what was happening to my face, but at that point I woke up. I don’t usually remember my dreams.

Ainsley was still asleep, so I boiled my egg and drank my tomato juice and coffee alone. Then I dressed in an outfit suitable for interviewing, an official-looking skirt, a blouse with sleeves, and a pair of low-heeled walking shoes. I intended to get an early start, but I couldn’t be too early or the men, who would want to sleep in on the holiday, wouldn’t be up yet. I got out my map of the city and studied it, mentally crossing off the areas I knew had been selected for the actual survey. I had some toast and a second cup of coffee, and traced out several possible routes for myself.

What I needed was seven or eight men with a certain minimum average beer consumption per week, who would be willing to answer the questions. Locating them might be more difficult than usual, because of the long weekend. I knew from experience that men were usually more unwilling than women to play the questionnaire game. The streets near the apartment were out: word might get back to the lady down below that I had been asking the neighbours how much beer they drank. Also, I suspected that it was a scotch area rather than a beer one, with a sprinkling of teetotalling widows. The rooming-house district further west was out, too: I had tried it once for a potato-chip taste test and found the landladies very hostile. They seemed to think I was a government agent in disguise, trying to raise their tax by discovering they had more lodgers than they claimed. I considered the fraternity houses near the university, but remembered the study demanded answerers over the age limit.

I took the bus, got off at the subway station, paused to note down my fare as “Transportation” on my expenses time-sheet, and crossed the street. Then I went down a slope into the flat treeless park spread out opposite the station. There was a baseball diamond in one corner, but nobody was playing on it. The rest of the park was plain grass, which had turned yellow; it crackled underfoot. This day was going to be like the one before, windless and oppressive. The sky was cloudless but not clear: the air hung heavily, like invisible steam, so that the colours and outlines of objects in the distance were blurred.

At the far side of the park was a sloping asphalt ramp, which I climbed. It led to a residential street lined with small, rather shabby houses set close together, the two-storey shoe-box kind with wooden trim round the windows and eaves. Some of the houses had freshly painted trimmings, which merely accentuated the weather-beaten surfaces of the shingled fronts. The district was the sort that had been going downhill for some decades but had been pushed uphill again in the past few years. Several refugees from the suburbs had bought these city houses and completely refinished them, painting them a sophisticated white and adding flagstone walks and evergreens in cement planters and coachlamps by the doors. The redone houses looked flippant beside the others, as though they had chosen to turn their backs with an irresponsible light-heartedness upon the problems of time and shabbiness and puritan weather. I resolved to avoid the transformed houses when I began to interview. I wouldn’t find the right sort of people there: they would be the martini set.

There is something intimidating about a row of closed doors if you know you have to go up and knock on them and ask what amounts to a favour. I straightened my dress and my shoulders and assumed what I hoped was an official but friendly expression, and walked as far as the next block practising it before I had worked up resolution enough to begin. At the end of the block I could see what looked like a fairly new apartment building. I made it my goal: it would be cool inside, and might supply me with any missing interviews.

I rang the first doorbell. Someone scrutinized me briefly through the white semi-transparent curtains of the front window; then the door was opened by a sharp-featured woman in a print apron with a bib. Her face had not a vestige of makeup on it, not even lipstick, and she was wearing those black shoes with laces and thick heels that make me think of the word “orthopaedic” and that I associate with the bargain-basements of department stores.

“Good morning, I represent Seymour Surveys,” I said, smiling falsely. “We’re doing a little survey and I wonder if your husband would be kind enough to answer a few questions for me?”

“You selling anything?” she asked, glancing at my papers and pencil.

“Oh, no! We have nothing to do with selling. We’re a market research company, we merely ask questions. It helps improve the products,” I added lamely. I didn’t think I was going to find what I was looking for.

“What’s it about?” she asked, the corners of her mouth tightening with suspicion.

“Well, actually it’s about beer,” I said in a tinsel-bright voice, trying to make the word sound as skim-milk-like as possible.

Her face changed expression. She was going to refuse, I thought. But she hesitated, then stepped aside and said in a voice that reminded me of cold oatmeal porridge, “Come in.”

I stood in the spotless tiled hallway, inhaling the smell of furniture polish and bleach, while she disappeared through a door farther on, closing it behind her. There was a murmured conversation; then the door opened again and a tall man with grey hair and a severe frown came through it, followed by the woman. The man wore a black coat even though the day was so warm.

“Now young lady,” he said to me, “I’m not going to chastise you personally because I can see you are a nice girl and only the innocent means to this abominable end. But you will be so kind as to give these tracts to your employers. Who can tell but that their hearts may yet be softened? The propagation of drink and of drunkenness to excess is an iniquity, a sin against the Lord.”

I took the pamphlets he handed me, but felt enough loyalty to Seymour Surveys to say, “Our company doesn’t have anything to do with selling the beer, you know.”

“It is the same thing,” he said sternly, “it is all the same thing, ‘Those who are not with me are against me, saith the Lord.’ Do not try to whiten the sepulchres of those traffickers in human misery and degradation.” He was about to turn away, but said to me as an afterthought, “You might read those yourself, young lady. Of course you never pollute your lips with alcohol, but no soul is utterly pure and proof against temptation. Perhaps the seed will not fall by the wayside, nor yet on stony ground.”

I said a faint “Thank you,” and the man extended the edges of his mouth in a smile. His wife, who had been watching the small sermon with frugal satisfaction, stepped forward and opened the door for me, and I went out, resisting the reflex urge to shake both of them by the hand as though I was coming out of church.

It was a bad beginning. I looked at the tracts as I walked to the next house. “TEMPERANCE,” commanded one. The other was titled, more stirringly, “DRINK AND THE DEVIL.” He must be a minister, I thought, though certainly not Anglican, and probably not even United. One of those obscure sects.

No one was at home in the next house, and at the one after that the door was opened by a chocolate-smeared urchin who informed me that her daddy was still in bed. At the next one though I soon knew that I had come at last to a good place for head-hunting. The main door was standing open, and the man I could see coming towards me several moments after I had rung was of medium height but very thickly built, almost fat. When he opened the screen door I could see that he had only his socks on his feet, no shoes; he was wearing an undershirt and a pair of Bermuda shorts. His face was brick-red.

I explained my errand and showed him the card with the average-beer-consumption-per-week scale on it. Each average is numbered, and the scale runs from 0 to 10. The company does it that way because some men are shy about naming their consumption in so many words. This man picked No. 9, the second from the top. Hardly anybody chooses No. 10: everyone likes to think there’s a chance that somebody else drinks more than he does.

When we had got that far the man said, “Come on into the living room and sit down. You must be tired walking around in all that heat. My wife’s just gone to do the shopping,” he added irrelevantly.

I sat down in one of the easy chairs and he turned down the sound on the T. V. set. I saw a bottle of one of Moose Beer’s competitors standing on the floor by his chair, half empty. He sat down opposite me, smiling and mopping his forehead with his handkerchief, and answered the preliminary questions with the air of an expert delivering a professional verdict. After he had listened to the telephone commercial he scratched the hair on his chest thoughtfully and gave the sort of enthusiastic response for which a whole seminary of admen had no doubt been offering daily prayers. When we finished and I had written down the name and address, which the company needs so it won’t re-interview the same people, got up, and began to thank him, I saw him lurching out of his chair towards me with a beery leer. “Now what’s a nice little girl like you doing walking around asking men all about their beer?” he said moistly. “You ought to be at home with some big strong man to take care of you.”

I pressed the two Temperance pamphlets into his damp outstretched hand and fled.

I shuffled through four more complete interviews without much incident, discovering in the process that the questionnaire needed the addition of a “Does not have phone… End interview” box and a “Does not listen to radio” one, and that men who approved of the chest-thumping sentiments of the commercial tended to object to the word “Tingly” as being “Too light,” or, as one of them put it, “Too fruity.” The fifth interview was with a spindly balding man who was so afraid of expressing any opinions at all that getting words out of him was like pulling teeth with a monkey-wrench. Every time I asked him a new question he flushed, bobbed his Adam’s apple, and contorted his face in a wince of agony. He was speechless for several minutes after he had listened to the commercial and I had asked him, “How did you like the commercial? Very Much; Only Moderately; or Not Very Much?” At last he managed to whisper, feebly, “Yes.”

I had now only two more interviews to get. I decided to skip the next few houses and go to the square apartment building. I got in by the usual method, pressing all the buttons at once until some deluded soul released the inner door.

The coolness was a relief. I went up a short flight of stairs whose carpeting was just beginning to wear thin, and knocked at the first door, which was numbered Six. I found this curious because from its position it should have been numbered One.

Nothing happened when I knocked. I knocked again more loudly, waited, and was about to go on to the next apartment when the door swung inward noiselessly and I found myself being looked at by a young boy whom I judged to be about fifteen.

He rubbed one of his eyes with a finger, as if he had just got up. He was cadaverously thin; he had no shirt on, and the ribs stuck out like those of an emaciated figure in a medieval woodcut. The skin stretched over them was nearly colourless, not white but closer to the sallow tone of old linen. His feet were bare; he was wearing only a pair of khaki pants. The eyes, partly hidden by a rumpled mass of straight black hair that came down over the forehead, were obstinately melancholy, as though he was assuming the expression on purpose.

We stared at each other. He was evidently not going to say anything, and I could not quite begin. The questionnaires I was carrying had suddenly become unrelated to anything at all, and at the same time obscurely threatening. Finally I managed to say, feeling very synthetic as I did so, “Hello there, is your father in?”

He continued to stare at me without a tremor of expression. “No. He’s dead,” he said.

“Oh.” I stood, swaying a little; the contrast with the heat outside had made me dizzy. Time seemed to have shifted into slow motion; there seemed to be nothing to say; but I couldn’t leave or move. He continued to stand in the doorway.

Then after what seemed hours it occurred to me that he might not actually be as young as he looked. There were dark circles under his eyes, and some fine thin lines at the outer corners. “Are you really only fifteen?” I asked, as though he had told me he was.

“I’m twenty-six,” he said dolefully.

I gave a visible start, and as if the answer had stepped on some hidden accelerator in me I babbled out a high-speed version of the blurb about being from Seymour Surveys and not selling anything and improving products and wanting to ask a few simple questions about how much beer he drank in an average week, thinking while I did so that he didn’t look as though he ever drank anything but water, with the crust of bread they tossed him as he lay chained in the dungeon. He seemed gloomily interested, much as one would be interested (if at all) in a dead dog, so I extended the average-weekly-consumption card towards him and asked him to pick his number. He looked at it a minute, turned it over and looked at the back, which was blank, closed his eyes, and said “Number six.”

That was seven to ten bottles per week, high enough to qualify him for the questionnaire, and I told him so. “Come in then,” he said. I felt a slight sensation of alarm as I stepped over the threshold and the door closed woodenly behind me.

We were in a living room of medium size, perfectly square, with a kitchenette opening off it on one side and the hallway to the bedrooms on the other. The slats of the venetian blind on the one small window were closed, making the room dim as twilight. The walls, as far as I could tell in the semi-darkness, were a flat white; there were no pictures on them. The floor was covered by a very good Persian carpet with an ornate design of maroon and green and purple scrolls and flowers, even better, I thought, than the one in the lady down below’s parlour which had been left her by her paternal grandfather. One wall had a bookcase running its whole length, the kind people make themselves out of boards and bricks. The only other pieces of furniture were three huge, ancient and overstuffed easy chairs, one red plush, one a worn greenish-blue brocade, and one a faded purple, each with a floor lamp beside it. All exposed surfaces of the room were littered with loose papers, notebooks, books opened face-down and other books bristling with pencils and torn slips of paper stuck in them as markers.

“Do you live here alone?” I asked.

He fixed me with his lugubrious eyes. “It depends what you mean,” he intoned, “by ‘alone’.”

“Oh, I see,” I said politely. I walked across the room, trying to preserve my air of cheerful briskness while picking my way unsteadily over and around the objects on the floor. I was heading towards the purple chair, which was the only one that didn’t have a rat’s nest of papers in it.

“You can’t sit there,” he said behind me in a tone of slight admonishment, “that’s Trevor’s chair. He wouldn’t like you sitting in his chair.”

“Oh. Is the red one all right then?”

“Well,” he said, “that’s Fish’s, and he wouldn’t mind if you sat in it; at least I don’t think he would. But he’s got his papers in it and you might mess them up.” I didn’t see how by merely sitting on them I could possibly disorganize them any more, but I didn’t say so. I was wondering whether Trevor and Fish were two imaginary playmates that this boy had made up, and also whether he had lied about his age. In this light his face could have been of a ten-year-old. He stood gazing at me solemnly, shoulders hunched, arms folded across his torso, holding his own elbows.

“And I suppose yours is the green one then.”

“Yes,” he said, “but I haven’t sat in it myself for a couple of weeks. I’ve got everything all arranged in it.”

I wanted to go over and see exactly what he had got all arranged in it, but I reminded myself that I was there on business. “Where are we going to sit then?”

“The floor,” he said, “or the kitchen, or my bedroom.”

“Oh, not the bedroom,” I said hurriedly. I made my way back across the expanse of paper and peered around the corner into the kitchenette. A peculiar odour greeted me – there seemed to be garbage bags in every corner, and the rest of the space was taken up by large pots and kettles, some clean, others not. “I don’t think there’s room in the kitchen,” I said. I stooped and began to skim the papers off the surface of the carpet, much as one would skim scum from a pond.

“I don’t think you’d better do that,” he said. “Some of them aren’t mine. You might get them mixed up. We’d better go into the bedroom.” He slouched across to the hall and through an open doorway. Of necessity I followed him.

The room was a white-walled oblong box, dark as the living room: the venetian blind was down here too. It was bare of furniture except for an ironing board with an iron on it, a chess set with a few scattered pieces in a corner of the room, a typewriter sitting on the floor, a cardboard carton which seemed to have dirty laundry in it and which he kicked into the closet as I came in, and a narrow bed. He pulled a grey army blanket over the tangle of sheets on the bed and crawled onto it, where he settled himself cross-legged, backed into the corner formed by the two walls. He switched on the reading lamp over the bed, took a cigarette from a pack which he replaced in his back pocket, lit it, and sat holding the cigarette before him, his hands cupped, like a starved buddha burning incense to itself.

“All right,” he said.

I sat down on the edge of the bed – there were no chairs – and began to go through the questionnaire with him. After I had asked each question he would lean his head back against the wall, close his eyes, and give the answer; then he would open his eyes again and watch me with barely perceptible signs of concentration while I asked the next.

When we got to the telephone commercial he went to the phone in the kitchen to dial the number. He stayed out there for what seemed to me a long time. I went to check, and found him listening with the receiver pressed to his ear and his mouth twisted in something that was almost a smile.

“You’re only supposed to listen once,” I said reproachfully.

He put down the receiver with reluctance. “Can I phone it after you go and listen some more?” he asked in the diffident but wheedling voice of a small child begging an extra cookie.

“Yes,” I said, “but not next week, okay?” I didn’t want him blocking the line for the interviewers.

We went back to the bedroom and resumed our respective postures. “Now I’m going to repeat some of the phrases from the commercial to you, and for each one I would like you to tell me what it makes you think of,” I said. This was the free-association part of the questionnaire, meant to test immediate responses to certain key phrases. “First, what about ‘Deep-down manly flavour’?”

He threw his head back and closed his eyes. “Sweat,” he said, considering. “Canvas gym shoes. Underground locker rooms and jockstraps.”

An interviewer is always supposed to write down the exact words of the answer, so I did. I thought about slipping this interview into the stack of real ones, to vary the monotony for one of the women with the crayons – Mrs. Weemers, perhaps, or Mrs. Gundridge. She’d read it out loud to the others, and they would remark that it took all kinds; the topic would be good for at least three coffee breaks.

“Now what about ‘Long cool swallow’?”

“Not much. Oh, wait a moment. It’s a bird, white, falling from a great height. Shot through the heart, in winter; the feathers coming off, drifting down… This is just like those word-game tests the shrink gives you,” he said with his eyes open. “I always liked doing them. They’re better than the ones with pictures.”

I said, “I expect they use the same principle. What about ‘Healthy hearty taste’?”

He meditated for several minutes. “It’s heartburn,” he said. “Or no, that can’t be right.” His forehead wrinkled. “Now I see. It’s one of those cannibal stories.” For the first time he seemed upset. “I know the pattern, there’s one of them in The Decameron and a couple in Grimm’s; the husband kills the wife’s lover, or vice versa, and cuts out the heart and makes it into a stew or a pie and serves it up in a silver dish, and the other one eats it. Though that doesn’t account for the Healthy very well, does it? Shakespeare,” he said in a less agitated voice, “Shakespeare has something like that too. There’s a scene in Titus Andronicus, though it’s debatable whether Shakespeare really wrote it, or…”

“Thank you.” I wrote busily. By this time I was convinced that he was a compulsive neurotic of some sort and that I’d better remain calm and not display any fear. I wasn’t frightened exactly – he didn’t look like the violent type – but these questions definitely made him tense. He might be tottering on an emotional brink, one of the phrases might be enough to push him over. Those people are like that I thought, remembering certain case histories Ainsley had told me; little things like words can really bother them.

“Now, ‘Tingly, heady, rough-and-ready’?”

He contemplated that one at length. “Doesn’t do a thing for me,” he said, “it doesn’t fit together. The first bit gives me an image of someone with a head made out of glass being hit with a stick: like musical glasses. But rough-and-ready doesn’t do anything. I suppose,” he said sadly, “that one’s not much use to you.”

“You’re doing fine,” I said, thinking of what would happen to the I.B.M. machine if they ever tried to run this thing through it. “Now the last one: ‘Tang of the wilderness.’ ”

“Oh,” he said, his voice approaching enthusiasm, “that one’s easy; it struck me at once when I heard it. It’s one of those technicolour movies about dogs or horses. ‘Tang of the Wilderness’ is obviously a dog, part wolf, part husky, who saves his master three times, once from fire, once from flood and once from wicked humans, more likely to be white hunters than Indians these days, and finally gets blasted by a cruel trapper with a.22 and wept over. Buried, probably in the snow. Panoramic shot of trees and lake. Sunset. Fade-out.”

“Fine,” I said, scribbling madly to get it all down. There was silence while we both listened to the scratching of my pencil. “Now, I hate to ask you, but you’re supposed to say how well you think each of those five phrases applies to a beer – Very Well, Medium Well, or Not Very Well At All?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” he said, losing interest completely. “I never drink the stuff. Only scotch. None of them are any good for scotch.”

“But,” I protested, astonished, “you picked Number Six on the card. The one that said seven to ten bottles per week.”

“You wanted me to pick a number,” he said with patience, “and six is my lucky number. I even got them to change the numbers on the apartments; this is really Number One, you know. Besides, I was bored; I felt like talking to someone.”

“That means I won’t be able to count your interview,” I said severely. I had forgotten for the moment that it wasn’t real.

“Oh, you enjoyed it,” he said, smiling his half-smile again. “You know all the other answers you’ve been getting are totally dull. You have to admit I’ve livened up your day considerably.”

I had a twinge of irritation. I had been feeling compassion for him as a sufferer on the verge of mental collapse, and now he had revealed the whole thing as a self-conscious performance. I could either get up and leave at once, showing my displeasure, or admit that he was right. I frowned at him, trying to decide what to do; but just then I heard the front door opening and the sound of voices.

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.

7

Technically 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.

We had met at a garden party following my graduation; he was a friend of a friend, and we had eaten ice-cream in the shade together. He had been quite formal and had asked me what I planned to do. I had talked about a career, making it sound much less vague than it was in my own mind, and he told me later that it was my aura of independence and common sense he had liked: he saw me as the kind of girl who wouldn’t try to take over his life. He had recently had an unpleasant experience with what he called “the other kind.” That was the assumption we had been working on, and it had suited me. We had been taking each other at our face values, which meant we had got on very well. Of course I had to adjust to his moods, but that’s true of any man, and his were too obvious to cause much difficulty. Over the summer he had become a pleasant habit, and as we had been seeing each other only on weekends the veneer hadn’t had a chance to wear off.

However the first time I had gone to his apartment had almost been the last. He had plied me with hi-fi music and brandy, thinking he was crafty and suave, and I had allowed myself to be manipulated into the bedroom. We had set our brandy snifters down on the desk, when Peter, being acrobatic, had knocked one of the glasses to the floor where it smashed.

“Oh leave the damn thing,” I said, perhaps undiplomatically; but Peter had turned on the light, gone for the broom and dustpan, and swept up all the bits of glass, picking the larger ones up carefully and accurately like a pigeon pecking crumbs. The mood had been shattered. We had said goodnight soon afterwards, rather snappishly, and I hadn’t heard from him after that for over a week. Of course things were much better now.

Peter stretched and yawned beside me, grinding my arm against the porcelain. I winced and withdrew it gently from beneath him.

“How was it for you?” he asked casually, his mouth against my shoulder. He always asked me that.

“Marvellous,” I murmured; why couldn’t he tell? One of these days I should say “Rotten,” just to see what he would do; but I knew in advance he wouldn’t believe me. I reached up and stroked his damp hair, scratching the back of his neck; he liked that, in moderation.

Maybe he had intended the bathtub as an expression of his personality. I tried thinking of ways to make that fit. Asceticism? A modern version of hair shirts or sitting on spikes? Mortification of the flesh? But surely nothing about Peter suggested that; he liked his comforts, and besides it wasn’t his flesh that was being mortified: he had been on top. Or maybe it had been a reckless young-man gesture, like jumping into the swimming pool with your clothes on, or putting things on your head at parties. But this image didn’t suit Peter either. I was glad there were no more of his group of old friends left to be married: next time he might have tried cramming us into a clothes closet, or an exotic posture in the kitchen sink.

Or maybe – and the thought was chilling – he had intended it as an expression of my personality. A new corridor of possibilities extended itself before me: did he really think of me as a lavatory fixture? What kind of a girl did he think I was?

He was twining his fingers in the hair at the nape of my neck. “I bet you’d look great in a kimono,” he whispered. He bit my shoulder, and I recognized this as a signal for irresponsible gaiety: Peter doesn’t usually bite.

I bit his shoulder in return, then, making sure the shower lever was still up, I reached out my right foot – I have agile feet – and turned on the COLD tap.

8

By eight-thirty we were on our way to meet Len. Peter’s mood, whatever it had been, had changed to one which I hadn’t yet interpreted, so I didn’t attempt conversation as we drove along. Peter kept his eyes on the road, turning corners too quickly and muttering under his breath at the other drivers. He hadn’t fastened his seat belt.

He had not been pleased at first when I told him about the arrangements I’d made with Len, even when I said, “I’m sure you’ll like him.”

“Who is he?” he had asked suspiciously. If it wasn’t Peter I would have suspected jealousy. Peter isn’t the jealous type.

“He’s an old friend,” I said, “from college. He’s just got back from England; I think he’s a T. V. producer or something.” I knew Len wasn’t that high on the scale, but Peter is impressed by people’s jobs. Since I had intended Len as a distraction for Peter I wanted the evening to be pleasant.

“Oh,” said Peter, “one of those arts-crafts types. Probably queer.” We were sitting at the kitchen table, eating frozen peas and smoked meat, the kind you boil for three minutes in the plastic packages. Peter had decided against going out for dinner.

“Oh no,” I said, eager to defend Len, “quite the opposite.”

Peter pushed his plate away. “Why can’t you ever cook anything?” he said petulantly.

I was hurt: I considered this unfair. I like to cook, but I had been deliberately refraining at Peter’s for fear he would feel threatened. Besides, he had always liked smoked meat before, and it was perfectly nourishing. I was about to make a sharp comment, but repressed it. Peter after all was suffering. Instead I asked, “How was the wedding?”

Peter groaned, leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and gazed inscrutably at the far wall. Then he got up and poured himself another gin-and-tonic. He tried pacing up and down in the kitchen, but it was too narrow, so he sat down again.

“God,” he said, “poor Trigger. He looked terrible. How could he let himself be taken in like that?” He continued in a disjointed monologue in which Trigger was made to sound like the last of the Mohicans, noble and free, the last of the dinosaurs, destroyed by fate and lesser species, and the last of the dodos, too dumb to get away. Then he attacked the bride, accusing her of being predatory and malicious and of sucking poor Trigger into the domestic void (making me picture her as a vacuum-cleaner), and finally ground to a halt with several funereal predictions about his own solitary future. By solitary he meant without other single men.

I swallowed the last of my frozen peas. I had heard this speech twice before, or something like it, and I knew there was nothing I could say. If I agreed with him it would only intensify his depression, and if I disagreed he would suspect me of siding with the bride. The first time I had been cheerful and maxim-like, and had attempted consolation. “Well, it’s done now,” I had said, “and maybe it’ll turn out to be a good thing in the end. After all, it isn’t as though she’s robbing the cradle. Isn’t he twenty-six?”

“I’m twenty-six,” Peter had said moodily.

So this time I said nothing, remarking to myself that it was a good thing Peter had got this speech over with early in the evening. I got up and dished him out some ice-cream, which he took as a sympathetic gesture, putting his arm round my waist and giving me a gloomy hug.

“God, Marian,” he said, “I don’t know what I’d do if you didn’t understand. Most women wouldn’t, but you’re so sensible.”

I leaned against him, stroking his hair while he ate his ice-cream.

We left the car in one of the usual places, on a side street behind the Park Plaza. As we started to walk along I put my hand through Peter’s arm and he smiled down at me abstractedly. I smiled back at him – I was glad he was out of the teeth-gritting mood he had been in while driving – and he brought his other hand over and placed it on top of mine. I was going to bring my other hand up and place it on top of his, but I thought if I did then mine would be on top and he’d have to take his arm out from underneath so he’d have another hand to put on top of the heap, like those games at recess. I squeezed his arm affectionately instead.

We reached the Park Plaza and Peter opened the plate-glass door for me as he always does. Peter is scrupulous about things like that; he opens car doors too. Sometimes I expect him to click his heels.

While we waited for the elevator I watched our double image in the floor-to-ceiling mirror by the elevator doors. Peter was wearing one of his more subdued costumes, a brownish-green summer suit whose cut emphasized the functional spareness of his body. All his accessories matched.

“I wonder if Len’s up there yet,” I said to him, keeping an eye on myself and talking to him in the mirror. I was thinking I was just about the right height for him.

The elevator came and Peter said “Roof, please,” to the white-gloved elevator girl, and we moved smoothly upwards. The Park Plaza is a hotel really, but they have a bar at the top, one of Peter’s favourite places for a quiet drink, which was why I had suggested it to Len. Being up that high gives you a sense of the vertical which is rare in the city. The room itself is well lit, not dark as a drain like many others, and it’s clean. No one ever seems to get offensively drunk there, and you can hear yourself talk: there’s no band or singer. The chairs are comfortable, the décor is reminiscent of the eighteenth century, and the bartenders all know Peter. Ainsley told me once that she had been there when someone threatened to commit suicide by jumping off the wall of the patio outside, but it may have been one of her stories.

We walked in; there weren’t many people, so I immediately spotted Len, sitting at one of the black-topped tables. We went over and I introduced Peter to him; they shook hands, Peter abruptly, Len affably. The waiter appeared promptly at our table and Peter ordered two more gin-and-tonics.

“Marian, it’s good to see you!” Len said, leaning across the corner of the table to kiss my cheek; a habit, I reflected, he must have picked up in England, as he never used to do it. He had put on a little weight.

“And how was England?” I asked him. I wanted him to talk and entertain Peter, who was looking grumpy.

“All right, I guess; crowded, though. Every time you turn around you bump into somebody from here. It’s getting so you might as well not go there at all, the place is so cluttered up with bloody tourists. I was sorry, though,” he said, turning to Peter, “that I had to leave; I had a good job going for me and some other good things too. But you’ve got to watch these women when they start pursuing you. They’re always after you to marry them. You’ve got to hit and run. Get them before they get you and then get out.” He smiled, showing his brilliantly polished white teeth.

Peter brightened perceptibly. “Marian tells me you’re in television,” he said.

“Yes,” Len said, examining the squarish nails of his disproportionately large hands; “I haven’t got anything at the moment but I ought to be able to pick up something here. They need people with my experience. News reports. I’d like to see a good commentary programme in this country, I mean a really good one, though god knows how much red tape you have to go through to get anything done around here.”

Peter relaxed; anyone interested in news reports, he was probably thinking, couldn’t be queer.

I felt a hand touch my shoulder, and looked around. A young girl I’d never seen before was standing there. I opened my mouth to ask her what she wanted, when Peter said, “Oh. It’s Ainsley. You didn’t tell me she was coming along.” I looked again: it was Ainsley.

“Gosh, Marian,” she said in a breathless semi-whisper, “you didn’t tell me this was a bar. I sure hope they don’t ask me for my birth certificate.”

Len and Peter had risen. I introduced Ainsley to Len, much against my better judgement, and she sat down in the fourth chair. Peter’s face had a puzzled expression. He had met Ainsley before and hadn’t liked her, suspecting her of holding what he called “wishy-washy radical” views because she had favoured him with a theoretical speech about liberating the Id. Politically Peter is conservative. She had offended him too by calling one of his opinions “conventional,” and he had retaliated by calling one of hers “uncivilized.” Right now, I guessed, he could tell she was up to something but was unwilling to rock her boat until he knew what it was. He required evidence.

The waiter appeared and Len asked Ainsley what she would have. She hesitated, then said timidly, “Oh, could I have just a – just a glass of ginger ale?”

Len beamed at her. “I knew you had a new roommate, Marian,” he said, “but you didn’t tell me she was so young!”

“I’m sort of keeping an eye on her,” I said sourly, “for the folks back home.” I was furious with Ainsley. She had put me in a very awkward position. I could either give the game away by revealing she had been to college and was in fact several months older than me, or I could keep silent and participate in what amounted to a fraud. I knew perfectly well why she had come: Len was a potential candidate, and she had chosen to inspect him this way because she had sensed she’d have difficulty forcing me to introduce them otherwise.

The waiter returned with her ginger ale. I was amazed that he hadn’t asked for her birth certificate, but upon reflection I decided that any experienced waiter would assume that no girl who seemed so young would dare to walk into a bar dressed like that and order ginger ale unless she was in reality safely over-age. It’s the adolescents who overdress that they suspect, and Ainsley was not overdressed. She had dug out from somewhere a cotton summer creation I’d never seen before, a pink and light-blue gingham check on white with a ruffle around the neck. Her hair was tied behind her head with a pink bow and on one of her wrists she had a tinkly silver charm bracelet. Her makeup was understated, her eyes carefully but not noticeably shadowed to make them twice as large and round and blue, and she had sacrificed her long oval fingernails, biting them nearly to the quick so that they had a jagged schoolgirlish quality. I could see she was determined.

Len was talking to her, asking her questions, trying to draw her out. She sipped at her ginger ale, giving short, shy answers. She was evidently afraid of saying too much, aware of Peter as a threat. When Len asked her what she did, however, she could give a truthful answer. “I work at an electric toothbrush company,” she said, and blushed a warm and genuine-looking pink. I almost choked.

“Excuse me,” I said, “I’m just going out on the patio for a breath of air.” Actually I wanted to decide what I should do – surely it was unethical of me to let Len be deceived – and Ainsley must have sensed this, for she gave me a quick warning look as I got up.

Outside, I leaned my arms against the top of the wall, which came almost to my collarbone, and gazed out over the city. A moving line of lights ran straight in front of me till it hit and broke against and flowed around a blob of darkness, the park; and another line went at right angles, disappearing on both sides into the distance. What could I do? Was it any of my business? I knew that if I interfered I would be breaking an unspoken code, and that Ainsley was sure to get back at me some way through Peter. She was clever at such things.

Far off on the eastern horizon I saw a flicker of lightning. We were going to have a storm. “Good,” I said out loud, “it’ll clear the air.” If I wasn’t going to take deliberate steps, I’d have to be sure of my self-control so I wouldn’t say something by accident. I paced the terrace a couple of times till I felt I was ready to go back in, noting with a faint surprise that I was wobbling slightly.

The waiter must have been around again: there was a fresh gin-and-tonic in my place. Peter was deep in a conversation with Len and scarcely acknowledged my return. Ainsley sat silent, her eyes lowered, jiggling her ice cube around in her ginger-ale glass. I studied her latest version of herself, thinking that it was like one of the large plump dolls in the stores at Christmas-time, with washable rubber-smooth skin and glassy eyes and gleaming artificial hair. Pink and white.

I attuned myself to Peter’s voice; it sounded as though it was coming from a distance. He was telling Len a story, which seemed to be about hunting. I knew Peter used to go hunting, especially with his group of old friends, but he had never told me much about it. He had said once that they never killed anything but crows, groundhogs and other small vermin.

“So I let her off and Wham. One shot, right through the heart. The rest of them got away. I picked it up and Trigger said, ‘You know how to gut them, you just slit her down the belly and give her a good hard shake and all the guts’ll fall out.’ So I whipped out my knife, good knife, German steel, and slit the belly and took her by the hind legs and gave her one hell of a crack, like a whip you see, and the next thing you know there was blood and guts all over the place. All over me, what a mess, rabbit guts dangling from the trees, god the trees were red for yards…”

He paused to laugh. Len bared his teeth. The quality of Peter’s voice had changed; it was a voice I didn’t recognize. The sign saying TEMPERANCE flashed in my mind: I couldn’t let my perceptions about Peter be distorted by the effects of alcohol, I warned myself.

“God it was funny. Lucky thing Trigger and me had the old cameras along, we got some good shots of the whole mess. I’ve been meaning to ask you, in your business you must know quite a bit about cameras…” and they were off on a discussion of Japanese lenses.

Peter’s voice seemed to be getting louder and faster – the stream of words was impossible to follow, and my mind withdrew, concentrating instead on the picture of the scene in the forest. I saw it as though it was a slide projected on a screen in a dark room, the colours luminous, green, brown, blue for the sky, red. Peter stood with his back to me in a plaid shirt, his rifle slung on his shoulder. A group of friends, those friends whom I had never met, were gathered around him, their faces clearly visible in the sunlight that fell in shafts down through the anonymous trees, splashed with blood, the mouths wrenched with laughter. I couldn’t see the rabbit.

I leaned forward, my arms on the black tabletop. I wanted Peter to turn and talk to me, I wanted to hear his normal voice, but he wouldn’t; I studied the reflections of the other three as they lay and moved beneath the polished black surface as in a pool of water; they were all chin and no eyes, except for Ainsley’s eyes, their gaze resting gently on her glass. After a while I noticed with mild curiosity that a large drop of something wet had materialized on the table near my hand. I poked it with my finger and smudged it around a little before I realized with horror that it was a tear. I must be crying then! Something inside me started to dash about in dithering mazes of panic, as though I had swallowed a tadpole. I was going to break down and make a scene, and I couldn’t.

I slid out of my chair, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, walked across the room avoiding the other tables with great care, and went out to the Ladies’ Powder Room. Checking first to make sure no one else was in there – I couldn’t have witnesses – I locked myself into one of the plushy-pink cubicles and wept for several minutes. I couldn’t understand what was happening, why I was doing this; I had never done anything like it before and it seemed to me absurd. “Get a grip on yourself,” I whispered. “Don’t make a fool of yourself.” The roll of toilet paper crouched in there with me, helpless and white and furry, waiting passively for the end. I tore some of it off and blew my nose.

Some shoes appeared. I watched them carefully from under the door of my cell. They were, I decided, Ainsley’s shoes.

“Marian!” she called. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said. I wiped my eyes and came out.

“Well,” I said, trying to sound controlled, “getting your sights set?”

“We’ll see,” she said coolly. “I have to find out more about him first. Of course you won’t say anything.”

“I suppose not,” I said, “though it doesn’t seem ethical. It’s like bird-liming, or spearing fish by lantern or something.”

“I’m not going to do anything to him,” she protested. “It won’t hurt.” She took off her pink bow and combed her hair. “But what’s wrong? I saw you start to cry at the table.”

“Nothing,” I said. “You know I can’t drink very much. It’s probably the humidity.” By now I was perfectly under control.

We walked back to our chairs. Peter was talking at full speed to Len about the different methods of taking self-portraits: with reflecting images in mirrors, self-timers that let you press the shutter-release and then run to position and pose, and long cable-releases with triggers and air-type releases with bulbs. Len was contributing some information about the correct focussing of the image, but several minutes after I had sat down he gave me a quick peculiar look, as though he was disappointed with me. Then he switched back to the conversation.

What had he meant? I glanced from one to the other. Peter smiled at me in the middle of one of his sentences, fondly but from a distance, and then I thought I knew. He was treating me as a stage prop; silent but solid, a two-dimensional outline. He wasn’t ignoring me, as perhaps I had felt (did that account for the ridiculous flight?) – he was depending on me! And Len had looked at me that way because he thought I was being self-effacing on purpose, and that if so the relationship was more serious than I had said it was. Len never wished matrimony on anyone, especially anyone he liked. But he didn’t know the situation; he had misinterpreted.

Suddenly the panic swept back over me. I gripped the edge of the table. The square elegant room with its looped curtains and muted carpet and crystal chandeliers was concealing things; the murmuring air was filled with a soft menace. “Hang on,” I told myself. “Don’t move.” I eyed the doors and windows, calculating distances. I had to get out.

The lights flicked off and on and one of the waiters called “Time, gentlemen.” There was a pushing back of chairs.

We descended in the elevator. Len said as we stepped off, “The evening’s young, why don’t you all come over to my place for another drink? You can take a look at my teleconverter,” and Peter said “Great. Love to.”

We went out through the glass doors. I took Peter’s arm and we walked on ahead. Ainsley had cut Len out from the herd and was allowing him to keep her safely behind.

On the street the air was cooler; there was a slight breeze. I let go of Peter’s arm and began to run.

9

I was running along the sidewalk. After the first minute I was surprised to find my feet moving, wondering how they had begun, but I didn’t stop.

The rest of them were so astonished they didn’t do anything at all for a moment. Then Peter yelled, “Marian! Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

I could hear the fury in his voice: this was the unforgivable sin, because it was public. I didn’t answer, but I looked back over my shoulder as I ran. Both Peter and Len had started to run after me. Then they both stopped and I heard Peter call, “I’ll go get the car and head her off, you try to keep her out of the main drag,” and he turned around and sprinted off in the other direction. This disturbed me – I must have been expecting Peter to chase me, but instead it was Len who was galloping heavily along behind me. I turned my head to the front just in time to avoid collision with an old man who was shambling out of a restaurant, then glanced back again. Ainsley had hesitated, not knowing which of them to follow, but now she was bouncing off in the direction Peter had taken. I saw her wobble in a flounce of pink and white around the corner.

I was out of breath already, but I had a good head start on them. I could afford to slow down. Each lamp post as I passed it became a distance marker on my course: it seemed an achievement, an accomplishment of some kind to put them one by one behind me. Since it was bar-closing time there were quite a few people on the street. I grinned at them and waved at some as I went by, almost laughing at the surprise on their faces. I was filled with the exhilaration of speed; it was like a game of tag. “Hey! Marian! Stop!” Len called behind me at intervals.

Then Peter’s car turned the corner in front of me on to the main street. He must have driven around the block. That’s all right, I thought, he’s got to go across to the other lane, he won’t be able to reach me.

The car was on the far side of the road, coming towards me; but there was a gap in the line of traffic, and it spurted forward and swivelled into a reckless U-turn. It was parallel to me now, slowing down. I could see Ainsley’s round expressionless face peering at me through the back window like a moon.

All at once it was no longer a game. The blunt tank-shape was threatening. It was threatening that Peter had not given chase on foot but had enclosed himself in the armour of the car; though of course that was the logical thing to do. In a minute the car would stop, the door would swing open… where was there to go?

By this time I had passed the stores and restaurants and had come to a stretch of large old houses set well back from the street, most of which, I knew, were no longer lived in but had been converted into dentists’ offices and dress-making establishments. There was an open wrought-iron gateway. I plunged through it and ran up the gravel drive.

It must have been some sort of private club. The front door of the house had an awning over it, and the windows were lit up. As I hesitated, hearing Len’s footsteps pounding nearer along the sidewalk, the front door started to open.

I couldn’t be caught there; I knew it was private property. I leapt the small hedge by the side of the driveway and skittered diagonally across the lawn into the shadows. I visualized Len pelting up the driveway and colliding with the outraged forces of society, which I pictured as a group of middle-aged ladies in evening dress, and was momentarily conscience-stricken. He was my friend. But he had taken sides against me and would have to pay the price.

In the darkness at the side of the house I paused to consider. Behind me was Len; on one side was the house, and on the other two sides I could see something that was more solid than the darkness, blocking my way. It was the brick wall attached to the iron gate at the front; it seemed to go all the way around the house. I would have to climb it.

I pushed my way through a mass of prickly shrubberies. The wall was only shoulder high; I took off my shoes and threw them over, then scrambled up, using branches and the uneven bricking of the wall as toe-holds. Something ripped. The blood was throbbing in my ears.

I closed my eyes, knelt for a moment on the top of the wall, swaying dizzily, and dropped backwards.

I felt myself caught, set down and shaken. It was Peter, who must have stalked me and waited there on the side street, knowing I would come over the wall. “What the hell got into you?” he said, his voice stern. His face in the light of the streetlamps was partly angry, partly alarmed. “Are you all right?”

I leaned against him and put my hand up to touch his neck. The relief of being stopped and held, of hearing Peter’s normal voice again and knowing he was real, was so great I started to laugh helplessly.

“I’m fine,” I said, “of course I’m all right. I don’t know what got into me.”

“Put on your shoes then,” Peter said, holding them out to me. He was annoyed but he wasn’t going to make a fuss.

Len heaved himself over the wall and landed on the earth with a thunk. He was breathing heavily. “Got her? Good. Let’s get out of here before those people get the police after us.”

The car was right there. Peter opened the front door for me and I slid in; Len got into the back seat with Ainsley. All he said to me was, “Didn’t think you were the hysterical type.” Ainsley said nothing. We pulled away from the curb and rounded the corner, Len giving directions. I would rather have gone home, but I didn’t want to cause Peter any more trouble that night. I sat up straight and folded my hands in my lap.

We parked beside Len’s apartment building, which as far as I could tell at night was of the collapsing brown-brick ramshackle variety, with fire escapes down the outside. There was no elevator, just creaky stairs with dark wooden railings. We ascended in decorous couples.

The apartment itself was tiny, only one main room with a bathroom opening to one side and a kitchen to the other. It was somewhat disarranged, with suitcases on the floor and books and clothes strewn about: Len evidently hadn’t finished moving into it yet. The bed was immediately to the left of the door, doubling as a chesterfield, and I kicked off my shoes and subsided onto it. My muscles had caught up with me and were beginning to ache with fatigue.

Len poured the three of us generous shots of cognac, rummaged in the kitchen and managed to find some Coke for Ainsley, and put on a record. Then he and Peter began to fiddle with a couple of cameras, screwing various lenses onto them and peering through them and exchanging information about exposure times. I felt deflated. I was filled with penitence, but there was no outlet for it. If I could be alone with Peter it would be different, I thought: he could forgive me.

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 yourself 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.

“Peter, why can’t you be serious? You’re just an overgrown adolescent.”

This he chose to disregard.

The car stopped jerkily. “Here we are,” he said.

I took hold of the door handle, intending, I think, to make a final unanswerable remark and dash for the house; but he put his hand on my arm. “Better wait until it lets up a bit.”

He turned the ignition key and the heartbeats of the windshield-wipers stopped. We sat silently, listening to the storm. It must have been right overhead; the lightning was dazzling and continuous, and each probing jagged fork was followed almost at once by a rending crash, like the trees of a whole forest splitting and falling. In the intervals of darkness we heard the rain pounding against the car; water was coming through in a fine spray around the edges of the closed windows.

“It’s a good thing I didn’t let you walk home,” Peter said in the tone of a man who has made a firm and proper decision. I could only agree.

During a long flickering moment of light I turned and saw him watching me, his face strangely shadowed, his eyes gleaming like an animal’s in the beam from a car headlight. His stare was intent, faintly ominous. Then he leaned towards me and said, “You’ve got some fluff. Hold still.” His hands fumbled against my head: he was awkwardly but with gentleness untangling a piece of dust that was caught in my hair.

I suddenly felt limp as a damp kleenex. I leaned my forehead against his and closed my eyes. His skin was cold and wet and his breath smelled of cognac.

“Open your eyes,” he said. I did: we still had our foreheads pressed together, and I found myself at the next bright instant gazing into a multitude of eyes.

“You’ve got eight eyes,” I said softly. We both laughed and he pulled me against him and kissed me. I put my arms around his back.

We rested quietly like that for some time in the centre of the storm. I was conscious only that I was very tired and that my body would not stop shivering. “I don’t know what I was doing tonight,” I murmured. He stroked my hair, forgiving, understanding, a little patronizing.

“Marian.” I could feel his neck swallow. I couldn’t tell now whether it was his body or my own that was shuddering; he tightened his arms around me. “How do you think we’d get on as… how do you think we’d be, married?”

I drew back from him.

A tremendous electric blue flash, very near, illuminated the inside of the car. As we stared at each other in that brief light I could see myself, small and oval, mirrored in his eyes.

10

When I woke up on Sunday morning – it was closer to Sunday afternoon – my mind was at first as empty as though someone had scooped out the inside of my skull like a cantaloupe and left me only the rind to think with. I looked around the room, scarcely recognizing it as a place I had ever been before. My clothes were scattered over the floor and draped and crumpled on the chairback like fragments left over from the explosion of some life-sized female scarecrow, and the inside of my mouth felt like a piece of cotton-wool stuffing. I got up and wavered out to the kitchen.

Clear sunshine and fresh air were shimmering in through the open kitchen window. Ainsley was up before me. She was leaning forward, concentrating on something that was spread out in front of her, her legs drawn up and tucked under her on the chair, her hair cascading over her shoulders. From the back she looked like a mermaid perched on a rock: a mermaid in a grubby green terry-cloth robe. Around her on a tabletop pebbled with crumbs lay the remnants of her breakfast – a limp starfish of a banana peel, some bits of shell, and brown crusts of toast beached here and there, random as driftwood.

I went to the refrigerator and got out the tomato juice. “Hi,” I said to Ainsley’s back. I was wondering whether I could face an egg.

She turned around. “Well,” she said.

“Did you get home okay?” I asked. “That was quite a storm.” I poured myself a large glassful of tomato juice and drank it blood-thirstily.

“Of course,” she said. “I made him call a taxi. I got home just before the storm broke and had a cigarette and a double scotch and went straight to bed; god, I was absolutely exhausted. Just sitting still like that takes a lot out of you, and then after you’d gone I didn’t know how I was going to get away. It was like escaping from a giant squid, but I did it, mostly by acting dumb and scared. That’s very necessary at this stage, you know.”

I looked into the saucepan that was sitting, still hot, on one of the burners. “You through with the egg water?” I switched the stove on.

“Well, what about you? I was quite worried, I thought maybe you were really drunk or something; if you don’t mind my saying so you were behaving like a real idiot.”

“We got engaged,” I said, a little reluctantly. I knew she would disapprove. I manoeuvred the egg into the saucepan; it cracked immediately. It was straight out of the refrigerator and too cold.

Ainsley lifted her barely nubile eyebrows; she didn’t seem surprised. “Well, if I were you I’d get married in the States, it’ll be so much easier to get a divorce when you need one. I mean, you don’t really know him, do you? But at least,” she continued more cheerfully, “Peter will soon be making enough money so you can live separately when you have a baby, even if you don’t get a divorce. But I hope you aren’t getting married right away. I don’t think you know what you’re doing.”

“Subconsciously,” I said, “I probably wanted to marry Peter all along.” That silenced her. It was like invoking a deity.

I inspected my egg, which was sending out a white semi-congealed feeler like an exploring oyster. It’s probably done, I thought, and fished it out. I turned on the coffee and cleared a space for myself on the oilcloth. Now I could see what Ainsley was busy with. She had taken the calendar down from the kitchen wall – it had a picture of a little girl in an old-fashioned dress sitting on a swing with a basket of cherries and a white puppy – I get one every year from a third cousin who runs a service station back home – and was making cryptic marks on it with a pencil.

“What’re you doing?” I asked. I whacked my egg against the side of my dish and got my thumb stuck in it. It wasn’t done after all. I poured it into the dish and stirred it up.

“I’m figuring out my strategy,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice.

“Really Ainsley, I don’t see how you can be so cold-blooded about it,” I said, eyeing the black numbers in their ordered rows.

“But I need a father for my child!” Her tone implied I was trying to snatch bread from the mouths of all the world’s widows and orphans, incarnate for the moment in her.

“Okay, granted, but why Len? I mean it could get complicated with him, after all he is my friend and he’s had a bad time lately; I wouldn’t want to see him upset. Aren’t there lots of others around?”

“Not right now; or at least nobody who’s such a good specimen,” she said reasonably, “and I’d sort of like the baby in the spring. I’d like a spring baby; or early summer. That means he can have his birthday parties outside in the back yard instead of in the house, it’ll be less noisy…”

“Have you investigated his ancestors?” I asked acidly, spooning up the last strand of egg.

“Oh yes,” said Ainsley with enthusiasm, “we had a short conversation just before he made his pass. I found out his father went to college. At least there don’t seem to be any morons on his side of the family, and he doesn’t have any allergies either. I wanted to find out whether he was Rh Negative but that would have been a little pointed, don’t you think? And he is in television, that means he must have something artistic in him somewhere. I couldn’t find out much about the grandparents, but you can’t be too selective about heredity or you’d have to wait around forever. Genetics are deceptive anyway,” she went on; “some real geniuses have children that aren’t bright at all.”

She put a decisive-looking checkmark on the calendar and frowned at it. She bore a chilling resemblance to a general plotting a major campaign.

“Ainsley, what you really need is a blueprint of your bedroom,” I said, “or no, a contour map. Or an aerial photograph. Then you could draw little arrows and dotted lines on it, and an X at the point of conjunction.”

“Please don’t be frivolous,” she said. Now she was counting under her breath.

“When’s it going to be? Tomorrow?”

“Wait a sec,” she said, and counted some more. “No. It can’t be for a while. At least a month anyway. You see, I’ve got to make sure that the first time will do it; or the second.”

“The first time?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’ve got it all worked out. It’s going to be a problem though, you see it all depends on his psychology. I can tell he’s the sort that’ll get scared off if I act too eager. I’ve got to give him lots of rope. Because as soon as he gets anywhere, I can just hear it, he’ll go into the old song-and-dance about maybe we’d better not see each other any more, wouldn’t want this to get too serious, neither of us should get tied down and so on. And he’ll evaporate. I won’t be able to call him up when it’s really essential, he’d accuse me of trying to monopolize his time or of making demands on him or something. But as long as he hasn’t got me,” she said, “I can have him whenever I need him.”

We ruminated together for some moments.

“The place is going to be a problem too,” she said. “It’s all got to seem accidental. A moment of passion. My resistance overcome, swept off my feet and so forth.” She smiled briefly. “Anything prearranged, meeting him at the motel for instance, wouldn’t do at all. So it’s either got to be his place, or here.”

“Here?”

“If necessary,” she said firmly, sliding off her chair. I was silent: the thought of Leonard Slank being undone beneath the same roof that also sheltered the lady down below and her framed family tree was disturbing to me; it would almost be a sacrilege.

Ainsley went into her bedroom, humming busily to herself, taking the calendar with her. I sat thinking about Len. I was again having stirrings of conscience about allowing him to be led flower-garlanded to his doom without even so much as a word of warning. Of course he had asked for it, in a way, I supposed, and Ainsley seemed determined not to make any further claims on whoever she singled out for this somewhat dubious, because anonymous, honour. If Leonard had been merely the standardized ladies’ man I wouldn’t have worried. But surely he was, I reflected as I sipped my coffee, a more complex and delicately adjusted creature. He was a self-consciously lecherous skirt-chaser, granted; but it wasn’t true as Joe had said, that he had no ethical sense. In his own warped way he was a kind of inverted moralist. He liked to talk as though everyone was out for nothing but sex and money, but when anyone provided a demonstration of his theories in real life, he reacted with scalding critical invective. His blend of cynicism and idealism had a lot to do with his preference for “corrupting,” as he called it, greenish girls, as opposed to the more vine-ripened variety. The supposedly pure, the unobtainable, was attractive to the idealist in him; but as soon as it had been obtained, the cynic viewed it as spoiled and threw it away. “She turned out to be just the same as all the rest of them,” he would remark sourly. Women whom he thought of as truly out of his reach, such as the wives of his friends, he treated with devotion. He trusted them to an unrealistic degree simply because he would never be compelled by his own cynicism to put them to the test: they were not only unassailable but too old for him anyway. Clara, for instance, he idolized. At times he showed a peculiar tenderness, almost a sloppy sentimentality, towards the people he liked, who were few in number; but in spite of this he was constantly accused by women of being a misogynist and by men of being a misanthropist, and perhaps he was both.

However, I could think of no specific way in which Ainsley’s making use of him as she had planned could damage him irreparably, or even much at all, so I consigned him to whatever tough-minded, horn-rimmed guardian angels he might possess, finished the granular dregs of my coffee, and went to dress. After that I phoned Clara to tell her the news; Ainsley’s reaction had not been very satisfying.

Clara sounded pleased, but her response was ambiguous. “Oh, good,” she said, “Joe will be delighted. He’s been saying lately that it’s about time you settled down.” I was slightly irritated: after all, I wasn’t thirty-five and desperate. She was talking as though I was simply taking a prudent step. But I reflected that people on the outside of a relationship couldn’t be expected to understand it. The rest of the conversation was about her digestive upsets.

As I was washing the breakfast dishes I heard footsteps coming up our stairs. That was another variation of the door-opening gambit employed by the lady down below: she would let people in quietly without announcing them, usually at times of disintegration like Sunday afternoons, doubtless hoping that we’d be caught in some awkward state, with our hair up in curlers or down in wisps, or lolling about in our bathrobes.

“Hi!” a voice said, halfway, up. It was Peter’s. He had already assumed impromptu visiting privileges.

“Oh hi,” I answered, making my voice casual but welcoming. “I was just doing the dishes,” I added inanely as his head emerged from the stairwell. I left the rest of the dishes in the sink and dried my hands on my apron.

He came into the kitchen. “Boy,” he said, “judging from the hangover I had when I woke up, I must’ve been pie-eyed last night. I guess I really tied one on. This morning my mouth tasted like the inside of a tennis shoe.” His tone was half proud, half apologetic.

We scanned each other warily. If there was going to be a retraction from either side, this was the moment for it; the whole thing could be blamed on organic chemistry. But neither of us backed down. Finally Peter grinned at me, a pleased though nervous grin.

I said, solicitously, “Oh that’s too bad. You were drinking quite a lot. Like a cup of coffee?”

“Love one,” he said, and came over and pecked me on the cheek, then collapsed on one of the kitchen chairs. “By the way, sorry I didn’t phone first – I just felt like seeing you.”

“That’s okay,” I said. He did look hungover. He was carelessly dressed, but it’s impossible for Peter to dress with genuine carelessness. This was an arranged carelessness; he was meticulously unshaven, and his socks matched the colour of the paint stains on his sports shirt. I turned on the coffee.

“Well!” he said, just as Ainsley had but with a very different emphasis. He sounded as though he’d just bought a shiny new car. I gave him a tender chrome-plated smile; that is, I meant the smile to express tenderness, but my mouth felt stiff and bright and somehow expensive.

I poured two cups of coffee, got out the milk and sat down in the other kitchen chair. He put one of his hands over mine.

“You know,” he said, “I didn’t think I was intending – what happened last night – at all.” I nodded: I hadn’t thought I was, either.

“I guess I’ve been running away from it.”

I had been, too.

“But I guess you were right about Trigger. And maybe I was intending it, without knowing it. A man’s got to settle down sometime, and I am twenty-six.”

I was seeing him in a new light: he was changing form in the kitchen, turning from a reckless young bachelor into a rescuer from chaos, a provider of stability. Somewhere in the vaults of Seymour Surveys an invisible hand was wiping away my signature.

“And now things are settled I feel I’m going to be much happier. A fellow can’t keep running around indefinitely. It’ll be a lot better in the long run for my practice too, the clients like to know you’ve got a wife; people get suspicious of a single man after a certain age, they start thinking you’re a queer or something.” He paused, then continued, “And there’s one thing about you, Marian, I know I can always depend on you. Most women are pretty scatterbrained but you’re such a sensible girl. You may not have known this but I’ve always thought that’s the first thing to look for when it comes to choosing a wife.”

I didn’t feel very sensible. I lowered my eyes modestly and fixed them upon a toast crumb that had eluded me when I wiped the table. I wasn’t sure what to say – “You’re very sensible too” didn’t seem appropriate.

“I’m very happy too,” I said. “Let’s take our coffee into the living room.”

He followed me in; we set our cups on the round coffee table and sat down on the chesterfield.

“I like this room,” he said, glancing over it. “It’s so homey.” He put his arm around my shoulders, and we sat in what I hoped was a blissful silence. We were awkward with each other. We no longer had the assumptions, the tracks and paths of our former relationship to guide us. Until we’d established the new assumptions we wouldn’t know quite what to do or say.

Peter chuckled to himself.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

“Oh, not much. When I went out to get the car I found three shrubs caught underneath it; so I just took a drive past that lawn. We made a neat little hole in their hedge.” He was still pleased with himself about that.

“You big silly idiot,” I said fondly. I could feel the stirrings of the proprietary instinct. So this object, then, belonged to me. I leaned my head against his shoulder.

“When do you want to get married?” he asked, almost gruffly.

My first impulse was to answer, with the evasive flippancy I’d always used before when he’d asked me serious questions about myself, “What about Groundhog Day?” But instead I heard a soft flannelly voice I barely recognized, saying, “I’d rather have you decide that. I’d rather leave the big decisions up to you.” I was astounded at myself. I’d never said anything remotely like that to him before. The funny thing was I really meant it.

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.

12

So here I am.

I’m sitting on my bed in my room with the door shut and the window open. It’s Labour Day, a fine cool sunny day like yesterday. I found it strange not to have to go to the office this morning. The highways outside the city will be coagulating with traffic even this early, people already beginning to come back from their weekends at summer cottages, trying to beat the rush. At five o’clock everything will have slowed down to an ooze out there and the air will be filled with the shimmer of sun on miles of metal and the whining of idling motors and bored children. But here, as usual, it’s quiet.

Ainsley is in the kitchen. I’ve hardly seen her today. I can hear her walking about on the other side of the door, humming intermittently. I feel hesitant about opening the door. Our positions have shifted in some way I haven’t yet assessed, and I know I would find it difficult to talk with her.

Friday seems a long time ago, so much has happened since then, but now I’ve gone over it all in my mind I see that my actions were really more sensible than I thought at the time. It was my subconscious getting ahead of my conscious self, and the subconscious has its own logic. The way I went about doing things may have been a little inconsistent with my true personality, but are the results that inconsistent? The decision was a little sudden, but now I’ve had time to think about it I realize it is actually a very good step to take. Of course I’d always assumed through high school and college that I was going to marry someone eventually and have children, everyone does. Either two or four, three is a bad number and I don’t approve of only children, they get spoiled too easily. I’ve never been silly about marriage the way Ainsley is. She’s against it on principle, and life isn’t run by principles but by adjustments. As Peter says, you can’t continue to run around indefinitely; people who aren’t married get funny in middle age, embittered or addled or something, I’ve seen enough of them around the office to realize that. But although I’m sure it was in the back of my mind I hadn’t consciously expected it to happen so soon or quite the way it did. Of course I was more involved with Peter all along than I wanted to admit.

And there’s no reason why our marriage should turn out like Clara’s. Those two aren’t practical enough, they have no sense at all of how to manage, how to run a well-organized marriage. So much of it is a matter of elementary mechanical detail, such as furniture and meals and keeping things in order. But Peter and I should be able to set up a very reasonable arrangement. Though of course we still have a lot of the details to work out. Peter is an ideal choice when you come to think of it. He’s attractive and he’s bound to be successful, and also he’s neat, which is a major point when you’re going to be living with someone.

I can imagine the expressions on their faces at the office when they hear. But I can’t tell them yet, I’ll have to keep my job there for a while longer. Till Peter is finished articling we’ll need the money. We’ll probably have to live in an apartment at first, but later we can have a real house, a permanent place; it will be worth the trouble to keep clean.

Meanwhile I should be doing something constructive instead of sitting around like this. First I should revise the beer questionnaire and make out a report on my findings so I can type it up first thing tomorrow and get it out of the way.

Then perhaps I’ll wash my hair. And my room needs a general clean-up. I should go through the dresser drawers and throw out whatever has accumulated in them, and there are some dresses hanging in the closet I don’t wear enough to keep. I’ll give them to the Salvation Army. Also a lot of costume jewellery, the kind you get from relatives at Christmas: imitation gold pins in the shapes of poodle dogs and bunches of flowers with pieces of cut glass for petals and eyes. There’s a cardboard box full of books, textbooks mostly, and letters from home I know I’ll never look at again, and a couple of ancient dolls I’ve kept for sentimental reasons. The older doll has a cloth body stuffed with sawdust (I know that because I once performed an operation on it with a pair of nail scissors) and hands, feet and head made of a hard woody material. The fingers and toes have been almost chewed off; the hair is black and short, a few frizzy wisps attached to a piece of netting which is coming unglued from the skull. The face is almost eroded but still has its open mouth with the red felt tongue inside and two china teeth, its chief fascination as I remember. It’s dressed in a strip of old sheet. I used to leave food in front of it overnight and was always disappointed when it wasn’t gone in the morning. The other doll is newer and has long washable hair and a rubbery skin. I asked for her one Christmas because you could give her baths. Neither of them is very attractive any longer; I might as well throw them out with the rest of the junk.

I still can’t quite fit in the man at the laundromat or account for my own behaviour. Maybe it was a kind of lapse, a blank in the ego, like amnesia. But there’s little chance of my ever running into him again – I don’t even know his name – and anyway he has nothing at all to do with Peter.

After I finish cleaning my room I should write a letter home. They will all be pleased, this is surely what they’ve been waiting for. They’ll want us to come down for the weekend as soon as possible. I’ve never met Peter’s parents either.

In a minute I’ll get off the bed and walk through the pool of sunshine on the floor. I can’t let my whole afternoon dribble away, relaxing though it is to sit in this quiet room gazing up at the empty ceiling with my back against the cool wall, dangling my feet over the edge of the bed. It’s almost like being on a rubber raft, drifting, looking up into a clear sky.

I must get organized. I have a lot to do.