The Edible Woman (14 page)

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
.

S
o 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.