As she stepped onto the street a new thought came to her. Maybe it was really Peter. Slipping out from his law office into the nearest phone booth to dial the numbers of housewives in Etobicoke. His protest against something or other - surveys? housewives in Etobicoke? vulcanization? - or his only way of striking back at a cruel world that saddled him with crushing legal duties and prevented him from taking her to dinner. And he had got the company name and the knowledge of official interviewing procedures, of course, from her! Perhaps this was his true self, the core of his personality, the central Peter who had been occupying her mind more and more lately. Perhaps this was what lay hidden under the surface, under the other surfaces, that secret identity which in spite of her many guesses and attempts and half-successes she was aware she had still not uncovered: he was really the Underwear Man.
14
The first thing Marian's eyes encountered as her head emerged periscope-like through the stairwell was a pair of naked legs. They were topped by Ainsley, who was standing half-dressed in the small vestibule, gazing down upon her, the usual blankness of her face tinged almost imperceptibly here and there with shades of surprise and annoyance.
"Hi," she said. "I thought you were going out for dinner tonight." She fastened her eyes accusingly upon the small bag of groceries Marian was carrying.
Marian's legs pushed the rest of her body up the remaining stairs before she answered. "I was, but I'm not. Something came up at Peter's office." She went into the kitchen and deposited the paper bag on the table. Ainsley followed her in and sat down on one of the chairs.
"Marian," she said dramatically, "it has to be tonight!"
"What does?" Marian asked vaguely, putting her carton of milk into the refrigerator. She wasn't really listening.
"It. Leonard. You know."
Marian had been so occupied with her own thoughts that it was a moment before she remembered what Ainsley was talking about. "Oh. That," she said. She took off her coat, reflectively.
She hadn't been paying close attention to the progress of Ainsley's campaign (or was it Leonard's?) over the past two months - she'd wanted to keep her hands clean of the whole thing - but she had been force-fed enough with Ainsley's own accounts and analyses and complaints to be able to deduce what had been happening; after all, however clean one's hands, one's ears were of necessity open. Things hadn't gone according to schedule. It appeared that Ainsley had overshot the mark. At the first encounter she had made herself into an image of such pink-gingham purity that Len had decided, after her strategic repulse of him that evening, that she would require an extralong and careful siege. Anything too abrupt, too muscular, would frighten her away; she would have to be trapped with gentleness and caution. Consequently he had begun by asking her to lunch several times, and had progressed, at intervals of medium length, to dinners out and finally to foreign films, in one of which he had gone so far as to hold her hand. He had even invited her to his apartment once, for afternoon tea. Ainsley said later with several vigorous oaths that he had been on this occasion a model of propriety. Since by her own admission she didn't drink, she could not even pretend to permit him to get her drunk. In conversation he treated her as though she was a little girl, patiently explaining things to her and impressing her with stories about the television studio and assuring her that his interest in her was strictly that of a well-wishing older friend until she wanted to scream. And she couldn't even talk back: it was necessary for her mind to appear as vacant as her face. Her hands were tied. She had constructed her image and now she had to maintain it. To make any advances herself, or to let slip a flicker of anything resembling intelligence, would have been so out of character as to give her dumb-show irrevocably away. So she had been stewing and fussing in private, suffering Len's overly subtle manoeuvrings with suppressed impatience and watching the all-important calendar days slide uneventfully by.
"If it isn't tonight," Ainsley said, "I don't know what I'll do. I can't stand it much longer - I'll have to get another one. But I've wasted so much time." She frowned, as much as she was able to with her embryonic eyebrows.
"And where ...?" Marian asked, beginning to see why Ainsley had been annoyed at her unexpected return.
"Well he's obviously not going to ask me up to see his camera lenses," Ainsley said petulantly. "And anyway if I said Yes he'd get suspicious as hell. We're going out to dinner though, and I thought maybe if I invited him up for coffee afterwards ..."
"So you'd rather I went out," Marian said, her voice heavy with disapproval.
"Well, it would be an awful help. Ordinarily I wouldn't give a damn if there was a whole camp meeting in the next room, or under the bed for that matter, and I bet he wouldn't either, but you see, he'll think I ought to care. I've got to let myself be backed slowly into the bedroom. Inch by inch."
"Yes, I can see that." Marian sighed. Censure was, at this point, none of her business. "I'm just wondering where I can go."
Ainsley's face brightened. Her main objective had been gained; the rest of the details were secondary. "Well, do you think maybe you could just phone up Peter and tell him you're coming over? He shouldn't mind, he's engaged to you."
Marian considered. Previously, in some area of time she could not at the moment remember clearly, she would have been able to; it wouldn't have mattered if he had got peeved. But these days, and especially after their conversation in the afternoon, it would not be a good idea. No matter how unobtrusive she made herself with a book in the living room, he would silently accuse her of being overpossessive, or of being jealous and interfering about his work. Even if she explained the real situation. And she didn't want to do that: though Peter had seen almost nothing of Len since the first evening, having exchanged the free-bachelor image for the mature-fiance one and adjusted his responses and acquaintances accordingly, there would still be a kind of clan loyalty that might cause trouble, if not for Ainsley, at least for her. It would give him ammunition. "I don't think I'd better," she said. "He's working awfully hard." There was really no place she could go. Clara's was out. It was getting too cold for sitting in parks or for prolonged walking. She might call one of the office virgins.... "I'll see a movie," she said at last.
Ainsley smiled with relief. "Fabulous," she said, and went into her bedroom to finish dressing. She stuck her head out a few minutes later to ask, "Can I use that bottle of scotch if I need it? I'll say it's yours but that you won't mind."
"Sure, go ahead," Marian said. The scotch was mutually owned. Ainsley, she knew, would pay her back out of the next bottle. Even if she forgot to, a half-bottle of scotch would be a small enough sacrifice to get the thing decisively over and done with. This vicariously nervewracking delay and shilly-shally had gone on far too long. She remained in the kitchen, leaning against the counter and gazing with pensive interest into the sink, which contained four glasses partly filled with opaque water, a fragment of eggshell, and a pot that had recently been used for cooking macaroni and cheese. She decided not to wash the dishes, but as a token gesture of cleanliness she picked out the eggshell and put it in the garbage. She disliked remnants.
When Ainsley reappeared, in a blouse and jumper outfit set off by earrings in the shape of tiny daisies and an extra good eye-job, Marian said to her, "That movie isn't going to last all night, you know. I'll have to come back around twelve-thirty." Even if she expects me to sleep in the gutter, she thought.
"I imagine the situation will be well under control by then," Ainsley said with determination. "If it isn't, neither of us will be there anyway: I'll have thrown him out of the window. And leaped out myself. But just in case, don't go charging through any closed doors without knocking."
Marian's mind selected the most ominous word. Any closed doors. "Now look," she said, "I draw the line at my own bedroom."
"Well, it is neater," Ainsley said reasonably, "and if I'm being overwhelmed in a moment of passion and swept off my feet I can't very well interrupt and say 'You've got the wrong bedroom,' can I?"
"No, I guess not," said Marian. She was beginning to feel homeless and dispossessed. "I just don't like the thought of stumbling into my bed and finding that there are people in it already."
"Tell you what," said Ainsley, "if we do happen to end up in your room I'll hang a tie on the doorknob, okay?"
"Whose tie?" Marian asked. She knew Ainsley collected things - among the objects covering the floor of her room were several photographs, some letters, and a half-dozen dried out flowers - but didn't know she had collected any ties.
"Why his, of course," said Ainsley.
Marian had a disturbing vision of a trophy room with stuffed and antlered heads nailed to the walls. "Why not just use his scalp?" she asked. Leonard, after all, was supposed to be her friend.
She pondered the situation while she ate her T. V. dinner and drank her tea in solitude, Ainsley having departed, and while she dawdled around the apartment waiting for it to be the right time for the late show. All the way to the nearest movie-theatre district she was still pondering it. She had felt for some time, in one of the smaller and more obscure crevices of her mind, that she ought to do something to warn Len, but she didn't know what, or, more importantly, why. She knew he would not readily believe that Ainsley, who seemed as young and inexperienced as a button mushroom, was in reality a scheming superfemale carrying out a foul plot against him, using him in effect as an inexpensive substitute for artificial insemination with a devastating lack of concern for his individuality. And there was no convincing evidence as yet; Ainsley had been most discreet. Marian had thought several times of calling him up in the middle of the night with a nylon stocking over the telephone mouthpiece and whispering "Beware!"; but that would do no good. He would never guess what he was supposed to beware of. Anony mous letters ... he'd think it was some crank; or a jealous former girlfriend trying to foil his own fiendish plans, which would only make his pursuit more eager. Besides, ever since she had become engaged there had been a tacit agreement with Ainsley: neither was to interfere with the other's strategy, though it was apparent that each disapproved of the other's course of action on moral grounds. If she said anything to Len she knew that Ainsley would be perfectly capable of carrying out a successful, or at any rate an unsettling, counter-attack. No, Len must be abandoned to his fate, which he would no doubt embrace with glee. Marian was further confused by the fact that she didn't exactly know whether an early Christian was being thrown to the lions, or an early lion to the Christians. Was she, as Ainsley had asked her during one of their Sunday discussions, on the side of the Creative Life Force, or wasn't she?
There was also the lady down below to be considered. Even if she wasn't peering out a window or standing in ambush behind one of the velvet curtains when Leonard arrived, she would almost certainly be aware that a pair of masculine feet had ascended the stairs; and in her mind, that despotic empire where the proprieties had the rigidity and force of the law of gravity, what went up must come down, preferably before eleven-thirty at night. Though she had never said so: it was merely something one took into account. Marian hoped Ainsley would have the sense either to get him over with and get him out before twelve at the latest, or, if the worse came to the worst, to keep him there, and keep him quiet, all night; what they would do with him the next morning, in that case, she was not sure. He would probably have to be smuggled out in the laundry bag. Even if he was in any condition to walk by himself. Oh, well; they could always find another apartment. But she hated scenes.
Marian got off the subway at the station near the laundromat. There were two movie theatres close by, across the street from each other. She inspected them. One was offering a foreign film with subtitles, advertised outside by black-and-white fuzzy reproductions of ecstatic newspaper reviews and much use of the words "adult" and "mature." It had won several awards. The other had a low-budget American Western and technicolour posters of horsemen and dying Indians. In her present state she did not feel like writhing through intensities and pauses and long artistic closeups of expressively twitched skin pores. She was looking only for warmth, shelter, and something resembling oblivion, so she chose the Western. When she groped her way to a seat in the half-empty theatre the movie had already begun.
She slouched her body down, resting her head on the back of the seat and her knees against the seat in front and half-closing her eyes. Not a ladylike position, but nobody could see in the dark; and the seats on either side of her were empty. She had made sure of that: she didn't want any trouble with furtive old men. She recalled such encounters from early school days, before she had learned about movie theatres. Hands squeezing against knees and similar bits of shuffling pathos, although not frightening (one should just move quietly away), were painfully embarrassing to her simply because they were sincere. The attempt at contact, even slight contact, was crucial for the fumblers in the dark.
The coloured pictures succeeded each other in front of her: gigantic Stetsoned men stretched across the screen on their even more gigantic horses, trees and cactus plants rose in the foreground or faded in the background as the landscape flowed along; smoke and dust and galloping. She didn't attempt to decide what the cryptic speeches meant or to follow the plot. She knew there must be bad people who were trying to do something evil and good people who were trying to stop them, probably by getting to the money first (as well as Indians who were numerous as buffalo and fair game for everyone), but it didn't matter to her which of these moral qualities was incarnate in any given figure presented to her. At least it wasn't one of the new Westerns in which people had psychoses. She amused herself by concentrating on the secondary actors, the bit players, wondering what they did in their no doubt copious spare time and whether any of them still had illusions of future stardom.
It was night, the purplish-blue translucent night that descends only on the technicolour screen. Someone was sneaking through a meadow towards someone else; all was quiet except for the rustling of the grass and the chirping of several mechanical crickets. Close beside her, to the left, she heard a small cracking noise, then the sound of something hard hitting the floor. A gun went off, there was a struggle, and it was day. She heard the cracking noise again.
She turned her head to the left. In the faint reflection from the glare of sunlight on the screen she could barely make out who was sitting beside her, two places away. It was the man from the laundromat. He was slumped in the seat, staring glassily in front of him. Every half-minute or so he would lift his hand to his mouth from a bag he was holding in his other hand, and there would be the small crack and then the sound from the floor. He must be eating something with shells, but they weren't peanuts. That would make a softer noise. She studied his dim profile, the nose and one eye and the shadowed hunch of one shoulder.
She turned her head to the front again and tried to concentrate all her attention on the screen. Although she found herself being glad that he had suddenly materialized in that seat, it was an irrational gladness: she didn't intend to speak to him, in fact she was hoping very much that he had not seen her, would not see her sitting alone there in the movie theatre. He seemed entranced by the screen, almost totally absorbed in it, and in whatever he was eating - what could possibly make that exasperating thin cracking sound? - and he might not notice her if she kept quite still. But she had the disquieting sense that he knew perfectly well who she was and had been aware of her presence for some time before she had recognized his. She gazed at the vast featureless expanse of prairie before her. At her side the cracking went on, irritatingly regular.
They were fording a river, men and horses together and one blonde woman in a dishevelled dress, when she noticed a peculiar sensation in her left hand. It wanted to reach across and touch him on the shoulder. Its will seemed independent of her own: surely she herself wanted nothing of the kind. She made its fingers grip the arm of her seat. "That would never do," she admonished it silently, "he might scream." But she was also afraid, now that she wasn't looking at him any more
, that if she did reach across, her hand would encounter only darkness and emptiness or the plush surface of movie-theatre upholstery.
The soundtrack exploded, spattering the air with yelps and whoops, as a band of Indians swept from their hiding place for the attack. After they had been demolished and listening was possible again she could no longer hear the small clock-like sound he had been making. She jerked her head round to the side: nobody. Well, he had gone then, or perhaps he had never been there in the first place; or maybe it had been somebody else.
On the screen a gargantuan cowboy was pressing his lips chastely to those of the blonde woman. "Hank, does this mean ...?" she was whispering. Shortly there would be a sunset.
Then, so close to her ear that she could feel the breath stirring her hair, a voice spoke. "Pumpkin seeds," it said.
Her mind accepted the information calmly. "Pumpkin seeds," it replied in silence, "of course, why not?" But her body was startled, and froze momentarily. When she had overcome its purely muscular surprise enough to turn around, there wasn't anybody behind her.
She sat through the closing scene of the movie, beginning to be convinced that she was the victim of a complicated hallucination. "So I'm finally going mad," she thought, "like everybody else. What a nuisance. Though I suppose it will be a change." But when the lights went on after a brief shot of a waving flag and some tinny music, she took the trouble to examine the floor beneath the seat where he had (possibly) been sitting. She found a little pile of white shells. They were like some primitive signal, a heap of rocks or a sign made with sticks or notches cut in trees, marking a path or indicating something ahead, but though she stared down at them for several minutes while the handful of moviegoers straggled past her up the aisle, she could not interpret them. At any rate, she thought as she left the theatre, this time he left a visible trail.
The Edible Woman Page 13