They were having sherry with the soup. Fish groped for his sherry glass, almost upsetting it.
Marian was now under crossfire, since as soon as Trevor had sat down again he had begun to talk at her from the other side, telling her about the soup, which was clear and subtly flavoured: how he had extracted its essences, painstakingly, moment by moment, at a very low heat; and since he was the only person at the table who was looking more or less at her she felt obliged to look at him in return. Duncan wasn't paying any attention to anyone and neither Fish nor Trevor seemed at all disconcerted by the fact that both of them were talking at once. They were evidently used to it. She found however that she could manage by nodding and smiling from time to time and keeping her eyes riveted on Trevor and her ears on Fish, who was continuing, "You see as long as the population, per square mile especially, was low and the infant mortality rate and the death rate in general was high, there was a premium on Birth. Man was in harmony with the purposes, the cyclical rhythms of Nature, and the earth said, Produce, Produce. Be fruitful and multiply, if you'll recall...."
Trevor sprang up and dashed around the table, removing the soup plates. His voice and his gestures were becoming more and more accelerated; he was popping in and out of the kitchen like the cuckoo in a cuckoo-clock. Marian glanced at Fish. Apparently he had missed several times with the soup: his beard was becoming glutinous with spilled food. He looked like a highchaired and bewhiskered baby; Marian wished someone would tie a bib around his neck.
Trevor made an entrance with clean plates, and another exit. She could hear him fidgeting about the kitchen, in the background of Fish's voice: "And so then consequently the poet also thought of himself as the same kind of natural producer; his poem was something begotten so to speak on him by the Muses, or let's say maybe Apollo, hence the term 'inspiration,' the instilling of breath as it were into; the poet was pregnant with his work, the poem went through a period of gestation, often a long one, and when it was finally ready to see the light of day the poet was delivered of it often with much painful labour. In this way the very process of artistic creation was itself an imitation of Nature, of the thing in nature that was most important to the survival of Mankind. I mean birth; birth. But what do we have nowadays?"
There was a fizzling sound, and Trevor appeared dramatically in the doorway, holding a flaming blue sword in either hand. Marian was the only person who even looked at him.
"Oh my goodness," she said appreciatively. "That's quite an effect!"
"Yes, isn't it? I just love things flambe. It's not really shish kebab of course, it's a little more French, not so blatant as the Greek kind...."
When he dexterously slid whatever was impaled on the skewers onto her plate, she could see that most of it was meat. Well, now her back was to the wall. She would have to think of something. Trevor poured the wine, explaining how hard it was to find really fresh tarragon in this city.
"What we have now, I say, is a society in which all the values are anti-birth. Birth control, they all say, and, It's the population explosion not the atomic explosion that we must all worry about. Malthus, you see, except that war no longer exists as a means of seriously diminishing the population. It's easy to see in this context that the rise of Romanticism ..."
The other dishes contained rice with something in it, an aromatic sauce which went on the meat, and an unidentifiable vegetable. Trevor passed them round. Marian put some of the dark green vegetable substance into her mouth, tentatively, as one would make an offering to a possibly angry god. It was accepted.
"... coincides most informatively with the population increase which had started of course some time earlier but which was reaching almost epidemic proportions. The poet could no longer see himself with any self-congratulation as a surrogate mother-figure, giving birth to his works, delivering as it were another child to society. He had to become a something else, and what really is this emphasis on individual expression, notice it's expression, a pressing out, this emphasis on spontaneity, the instantaneous creation? Not only does the twentieth century have ..."
Trevor was in the kitchen again. Marian surveyed the chunks of meat on her plate with growing desperation. She thought of sliding them under the tablecloth - but they would be discovered. She would have been able to put them into her purse if only she hadn't left it over by the chair. Perhaps she could slip them down the front of her blouse or up her sleeves....
"... painters who splatter the paint all over the canvas in practically an orgasm of energy but we have writers thinking the same way about themselves ..."
She reached under the table with her foot and prodded Duncan gently on the shin. He started, and looked across at her. For a moment his eyes held no recognition whatsoever; but then he watched, curious.
She scraped most of the sauce from one of the hunks of meat, picked it up between thumb and finger, and tossed it to him over the candles. He caught it, put it on his plate, and began to cut it up. She started to scrape another piece.
"... no longer as giving birth however; no, long meditation and bringing forth are things of the past. The act of Nature that Art now chooses to imitate, yes is forced to imitate, is the very act of copulation...."
Marian flung the second chunk, which was also neatly caught. Maybe they should quickly exchange plates, she thought; but no, that would be noticed, he had finished his before Trevor left the room.
"What we need is a cataclysm," Fish was saying. His voice had become almost a chant, and was swelling in volume; he seemed to be building up to some kind of crescendo. "A cataclysm. Another Black Death, a vast explosion, millions wiped from the face of the earth, civilization as we know it all but obliterated, then Birth would be essential again, then we could return to the tribe, the old gods, the dark earthgods, the earth goddess, the goddess of waters, the goddess of birth and growth and death. We need a new Venus, a lush Venus of warmth and vegetation and generation, a new Venus, big-bellied, teeming with life, potential, about to give birth to a new world in all its plenitude, a new Venus rising from the sea...."
Fischer decided to stand up, perhaps to give rhetorical emphasis to his last words. To lift himself he placed his hands on the card table, two of whose legs jackknifed, sending Fish's plate slithering into his lap. At that moment the chunk of meat which Marian had just hurled was in mid-air; it caught Duncan squarely in the side of the head, then deflected, bounced across the floor, and landed on a pile of term papers.
Trevor, a small salad dish in either hand, had stepped through the doorway just in time to witness both events. His jaw dropped.
"At last I know what I really want to be," Duncan said into the suddenly quiet room. He was gazing serenely at the ceiling, a whitish-grey trace of sauce in his hair. "An amoeba."
Duncan had said he would walk her partway home: he needed a breath of fresh air.
Luckily none of Trevor's dishes had been broken, although several things had been spilled; and when the table had been straightened and Fischer had subsided, muttering to himself, Trevor had gracefully dismissed the whole incident, though for the remainder of the meal, through the salad and the peches flambees and the coconut cookies and the coffee and liqueurs, his manner to Marian had been cooler.
Now, crunching along the snowy street, they were discussing the fact that Fischer had eaten the slice of lemon out of his finger bowl. "Trevor doesn't like it, of course," Duncan said, "and I told him once that if he doesn't like Fish eating it he shouldn't put one in. But he insists on doing these things properly, though as he says, nobody appreciates his efforts much. I generally eat mine, too, but I didn't today: we had company."
"It was all very ... interesting," Marian said. She was considering the total absence all evening of any reference to or question about herself, though she had assumed she was invited because the two roommates wanted to know more about her. Now, however, she thought it more than likely that they were merely desperate for new audiences.
Duncan looked at her with a sardonic
smile. "Well, now you know what it's like for me at home."
"You might move out," she suggested.
"Oh no. Actually I sort of like it. Besides, who else would take such good care of me? And worry about me so much? They do, you know, when they aren't engrossed in their hobbies or off on some other tangent. They spend so much time fussing about my identity that I really shouldn't have to bother with it myself at all. In the long run they ought to make it a lot easier for me to turn into an amoeba."
"Why are you so interested in amoebas?"
"Oh, they're immortal," he said, "and sort of shapeless and flexible. Being a person is getting too complicated."
They had reached the top of the asphalt ramp that led down to the baseball park. Duncan sat down on the snowbank at one side and lit a cigarette; he never seemed to mind the cold. After a moment she sat down beside him. Since he made no attempt to put his arm around her, she put hers around him.
"The thing is," he said after a while, "I'd like something to be real. Not everything, that's impossible, but maybe one or two things. I mean Dr. Johnson refuted the theory of the unreality of matter by kicking a stone, but I can't go around kicking my roommates. Or my professors. Besides, maybe my foot's unreal anyway." He threw the stub of his cigarette into the snow and lit another. "I thought maybe you would be. I mean if we went to bed, god knows you're unreal enough now, all I can think of is those layers and layers of woolly clothes you wear, coats and sweaters and so on. Sometimes I wonder whether it goes on and on, maybe you're woollen all the way through. It would be sort of nice if you weren't...."
Marian couldn't resist this appeal. She knew she wasn't woollen. "All right, suppose we did," she said, speculating. "We can't go to my place though."
"And we can't go to mine," Duncan said, showing neither surprise nor glee at her implied acceptance.
"I guess we'd have to go to a hotel," she said, "as married people."
"They'd never believe it," he said sadly. "I don't look married. They're still asking me in bars whether I'm sixteen yet."
"Don't you have a birth certificate?"
"I did once, but I lost it." He turned his head and kissed her on the nose. "I suppose we could go to the kind of hotel where you don't have to be married."
"You mean ... you'd want me to pose as a - some kind of prostitute?"
"Well? Why not?"
"No," she said, a little indignantly. "I couldn't do that."
"I probably couldn't either," he said in a gloomy voice. "And motels are out, I can't drive. Well I guess that's that." He lit another cigarette. "Oh well, it's true anyway: doubtless you would be corrupting me. But then again," he said with mild bitterness, "maybe I'm incorruptible."
Marian was looking out over the baseball park. The night was clear and crisp, and the stars in the black sky burnt coldly. It had snowed earlier, fine powdery snow, and the park was a white blank space, untracked. Suddenly she wanted to go down and run and jump in it, making footmarks and mazes and irregular paths. But she knew that in a minute she would be walking sedately as ever across it towards the station.
She stood up, brushing the snow from her coat. "Coming any further?" she asked.
Duncan stood up too and put his hands into his pockets. His face was shadowed in places and yellowed by the light from the feeble street lamp. "Nope," he said. "See you, maybe." He turned away, his retreating figure blurring almost noiselessly into the blue darkness.
When she had reached the bright pastel oblong of the subway station, Marian took out her change purse and retrieved her engagement ring from among the pennies, nickels and dimes.
23
Marian was resting on her stomach, eyes closed, an ashtray balanced in the hollow of her bare back where Peter had set it. He was lying beside her, having a cigarette and finishing his double scotch. In the living room the hi-fi set was playing cocktail music.
Although she was keeping her forehead purposefully unwrinkled, she was worrying. That morning her body had finally put its foot down on canned rice pudding, after accepting it with scarcely a tremor for weeks. It had been such a comfort knowing she could rely on it: it provided bulk, and as Mrs. Withers the dietician had said, it was fortified. But all at once as she had poured the cream over it her eyes had seen it as a collection of small cocoons. Cocoons with miniature living creatures inside.
Ever since this thing had started she had been trying to pretend there was nothing really wrong with her, it was a superficial ailment, like a rash: it would go away. But now she had to face up to it; she had wondered whether she ought to talk to someone about it. She had already told Duncan, but that was no good; he seemed to find it normal, and what was essentially bothering her was the thought that she might not be normal. This was why she was afraid to tell Peter: he might think she was some kind of freak, or neurotic. Naturally he would have second thoughts about getting married; he might say they should postpone the wedding until she got over it. She would say that, too, if it was him. What she would do after they were married and she couldn't conceal it from him any longer, she couldn't imagine. Perhaps they could have separate meals.
She was drinking her coffee and staring at her uneaten rice pudding when Ainsley came in, wearing her dingy green robe. These days she no longer hummed and knitted; instead she had been reading a lot of books, trying, she said, to nip the problem in the bud.
She assembled her ironized yeast, her wheat germ, her orange juice, her special laxative and her enriched cereal on the table before sitting down.
"Ainsley," Marian said, "do you think I'm normal?"
"Normal isn't the same as average," Ainsley said cryptically. "Nobody is normal." She opened a paperback book and began to read, underlining with a red pencil.
Ainsley wouldn't have been much help anyway. A couple of months ago she would have said it was something wrong with Marian's sex life, which would have been ridiculous. Or some traumatic experience in her childhood, like finding a centipede in the salad or like Len and the baby chicken; but as far as Marian knew there wasn't anything like that in her past. She had never been a picky eater, she had been brought up to eat whatever was on the plate; she hadn't even balked at such things as olives and asparagus and clams, which people say you have to learn to like. Lately though Ainsley had been talking a lot about Behaviourism. Behaviourists, she said, could cure diseases like alcoholism and homosexuality, if the patients really wanted to be cured, by showing them images associated with their sickness and then giving them a drug that stopped their breathing.
"They say whatever causes the behaviour, it's the behaviour itself that becomes the problem," Ainsley had told her. "Of course there are still a few hitches. If the cause is deep-rooted enough, they simply switch their addiction, like from alcohol to dope; or they commit suicide. And what I need is not a cure but a prevention. Even if they can cure him - if he wants to be cured," she said darkly, "he'll still blame me for causing it in the first place."
But Behaviourism, Marian thought, wouldn't be much use in her case. How could it work on any condition so negative? If she were a glutton it would be different; but they couldn't very well show her images of non-eating and then stop her breathing.
She had gone over in her mind the other people she might talk to. The office virgins would be intrigued and would want to hear all about it, but she didn't think they would be able to give her any constructive advice. Besides, if she told one they'd all know and soon everyone they knew would know: you could never tell how it might get back to Peter. Her other friends were elsewhere, in other towns, other cities, other countries, and writing it in a letter would make it too final. The lady down below ... that was the bottom of the barrel; she would be like the relatives, she would be dismayed without understanding. They would all think it in bad taste for Marian to have anything wrong with what they would call her natural functions.
She decided to go and see Clara. It was a faint hope - surely Clara wouldn't be able to offer any concrete suggestions - but at least she
would listen. Marian telephoned her to make certain she would be in, and left work early.
She found Clara in the playpen with her second-youngest child. The youngest was asleep in its carrier on the dining-room table, and Arthur was nowhere to be seen.
"I'm so glad you came," she said, "Joe's down at the university. I'll get out in a minute and make the tea. Elaine doesn't like the playpen," she explained, "and I'm helping her get used to it."
"I'll make the tea," Marian said; she thought of Clara as a perpetual invalid and connected her with meals carried on trays. "You stay where you are."
It took her some time to find everything but at last she had the tray arranged, with tea and lemon and some digestive biscuits she had discovered in the laundry basket, and she carried it in and set it on the floor. She handed Clara her cup over the bars.
"Well," said Clara when Marian had settled herself on the rug, so as to be on the same level, "how's everything? I bet you're busy these days, getting ready and all."
Looking at her sitting in there with the baby chewing on the buttons of her blouse, Marian found herself being envious of Clara for the first time in three years. Whatever was going to happen to Clara had already happened: she had turned into what she was going to be. It wasn't that she wanted to change places with Clara; she only wanted to know what she was becoming, what direction she was taking, so she could be prepared. It was waking up in the morning one day and finding she had already changed without being aware of it that she dreaded.
The Edible Woman Page 22