The lady down below had turned quite pale. "Oh," she said faintly, clutching at her pearls. "A baby! Oh, oh, oh!" She turned, emitting small cries of outrage and dismay, and tottered away down the stairs.
"I guess you'll have to move," said Marian. She felt safely remote from this fresh complication. She was leaving for home the next day anyway; and now that the lady down below had finally forced a confrontation she couldn't imagine why she had ever been even slightly afraid of her. She had been so easily deflated.
"Yes, of course," Ainsley said calmly, and sat down and began to outline her other eye.
Downstairs the doorbell rang.
"That must be Peter," Marian said, "already." She had no idea it was so late. "I'm supposed to go over with him and help get things ready - I wish we could give you a ride, but I don't think we'll be able to wait."
"That's okay," said Ainsley, drawing a long gracefully curved artistic eyebrow on her forehead in the place where hers ought to have been. "I'll come on later. I've got some things to do anyway. If it's too cold for the baby I can always take a taxi, it isn't that far."
Marian went into the kitchen, where she had left her coat. I really should have eaten something, she said to herself, it's bad to drink on an empty stomach. She could hear Peter coming up the stairs. She took another vitamin pill. They were brown, oval shaped, with pointed ends: like hard-cased brown seeds. I wonder what they grind up to put into these things, she thought as she swallowed.
26
Peter unlocked the glass door with his key and fixed the latch so that the door would remain open for the guests. Then they stepped into the lobby and walked together across the wide tiled floor towards the staircase. The elevator was not yet in working order, though Peter said it would be by the end of next week. The service elevator was running but the workmen kept it locked.
The apartment building was almost finished. Each time Marian had come there she had been able to notice a minor alteration. Gradually the clutter of raw materials, pipes and rough boards and cement blocks, had disappeared, transmuted by an invisible process of digestion and assimilation into the shining skins that enclosed the space through which they were moving. The walls and the line of square supporting pillars had been painted a deep orange-pink; the lighting had been installed, and was blazing now at its full cold strength, since Peter had turned all the lobby switches on for his party. The floor-length mirrors on the pillars were new since the last time she had been there; they made the lobby seem larger, much longer than it really was. But the carpets, the furniture (imitation-leather sofas, she predicted) and the inevitable broad-leaved philodendrons twining around pieces of driftwood had not yet arrived. They would be the final rich layer, and would add a touch of softness, however synthetic, to this corridor of hard light and brittle surfaces.
They ascended the staircase together, Marian leaning on Peter's arm. In the hallways of each floor they passed as they went up Marian could see gigantic wooden crates and oblong canvas-covered shapes standing outside the apartment doors: they must be installing the kitchen equipment, the stoves and refrigerators. Soon Peter would no longer be the only person living in the building. Then they would turn the heat up to its full capacity; as it was, the building, all except Peter's place, was kept almost as cold as the outside air.
"Darling," she said in a casual tone when they had reached the fifth floor and were pausing for a moment on the landing to catch their breath, "something came up and I've invited a few more people. I hope you don't mind."
All the way there in the car she had been pondering how she would tell him. It would not be a good thing for those people to arrive with Peter not knowing anything about it, though it had been a great temptation to say nothing, to rely on her ability to cope with the situation when the moment came. In the confusion she would not have to explain how she had come to invite them, she didn't want to explain, she couldn't explain, and she dreaded questions from Peter about it. Suddenly she felt totally without her usual skill at calculating his reactions in advance. He had become an unknown quantity; just after she had spoken, blind rage and blind ecstasy on his part seemed equally possible. She took a step away from him and gripped the railing with her free hand: there was no telling what he might do.
But he only smiled down at her, a slight crease of concealed irritation appearing between his eyebrows. "Did you, darling? Well the more the merrier. But I hope you didn't ask too many: we won't have enough liquor to go around, and if there's anything I hate it's a party that goes dry."
Marian was relieved. Now he had spoken she saw that it was exactly what he would have said. She was so pleased with him for answering predictably that she pressed his arm. He slid it around her waist, and they began to climb again. "No," she said, "only about six." Actually there were nine, but since he had been so polite about it she made the courteous gesture of minimizing.
"Anyone I know?" he asked pleasantly.
"Well ... Clara and Joe," she said, her momentary elation beginning to vanish. "And Ainsley. But not the others: not really...."
"My, my," he said, teasing, "I wasn't aware you had that many friends I've never met. Been keeping little secrets, eh? I'll have to make a special point of getting to know them so I can find out all about your private life." He kissed her ear genially.
"Yes," Marian said, with feeble cheerfulness. "I'm sure you'll like them." Idiot, she raged at herself. Idiot, idiot. How could she have been so stupid? She foresaw how it was going to be. The office virgins would be all right - Peter would just look somewhat askance at them, particularly Emmy; and Clara and Joe would be tolerated. But the others. Duncan would not give her away - or would he? He might think it was funny to drop an insinuating remark; or he might do it out of curiosity. She could take him aside when he arrived though and ask him not to. But the roommates were an insoluble problem. She did not think either of them knew yet that she was engaged, and she could picture Trevor's shriek of surprise when he found out, the way he would glance at Duncan and say, "But my dear, we thought ..." and trail off into a silence weighted with innuendoes that would be even more dangerous than the truth. Peter would be furious, he would think someone had been infringing on his private-property rights, he wouldn't understand at all, and what would happen then? Why in heaven's name had she invited them? What a colossal mistake; how could she stop them from coming?
They reached the seventh floor and walked along the corridor towards the door of Peter's apartment. He had spread several newspapers outside his door for people to put their overshoes and boots on. Marian took off her own boots and stood them neatly beside Peter's overshoes. "I hope they'll follow our example," Peter said. "I just had the floors done, I don't want them getting all tracked up." With no others beside them yet, the two pairs looked like black leathery bait in a large empty newspaper trap.
Inside, Peter took off her coat for her. He put his hands on her bare shoulders and kissed her lightly on the back of the neck. "Yum yum," he said, "new perfume." Actually it was Ainsley's, an exotic mixture she had selected to go with the earrings.
He took off his own coat and hung it up in the closet just inside the door. "Take your coat into the bedroom, darling," he said, "and then come on out to the kitchen and help me get things ready. Women are so much better at arranging things on plates."
She walked across the living-room floor. The only addition Peter had made to its furniture recently was another matching Danish Modern chair; most of the space was still unoccupied. At least it meant that the guests would have to circulate: there wasn't room for all of them to sit down. Peter's friends did not, as a rule, sit on floors until rather late in the evening. Duncan might though. She imagined him cross-legged in the centre of the bare room, a cigarette stuck in his mouth, staring with gloomy incredulity perhaps at one of the soap-men or at one of the Danish Modern sofa legs while the other guests circled around him, not noticing him much but being careful not to step on him, as though he were a coffee table or a conversation pie
ce of some kind: a driftwood-and-parchment mobile. Maybe it wasn't too late to phone them and ask them not to come. But the phone was in the kitchen and so was Peter.
The bedroom was meticulously neat as always. The books and the guns were in their usual places; four of Peter's model ships now served as book-ends. Two of the cameras had been taken out of their cases and were standing on the desk. One of them had a flash attachment on it with a blue flashbulb already clipped inside the silver saucer-shaped reflector. More of the blue bulbs were lying near an opened magazine. Marian placed her coat on the bed; Peter had told her that the coat closet by the door wouldn't be large enough for all the coats and that the women were to put their coats in his bedroom. Her coat then, lying with its arms at its sides, was really more functional than it looked: it was acting as a sort of decoy for the other coats. By it they would see where they were supposed to go.
She turned, and saw herself reflected in the full-length mirror on the back of the cupboard door. Peter had been so surprised and pleased. "Darling, you look absolutely marvellous," he had said as soon as he had come up through the stairwell. The implication had been that it would be most pleasant if she could arrange to look like that all the time. He had made her turn around so he could see the back, and he had liked that too. Now she wondered whether or not she did look absolutely marvellous. She turned the phrase over in her mind: it had no specific shape or flavour. What should it feel like? She smiled at herself. No, that wouldn't do. She smiled a different smile, drooping her eyelids; that didn't quite work either. She turned her head and examined her profile out of the corner of her eye. The difficulty was that she couldn't grasp the total effect: her attention caught on the various details, the things she wasn't used to - the fingernails, the heavy earrings, the hair, the various parts of her face that Ainsley had added or altered. She was only able to see one thing at a time. What was it that lay beneath the surface these pieces were floating on, holding them all together? She held both of her naked arms out towards the mirror. They were the only portion of her flesh that was without a cloth or nylon or leather or varnish covering, but in the glass even they looked fake, like soft pinkish-white rubber or plastic, boneless, flexible....
Annoyed with herself for slipping back towards her earlier panic, she opened the cupboard door to turn the mirror to the wall and found herself staring at Peter's clothes. She had seen them often enough before, so there was no particular reason why she should stand, one hand on the edge of the door, gazing into the dark cupboard.... The clothes were hanging neatly in a row. She recognized all the costumes she had ever seen Peter wearing, except of course the dark winter suit he had on at the moment: there was his midsummer aspect, beside it his tweedy casual jacket that went with his grey flannels, and then the series of his other phases from late summer through fall. The matching shoes were lined up on the floor, each with its own personal shoe-tree inside. She realized that she was regarding the clothes with an emotion close to something like resentment. How could they hang there smugly asserting so much invisible silent authority? But on second thought it was more like fear. She reached out a hand to touch them, and drew it back: she was almost afraid they would be warm.
"Darling, where are you?" Peter called from the kitchen.
"Coming, darling," she called back. She shut the cupboard door hastily, glanced into the mirror and patted one of her fronds back into place, and went to join him, walking carefully inside her finely adjusted veneers.
The kitchen table was covered with glassware. Some of it was new: he must have bought it especially for the party. Well, they would always be able to use it after they were married. The counters held rows of bottles in different colours and sizes: scotch, rye, gin. Peter seemed to have everything well under control. He was giving some of the glasses a final polish with a clean tea towel.
"Anything I can do to help?" she asked.
"Yes darling, why don't you fix up some of these things on some dishes? Here, I've poured you a drink, scotch and water, we might as well get a head start." He himself had wasted no time; his own glass was standing half empty on the counter.
She sipped at her drink, smiling at him over the rim. It was far too strong for her; it burnt as it went down her throat. "I think you're trying to get me drunk," she said. "Could I have another ice cube?" She noticed with distaste that her mouth had left a greasy print on the rim of the glass.
"There's lots of ice in the fridge," he said, sounding pleased that she felt in need of dilution.
The ice was in a large bowl. There was more in reserve, two polyethylene bags. The rest of the space was taken up by bottles, bottles of beer stacked on the bottom shelf, tall green bottles of ginger ale and short colourless bottles of tonic water and soda on the shelves beside the freezing compartment. His refrigerator was so white and spotless and arranged; she thought with guilt of her own.
She busied herself with the potato chips and peanuts and olives and cocktail mushrooms, filling the bowls and platters that Peter had indicated, handling the foods with the very ends of her fingers so as not to get her nail polish dirty. When she had almost finished Peter came up behind her. He put one arm around her waist. With the other hand he half-undid the zipper of her dress; then he did it back up again. She could feel him breathing down the back of her neck.
"Too bad we don't have time to hop into bed," he said, "but I wouldn't want to get you all mussed up. Oh well, plenty of time for that later." He put his other arm around her waist.
"Peter," she said, "do you love me?" She had asked him that before as a kind of joke, not doubting the answer. But this time she waited, not moving, to hear what he would say.
He kissed her lightly on the earring. "Of course I love you, don't be silly," he said in a fond tone that indicated he thought he was humouring her. "I'm going to marry you, aren't I? And I love you especially in that red dress. You should wear red more often." He let go of her, and she transferred the last of the pickled mushrooms from the bottle to the plate.
"Come in here a minute, darling," his voice called. He was in the bedroom. She rinsed off her hands, dried them, and went to join him. He had switched on his desk lamp and was sitting at the desk adjusting one of his cameras. He looked up at her, smiling. "Thought I'd get some pictures of the party, just for the record," he said. "They'll be fun to have later, to look back on. This is our first real party together, you know; quite an occasion. By the way, have you got a photographer for the wedding yet?"
"I don't know," she said, "I think they have."
"I'd like to do it myself, but of course that's impossible," he said with a laugh. He began doing things to his light meter.
She leaned affectionately against his shoulder, glancing over it at the objects on the desk, the blue flashbulbs, the concave silver circle of the flash gun. He was consulting the open magazine; he had marked the article entitled, "Indoors Flash Lighting." Beside the column of print there was an advertisement: a little girl with pigtails on a beach, clutching a spaniel. "Treasure It Forever," the caption read.
She walked over to the window and looked down. Below was the white city, its narrow streets and its cold winter lights. She was holding her drink in one of her hands; she sipped at it. The ice tinkled against the glass.
"Darling," Peter said, "it's almost zero hour, but before they come I'd like to get a couple of shots of you alone, if you don't mind. There are only a few exposures left on this roll and I want to put a new one in for the party. That red ought to show up well on a slide, and I'll get some black-and-whites too while I'm at it."
"Peter," she said hesitantly, "I don't think ..." The suggestion had made her unreasonably anxious.
"Now don't be modest," he said. "Could you just stand over there by the guns and lean back a little against the wall?" He turned the desk lamp around so that the light was on her face and held the small black light meter out towards her. She backed against the wall.
He raised the camera and squinted through the tiny glass window at th
e top; he was adjusting the lens, getting her in focus. "Now," he said. "Could you stand a little less stiffly? Relax. And don't hunch your shoulders together like that, come on, stick out your chest, and don't look so worried darling, look natural, come on, smile...."
Her body had frozen, gone rigid. She couldn't move, she couldn't even move the muscles of her face as she stood and stared into the round glass lens pointing towards her, she wanted to tell him not to touch the shutter release but she couldn't move....
There was a knock at the door.
"Oh damn," Peter said. He set the camera on the desk. "Here they come. Well, later then, darling." He went out of the room.
Marian came slowly from the corner. She was breathing quickly. She reached out one hand, forcing herself to touch it.
"What's the matter with me?" she said to herself. "It's only a camera."
27
The first to arrive were the three office virgins, Lucy alone, Emmy and Millie almost simultaneously five minutes later. They were evidently not expecting to see each other there: each seemed annoyed that the others had been invited. Marian performed the introductions and led them to the bedroom, where their coats joined hers on the bed. Each of them said in a peculiar tone of voice that Marian should wear red more often. Each glanced at herself in the mirror, preening and straightening, before going out to the living room. Lucy refrosted her mouth and Emmy scratched hurriedly at her scalp.
They lowered themselves carefully onto the Danish Modern furniture and Peter got them drinks. Lucy was in purple velvet, with silver eyelids and false lashes; Emmy was in pink chiffon, faintly suggestive of high-school formals. Her hair had been sprayed into stiff wisps and her slip was showing. Millie was encased in pale-blue satin which bulged in odd places; she had a tiny sequin-covered evening-bag, and sounded the most nervous of the three.
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