The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  She stands on tiptoe and peers through the intertwined hedge of arms and shoulders and heads, of black wool rib-knit breasts and denim chests and torsos. But West is nowhere in sight.

  Maybe it's because the room is so dark; maybe that's why she can't see him. Then she realizes that the room is not only dark, it's black. The walls, the ceiling, even the floor are a glossy, hard enamel black. Even the windows have been painted over; even the light fixtures. Instead of electric lights there are candles, stuck in Chianti bottles. And all over the room there are big silvery juice tins, peeled of their labels and filled with bunches of white chrysanthemums that waver and shine in the light from the candles.

  Tony wants to leave, but she wouldn't like to do that without seeing West. He might think she'd refused his invitation, had failed to come; he might think she was being snobby. Also she wants to be soothed and reassured: with him there she will not be so out of place. She goes in search of him, down a hallway that leads off to the left. This terminates in a bathroom. A door opens, there's a flushing sound, and a large, hair-covered man comes out. He gives Tony an unfocused look. "Shit, the Girl Guides," he says.

  Tony feels about two inches tall. She flees into the bathroom, which will at least be a refuge. It too has been painted black, even the bathtub, even the sink, even the mirror. She locks the door and sits down on the black toilet, touching it first to make sure the paint is dry.

  She's not sure she's in the right place. Perhaps West doesn't live here at all. Perhaps she has the wrong address; perhaps this is some other bash. But she checked the scrap of paper before coming up the stairs. Perhaps, then, it's the time that's wrong - perhaps she's too early for West, or too late. There's no way of knowing, since his comings and goings have always been so unpredictable.

  She could go out of the bathroom and ask someone - one of the enormous, furry men, one of the tall supercilious women - where he might be, but she dreads doing this. What if nobody knows who he is? It would be safer to stay in here, replaying the Battle of Culloden to herself, calculating the odds. She arranges the terrain - the hill that slopes downwards, the line of the stone wall with the tidy British soldiers and their tidy guns in a row behind it. The raggedy clans charging, plunging down the hill yelling, with nothing but their heavy outdated swords and their round bucklers. Falling in picturesque, noble heaps. An abattoir. Courage is of use only when technologies are evenly matched. Bonnie Prince Charlie was an idiot.

  Unwinnable, she thinks, as a battle. The only hope would have been to avoid a battle altogether. To reject the terms of the argument, refuse the conventions. Strike at night, then melt away into the hills. Disguise yourself as a peasant. Not a fair fight, but then, what is a fair fight? Nothing she's learned about yet.

  Someone's knocking at the door. Tony gets up, flushes the black toilet, rinses her hands at the black sink. There's no towel so she wipes her hands on her corduroy jumper. She unlocks the door: it's one of the ballerina women.

  "Sorry," Tony says to her. The woman stares coldly.

  Tony goes back into the main room, intending to leave. Without West, there's no point. But there, in the centre of the room, is Zenia.

  Tony doesn't know Zenia's name yet, but Zenia doesn't seem to need a name. She isn't wearing black like most of the others. Instead she's in white, a sort of shepherd's smock that comes down to mid-thigh on the long legs of her tight jeans. The smock isn't thin but it suggests lingerie, perhaps because the front buttons are open to a point level with her nipples. In the V of cloth, a small firm half-breast curves away to either side, like back-to-back parentheses.

  All the others, in their black, sink into the black background of the walls. Zenia stands out: her face and hands and torso swim against the darkness, among the white chrysanthemums, as if disembodied and legless. She must have thought it all out beforehand, Tony realizes - how she would glow in the dark like an all-night gas station, or - to be honest - like the moon.

  Tony feels herself being sucked back, pushed back into the black enamel of the wall. Very beautiful people have that effect, she thinks: they obliterate you. In the presence of Zenia she feels more than small and absurd: she feels non-existent.

  She ducks into the kitchen. It's black too, even the stove, even the refrigerator. The paint glistens moistly in the candlelight.

  West is leaning against the refrigerator. He is quite drunk. Tony can see it at once, she's had enough practice. Something turns over inside her, turns over and sinks.

  "Hi, Tony," he says. "How's my little pal?"

  West has never called Tony his little pal before. He's never called her little. It seems a violation.

  "Actually I have to go," she says.

  " 'Night's young," he says. "Have a beer." He opens the black refrigerator, which is still white inside, and digs out two Molson's Ex. "Where'd I put the fucker?" he asks, patting parts of his body.

  Tony doesn't know what he's talking about or what he's doing, or even who he is, exactly. Not who she thought he was, that's for sure. He doesn't usually swear. She starts backing away.

  "It's in your pocket," says a voice behind her. Tony looks: it's the girl in the white smock. She smiles at West, points her index finger at him. "Hands up."

  Grinning, West puts his hands in the air. The girl kneels and fumbles in his pockets, leaning her head against his thighs, and after a very long moment - during which Tony feels as if she's being forced to peep through a keyhole at a scene far too intimate to be borne - brings out a bottle-opener. She opens both beers with it, flipping the tops off expertly, hands one to Tony, tilts the other one back and drinks from it. Tony watches her throat undulate as she swallows. She has a long neck.

  "What about me?" says West, and the girl hands him the bottle.

  "So, how do you like our flowers?" she says to Tony. "We stole them from the Mount Hope Cemetery. Some big cheese croaked. They're sort of wilted, though: we had to wait until everyone had buggered off." Tony notes the words - stole, croaked, buggered - and feels timid and lacking in style.

  "This is Zenia," says West. There's a proprietary reverence in his voice, and a huskiness, that Tony doesn't like at all. Mine, is what he means. Handfuls of mine.

  Tony can see now that she was wrong about we. We had nothing to do with male roommates. We meant Zenia. Zenia is now leaning back against West as if he's a lamppost. He has his arms around her waist, under her smock; his face is half hidden in her smoky hair.

  "They're great," Tony says. She tries to sound enthusiastic. She takes an awkward swallow from the bottle Zenia has given her, and concentrates to avoid spluttering. Her eyes are stinging, her face reddening, her nose is full of prickles.

  "And this is Tony," says West's voice. His mouth is behind Zenia's hair, so it looks like the hair talking. Tony thinks about running: out the kitchen door, between the denim-covered legs in the main room, down the stairs. A stampeding mouse.

  "Oh, this is Tony," says Zenia. She sounds amused. "Hi there, Tony. Do you like our black walls? Please get your cold hands off my stomach," she adds, to West.

  "Cold hands, warm heart," West mutters.

  "Heart," says Zenia. "Who cares about your heart? It's not your most useful body part." She lifts up the bottom of her smock, finds his two big hands, extracts them, and holds them in hers, caressing them, all the time smiling at Tony. "It's revenge," she says. Her eyes aren't black, as Tony thought at first: they're navy blue. "This is a revenge party. The landlord's kicking us out, so we thought we'd give the old fucker something to remember us by. It'll take him more than two coats to cover this up. The lease said we had the right to paint, but it didn't say what colour. Did you see the toilet?"

  "Yes," says Tony. "It's very slippery." She doesn't mean this to be funny, but Zenia laughs.

  "You're right," she says to West. "Tony's a scream."

  Tony hates being talked about in the third person. She's always hated it; her mother used to do the same thing. West has been discussing her with Zenia, the two of
them, analyzing her behind her back, sticking adjectives onto her as if she's a child, as if she's anyone at all, as if she's a topic. It occurs to her also that the only reason West asked her to their party is that Zenia told him to. She sets the beer bottle down on the black stove, noticing that it's half empty. She must have drunk the other half. How did she do that? "I should be going," she says, with what she hopes is dignity.

  Zenia doesn't seem to have heard her. Neither does West. He's peering out now from the burrow of Zenia's hair; she can see his eyes gleaming in the light from the candles.

  Tony's arms and legs are coming detached from the rest of her, and sounds are slowing down. It's the beer, she doesn't usually drink it, she isn't used to it. Longing sweeps through her. She wishes she knew someone who would bury his face in her own hair like that. She wishes it could be West. But she doesn't have enough hair for that. He would just hit scalp.

  She's lost something. She's lost West. Tsol. Reverof. It's a dumb thought: how can you lose somebody you never really had?

  "So, Tony," says Zenia. She says Tony as if it's a foreign word, as if it's in quotes. "West tells me you're brilliant. What's your direction?"

  Tony thinks that Zenia is asking her where she's going from here. She could pretend there's another party, a better one, to which Zenia herself has not been invited. But it's not likely she would be believed. "I guess I'll take the subway back," she says. "I have to work."

  "She's always working," says West.

  "No," says Zenia, with a hint of impatience. "I mean, what do you want to do with your life? What's your obsession?"

  Obsession. Tony doesn't know anyone who talks like that. Only criminals and creepy people have obsessions, and if you have one yourself you aren't supposed to admit to it. I don't have to answer, she tells herself. She pictures the girls in the Common Room, and what they would think of obsessions; and what they would think of Zenia, come to that. They would think she was full of it, and also a slut, with her buttons undone like that. They would disapprove of her slutty hair. Usually Tony finds their judgments on other women catty and superficial, but right now she finds them comforting.

  She should smile a bored, dismissive smile. She should say, "My what?" and laugh, and act puzzled, as if it's a stupid question. She knows how to do this, she has watched and listened.

  But it isn't a stupid question, and she knows the answer. "Raw," she says.

  "What?" says Zenia. She's concentrating on Tony now, as if she is finally interesting. Something worth figuring out. "Did you say law?"

  Tony realizes she's made a mistake, a slip of the tongue. She's reversed the word. It must be the alcohol.

  "I mean war," she says, pronouncing this time carefully. "That's what I want to do with my life. I want to study war." She shouldn't have said it, she shouldn't have told that much about herself, she's put it wrong. She's been ridiculous.

  Zenia laughs, but it isn't a mocking laugh. It's a laugh of delight. She touches Tony's arm, lightly, as in a game of tag played with cobwebs. "Let's have coffee," she says. And Tony smiles.

  20

  That was it, that was the decisive moment. Rubicon! The die was cast, but who would have known it at the time? Not Tony, although she does remember a sensation, the sensation of having lost her footing, of being swept out into a strong current. And what, exactly, had acted as the invitation proper? What had beckoned to Zenia, shown her an opening in Tony's beetle-like little armoured carapace? Which was the magic word, raw or war? Probably it was the two of them together; the doubleness. That would have had high appeal, for Zenia.

  But this may be just overcomplication, intellectual web-spinning, to which Tony knows she is prone. Doubtless it was something much simpler, much more obvious: Tony's confusion, her lack of defences under the circumstances, the circumstances being West; West, and the fact that Tony loved him. Zenia must have sensed this before Tony did, and known that Tony was no threat, and known as well that Tony had some feathers worth plucking.

  But what about Tony herself? What was Zenia offering her, or appearing to offer, as she stood there in the black kitchen, as she smiled with her fingers lightly on Tony's arm, shimmering in the candlelight like a mirage?

  Nature abhors a vacuum, thinks Tony. How inconvenient. Otherwise, we vacuums might lead our lives in relative security.

  Not that Tony is a vacuum now. No, not at all. Now she's replete, now she wallows in plenitude, now she's guarding a castle full of treasure, now she's involved. Now she must take hold.

  Tony paces the basement floor, her pen and notebook neglected on the ping-pong table, thinking of West sleeping upstairs, with the air going deeply into and out of him; West, shifting and groaning, with forlorn sighs, sighs that sound like heartbreak. She listens to the screams of the dying, to the cheering of the Saracens on the barren coast, to the refrigerator humming nearby, to the clunk of the furnace as it turns itself off and on, and to Zenia's voice.

  A drawling voice, with a slight hesitation in it, a slight foreign flavour, the hint of a lisp; low, succulent, but with a hard surface. A glazed chocolate, with a soft, buttery, deceptive centre. Sweet, and bad for you.

  "What would cause you to kill yourself?" says Zenia.

  "Kill myself?" says Tony wonderingly, as if she's never thought of such a thing. "I don't know. I don't think I would."

  "What if you had cancer?" Zenia says. "What if you knew you were going to die slowly, in unbearable pain? What if you knew where the microfilm was, and the other side knew you knew, and they were going to torture you to get it out of you and then kill you anyway? What if you had a cyanide tooth? Would you use it?"

  Zenia is fond of such interrogations. Usually they are based on fairly extreme scripts: what if you'd been on the Titanic, going down? Would you have elbowed and shoved, or stood back and drowned politely? What if you were starving, in an open boat, and one of the others died? Would you eat him? If so, would you push the others overboard so you could keep him all to yourself? She seems to have her own answers fairly firmly in place, though she does not always reveal them.

  Despite the weightless corpses strewn about in her head, despite her graph-paper wars and the mass bloodshed she contemplates daily, Tony finds herself taken aback by such questions. They aren't abstract problems - they're too personal for that - and there are no correct solutions to them. But it would be a tactical error to let her dismay show. "Well, you'd never know, would you?" she says. "Unless it happened."

  "Granted," Zenia says. "Well then, what would cause you to kill someone else?"

  Tony and Zenia are having coffee, as they have done almost every third day now for the past month, ever since they met. Or not every third day, every third evening: right now it's eleven o'clock, Tony's usual bedtime, and here she is, still up. She isn't even sleepy.

  They aren't in a tame campus coffee shop, either; they're in a real coffee shop, near Zenia's new place. Zenia's and West's. A dive, says Zenia. This coffee shop is called Christie's, and it stays open all night. At the moment there are three men in it, two of them in trench coats, one in a greasy tweed jacket, sobering up, says Zenia; and two women, sitting in a booth together, talking in low voices.

  Zenia says these women are prostitutes; prosties, she calls them. She says she can always tell. They don't seem like very attractive sexual produce, to Tony: they aren't young, they're stuccoed with makeup, and they have forties hairdos, shoulder length, stiffened with spray and with a parting of white scalp at the side. One of them has taken off a sling-backed shoe, and dangles her nyloned foot out over the aisle. The whole place, with its dirty linoleum floor and its out-of-order jukebox and its thick, chipped cups, has a discarded quality to it, a raffish and tawdry carelessness, that repels Tony and also thrills her deeply.

  She's been signing out at McClung Hall for later and later hours. She says she's helping to paint the sets for a play: The Trojan Women. Zenia read for Helen, but instead she's Andromache. "All that wailing," she says. "Female whining. I hate
it really." She says she once wanted to be an actress, but not any more. "Fucking directors think they're God," she says. "You're just dog food, as far as they're concerned. And the way they drool and paw at you!" She's thinking of quitting.

  Drooling and pawing is a new concept, for Tony. She has never been drooled on or pawed. She would like to ask how it is done, but refrains.

  Sometimes the two of them really do paint sets. Not that Tony's any good at painting - she's never painted anything before in her life - but the others give her a brush and the paint and show her where, and she puts on the base colours. She gets paint on her face and in her hair, and on the man's shirt they've provided, which comes down to her knees. She feels baptized.

  By the others - the thin scornful straight-maned women, the black-sweatered, ironic men - she is almost accepted, which is naturally Zenia's doing. For some reason that none of these people can figure out, Zenia and Tony are thick as thieves. Even the girls in the residence have noticed it. They no longer call Tony Tonikins, or offer her cookie shards, or beg her to sing "Darling Clementine" in reverse. They have backed off.

  Tony can't tell if this is dislike or respect; or possibly it's fright, because Zenia, it seems, has a certain reputation among them. Although none of them know her personally, she is one of the visible people - visible to everyone else, but unseen by Tony before now because she wasn't looking. It's partly her appearance: Zenia is the incarnation of how plainer, more oblong women wish to look, and therefore to be: it's a belief of theirs that such things can be arranged from the outside in. She is thought also to be brilliant, and she gets top marks - though she doesn't exert herself, she hardly ever attends a lecture, so how does she do it? Brilliant, and also fearsome. Wolfish, feral, beyond the pale.

  Tony hears some of this from Roz, who barges into her room one morning while Tony is studying, trying to catch up on the time she's missed the night before. Mothering Roz descends with squawks and a flutter of feathers, and attempts to enlighten small Tony, towards whom she feels protective. Tony listens in silence, her eyes hardening, her ears closing over. She will not hear a word against Zenia. Jealous bitch, she thinks. Hctib suolaej.