The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  He's more considerate of her, more attentive; he's alert to her, watching her to see if she's watching. He gives her little kisses on the back of her neck, on her fingertips - little homage kisses, little forgive-me kisses, but nothing that might be construed as foreplay, because in bed he becomes inert, he turns his back, he pleads minor illnesses, he takes up the jackknife position, oystering himself against her stroking fingers. His prick is a serial monogamist; a sure sign of a dyed-in-the-wool romantic, in Roz's books. No cynical polygamy for it! One more, it wants. Just one more woman, because a man's reach should exceed his grasp, and Mitch is afraid of dying, and if he were ever to pause, to see himself as a man married to Roz, married only to Roz, married to Roz forever, in that instant his hair would fall out, his face would wrinkle up like a thousand-year-old mummy's, his heart would stop. Or that is how Roz explains him, to herself.

  She asks him if he's seeing someone.

  He says no. He says he's just tired. He's under a lot of pressure, he says, a lot of stress, and to prove it he gets up in the middle of the night and goes into his study, where he shuts the door and works until dawn. Sometimes there is the murmur of his voice: dictating letters, or so he claims, offering unasked-for explanations at breakfast.

  And thus it goes, until Mitch gets tired of whoever it is he really has been seeing. Then he becomes deliberately careless, then he starts to leave clues. The match folder from the restaurant where he and Roz have never been, the unknown-number long-distance phone-call entries on their home phone bill. Roz knows that at this point she is supposed to call him on it. She's supposed to confront him, to rave and scream, to cry and accuse and grovel, to ask him if he still loves her and whether the children mean anything to him at all. She's supposed to behave the way she did the first time (the second time, the fifth time), so he will be able to wriggle off the hook, so he can tell the other woman, the one with the haggard lines appearing around her eyes, the one with the pieces of love bitten out of her, that he will always adore her but he can't bear to leave the kids; and so he will be able to tell Roz - magnanimously, and with a heroic air of self-sacrifice - that she is the most important woman in his life, no matter how badly and foolishly he may behave from time to time, and he's given the other woman up for her, so how can she refuse to forgive him? The other women are just trivial adventures, he will imply: she's the one he comes home to. Then he will throw himself into her as into a warm bath, as into a deep feather bed, and exhaust himself, and sink again into connubial torpor. Until the next time.

  Lately, however, Roz has been refusing her move. She's learned to keep her big fat mouth shut. She ignores the phone bills and the match covers, and after the midnight conversations she tells him sweetly that she hopes he's not overdoing it with too much work. During his conference absences she finds other things to do. She has meetings to go to, she has plays to attend, she has detective novels to read, tucked up in bed with her night cream; she has friends, she has her business to keep up; her time is fully occupied with items other than him. She adopts absent-mindedness: she forgets to send his shirts to the cleaners, and when he speaks to her she says, "What did you just say, sweetie?" She buys new dresses and new perfumes, and smiles at herself in mirrors when he can be supposed not to be looking, but is, and Mitch begins to sweat.

  Roz knows why: his little piece of cotton candy is growing claws, she's saying she doesn't understand what's going on with him, she's whining, she's babbling about commitment and divorce, both of them things he is now supposed to be doing, after all he's promised. The net is closing around him and he's not being rescued. He's being thrown from the troika, thrown to the wolves, to the hordes of ravening bimbos snapping at his heels.

  In desperation he resorts to more and more open ploys. He leaves private letters lying around - the women's letters to him, and, worse, his letters to the women - he actually makes copies! - and Roz reads them and fumes, and goes to the gym to work out, and eats chocolate mud cake afterwards, and puts the letters back where she found them and does not mention them at all. He announces a separate vacation - maybe he will take the boat on a short trip around Georgian Bay, by himself, he needs some time to unwind - and Roz pictures some loose-mouthed slut spread out on the deck of the Rosalind II, and mentally rips up the snapshot, and tells him she thinks that's a wonderful idea because each of them could use a little space.

  God only knows how much she bites her tongue. She waits until the last minute, just before he really has to elope, or else get caught screwing his latest thing in Roz's raspberry-coloured bed in order to get Roz's attention. Only then will she reach out a helping hand, only then will she haul him back from the brink, only then will she throw the expected tantrum. The tears Mitch sheds then are not tears of repentance. They are tears of relief.

  Does Roz secretly enjoy all this? She didn't at first. The very first time it happened she felt scooped out, disjointed, scorned and betrayed, crushed by bulldozers. She felt worthless, useless, sexless. She thought she would die. But she's developed a knack, and therefore a taste. It's the same as a business negotiation or a poker game. She's always been a whiz at poker. You have to know when to up the stakes, when to call a bluff, when to fold. So she does enjoy it, some. It's hard not to enjoy something you're good at.

  But does her enjoyment make it all right? On the contrary. It's her enjoyment that makes it all wrong. Any old nun could tell you that, and many of them did tell Roz, once, in the earlier part of her life. If she could suffer through Mitch's attacks like a martyr, weeping and flagellating herself - if she could let them be imposed on her, without participating at all, without colluding, without lying and concealing and smiling and playing Mitch like an oversized carp, how right it would be. She'd be suffering for love, suffering passively, instead of fighting. Fighting for herself, for her idea of who she is. The right kind of love should be selfless, for women at any rate, or so said the Sisters. The Self should be scrubbed like a floor: on both knees, with a harsh wire brush, until nothing is left of it at all.

  Roz can't do that. She can't be selfless, she never could. Anyway her way is better. It's harder on Mitch, perhaps, but it's easier on her. She's had to give up some love, of course; some of her once-boundless love for Mitch. You can't keep a cool head when you're drowning in love. You just thrash around a lot, and scream, and wear yourself out.

  The May sunlight comes in through the window, and Mitch whistles "It Ain't Me, Babe," and Roz flosses her teeth quickly so Mitch won't see her doing it when he gets out of the shower. There is nothing so dampening to lust as dental floss, in Roz's opinion: a wide-open mouth with a piece of gooey string being manoeuvred around in it. She has always had good teeth, they are one of her features. Only recently has she begun to think they may not always be where they are right now, namely inside her mouth.

  Mitch steps out of the shower and comes up behind her and encircles her with his arms, and presses her against himself, and nuzzles her hair aside and kisses her on the neck. If they hadn't made love last night she would find this neck kiss conclusive: surely it is too courtly to be innocent! But at this preliminary stage, you never know.

  "Good shower, honey?" she says. Mitch makes the noise he makes when he thinks Roz has asked a question so meaningless it doesn't require an answer, not knowing that what she said wasn't a question anyway but an inverted wish: translation, I hope you had a good shower, and here is your opening to complain about any little physical problems you may be having so I can offer sympathy.

  "I thought we could have lunch," says Mitch. Roz notes the formulation: not Would you like to have lunch or I am inviting you to lunch. No room here for a yes or no from her, no room for a rejection: Mitch is nothing if not directive. But at the same time her heart turns over, because she doesn't get invitations like this from him very often. She looks at his face in the mirror, and he smiles at her. She always finds his mirror reflection disconcerting. Lopsided, because she isn't used to seeing him that way around and he looks reversed.
But nobody's symmetrical.

  She suppresses the desire to say, Judas Priest, how come I rate all of a sudden? Is hell freezing over, or what? Instead she says, "Honey, that would be great! I'd love it!"

  Roz sits on the bath stool, a converted Victorian commode, and watches Mitch while he shaves. She adores watching him shave! All that wild white foam, a sort of caveman beard, and the way he contorts his face to get at the hidden stubble. She has to admit he's not only distinguished, he's still what you'd call handsome, though his skin is getting redder and his blue eyes are paling. Ruggedly handsome, they might say in a men's clothing ad, though they'd be talking about the sheepskin coat. The sheepskin coat, the sheepskin gloves, the calfskin briefcase: that's Mitch's style. He has many items of good-taste expensive leather. He's not going bald yet, praise the Lord, not that Roz would mind but men seem to, and she hopes if he does start to shed that he won't get his armpit transplanted to the top of his head. Though he's showing some pepper and salt in the sideburns. Roz checks him over for rust spots, the way she would a car.

  What she's really waiting for though is the aftershave. Which one will he pick, and where will he put it? Ah! Nothing too seductive, just some stuff he got in England, heather or something. The outdoor mode. And nothing below the neck. Roz sighs with relief.

  She does love him. She loves him still. She can't afford to go overboard, is all.

  But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it's her excessive love that pushes him away.

  After Mitch is out of the bathroom Roz continues with her own preparations, the creams and lotions and perfumes that should never be seen by Mitch. They belong behind the scenes, as at theatres. Roz collects perfumes the way other people collect stamps, she's a sucker for anything new that comes out. She has three rows of them, three rows of cunning little bottles, sorted into categories that she thinks of as Flower Arranging, Executive Briskness, and Heavy Petting. Today, in honour of her lunch with Mitch, she chooses Shalimar, from the Heavy Petting section. But it's a bit too sultry for the middle of the day so she cuts it with something from Flower Arranging. Then, suited and made up but wearing her bedroom slippers and carrying her high heels, she descends to do her mother routine in the kitchen. Mitch, needless to say, is already out the door. He has a breakfast meeting.

  "Hi, kids," says Roz. There they are, all three of them, bless their greedy overnourished hearts, gobbling down the Rice Krispies with brown sugar and bananas on top, supervised by Dolores, who is from the Philippines and is, Roz hopes, beginning to get over her culture shock. "Hi, Dolores."

  Dolores fills Roz with anxiety and misgiving: should Dolores be here? Will Western culture corrupt her? Is Roz paying her enough? Does Dolores secretly hate them all? Is she happy, and, if not, is it Roz's fault? Roz has had spates of thinking they shouldn't have a live-in housekeeper. But when they don't, there's no one to do the kids' lunches and handle the illnesses and last-minute emergencies except Roz, and Roz becomes over-organized and can't pay enough attention to Mitch, and Mitch gets very short-tempered.

  Roz makes the rounds of the kitchen table, bestowing smooches. Larry is fourteen going on fifteen and embarrassed by her, but he endures. The twins kiss her back, briefly, milkily. "Mom," says Erin, "you smell like room freshener."

  How wonderful! How exact! Roz glances around the kitchen, done in warm wood panelling with chopping-block counters where the three school lunches sit in their matching lunch boxes, blue for Erin, green for Paula, black for Larry, and she lights up within, she glows! This is why she goes through it, this is what it's for! All the holy hell with Mitch has been worth it, for mornings like this, to be able to walk into the kitchen and say "Hi, kids," and have them continue scarfing down the breakfast food as if she's practically not there. She extends her invisible wings, her warm feathery angel's wings, her fluttery hen's wings, undervalued and necessary, she enfolds them. Secure, is what she wants them to feel; and they do feel secure, she's certain of it. They know this is a safe house, they know she's there, planted solidly, two feet on the ground, and Mitch is there too, more or less, in his own way. They know it's all right, so they can get on with whatever they're doing, they don't have to worry.

  Maybe she's wrong about Mitch, this time. Maybe there's nothing going on. Maybe he's finally settled down.

  41

  The lunch is at a restaurant called Nereids. It's a small place, a done-over house on Queen East, with a large well-put-together stone man without any clothes on standing outside it. Roz has never been to it before, but Mitch has; she can tell by the way the hostess greets him, by the way he looks around with an amused, proprietorial eye. She can see too why he likes it: the whole place is decorated with paintings, paintings that twenty years ago could've got you arrested, because they are all of naked women. Naked women, and naked mermaids too, with enormous and statuesque breasts: not a droopy boob among them. Well, naked people, because the naked women do not lack for male company. Walking to their table Roz gets a cock right in the eye, and averts her gaze.

  "What is this?" she whispers, alight with curiosity and appalled glee, and with the sheer pleasure of being taken out to lunch by Mitch. "Am I seeing what I think I'm seeing? I mean, is this a porn shop, or what?"

  Mitch chuckles, because he likes to shock Roz a little, he likes to show that he's above her prejudices. (Not that she's a prude, but there's private and there's public, and this is public. Public privates!) He explains that this is a seafood restaurant, a Mediterranean seafood restaurant, one of the best in the city in his opinion, but that the owner is also a painter, and some of these paintings are by him and some are by his friends, who appear to share his interests. Venus is featured, because she was after all a goddess of the sea. The fish motif accounts too for the mermaids. Roz deduces that these are not just naked people, they are mythological naked people. She can deal with that, she took it at university. Proteus blowing his conch. Or getting it blown.

  "Oh," says Roz in her mock-naive voice. "So this is capital-A Art! Does that make it legal?" and Mitch laughs again, uneasily, and suggests that maybe she should lower her voice because she wouldn't want to hurt people's feelings.

  If anyone else told her to lower her voice, Roz would know what to do: scream louder. But Mitch has always been able to make her feel as if she were just off the boat, head wrapped in a shawl, wiping her nose on her sleeve, and lucky to have a sleeve at that. Which boat? There are many boats in her ancestral past, as far as she can tell. Everyone she's descended from got kicked out of somewhere else, for being too poor or too politically uncouth or for having the wrong profile or accent or hair colour.

  The boat her father came over on was more or less recent, though far enough back to have arrived before the Canadian government walled out the Jews, in the thirties and during the war. Not that her father was even a whole Jew. Why do you inherit Jewishness through the mother's side? Tony once asked Roz. Because so many Jewish women were raped by Cossacks and what-have-you that they could never be sure who the father was. But her father was Jewish enough for Hitler, who hated mixtures more than anything.

  The boat on her mother's side was much further back. Famine caused by landlessness caused by war drove them out, a hundred and fifty years ago, Irish and Scots both. One of those families set out with five children and arrived with none, and then the father died of cholera in Montreal and the mother remarried, as fast as she could - an Irishman whose wife had died, so he needed a new one. Men needed wives then, for such enterprises. Off they went into the semi-cleared bush, to be overtaxed and to have other children and to plant potatoes, and to chop down trees with implements they'd never used before, because how many trees were left in Ireland? A lot of legs got chopped into, by those people. Tony, who is more interested in these details than Roz is, once showed Roz an old picture - the men standing in metal washtubs, to protect their legs from their own axes. Low comedy for the English middle classes, back home, living off the avails. Stupid bogtrotters! The Irish were al
ways good for a smirk or two, then.

  All of them came steerage, of course. Whereas Mitch's ancestors, although not created by God from the sacred mud of Toronto - they had to have got here somehow - must have come cabin. Which means they threw up into a china basin instead of onto other people's feet, on the way across.

  Big deal, but Roz is intimidated anyway. She opens the mermaid-festooned menu, and reads the items, and asks Mitch to advise her, as if she can't make up her own mind what to put into her mouth. Roz, she tells herself. You are a suck.

  She remembers the time she first went out with Mitch. She was old, she was almost twenty-two, she was over the hill. A lot of girls she'd known in high school and then in university were already married, so why wasn't she? It was a question that looked out at her from her mother's increasingly baffled eyes.

  Roz had already had a love affair, or rather a sex affair, and then another. She hadn't even felt too guilty about them. Although the nuns had ground it in about sex and what a sin it was, Roz was no longer a Catholic. She was once a Catholic, though, and once a Catholic, always a Catholic, according to her mother; so she'd had some qualms, after the first exhilarating sense of transgression had faded. Strangely enough, these qualms focused less on the sex itself than on the condoms - things you had to buy under the counter, not that she ever did, that was a man's job. Condoms seemed to her inherently wicked. But they were also inherently funny. They were like rubber gloves with only one finger, and every time she saw one she had to be severe with herself or she'd get the giggles, a terrifying thought because the man might think you were laughing at him, at his dick, at its size, and that would be fatal.

  But the sex was great, it was something she was good at, though neither one of these men was her idea of bliss from the neck up. One had big sticking-out ears, the other one was two inches shorter than she was, and she didn't see going through life in flats. She wanted children, but not runty ones with jug ears.