The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  Also Zenia has been out in the world. The wide world, wider than Toronto; the deep world, deeper than the small pond where Roz is such a large and sheltered frog. Zenia makes Roz feel not only protected, but lax. Her own battles have been so minor.

  "You've done really well," Roz says. "I mean - what a story! It's great material!" She's thinking of the magazine, because this is the kind of story they like to run: inspirational, a success story. A story about overcoming fears and obstacles, about facing up to yourself and becoming a whole person. It's like the story they did two months ago, about the woman who fought bulimia to a standstill. Roz finds stories about the one lost sheep who caused more joy in Heaven hard to resist. There's a story in the aunt, as well: Wise Woman World appreciates real-life heroines, ordinary women who have been more than ordinarily courageous.

  To her amazement, and also to her horror, Zenia begins to cry. Big tears roll from her eyes, which remain open and fixed on Roz. "Yeah," she says. "I guess that's all it amounts to. It's just a story. It's just material. Something to use."

  Roz, for gosh sake, get your big fat foot out of your mouth, thinks Roz. Miss Tact of 1983. "Oh honey, I didn't mean it that way," she says.

  "No," says Zenia. "I know. Nobody does. It's just, I'm so strung out. I've been on the edge, I've been out there so long; I've had to do it alone. I can't work it out with men, they all want the same thing from me, I just can't make those kinds of compromises any more. I mean, you've got all this, you've got a home, a husband, you've got your kids. You're a family, you've got solid ground under your feet. I've never had any of that, I've never fitted in. I've lived out of a suitcase, all my life; even now it's hand-to-mouth, that's what freelancing means, and I'm running out of energy, you know? There's just no base, there's no permanence!"

  How badly Roz has misjudged Zenia! Now she sees her in a new light. It's a tempestuous light, a bleak light, a lonely, rainy light; in the midst of it Zenia struggles on, buffeted by men, blown by the winds of fate. She's not what she appears, a beautiful and successful career woman. She's a waif, a homeless wandering waif; she's faltering by the wayside, she's falling. Roz opens her heart, and spreads her wings, her cardboard angel's wings, her invisible dove's wings, her warm sheltering wings, and takes her in.

  "Don't you worry," she says, in her most reassuring voice. "We'll work something out."

  47

  Mitch passes Zenia in the front hall as she is leaving and he is coming in. She gives him only the briefest and chilliest of nods.

  "Your old friend is certainly hostile," he says to Roz.

  "I don't think so," says Roz. "I think she's just tired."

  She doesn't want to share Zenia's dismaying life story with him. It's a story told just to her, for her, for her ears alone, by one outsider to another. Only Roz can understand it. Not Mitch, because what would he know about being outside?

  "Tired?" says Mitch. "She didn't look too tired."

  "Tired of men coming on to her," says Roz.

  "Don't believe it," says Mitch. "Anyway, I wasn't coming on to her. But I bet she'd like it if I did. She's an adventuress, she has the look."

  "Poetess, songstress, adventuress," says Roz lightly. Mitch is such an authority, he can tell what a woman thinks by the shape of her bottom. "Why not just call her an adventurer?" Roz is teasing, she knows the feminist terminology stuff drives him nuts. But also she thinks of herself as an adventurer, at least in some areas of life. The financial ones. Gentleman adventurer was once a term.

  "It's not the same," says Mitch. "Adventurers live by their wits."

  "And adventuresses?" says Roz.

  "By their tits," says Mitch.

  "Point," says Roz, laughing. He set her up for it.

  But he's wrong, thinks Roz, remembering. It was wits for Zenia also.

  That was the beginning of the end of her marriage, although she didn't realize it at the time. Or maybe it was the end of the end. Who knows? The end must have been a long time coming. These things are not sudden.

  Roz wouldn't have known it from Mitch, though. He made love to her that night with an urgency he hadn't shown for a long time. No voluptuous ease, no lordly walrus-like wallowing: it was snatch and grab. There was nothing he wanted her to give; instead he wanted to take. Roz finds herself being bitten, and is pleased rather than otherwise. She didn't know she was still that irresistible.

  A week later she arranges an early dinner, at Scaramouche, for herself and Zenia and the current Wise Woman World editor, whose name is BethAnne, and they ingest radicchio salads and exotic parboiled vegetables and clever pastas, and go over Zenia's resume and her file of magazine stories. First there are the ones written when she was on staff for a cutting-edge fashion magazine, in England. But she quit that job because she felt too tied down, and also she'd wanted to write about more political things. Libya, Mozambique, Beirut, the Palestinian camps; Berlin, Northern Ireland, Colombia, Bangladesh, El Salvador - Zenia has been to most of the hot spots Roz can remember, and a few she can't. Zenia regales them with incidents, of stones and bullets that have whizzed past her head, of cameras that have been broken by policemen, of narrow escapes in Jeeps. She names hotels.

  A lot of the stories are under other names, men's names, because, as Zenia says, the material in them is controversial, inflammatory even, and she didn't want to open the door in the middle of the night and find some enraged Arab or Irish hit man or Israeli or drug lord standing on the other side of it. "I wouldn't want this to get around," she says, "but that's the main reason I came back to Canada. It's kind of a safe haven for me - you know? Things were getting just a little too interesting for me, over there. Canada is such a - such a gentle place."

  Roz and BethAnne exchange a look across the table. Both are deeply thrilled. A political reporter from the trouble zones of the world, right in their midst; and a female political reporter, at that! Of course they must shelter her. What are safe havens for? It doesn't escape Roz that the opposite of interesting is not gentle, but boring. However, boring has something to offer, these days. Maybe they should export a little boring. It's better than getting your head shot off.

  "We'd love it if you'd do a story for us," says BethAnne.

  "To tell you the truth," says Zenia, "I'm sort of emptied out for now, story-wise. But I have a better idea."

  Her better idea is that she should help them out in the advertising department. "I've been through the magazine, and I've noticed you don't have many ads," she says. "You must be losing money, a lot of money."

  "Absolutely," says Roz, who knows exactly how much because the money they're losing is hers.

  "I think I could double your ads, in, say, two months," says Zenia. "I've had experience."

  She makes good her word. Roz isn't sure quite how it happened, but Zenia is soon sitting in on editorial meetings, and when BethAnne leaves to have another baby, creating a power vacuum, Zenia is offered the job, because who else - be honest - is as qualified? It may even be that Roz set it up for her. Most likely; it was the kind of sucky shoot-yourself-in-the-foot thing she must have been doing around then. Part of her save-poor-Zenia project. She'd rather not remember the details.

  Zenia has her photograph taken, a glamour shot in a V-necked outfit; it appears on the editorial page. Women figure out how old she is and wonder how she manages to stay looking so good. Circulation goes up.

  Zenia goes to parties now, a lot of parties. Why not? She has schlep, she has clout, she has - the men on the board are fond of saying - balls. Sharp as a tack, smart as a whip, and a great figure too, they can never resist adding, causing Roz to go home and frown at her dimpling grapefruit-peel leg skin in the mirror, and then to reproach herself for making odious comparisons.

  Some of the parties Zenia goes to are given by Roz. Roz supervises the passing of the filo-bundle and stuffed-mushroom nibbles, and greets her friends with hugs and airy kisses, and watches Zenia work the room. She works it seriously, thoroughly; she seems to know by instinct jus
t how much time any one person is worth. She spends some of her precious moments on Roz, though. She gets her off to one side and murmurs to her, and Roz murmurs back. Anyone watching them would think they were conspirators.

  "You're really good at this," Roz tells Zenia. "Me, I always end up stuck for hours with some hard-luck story, but you never get cornered."

  Zenia smiles back at her. "All foxes dig back doors. I like to know where the exit sign is." And Roz remembers the story of Zenia's narrow escape from death, and feels sorry for her. Zenia always arrives alone. She leaves alone. It's sad.

  Mitch works the room too. Surprisingly, he doesn't work the part of it with Zenia in it. Ordinarily he'd flirt with everyone; he'd flirt with a saluki if there was nothing else on offer. He likes to see his own charm reflected back at him from the eyes of every woman in the room; he goes from one to another as if they're bushes and he's a dog. But he stays away from Zenia, and, when she's watching, pays extra attention to Roz. He keeps a hand on her whenever possible. Steadying himself, Roz thinks later.

  Roz grows increasingly uneasy. There's something not quite right about the turn things have taken, but what could it be? She set out to help Zenia, and it appears she has helped her, and Zenia is certainly grateful, and she's performing well; they have lunch once a week just to go over things, and so Zenia can ask Roz's advice, because Roz has been around the magazine so much longer than Zenia has. Roz dismisses her own reaction as simple envy. Ordinarily if there was something bothering her, something she couldn't quite put her finger on, she'd discuss it with Tony or Charis. But she can't do that, because she's friends with Zenia now, and they might not understand that part of it. They might not understand how Roz could be friends with someone who is - face it - an enemy of theirs. They might see it as betrayal.

  "I've been giving it some thought," Zenia says at the next board of directors meeting. "We're still losing money, despite the new ads. We can't seem to hook the big spenders - the perfume companies, the cosmetics, high fashion. To be honest, I think we need to change the name. The concept we're working with is too seventies. This is the eighties - we're way beyond a lot of those old positions."

  "Change the name?" asks Roz, with fond memories of the early collective. What happened to those women? Where did they go? Why has she lost touch with them? Where did all these business suits come from?

  "Yes," says Zenia. "I've had a small survey done. We'd do better with Woman World, or, even better, just plain Woman."

  It's obvious to Roz what's being dropped. The wisdom part, for one thing. Also the world. But how can she object to Woman without implying that there's something wrong with being one?

  So Zenia changes the name, and soon the magazine changes too. It changes so much that Roz hardly recognizes it. Gone are the mature achievers, the stories about struggling to overcome sexism and stacked odds. Gone too are the heavy-hitting health care stories. Now there are five-page spreads on spring fashions, and new diets and hair treatments and wrinkle creams, and quizzes about the man in your life and whether or not you're handling your relationships well. Are these things unimportant? Roz would be the last to say so, but surely there's something missing.

  She no longer has lunch with Zenia once a week; Zenia is now too busy. She's a busy bee, she has a lot of iron maidens in the fire. So, at the next board meeting, Roz pushes her about the shift in content. "This wasn't the original idea," she says.

  Zenia smiles gently at her. "Most women don't want to read about other women who achieve," she says. "It makes them feel unsuccessful."

  Roz finds herself getting angry - surely this is a dig at her - but she controls herself. "What do they want to read about, then?"

  "I'm not talking intellectuals," says Zenia. "I'm talking about the average woman. The average magazine-buying woman. According to our demographics, they want to read about how to look. Oh, and sex, of course. Sex with the right accessories."

  "What are the right accessories?" asks Roz pleasantly. She thinks she'll choke.

  "Men," says Zenia. The men on the board of directors laugh, Mitch included. So much for Roz. She has a flash of Zenia, wearing black fringed gloves with gauntlets, blowing the smoke off her six-shooter, sliding it back into her holster.

  Roz is the majority shareholder. She could pull strings, she could stack the deck, she could force Zenia out. But she can't do that without looking like a vindictive shrew.

  And let's face it, they're making money, finally, and money talks.

  One day Mitch is gone. He is just gone, in a snap of the fingers, in a wink. No prelude, no hints, no letters left lying around, none of the usual. But looking back, Roz realizes he must have been gone for some time.

  Where has he gone? He's gone to live with Zenia. A whole courtship, a whole romance, has taken place right under Roz's very nose and she hasn't noticed a thing. It must have been going on for months.

  But no, that isn't it. Mitch tells her - he seems to want to tell her - that it was all very sudden. Unexpected to him. Zenia came to his office one evening, after work, to consult him about some financials, and then ...

  "I don't want to hear about it," says Roz, who is familiar with the pleasures of narration. She doesn't intend to give him the satisfaction.

  "I just want you to understand," says Mitch.

  "Why?" says Roz. "Why is that important? Who gives a shit whether I understand or not?"

  "I do," says Mitch. "Because I still love you. I love both of you. This is really difficult for me."

  "Get stuffed," says Roz.

  Mitch came to the house when Roz wasn't there. He came furtively because he couldn't face her. He came and went, soft as a thief, and he removed things: his suits from the mirror-door bedroom closet, his boat clothes, his best bottles of wine, his pictures. Roz would come back after work to find these blanks, these piercing eloquent spaces, where something of Mitch's used to be. But he left some things behind: an overcoat, his anorak, some books, his old boots, boxes of this and that in the storage room down in the cellar. What was it supposed to mean? That he was of two minds? That he still had one foot in the door? Roz almost wished he would take everything away at once, make a clean sweep. On the other hand, where there were boots there was hope. But hope was the worst. As long as she had hope, how was she supposed to get on with her life? Which was what women in her situation were constantly urged to do.

  Mitch didn't take anything that wasn't his. He didn't take anything Roz had bought for the house, bought for them to share. Roz was surprised to discover how little he had actually been involved in all that shopping, how few choices he'd helped her make; or, look at it another way, how little he'd contributed. Well, how could he have helped her? She'd always forestalled him; she'd seen a need or a desire and supplied it instantly, with a wave of her magic chequebook. Maybe it had grated on him after a while, her munificence, her largesse, her heaps of pearls, her outpourings. Ask and it shall be given. Heck, Mitch didn't even ask! All he had to do was lie on the lawn with his mouth open while Roz climbed the tree and shook down the golden apples.

  Maybe that was Zenia's trick. Maybe she presented herself as vacancy, as starvation, as an empty beggar's bowl. Maybe the posture she'd assumed was on her knees, hands upstretched for alms. Maybe Mitch wanted the opportunity to do a little coin-scattering, an opportunity never provided by Roz. He was tired of being given to, of being forgiven, of being rescued; maybe he wanted to do a little giving and rescuing of his own. Even better than a beautiful woman on her knees would be a grateful beautiful woman on her knees. But hadn't Roz been grateful enough?

  Apparently not.

  Roz stoops low. She gives in to her gnawing hunger for dirt and hires a private detective, a woman named Harriet; Harriet the Hungarian, someone she learned about, way back, through Uncle Joe, who had some Hungarian connections. "I just want to know what they're up to," she tells Harriet.

  "What sort of thing?" asks Harriet.

  "Where they're living, what they do," says Ro
z. "Whether she's real."

  "Real?" says Harriet.

  "Where she came from," says Roz.

  Harriet finds out sufficient. Sufficient to make Roz even more miserable than she is. Zenia and Mitch live in a penthouse apartment overlooking the harbour, near where Mitch moors his boat. That way they can go for quick little sails on it, Roz supposes, though she can't see Zenia putting up with too much of that. Getting wet, chipping her polish. Not as much as Roz put up with. What else do they do? They eat out, they eat in. Zenia goes shopping. What's to see?

  The question of whether Zenia is real or not is more difficult to solve. She doesn't seem to have been born, at least not under that name; but how can anyone say, since so much of Berlin went up in smoke? Inquiries in Waterloo produce nothing. She didn't go to school there, or not under her present name. Is she even Jewish? It's anybody's guess, says Harriet.

  "But what about the picture?" says Roz. "Her family?"

  "Oh, Roz," says Harriet. "Pictures are a dime a dozen. Whose word have you got for it that those people were her family?"

  "She knew about my father," says Roz. She's reluctant to let go.

  "So did I," said Harriet. "Come on, Roz, there are hints about all that in every magazine interview you've ever given. What did she tell you about him that any twelve-year-old with an active imagination wouldn't have been able to make up?"

  "You're right," sighs Roz, "but there was so much detail."

  "She's very good," Harriet agrees.

  London proves more fruitful: Zenia did indeed work for a magazine there; she appears to have written some of the articles she's claimed as hers, though by no means all of them. The ones on clothing, yes; the ones on political hot spots, no. The ones with men's names actually seem to have been written by the men in question, although three out of the five are dead. She made a brief traverse through the gossip columns when her name was linked with that of a cabinet minister; the phrase "good friend" was used, and marriage was subsequently hinted at but did not take place. Then there was a scandal when it came to light that Zenia had been seeing a Soviet cultural attache at the same time. "Seeing" was a euphemism. There was a lot of political name-calling, and the usual English tabloid foxhunting and muckraking. After that incident Zenia had dropped out of sight.