The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  She's not that keen on going to Roz's anyway, though Roz's twins are - in theory - favourites of hers. She used to regret not having had children, though she wasn't sure she would have been all that good at it, considering Anthea. But being a godmother has suited her better than being a mother - for one thing it's more intermittent - and the twins have done her proud. They have a fine glittering edge to them, and so does her other goddaughter, Augusta. None of them is what you would call self-effacing - all three would be at home on horses, riding astride, hair flying, scouring the plains, giving no quarter. Tony isn't sure how they've come by their confidence, their straight-ahead level gazes, their humorous but remorseless mouths. They have none of the timidity that used to be so built in, for women. She hopes they will gallop through the world in style, more style than she herself has been able to scrape together. They have her blessing; but from a distance, because close up Augusta is faintly chilling - she's so intent on success - and the twins have become gigantic; gigantic, and also careless. Tony is slightly afraid of them. They might step on her by mistake.

  So it was Tony who suggested the Toxique, this time. Roz may have something to tell, but Tony has something to tell also and it's fitting that it should be told here. She has requested their usual table, the one in the corner by the smoked mirror. From the young woman, or possibly man, who appears beside her, dressed in a black cat-suit with a wide leather stud-covered belt and five silver earrings in each ear, she orders a bottle of white wine and a bottle of Evian.

  Charis arrives at the same time as the bottles, looking strangely pale. Well, thinks Tony, she always looks strangely pale, but tonight she's even more so. "Something weird happened to me today," she tells Tony, shedding her damp woollen sweater-coat and her fuzzy knitted hat. But this is not an unusual thing for Charis to say, so Tony merely nods and pours her a glass of Evian. Sooner or later they will get the story of the dream about shiny people sitting in trees, or the odd coincidence involving street numbers or cats that look just like other cats that used to belong to someone Charis once knew and doesn't any more, but Tony would rather have it wait till Roz gets here. Roz is more tolerant of such intellectual wispiness, and better at changing the subject.

  Roz comes in, waving and yoo-hooing and wearing a flame-red trench coat and matching sou'wester, and shaking herself. "Judas Priest!" she says, pulling off her purple gloves. "Wait till you hear! You won't believe!" Her tone is dismayed rather than jubilant.

  "You saw Zenia today," says Charis.

  Roz's mouth opens. "How did you know?" she says.

  "Because, so did I," says Charis.

  "And so did I," says Tony.

  Roz sits heavily down, and stares at each one of them in turn. "All right," she says. "Tell."

  Tony waits in the lobby of the Arnold Garden Hotel, which would not have been her own hotel of choice. It's a graceless fifties construction, cement slabs on the outside and a lot of plate glass. From her vantage point she can see out through the double doors at the back, into a patio dotted with chunky planters and with a large circular fountain off in one corner, non-functional at this time of year and overlooked by tiers of balconies with orange-painted sheet-metal railings. The post-modern awning and brass at the front is just an add-on: the essence of the Arnold Garden is those balconies. Though efforts are being made: above Tony looms a prehensile arrangement of purplish dried flowers and wires and strange pods, daring the aesthetically uninitiated to call it ugly.

  The patio and the fountain must be the garden part of the Arnold Garden, Tony decides; but she wonders about the Arnold. Is it Arnold as in Matthew, he of the ignorant armies clashing by night? Or Arnold as in Benedict, traitor or hero depending on point of view? Or perhaps it's a first name, denoting some bygone city councillor, some worthy backroom fixer whose friends called him Arnie. The lobby, with its framed prints of rotund pink-coated foxhunting Englishmen, gives no clue.

  The chair Tony sits in is leathery and slippery and built for colossi. Her feet don't touch the ground even if she moves well forward, and if she slides herself all the way back, then her knees can't bend over the front edge and her legs stick out stiffly like the legs of a china doll. So she has adopted a compromise - a sort of hunched curvature - but she is far from comfortable.

  Also, despite her demure navy blue coat and her sensible walking shoes and her wimpy Peter Pan collar, she feels conspicuous. Her bad intentions must be sticking out all over her. She has the sensation that she's growing hair, little prickles of it pushing out through the skin of her legs like the quills of a porcupine, hanks of it shoving through in tufts around her ears. It's Zenia doing this, the effort of tracking Zenia: it's fusing her neurons, rearranging the molecules in her brain. A hairy white devil is what she's becoming, a fanged monster. It's a necessary transformation perhaps, because fire must be fought with fire. But every weapon is two-edged, so there will be a price to pay: Tony won't get out of this unaltered.

  In her outsized tote bag is her father's Luger, unearthed from the box of Christmas decorations where it's usually stored, and freshly oiled and loaded according to the instructions in the manual of forties weaponry she photocopied in the library. She took care to wear gloves while photocopying, so as not to leave fingerprints, just in case. In case they try to pin anything on her, afterwards. The gun itself is unregistered, she believes. It is after all a sort of souvenir.

  Beside it is another implement. Tony has taken advantage of one of the many tool circulars littering her front lawn to purchase a cordless drill, with screwdriver attachment, at a third off. She has never used one of these before. Also, she's never used a gun before. But there's a first time for everything. Her initial idea was that she could use the drill to break into Zenia's room, if necessary. Unscrew the door hinges, or something. But it occurs to her, sitting here in the lobby, that the drill too is potentially lethal, and might be put to use. If she could murder Zenia with a cordless drill, what policeman would be smart enough to figure it out?

  But the actual scenario is unclear in her mind. Maybe she should shoot Zenia first and then finish her off with the drill: the other way around would be cumbersome, as she would have to sneak up behind Zenia with the drill and then turn it on, and the whirring noise would be a giveaway. She could always do an ambidextrous murder: gun in the left hand, cordless drill in the right, like the rapier-and-dagger arrangements of the late Renaissance. It's an appealing thought.

  The catch is that Zenia is considerably taller than Tony, and Tony would of course be aiming for the head. Symmetrical retaliation: Zenia's pattern has been to attack her victims at the point of most vulnerability, and the most vulnerable point is the one most prized, and Tony's most vulnerable point is her brain. That's how she was trapped by Zenia in the first place: that was the temptation, the bait. Tony got suckered in through her own intellectual vanity. She thought she'd found a friend who was as smart as she was. Smarter was not a category.

  Tony's love for West is her other most vulnerable point, so it stands to reason that it's through West that Zenia will attack her now. It's to protect West that she's doing this, really - he would not survive another slice cut out of his heart.

  She hasn't shared her plans with Roz or Charis. Each of them is a decent person; neither would condone violence. Tony knows that she herself is not a decent person, she's known that ever since childhood. She does act like one, most of the time, because there's usually no reason not to, but she has another self, a more ruthless one, concealed inside her. She is not just Tony Fremont, she is also Tnomerf Ynot, queen of the barbarians, and, in theory, capable of much that Tony herself is not quite up to. Bulc egdirb! Bulc egdirb! Take no prisoners, because in order to protect the innocent, some must sacrifice their own innocence. This is one of the rules of war. Men have to do hard things, they have to do hard man-things. Hard-man things. They have to shed blood, so that others may live out their placid lives suckling their infants and rummaging in their gardens and creating unmusical music, free
from guilt. Women are not usually called upon to commit such cold-blooded acts, but this does not mean they are incapable of them. Tony clenches her small teeth and invokes her left hand, and hopes that she will rise to the occasion.

  In front of her face she holds the Globe and Mail, opened to the business section. She's not reading, however: she's watching the lobby for Zenia. Watching, and getting jittery, because it isn't every day she does something this risky. To cut the tension, to give herself some critical distance, she folds up the paper and takes her lecture notes out of her bag. It will focus her mind to review them, it will refresh her memory: she hasn't given this lecture since last year.

  The lecture is a favourite among her students. It's the one on the role of female camp-followers through the ages, before and after battles - their handiness as bodies-for-hire, rapees, and producers of cannon fodder, their tension-reducing, nursing, psychiatric, cooking and laundering and post-massacre looting and life-terminating skills - with a digression on venereal diseases. Rumour has it that the students' nickname for this lecture is "Mother Courage Meets Spotted Dick," or "Whores 'n' Sores"; it usually attracts a contingent of visiting engineers, who come for the visuals, because Tony has an impressive instructional film she always screens. It's the same one the army showed to its new recruits at the time of the Second World War to promote the use of condoms, and features many a rotted-off nose and green, leaking male organ. Tony is used to the nervous laughter. Put yourself there, she will tell them. Pretend it's you. Now: less funny?

  At that time syphilis was considered to be a self-inflicted wound. Some guys used VD to get themselves invalided home. You could be court-martialled for having a dose, just as you could for shooting yourself in the foot. If the wound was the disease, then the weapon was the whore. Yet another weapon in the war of the sexes, the whore of the sexes, the raw of the sexes, the raw sexes war. A perfect palindrome.

  Maybe that's what West found so irresistible about Zenia, Tony used to think: that she was raw, that she was raw sex, whereas Tony herself was only the cooked variety. Parboiled to get the dangerous wildness out, the strong fresh-blood flavours. Zenia was gin at midnight, Tony was eggs for breakfast, and in eggcups at that. It's not the category Tony would have preferred.

  All these years Tony had refrained from asking West about Zenia. She hadn't wanted to upset him; also she was afraid of finding out any more about Zenia's powers of attraction, about their nature and their extent. But after the return of Zenia she couldn't help herself. On the edge of the crisis, she had to know.

  "Remember Zenia?" she asked West at dinner, two nights ago. They were having fish, a sole a la bonne femme from Tony's Basic French Cooking book, bought to go with her battlefield-of-Pourrieres fish platter.

  West stopped chewing, just for a moment. "Of course," he said.

  "What was it?" said Tony.

  "What was what?" said West.

  "Why you - you know. Why you went with her." Tony felt herself tensing up all over. Instead of me, she thought. Why you abandoned me.

  West shrugged, then smiled. "I don't know," he said. "I can't remember. Anyway, that was a long time ago. She's dead now."

  Tony knew that West knew that Zenia was far from dead. "True," she said. "Was it the sex?"

  "The sex?" said West, as if she'd just mentioned some forgotten but unimportant shopping-list item. "No, I don't think so. Not exactly."

  "What do you mean, not exactly?" said Tony, more sharply than she should have.

  "Why are we talking about this?" said West. "It doesn't matter now."

  "It matters to me," said Tony in a small voice.

  West sighed. "Zenia was frigid," he said. "She couldn't help it. She was sexually abused in childhood, by a Greek Orthodox priest. I felt sorry for her."

  Tony's mouth dropped open. "Greek Orthodox?"

  "Well, she was part Greek," said West. "Greek immigrant. She couldn't tell anyone about the priest, because nobody would have believed her. It was a very religious community."

  Tony could barely contain herself. She felt a raucous and unseemly merriment building up inside her. Frigid! So that's what Zenia had told poor West! It does not at all accord with certain confidences Zenia once saw fit to share with Tony on the subject of sex. Sex as a huge plum pudding, a confection of rich delights, whose pleasures she would enumerate while Tony listened, shut out, nose to the glass. Tony could just see white-knight West, dutifully huffing and puffing away, giving it his best shot, trying to save Zenia from the evil spell cast by the wicked, non-existent Greek Orthodox priest, with Zenia having the time of her life. Probably she told him she was faking orgasm to please him. Double the guilt!

  It would have been a challenge for him, of course. Warm up the Ice Maiden. The first man ever to successfully explore those polar climes. But of course there was no way he could win, because Zenia's games were always rigged.

  "I never knew that," she said. She fixed West with her large wide-open eyes, trying to look sympathetic.

  "Yeah, well," said West. "She found it really hard to talk about."

  "Why did you break up with her?" said Tony. "The second time. Why did you move out?" Now that they'd crossed the border into the never-mentioned, now that West was talking, she might as well push her advantage.

  West sighed. He looked at Tony with something close to shame. "To be honest," he said, and stopped.

  "Yes?" said Tony.

  "Well, to be honest, she kicked me out. She said she found me boring."

  Tony appalled herself by nearly laughing out loud. Maybe Zenia was right: from a certain point of view, West was boring. But one woman's meat was another woman's boredom, and West was boring in the same way children were boring, and interesting in the same way, too, and that's what a woman like Zenia would never see. Anyway, what was true love if it couldn't put up with a little boredom?

  "Are you all right?" West asked.

  "Choked on a bone," said Tony.

  West hung his head. "I guess I am boring," he said.

  Tony felt contrite. She was cruel for finding this funny. It wasn't funny, because West had been deeply wounded. She got up from the table and put her arms around his neck from behind, and laid her cheek against the top of his sparsely covered head. "You aren't at all boring," she said. "You're the most interesting man I've ever known." This was correct, since West was in fact the only man Tony had ever known, in any way that counted.

  West reached up and patted her hand. "I love you," he said. "I love you much more than I ever loved Zenia."

  Which is all very well, thinks Tony, sitting in the lobby of the Arnold Garden Hotel, but if that's really true, why didn't he tell me that Zenia called? Maybe he's already seen her. Maybe she's already lured him into bed. Maybe her teeth are in his neck, right now; maybe she's sucking out his life's blood while Tony sits here in this perverse leather chair, not even knowing where to look, because Zenia could be anywhere, she could be doing anything, and so far Tony doesn't have a clue.

  This is the third hotel she's tried out. She's spent two other mornings hanging around in the lobbies of the Arrival and the Avenue Park, with no results whatsoever. Her only lead is the extension number, the one scribbled by West and left beside his phone, but she's hesitated to call all the hotels and use it because she doesn't want to alert Zenia, she wants to take her by surprise. She doesn't want to ask for her at the desk either, because she knows in her bones that Zenia will be using a false name; and once Tony has asked, and has been told there's no guest of that name, it would look suspicious if she were to keep on sitting in the lobby. Also she doesn't want to be remembered by the staff, should Zenia be found later wallowing in a pool of blood. So she merely sits, trying to look like someone waiting for a business meeting.

  Her theory is that Zenia - who is by habit a late riser - must at some point get out of bed, must take the elevator to the main floor, must walk through the lobby. Of course it's not beyond Zenia to stay in bed all day or sneak down the fire stairs, but
Tony is betting on the law of averages. Sooner or later - supposing Tony is in the right hotel - Zenia will appear.

  And then what? Then Tony will leap or slither out of her chair, will patter across the floor to Zenia, will chirp a greeting, will be ignored; will scuttle after Zenia as she sweeps out through the glass doors. Gasping for breath, her outmoded gun and silly cordless drill clanking together in her bag, she will catch up to Zenia as she strides along the sidewalk. "We need to talk," Tony will blurt.

  "What about?" Zenia will say. At that point she will simply walk faster, and Tony will either have to trot ridiculously or give up.

  This is the nightmare scenario. Just thinking about it makes Tony blush with the sense of her own future humiliation. There's another scenario, one in which Tony is persuasive and dexterous and Zenia is taken in, one that acts out some of Tony's more violent although hypothetical fantasies and includes a neat red hole placed competently in the exact centre of Zenia's forehead. But at the moment Tony doesn't have a lot of faith in it.

  She isn't having much luck concentrating on her lecture notes, so she switches back to the Globe business section and forces herself to read. Tsol Sboj Erom. Gnisolc Tnalp. This has a satisfying Slavic ring to it. That, or Finnish, or some wild-haired tribe from Planet Pluto. As Tony is savouring it she feels a hand on her shoulder.

  "Tony! There you are, finally!" Tony looks up, then stifles a small rodent-like shriek: Zenia is bending over her, smiling warmly. "Why didn't you call before? And why are you just sitting here in the lobby? I gave West the room number!"

  "Well," says Tony. Her mind scrabbles, trying to fit all this together. "He jotted it down and then lost it. You know what he's like." Awkwardly she disentangles herself from the leather chair, which appears to have grown suction cups.

  "I told him to make you call me right away," says Zenia. "It was just after I saw you in the Toxique. I guess you didn't recognize me! But I called up and told him it was very important." She's no longer smiling: she's beginning to assume an expression Tony recalls well, something between a frown and a wince, urgent and at the same time beset. What it means is that Zenia wants something.