Life Before Man

by Margaret Atwood

  The man has children, he says, three of them, and a wife. They discuss the local school. He likes to read, he tells her, but only non-fiction. Books about history, famous crimes, the world wars. He asks her what she thinks about the results of the Quebec election. "They'll never pull it off," he says. "Too much debt."

  "Probably," says Elizabeth, whose attention is wandering now that there's no threat.

  "We could have a drink sometime," he says abruptly.

  Elizabeth sits up. "I don't think ..." she says.

  "You wouldn't regret it," he says, his eyes shining. He leans towards her confidentially. Sweet brandy on his breath. "I know," he says. "I know what you want. You might not think so to look at me, but I know."

  "Right now I don't want anything," Elizabeth says, realizing at once that this is false. What she wants is to want something.

  "All right," says the man. "If you change your mind, let me know." He hands her a little card, which she holds in her gloved hand without looking at it. "The office number," he says.

  "I'll do that," Elizabeth says, laughing, turning it into a joke. She can taste the brandy in his mouth, blue flame flickering over her tongue. She looks at the card. There's a name, two numbers, nothing more.

  "What do you do?" she asks, clutching at work, the objective world.

  "Here," the man says, unsnapping the clasps of his suitcase. "Take your pick. Have a souvenir." He lifts the lid. The suitcase is full of women's bikini briefs, samples: red, black, white, pink, mauve, trimmed with lace, sheer, embroidered, some with - she can see - split crotches.

  "I do a lot of traveling," the man says mournfully. "Pushing the line. Airports. They're big customers, airports." He lifts a pair of black briefs with the word STOP embroidered on a hexagonal scrap of red satin. "A very popular item," he says, his voice switching to a salesman's insinuating baritone. He sticks his finger through the split crotch, wiggles it.

  Elizabeth stands up. "There's my bus," she says lightly. His hand, tented in black nylon, clothed like a puppet in some woman's empty groin, is absurdly and at last, at last, exciting to her.

  For an instant only. The man fades almost at once, flattens, greys.

  "Thank you for the conversation," she says, feeling she should thank him for something.

  He withdraws his hand, looks up at her sadly. "Do you think I'd do this," he says, "if I didn't have to?"

  Thursday, December 23, 1976

  NATE

  When Nate is in the middle of his bath, soaping his long shankbones, Elizabeth opens the door and comes in without knocking. She closes the lid of the toilet and sits down on it, hunching forward, elbows on her dark-skirted knees. She wants to show him something she's bought as a Christmas present for Nancy. It's a small theatrical makeup kit; she got it at Malabar's, making a special trip. It has a few sticks of grease paint, some fake blood, and a couple of moustaches and pairs of eyebrows to match. Nancy will love it, Elizabeth says, and Nate knows she will. Elizabeth can always think up good presents for the children. He himself has to ask them what they want.

  Elizabeth sitting on the toilet at right angles to his left shoulderblade makes him nervous. He has to turn his head to see her, whereas she can see most of him - naked, exposed - without making any effort. He's aware of the soap curds, the grey particles, the flecks of his own skin that litter the water. He scrubs his arms vigorously with the loofah, rough on the skin like a tiger's tongue. The loofah is his; he buys them at a little store on Bathurst that sells nothing but natural sponges; not one of those bath boutiques, but a grimy store, unadorned, that has the feel of raw materials. A small importer. Nate likes walking into this store, picking out his new sponge from the mounds of them that lie in heaps on the tiny counter. Himself, in aqua water, knife between his teeth, cutting the raw sponge loose from coral rocks, making it to the surface gasping for breath, heaving the sponge overarm into the moored boat. Eyeball-to-eyeball combat with a giant squid, one tentacle cut loose, then another. Nothing to think about but getting free. Clouds of ink obscuring the water, round welts on his legs. Plunging the knife right in between its eyes.

  Elizabeth doesn't like his loofahs. She says that because he doesn't take the time to rinse and dry them between baths, they get moldy. This is true, they do get moldy. She doesn't understand that if each loofah were allowed to continue forever, he'd be deprived of the pleasure of going to the little store for a new one.

  When she opened the door she let in a draft. Nate pulls the plug and clambers out of the tub, a towel clutched to his groin, feeling like a stick man.

  Now that he's standing up in this room that is obviously too small for both of them, he expects her to leave. But she shifts her knees towards the wall and asks, "Where are you off to?"

  "How do you know I'm off to anywhere?" he says.

  She smiles. More like herself, her old self; the self that is, like his, getting old. "You're taking a bath." She leans her chin on her interlaced fingers, looks up at him. That nymph-on-a-lilypad pose. He wraps his abdomen, tucking the towel in.

  "I'm going to a party," he says. "A Christmas party."

  "At Martha's?"

  "How did you know?" He hasn't wanted to tell her; not that he has anything to hide. It continues to amaze him, the way she's able to keep track of his activities without even seeming to be interested.

  "She invited me."

  "Oh," he says. He might have known Martha would consider it appropriate to invite Elizabeth. He folds his arms across his chest; ordinarily he would use her Arrid Extra Dry to roller his armpits, but he can't do that with her in the bathroom. He can feel his mouth sagging downwards.

  "Don't look so devastated," she says. "I'm not going."

  "That's all over, you know," he says, feeling he has no moral obligation to tell her, telling her anyway.

  "I know," she says. "I've been hearing quite a lot about it. She phones me at the office."

  This is something Nate has always resented: they talk to each other, about him, behind his back. It was Elizabeth who started it. She'd invited Martha to lunch early on; to explain, she'd said, to get things clear. Martha had complained to him first, but she'd gone. "Why not be friendly?" Elizabeth said. "It's not as though I'm the jealous wife. I hardly have the right to be." She laughed softly, that furred laugh that had at first entranced him. "We might as well behave like reasonable adults."

  "What did you talk about?" Nate asked Martha afterwards.

  "You," she said.

  "What about me?"

  "About who owns you," Martha said. "We figured it out that Elizabeth really owns you, but I get fucking privileges one night a week."

  "I don't believe Elizabeth would say a thing like that," Nate said.

  "No," Martha said. "You're right, she wouldn't. She's too goddamned discreet. Let's say she just gave me to understand. She might think it, but the only one who'd ever say it is me. Old garbage-mouth."

  Nate wanted to tell Martha not to demean herself, but he knew she didn't really feel she was demeaning herself. She saw it as saying what she thought. She conceived of herself as down-to-earth and honest, and of Nate and Elizabeth as hypocrites who evaded the issues. But she only said what she thought to Nate; never to Elizabeth.

  By this time Nate no longer wants to know what they say to each other during those office phone calls. He doesn't want to go to Martha's party either, but he feels he ought to. His presence is supposed to establish the fact that they can still be friends. This is what Martha said to him on the phone. He doesn't much want to be friends with her, but he thinks he should want to. He wants to be kind and as gentle as possible. He won't stay long, he'll just put in an appearance, make a gesture, cast his shadow on the wall.

  "She sounded all right to me," Nate says, too defensively. "When she asked me."

  "Don't fool yourself," Elizabeth says. It's one of her axioms that Nate is always fooling himself. She puts her hands behind her on the toilet seat and leans back, which throws her breasts up and out.
Is this an invitation, can it be possible? Nate refuses to believe it. He turns his head quickly away, scowls at himself in the mirror.

  "I'll be back around ten," he says.

  "I expect you will," Elizabeth says. "You're not too popular in that quarter, you know."

  You know. Always meaning that he doesn't. Both of them do that: the constant hints that there are things he doesn't know, important things he's missed and that they, with their finer perceptions, can pick up every time.

  Elizabeth stands up, brushes past him, picks up his loofah from where he's left it lying in the bathtub, squeezes it out.

  "Take care of yourself," she says. She walks out of the bathroom, carrying the box of false moustaches.

  Martha has made a large bowl of eggnog. It sits on her dining-room table along with the bottles of Scotch and rye, the mixes, the ice in a bucket. A red paper accordion bell is suspended over the table. Nate bumps it with his head as he straightens up with his glass of Scotch. If he wants eggs he'll boil them. He always likes to know exactly what he's drinking.

  Martha is wearing a long dress, some synthetic material, red, to match the bell. The neckline is too wide; it makes her shoulders look even broader than they are. Nate hasn't seen that dress before. One of her bare arms is hooked through the arm of the man standing beside her. She looks up into his face, talking, smiling. Apart from greeting him she's ignored Nate so far. The new man is pale blond, shorter than Nate, with a businessman's prim little paunch already beginning under the vest of his three-piece suit.

  Nate knows a few of the people, leftovers from his earlier life. A couple of the receptionists and legal secretaries, two or three of the men who joined the firm around the same time he did. Someone slaps his shoulder.

  "Nate. How's it going?" Paul Callaghan, one-time rival, now patronizing. "Still whittling away?"

  "Pretty good," Nate says.

  "You're probably smarter than all of us," Paul says. "Taking it easy. No heart attacks at forty for you." He floats past Nate, already smiling at someone else.

  Nate is talking with a girl in a white dress. He's never seen her before, though she claims to have met him at one of Martha's parties, two years ago, she says. She's telling Nate about her job. She makes plastic models of Holstein cows which are sold to breeders and dealers. The cows have to be made exactly to scale, perfect in every detail. She's hoping to go into painted portraits of individual cows, for which she could get more money. She asks Nate what his sign is.

  Nate knows he should leave the party. He's done his duty. But the girl seizes his hand and bends over his palm, squinting at his life line. He can see a short distance down the front of her dress. He watches this pinched landscape idly. He isn't very good at casual encounters.

  Martha is there, right beside his ear. She wants to have a word with him, she says. She takes his other hand and he allows himself to be led from the living room, down the hall into the bedroom. Coats are piled on the bed.

  "You're disgusting," Martha says. "You make me want to puke."

  Nate blinks at her, bending his head towards her as if this will help him to understand. Martha punches him in the face, then begins kicking him in the shins. She's hampered by the long skirt of her dress, so she slugs him, aiming for the belly, hitting him in the rib cage. Nate catches her arms and holds her against him. Now she's crying. He could throw her onto the bed, roll her up in coats to hold her still, then try to find out what he's done.

  "What did I do?" he says.

  "Making up to her at my party, right in front of me. You always try to humiliate me," Martha says, her voice coming in spurts. "You know what? You succeed."

  "I wasn't," Nate says, "We were talking about plastic cows."

  "You just don't know how it feels to be left," Martha says. Nate loosens his grip. Martha steps back, snatches a Kleenex from the night table and blots her face. "Why don't you try feeling something for a change?"

  The new man's head appears in the doorway, withdraws, reappears. "Am I interrupting something?" he says.

  "Yes," Martha says rudely.

  "I was just leaving," Nate says. He roots among the coats, fur and tweed, looking for his pea jacket.

  "It's in the hall closet," Martha says. "I guess you know where that is."

  Because of the snow, Nate hasn't brought his bicycle. It's five blocks to the subway station but he's glad, he wants to walk. His right eyebrow where Martha hit him is beginning to hurt. Is the skin cut? She was wearing a ring. What bothers him isn't the pain but the wise look Elizabeth will give him.

  He's only gone half a block before he hears Martha behind him.

  "Nate. Stop."

  He turns. She's running, slipping towards him in her gold shoes, her long red dress, no coat. Smiling, gleeful, her eyes brilliant. "I just took all the pills in the bathroom cabinet," she says. "Sixty-two aspirin with codeine, twenty-four Valiums. I thought you might like to say good-bye."

  "That was stupid, Martha," Nate says. "Did you really?"

  "Wait and see," she says, laughing. "Wait till five in the morning when you get to inspect the body. Hell, you can cart me away to that cellar of yours. You can shellac me. I won't bother you with demands any more."

  The man in the three-piece suit is picking his way down Martha's steps. "Martha," he calls, slightly peevish, as if calling a runaway cat.

  "Martha says she took all the pills in the bathroom," Nate says to him.

  "Well, she was just in there. Why would she do that?" the new man asks Nate.

  "Stop discussing me as if I'm a thing," Martha says. She's swaying a little. Nate takes off his pea jacket and hands it to her. "Here," he says.

  "I don't need that," Martha says. She begins to cry again.

  "We'll have to take her down to the hospital," Nate says. He's familiar with the procedure, he's been through it with the kids. Mothballs, baby aspirins, Elizabeth's birth control pills.

  "I'm not going," Martha sobs. "I want to die."

  "We can take my car," the new man says. "It's in the driveway." Nate grips Martha under the arms. She goes limp. He begins to drag her towards the new man's car, which is new also, a dark blue Torino. One of her shoes comes off and the new man picks it up and carries it along behind them, like a trophy in some kind of sports parade or religious procession.

  "Give me my goddamned shoe," Martha says when they're in the car. She buckles the shoe on, then checks her hair in the rear-view mirror. The new man is driving; Nate sits in the back with Martha, to keep her from, as the new man says, "doing anything." By the time they reach Emergency Admissions at the Toronto General she seems quite cheerful.

  "You can't make me go in there," she says to Nate.

  "You can walk in or be dragged in," he tells her. "Did you really take those pills?"

  "Guess," she says. "You're so good at female psychology. You figure it out." But she walks in between them with no more protest.

  She lets them tell the Admissions nurse all about the pills. Nate explains that they don't know whether she's really taken them or not.

  "Did you check the bottles?" the nurse says. "Were they empty?"

  They didn't think to look for bottles, Nate says. They were in too much of a hurry.

  "Actually this is all a joke," Martha says. "They've been drinking. It's the Christmas spirit, they thought it would be fun to cart me down here and make me get my stomach pumped out."

  The nurse hesitates, looking severely from Nate to the new man. "You can smell the liquor," Martha says. "They aren't like this except when they drink. See, they've been fighting."

  The nurse squints at Nate's swelling eye. "Is this true?" she says.

  "They used force," Martha says. "You can see the finger-marks on my arms. Do I seem to you like someone who's just swallowed a bottle of pills?" She stretches out her bare arms. "Would you like to see me walk a straight line?"

  Tuesday, December 28, 1976

  LESJE

  Lesje joins the queue in front of the cashier
at the liquor store. The time is past when they'd ask to see her birth certificate, but she still gets the same cold feeling. Whenever she has to present a document proving she is who she is, she's convinced they'll find something out of order or that it will have someone else's name stamped on it. The worst that ever happens is that they mispronounce her name, giving her the look that says, we thought you were one of us but now we can tell you aren't.

  She's buying a bottle of wine to celebrate the return of William, which will take place this evening. William is in London, Ontario, celebrating Christmas with his family. Impossible, of course (Of course! She agrees!) for her to have gone with him. Last year this separation between them seemed like a conspiracy, both of them giggling over the puritanism, xenophobia and general dingy-mindedness of their respective families. This year it seems like a betrayal.

  Not that she could have gone with him, even if invited. She was expected to go to her parents' house for Christmas dinner, and dutifully she'd gone, as she did every year. How can she deprive them of their only daughter, their only child, they who have deprived themselves of whole platoons of sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins and second cousins, all, it's understood, for her sake?

  Her parents' house is neither far enough north to be impressive, like the aunts' houses, nor far enough south to be quaint, like the grandmothers'. Her mother's brothers did well in real estate, her father's sister married into a china shop. Her parents began the trek north but got stuck halfway up, on a nondescript street south of St. Clair. It was as if all their desire for transformation and change had gone into one act, their marriage to each other. They had none left over for two-car garages.

  Her father doesn't possess that ferocious instinct for business, or is it survival, which is supposed to be Jewish; which had impelled her grandfather from door to door, buying castoffs; and which once gave her grandmother six stitches in the head, defending her front-parlor variety store against a young man with an iron bar. Turn your back, they steal you blind. Not the Chinese kids though. Them you don't have to watch. Lesje's father rolled to his present modest eminence of color television and a second-hand Chev on used fur coats, on bubble gum and jawbreakers, two for a penny and the pennies carefully saved. And was he grateful? No. Married a shiksa, and of the worst kind too. (Like Lesje.)