Life Before Man

by Margaret Atwood

  In the other column she puts the rent from the tenants. She doesn't want to be unfair, just accurate, and she's willing to offset the tenants' rent against the mortgage.

  Already she feels better. This is what she needs: small goals, projects, something to keep her busy. Other women knit. She can even sense a hint of that lightness of spirit she hopes to be able to describe, later, to her acquaintances. And really it may not be so bad. Freedom from that other set of rules, that constant pained look which is worse than nagging. Living with Nate has been like living with a huge mirror in which her flaws are magnified and distorted. Fly-eyes. She's been forced to see herself measured constantly beside his set of East York domestic standards, his pious nun-faced mother with her awful Melmac dishes and her faint smell of old wool and cod liver oil. She'll be free of that. It will mean she'll have to carry out the garbage bags herself on garbage day, but she thinks she can live with that.

  Thursday, April 7, 1977

  LESJE

  Lesje is having difficulty getting up in the mornings. In that prehistoric era during which she lived with William, she was able to depend on him. He liked being on time for work. He also liked getting up. He'd take a brisk shower, scrubbing himself with some kind of medieval flagellation instrument, and emerge pink as a rubber duck to ferret in the kitchen for Shreddies and milk, rubbing his head with a towel, making forays into the bedroom to prod Lesje and pull the covers off her legs.

  But now, alone in the small chilly house, she has to force herself into the air, sticking her feet out one at a time from beneath the blankets, a lungfish ousted from its stagnant puddle. The house, with no furniture, nothing radiating back to her from the bare walls, absorbs what little energy she has. She feels she's losing weight and that the house is gaining it.

  Sometimes, gulping instant coffee with artificial whitener, chewing a stale bran muffin, she goes to the living-room door to contemplate the small piles of sawdust Nate is now making. The living room, he says, is the only room in the house big enough for his machines. Though none of these machines has actually appeared yet, he's brought over some hand tools and a few unfinished hobby horses and has even spent a couple of hours in there, rasping and sanding. The piles of sawdust comfort her. They mean Nate is at least in theory moving into the house. Taking possession.

  He has explained very carefully why he's still sleeping at what she thinks of as Elizabeth's house. Lesje listened, she tried to listen, but she does not understand. She feels she's blundered into something tangled and complex, tenuous, hopelessly snarled. She's out of her element. If she were in control of this, the moves would be concrete, straightforward. She herself has been straightforward. She loves Nate; therefore she's left William and gone to live with Nate. Why then has Nate not yet come to live with her?

  He claims he has. He's even slept over a couple of nights, and after the second of these, watching him hobble around the kitchen in the morning, wincing every time he straightened up, she'd given in, squeezed her budget and bought a second-hand mattress. Which was a little like putting up a birdhouse: you couldn't make the bird move in.

  "This is my real home," Nate says. And once, his head resting on her belly, "I want to have a child by you." He rapidly changed it to "with you," then said, "I want us to have a child together," but Lesje was so struck by the content she didn't notice the phrasing. She doesn't especially want to have a baby, not right at the moment; she doesn't know whether she's up to it; but she was touched by Nate's wish. He considered her not only desirable but acceptable. She sat up and lifted his head, hugging him gratefully.

  What she can't explain is the gap between what he says he feels and what he actually does. She can't reconcile his proclamations of love - which she believes! - with the simple fact of his absence. His absence is evidence, it's empirical. It has hardened now to stone, a small tight lump she carries everywhere with her in the pit of her stomach.

  She climbs the grey steps of the Museum, walks past the ticket-takers, hurries up the stairs to the Hall of Vertebrate Evolution, tracing again her daily path: the human skull, the saber-toothed cat in its tar pit, the illuminated scenes of undersea life, with their hungry mosasaurs and doomed ammonites. The door that leads to her office is reached through this portion of the ancient sea floor. Most of the other offices in the Museum have ordinary doors; she's glad this one is camouflaged to look like rock. If she can't live in a cave, which is what she would prefer at the moment (meditation, bread and water, no complications), this is the next best thing.

  Though she's been arriving late, she's also been staying later, sometimes till seven-thirty or eight, cataloguing steadily, squinting hunched over labels and cards, fixing her mind on tibiae, metatarsals, shards of the real world. She finds it restful, this contemplation of details; it stops that small noise in her mind, the worrying of something trapped behind the woodwork. Also she's putting off the return to her empty house.

  If she's there alone in the evenings she prowls. She opens the cupboard in the tiny extra bedroom and stares at the four abandoned wire coat hangers, thinking she should do something about the chewed shreds of wallpaper and the mouse droppings on the floor. She tries to make herself do useful things, such as scraping the yellow mineral deposit off the back of the toilet bowl with a paring knife; but she's likely to find herself sitting half an hour later in the same place with nothing accomplished, gazing into space. She realizes now that her life with William, haphazard as it seemed, had at least its daily routines. Routines hold you in place. Without them she floats, weightless. She can never expect Nate till after ten.

  She nods through the open door to Dr. Van Vleet, who nods back. He hasn't yet said a word about her lateness. She hopes that when he retires his replacement will be someone equally tolerant, in other ways as well.

  When she steps through the doorway of her cubbyhole, Elizabeth Schoenhof is there.

  Lesje isn't ready for this. She's been avoiding the cafeteria, the ladies' rooms Elizabeth is likely to use, any corner in which this encounter might take place, and she's assumed Elizabeth was also avoiding her. She doesn't feel guilty and she has nothing to hide. She just doesn't think they could possibly have anything to say to each other.

  Now here is Elizabeth, sitting in Lesje's chair and smiling graciously, as if this is her office and Lesje is visiting it. Her purse is on the desk, resting on a tray of eel fragments, her sweater is draped across the chair back. She looks as if she's about to say, "Is there anything I can do for you?"

  Instead she says, "I brought these requisition slips myself. The internal mail is so slow."

  There's no other chair in the office; there's no room for one. Elizabeth seems to fill all the available space. Lesje backs against a wall chart, the geological ages marked in color blocks. Dinosaurs, a hundred and twenty million years of tawny yellow; man, a speck of red. She's a fleck, a molecule, an ion lost in time. But so is Elizabeth.

  She glances over the sheet of paper Elizabeth has handed to her. They want something for the subway display case, preferably a leg and a foot. She'll have to discuss it with Dr. Van Vleet, choose the specimen, sign it out.

  "Right," she says. Elizabeth must have turned up the heat. Lesje is broiling; she wants desperately to take off her coat, but feels that to turn away at this moment would lose her something. Besides, she needs the covering, the insulation between herself and Elizabeth.

  "I felt we should discuss things," Elizabeth says, still smiling. "I think we should work together. It's in everyone's best interests, don't you think?"

  Lesje knows she's talking about Nate, not about fossilized feet. But her tone of voice suggests a charitable project of some kind, a benefit concert, a rummage sale. Lesje doesn't think of Nate as a charitable project and she has no wish to discuss him. "Of course," she says.

  "Nate and I have always tried to work together," Elizabeth says. "We've managed to stay good friends. I think it's always better that way, don't you? We often talk things over when he's in the batht
ub." She gives a cosy laugh. She obviously wants Lesje to think that she herself is one of the chief topics of bathtub discussion.

  Lesje knows for a fact that Elizabeth and Nate haven't talked about anything in such intimacy for months and months. Unless he's been lying. Would he lie? She realizes that she doesn't know him well enough to know.

  When Elizabeth walks away fifteen minutes later, still smiling, Lesje cannot remember anything that has actually been said. She takes off her coat and hangs it up, then goes to the wet lab to make herself a cup of instant coffee. She isn't sure Elizabeth said anything at all, not clearly, not directly. But she's been left with two impressions. One is that Nate has been, or is about to be, fired for incompetence, and that she herself is therefore free to take him on. That is, if she wants to. The other is that she's just been hired for a job she hasn't applied for. Apparently she is going to be tried out as a kind of governess. Elizabeth, it seems, feels she deserves some time to herself. "It will be so good for the children," Elizabeth said, "to learn to relate to someone with unusual interests."

  Lesje thinks she intended something more complicated, less neutral. Something like foreigner. Not dirty foreigner, exactly, as when in Grade Four the Irish-headed older girls gathered around her as she walked across the schoolyard. Pee-ew, they said, holding their noses, while Lesje smiled weakly, appeasingly. Wipe that smirk off your face or we'll wipe it for you. She could use a wash.

  Elizabeth is too haute Wasp for that. More like outlandish, someone from out of the land. Interesting, mind you; as if she'll play the violin and do charming ethnic dances, like something from Fiddler on the Roof. To amuse the children.

  Lesje sees she has been studying the wrong thing. Modern mammals, that would be of some use. Primate behavior. She recalls once having read something about apes' eyelids. The dominant ape stares, the others lower their eyes, flashing their colored lids. It avoids murders.

  Tomorrow, when she's less depressed, she'll ask Marianne about this; Marianne is well up on primate behavior. Or Dr. Van Vleet, or anyone. Surely anyone at all will know more about such things than she does.

  Wednesday, April 13, 1977

  ELIZABETH

  Elizabeth is lying in bed, the Indian bedspread pulled up to her chin. The window is open a little at the bottom, she left it that way when she set off for work this morning, and the room is chilly and damp. She's looking at the bedside clock, wondering whether it's worth the effort to get up, get dressed and go back to the office for an hour or so. Probably not.

  Resting on her left arm is a head. William's head. William's head is on her arm because they've just made love. Before that they had lunch, a lingering, expensive lunch at the Courtyard Cafe, with cucumber soup and sweetbreads and undertones. And two bottles of wine, which may have accounted for the undertones. William sighed a lot and shrugged several times, as if practicing subdued melancholy. He told her about a recent study on the effects of an uncooked all-meat diet as practiced by the Inuit, but his heart wasn't in it. Though they alluded to their shared problem, they didn't discuss it directly. Defection is painful.

  Elizabeth said (but only once) that she was glad Nate finally seemed to be working out some of his conflicts and that she herself was finding it less of a strain to have him not so much, well, underfoot. This did not perk William up. During the chocolate mousse with Armagnac Elizabeth stroked his hand. They looked into each other's eyes, wryly: each was the other's consolation prize. It was logical; besides, Elizabeth felt she owed him one good fuck. It was partly because of her that Lesje walked out on him so suddenly. She didn't foresee the walkout. What she intended was a confrontation, then a reconciliation, and after the reconciliation Lesje would of course have been honor bound to renounce Nate. Elizabeth could then have been spending her time consoling Nate instead of William.

  In the early days, this was how it had worked with Nate and herself, and she'd taken care never to divulge her lovers until she was ready to give them up. In theory at least. But neither William nor Lesje had behaved according to plan. She isn't exactly sure what happened. She went to lunch with William partly to find out, but William didn't want to discuss it.

  Copulating with William was not unpleasant, she thinks, but neither was it memorable. It was like sleeping with a large and fairly active slab of Philadelphia cream cheese. Emulsified. It isn't that William is without mystery. He's probably as mysterious as any other object in the universe: a bottle, an apple. It's just that his mystery is not of the kind that usually intrigues Elizabeth. On second thought he isn't totally bland. Remembering the way he wielded his teeth, she's sure he has pockets of energy, even violence, hidden in him, like Mexican jumping beans in a box of cotton wool.

  But she doesn't like boxes whose contents she can guess. Why open William? For her he contains no surprises. Chris had been a dangerous country, swarming with ambushes and guerrillas, the center of a whirlpool, a demon lover. Maybe for someone else William would be that: Elizabeth is old enough to know that one woman's demon lover is another's worn-out shoe. She doesn't begrudge Lesje the fascination Nate evidently holds for her, since she's never experienced it herself. What she envies is not the people involved but the fact. She wishes she could feel that again, for anyone at all.

  William stirs, and Elizabeth worms her arm out from beneath his head.

  "That was terrific," he says.

  Elizabeth winces slightly. Terrific.

  "Was it for you?" he asks anxiously.

  "Of course," she says. "Couldn't you tell?"

  William grins, reassured. "Hell," he says, "Lesje's not in the same class with you."

  Elizabeth finds this remark in extremely bad taste. One does not compare one's lovers, not to their faces. Nevertheless she smiles. "I'd better hurry," she says. "I should put in an appearance at the office, I guess you should, too." Also: the children will be home from school in an hour. But she doesn't mention that.

  She doesn't especially want William looking at her from behind, but there's nothing she can do to stop him. She gets out of bed, hooks her brassiere, and pulls her magenta slip on over her head. She chose it in the morning thinking something like this might happen.

  "You're damned sexy," William says a little too heartily; that tone might preface a slap on the rump. "Full-bodied."

  Elizabeth shivers with irritation. Stupid; sometimes she's very stupid. Get your goddamn jockey shorts on and get out of my bed. She smiles at him graciously over her shoulder, and the doorbell rings.

  Ordinarily Elizabeth wouldn't appear at the door half-dressed in the middle of the day. Neighbors talk, they talk to their children; someone may have seen William going in with her. But right now she wants to be out of the room.

  "It's probably the meter reader," she says. She doesn't know whether this is likely to be true. Since he started working at home, Nate has always coped with such details. "I'll just be a second." She pulls on her blue dressing gown, ties the sash and heads down the stairs in her uncomfortably bare feet. The doorbell rings again as she unchains the door.

  Auntie Muriel is standing on the front porch, looking with distaste at the peeling white rocker, the broken step, the neighbors' tiny front lawns with their withered remnants of last summer's gardens. She's wearing a white velour hat shaped like an inverted potty and white gloves, as if on her way to Easter church, and a mink stole Elizabeth remembers from twenty-five years ago. Auntie Muriel does not throw things out or give them away.

  Auntie Muriel has never before come to visit Elizabeth. She's chosen to ignore the existence of Elizabeth's disreputable address, as if Elizabeth doesn't live in a house at all, but materializes in Auntie Muriel's front hall at every visit and dematerializes again when leaving. But just because Auntie Muriel has never before done something is no reason to expect she will never do it. Elizabeth knows she shouldn't be surprised - who else? - but she is. She feels her wind go, as if someone has rammed her in the solar plexus, and clutches the stomach of her dressing gown.

  "
I've come here," Auntie Muriel says, with a slight pause before here, "because I felt I ought to tell you what I think about what you've done. Not that it will make any difference to you." She walks forward and Elizabeth of necessity has to step back. Auntie Muriel, breathing mothballs and Bluegrass dusting power, marches into her living room.

  "You're sick," Auntie Muriel says, looking not at Elizabeth but at her perfectly arranged room, which shrinks, which fades, which exudes dust under her glance. Illness would be the only excuse for having your dressing gown on in the middle of the day, and a poor one at that. "You don't look well. I'm not surprised." Auntie Muriel herself does not look particularly radiant. Elizabeth wonders briefly if there's something wrong with her, then dismisses the thought. Nothing is ever wrong with Auntie Muriel. She clumps around the room, inspecting the chairs and the sofa.

  "Won't you sit down?" Elizabeth says. She's decided how she will handle this. Sweetness and light, reveal nothing. Don't let yourself be needled. Auntie Muriel would like nothing better than to provoke her.

  Auntie Muriel settles herself on the sofa but doesn't take off her stole or gloves. She wheezes, or perhaps it's a sigh, as if merely being in Elizabeth's house is too much for her. Elizabeth remains standing. Dominate her through height. Not a hope.

  "In my opinion," Auntie Muriel says, "mothers of young children do not break up families for their own selfish gratification. I know a lot of people do it these days. But there is such a thing as immoral behavior and such a thing as common decency."

  Elizabeth cannot and will not admit to Auntie Muriel that Nate's departure was not entirely her choice. Besides, if she says, "Nate left me," she'll hear that it was her fault. Husbands do not leave wives who behave properly. No doubt. "How did you hear about it?" she says.