Moral Disorder

by Margaret Atwood

  So for the first part of that winter, Nell snuck around like a criminal on the run. She left no traces in the house when she wasn’t there – no clothes in the small dark cupboard at the top of the stairs, no toothbrush on the inadequate shelf in the bathroom, no textbooks or lecture notes or page proofs on the improvised desk. Did Tig go through the house after she’d left, wiping her fingerprints off the doorknobs? It felt like that to her.

  On Thursdays and Fridays, she had a temporary part-time teaching job at the university, filling in for a friend on sabbatical. She taught the Victorian novel to second-year undergraduates: the Brontë sisters, followed by Dickens, Eliot, and Thackeray, then the depressing realists, George Gissing and Thomas Hardy, with a decadent finale supplied by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. She’d never taught this course before, so she had to read hard to keep ahead of the students. In theory, her Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays were reserved for the freelance editorial work that had been her intermittent mainstay over the past few years. The novel-reading and the editing were both things that she could do at the farm. On her non-teaching weekdays, she would take the Greyhound bus to Stiles, the town nearest the farm, then wait in the bus station on a hard wooden bench along a wall as if in a skating-rink change room, breathing in the gas fumes and cigarette smoke that permeated the chilly air. She would eat potato chips and drink black, acid-filled coffee and read about love and money and madness and furniture and governesses and adultery and drapery and scenery and death, until Tig would come along in his rusty blue Chevy to collect her.

  Or she’d drive up from the city with him after he’d taken the children back in on Monday mornings – early, so they could get to school by nine. Nell and Tig could be at the farm in time for lunch, though during these drives Nell did not get hungry. Instead she felt light-headed and slightly ill, as she used to do before examinations. It was the anticipation, and the sense of being tested and judged, and the fear of failing. But what was it she might fail?

  The car would be warm, and would smell of apple cores: the boys often ate apples in the car on the way to the city. Tig and Nell would hold hands, on the lonelier and less icy stretches of road. Instead of talking they would listen to the radio. At a certain distance from the city it was mostly country and western. Nell liked the songs of yearning, Tig liked the songs of regret.

  The farm was on a gravel road, several miles from the main highway. In winter the farmhouse looked like a picture – snow on the roof, icicles dripping from the eaves, the white hills and sombre trees rising behind it – but it wasn’t a picture Nell would ever have allowed on her Christmas cards. Like sunsets, it was beautiful in real life, but too overdone for art.

  At the bottom of the long, curved, ice-covered driveway the car wheels would start spinning and the car would slew from side to side. Tig might take several runs at the hill, but he knew when to stop: it was important to avoid going into the decorative pond. If they couldn’t make it up the drive, even with the aid of the bag of sand and the shovel Tig kept in the trunk, they’d leave the car at the bottom and crunch their way through the snowbanks at the sides of the drive, their breaths whitening the air, their noses dripping. It wasn’t the best prelude to the romantic moment that was then supposed to follow once they’d gone in through the lean- to and the back door and stamped the snow off their feet and shed their boots and their heavy coats and their mittens and scarves.

  Their other layers of clothing would be thrown off in Tig’s gelid bedroom – insulation had not been a feature of The Ancestral Roof type of house, Nell had read – and then they’d be shivering under Tig’s duvet, between Tig’s threadbare sheets, locked in the sort of desperate embrace that reminded Nell of her Victorian novelists’ descriptions of drowning. People drowned quite a lot in such novels, especially if they’d had sex out of wedlock.

  After that would come an interlude of warm and languorous amnesia, followed shortly – for Nell – by disbelief: what was she doing here, in this situation? And what was the situation, exactly? She thought of herself as a person who liked things to be clear and direct and above-board, so how had she got mixed up in something so murky, and – if you looked at it objectively, from the point of view, say, of someone writing it up for the tabloids, should Tig and Nell be found asphyxiated in his car in a snowdrift because of carbon monoxide poisoning – so grubby? Runaway Hubby Gassed Near Rural Love Nest with Editorial Cutie. Although nothing like that had happened yet, and was unlikely to happen – neither of them was stupid enough to leave the motor running in a stranded car – the mere thought of it was humiliating.

  Nell did not in any way let herself off the hook, being nothing if not self-critical, and anyway she was an adult – it was she who had chosen, it was she who had acted – but nonetheless the hard truth was that to some extent the whole thing was Oona’s doing. Oona was the pivotal factor. Oona had set up the relationship, Oona had pushed it forward, Oona had made herself scarce at what turned out to be the critical moments, like some salacious Nurse figure out of a Shakespearean play. Why? Because Nell had suited Oona’s purposes. Not that Nell herself had recognized those purposes at the time.

  The first twosome had not been Nell and Tig, it had been Oona and Nell. They’d started out on fine terms. Oona could be very pleasant when she wanted to be: she could make you feel that you were her best friend, the only person in the world she could really depend on. Nell had been susceptible to that, as her image of herself had once included that kind of dependability. She’d been younger; younger than she is now, but also younger than Oona.

  Nell had been Oona’s editor in those days. She was already freelancing, ping-ponging her way among publishers caught short-handed. She’d carved a medium-sized niche for herself – she was known for working wonders with not-yet-publishable raw material, and for getting things in on time, and for not charging too much, and for fielding midnight calls from drunken authors with encouragement and tact and a form of murmuring that passed for understanding. Usually she edited novels. She’d taken on Oona’s book as a trade-off for a publisher pal of hers, an old lover, in point of fact; he’d offered a plum in return for the root vegetable he considered Oona’s book to be.

  Yet Oona’s book was the kind that publishers wanted, because it could potentially make money. In the time left over from her day job, which was as office manager for a smallish magazine, Oona had written a Superwoman self-help manual called Femagician, about how to juggle a career and a family and still find time for personal beauty routines and for remodelling the den. It was a subject that was fashionable just then, and the publisher was in a hurry: such waves had to be surfed before they’d passed by. They were counting on Nell – said her pal – to wrestle the book into shape in double-quick time.

  Nell had spent many hours with Oona, recasting chapters and reorganizing paragraphs and suggesting fresh details and additions and deletions. She was surprised to find that, despite her outward appearance – briskness, tidiness, smiling capability – Oona’s mind was like a sock drawer into which a number of disparate things had been shoved. There was a lot of jumble.

  At the end of the editing process, the thing had been practically a different book, and certainly a better one, for which Oona had said she was grateful. She’d expressed this gratitude in the Acknowledgements section, and then again, in pen and ink, on the title page of the copy she’d given to Nell. For invaluable Nell, the rewrite queen – the power behind the scenes. Love, Oona. Nell had been pleased, because she admired Oona quite a lot, and looked up to her as an older woman who’d got her life figured out, unlike Nell herself.

  The book had been a success, or what was considered a success then. Oona had been interviewed, not only in newspapers and on radio, but on television as well, on the kinds of morning chat shows for women that existed at that time. She’d become moderately and, as it turned out, temporarily famous. In the context of Oona’s life – the editing sessions with Nell, and th
en the book’s publication and its aftermath – Nell had seen Tig as an indistinct form, a shadow in the background. Nell had known nothing about Tig then, and nothing about the submerged horrors of the marriage: she was far outside the circle of friends who were in on the civilized arrangement.

  In public, Oona’d had nothing but praise for Tig. He’d been so supportive of her career, she’d said. He helped with the grocery shopping, he did a lot of the cooking, he stayed with the kids when Oona was otherwise occupied, and all of that in addition to his job at the radio station where he worked as a producer of documentaries and interviews. Unlike the jealous monsters that turned up in newspaper headlines for beating their wives to death with crowbars or drowning them in the bathtub, he was entirely in favour of her having a life of her own.

  The two of them had appeared, glossily coloured, in the pictures taken for a magazine article. They were pretending to cook a meal together – possibly not even pretending. Oona was stately in a loose caftan garment, a necklace of uncut amber around her neck, Tig large and ruggedly casual in a vest and shirt sleeves. The magazine was a women’s magazine, so shots of the kitchen were featured. A raw turkey was posed between them, with carrots and potatoes and celery stalks surrounding it in an artful arrangement. They made an imposing couple, Nell had thought wistfully: at that time they’d represented the kind of stability lacking in her own life. She’d been discovering recently that she was a more conventional person than she’d once imagined herself to be.

  Then Oona had wanted to write another book, a follow-up to the first one. Actually, she’d wanted Nell to write it: she, Oona, would dictate her thoughts into a tape recorder, and Nell could do the useful, necessary work of transmuting these thoughts into print. The book was to be called Femagician’s Box of Tricks, which was – Nell agreed – a good title, even if it did sound a bit like a children’s fantasy adventure. The trouble was that Oona seemed unsure about what she wanted to include in the box. Some days the book sounded like a memoir, other days like a do-it-yourself – how to get white rings off the furniture, what to do about ink spots on the rug – and on yet other days it resembled a manifesto. Of course, it could be all three, Nell said – there were ways of doing that – but Oona had to make some preliminary decisions about goals and intentions. Here Oona had wavered. Couldn’t Nell do that? Because Oona herself was so busy.

  During the time of these – what were they? Skirmishes? Pleadings? Negotiations? – Oona had done some confiding in Nell. (Nell thought she was being specially favoured, let in on something very private – Oona had a way of dropping her voice that suggested secrecy – but she found out soon enough that this was not the case. Oona’s secrets were open secrets, her recital of them a frequently repeated ritual.) Her marriage to Tig, said Oona, wasn’t a real marriage any longer. The two of them slept in separate rooms, they’d been doing that for years. They were staying together for the sake of the children: Tig had been wonderful about that. They had a gentleman’s agreement about what Chaucer’s Wife of Bath had called “other company.” Oona had tossed off the reference lightly: a lesser practitioner would have made more out of it, used it perhaps to show off, but Oona was more sophisticated than that.

  Sophisticated was the word that came to mind when Nell thought of Oona. Oona had true furniture, a blend of Victorian, with a heirloom aura about it, and pared-down modernist; she also had genuine pictures on the wall, with frames. She had some signed and numbered prints. Nell did not aspire to this level: her one-bedroom apartment had a table and two chairs, one of them a cheap beanbag, and a baggy corduroy-covered sofa, and four bookcases with her accumulation of books, and a single bed with squeaky springs – all thanks to the Salvation Army and the Goodwill shop – and a couple of posters stuck to the walls with tacks. She was saving up her money, though she wasn’t sure what she was saving it for. She’d gone so far as to paint the table orange and add two throw pillows to the sofa, but she saw no point in exerting herself any further because the apartment was only a stopover, like the many other apartments and rooms she’d camped in before it. She wasn’t ready to settle down, she told her friends.

  That was one way of putting it. Another way would have been that she had not found anyone to settle down with. There had been several men in her life, but they hadn’t been convincing. They’d been somewhat like her table – quickly acquired, brightened up a little, but temporary. The time for that kind of thing was running out, however. She was tired of renting.

  After the conversation about the separate rooms and the gentleman’s agreement, Nell went back to her one-bedroom and sat at her Sally Ann table with her college Chaucer and looked up the Wife of Bath reference, just out of curiosity. The Wife of Bath was not exactly an adulteress, as Oona technically was: the “other company” consisted of men she’d played around with before marriage, not during it. But that was quibbling. Anyway, no one used the word adultery any more; it was not a cool word, and to pronounce it was a social gaffe. It had been banished somewhere around 1968; now, three years later, long-term marriages were still blowing apart for no visible reason, middle-aged men with respectable jobs were still smoking dope on weekends and wearing wooden love beads and ending up in bed with girls half their age, and once-contented homemakers were still jumping ship and starting new careers, and, in extreme cases, turning into lesbians overnight. Once, there had been no lesbians, or none to be seen, but suddenly they were bursting out all over. Some of them weren’t even real lesbians; they were just getting back at their husbands for the love beads and the young girls.

  The young girls themselves, as well as the wives in escape mode, signalled their open-mindedness by their clothing. They wore overalls and glasses with big round frames, or else folkloric ankle-length skirts and thick-soled sandals; they had long straight picture-book hair or curly ethnic mops or very short crops; they ringed their eyes in black and had pale pink lipstick, or else they used no makeup at all. “Love is love,” they would say, with a smiling but doctrinaire manner that Nell found self-righteous. Love is love. It sounded very simple. But in practical terms, what did it mean?

  Nell liked to know the rules, whatever the game: she was a stickler for rules. As a child she’d separated her food into piles: meat here, mashed potatoes there, peas fenced into a special area reserved for peas, according to a strict plan of her own. One pile could not be eaten before the one already started had been consumed: that was the rule. She didn’t even cheat herself at Solitaire, which she’d spent quite a lot of time playing over the years.

  As for social interactions, she had learned only the old rules, the ones in force up to the explosive moment – it seemed like a moment – when all games had changed at once and earlier structures had fallen apart and everyone had begun pretending that the very notion of rules was obsolete. By the former rules, you did not steal other women’s husbands, just for instance. But there was no such thing as husband-stealing now, it appeared; instead there were just different folks doing their own thing and making alternate life choices.

  Nell had spent the period of upheaval feeling bewildered and disoriented and out of her depth. To have confessed to such a thing, however, would have been to attract contempt. She’d felt alone in her reaction, and had kept her mouth shut, and had left literary parties early so as not to have to struggle with bearded men in hallways and fend off stoned individuals of either sex in gardens lit with Japanese paper lanterns and listen to their slurred but angry pronouncements on her uptight mode of being.

  Her affairs – affairs, another obsolete word – her relationships before this moment had at least had plots. They’d had beginnings and middles and ends, marked by scenes of various kinds – in bars, in restaurants, in coffee shops, and even – when things had got extreme – on sidewalks. Despite the necessary pain, and the tears shed – usually by herself – there had been something satisfying, though not enjoyable, about such scenes: after them Nell had frequently felt congratulations were in order, as if parts had been played
as written and unspecified duties discharged.

  There had been entrances and exits then, not just the vague wanderings in and out of rooms and the mumblings and slouchings and shrugs that had replaced social life. Emotions with recognizable words attached to them had been involved: jealousy, despair, love, treachery, hate, fault, the whole antique shop. But to have a vocabulary of any size was now a disadvantage, among the young and those who purported to be young.

  Oona and Tig were older than Nell. They had not discarded the old rules completely, they still went in for talking. Shortly after the Wife of Bath episode, Oona invited Nell to dinner – one of the convivial roast beef dinners Oona and Tig were apparently famous for. Nell went off to the dinner in good faith, hoping that there would be chairs around a proper dining table, instead of the agglomerations of brown rice and the random grazing that were the fashion at more addled or bohemian gatherings. She’d seen the table, she’d done some editing sessions with Oona at it. Even at the worst, there would be place settings; at the very best, no people sitting cross-legged on the floor and monologuing about their acid trips. There was another couple there – a history professor and his wife, miraculously still together. The professor had been in one of Tig’s documentaries, and was an authority on the Seven Years War.

  The two children had had their dinners earlier but appeared for the special dessert, a Grand Marnier soufflé with chocolate sauce.

  The atmosphere was festive, if a little supercharged. Oona and Tig turned bright, interested faces toward Nell whenever she spoke, which wasn’t often – mostly it was the history professor who held forth. Still, when Nell did find something to say, she didn’t feel she had to sift through her words and pick only the short ones.

  After dinner, the history couple left and Nell helped Oona carry the dishes out to the kitchen – that was one of the old rules – and then she played a game of Monopoly with the two boys. They were friendly and polite, and treated her as if she were a somewhat older child. She shook the dice and rolled them, and was lucky, and acquired not only the water works and the electric company and all four railways and some blocks of red streets and pale-blue and purple slum property, but Park Place and Boardwalk as well, on which she built hotels. Although surprised by her own ruthlessness – it was only a game, she should let the children win – she then charged high rents, and ended by driving the kids into bankruptcy and winning the game.