She needs to concentrate her attention on other things. This is the real reason for the night courses, which she picks almost at random, to coincide with the evenings Ed isn’t in. He has meetings, he’s on the boards of charities, he has trouble saying no. She runs the courses past herself, mediaeval history, cooking, anthropology, hoping her mind will snag on something; she’s even taken a course in geology, which was fascinating, she told her friends, all that magma. That’s just it: everything is fascinating, but nothing enters her. She’s always a star pupil, she does well on the exams and impresses the teachers, for which she despises them. She is familiar with her brightness, her techniques; she’s surprised other people are still taken in by them.
Forms of Narrative Fiction started out the same way. Sally was full of good ideas, brimming with helpful suggestions. The workshop part of it was anyway just like a committee meeting, and Sally knew how to run those, from behind, without seeming to run them: she’d done it lots of times at work. Bertha, the instructor, told Sally she had a vivid imagination and a lot of untapped creative energy. “No wonder she never gets anywhere, with a name like Bertha,” Sally said, while having coffee afterwards with two of the other night-coursers. “It goes with her outfits, though.” (Bertha sports the macramé look, with health-food sandals and bulky-knit sweaters and hand-weave skirts that don’t do a thing for her square figure, and too many Mexican rings on her hands, which she doesn’t wash often enough.) Bertha goes in for assignments, which she calls learning by doing. Sally likes assignments: she likes things that can be completed and then discarded, and for which she gets marks.
The first thing Bertha assigned was The Epic. They read The Odyssey (selected passages, in translation, with a plot summary of the rest); then they poked around in James Joyce’s Ulysses, to see how Joyce had adapted the epic form to the modern-day novel. Bertha had them keep a Toronto notebook, in which they had to pick out various spots around town as the ports of call in The Odyssey, and say why they had chosen them. The notebooks were read out loud in class, and it was a scream to see who had chosen what for Hades. (The Mount Pleasant Cemetery, McDonald’s, where, if you eat the forbidden food, you never get back to the land of the living, the University Club with its dead ancestral souls, and so forth.) Sally’s was the hospital, of course; she had no difficulty with the trench filled with blood, and she put the ghosts in wheelchairs.
After that they did The Ballad, and read gruesome accounts of murders and betrayed love. Bertha played them tapes of wheezy old men singing traditionally, in the Doric mode, and assigned a newspaper scrapbook, in which you had to clip and paste up-to-the-minute equivalents. The Sun was the best newspaper for these. The fiction that turned out to go with this kind of plot was the kind Sally liked anyway, and she had no difficulty concocting a five-page murder mystery, complete with revenge.
But now they are on Folk Tales and the Oral Tradition, and Sally is having trouble. This time, Bertha wouldn’t let them read anything. Instead she read to them, in a voice, Sally said, that was like a gravel truck and was not conducive to reverie. Since it was the Oral Tradition, they weren’t even allowed to take notes; Bertha said the original hearers of these stories couldn’t read, so the stories were memorized. “To recreate the atmosphere,” said Bertha, “I should turn out the lights. These stories were always told at night.” “To make them creepier?” someone offered. “No,” said Bertha. “In the days, they worked.” She didn’t do that, though she did make them sit in a circle.
“You should have seen us,” Sally said afterwards to Ed, “sitting in a circle, listening to fairy stories. It was just like kindergarten. Some of them even had their mouths open. I kept expecting her to say, ‘If you need to go, put up your hand.’ ” She was meaning to be funny, to amuse Ed with this account of Bertha’s eccentricity and the foolish appearance of the students, most of them middle-aged, sitting in a circle as if they had never grown up at all. She was also intending to belittle the course, just slightly. She always did this with her night courses, so Ed wouldn’t get the idea there was anything in her life that was even remotely as important as he was. But Ed didn’t seem to need this amusement or this belittlement. He took her information earnestly, gravely, as if Bertha’s behaviour was, after all, only the procedure of a specialist. No one knew better than he did that the procedures of specialists often looked bizarre or incomprehensible to onlookers. “She probably has her reasons,” was all he would say.
The first stories Bertha read them, for warm-ups (“No memorizing for her,” said Sally), were about princes who got amnesia and forgot about their true loves and married girls their mothers had picked out for them. Then they had to be rescued, with the aid of magic. The stories didn’t say what happened to the women the princes had already married, though Sally wondered about it. Then Bertha read them another story, and this time they were supposed to remember the features that stood out for them and write a five-page transposition, set in the present and cast in the realistic mode. (“In other words,” said Bertha, “no real magic.”) They couldn’t use the Universal Narrator, however: they had done that in their Ballad assignment. This time they had to choose a point of view. It could be the point of view of anyone or anything in the story, but they were limited to one only. The story she was about to read, she said, was a variant of the Bluebeard motif, much earlier than Perrault’s sentimental rewriting of it. In Perrault, said Bertha, the girl has to be rescued by her brothers; but in the earlier version things were quite otherwise.9
This is what Bertha read, as far as Sally can remember:
There were once three young sisters. One day a beggar with a large basket on his back came to the door and asked for some bread. The eldest sister brought him some, but no sooner had she touched him than she was compelled to jump into his basket, for the beggar was really a wizard in disguise. (“So much for United Appeal,” Sally murmured. “She should have said, ‘I gave at the office.’ ”) The wizard carried her away to his house in the forest, which was large and richly furnished. “Here you will be happy with me, my darling,” said the wizard, “for you will have everything your heart could desire.”
This lasted for a few days. Then the wizard gave the girl an egg and a bunch of keys. “I must go away on a journey,” he said, “and I am leaving the house in your charge. Preserve this egg for me, and carry it about with you everywhere; for a great misfortune will follow from its loss. The keys open every room in the house. You may go into each of them and enjoy what you find there, but do not go into the small room at the top of the house, on pain of death.” The girl promised, and the wizard disappeared.
At first the girl contented herself with exploring the rooms, which contained many treasures. But finally her curiosity would not let her alone. She sought out the smallest key, and, with beating heart, opened the little door at the top of the house. Inside it was a large basin full of blood, within which were the bodies of many women, which had been cut to pieces; nearby were a chopping block and an axe. In her horror, she let go of the egg which fell into the basin of blood. In vain did she try to wipe away the stain: every time she succeeded in removing it, back it would come.
The wizard returned, and in a stern voice asked for the egg and the keys. When he saw the egg, he knew at once she had disobeyed him and gone into the forbidden room. “Since you have gone into the room against my will,” he said, “you shall go back into it against your own.” Despite her pleas he threw her down, dragged her by the hair into the little room, hacked her into pieces and threw her body into the basin with the others.
Then he went for the second girl, who fared no better than her sister. But the third was clever and wily. As soon as the wizard had gone, she set the egg on a shelf, out of harm’s way, and then went immediately and opened the forbidden door. Imagine her distress when she saw the cut-up bodies of her two beloved sisters; but she set the parts in order, and they joined together and her sisters stood up and moved, and were living and well. They embraced each other,
and the third sister hid the other two in a cupboard.
When the wizard returned he at once asked for the egg. This time it was spotless. “You have passed the test,” he said to the third sister. “You shall be my bride.” (“And second prize,” said Sally, to herself this time, “is two weeks in Niagara Falls.”) The wizard no longer had any power over her, and had to do whatever she asked. There was more, about how the wizard met his come-uppance and was burned to death, but Sally already knew which features stood out for her.
At first she thought the most important thing in the story was the forbidden room. What would she put in the forbidden room, in her present-day realistic version? Certainly not chopped-up women. It wasn’t that they were too unrealistic, but they were certainly too sick, as well as being too obvious. She wanted to do something more clever. She thought it might be a good idea to have the curious woman open the door and find nothing there at all, but after mulling it over she set this notion aside. It would leave her with the problem of why the wizard would have a forbidden room in which he kept nothing.
That was the way she was thinking right after she got the assignment, which was a full two weeks ago. So far she’s written nothing. The great temptation is to cast herself in the role of the cunning heroine, but again it’s too predictable. And Ed certainly isn’t the wizard; he’s nowhere near sinister enough. If Ed were the wizard, the room would contain a forest, some ailing plants and feeble squirrels, and Ed himself, fixing them up; but then, if it were Ed the room wouldn’t even be locked, and there would be no story.
Now, as she sits at her desk, fiddling with her felt-tip pen, it comes to Sally that the intriguing thing about the story, the thing she should fasten on, is the egg. Why an egg? From the night course in Comparative Folklore she took four years ago, she remembers that the egg can be a fertility symbol, or a necessary object in African spells, or something the world hatched out of. Maybe in this story it’s a symbol of virginity, and that is why the wizard requires it unbloodied. Women with dirty eggs get murdered, those with clean ones get married.
But this isn’t useful either. The concept is so outmoded. Sally doesn’t see how she can transpose it into real life without making it ridiculous, unless she sets the story in, for instance, an immigrant Portuguese family, and what would she know about that?
Sally opens the drawer of her desk and hunts around in it for her nail file. As she’s doing this, she gets the brilliant idea of writing the story from the point of view of the egg. Other people will do the other things: the clever girl, the wizard, the two blundering sisters, who weren’t smart enough to lie, and who will have problems afterwards, because of the thin red lines running all over their bodies, from where their parts joined together. But no one will think of the egg. How does it feel, to be the innocent and passive cause of so much misfortune?
(Ed isn’t the Bluebeard: Ed is the egg. Ed Egg, blank and pristine and lovely. Stupid, too. Boiled, probably. Sally smiles fondly.)
But how can there be a story from the egg’s point of view, if the egg is so closed and unaware? Sally ponders this, doodling on her pad of lined paper. Then she resumes the search for her nail file. Already it’s time to begin getting ready for her dinner party. She can sleep on the problem of the egg and finish the assignment tomorrow, which is Sunday. It’s due on Monday, but Sally’s mother used to say she was a whiz at getting things done at the last minute.
After painting her nails with Nuit Magique,10 Sally takes a bath, eating her habitual toasted English muffin while she lies in the tub. She begins to dress, dawdling; she has plenty of time. She hears Ed coming up out of the cellar; then she hears him in the bathroom, which he has entered from the hall door. Sally goes in through the other door, still in her slip. Ed is standing at the sink with his shirt off, shaving. On the weekends he leaves it until necessary, or until Sally tells him he’s too scratchy.
Sally slides her hands around his waist, nuzzling against his naked back. He has very smooth skin, for a man. Sally smiles to herself: she can’t stop thinking of him as an egg.
“Mmm,” says Ed. It could be appreciation, or the answer to a question Sally hasn’t asked and he hasn’t heard, or just an acknowledgement that she’s there.
“Don’t you ever wonder what I think about?” Sally says. She’s said this more than once, in bed or at the dinner table, after dessert. She stands behind him, watching the swaths the razor cuts in the white of his face, looking at her own face reflected in the mirror, just the eyes visible above his naked shoulder. Ed, lathered, is Assyrian, sterner than usual; or a frost-covered Arctic explorer; or demi-human, a white-bearded forest mutant. He scrapes away at himself, methodically destroying the illusion.
“But I already know what you think about,” says Ed.
“How?” Sally says, taken aback.
“You’re always telling me,” Ed says, with what might be resignation or sadness; or maybe this is only a simple statement of fact.
Sally is relieved. If that’s all he’s going on, she’s safe.
Marylynn arrives half an hour early, her pearl-coloured Porsche leading two men in a delivery truck up the driveway. The men install the keyhole desk, while Marylynn supervises: it looks, in the alcove, exactly as Marylynn has said it would, and Sally is delighted. She sits at it to write the cheque. Then she and Marylynn go into the kitchen, where Sally is finishing up her sauce, and Sally pours them each a Kir. She’s glad Marylynn is here: it will keep her from dithering, as she tends to do just before people arrive. Though it’s only the heart men, she’s still a bit nervous. Ed is more likely to notice when things are wrong than when they’re exactly right.
Marylynn sits at the kitchen table, one arm draped over the chair-back, her chin on the other hand; she’s in soft grey which makes her hair look silver, and Sally feels once again how banal it is to have ordinary dark hair like her own, however well-cut, however shiny. It’s the confidence she envies, the negligence. Marylynn doesn’t seem to be trying at all, ever.
“Guess what Ed said today?” Sally says.
Marylynn leans further forward. “What?” she says, with the eagerness of one joining in a familiar game.
“He said, ‘Some of these femininists go too far,’ ” Sally reports. “ ‘Femininists.’ Isn’t that sweet?”
Marylynn holds the pause too long, and Sally has a sudden awful thought: maybe Marylynn thinks she’s showing off, about Ed. Marylynn has always said she’s not ready for another marriage yet; still, Sally should watch herself, not rub her nose in it. But then Marylynn laughs indulgently, and Sally, relieved, joins in.
“Ed is unbelievable,” says Marylynn. “You should pin his mittens to his sleeves when he goes out in the morning.”
“He shouldn’t be let out alone,” says Sally.
“You should get him a seeing-eye dog,” says Marylynn, “to bark at women.”
“Why?” says Sally, still laughing but alert now, the cold beginning at the ends of her fingers. Maybe Marylynn knows something she doesn’t; maybe the house is beginning to crumble, after all.
“Because he can’t see them coming,” says Marylynn. “That’s what you’re always telling me.”
She sips her Kir; Sally stirs the sauce. “I bet he thinks I’m a femininist,” says Marylynn.
“You?” says Sally. “Never.” She would like to add that Ed has given no indication of thinking anything at all about Marylynn, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t want to take the risk of hurting her feelings.
The wives of the heart men admire Sally’s sauce; the heart men talk shop, all except Walter Morly, who is good at by-passes. He’s sitting beside Marylynn, and paying far too much attention to her for Sally’s comfort. Mrs. Morly is at the other end of the table, not saying much of anything, which Marylynn appears not to notice. She keeps on talking to Walter about St. Lucia, where they’ve both been.
So after dinner, when Sally has herded them all into the living room for coffee and liqueurs, she takes Marylynn by the elbow. “Ed ha
sn’t seen our desk yet,” she says, “not up close. Take him away and give him your lecture on nineteenth-century antiques. Show him all the pigeon-holes. Ed loves pigeon-holes.” Ed appears not to get this.
Marylynn knows exactly what Sally is up to. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I won’t rape Dr. Morly; the poor creature would never survive the shock,” but she allows herself to be shunted off to the side with Ed.
Sally moves from guest to guest, smiling, making sure everything is in order. Although she never looks directly, she’s always conscious of Ed’s presence in the room, any room; she perceives him as a shadow, a shape seen dimly at the edge of her field of vision, recognizable by the outline. She likes to know where he is, that’s all. Some people are on their second cup of coffee. She walks towards the alcove: they must have finished with the desk by now.
But they haven’t, they’re still in there. Marylynn is bending forward, one hand on the veneer. Ed is standing too close to her, and as Sally comes up behind them she sees his left arm, held close to his side, the back of it pressed against Marylynn, her shimmering upper thigh, her ass to be exact. Marylynn does not move away.
It’s a split second, and then Ed sees Sally and the hand is gone; there it is, on top of the desk, reaching for a liqueur glass.
“Marylynn needs more Tia Maria,” he says. “I just told her that people who drink a little now and again live longer.” His voice is even, his face is as level as ever, a flat plain with no signposts.
Marylynn laughs. “I once had a dentist who I swear drilled tiny holes in my teeth, so he could fix them later,” she says.
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