Authors: Margaret Atwood
“How’s Peter?” Lucy asked after she had fiddled with her omelette and accused it of being leathery. She took an interest in Peter. He had got into the habit of phoning Marian at the office to tell her what he had done that day and what he was going to do that evening, and when Marian wasn’t there he left messages with Lucy, who shared Marian’s phone. Lucy thought him most polite, and found his voice intriguing.
Marian was watching Millie as she stowed away her steak-and-kidney pie, methodically, like putting things in a trunk. “There,” she’d say, or ought to, when it was finished: “all stored neatly away.” And her mouth would close like a lid.
“Just fine,” Marian said. She and Peter had decided she shouldn’t tell them at the office quite yet. She had been holding out therefore,
day after day, but now the question caught her desire to announce off-guard, and she couldn’t resist. They might as well know there’s hope in the world yet, she rationalized. “I have something to tell you all,” she said, “but it isn’t to go any further just now.” She waited until the three pairs of eyes had transferred their attention from the plates to her, then said, “We’re engaged.”
She smiled glowingly at them, watching the expression in their eyes change from expectation to dismay. Lucy dropped her fork and gasped, “No!” adding, “how wonderful!” Millie said, “Oh. Jolly good.” Emmy hurriedly took another pill.
Then there were flurried questions, which Marian dealt with calmly, doling out the information like candies to small children: one at a time, and not too much: it might make them sick. The triumphant elation she had assumed would follow the announcement, for her at least, was only momentary. As soon as the surprise effect had worn off, the conversation became as remote and impersonal, on both sides, as the razor-blade questionnaires: enquiries about the wedding, the future apartment, the possible china and glassware, what would be bought and worn.
Lucy asked finally, “I always thought he was the confirmed bachelor type, that’s what you said. How on earth did you ever catch him?”
Marian looked away from the suddenly pathetic too-eager faces poised to snatch at her answer, down at the knives and forks on the plates. “I honestly don’t know,” she said, trying to convey a becoming bridal modesty. She really didn’t know. She was sorry now that she had told them, dangled the effect in front of them that way without being able to offer them a reproducible cause.
Peter phoned almost as soon as they got back to the office. Lucy handed the phone to Marian with a whispered “It’s the man!”, a little awed by the presence of an actual prospective groom at the other end of the line. Marian felt through the air the tensing of
three pairs of ear-muscles, the swivelling of three blonde heads, as she spoke into the phone.
Peter’s voice was terse. “Hi honey how are you? Listen, I really can’t make it tonight. A case came up suddenly, something big, and I’ve just got to do some work on it.”
He sounded as though he was accusing her of trying to interfere with his work, and she resented this. She hadn’t even been expecting to see him in mid-week like that until he’d called the day before and asked her to have dinner; since then she’d been looking forward to it. She said rather sharply, “That’s all right, darling. But it would be nice if we could get these things straight before the last minute.”
“I told you it came up
suddenly
,” he said with irritation.
“Well you needn’t bite my head off.”
“I wasn’t,” he said, exasperated. “You know I’d much rather see you, of course, only you’ve got to understand.…” The rest of the conversation was a tangle of retractions and conciliations. Well, we have to learn to compromise, Marian thought, and we might as well begin working at it now. She concluded, “Tomorrow then?”
“Look darling,” he said, “I really don’t know. It’ll really all depend, you know how these things are, I’ll let you know, okay?”
When Marian had said good-bye sweetly for the benefit of her audience and had put down the phone she felt exhausted. She must watch how she spoke to Peter, she would have to handle him more carefully, there was evidently a good deal of pressure on him at his office.… “I wonder if I’m getting anaemia?” she said to herself as she turned back to the typewriter.
After she had finished the razor-blade questionnaire and had begun to work on a different one, the instructions for a product test of a new dehydrated dog food, the phone rang again. It was Joe Bates. She had been half-expecting the call. She greeted Joe with false enthusiasm: she knew she had been shirking her responsibilities
lately, avoiding the Bates’ dinner-invitations even though Clara had been wanting to see her. The pregnancy had gone first one week, then two weeks longer than it was supposed to, and Clara had sounded over the phone as though she herself was being dragged slowly down into the gigantic pumpkin-like growth that was enveloping her body. “I can hardly stand up,” she had groaned. But Marian had not been able to face another evening of contemplating Clara’s belly and speculating with her on the mysterious behaviour of its contents. She had responded the last time only with cheerful but notably uncheering remarks intended to lighten the atmosphere, such as “Maybe it’s got three heads,” and “Maybe it isn’t a baby at all but a kind of parasitic growth, like galls on trees, or elephantiasis of the navel, or a huge bunion.…” After that evening she had rationalized that she would do Clara more harm by going to see her than by staying away. In a spurt of solicitude catalysed by guilt, though, she had made Joe promise as she was leaving to let her know as soon as anything happened, even offering heroically to babysit for the others if absolutely necessary; and now his voice was saying, “Well thank god it’s all over. It’s another girl, ten pounds seven ounces, and she only went into the hospital at two last night. We were afraid she was going to have it in the taxi.”
“Well that’s marvellous,” Marian exclaimed, and added various inquiries and congratulations. She got the visiting hours and the room number from Joe and wrote them down on her telephonemessages pad. “Tell her I’ll come down and see her tomorrow,” she said. She was thinking that now Clara was deflating toward her normal size again she would be able to talk with her more freely: she would no longer feel as though she was addressing a swollen mass of flesh with a tiny pinhead, a shape that had made her think of a queen ant, bulging with the burden of an entire society, a semi-person – or sometimes, she thought, several people, a cluster of hidden personalities that she didn’t know at all. She decided on impulse to buy her
some roses: a welcoming-back gift for the real Clara, once more in uncontended possession of her own frail body.
She settled the phone in its black cradle and leaned back in her chair. The second-hand on the clock was sweeping around, accompanied by the ticking of typewriters and the click-clack of high-heeled shoes on the hard floor. She could feel time eddying and curling almost visibly around her feet, rising around her, lifting her body in the office chair and bearing her, slowly and circuitously but with the inevitability of water moving downhill, towards the distant, not-so-distant-any-more day they had agreed on – in late March? – that would end this phase and begin another. Somewhere else, arrangements were being gradually made; the relatives were beginning to organize their forces and energies, it was all being taken care of, there was nothing for her to do. She was floating, letting the current hold her up, trusting to it to take her where she was going. Now there was this day to get through: a landmark to be passed on the shore, a tree not much different from any of the others that could be distinguished from the rest only by being here rather than further back or further on, with no other purpose than to measure the distance travelled. She wanted to get it behind her. To help the propelling second hand she typed out the rest of the dog-food questionnaire.
Towards the end of the afternoon Mrs. Bogue sauntered out of her cubicle. The upwardly arranged lines on her brow expressed consternation, but her eyes were level as ever.
“Oh dear,” she said to the office at large – it was part of her human-relations policy to let them in on minor managerial crises – “What a day. Not only that disturbance in the West, but there’s been some trouble with that horrible Underwear Man again.”
“Not that filthy man!” Lucy said, wrinkling her opalescently powdered nose in disgust.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Bogue, “it’s so upsetting.” She wrung her hands together in feminine despair. She was evidently not at all upset. “He
seems to have shifted his field of operations to the suburbs, to Etobicoke as a matter of fact. I’ve had two ladies from Etobicoke on the phone this afternoon complaining. Of course he’s probably some nice ordinary man, perfectly harmless, but it’s so nasty for the company’s image.”
“What does he do?” asked Marian. She had never heard about the Underwear Man before.
“Oh,” said Lucy, “he’s one of those dirty men who phone women and say filthy things to them. He was doing it last year too.”
“The trouble is,” Mrs. Bogue lamented, still clasping her hands in front of her, “he tells them he’s from our company. Apparently he has a very convincing voice. Very official. He says he’s doing a survey on underwear, and I guess the first questions he asks must sound genuine. Brands and types and sizes and things. Then he gets more and more personal until the ladies get annoyed and hang up. Of course then they phone the company to complain, and sometimes they’ve accused us of all sorts of indecent things before I can explain that he’s not one of our interviewers and our company would never ask questions like that. I wish they’d catch him and ask him to stop, he’s such a nuisance, but of course he’s almost impossible to trace.”
“I wonder why he does it?” Marian speculated.
“Oh, he’s probably one of those sex fiends,” Lucy said with a delicate mauve shiver.
Mrs. Bogue puckered her brow again and shook her head. “But they all say he sounds so
nice
. So normal and even intelligent. Not at all like those awful people who call you up and breathe at you.”
“Maybe it all proves that some sex fiends are very nice normal people,” Marian said to Lucy when Mrs. Bogue had gone back to her cubicle.
As she put on her coat and drifted out of the office and down the hall and let herself be floated down in the decompression chamber
of the elevator, she was still thinking about the Underwear Man. She pictured his intelligent face, his polite, attentive manner, something like that of an insurance salesman, or an undertaker. She wondered what sort of personal questions he asked, and what she would say if he were ever to phone
her
(Oh, you must be the Underwear Man. I’ve heard
so
much about you.… I think we must have some friends in common). She saw him as wearing a business suit and a fairly conservative tie, diagonal stripes in brown and maroon; shoes well shined. Perhaps his otherwise normal mind had been crazed into frenzy by the girdle advertisements on the buses: he was a victim of society. Society flaunted these slender laughing rubberized women before his eyes, urging, practically forcing upon him their flexible blandishments, and then refused to supply him with any. He had found when he had tried to buy the garment in question at store counters that it came empty of the promised contents. But instead of raging and fuming and getting nowhere he had borne his disappointment quietly and maturely, and had decided, like the sensible man he was, to go systematically in search of the underwear-clad image he so ardently desired, using for his purposes the handy telecommunications network provided by society. A just exchange: they owed it to him.
As she stepped onto the street a new thought came to her. Maybe it was really Peter. Slipping out from his law office into the nearest phone booth to dial the numbers of housewives in Etobicoke. His protest against something or other – surveys? housewives in Etobicoke? vulcanization? – or his only way of striking back at a cruel world that saddled him with crushing legal duties and prevented him from taking her to dinner. And he had got the company name and the knowledge of official interviewing procedures, of course, from her! Perhaps this was his true self, the core of his personality, the central Peter who had been occupying her mind more
and more lately. Perhaps this was what lay hidden under the surface, under the other surfaces, that secret identity which in spite of her many guesses and attempts and half-successes she was aware she had still not uncovered: he was really the Underwear Man.
T
he first thing Marian’s eyes encountered as her head emerged periscope-like through the stairwell was a pair of naked legs. They were topped by Ainsley, who was standing half-dressed in the small vestibule, gazing down upon her, the usual blankness of her face tinged almost imperceptibly here and there with shades of surprise and annoyance.
“Hi,” she said. “I thought you were going out for dinner tonight.” She fastened her eyes accusingly upon the small bag of groceries Marian was carrying.
Marian’s legs pushed the rest of her body up the remaining stairs before she answered. “I was, but I’m not. Something came up at Peter’s office.” She went into the kitchen and deposited the paper bag on the table. Ainsley followed her in and sat down on one of the chairs.
“Marian,” she said dramatically, “it has to be tonight!”
“What does?” Marian asked vaguely, putting her carton of milk into the refrigerator. She wasn’t really listening.
“It. Leonard. You know.”
Marian had been so occupied with her own thoughts that it was a moment before she remembered what Ainsley was talking about. “Oh. That,” she said. She took off her coat, reflectively.
She hadn’t been paying close attention to the progress of Ainsley’s campaign (or was it Leonard’s?) over the past two months – she’d wanted to keep her hands clean of the whole thing – but she had been force-fed enough with Ainsley’s own accounts and analyses and complaints to be able to deduce what had been happening; after all, however clean one’s hands, one’s ears were of necessity open. Things hadn’t gone according to schedule. It appeared that Ainsley had overshot the mark. At the first encounter she had made herself into an image of such pink-gingham purity that Len had decided, after her strategic repulse of him that evening, that she would require an extralong and careful siege. Anything too abrupt, too muscular, would frighten her away; she would have to be trapped with gentleness and caution. Consequently he had begun by asking her to lunch several times, and had progressed, at intervals of medium length, to dinners out and finally to foreign films, in one of which he had gone so far as to hold her hand. He had even invited her to his apartment once, for afternoon tea. Ainsley said later with several vigorous oaths that he had been on this occasion a model of propriety. Since by her own admission she didn’t drink, she could not even pretend to permit him to get her drunk. In conversation he treated her as though she was a little girl, patiently explaining things to her and impressing her with stories about the television studio and assuring her that his interest in her was strictly that of a well-wishing older friend until she wanted to scream. And she couldn’t even talk back: it was necessary for her mind to appear as vacant as her face. Her hands were tied. She had constructed her image and now she had to maintain it. To make any advances herself, or to let slip a flicker of anything resembling intelligence, would have been so out of character as to
give her dumb-show irrevocably away. So she had been stewing and fussing in private, suffering Len’s overly subtle manoeuvrings with suppressed impatience and watching the all-important calendar days slide uneventfully by.