Authors: Margaret Atwood
The voice at the other end had said, “This is Duncan.”
“Who?”
“The guy at the laundromat.”
“Oh. Yes.” Now she recognized the voice, though it sounded more nervous than usual.
“I’m sorry I startled you in the movie, but I knew you were dying to know what I was eating.”
“Yes, I was actually,” she said, glancing at the clock and then at the open door of Mrs. Bogue’s cubicle. She had already spent far too much time on the phone that afternoon.
“They were pumpkin seeds. I’m trying to stop smoking, you know, and I find them very helpful. There’s a lot of oral satisfaction in cracking them open. I get them at the pet store, they’re supposed to be for birds, really.”
“Yes,” she said, to fill up the pause that followed.
“It was a crummy movie.”
Marian wondered whether the switchboard girl downstairs was listening in on the conversation, as she had been known to do, and if so, what she was thinking about it; she must have realized by now that it was not a business call. “Mr.… Duncan,” she said in her most official voice, “I’m sort of at the office, and we aren’t supposed to take much time for outside calls; I mean from friends and so on.”
“Oh,” he said. He sounded discouraged, but he made no attempt to clarify the situation.
She pictured him at the other end of the line, morose, hollow-eyed, waiting for the sound of her voice. She had no idea why he had called. Perhaps he needed her, needed to talk to her. “But I
would
like to talk to you,” she said encouragingly. “Some more convenient time?”
“Well,” he said, “as a matter of fact I sort of need you; right now. I mean I need – what I need is some ironing. I’ve just got to iron something and I’ve already ironed everything in the house, even the dishtowels, and I sort of wondered whether maybe I could come over to your house and maybe iron some of your things.”
Mrs. Bogue’s eve was now definitely upon her. “Why, of course,” she said crisply. Then she suddenly decided that it would be, for some as yet unexamined reason, disastrous if this man were to encounter either Peter or Ainsley. Besides, who could tell what variety of turmoil had broken loose after she had tiptoed out of the house that morning, leaving Len still caught in the toils of vice behind the door ornamented with his own tie? She hadn’t heard from Ainsley all day, which might be either a good or an evil omen.
And even if Len had managed to escape safely, the wrath of the lady down below, foiled of its proper object, might very well descend on the head of the harmless ironer as a representative of the whole male species. “Maybe I’d better bring some things to your house,” she said.
“Actually I’d prefer that. It means I can use my own iron; I’m used to it. It makes me uncomfortable to iron with other people’s irons. But please hurry, I really do need it. Desperately.”
“Yes, as soon as I can after work,” she said, trying both to reassure him and to sound, for the benefit of the office, as though she was making a dentist appointment. “About seven.” She realized as soon as she had hung up that this would mean postponing dinner with Peter yet again; but then she could see him any night. The other thing was an emergency.
By the time she had got matters straightened out with Peter she had felt as though she had been trying to unsnarl herself from all the telephone lines in the city. They were prehensile, they were like snakes, they had a way of coiling back on you and getting you all wrapped up.
A nurse was coming towards her, pushing a rubber-wheeled wagon loaded with trays of food. Although her mind was occupied with other things, Marian’s eyes registered the white shape and found it out of place. She stopped and looked around. Wherever else she was going it was not towards the main exit. She had been so involved in the threads of her own plans and reflections that she must have got off the elevator on the wrong floor. She was in a corridor exactly similar to the one she had just come from, except that all the room-doors were closed. She looked for a number: 273. Well, that was simple: she had got off a floor too soon.
She turned and walked back, trying to remember where the elevator was supposed to be; she seemed to recall having gone around several corners. The nurse had disappeared. Coming towards her
now from the far end of the hallway was a figure, a man wearing a green smock, with a white mask over the lower part of his face. She was aware for the first time of the hospital smell, antiseptic, severe.
It must be one of the doctors. She could see now that he had a thin black thing, a stethoscope, around his neck. As he came nearer she looked at him more closely. In spite of the mask there was something familiar about him; it bothered her that she could not tell what it was. But he passed her, staring straight ahead, his eyes expressionless, and opened one of the doors to the right and went in. When he turned she could see that he had a bald spot on the back of his head.
“Well, nobody I know is going bald, at any rate,” she said to herself. She was relieved.
S
he remembered the way to his apartment perfectly, although she couldn’t recall either the number or the street name. She hadn’t been in that district for a long time, in fact ever since the day of the beer interviews. She took the right directions and turnings almost automatically, as though she was trailing somebody by an instinct that was connected not with sight or smell but with a vaguer sense that had to do with locations. But it wasn’t a complicated route: just across the baseball park, up the asphalt ramp and along a couple of blocks; though the way seemed longer now that she was walking in a darkness illuminated only by the dim street lamps rather than the former searing light of the sun. She walked quickly: already her legs were cold. The grass on the baseball park had been grey with frost.
The few times she had thought about the apartment, in idle moments at the office when she had had nothing but a blank sheet of paper in front of her or at other times when she was bending to pick some piece of clutter off the floor, she had never given it any
specific place in the city. She had an image in her mind of the inside, the appearance of the rooms, but not of the building itself. Now it was disconcerting to have the street produce it, square and ordinary and anonymous, more or less exactly where it had been before.
She pushed the buzzer of Number Six and slipped through the inside glass door as soon as the mechanism started its chainsaw noise. Duncan opened the door partway. He stared at her suspiciously; in the semi-darkness his eyes gleamed behind his hair. He had a cigarette stub in his mouth, burning dangerously close to his lips.
“Got the stuff?” he asked.
Mutely she held towards him the small cloth bundle she had been carrying under her arm, and he stepped aside to let her come in.
“It’s not very much,” he said, undoing the clothes. There were only two white cotton blouses, recently washed, a pillowcase, and a few guest towels embroidered with flowers, donated by a great-aunt, that were wrinkled from lying underneath everything else on the linen shelf.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “it was really all I had.”
“Well, it’s better than nothing,” he said grudgingly. He turned and walked towards his bedroom.
Marian wasn’t certain whether she was supposed to follow him or whether he expected her to go away now that she had made the delivery. “Can I watch?” she asked, hoping he wouldn’t consider it an invasion of privacy. She didn’t feel like going back to her own apartment right away. There would be nothing to do and she had, after all, sacrificed an evening with Peter.
“Sure, if you want to; though there isn’t much to see.”
She made her way towards the hall. The living room had not been altered since her former visit, except that there were if possible more stray papers lying about. The three chairs were still in the same positions; a slab of board was leaning against an arm of the red
plush one. Only one of the lamps, the one by the blue chair, was turned on. Marian inferred that both of the roommates were out.
Duncan’s room too was much the same as she remembered it. The ironing board was nearer the centre of the room and the chessmen had been set up in their two opposing rows; the black-and-white chequered board was resting now on top of a stack of books. On the bed were several freshly ironed white shirts on coathangers. Duncan hung them up in the closet before going over to plug in the iron. Marian took off her coat and sat down on the bed.
He threw his cigarette into one of the crowded ashtrays on the floor, waited for the iron to heat, testing it at intervals on the board, and then began to iron one of the blouses, with slow concentration and systematic attention to collar corners. Marian watched him silently; he obviously didn’t want to be interrupted. She found it strange to see someone else ironing her clothes.
Ainsley had given her a peculiar look when she had come out of her bedroom with her coat on and the bundle under her arm. “Where are you going with those?” she had asked. It was too small a lot for the laundromat.
“Oh, just out.”
“What’ll I say if Peter calls?”
“He won’t call. But just say I’m out.” She had plunged down the stairs then, not wishing to explain anything at all about Duncan or even to reveal his existence. She felt it might upset the balance of power. But Ainsley had no time at the moment for anything more than a tepid curiosity: she was too elated by the probable success of her own campaign, and also by what she had called “a stroke of luck.”
Marian had asked, when she had reached the apartment and had found Ainsley in the living room with a paperback on baby and child care, “Well, how did you get the poor thing out of here this morning?”
Ainsley laughed. “Great stroke of luck,” she said. “I was sure the old fossil down there would be lying in wait for us at the bottom of the stairs. I really didn’t know what I’d do. I was trying to think of some bluff, like saying he was the telephone man.…”
“She tried to pin me down about it last night,” Marian interjected. “She knew perfectly well he was up there.”
“Well for some reason she actually went
out
. I saw her go from the living-room window; just by chance really. Can you imagine? I didn’t think she ever went out, not in the mornings. I skipped work today of course and I was just wandering around having a cigarette. But when I saw her go I got Len up and stuck his clothes on him and hustled him down the stairs and out of there before he was quite awake. He had a terrible hangover too, he just about killed that bottle. All by himself. I don’t think he’s too sure yet exactly what happened.” She smiled with her small pink mouth.
“Ainsley, you’re immoral.”
“Why? He seemed to enjoy it. Though he was terribly apologetic and anxious this morning when we were out having breakfast, and then sort of soothing, as though he was trying to console me or something. Really it was embarrassing. And then, you know, as he got wider and wider awake and soberer and soberer, he couldn’t wait to get away from me. But now,” she said, hugging herself with both arms, “we’ll have to wait and see. Whether it was all worth it.”
“Yes, well,” Marian said, “would you mind fixing the bed?”
Thinking back on it, she found something ominous about the fact that the lady down below had gone out. It wasn’t like her at all. She’d be much more likely to lurk behind the piano or the velvet curtains while they were creeping down the stairs and spring out upon them just as they had reached the threshold of safety.
He was starting on the second blouse. He seemed to be unaware of everything but the wrinkled white material spread on the board in
front of him, poring over it as though it was an ancient and very fragile manuscript that he couldn’t quite translate. Before, she had thought of him as being short, perhaps because of the shrunken child’s face, or because she had mostly seen him sitting down; but now she thought, actually he would be quite tall if he didn’t slouch like that.
As she sat watching him she recognized in herself a desire to say something to him, to intrude, to break through the white cloth surface of his absorption: she did not like being so totally closed out. To avoid the emotion she picked up her purse and went into the bathroom, intending to comb her hair, not because it needed combing but as what Ainsley called a substitution-activity; like a squirrel scratching itself when confronted by hazardous or unobtainable breadcrumbs. She wanted to talk to him, but talking to him now, she thought, might cancel out any therapeutic effects the ironing was having.
The bathroom was ordinary enough. Damp towels were mounded on the racks and a clutter of shaving things and men’s cosmetics covered the various porcelain ledges and surfaces. But the mirror over the basin had been broken. There were only a few jagged pieces of glass left sticking around the edges of the wooden frame. She tried peering into one of them but it wasn’t large enough to be of much use.
When she went back into the room he was doing the pillowcase. He seemed more relaxed: he was ironing with a long easy sweeping motion instead of the exact staccato strokes he had been using on the blouse. He looked up at her as she came in.
“I suppose you’re wondering what happened to the mirror,” he said.
“Well …”
“I smashed it. Last week. With the frying pan.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I got tired of being afraid I’d walk in there some morning and wouldn’t be able to see my own reflection in it. So I went and grabbed the frying pan out of the kitchen and gave it a whack. They both got very upset,” he said meditatively, “particularly Trevor, he was cooking an omelette at the time and I guess I sort of ruined it. Got it all full of broken glass. But I don’t really see why it should disturb them, it was a perfectly understandable symbolic narcissistic gesture, and it wasn’t a good mirror anyway. But they’ve been jittery ever since. Especially Trevor, subconsciously he thinks he’s my mother; it’s rather hard on him. It doesn’t bother me that much, I’m used to it, I’ve been running away from understudy mothers ever since I can remember, there’s a whole herd of them behind me trying to catch up and rescue me, god knows what from, and give me warmth and comfort and nourishment and make me quit smoking, that’s what you get for being an orphan. And they’re quoting things at me: Trevor quotes T. S. Eliot these days and Fish quotes the
Oxford English Dictionary
.”