Authors: Margaret Atwood
Fish opened his eyes, blinked, and frowned at Duncan, but before he could make any comment Trevor bustled into the room.
“Has he been going on about those horrid symbols and things again? I don’t approve of that kind of criticism myself, I think
style’s
so much more important, and Fischer gets much too Viennese, especially when he drinks. He’s very wicked. Besides, he’s so out of
date
,” he said cattily. “The very latest approach to
Alice
is just to dismiss it as a rather charming children’s book. I’m almost ready, Duncan could you just help me set the table?”
Fischer sat watching them, sunk in the depths of his chair. They were putting up two card tables, placing the legs carefully in the gaps between the piles of paper, shifting the papers when necessary. Then Trevor spread a white cloth over the two tables and Duncan started to arrange the silverware and dishes. Fish picked up his sherry glass from his board and swallowed the contents at one gulp. He noticed the other glass that was standing there, and emptied that one also.
“There now!” Trevor cried. “Dinner will be served!”
Marian stood up. Trevor’s eyes were glittering and a round red spot of excitement had appeared in the centre of each of his flour-white cheeks. A strand of blond hair had come detached and was hanging limply across his high forehead. He lit the candles on the table, and went around the living room turning off the floorlamps. Finally he removed the board from in front of Fish.
“You sit here, ah, Marian,” he said, and disappeared into the kitchen. She sat down in the card-table chair indicated. She could not get as close to the table as she would have liked, because of the legs. She ran her eyes over the dishes, checking: they were to begin with shrimp cocktail. That was all right. She wondered apprehensively
what else would be produced for her body’s consumption. Evidently there would be many more objects: the table bristled with silverware. She noted with curiosity the ornately garlanded silver Victorian salt-cellar and the tasteful flower decoration which stood between the two candles. They were real flowers too, chrysanthemums in an oblong silver dish.
Trevor returned and sat down in the chair nearest the kitchen and they began to eat. Duncan was seated opposite, and Fish to her left, at what she supposed was the foot of the table, or possibly the head. She was glad they were dining by candlelight: it would be easier to dispose of things if necessary. She hadn’t as yet the least idea of how she was going to cope, if coping was going to be required, and it did not look as though Duncan would be much help. He seemed to have retreated into himself; he ate mechanically, and while chewing fixed his gaze on the candle flames, which made his eyes appear to be slightly crossed.
“Your silverware is beautiful,” she said to Trevor.
“Yes, isn’t it,” he smiled. “It’s been in the family for ages. The china too, I think it’s rather heavenly, so much nicer than those stark Danish things everybody is using nowadays.”
Marian inspected the pattern. It was a burgeoning floral design with many scallops, flutings and scrolls. “Lovely,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ve taken far too much trouble.”
Trevor beamed. She was obviously saying the right things. “Oh, no trouble at all. I think eating
well
is awfully important, why eat just to stay alive as most people do? The sauce is my own, do you like it?” He went on without waiting for an answer. “I can’t stand these bottled things, they’re so standardized; I can get real horseradish at the Market down near the waterfront but of course it’s so difficult to get fresh shrimp in this city.…” He cocked his head to one side as though listening, then sprang out of his chair and pivoted round the corner into the kitchenette.
Fischer, who had not said anything since they had sat down, now opened his mouth and began to speak. Since he continued to eat at the same time, the intake of food and the output of words made a rhythm, Marian commented to herself, much like breathing, and he seemed to be able to handle the alternation quite as automatically; which was a good thing because she was sure that if he paused to think about it something would go down the wrong way. It would be more than painful to have a shrimp caught in one’s windpipe; especially with horseradish sauce. She watched him, fascinated. She was able to stare openly because he had his eyes shut most of the time. His fork found its way to his mouth by some mechanism or sense peculiar to himself, she couldn’t imagine how: perhaps batlike supersonic radar waves bounced back from the fork; or perhaps his individual whiskers functioned like antennae. He didn’t break his pace even when Trevor, who had been busily removing the shrimp-cocktail dishes, set his soup plate in front of him, though he opened his eyes long enough to pick up his soup spoon after a preliminary trial with his fork.
“Now my proposed thesis topic,” he had begun. “They may not approve of it, they’re very conservative around here, but even if they turn it down I can always write it up for one of the journals, no human thought is ever wasted; anyway it’s publish or perish these days, if I can’t do it here I can always do it in the States. What I have in mind is something quite revolutionary, ‘Malthus and the Creative Metaphor,’ Malthus being of course merely a symbol for what I want to get at, that’s the inescapable connection between the rise of the birth rate in modern times, say the past two or three centuries, especially the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth, and the change in the way the critics have been thinking about poetry, with the consequent change in the way poets have been writing it, and oh I could safely extend the thing to cover all of the creative arts. It’ll be an interdisciplinary study, a crossing over the
presently much too rigid field lines, a blend of say economics, biology, and literary criticism. People get much too narrow, too narrow, they’re specializing too much, that makes you lose sight of a lot of things. Of course I’ll have to get some statistics and draw some graphs; thus far I’ve merely been doing the groundwork thinking, the primary research, the necessary examination of the works of ancient and modern authors.…”
They were having sherry with the soup. Fish groped for his sherry glass, almost upsetting it.
Marian was now under crossfire, since as soon as Trevor had sat down again he had begun to talk at her from the other side, telling her about the soup, which was clear and subtly flavoured: how he had extracted its essences, painstakingly, moment by moment, at a very low heat; and since he was the only person at the table who was looking more or less at her she felt obliged to look at him in return. Duncan wasn’t paying any attention to anyone and neither Fish nor Trevor seemed at all disconcerted by the fact that both of them were talking at once. They were evidently used to it. She found however that she could manage by nodding and smiling from time to time and keeping her eyes riveted on Trevor and her ears on Fish, who was continuing, “You see as long as the population, per square mile especially, was low and the infant mortality rate and the death rate in general was high, there was a premium on Birth. Man was in harmony with the purposes, the cyclical rhythms of Nature, and the earth said, Produce, Produce. Be fruitful and multiply, if you’ll recall.…”
Trevor sprang up and dashed around the table, removing the soup plates. His voice and his gestures were becoming more and more accelerated; he was popping in and out of the kitchen like the cuckoo in a cuckoo-clock. Marian glanced at Fish. Apparently he had missed several times with the soup: his beard was becoming glutinous with spilled food. He looked like a highchaired and bewhiskered baby; Marian wished someone would tie a bib around his neck.
Trevor made an entrance with clean plates, and another exit. She could hear him fidgeting about the kitchen, in the background of Fish’s voice: “And so then consequently the poet also thought of himself as the same kind of natural producer; his poem was something begotten so to speak on him by the Muses, or let’s say maybe Apollo, hence the term ‘inspiration,’ the instilling of breath as it were into; the poet was pregnant with his work, the poem went through a period of gestation, often a long one, and when it was finally ready to see the light of day the poet was delivered of it often with much painful labour. In this way the very process of artistic creation was itself an imitation of Nature, of the thing in nature that was most important to the survival of Mankind. I mean birth; birth. But what do we have nowadays?”
There was a fizzling sound, and Trevor appeared dramatically in the doorway, holding a flaming blue sword in either hand. Marian was the only person who even looked at him.
“Oh my goodness,” she said appreciatively. “That’s quite an effect!”
“Yes, isn’t it? I just love things flambé. It’s not really shish kebab of course, it’s a little more French, not so blatant as the Greek kind.…”
When he dexterously slid whatever was impaled on the skewers onto her plate, she could see that most of it was meat. Well, now her back was to the wall. She would have to think of something. Trevor poured the wine, explaining how hard it was to find really fresh tarragon in this city.
“What we have now, I say, is a society in which all the values are anti-birth. Birth control, they all say, and, It’s the population explosion not the atomic explosion that we must all worry about. Malthus, you see, except that war no longer exists as a means of seriously diminishing the population. It’s easy to see in this context that the rise of Romanticism …”
The other dishes contained rice with something in it, an aromatic
sauce which went on the meat, and an unidentifiable vegetable. Trevor passed them round. Marian put some of the dark green vegetable substance into her mouth, tentatively, as one would make an offering to a possibly angry god. It was accepted.
“… coincides most informatively with the population increase which had started of course some time earlier but which was reaching almost epidemic proportions. The poet could no longer see himself with any self-congratulation as a surrogate mother-figure, giving birth to his works, delivering as it were another child to society. He had to become a something else, and what really is this emphasis on individual expression, notice it’s expression, a pressing out, this emphasis on spontaneity, the instantaneous creation? Not only does the twentieth century have …”
Trevor was in the kitchen again. Marian surveyed the chunks of meat on her plate with growing desperation. She thought of sliding them under the tablecloth – but they would be discovered. She would have been able to put them into her purse if only she hadn’t left it over by the chair. Perhaps she could slip them down the front of her blouse or up her sleeves.…
“… painters who splatter the paint all over the canvas in practically an orgasm of energy but we have writers thinking the same way about themselves …”
She reached under the table with her foot and prodded Duncan gently on the shin. He started, and looked across at her. For a moment his eyes held no recognition whatsoever; but then he watched, curious.
She scraped most of the sauce from one of the hunks of meat, picked it up between thumb and finger, and tossed it to him over the candles. He caught it, put it on his plate, and began to cut it up. She started to scrape another piece.
“… no longer as giving birth however; no, long meditation and bringing forth are things of the past. The act of Nature that Art
now chooses to imitate, yes is
forced
to imitate, is the very act of copulation.…”
Marian flung the second chunk, which was also neatly caught. Maybe they should quickly exchange plates, she thought; but no, that would be noticed, he had finished his before Trevor left the room.
“What we need is a cataclysm,” Fish was saying. His voice had become almost a chant, and was swelling in volume; he seemed to be building up to some kind of crescendo. “A cataclysm. Another Black Death, a vast explosion, millions wiped from the face of the earth, civilization as we know it all but obliterated, then Birth would be essential again, then we could return to the tribe, the old gods, the dark earthgods, the earth goddess, the goddess of waters, the goddess of birth and growth and death. We need a new Venus, a lush Venus of warmth and vegetation and generation, a new Venus, big-bellied, teeming with life, potential, about to give birth to a new world in all its plenitude, a new Venus rising from the sea.…”
Fischer decided to stand up, perhaps to give rhetorical emphasis to his last words. To lift himself he placed his hands on the card table, two of whose legs jackknifed, sending Fish’s plate slithering into his lap. At that moment the chunk of meat which Marian had just hurled was in mid-air; it caught Duncan squarely in the side of the head, then deflected, bounced across the floor, and landed on a pile of term papers.
Trevor, a small salad dish in either hand, had stepped through the doorway just in time to witness both events. His jaw dropped.
“At last I know what I really want to be,” Duncan said into the suddenly quiet room. He was gazing serenely at the ceiling, a whitish-grey trace of sauce in his hair. “An amoeba.”
Duncan had said he would walk her partway home: he needed a breath of fresh air.
Luckily none of Trevor’s dishes had been broken, although several
things had been spilled; and when the table had been straightened and Fischer had subsided, muttering to himself, Trevor had gracefully dismissed the whole incident, though for the remainder of the meal, through the salad and the
pêches flambées
and the coconut cookies and the coffee and liqueurs, his manner to Marian had been cooler.
Now, crunching along the snowy street, they were discussing the fact that Fischer had eaten the slice of lemon out of his finger bowl. “Trevor doesn’t like it, of course,” Duncan said, “and I told him once that if he doesn’t like Fish eating it he shouldn’t put one in. But he insists on doing these things properly, though as he says, nobody appreciates his efforts much. I generally eat mine, too, but I didn’t today: we had company.”
“It was all very … interesting,” Marian said. She was considering the total absence all evening of any reference to or question about herself, though she had assumed she was invited because the two roommates wanted to know more about her. Now, however, she thought it more than likely that they were merely desperate for new audiences.