Authors: Margaret Atwood
I pressed the two Temperance pamphlets into his damp outstretched hand and fled.
I shuffled through four more complete interviews without much incident, discovering in the process that the questionnaire needed the addition of a “Does not have phone … End interview” box and a “Does not listen to radio” one, and that men who approved of the chest-thumping sentiments of the commercial tended to object to the word “Tingly” as being “Too light,” or, as one of them put it, “Too fruity.” The fifth interview was with a spindly balding man who was so afraid of expressing any opinions at all that getting words out of him was like pulling teeth with a monkey-wrench. Every time I asked him a new question he flushed, bobbed his Adam’s apple, and contorted his face in a wince of agony. He was speechless for several minutes after he had listened to the commercial and I had asked him, “How did you like the commercial? Very Much; Only Moderately; or Not Very Much?” At last he managed to whisper, feebly, “Yes.”
I had now only two more interviews to get. I decided to skip the next few houses and go to the square apartment building. I got in
by the usual method, pressing all the buttons at once until some deluded soul released the inner door.
The coolness was a relief. I went up a short flight of stairs whose carpeting was just beginning to wear thin, and knocked at the first door, which was numbered Six. I found this curious because from its position it should have been numbered
One
.
Nothing happened when I knocked. I knocked again more loudly, waited, and was about to go on to the next apartment when the door swung inward noiselessly and I found myself being looked at by a young boy whom I judged to be about fifteen.
He rubbed one of his eyes with a finger, as if he had just got up. He was cadaverously thin; he had no shirt on, and the ribs stuck out like those of an emaciated figure in a medieval woodcut. The skin stretched over them was nearly colourless, not white but closer to the sallow tone of old linen. His feet were bare; he was wearing only a pair of khaki pants. The eyes, partly hidden by a rumpled mass of straight black hair that came down over the forehead, were obstinately melancholy, as though he was assuming the expression on purpose.
We stared at each other. He was evidently not going to say anything, and I could not quite begin. The questionnaires I was carrying had suddenly become unrelated to anything at all, and at the same time obscurely threatening. Finally I managed to say, feeling very synthetic as I did so, “Hello there, is your father in?”
He continued to stare at me without a tremor of expression. “No. He’s dead,” he said.
“Oh.” I stood, swaying a little; the contrast with the heat outside had made me dizzy. Time seemed to have shifted into slow motion; there seemed to be nothing to say; but I couldn’t leave or move. He continued to stand in the doorway.
Then after what seemed hours it occurred to me that he might not actually be as young as he looked. There were dark circles under
his eyes, and some fine thin lines at the outer corners. “Are you really only fifteen?” I asked, as though he had told me he was.
“I’m twenty-six,” he said dolefully.
I gave a visible start, and as if the answer had stepped on some hidden accelerator in me I babbled out a high-speed version of the blurb about being from Seymour Surveys and not selling anything and improving products and wanting to ask a few simple questions about how much beer he drank in an average week, thinking while I did so that he didn’t look as though he ever drank anything but water, with the crust of bread they tossed him as he lay chained in the dungeon. He seemed gloomily interested, much as one would be interested (if at all) in a dead dog, so I extended the average-weekly-consumption card towards him and asked him to pick his number. He looked at it a minute, turned it over and looked at the back, which was blank, closed his eyes, and said “Number six.”
That was seven to ten bottles per week, high enough to qualify him for the questionnaire, and I told him so. “Come in then,” he said. I felt a slight sensation of alarm as I stepped over the threshold and the door closed woodenly behind me.
We were in a living room of medium size, perfectly square, with a kitchenette opening off it on one side and the hallway to the bedrooms on the other. The slats of the venetian blind on the one small window were closed, making the room dim as twilight. The walls, as far as I could tell in the semi-darkness, were a flat white; there were no pictures on them. The floor was covered by a very good Persian carpet with an ornate design of maroon and green and purple scrolls and flowers, even better, I thought, than the one in the lady down below’s parlour which had been left her by her paternal grandfather. One wall had a bookcase running its whole length, the kind people make themselves out of boards and bricks. The only other pieces of furniture were three huge, ancient and overstuffed easy chairs, one red plush, one a worn greenish-blue brocade, and one a faded purple,
each with a floor lamp beside it. All exposed surfaces of the room were littered with loose papers, notebooks, books opened face-down and other books bristling with pencils and torn slips of paper stuck in them as markers.
“Do you live here alone?” I asked.
He fixed me with his lugubrious eyes. “It depends what you mean,” he intoned, “by ‘alone’.”
“Oh, I see,” I said politely. I walked across the room, trying to preserve my air of cheerful briskness while picking my way unsteadily over and around the objects on the floor. I was heading towards the purple chair, which was the only one that didn’t have a rat’s nest of papers in it.
“You can’t sit there,” he said behind me in a tone of slight admonishment, “that’s Trevor’s chair. He wouldn’t like you sitting in his chair.”
“Oh. Is the red one all right then?”
“Well,” he said, “that’s Fish’s, and he wouldn’t mind if you sat in it; at least I don’t think he would. But he’s got his papers in it and you might mess them up.” I didn’t see how by merely sitting on them I could possibly disorganize them any more, but I didn’t say so. I was wondering whether Trevor and Fish were two imaginary playmates that this boy had made up, and also whether he had lied about his age. In this light his face could have been of a ten-year-old. He stood gazing at me solemnly, shoulders hunched, arms folded across his torso, holding his own elbows.
“And I suppose yours is the green one then.”
“Yes,” he said, “but I haven’t sat in it myself for a couple of weeks. I’ve got everything all arranged in it.”
I wanted to go over and see exactly what he had got all arranged in it, but I reminded myself that I was there on business. “Where are we going to sit then?”
“The floor,” he said, “or the kitchen, or my bedroom.”
“Oh, not the bedroom,” I said hurriedly. I made my way back across the expanse of paper and peered around the corner into the kitchenette. A peculiar odour greeted me – there seemed to be garbage bags in every corner, and the rest of the space was taken up by large pots and kettles, some clean, others not. “I don’t think there’s room in the kitchen,” I said. I stooped and began to skim the papers off the surface of the carpet, much as one would skim scum from a pond.
“I don’t think you’d better do that,” he said. “Some of them aren’t mine. You might get them mixed up. We’d better go into the bedroom.” He slouched across to the hall and through an open doorway. Of necessity I followed him.
The room was a white-walled oblong box, dark as the living room: the venetian blind was down here too. It was bare of furniture except for an ironing board with an iron on it, a chess set with a few scattered pieces in a corner of the room, a typewriter sitting on the floor, a cardboard carton which seemed to have dirty laundry in it and which he kicked into the closet as I came in, and a narrow bed. He pulled a grey army blanket over the tangle of sheets on the bed and crawled onto it, where he settled himself cross-legged, backed into the corner formed by the two walls. He switched on the reading lamp over the bed, took a cigarette from a pack which he replaced in his back pocket, lit it, and sat holding the cigarette before him, his hands cupped, like a starved buddha burning incense to itself.
“All right,” he said.
I sat down on the edge of the bed – there were no chairs – and began to go through the questionnaire with him. After I had asked each question he would lean his head back against the wall, close his eyes, and give the answer; then he would open his eyes again and
watch me with barely perceptible signs of concentration while I asked the next.
When we got to the telephone commercial he went to the phone in the kitchen to dial the number. He stayed out there for what seemed to me a long time. I went to check, and found him listening with the receiver pressed to his ear and his mouth twisted in something that was almost a smile.
“You’re only supposed to listen once,” I said reproachfully.
He put down the receiver with reluctance. “Can I phone it after you go and listen some more?” he asked in the diffident but wheedling voice of a small child begging an extra cookie.
“Yes,” I said, “but not next week, okay?” I didn’t want him blocking the line for the interviewers.
We went back to the bedroom and resumed our respective postures. “Now I’m going to repeat some of the phrases from the commercial to you, and for each one I would like you to tell me what it makes you think of,” I said. This was the free-association part of the questionnaire, meant to test immediate responses to certain key phrases. “First, what about ‘Deep-down manly flavour’?”
He threw his head back and closed his eyes. “Sweat,” he said, considering. “Canvas gym shoes. Underground locker rooms and jockstraps.”
An interviewer is always supposed to write down the exact words of the answer, so I did. I thought about slipping this interview into the stack of real ones, to vary the monotony for one of the women with the crayons – Mrs. Weemers, perhaps, or Mrs. Gundridge. She’d read it out loud to the others, and they would remark that it took all kinds; the topic would be good for at least three coffee breaks.
“Now what about ‘Long cool swallow’?”
“Not much. Oh, wait a moment. It’s a bird, white, falling from a great height. Shot through the heart, in winter; the feathers coming off, drifting down.… This is just like those word-game tests the
shrink gives you,” he said with his eyes open. “I always liked doing them. They’re better than the ones with pictures.”
I said, “I expect they use the same principle. What about ‘Healthy hearty taste’?”
He meditated for several minutes. “It’s heartburn,” he said. “Or no, that can’t be right.” His forehead wrinkled. “Now I see. It’s one of those cannibal stories.” For the first time he seemed upset. “I know the pattern, there’s one of them in
The Decameron
and a couple in Grimm’s; the husband kills the wife’s lover, or vice versa, and cuts out the heart and makes it into a stew or a pie and serves it up in a silver dish, and the other one eats it. Though that doesn’t account for the Healthy very well, does it? Shakespeare,” he said in a less agitated voice, “Shakespeare has something like that too. There’s a scene in
Titus Andronicus
, though it’s debatable whether Shakespeare really wrote it, or …”
“Thank you.” I wrote busily. By this time I was convinced that he was a compulsive neurotic of some sort and that I’d better remain calm and not display any fear. I wasn’t frightened exactly – he didn’t look like the violent type – but these questions definitely made him tense. He might be tottering on an emotional brink, one of the phrases might be enough to push him over. Those people are like that I thought, remembering certain case histories Ainsley had told me; little things like words can really bother them.
“Now, ‘Tingly, heady, rough-and-ready’?”
He contemplated that one at length. “Doesn’t do a thing for me,” he said, “it doesn’t fit together. The first bit gives me an image of someone with a head made out of glass being hit with a stick: like musical glasses. But rough-and-ready doesn’t do anything. I suppose,” he said sadly, “that one’s not much use to you.”
“You’re doing fine,” I said, thinking of what would happen to the
I.B.M
. machine if they ever tried to run this thing through it. “Now the last one: ‘Tang of the wilderness.’ ”
“Oh,” he said, his voice approaching enthusiasm, “that one’s easy; it struck me at once when I heard it. It’s one of those technicolour movies about dogs or horses. ‘Tang of the Wilderness’ is obviously a dog, part wolf, part husky, who saves his master three times, once from fire, once from flood and once from wicked humans, more likely to be white hunters than Indians these days, and finally gets blasted by a cruel trapper with a .22 and wept over. Buried, probably in the snow. Panoramic shot of trees and lake. Sunset. Fade-out.”
“Fine,” I said, scribbling madly to get it all down. There was silence while we both listened to the scratching of my pencil. “Now, I hate to ask you, but you’re supposed to say how well you think each of those five phrases applies to a beer – Very Well, Medium Well, or Not Very Well At All?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” he said, losing interest completely. “I never drink the stuff. Only scotch. None of them are any good for scotch.”
“But,” I protested, astonished, “you picked Number Six on the card. The one that said seven to ten bottles per week.”
“You wanted me to pick a number,” he said with patience, “and six is my lucky number. I even got them to change the numbers on the apartments; this is really Number One, you know. Besides, I was bored; I felt like talking to someone.”
“That means I won’t be able to count your interview,” I said severely. I had forgotten for the moment that it wasn’t real.
“Oh, you enjoyed it,” he said, smiling his half-smile again. “You know all the other answers you’ve been getting are totally dull. You have to admit I’ve livened up your day considerably.”
I had a twinge of irritation. I had been feeling compassion for him as a sufferer on the verge of mental collapse, and now he had revealed the whole thing as a self-conscious performance. I could either get up and leave at once, showing my displeasure, or admit
that he was right. I frowned at him, trying to decide what to do; but just then I heard the front door opening and the sound of voices.