Authors: Margaret Atwood
Then she hears a small voice, a small voice clear as ice-water, right at the back of her head. It’s the voice of experience. It’s the voice of Tony.
Zenia lies
, it says.
“Do you remember Tony?” Roz blurts out, before she can stop herself. “Tony Fremont from McClung Hall?” How can she be such a jerk, such a
shit
, as to question Zenia’s story, even in her head? No one would lie about such a thing. It would be too mean, it would be too cynical, it would be virtually sacrilegious!
“Oh yes,” Zenia laughs. “That was a million years ago! Tony and her funny war collection! I see she’s written a couple of books. She was always a bright little thing.”
Bright little thing
causes Roz to feel, by comparison, large and dim. But she trudges forward. “Tony told me you were a White Russian,” she says. “A child prostitute, in Paris. And Charis says your mother was a gypsy, and was stoned to death by Roumanian peasants.”
“Charis?” says Zenia.
“She used to be Karen,” says Roz. “You lived with her on the Island. You told her you had cancer,” she adds, pressing relentlessly on.
Zenia looks out the window of the sun room, and sips at the edge of her martini. “Oh yes, Charis,” she says. “I’m afraid I told some awful – I didn’t always tell the truth, when I was younger. I think I was emotionally disturbed. After my aunt died I had some hard times. She had nothing, no money; we lived over storefronts. And when she was gone, nobody would help me. This was in Waterloo, in the fifties. It wasn’t a good time or place for orphans who didn’t fit in.
“So part of what I told Tony was true, I did work as a hooker. And I didn’t want to be Jewish, I didn’t want to be connected with all of that in any way. I guess I was running away from the past. That
was then, this is now, right? I even got my nose done, after I’d gone to England and landed a magazine job and could afford it. I suppose I was ashamed. When those things get done to you, you feel more ashamed than if you’d done them yourself to other people. You think maybe you deserved it; or else that you should have been stronger – able to defend yourself, or something. You feel – well, beaten up.
“So I made up a different past for myself – it was better to be a White Russian. Denial, I guess you could call it. I lived with a White Russian, once, when I was sixteen, so I knew something about them.
“With Karen – with Charis – I must have been having some kind of a nervous breakdown. I needed to be mothered; my shrink says it was because my own mother was taken away. I shouldn’t have said I had cancer, because I didn’t. But I
was
sick, in another kind of way. Karen did wonders for me.
“It wasn’t a good thing – it was terrible, I suppose, to tell those stories. I owe both of them an apology. But I didn’t think I could’ve told them the real story, what really happened to me. They wouldn’t have understood it.”
She gives Roz a long look, straight out of her deep indigo eyes, and Roz is touched. She, Roz – she alone – has been chosen, to understand. And she does, she does.
“After I left Canada,” Zenia says, “things got worse. I had big ideas, but nobody seemed to share them. Looking the way I do doesn’t help, you know. Men don’t see you as a person, they just see the body, and so that’s all you see yourself. You think of your body as a tool, something to use. God, I’m tired of men! They’re so easy to amuse. All you have to do to get their attention is take off your clothes. After a while you want a bit more of a challenge, you know?
“I worked as a stripper for a year or so – that’s when I had my breasts done, this man I was living with paid for it – and I got into some bad habits. Coke first, and then heroin. It’s a wonder I’m not
dead. Maybe I was trying to be, because of my family. You’d think that because I didn’t really know them it wouldn’t hurt. But it’s like being born minus a leg. There’s this terrible
absence
.
“It took me a long time, but I’ve finally come to terms with myself. I’ve worked it through. I was in therapy for years. It was hard, but now I know who I am.”
Roz is impressed. Zenia has not evaded, she hasn’t wriggled or squirmed. She has owned up, she has admitted, she’s confessed. That shows – what? Honesty? Good will? Maturity? Some admirable quality. The nuns used to put a high value on confessing, so much so that Roz once confessed to placing a dog turd in the cloakroom, something she had not actually done. They didn’t let you off punishment for confessing, though – she got the strap, all the same, and when you confessed to the priest you had to do penance – but they thought more highly of you, or so they said.
Also Zenia has been out in the world. The wide world, wider than Toronto; the deep world, deeper than the small pond where Roz is such a large and sheltered frog. Zenia makes Roz feel not only protected, but lax. Her own battles have been so minor.
“You’ve done really well,” Roz says. “I mean – what a story! It’s great material!” She’s thinking of the magazine, because this is the kind of story they like to run: inspirational, a success story. A story about overcoming fears and obstacles, about facing up to yourself and becoming a whole person. It’s like the story they did two months ago, about the woman who fought bulimia to a standstill. Roz finds stories about the one lost sheep who caused more joy in Heaven hard to resist. There’s a story in the aunt, as well:
Wise Woman World
appreciates real-life heroines, ordinary women who have been more than ordinarily courageous.
To her amazement, and also to her horror, Zenia begins to cry. Big tears roll from her eyes, which remain open and fixed on Roz.
“Yeah,” she says. “I guess that’s all it amounts to. It’s just a story. It’s just material. Something to use.”
Roz, for gosh sake, get your big fat foot out of your mouth, thinks Roz. Miss Tact of 1983. “Oh honey, I didn’t mean it that way,” she says.
“No,” says Zenia. “I know. Nobody does. It’s just, I’m so strung out. I’ve been on the edge, I’ve been out there so long; I’ve had to do it alone. I can’t work it out with men, they all want the same thing from me, I just can’t make those kinds of compromises any more. I mean, you’ve got all this, you’ve got a home, a husband, you’ve got your kids. You’re a family, you’ve got solid ground under your feet. I’ve never had any of that, I’ve never fitted in. I’ve lived out of a suitcase, all my life; even now it’s hand-to-mouth, that’s what freelancing means, and I’m running out of energy, you know? There’s just no base, there’s no permanence!”
How badly Roz has misjudged Zenia! Now she sees her in a new light. It’s a tempestuous light, a bleak light, a lonely, rainy light; in the midst of it Zenia struggles on, buffeted by men, blown by the winds of fate. She’s not what she appears, a beautiful and successful career woman. She’s a waif, a homeless wandering waif; she’s faltering by the wayside, she’s falling. Roz opens her heart, and spreads her wings, her cardboard angel’s wings, her invisible dove’s wings, her warm sheltering wings, and takes her in.
“Don’t you worry,” she says, in her most reassuring voice. “We’ll work something out.”
M
itch passes Zenia in the front hall as she is leaving and he is coming in. She gives him only the briefest and chilliest of nods.
“Your old friend is certainly hostile,” he says to Roz.
“I don’t think so,” says Roz. “I think she’s just tired.”
She doesn’t want to share Zenia’s dismaying life story with him. It’s a story told just to her, for her, for her ears alone, by one outsider to another. Only Roz can understand it. Not Mitch, because what would he know about being outside?
“Tired?” says Mitch. “She didn’t look too tired.”
“Tired of men coming on to her,” says Roz.
“Don’t believe it,” says Mitch. “Anyway, I wasn’t coming on to her. But I bet she’d like it if I did. She’s an adventuress, she has the look.”
“Poetess, songstress, adventuress,” says Roz lightly. Mitch is such an authority, he can tell what a woman thinks by the shape of her bottom. “Why not just call her an adventurer?” Roz is teasing, she knows the feminist terminology stuff drives him nuts. But also she thinks of herself as an adventurer, at least in some areas of life. The financial ones.
Gentleman adventurer
was once a term.
“It’s not the same,” says Mitch. “Adventurers live by their wits.”
“And adventuresses?” says Roz.
“By their tits,” says Mitch.
“Point,” says Roz, laughing. He set her up for it.
But he’s wrong, thinks Roz, remembering. It was wits for Zenia also.
That was the beginning of the end of her marriage, although she didn’t realize it at the time. Or maybe it was the end of the end. Who knows? The end must have been a long time coming. These things are not sudden.
Roz wouldn’t have known it from Mitch, though. He made love to her that night with an urgency he hadn’t shown for a long time. No voluptuous ease, no lordly walrus-like wallowing: it was snatch and grab. There was nothing he wanted her to give; instead he wanted to take. Roz finds herself being bitten, and is pleased rather than otherwise. She didn’t know she was still that irresistible.
A week later she arranges an early dinner, at Scaramouche, for herself and Zenia and the current
Wise Woman World
editor, whose name is BethAnne, and they ingest radicchio salads and exotic parboiled vegetables and clever pastas, and go over Zenia’s résumé and her file of magazine stories. First there are the ones written when she was on staff for a cutting-edge fashion magazine, in England. But she quit that job because she felt too tied down, and also she’d wanted to write about more political things. Libya, Mozambique, Beirut, the Palestinian camps; Berlin, Northern Ireland, Colombia, Bangladesh, El Salvador – Zenia has been to most of the hot spots Roz can remember, and a few she can’t. Zenia regales them with incidents, of stones and bullets that have whizzed past her head, of cameras that have been broken by policemen, of narrow escapes in Jeeps. She names hotels.
A lot of the stories are under other names, men’s names, because, as Zenia says, the material in them is controversial, inflammatory even, and she didn’t want to open the door in the middle of the night and find some enraged Arab or Irish hit man or Israeli or drug lord standing on the other side of it. “I wouldn’t want this to get around,” she says, “but that’s the main reason I came back to Canada. It’s kind of a safe haven for me – you know? Things were getting just a little too
interesting
for me, over there. Canada is such a – such a
gentle
place.”
Roz and BethAnne exchange a look across the table. Both are deeply thrilled. A political reporter from the trouble zones of the world, right in their midst; and a female political reporter, at that! Of course they must shelter her. What are safe havens for? It doesn’t escape Roz that the opposite of
interesting
is not
gentle
, but
boring
. However,
boring
has something to offer, these days. Maybe they should export a little
boring
. It’s better than getting your head shot off.
“We’d love it if you’d do a story for us,” says BethAnne.
“To tell you the truth,” says Zenia, “I’m sort of emptied out for now, story-wise. But I have a better idea.”
Her better idea is that she should help them out in the advertising department. “I’ve been through the magazine, and I’ve noticed you don’t have many ads,” she says. “You must be losing money, a lot of money.”
“Absolutely,” says Roz, who knows exactly how much because the money they’re losing is hers.
“I think I could double your ads, in, say, two months,” says Zenia. “I’ve had experience.”
She makes good her word. Roz isn’t sure quite how it happened, but Zenia is soon sitting in on editorial meetings, and when BethAnne leaves to have another baby, creating a power vacuum, Zenia is offered the job, because who else – be honest – is as qualified? It may
even be that Roz set it up for her. Most likely; it was the kind of sucky shoot-yourself-in-the-foot thing she must have been doing around then. Part of her save-poor-Zenia project. She’d rather not remember the details.
Zenia has her photograph taken, a glamour shot in a V-necked outfit; it appears on the editorial page. Women figure out how old she is and wonder how she manages to stay looking so good. Circulation goes up.
Zenia goes to parties now, a lot of parties. Why not? She has
schlep
, she has clout, she has – the men on the board are fond of saying – balls. Sharp as a tack, smart as a whip, and a great figure too, they can never resist adding, causing Roz to go home and frown at her dimpling grapefruit-peel leg skin in the mirror, and then to reproach herself for making odious comparisons.
Some of the parties Zenia goes to are given by Roz. Roz supervises the passing of the filo-bundle and stuffed-mushroom nibbles, and greets her friends with hugs and airy kisses, and watches Zenia work the room. She works it seriously, thoroughly; she seems to know by instinct just how much time any one person is worth. She spends some of her precious moments on Roz, though. She gets her off to one side and murmurs to her, and Roz murmurs back. Anyone watching them would think they were conspirators.
“You’re really good at this,” Roz tells Zenia. “Me, I always end up stuck for hours with some hard-luck story, but you never get cornered.”
Zenia smiles back at her. “All foxes dig back doors. I like to know where the exit sign is.” And Roz remembers the story of Zenia’s narrow escape from death, and feels sorry for her. Zenia always arrives alone. She leaves alone. It’s sad.
Mitch works the room too. Surprisingly, he doesn’t work the part of it with Zenia in it. Ordinarily he’d flirt with everyone; he’d flirt
with a saluki if there was nothing else on offer. He likes to see his own charm reflected back at him from the eyes of every woman in the room; he goes from one to another as if they’re bushes and he’s a dog. But he stays away from Zenia, and, when she’s watching, pays extra attention to Roz. He keeps a hand on her whenever possible.
Steadying himself
, Roz thinks later.