Authors: Margaret Atwood
Roz grows increasingly uneasy. There’s something not quite right about the turn things have taken, but what could it be? She set out to help Zenia, and it appears she has helped her, and Zenia is certainly grateful, and she’s performing well; they have lunch once a week just to go over things, and so Zenia can ask Roz’s advice, because Roz has been around the magazine so much longer than Zenia has. Roz dismisses her own reaction as simple envy. Ordinarily if there was something bothering her, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, she’d discuss it with Tony or Charis. But she can’t do that, because she’s friends with Zenia now, and they might not understand that part of it. They might not understand how Roz could be friends with someone who is – face it – an enemy of theirs. They might see it as betrayal.
“I’ve been giving it some thought,” Zenia says at the next board of directors meeting. “We’re still losing money, despite the new ads. We can’t seem to hook the big spenders – the perfume companies, the cosmetics, high fashion. To be honest, I think we need to change the name. The concept we’re working with is too seventies. This is the eighties – we’re way beyond a lot of those old positions.”
“Change the name?” asks Roz, with fond memories of the early collective. What happened to those women? Where did they go? Why has she lost touch with them? Where did all these business suits come from?
“Yes,” says Zenia. “I’ve had a small survey done. We’d do better with
Woman World
, or, even better, just plain
Woman.”
It’s obvious to Roz what’s being dropped. The wisdom part, for one thing. Also the world. But how can she object to
Woman
without implying that there’s something wrong with being one?
So Zenia changes the name, and soon the magazine changes too. It changes so much that Roz hardly recognizes it. Gone are the mature achievers, the stories about struggling to overcome sexism and stacked odds. Gone too are the heavy-hitting health care stories. Now there are five-page spreads on spring fashions, and new diets and hair treatments and wrinkle creams, and quizzes about the man in your life and whether or not you’re handling your relationships well. Are these things unimportant? Roz would be the last to say so, but surely there’s something missing.
She no longer has lunch with Zenia once a week; Zenia is now too busy. She’s a busy bee, she has a lot of iron maidens in the fire. So, at the next board meeting, Roz pushes her about the shift in content. “This wasn’t the original idea,” she says.
Zenia smiles gently at her. “Most women don’t want to read about other women who achieve,” she says. “It makes them feel unsuccessful.”
Roz finds herself getting angry – surely this is a dig at her – but she controls herself. “What do they want to read about, then?”
“I’m not talking intellectuals,” says Zenia. “I’m talking about the average woman. The average magazine-buying woman. According to our demographics, they want to read about how to look. Oh, and sex, of course. Sex with the right accessories.”
“What are the right accessories?” asks Roz pleasantly. She thinks she’ll choke.
“Men,” says Zenia. The men on the board of directors laugh, Mitch included. So much for Roz. She has a flash of Zenia, wearing
black fringed gloves with gauntlets, blowing the smoke off her six-shooter, sliding it back into her holster.
Roz is the majority shareholder. She could pull strings, she could stack the deck, she could force Zenia out. But she can’t do that without looking like a vindictive shrew.
And let’s face it, they’re making money, finally, and money talks.
One day Mitch is gone. He is just gone, in a snap of the fingers, in a wink. No prelude, no hints, no letters left lying around, none of the usual. But looking back, Roz realizes he must have been gone for some time.
Where has he gone? He’s gone to live with Zenia. A whole courtship, a whole romance, has taken place right under Roz’s very nose and she hasn’t noticed a thing. It must have been going on for months.
But no, that isn’t it. Mitch tells her – he seems to want to tell her – that it was all very sudden. Unexpected to him. Zenia came to his office one evening, after work, to consult him about some financials, and then …
“I don’t want to hear about it,” says Roz, who is familiar with the pleasures of narration. She doesn’t intend to give him the satisfaction.
“I just want you to understand,” says Mitch.
“Why?” says Roz. “Why is that important? Who gives a shit whether I understand or not?”
“I do,” says Mitch. “Because I still love you. I love both of you. This is really difficult for me.”
“Get stuffed,” says Roz.
Mitch came to the house when Roz wasn’t there. He came furtively because he couldn’t face her. He came and went, soft as a thief, and he removed things: his suits from the mirror-door bedroom closet, his boat clothes, his best bottles of wine, his pictures. Roz would come back after work to find these blanks, these piercing eloquent
spaces, where something of Mitch’s used to be. But he left some things behind: an overcoat, his anorak, some books, his old boots, boxes of this and that in the storage room down in the cellar. What was it supposed to mean? That he was of two minds? That he still had one foot in the door? Roz almost wished he would take everything away at once, make a clean sweep. On the other hand, where there were boots there was hope. But hope was the worst. As long as she had hope, how was she supposed to get on with her life? Which was what women in her situation were constantly urged to do.
Mitch didn’t take anything that wasn’t his. He didn’t take anything Roz had bought for the house, bought for them to share. Roz was surprised to discover how little he had actually been involved in all that shopping, how few choices he’d helped her make; or, look at it another way, how little he’d contributed. Well, how could he have helped her? She’d always forestalled him; she’d seen a need or a desire and supplied it instantly, with a wave of her magic chequebook. Maybe it had grated on him after a while, her munificence, her largesse, her heaps of pearls, her outpourings. Ask and it shall be given. Heck, Mitch didn’t even ask! All he had to do was lie on the lawn with his mouth open while Roz climbed the tree and shook down the golden apples.
Maybe that was Zenia’s trick. Maybe she presented herself as vacancy, as starvation, as an empty beggar’s bowl. Maybe the posture she’d assumed was on her knees, hands upstretched for alms. Maybe Mitch wanted the opportunity to do a little coin-scattering, an opportunity never provided by Roz. He was tired of being given to, of being forgiven, of being rescued; maybe he wanted to do a little giving and rescuing of his own. Even better than a beautiful woman on her knees would be a grateful beautiful woman on her knees. But hadn’t Roz been grateful enough?
Apparently not.
Roz stoops low. She gives in to her gnawing hunger for dirt and hires a private detective, a woman named Harriet; Harriet the Hungarian, someone she learned about, way back, through Uncle Joe, who had some Hungarian connections. “I just want to know what they’re up to,” she tells Harriet.
“What sort of thing?” asks Harriet.
“Where they’re living, what they do,” says Roz. “Whether she’s real.”
“Real?” says Harriet.
“Where she came from,” says Roz.
Harriet finds out sufficient. Sufficient to make Roz even more miserable than she is. Zenia and Mitch live in a penthouse apartment overlooking the harbour, near where Mitch moors his boat. That way they can go for quick little sails on it, Roz supposes, though she can’t see Zenia putting up with too much of that. Getting wet, chipping her polish. Not as much as Roz put up with. What else do they do? They eat out, they eat in. Zenia goes shopping. What’s to see?
The question of whether Zenia is real or not is more difficult to solve. She doesn’t seem to have been born, at least not under that name; but how can anyone say, since so much of Berlin went up in smoke? Inquiries in Waterloo produce nothing. She didn’t go to school there, or not under her present name. Is she even Jewish? It’s anybody’s guess, says Harriet.
“But what about the picture?” says Roz. “Her family?”
“Oh, Roz,” says Harriet. “Pictures are a dime a dozen. Whose word have you got for it that those people were her family?”
“She knew about my father,” says Roz. She’s reluctant to let go.
“So did I,” said Harriet. “Come on, Roz, there are hints about all that in every magazine interview you’ve ever given. What did she tell you about him that any twelve-year-old with an active imagination wouldn’t have been able to make up?”
“You’re right,” sighs Roz, “but there was so much detail.”
“She’s very good,” Harriet agrees.
London proves more fruitful: Zenia did indeed work for a magazine there; she appears to have written some of the articles she’s claimed as hers, though by no means all of them. The ones on clothing, yes; the ones on political hot spots, no. The ones with men’s names actually seem to have been written by the men in question, although three out of the five are dead. She made a brief traverse through the gossip columns when her name was linked with that of a cabinet minister; the phrase “good friend” was used, and marriage was subsequently hinted at but did not take place. Then there was a scandal when it came to light that Zenia had been seeing a Soviet cultural attaché at the same time. “Seeing” was a euphemism. There was a lot of political name-calling, and the usual English tabloid foxhunting and muckraking. After that incident Zenia had dropped out of sight.
“Did she really travel to all those countries?” says Roz.
“How much money do you want to spend?” asks Harriet.
Knowing about the flimsiness of Zenia’s façade is no help to Roz at all. She’s stalemated. If she tells Mitch about the lies it will just come across as jealousy.
It is jealousy. Roz is so jealous she can’t think straight. Some nights she cries with rage, others with sorrow. She walks around in a red fog of anger, in a grey mist of self-pity, and she hates herself for both. She calls on her stubbornness, her will to fight, but who exactly is her enemy? She can’t fight Mitch, because she wants him back. Maybe if she holds her fire long enough, this will all blow over. Mitch will fizzle out like a barbecue in the rain, he’ll come back home as he has before, wanting her to disentangle him from Zenia, wanting to be saved. And Roz will do it, though this time it won’t be so easy. He’s violated something, some unwritten contract, some
form of trust. He’s never moved out before. The other women were a game to him but Zenia is serious business.
There’s another way it could play: Zenia would divest herself of Mitch. She would throw him out the window, as he has thrown many. Mitch would get his comeuppance. Roz would get revenge.
In public Roz maintains her grin, her tooth-filled grin. The muscles of her jaws ache with it. She wishes to preserve her dignity, put up a bold front. But that’s not so easy, with her chest ripped open like this and her heart exposed for all to surely see; her heart, which is on fire and dripping blood.
She can’t expect much pity from her friends, the ones who used to tell her to dump Mitch. She sees now what they’d meant:
Dump him before he dumps you!
But she didn’t listen. Instead she’d kept on playing the knife-thrower’s assistant, in her sparkly costume, with her arms and legs splayed out, standing still and smiling while the knives thudded into the wall, tracing the outline of her body.
Flinch and you’re dead
. It was inevitable that one day, by accident or on purpose, she’d get hit.
Tony phones her. So does Charis. She hears the concern in their voices: they know something, they’ve heard. But she puts them off, she holds them at arm’s length. One touch of their compassion now would do her in.
Three months go by. Roz straightens her back and tightens her lips and clenches her jaws so hard she’s sure her teeth are being ground to stumps, and tints her hair maroon, and buys a new outfit, an Italian leather suit in an opulent shade of vermilion. She has several unsatisfactory flings with men. She rolls about with them, fitfully, self-consciously, as if her bedroom’s wired for sound: she knows she’s acting. She hopes the news of her reckless unfaithfulness will get back to Mitch and make him writhe, but any writhing he does is in the privacy of his own home, if the viper’s nest he’s living in
can be called that. Worst case: maybe he’s not writhing. Maybe he’s delighted at the possibility that some hapless fall guy might take her off his hands.
Harriet phones: she thinks Roz might like to know that Zenia is seeing another man, in the afternoons, while Mitch is out.
“What sort of other man?” says Roz. Adrenalin rushes through her brain.
“Let’s just say he wears a black leather jacket and drives a Harley, and has two arrests but no convictions. Lack of witnesses willing to come forward.”
“Arrests for what?” says Roz.
“Dealing coke,” says Harriet.
Roz asks for a written report, and pops it into an envelope, and addresses it anonymously to Mitch, and waits for the other shoe to drop; and it does drop, because one Monday just before lunchtime Harriet calls her at the office.
“She’s taken a plane,” says Harriet. “Three big suitcases.”
“Where to?” says Roz. Her whole body is tingling. “Was Mitch with her?”
“No,” says Harriet. “To London.”
“Maybe he’ll join her there later,” says Roz. Well, well, she thinks. Bye bye black sheep. Three bags full.
“I don’t think so,” says Harriet. “She didn’t have that look.”
“What look did she have?” says Roz.
“The dark glasses look,” says Harriet. “The scarf-around-the-neck look. I’d lay money on a black eye, and two to one he tried to throttle her. Or somebody did. I’d say from all appearances she’s on the run.”
“He’ll go after her,” says Roz, who doesn’t want to get her hopes up. “He’s obsessed.”
But that evening, when she walks into her house, into her living room with its deep pink-and-mauve carpets and its subtle off-green
accents, neo-forties revival with postmod undertones, there is Mitch, sitting in his favoured armchair as if he’s never been away.