The Edible Woman (20 page)

“How do you shave then?” Marian asked. She could not quite imagine life without a mirror in the bathroom. She speculated, while she spoke, about whether he even shaved at all. She had never examined him for bristles.

“What?”

“I mean with no mirror.”

“Oh,” he said, grinning, “I’ve got my own private mirror. One I can trust, I know what’s in it. It’s just public ones that I don’t like.” He seemed to lose interest in the subject, and ironed in silence for a minute. “What grisly things,” he said at last; he was doing one of the guest towels. “I can’t stand things with flowers embroidered on them.”

“I know. We never use them.”

He folded the towel, then looked up at her gloomily. “I suppose you believed all that.”

“Well … all what?” she answered cautiously.

“About why I broke the mirror and my reflection and so on. Really I broke it because I felt like breaking something. That’s the trouble with people, they always believe me. It’s too much of an encouragement, I can never resist the temptation. And those brilliant insights about Trevor, how do
I
know whether they’re true? Maybe the real truth is that I want to think that he wants to think he’s my mother. Actually I’m not an orphan anyway, I do have some parents, back there somewhere. Can you believe that?”

“Should I?” She couldn’t tell whether or not he was being serious; his expression revealed nothing. Perhaps this was another labyrinth of words, and if she said the wrong thing, took the wrong turning, she would suddenly find herself face to face with something she could not cope with.

“If you like. But the real truth is, of course” – he waved the iron in the air for emphasis, watching the movement of his hand as he did so – “that I’m a changeling. I got switched for a real baby when young and my parents never discovered the fraud, though I must admit they suspected something.” He closed his eyes, smiling faintly. “They kept telling me my ears were too big; but really I’m not human at all, I come from the underground.…” He opened his eyes and began to iron again, but his attention had wandered away from the ironing board. He brought the iron too close to his other hand, and gave a yelp of pain. “Damn,” he said. He set the iron down and stuck his finger in his mouth.

Marian’s first impulse was to go over and see whether it was a bad burn, and suggest remedies, butter or baking soda; but she decided against it. Instead she sat unmoving and said nothing.

He was looking at her now, expectantly but with a trace of hostility. “Aren’t you going to comfort me?” he asked.

“I don’t think,” she said, “that it’s really needed.”

“You’re right; I enjoy it though,” he said sadly. “And it does hurt.” He picked up the iron again.

When he had folded the last towel and pulled the plug out of the wall-socket he said, “That was a vigorous session, thanks for the clothes, but it wasn’t really enough. I’ll have to think of something else to do with the rest of the tension. I’m not a chronic ironer you know, I’m not hooked, it’s not one of the habits I ought to kick, but I go on these binges.” He came over and sat gingerly down beside her on the bed, and lit a cigarette. “This one started the day before yesterday when I dropped my term paper in a puddle on the kitchen floor and I had to dry it out and iron it. It was all typed and I couldn’t face typing it over again, plowing through all that verbiage, I’d start wanting to change everything. It came out okay, nothing blurred, but you could tell it had been ironed, I scorched one of the pages. But they can’t reasonably object, it would sound pretty silly to say, ‘We can’t accept a term paper that’s been ironed.’ So I turned it in and then of course I had to get rid of all that frenzy, so I ironed everything in the house that was clean. Then I had to go to the laundromat and wash some dirty things, that’s why I was sitting in that wretched movie, I was waiting for the clothes to get done. I got bored watching them churning around in there, that’s a bad sign, if I get bored with the laundromat even, what the hell am I going to do when I get bored with everything else? Then I ironed all the things I’d washed, and then I’d run out.”

“And then you phoned me,” Marian said. It irritated her slightly that he went on talking to himself, about himself, without giving much evidence that he even knew she was there.

“Oh. You. Yes. Then I phoned you. At least, I phoned your company. I remembered the name, I guess it was the switchboard girl I got, and I sort of described you to whoever it was for a while, I said you didn’t look like the usual kind of interviewer; and then they figured out who you were. You never told me your name.”

It had not occurred to Marian that she hadn’t told him her name. She had taken it for granted that he knew it all along.

Her introduction of a new subject seemed to have brought him to a standstill. He stared down at the floor, sucking on the end of his cigarette.

She found the silence disconcerting. “Why do you like ironing so much?” she asked. “I mean, apart from relieving tension and all that; but why ironing? Instead of maybe bowling, for instance?”

He drew his thin legs up and clasped his arms around his knees. “Ironing’s nice and simple,” he said. “I get all tangled up in words when I’m putting together those interminable papers, I’m on another one by the way, ‘Sado-Masochistic Patterns in Trollope,’ and ironing – well, you straighten things out and get them flat. God knows it isn’t because I’m neat and tidy; but there’s something about a flat surface.…” He had shifted his position and was contemplating her now. “Why don’t you let me touch up that blouse for you a bit while the iron’s still hot?” he said. “I’ll just do the sleeves and the collar. It looks like you missed a few places.”

“You mean the one I have on?”

“That’s the one,” he said. He unwound his arms from around his knees and stood up. “Here, you can wear my dressing gown. Don’t worry, I won’t peek.” He took a grey object out of the closet, handed it to her, and turned his back.

Marian stood for a moment, clutching the grey bundle, uncertain how to act. Doing as he suggested, she knew, was going to make her feel both uneasy and silly; but to say at this point, “No thank you, I’d rather not,” when the request was obviously harmless, would have made her feel even sillier. After a minute she found herself undoing the buttons, then slipping on the dressing gown. It was much too large for her: the sleeves came down over her hands and the bottom edge trailed along the floor.

“Here you are then,” she said.

She watched with a slight anxiety as he wielded the iron. This time the activity seemed more crucial, it was like a dangerous hand
moving back and forth slowly an inch away, the cloth had been so recently next to her skin. If he burns it or anything though, she thought, I can always put on one of the others.

“There,” he said, “all done.” He unplugged the iron again and draped the blouse over the small end of the ironing board; he seemed to have forgotten that she was supposed to be wearing it. Then, unexpectedly, he came over to the bed, crawled onto it beside her, and stretched himself out on his back with his eyes closed and his arms behind his head.

“God,” he said, “all these distractions. How does one go on? It’s like term papers, you produce all that stuff and nothing is ever done with it, you just get a grade for it and heave it in the trash, you know that some other poor comma-counter is going to come along the year after you and have to do the same thing over again, it’s a treadmill, even ironing, you iron the damn things and then you wear them and they get all wrinkled again.”

“Well, and then you can iron them again, can’t you?” Marian said soothingly. “If they stayed neat you wouldn’t have anything to do.”

“Maybe I’d do something worthwhile for a change,” he said. His eyes were still closed. “Production-consumption. You begin to wonder whether it isn’t just a question of making one kind of garbage into another kind. The human mind was the last thing to be commercialized but they’re doing a good job of it now; what
is
the difference between the library stacks and one of those used-car graveyards? What bothers me though is that none of it is ever final; you can’t ever finish anything. I have this great plan for permanent leaves on trees, it’s a waste for them having to produce a new lot each year; and come to think of it there’s no reason at all why they have to be green, either; I’d have them white. Black trunks and white leaves. I can hardly wait till it snows, this city in the summer has altogether too much vegetation, it’s stifling, and then it all falls off and lies around in the gutters. The thing I like about the place I
came from, it’s a mining town, there isn’t much of anything in it but at least it has no vegetation. A lot of people wouldn’t like it. It’s the smelting plants that do it, tall smokestacks reaching up into the sky and the smoke glows red at night, and the chemical fumes have burnt the trees for miles around, it’s barren, nothing but the barren rock, even grass won’t grow on most of it, and there are the slag-heaps too; where the water collects on the rock it’s a yellowish-brown from the chemicals. Nothing would grow there even if you planted it, I used to go out of the town and sit on the rocks, about this time of year, waiting for the snow.…”

Marian was sitting on the edge of the bed, bending slightly down towards his talking face, only half listening to the monotonous voice. She was studying the contours of his skull under the papery skin, wondering how anyone could be that thin and still remain alive. She did not want to touch him now, she was even slightly repelled by the hollowness of the eye sockets, the angular hinge of the jawbone moving up and down in front of the ear.

Suddenly he opened his eyes. He stared at her for a minute as though he couldn’t remember who she was and how she happened to be in his bedroom. “Hey,” he said finally in a different voice, “you look sort of like me in that.” He reached out a hand and tugged at the shoulder of the dressing gown, pulling her down. She let herself sink.

The transition from the flat hypnotic voice, and then the realization that he had actual flesh, a body like most other people, startled her at first. She felt her own body stiffen in resistance, begin to draw away; but he had both arms around her now. He was stronger than she had thought. She was not sure what was happening: there was an uneasy suspicion in one corner of her mind that what he was really caressing was his own dressing gown, and that she merely happened to be inside it.

She pulled her face away and gazed down at him. His eyes were
closed. She kissed the end of his nose. “I think I ought to tell you something,” she said softly; “I’m engaged.” At that moment she could not recall exactly what Peter looked like, but the memory of his name was accusing her.

His dark eyes opened and looked up at her vacantly. “That’s your problem, then,” he said. “It’s like me telling you I got an A on my Pre-Raphaelite Pornography paper – interesting, but it doesn’t have much of anything to do with anything. Does it?”

“Well, but it does,” she said. The situation was rapidly becoming a matter of conscience. “I’m going to get married, you know. I shouldn’t be here.”

“But you are here.” He smiled. “Actually I’m glad you told me. It makes me feel a lot safer. Because really,” he said earnestly, “I don’t want you to think that all this means anything. It never sort of does, for me. It’s all happening really to somebody else.” He kissed the end of her nose. “You’re just another substitute for the laundromat.”

Marian wondered whether her feelings ought to be hurt, but decided that they weren’t: instead she was faintly relieved. “I wonder what you’re a substitute for, then,” she said.

“That’s the nice thing about me. I’m very flexible, I’m the universal substitute.” He reached up over her head and turned off the light.

Not very much later the front door was opened and closed, admitting a number of heavy footsteps. “Oh, shit,” he said from somewhere inside his dressing gown. “They’re back.” He pushed her upright, turned the light back on, yanked the dressing gown closed around her and slithered off the bed, smoothing his hair down over his forehead with both hands, then straightening his sweater. He stood in the middle of the room for an instant, glaring wildly at the bedroom doorway, then clashed across the room, seized the chessboard, dropped it onto the bed, and sat down facing her. He quickly began to set the toppled pieces upright.

“Hi,” he said calmly a moment later, to someone who had presumably appeared in the doorway. Marian was feeling too dishevelled to look around. “We were just having a game of chess.”

“Oh, good show,” said a dubious voice.

“Why get all upset about it?” Marian said, when whoever it was had gone into the bathroom and shut the door. “It’s nothing to be disturbed about, it’s all perfectly natural, you know. If anything it’s their fault for barging in like that.” She herself was feeling extraordinarily guilty.

“Well, I told you,” he said, staring down at the orderly pattern of chessmen on the board. “They think they’re my parents. You know parents never understand about things like that. They’d think you were corrupting me. They have to be protected from reality.” He reached across the chessboard and took hold of her hand. His fingers were dry and rather cold.

M
arian gazed down at the small silvery image reflected in the bowl of the spoon: herself upside down, with a huge torso narrowing to a pinhead at the handle end. She tilted the spoon and her forehead swelled, then receded. She felt serene.

She looked fondly across the white tablecloth and the intervening plates and the basket of rolls at Peter, who smiled back at her. The angles and curves of his face were highlighted by the orange glow from the shaded candle at the side of the table; in the shadow his chin was stronger, his features not so smooth. Really, she thought, anyone seeing him would find him exceptionally handsome. He was wearing one of his suave winter costumes – dark suit, sombrely opulent tie – not as jaunty as some of his young-man-about-town suits, but more quietly impressive. Ainsley had once called him “nicely packaged,” but now Marian decided that she found this quality attractive. He knew how to blend in and stand out at the same time. Some men could never wear dark suits properly, they got flaky on the shoulders and shiny at the back, but Peter never shed and never shone in the wrong places. The sense of proud
ownership she felt at being with him there in that more or less public way caused her to reach across the table and take his hand. He put his own hand on top of hers in answer.