The Edible Woman (26 page)

Ainsley had not been at dinner; she had gone to the Pre-Natal Clinic, as she did every Friday evening. While Marian was folding the tablecloth, she heard her come upstairs and go into her room, and shortly afterwards her tremulous voice called, “Marian? Could you please come here?”

She went into Ainsley’s room, picking her way over the boggy surface of clothes that covered the floor towards the bed where Ainsley had thrown herself. “What’s the matter?” she asked. Ainsley looked dismayed.

“Oh Marian,” she quavered, “it’s too awful. I went to the Clinic tonight. And I was so happy, and I was doing my knitting and everything during the first speaker – he talked about The Advantages of Breast Feeding. They even have an Association for it now. But then they had this psy-psy-psychologist, and he talked about the Father Image.” She was on the verge of tears, and Marian got up and rooted around on the dresser until she unearthed a grubby piece of kleenex, just in case. She was concerned: it wasn’t like Ainsley to cry.

“He says they ought to grow up with a strong Father Image in the home,” she said when she had composed herself. “It’s good for them, it makes them
normal
, especially if they’re boys.”

“Well, but you sort of knew that before, didn’t you?” Marian asked.

“Oh no Marian, it’s really a lot more drastic. He has all kinds of statistics and everything. They’ve proved it scientifically.” She gulped. “If I have a little boy, he’s absolutely
certain
to turn into a hoho-ho-homosexual!” At this mention of the one category of man who had never shown the slightest interest in her, Ainsley’s large blue eyes filled with tears. Marian extended the kleenex, but Ainsley waved it away. She sat up and pushed back her hair.

“There’s got to be a way,” she said; her chin lifted, courageously.

T
hey were holding hands as they went up the wide stone stairway and through the heavy doors, but they had to let go to pass through the turnstile. Once they were inside it didn’t seem right to take hands again. The churchlike atmosphere created by the high gold-mosaicked dome under which they were standing discouraged any such fleshly attempts, even if they involved only fingers, and the blue-uniformed and white-haired guard had frowned at them as he took her money. Marian connected the frown with dim recollections of two previous visits during all-day educational bus excursions to the city when she was in elementary school: perhaps it came with the price of admission.

“Come on,” Duncan said, almost in a whisper. “I’ll show you my favourite things.”

They climbed the spiral staircase, round and around the incongruous totem pole, up towards the geometrical curved ceiling. Marian had not been in this part of the Museum for so long that it seemed like something remembered from a not altogether pleasant dream, the kind you had when recovering from ether after having
your tonsils out. When at university she had attended one class on the basement floor (Geology; it had been the only way to avoid Religious Knowledge, and she had felt surly towards rock specimens ever since), and occasionally she had gone to the Museum Coffee Shop on the main floor. But not up these marble stairs again, into the bowl-shaped space of air that looked almost solid now, shafted with dustmotes whenever the weak winter sunlight became positive enough through the narrow windows high above.

They paused for a minute to look over the balustrade. Down below a batch of schoolchildren was filing through the turnstile and going to pick up folding canvas chairs from the stack at the side of the rotunda, their bodies foreshortened by perspective. The shrill edges of their voices were dulled by the thick encircling space, so that they seemed even further away than they actually were.

“I hope they don’t come up here,” Duncan said as he pushed himself away from the marble railing. He tugged at her coatsleeve, turning and drawing her with him into one of the branching galleries. They walked slowly along the creaking parquet floor past the rows of glass cases.

She had been seeing Duncan frequently during the past three weeks, by collusion rather than by coincidence, as formerly. He was writing another term paper, he had told her, called “Monosyllables in Milton,” which was to be an intensive stylistic analysis done from a radical angle. He had been stuck on the opening sentence, “It is indeed highly significant that …” for two and a half weeks and, having exhausted the possibilities of the laundromat, he had felt a need for frequent escapes.

“Why don’t you find a
female
graduate student in English?” she had asked once when their two faces, reflected in a store window, had struck her as particularly ill matched. She looked like someone who was hired to take him out for walks.

“That wouldn’t be an escape,” he said, “they’re all writing term
papers too; we’d have to discuss them. Besides,” he added morosely, “they don’t have enough breasts. Or,” he qualified after a pause, “some of them have too many.”

Marian was being, she supposed, what they called “used,” but she didn’t at all mind being used, as long as she knew what for: she liked these things to take place on as conscious a level as possible. Of course Duncan was making what they called “demands,” if only on her time and attention; but at least he wasn’t threatening her with some intangible gift in return. His complete self-centredness was reassuring in a peculiar way. Thus, when he would murmur, with his lips touching her cheek, “You know, I don’t even really
like
you very much,” it didn’t disturb her at all because she didn’t have to answer. But when Peter, with his mouth in approximately the same position, would whisper “I love you” and wait for the echo, she had to exert herself.

She guessed that she was using Duncan too, although her motives eluded her; as all her motives tended to these days. The long time she had been moving through (and it was strange to realize that she had after all been moving: she was due to leave for home in another two weeks, the day after a party Peter was going to give, and two, or was it three, weeks after that she would be married) had been merely a period of waiting, drifting with the current, an endurance of time marked by no real event; waiting for an event in the future that had been determined by an event in the past; whereas when she was with Duncan she was caught in an eddy of present time: they had virtually no past and certainly no future.

Duncan was irritatingly unconcerned about her marriage. He would listen to the few things she had to say about it, grin slightly when she would say she thought it was a good idea, then shrug and tell her neutrally that it sounded evil to him but that she seemed to be managing perfectly well and that anyway it was her problem. Then he would direct the conversation towards the complex and
ever-fascinating subject of himself. He didn’t seem to care about what would happen to her after she passed out of the range of his perpetual present: the only comment he had ever made about the time after her marriage implied that he supposed he would have to dig up another substitute. She found his lack of interest comforting, though she didn’t want to know why.

They were passing through the Oriental section. There were many pale vases and glazed and lacquered dishes. Marian glanced at an immense wall-screen that was covered with small golden images of the gods and goddesses, arranged around a gigantic central figure: an obese Buddha-like creature, smiling like Mrs. Bogue controlling by divine will her vast army of dwarfed housewives, serenely, inscrutably.

Whatever the reasons though she was always glad when he telephoned, urgent and distraught, and asked her to meet him. They had to arrange out-of-the-way places – snowy parks, art galleries, the occasional bar (though never the Park Plaza) – which meant that their few embraces had been unpremeditated, furtive, gelid, and much hampered by muffling layers of winter clothing. That morning he had phoned her at work and suggested, or rather demanded, the Museum: “I crave the Museum,” he had said. She had fled the office early, pleading a dental appointment. It didn’t matter anyway, she was leaving at last in a week and her successor was already training for the job.

The Museum was a good place: Peter would never go there. She dreaded having Peter and Duncan encounter each other. An irrational dread because for one thing there was no reason, she told herself, why Peter should be upset – it had nothing to do with him, there was obviously no question of competition or anything silly like that – and, for another, even if they did collide she could always explain Duncan as an old friend from college or something of the sort. She would be safe; but what she really seemed to fear was the
destruction, not of anything in her relationship with Peter, but of one of the two by the other; though who would be destroyed by whom, or why, she couldn’t tell, and most of the time she was surprised at herself for having such vague premonitions.

Nevertheless it was for this reason that she couldn’t let him come to her apartment. It would be too great a risk. She had gone to his place several times, but one or both of the roommates had always been there, suspicious and awkwardly resentful. That would make Duncan more nervous than ever and they would leave quickly.

“Why don’t they like me?” she asked. They had paused to look at a suit of intricately embossed Chinese armour.

“Who?”

“Them. They always act as though they think I’m trying to gobble you up.”

“Well actually it isn’t that they don’t like you. As a matter of fact, they’ve said that you seem like a nice girl and why don’t I ask you home to dinner sometime, so they can really get to know you. I haven’t told them,” he said, suppressing a smile, “that you’re getting married. So they want a closer look at you to see if you’re acceptable to the family. They’re trying to protect me. They’re worried about me, it’s how they get their emotional vitamins, they don’t want me to get corrupted. They think I’m too young.”

“But why am I such a threat? What are they protecting you from?”

“Well, you see, you’re not in graduate English. And you’re a girl.”

“Well, haven’t they ever seen a girl before?” she asked indignantly.

Duncan considered. “I don’t think so. Not exactly. Oh I don’t know, what do you ever know about your parents? You always think they live in some kind of primal innocence. But I get the impression that Trevor believes in a version of Mediaeval Chastitie, sort of Spenserian you know. As for Fish, well, I guess he thinks it’s all right
in theory, he’s always talking about it and you ought to hear his thesis topic, it’s all about sex, but he thinks you’ve got to wait for the right person and then it will be like an electric shock. I think he picked it up from ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ or D. H. Lawrence or something. God, he’s been waiting long enough, he’s almost thirty.…”

Marian felt compassion; she started to make a mental list of ageing single girls she knew who might be suitable for Fish. Millie? Lucy?

They walked on, turned another corner, and found themselves in yet another room full of glass cases. By this time she was thoroughly lost. The labyrinthine corridors and large halls and turnings had confused her sense of direction. There seemed to be no one else in this part of the Museum.

“Do you know where we are?” she asked, a little anxiously.

“Yes,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

They went under another archway. In contrast to the crowded and gilded oriental rooms they had been passing through, this one was comparatively grey and empty. Marian realized, from the murals on the walls, that they were in the Ancient Egyptian section.

“I come up here occasionally,” Duncan said, almost to himself, “to meditate on immortality. This is my favourite mummy case.”

Marian looked down through the glass at the painted golden face. The stylized eyes, edged with dark-blue lines, were wide open. They gazed up at her with an expression of serene vacancy. Across the front of the figure, at chest level, was a painted bird with outstretched wings, each feather separately defined; a similar bird was painted across the thighs, and another one at the feet. The rest of the decorations were smaller: several orange suns, gilded figures with crowns on their heads, seated on thrones or being ferried in boats; and a repeated design of odd symbols that were like eyes.

“She’s beautiful,” Marian said. She wondered whether she really thought so. Under the surface of the glass the form had a peculiar floating drowned look; the golden skin was rippling.…

“I think it’s supposed to be a man,” Duncan said. He had wandered over to the next case. “Sometimes I think I’d like to live forever. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about Time anymore. Ah, Mutabilitie; I wonder why trying to transcend time never even succeeds in stopping it.…”

She went to see what he was looking at. It was another mummy case, opened so that the shrivelled figure inside could be seen. The yellowed linen wrappings had been removed from the head, and the skull with its dried grey skin and wisps of black hair and curiously perfect teeth was exposed. “Very well preserved,” Duncan commented, in a tone that implied he knew something about the subject. “They could never do a job like that now, though a lot of those commercial body-snatchers pretend they can.”

Marian shuddered and turned away. She was intrigued, not by the mummy itself – she didn’t enjoy looking at things like that – but by Duncan’s evident fascination with it. From somewhere the thought drifted into her mind that if she were to reach out and touch him at that moment he would begin to crumble. “You’re being morbid,” she said.

“What’s wrong with death?” Duncan said, his voice suddenly loud in the empty room. “There’s nothing morbid about it; we all do it, you know, it’s perfectly natural.”

“It’s not natural to like it,” she protested, turning toward him. He was grinning at her.

“Don’t take me seriously,” he said. “I’ve warned you about that. Now come on and I’ll show you my womb-symbol. I’m going to show it to Fish pretty soon. He’s threatening to write a short monograph for
Victorian Studies
called ‘Womb-Symbols in Beatrix Potter.’ He has to be stopped.”

He led her to the far corner of the room. At first in the rapidly fading light she couldn’t make out what was inside the case. It looked like a heap of rubble. Then she saw that it was a skeleton, still
covered in places with skin, lying on its side with its knees drawn up. There were some clay pots and a necklace lying beside it. The body was so small it looked like that of a child.