The Robber Bride (19 page)

N
one of the McClung Hall girls had anything to do with Zenia. And Zenia would have nothing to do with them. She wouldn’t have lived in a women’s residence if forced at gunpoint, as she said to Tony the first time she set foot in the place.
This dump
, she called it.

(Why had she come? To borrow something. What was it? Tony doesn’t wish to remember, but remembers anyway: it was money. Zenia was always running short. Tony found it embarrassing to be asked, but she would have found it more embarrassing still to refuse. What she finds embarrassing now is that she so naively, so tamely, so obligingly forked over.)

“Residence is for small people,” Zenia said, gazing contemptuously around her, at the institutional paintwork, the shoddy chairs in the Common Room, the comic strips cut out of the newspaper and Scotch-taped to the girls’ doors.

“Right,” said Tony, heavily.

Zenia looked down at Tony, smiling, correcting herself. “Imaginatively small. I don’t mean you.”

Tony was relieved, because Zenia’s contempt was a work of art. It was so nearly absolute; it was a great privilege to find yourself excluded from it. You felt reprieved, you felt vindicated, you felt grateful; or this is what Tony felt, pattering off to her room, locating her little chequebook, writing out her little cheque. Offering it up. Zenia took it carelessly, folded it twice, and stuck it into her sleeve. Both of them tried to act as if nothing had happened; as if nothing had changed hands, as if nothing at all was owed.

How she must have hated me for that, thinks Tony.

So Tony did not meet Zenia among the girls at McClung Hall. She met her instead through her friend West.

She was not sure, exactly, how West had become her friend. He had more or less materialized. He began by sitting beside her in class and borrowing her Modern History notes because he’d missed the lecture before that one, and then all of a sudden he was a part of her routine.

West was the only person she could talk to about her interest in war. She hadn’t done it yet, but she was working up to it gradually. Such a thing might take years, and he’d only been her friend for a month. For the first two weeks of this period she’d called him Stewart, like his other, his male friends, who would slap him on the shoulder, give him small punches on the arm, and say,
Hey Stew, what’s new?
But then he’d come across a few of the cryptic comments she’d written in the margins of her notes –
egabrag tahw, poop dlo gnirob –
and she’d had to explain them. He was impressed with her ability to write backwards –
That’s something
, was what he said – and he’d wanted his own name reversed. He claimed to like his new name a lot better.

The girls in the residence began referring to West as Tony’s boyfriend, although they knew he wasn’t. They did it to tease. “How’s your boyfriend?” Roz would yell, grinning at Tony from the saggy
depths of the orange sofa, which sagged even more when it was Roz who was sitting on it. “Hey, Tonikins! How’s your secret life? How’s Mr. Beanpole? Poor me! The tall guys always go for shrimps!”

West was tall enough, but walking beside Tony made him look even taller. He lacked the solidity of the word
giant;
instead he was skinny, loosely strung. His legs and arms were only tentatively attached to the rest of him, and his hands and feet seemed larger than they were because his sleeves and pant legs were always an inch or two short. He was handsome in an angular, an attenuated way, like a medieval stone saint or an ordinarily handsome man who had been stretched like rubber.

He had shaggy blond hair then, and wore dark, tarnished clothing – a frayed turtleneck, sullied jeans. This was unusual for the time: most men at university still wore ties, or at least jackets. His clothes were a badge of the fringe, they gave him an outlaw’s lustre. When Tony and West had coffee together after their Modern History lecture, in one of the student coffee shops they frequented, the girls would stare at West. Then their eyes would move downwards and they would spot Tony, in her kiddie pageboy, her horn-rimmed glasses and kilty skirt and penny loafers. Then they would be puzzled.

Drinking coffee was about all Tony did with West. As they drank the coffee, they talked; although neither of them was what you would call loquacious. Most of their talk was an easy silence. Sometimes they drank beer, in various dark beer parlours, or rather West did. Tony would sit on the edge of her chair, her toes barely touching the floor, and lick the froth off the top of her draft, her tongue exploring it thoughtfully, like a cat’s. Then West would drink the rest of the beer and order two more. Four was his limit. To Tony’s relief he never drank any more than that. It was surprising that the beer parlours let Tony in, because she looked so under-age. She
was
under-age. They must have thought she would never dare to set foot in such places unless she was in reality twenty-two. But
she was disguised as herself, one of the most successful disguises. If she’d tried to look older it wouldn’t have worked.

West said nobody took better history notes than Tony. That made her feel useful – even better, indispensable. Praised.

West was taking Modern History – which wasn’t modern history at all, it was simply not Ancient History, which ended with the fall of Rome – because he was interested in folk songs and ballads, and in antique musical instruments. He played the lute, or so he said. Tony had never seen his lute. She’d never been to his room, if in fact he lived in a room. She didn’t know where he lived, or what he did in the evenings. She told herself she wasn’t interested: theirs was a friendship of the afternoons.

As time went on, however, she began thinking about the rest of his life. She found herself wondering what he ate for dinner, and even breakfast. She assumed he lived with other men, or boys, because he’d told her about a guy he knew who could set fire to his own farts. He didn’t tell her this in a sniggering way, but regretfully somehow. “Imagine having that engraved on your tombstone,” he said. Tony recognized the fart-lighting as a variant of the more sedate tricks that went on in McClung Hall with the eggs and lipstick faces, and postulated a men’s residence. But she didn’t ask.

When West appeared, he said
Hi
. When he disappeared, he said
See you
. Tony never knew when either of these things was going to happen.

In this fashion they reached November. Tony and West were sitting in a beer parlour called Montgomery’s Inn, after one of the skirmishes of the 1837 Rebellion in Upper Canada, which, in Tony’s opinion, should have gone the other way, but had been lost through stupidity and panic. Tony was licking the foam off the top of her draft beer as usual, when West said something surprising. He said he was having a party.

What he actually said was
we
. And he didn’t say
party
, he said
bash
.

Bash
was an odd word, coming from West. Tony did not think of West as a violent person, and
bash
was harsh, a body-blow term. He sounded as if he were quoting someone.

“A bash?” Tony said uncertainly. “I don’t know.” She had heard the girls in the residence talking about bashes. They took place at men’s fraternities, and frequently ended with people being sick – men mostly, but sometimes girls too, either at the fraternity itself or later, in one of the McClung washrooms.

“I think you should come,” said West, gazing at her benevolently with his blue eyes. “I think you’re looking pale.”

“This is the colour I am,” said Tony defensively. She was taken aback by the sudden concern for her health on West’s part. It seemed too polite; although, in contradiction to his offhand and sullen clothing, he always opened doors. She wasn’t used to such concern from him, or from anyone else. She found it alarming, as if he had touched her.

“Well,” said West, “I think you should get out more.”

“Out?” said Tony. She was confused: what did he mean by
out?

“You know,” said West. “Meet people.”

There was something almost sly about the way he said this, as if he were concealing a more devious purpose. It occurred to her that he might be trying to set her up with some man, out of misplaced solicitude, the way Roz might.
Toinette! There’s someone I want you to meet!
Roz would say, and Tony would sidestep and evade.

Now she said, “But I wouldn’t know anyone there.”

“You’d know me,” said West. “And you could meet the others.”

Tony didn’t say she did not want to meet any more people. It would have sounded too strange. Instead she let West write down the address for her, on a corner of paper torn from his
Rise of the Renaissance
textbook. He didn’t say he would pick her up, so at least it wasn’t a date. Tony couldn’t have handled a date with anyone,
much less West. She couldn’t have handled the implications, or the hope. Hope of that kind might unbalance her. She didn’t want to get involved, with anyone, underlined, full stop.

The bash is up two flights of stairs, in a narrow asphalt-shingled building far downtown that forms part of a row of cut-price and army surplus stores, and fronts on the railway tracks. The stairs are steep; Tony climbs them one step at a time, helping herself up by the banister. The door at the top is open; smoke and noise are billowing out through the doorway. Tony wonders whether to knock, decides against it on the grounds that no one would hear her, and goes in.

Right away she wishes she hadn’t, because the room is thick with people, and they are the kind of people who, taken
en masse
, are most likely to frighten her, or at least make her very uneasy. Most of the women have straight hair, worn long in a ballerina ponytail or wound into austere buns. They have black stockings and black skirts and black tops, and no lipstick; their eyes are heavily outlined. Some of the men have beards. They wear the same kind of clothes that West does – work shirts, turtlenecks, jean jackets – but they lack his candour, his sweetness, his air of hairlessness. Instead they are compacted, matted, dense with supercharged matter. They hulk, they loom, they bristle with static energy.

The men are talking mostly to one another. The women aren’t talking at all. They’re leaning against the wall, or standing with their arms folded under their breasts, a cigarette carelessly in one hand, dropping ashes on the floor, looking as if they’re bored and about to leave for some other, better party; or they’re gazing expressionlessly at the men, or staring past their shoulders as if searching intently for someone else, some other man, a more important one.

A couple of the women glance over at Tony as she comes in, then shift their eyes quickly away. Tony is wearing the sort of clothes she
usually wears, a dark green corduroy jumper with a white blouse under it, a green velvet hairband, and knee socks and brown loafers. She has kept a lot of her clothes from high school, because they still fit. She knows at this moment that she will have to acquire other clothes. But she is not sure how.

She stands on tiptoe and peers through the intertwined hedge of arms and shoulders and heads, of black wool rib-knit breasts and denim chests and torsos. But West is nowhere in sight.

Maybe it’s because the room is so dark; maybe that’s why she can’t see him. Then she realizes that the room is not only dark, it’s black. The walls, the ceiling, even the floor are a glossy, hard enamel black. Even the windows have been painted over; even the light fixtures. Instead of electric lights there are candles, stuck in Chianti bottles. And all over the room there are big silvery juice tins, peeled of their labels and filled with bunches of white chrysanthemums that waver and shine in the light from the candles.

Tony wants to leave, but she wouldn’t like to do that without seeing West. He might think she’d refused his invitation, had failed to come; he might think she was being snobby. Also she wants to be soothed and reassured: with him there she will not be so out of place. She goes in search of him, down a hallway that leads off to the left. This terminates in a bathroom. A door opens, there’s a flushing sound, and a large, hair-covered man comes out. He gives Tony an unfocused look. “Shit, the Girl Guides,” he says.

Tony feels about two inches tall. She flees into the bathroom, which will at least be a refuge. It too has been painted black, even the bathtub, even the sink, even the mirror. She locks the door and sits down on the black toilet, touching it first to make sure the paint is dry.

She’s not sure she’s in the right place. Perhaps West doesn’t live here at all. Perhaps she has the wrong address; perhaps this is some other bash. But she checked the scrap of paper before coming up the stairs. Perhaps, then, it’s the time that’s wrong – perhaps she’s too
early for West, or too late. There’s no way of knowing, since his comings and goings have always been so unpredictable.

She could go out of the bathroom and ask someone – one of the enormous, furry men, one of the tall supercilious women – where he might be, but she dreads doing this. What if nobody knows who he is? It would be safer to stay in here, replaying the Battle of Culloden to herself, calculating the odds. She arranges the terrain – the hill that slopes downwards, the line of the stone wall with the tidy British soldiers and their tidy guns in a row behind it. The raggedy clans charging, plunging down the hill yelling, with nothing but their heavy outdated swords and their round bucklers. Falling in picturesque, noble heaps. An abattoir. Courage is of use only when technologies are evenly matched. Bonnie Prince Charlie was an idiot.

Unwinnable, she thinks, as a battle. The only hope would have been to avoid a battle altogether. To reject the terms of the argument, refuse the conventions. Strike at night, then melt away into the hills. Disguise yourself as a peasant. Not a fair fight, but then, what is a fair fight? Nothing she’s learned about yet.

Someone’s knocking at the door. Tony gets up, flushes the black toilet, rinses her hands at the black sink. There’s no towel so she wipes her hands on her corduroy jumper. She unlocks the door: it’s one of the ballerina women.