The Robber Bride (29 page)

Though part of what Tony feels is admiration. Despite her disapproval, her dismay, all her past anguish, there’s a part of her that has wanted to cheer Zenia on, even to encourage her. To make her into a saga. To participate in her daring, her contempt for almost everything, her rapacity and lawlessness. It’s like the time her mother disappeared downhill on the toboggan.
No! No! On! On!

But the recognition of that came later. At the time of West’s defection she was devastated.
(Devastate
, verb, to lay waste, to render
desolate; a familiar enough term in the literature of war, thinks Tony in the cellar, surveying her sand-table and the ruins of Otto’s army, and eating another clove.) She refused to cry, she refused to howl. She listened to West’s footsteps as he tiptoed around the apartment, as if in a hospital. When she heard the apartment door shut behind him she scuttled out and double-locked it, and put on the chain. Then she went into the bathroom and locked that door, too. She took off her wedding ring (simple, gold, no diamonds), intending to drop it down the toilet, but instead she placed it on a cabinet shelf, next to the disinfectant. Then she subsided onto the bathroom floor. American Standard, said the toilet.
Dradnats Nacirema
. A Bulgarian skin ointment.

After a while she came out of the bathroom because the phone was ringing. She stood there looking at it, it and its bridal silver telephone cover; it continued to ring. She lifted it, then dropped it down again. There was nobody she wanted to talk to. She wandered into the kitchen but there was nothing she wanted to eat.

Some hours later she found herself opening the box of old Christmas decorations where she also kept her father’s German pistol, wrapped in red tissue paper. There were even some bullets for it, in a metal cough-drop tin. She’d never shot a gun in her life, but she knew the theory.

You need some sleep
, she told herself. She could not stand the idea of sleeping in her desecrated bed, so she went to sleep finally in the living room, underneath the spinet. She had some thoughts of destroying it, with something – the meat cleaver? – but decided that could wait until morning.

When she woke up it was noon, and someone was pounding on the door. Probably it was West, come back because he’d forgotten something. (His underwear was gone from the drawer, his neatly arranged socks, washed by Tony and folded carefully in pairs. He’d taken a suitcase.)

Tony went to the door. “Go away,” she said.

“Sweetie, it’s me,” said Roz on the other side. “Open the door, honey, I really need to go to the can, I’m about to flood this entire floor.”

Tony didn’t want to let Roz in because she didn’t want to let anyone in, but she could not turn away a friend in urinary need. So she took off the chain and undid the locks and in waddled Roz, pregnant with her first baby. “This is just what I needed,” she said ruefully, “a bigger body. Hey! I’m eating for five!” Tony didn’t laugh. Roz looked at Tony’s face, then put her fattening arms around Tony. “Oh honey,” she said; then, with new-found knowledge, both personal and political, “Men are such pigs!”

Tony had a twinge of indignation. West was not a pig. He wasn’t even shaped like one. An ostrich, perhaps.
It’s not West’s fault
, she wanted to say.
It’s her. I loved him but he never really loved me. How could he? He was occupied territory, all along
. But she couldn’t say anything about this, because she couldn’t speak. Also she couldn’t breathe. Or rather she could only breathe in. She breathed in and in and finally made a sound, a wail, a long wail that went on and on, like a distant siren. Then she burst into tears.
Burst
, like a paper bag full of water. She couldn’t have burst like that if the tears hadn’t been there all along, a huge unfelt pressure behind her eyes. The tears cascaded down her cheeks; she licked her lips, she tasted them. In the Middle Ages they thought that only those without souls could not cry. Therefore she had a soul. It was no comfort.

“He’ll come back,” said Roz. “I know he will. What does she need him for? She’ll just take one bite out of him and throw him away.” She rocked Tony back and forth, back and forth, the most mother that Tony had ever had.

Roz moved into Tony’s apartment, just until Tony could function. She had a housekeeper, and her husband Mitch was away again, so
she didn’t need to be at her own house. She phoned the university and cancelled Tony’s classes, saying that Tony had strep throat. She ordered in groceries, and fed Tony canned chicken noodle soup, caramel pudding, peanut butter and banana sandwiches, grape juice: baby food. She made her take a lot of baths and played soothing music to her, and told her jokes. She wanted to install Tony in her Rosedale mansion, but Tony didn’t want to leave the apartment, even for a second. What if West should come back? She didn’t know what would happen if he did, but she knew she needed to be there. She needed to have the choice of slamming the door in his face or falling into his arms. She didn’t want to choose, though. She wanted to do both.

“He called you, didn’t he?” said Tony after a few days of this, when she was feeling less gutted.

“Yeah,” said Roz. “You know what he said? He said he was worried about you. That’s kind of cute.”

Tony didn’t think it was cute. She thought it was Zenia, putting him up to it. Twisting the knife.

It was Roz who suggested Tony should give up the apartment and buy a house. “The prices are great right now! You’ve got the down payment – just cash in some of those bonds. Look – think of it as an investment. Anyway, you should move out of here. Who needs the bad memories, eh?” She got Tony a good real estate agent, drove around with her from house to house, clambered panting up and down the stairs, peering at furnaces and dry rot and wiring. “Now this – this is a deal,” she whispered to Tony. “Ask low – see what they say! A few repairs and this could be gorgeous! Your study goes in the tower, just ditch the fake wood panelling, get rid of that linoleum – it’s maple underneath, I looked. It’s buried treasure, trust me! Once you’re out of the old place, things will be tons better.” She got a much bigger charge out of buying the house than Tony did. She
found Tony a decent contractor, and dictated the paint colours. Even at the best of times Tony would have been incapable of making such arrangements herself.

After Tony moved in, things were indeed better. She liked the house, though not for any reasons that Roz would have approved. Roz wanted the house to be the centre of the new, outgoing life she envisaged for Tony, but for Tony it was more like a convent. A convent of one. She didn’t belong in the land of the adults, the land of the giants. She shut herself up in her house like a nun, and went out only for supplies.

And for work, of course. Lots of work. She worked at school and also at home; she worked nights and weekends. She got pitying looks from her colleagues, because gossip travels through universities at the speed of influenza and they all knew about West, but she didn’t care. She skipped regular meals and snacked on cheese food and crackers. She booked an answering service so she couldn’t be disturbed while thinking. She did not answer the doorbell. It did not ring.

Tony in her turret room works late into the night. She wants to avoid bed, and sleep, and especially dreaming. She is having a dream, a recurring one; she has the feeling that this dream has been waiting for her a long time, waiting for her to enter it, re-enter it; or that it has been waiting to re-enter her.

This dream is underwater. In her waking life, she is no swimmer; she has never liked immersing herself, getting cold and wet. The most she’ll trust herself to is a bathtub, and on the whole she prefers showers. But in the dream she swims effortlessly, in water as green as leaves, with sunlight filtering down through it, dappling the sand. No bubbles come out of her mouth; she is not conscious of breathing. Beneath her, coloured fish flit away, darting like birds.

Then she comes to an edge, a chasm. Like going down a hill she drops over it, slides diagonally through the increasing darkness. The sand falls away under her like snow. The fish here are larger and more dangerous, brighter – phosphorescent. They light up and dim, flash on and off like neon signs, their eyes and teeth glowing – a gas-flame blue, a sulphur yellow, a red the colour of embers. Suddenly she knows she isn’t in the sea at all but miniaturized, inside her own brain. These are her neurons, the crackle of electricity touching them as she thinks about them. She looks at the incandescent fish with wonder: she is watching the electrochemical process of her own dreaming!

If so, then what is that, on the dim level white sand at the bottom? Not a ganglion. Someone walking away from her. She swims faster but it’s no use, she’s held in place, an aquarium goldfish bumping its nose against glass.
Reverof
, she hears. The backwards dream language. She opens her mouth to call, but there is no air to call with and water rushes in. She wakes up gasping and choking, her throat constricted, her face streaming with tears.

Now that she’s started to cry it seems impossible to stop. In the daytime, in the lamplight, when she can work, she can keep this weeping locked away. But sleep is fatal. Fatal and unavoidable.

She takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes. From the street her room must look like a lighthouse, a beacon. Warm and cheerful and safe. But towers have other uses. She could empty boiling oil out the left-hand window, get a dead hit on anyone standing at the front door.

Such as West or Zenia, Zenia and West. She broods about them too much, them and their entangled bodies. Action would be better. She thinks about going over to their apartment (she knows where they’re living, it wasn’t hard to find out, West is listed in the university
directory) and confronting Zenia. But what would she say?
Give him back?
Zenia would just laugh. “He’s a free agent,” she would say. “He’s a grown-up, he can make his own choices.” Or something like that. And if she were to turn up on Zenia’s doorstep, to whine and beg and plead, wouldn’t that be just what Zenia wanted?

She recalls a conversation she had with Zenia, early on, in the days when they were drinking coffee at Christie’s and Zenia was such a friend.

“Which would you rather have?” said Zenia. “From other people. Love, respect, or fear?”

“Respect,” said Tony. “No. Love.”

“Not me,” said Zenia. “I’d choose fear.”

“Why?” said Tony.

“It works better,” said Zenia. “It’s the only thing that works.”

Tony remembers having been impressed by this answer. But it wasn’t fear through which Zenia had stolen West. Not a show of strength. On the contrary, it was a show of weakness. The ultimate weapon.

She could always take the gun.

For almost a year there was no word from West; no mention – for instance – of lawyers or divorce; not even any petitions about the spinet and the lute, which Tony was holding captive in her new living room. Tony knew why West was so wordless. It was because he felt too awful about what he’d done, or rather what had been done to him. He felt too ashamed.

After a while he began to leave timid messages with Tony’s answering service, suggesting they get together for a beer. Tony did not reply, not because she was angry with him – she wouldn’t have been angry with him if he’d been run over by a truck, and she viewed seduction by Zenia as analogous – but because she couldn’t imagine what form any conversation between the two of them might
take.
How are you
and
Fine
would about cover it. Thus when he finally turned up at her door, her new house door, the door of her nunnery, she simply stared at him.

“Let me in?” said West. Tony could tell at a glance that it was all finished between Zenia and West. She could tell from the colour of his skin, which was a light greenish grey, and from his sagging shoulders and dejected mouth. He’d been dismissed, sacked, ejected. He’d been kicked in the nuts.

He looked so pitiful, so pulled apart – as if he’d been on the rack, as if every one of his bones had been disconnected from every other bone, leaving only a kind of anatomical jelly – that of course she let him in. Into her home, into her kitchen, where she made him a hot drink, and ultimately into her bed, where he clutched her, shivering. It was not a sexual clutch, it was the clutch of a man drowning. But Tony was in no danger of being dragged down. She felt, if anything, strangely dry; strangely detached from him. He might be drowning, but this time she was standing on the beach. Worse: with binoculars.

She began again to cook small dinners, to boil breakfast eggs. She remembered how to care for him, how to pat him back into shape, and she did it again; but this time with fewer illusions. She still loved him, but she didn’t believe he would ever love her in return, not to the same extent. How could he, after what he’d been through? Could a man with one leg tap-dance?

Nor could she trust him. He might crawl out of his depression, tell her how good she was, bring home treats for supper, go through the routines; but if Zenia were to return, from wherever she had gone – and even West didn’t seem to know – then all of these fond habits would count for nothing. He was only on loan. Zenia was his addiction; one sip of her and he’d be gone. He’d be like a dog summoned by a supersonic whistle, inaudible to human ears. He would run off.

She never mentioned Zenia: to dwell on her might be to invoke her. But when Zenia died, when she was blown up and safely encapsulated and planted under a mulberry tree, Tony no longer needed to fear the doorbell. Zenia was no longer a menace, not in the flesh. She was a footnote. She was history.

Now Zenia is back, and hungry for blood. Not for West’s blood: West is an instrument merely. The blood Zenia wants to drink is Tony’s, because she hates Tony and always has. Tony could see that hatred in her eyes today, at the Toxique. There’s no rational explanation for such hatred, but it doesn’t surprise Tony. She seems to have been familiar with it for a long time. It’s the rage of her unborn twin.

Or so thinks Tony, removing the vestiges of Otto the Red’s fallen army with her tweezers, installing the Saracens in their freshly captured territory. The flag of Islam flies above the corpse-strewn Italian beaches, while Otto himself escapes by sea. His defeat will inspire the Slavic Wends to make another looting and pillaging foray into Germany; it will motivate uprisings, rebellions, a return to the old cannibal gods. Brutality, counter-brutality, chaos. Otto is losing his grip.