The Robber Bride (6 page)

But Zenia strides past their table as if they aren’t there, as if nobody is. Tony senses them all fading in the glare that spreads out
from her. The perfume she’s wearing is unrecognizable: something dense and murky, sullen and ominous. The smell of scorched earth. She goes to the back of the room and sits down, and lights a cigarette and stares above their heads, out the window.

“Tony, what’s she doing?” Roz whispers. Tony is the only one with a clear view of Zenia.

“Smoking,” says Tony. “Waiting for someone.”

“But what’s she doing
here?”
says Roz.

“Slumming,” says Tony. “The same as us.”

“I don’t believe this,” says Charis plaintively. “I liked this day until now.”

“No, no,” says Roz. “I mean this city. Shit, I mean this entire
country
. She’s burnt all her bridges. What’s left for her?”

“I don’t want to talk about her,” says Tony.

“I don’t even want to
think
about her,” says Charis. “I don’t want her messing up my head.”

But there is no hope of thinking about anything else.

Zenia is as beautiful as ever. She’s wearing black, a tight outfit with a scoop neck that shows the tops of her breasts. She looks, as always, like a photo, a high-fashion photo done with hot light so that all freckles and wrinkles are bleached out and only the basic features remain: in her case, the full red-purple mouth, disdainful and sad; the huge deep eyes, the finely arched eyebrows, the high cheekbones tinged with terracotta. And her hair, a dense cloud of it, blown around her head by the imperceptible wind that accompanies her everywhere, moulding her clothes against her body, fitfully moving the dark tendrils around her forehead, filling the air near her with the sound of rustling. In the midst of this unseen commotion she sits unmoving, as still as if she were carved. Waves of ill will flow out of her like cosmic radiation.

Or this is what Tony sees. It’s an exaggeration, of course; it’s overdone. But these are the emotions that Zenia mostly inspires: overdone emotions.

“Let’s leave,” says Charis.

“Don’t let her frighten you,” says Tony, as if to herself.

“It’s not fear,” says Charis. “She makes me sick. She makes me sick of myself.”

Roz says, reflectively, “She does have that effect.”

The two others gather their purses and begin the ritual of dividing up the bill. Tony is still looking at Zenia. It’s true she’s as beautiful as ever; but now Tony can detect a slight powdery dullness, like the bloom on a grape – a slight contracting of the pores, a shrinkage, as if some of the juice has been sucked out from under her skin. Tony finds this reassuring: Zenia is mortal after all, like the rest of them.

Zenia blows out smoke, lowers her gaze. She stares at Tony. She stares right through her. But she sees her all right. She sees all three of them. She knows how they feel. She’s enjoying it.

Tony stops looking. Her heart inside her is cold and dense, packed together like a snowball. At the same time she’s excited, tense, as if waiting for a short word, a command, clipped and deadly.
Forward! Charge! Fire!
Or something of the sort.

But also she’s tired. Maybe she no longer has the energy for Zenia. She may not be up to her, this time. Not that she ever has been.

She focuses on the slick red tabletop, the black ashtray with its crumpled butts. The name of the restaurant is stamped on it in silver script:
Toxique
.

Euqixot
. It looks Aztec.

What is she up to? thinks Tony. What does she want?

What is she doing here, on this side of the mirror?

6

T
he three of them troop out the door, one by one. Beating a retreat. Tony resists the impulse to walk out backwards: the casualty rates go up when you turn tail.

It’s not as if Zenia has a gun. Still, Tony can sense the contemptuous ultramarine gaze drilling through the back of her flimsy little dotted-rayon dress like a laser.
Pathetic
, Zenia must be thinking. She must be laughing; or smiling, with the corners of her lush mouth upcurled. The three of them aren’t major enough for a laugh.
Shorn
, Tony murmurs, to herself. As in armour, as in dignity, as in hair.

Tony felt safe this morning, safe enough. But she doesn’t feel safe now. Everything has been called into question. Even in the best of times the daily world is tenuous to her, a thin iridescent skin held in place by surface tension. She puts a lot of effort into keeping it together, her willed illusion of comfort and stability, the words flowing from left to right, the routines of love; but underneath is darkness. Menace, chaos, cities aflame, towers crashing down, the anarchy of deep water. She takes a breath to steady herself and feels the oxygen and car fumes rushing into her brain. Her legs are
wavery, the façade of the street ripples, tremulous as a reflection on a pond, the weak sunlight blows away like smoke.

Nevertheless, when Roz offers to drive her home, or wherever she’s going, Tony says she’ll walk. She needs the interlude, she needs the space, she needs to ready herself for West.

This time the three of them don’t kiss the air. Instead they hug. Charis is shivering, despite her attempt at serenity. Roz is flippant and dismissive, but she’s holding back tears. She’ll sit in her car and cry, blotting her eyes on her bright jacket sleeve, until she’s ready to drive back to her penthouse office. Charis on the other hand will amble down to the Island ferry dock, peering into store windows and jay-walking. On the ferry she’ll watch the gulls and visualize being one, and try to put Zenia out of her mind. Tony feels protective towards the two of them. What do they know about the hard dark choices? Neither one of them is going to be a whole lot of help in the coming struggle. But then, they have nothing to lose. Nothing, or nobody. Tony does.

She makes her way along Queen, then turns north on Spadina. She wills her feet to move, she wills the sun to shine.
He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, Who puts it not unto the touch, To win, or lose it all
, she repeats in her head. A bracing verse, a general favourite, a favourite of generals. What she needs is some perspective. Some
evitcepsrep
. A medicinal word.

Gradually her heart settles. It’s soothing to be among strangers, who require from her no efforts, no explanations, no reassurances. She likes the mix on the street here, the mixed skins. Chinatown has taken over mostly, though there are still some Jewish delicatessens, and, further up and off to the side, the Portuguese and West Indian shops of the Kensington Market. Rome in the second century, Constantinople in the tenth, Vienna in the nineteenth. A crossroads. Those from other countries look as if they’re trying hard to
forget something, those from here as if they’re trying hard to remember. Or maybe it’s the other way around. In any case there’s an inturned, preoccupied cast to the eyes, a sideways glancing. Music from elsewhere.

The sidewalk is crowded with lunchtime shoppers; they avoid bumping into one another without seeming to look, as if they’re covered with cat whiskers. Tony weaves in and out, past the vegetable stores with their star fruit and lichees and long crinkly cabbages set out on stands at the front, the butchers with their glazed reddish ducks dangling in the windows, the linen shops with their cutwork tablecloths, their silk kimonos with good-luck dragons embroidered on the backs. Among Chinese people she feels the right height, although she is not unaware of how she might be viewed by some of them. A hairy white foreign devil; though she is not very hairy, as such things go, or very devilish either. Foreign, yes. Foreign here.

It’s nearly time for her to get her hair cut, at Liliane’s, two blocks up and around the corner. They make a fuss of her there: they admire, or pretend to admire, her small feet, her tiny mole-paw hands, her flat bum, her heart-shaped mouth, so out of date among the pouty bee-stung lips of the fashion magazines. They tell her she is almost Chinese.

Only almost, though.
Almost
is what she has always felt; approximate. Zenia has never been
almost
, even at her most fraudulent. Her fakery was deeply assumed, and even her most superficial disguises were total.

Tony walks and walks, up Spadina, past the old Victory Burlesque – which victory, whose victory, she wonders – now stuck with posters advertising films in Chinese, past Grossman’s Tavern and across College Street, where the Scott Mission offers Christian soup, to
more and more people with less and less money. She can walk all the way home, she has no classes today. She needs to regroup her forces, she needs to ponder, she needs to plan her strategy. Though how much strategy can you plan with so little to go on? For instance, why has Zenia chosen to resurrect herself? Why did she go to the trouble of blowing herself up in the first place? For her own reasons, perhaps; nothing to do with the three of them. Or with the two of them, with her and West. Still, it’s bad luck that Zenia spotted her in the Toxique.

Maybe Zenia has forgotten all about West by now.
He’s small game
, pleads Tony silently.
A tiny fish. Why bother?
But Zenia likes hunting. She likes hunting anything. She relishes it.

Imagine your enemy
, say the experts.
Put yourself in his place. Pretend you are him. Learn to predict him
. Unfortunately, Zenia is a bugger to predict. It’s all in the old children’s game – scissors, paper, stone. Scissors cut paper, but break on stone. The trick is to know what your opponent is concealing, what fist or nasty surprise or secret weapon he’s hiding behind his back. Or hers.

The sun declines and Tony walks along her own quiet street, scuffing through the fallen leaves of the maple and chestnut trees, back to her own house. Her stronghold. In the waning light the house is no longer thick, solid, incontrovertible. Instead it looks provisional, as if it’s about to be sold, or to set sail. It flickers a little, sways on its moorings. Before unlocking the door Tony runs her hand over the brickwork, reassuring herself that it exists.

West hears her come in, and calls down to her. Tony checks her face in the hall mirror, settling it into what she hopes is her normal expression.

“Listen to this,” says West, when she’s climbed the third-floor stairs.

Tony listens: it’s another noise, much the same – as far as she can tell – as yesterday’s. Courting male penguins bring rocks, held between their rubber-boot feet; West brings noises. “That’s wonderful,” she says. It’s one of her more minor lies.

West smiles, which means he knows she can’t hear what he hears but likes her for not saying so. She smiles back, scanning his face anxiously. She checks each wrinkle, each lift and inflection. All is as usual, from what she can tell.

Neither of them feels like cooking, so West goes around the corner for Japanese take-out – barbecued eel, yellowtail, and salmon sushi – and they eat it sitting on cushions, in front of the television set in West’s third-floor study, with their shoes off, licking their fingers.

West has the TV in there so he can play videos on it in which sounds are rendered as colours and wavy lines, but they also use it for watching old movies and junky late-night crime series. West usually prefers the movies, but tonight it’s Tony’s turn to choose, and they settle on a rerun of a cop show, high on the offensive-and-tacky scale and punctuated with bursts of gratuitous violence.

Tony’s students would smile if they caught her doing this; they’re under the illusion that their elders and teachers can’t possibly be as frivolous and lazy-minded as they are themselves. Tony watches as a woman brushes her freshly washed hair, and as another extols a new sanitary napkin, curved to catch the drips. She continues to watch as, for the hundredth, for the thousandth time, one man prepares to kill another.

Such men always have something appropriate to say before throwing the knife or breaking the neck or pulling the trigger. This may be just a screen phenomenon, a fantasy of scriptwriters; or maybe men really do say such things, under such circumstances. How would Tony know? Is there an urge to warn, to gloat, to intimidate the foe, to boost oneself into action?
Dieu et mon droit. Nemo
me impune lacessit. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Don’t mess with me
. Challenges, battle cries, epitaphs. Bumper stickers.

This man says, “You’re history.”

Tony has compiled a mental list of these televised synonyms for death.
You’re toast, you’re fried, you’re wasted, you’re steak, you’re dead meat
. It’s odd how many of them have to do with food, as if being reduced to nutrients is the final indignity. But
you’re history
has long been one of her favourites. It makes such an exact equation between the past – any of the past, all of the past – and a deserved and shoddy oblivion.
That’s history
, the young announce, with self-righteous scorn.
This is now
.

There’s a close-up of the bug-eyed fear on the face of the man who will soon be history if things go the way they’re going, and then the scene shifts to a view of nasal passages, with smile-button medicated orange bubbles percolating through them.

“This is awful,” says West. Tony doesn’t know whether he means the cop show or the cross-sectioned nose. She mutes the sound, and takes up his large hand, holding two of his soy-sauced fingers. “West,” she says. What is it she would like to convey?
You’re so large?
No.
I
don’t own you?
No.
Please stay?

Mutt and Jeff, he sometimes calls them.
Ttum and Ffej
, Tony replies. Cut that out, says West. When they go walking together, they always look as if one of them is on a leash; but which one? A bear and its handler? A poodle and its trainer?

“Want a beer?” says West.

“Apple juice,” says Tony, “please,” and West unfolds himself from his cushion and pads down the stairs in his sock feet.

Tony sits watching a new car scream around, silently, in the mountainous desert, overlooked by flat-topped buttes. Good ambush country. She has only one decision to make right now: whether or not to tell West. How could she put it?
Zenia lives
. And then what? What would West do? Run from the house, without his coat,
without his shoes? It’s possible. Tall people’s heads are too far from the ground, their centre of gravity is too high. One shock and they topple. As Zenia said once, West is a pushover.