Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [100]
Fischer decided to stand up, perhaps to give rhetorical emphasis to his last words. To lift himself he placed his hands on the card table, two of whose legs jackknifed, sending Fish’s plate slithering into his lap. At that moment the chunk of meat which Marian had just hurled was in mid-air; it caught Duncan squarely in the side of the head, then deflected, bounced across the floor, and landed on a pile of term papers.
Trevor, a small salad dish in either hand, had stepped through the doorway just in time to witness both events. His jaw dropped.
“At last I know what I really want to be,” Duncan said into the suddenly quiet room. He was gazing serenely at the ceiling, a whitish-grey trace of sauce in his hair. “An amoeba.”
Duncan had said he would walk her partway home: he needed a breath of fresh air.
Luckily none of Trevor’s dishes had been broken, although several things had been spilled; and when the table had been straightened and Fischer had subsided, muttering to himself, Trevor had gracefully dismissed the whole incident, though for the remainder of the meal, through the salad and the pêches flambées and the coconut cookies and the coffee and liqueurs, his manner to Marian had been cooler.
Now, crunching along the snowy street, they were discussing the fact that Fischer had eaten the slice of lemon out of his finger bowl. “Trevor doesn’t like it, of course,” Duncan said, “and I told him once that if he doesn’t like Fish eating it he shouldn’t put one in. But he insists on doing these things properly, though as he says, nobody appreciates his efforts much. I generally eat mine, too, but I didn’t today: we had company.”
“It was all very … interesting,” Marian said. She was considering the total absence all evening of any reference to or question about herself, though she had assumed she was invited because the two roommates wanted to know more about her. Now, however, she thought it more than likely that they were merely desperate for new audiences.
Duncan looked at her with a sardonic smile. “Well, now you know what it’s like for me at home.”
“You might move out,” she suggested.
“Oh no. Actually I sort of like it. Besides, who else would take such good care of me? And worry about me so much? They do, you know, when they aren’t engrossed in their hobbies or off on some other tangent. They spend so much time fussing about my identity that I really shouldn’t have to bother with it myself at all. In the long run they ought to make it a lot easier for me to turn into an amoeba.”
“Why are you so interested in amoebas?”
“Oh, they’re immortal,” he said, “and sort of shapeless and flexible. Being a person is getting too complicated.”
They had reached the top of the asphalt ramp that led down to the baseball park. Duncan sat down on the snowbank at one side and lit a cigarette; he never seemed to mind the cold. After a moment she sat down beside him. Since he made no attempt to put his arm around her, she put hers around him.
“The thing is,” he said after a while, “I’d like something to be real. Not everything, that’s impossible, but maybe one or two things. I mean Dr. Johnson refuted the theory of the unreality of matter by kicking a stone, but I can’t go around kicking my roommates. Or my professors. Besides, maybe my foot’s unreal anyway.” He threw the stub of his cigarette into the snow and lit another. “I thought maybe you would be. I mean if we went to bed, god knows you’re unreal enough now, all I can think of is those layers and layers of woolly clothes you wear, coats and sweaters and so on. Sometimes I wonder whether it goes on and on, maybe you’re woollen all the way through. It would be sort of nice if you weren’t.…”
Marian couldn’t resist this appeal. She knew she wasn’t woollen. “All right, suppose we did,” she said, speculating. “We can’t go to my place though.”
“And we can’t go to mine,” Duncan said, showing neither surprise nor glee at her implied acceptance.
“I guess we’d have to go to a hotel,” she said, “as married people.”
“They’d never believe it,” he