Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [106]
The little man started briskly to reduce a potato to a pulp. Marian lost her interest and continued her search for the yellow subway sign.
When she opened the front door she was met by a gabble of female voices. She took off her boots in the vestibule and put them on the newspapers that were there for that purpose. A number of other pairs had been deposited, many with thick soles and some with black fur tops. As she went past the parlour doorway she caught a glimpse of dresses and hats and necklaces. The lady down below was having a tea party; they must be the Imperial Daughters, or perhaps they were the Women Christian Temperates. The child, in maroon velvet with a lace collar, was passing cakes.
Marian climbed the stairs as noiselessly as she could. For some reason she had not yet spoken to the lady down below about giving up the apartment. She should have done it weeks ago. The delay might mean having to pay another month’s rent for insufficient notice. Maybe Ainsley would want to keep it on with another roommate; but she doubted it. In another few months that would be impossible.
When she had climbed the second flight of stairs she could hear Ainsley talking in the living room. The voice was harder, more insistent, angrier than she had ever heard it before: Ainsley did not usually lose her temper. Another voice was interrupting, answering. It was Leonard Slank’s.
“Oh no,” Marian thought. They seemed to be having an argument. She definitely did not want to get involved. She intended to slip quietly into her room and close the door, but Ainsley must have heard her coming up the stairs: her head appeared abruptly from the living room, followed by quantities of loose red hair and then by the rest of her body. She was dishevelled and had been crying.
“Marian!” she half-wailed, half-commanded. “You’ve got to come in here and talk to Len. You’ve got to make him listen to reason! I like your hair,” she added perfunctorily.
Marian trailed after her into the living room, feeling like a child’s wheeled wooden toy being pulled along by a string, but she didn’t know on what grounds, moral or otherwise, she could base a refusal. Len was standing in the middle of the room, looking even more disturbed than Ainsley.
Marian sat down on a chair, keeping her coat on as a shock-absorber. The other two both stared angrily and beseechingly at her in silence.
Then, “My God!” Len almost shouted. “After all that, now she wants me to marry her!”
“Well, what’s the matter with you anyway! You don’t want a homosexual son, do you?” Ainsley demanded.
“Goddamn it, I don’t want any son at all! I didn’t want it, you did it yourself, you should have it removed, there must be some kind of pill.…”
“That’s not the point, don’t be ridiculous, the point is of course I’m going to have the baby; but it should have the best circumstances, and it’s your responsibility to provide it with a father. A father-image.” Ainsley was now trying a slightly more patient and cool-headed approach.
Len paced across the floor. “How much do they cost? I’ll buy you one. Anything. But I’m not going to marry you, dammit. Don’t give me that responsibility stuff either, I’m not responsible anyway. It was all your doing, you deliberately allowed me to get myself drunk, you seduced me, you practically dragged me into …”
“That isn’t quite how I remember it,” Ainsley said, “and I was in a condition to remember it a lot more clearly than you can. Anyway,” she continued with relentless logic, “you thought you were seducing me. And after all, that’s important too, isn’t it: your motives. Suppose you really had been seducing me and I’d got pregnant accidentally. What would you do then? You’d certainly be responsible then, wouldn’t you? So it is your responsibility.”
Len contorted his face, his smile an anaemic parody of cynical sarcasm. “You’re like all the rest of them, you’re a sophist,” he said in a quaveringly savage voice. “You’re