Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [114]
They reached the seventh floor and walked along the corridor towards the door of Peter’s apartment. He had spread several newspapers outside his door for people to put their overshoes and boots on. Marian took off her own boots and stood them neatly beside Peter’s overshoes. “I hope they’ll follow our example,” Peter said. “I just had the floors done, I don’t want them getting all tracked up.” With no others beside them yet, the two pairs looked like black leathery bait in a large empty newspaper trap.
Inside, Peter took off her coat for her. He put his hands on her bare shoulders and kissed her lightly on the back of the neck. “Yum yum,” he said, “new perfume.” Actually it was Ainsley’s, an exotic mixture she had selected to go with the earrings.
He took off his own coat and hung it up in the closet just inside the door. “Take your coat into the bedroom, darling,” he said, “and then come on out to the kitchen and help me get things ready. Women are so much better at arranging things on plates.”
She walked across the living-room floor. The only addition Peter had made to its furniture recently was another matching Danish Modern chair; most of the space was still unoccupied. At least it meant that the guests would have to circulate: there wasn’t room for all of them to sit down. Peter’s friends did not, as a rule, sit on floors until rather late in the evening. Duncan might though. She imagined him cross-legged in the centre of the bare room, a cigarette stuck in his mouth, staring with gloomy incredulity perhaps at one of the soap-men or at one of the Danish Modern sofa legs while the other guests circled around him, not noticing him much but being careful not to step on him, as though he were a coffee table or a conversation piece of some kind: a driftwood-and-parchment mobile. Maybe it wasn’t too late to phone them and ask them not to come. But the phone was in the kitchen and so was Peter.
The bedroom was meticulously neat as always. The books and the guns were in their usual places; four of Peter’s model ships now served as book-ends. Two of the cameras had been taken out of their cases and were standing on the desk. One of them had a flash attachment on it with a blue flashbulb already clipped inside the silver saucer-shaped reflector. More of the blue bulbs were lying near an opened magazine. Marian placed her coat on the bed; Peter had told her that the coat closet by the door wouldn’t be large enough for all the coats and that the women were to put their coats in his bedroom. Her coat then, lying with its arms at its sides, was really more functional than it looked: it was acting as a sort of decoy for the other coats. By it they would see where they were supposed to go.
She turned, and saw herself reflected in the full-length mirror on the back of the cupboard door. Peter had been so surprised and pleased. “Darling, you look absolutely marvellous,” he had said as soon as he had come up through the stairwell. The implication had been that it would be most pleasant if she could arrange to look like that all the time. He had made her turn around so he could see the back, and he had liked that too. Now she wondered whether or not she did look absolutely marvellous. She turned the phrase over in her mind: it had no specific shape or flavour. What should it feel like? She smiled at herself. No, that wouldn’t do. She smiled a different smile, drooping her eyelids; that didn’t quite work either. She turned her head and examined her profile out of the corner of her eye. The difficulty was that she couldn’t grasp the total effect: her attention caught on the various details, the things she wasn’t used to – the fingernails, the heavy earrings, the hair, the various parts of her face that Ainsley had added or altered. She was only able to see one thing at a time. What was it that lay beneath the surface