Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [127]
With tight-lipped determination she began to undress. It was somewhat difficult to wisp off her stockings in reckless abandon or even a reasonable facsimile of it with those two eyes goggling at her in such a frog-like manner from over the top of the sheet. She scrabbled with her fingers for the zipper at the back of her dress. She could not quite reach it.
“Unzip me,” she said tersely. He complied.
She threw the dress over the back of the chair and struggled out of her girdle.
“Hey!” he said. “A real one! I’ve seen them in the ads but I never got that far in real life, I’ve always wondered how they worked. Can I look at it?”
She handed it over to him. He sat up in bed to examine it, stretching it all of its three ways and flexing the bones. “God, how medieval,” he said. “How can you stand it? Do you have to wear one all the time?” He spoke of it as though it was some kind of unpleasant but necessary surgical appliance: a brace or a truss.
“No,” she said. She was standing in her slip, wondering what to do next. She refused, somewhat prudishly she supposed, to undress the rest of the way with the lights on; but he seemed to be having such a good time at the moment that she didn’t want to interrupt. On the other hand the room was cold and she was beginning to shiver.
She walked doggedly towards the bed, gritting her teeth. It was an assignment that was going to take a lot of perseverance. If she had had any sleeves on she would have rolled them up. “Move over,” she said.
Duncan flung away the girdle and pulled himself back into the bedclothes like a turtle into its shell. “Oh no,” he said, “I’m not letting you into this bed until you go in there and peel that junk off your face. Fornication may be all very well in its way, but if I’m going to come out looking like a piece of flowered wallpaper I reject it.”
She saw his point.
When she returned, scraped more or less clean, she snapped off the light and slithered into bed beside him. There was a pause.
“I guess now I’m supposed to crush you in my manly arms,” Duncan said out of the darkness.
She slid her hand beneath his cool back.
He groped for her head, snuffling against her neck. “You smell funny,” he said.
Half an hour later Duncan said, “It’s no use. I must be incorruptible. I’m going to have a cigarette.” He got up, stumbled the few steps across the room in the dark, located his clothes and rummaged around in them till he had found the pack, and returned. She could see parts of his face now and the china seashell gleaming in the light of the burning cigarette. He was sitting propped against the iron scrollwork at the head of the bed.
“I don’t exactly know what’s wrong,” he said. “Partly I don’t like not being able to see your face; but it would probably be worse if I could. But it’s not just that, I feel like some kind of little stunted creature crawling over the surface of a huge mass of flesh. Not that you’re fat,” he added, “you aren’t. There’s just altogether too much flesh around here. It’s suffocating.” He threw back the covers on his side of the bed. “That’s better,” he said. He rested the arm with the cigarette across his face.
Marian knelt beside him in the bed, holding the sheet around her like a shawl. She could barely trace the outlines of his long white body, flesh-white against bed-white, faintly luminous in the blue light from the street. Somebody in the next room flushed a toilet; the gurgling of the water in the pipes swirled through the air of the room and died away with a sound between a sigh and a hiss.
She clenched her hands on the sheet. She was tense with impatience and with another emotion that she recognized as the cold energy of terror. At this moment to evoke something, some response, even though she could not predict the thing that might emerge from beneath