Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [128]
The glow of the cigarette vanished; there was the hard china click of the ashtray being set down on the floor. She could sense that he was smiling in the darkness, but with what expression, sarcasm, malevolence, or even kindness, she could not guess.
“Lie down,” he said.
She sank back, still with the sheet clutched around her and her knees drawn up.
He put his arm around her. “No,” he said, “you have to unbend. Assuming the foetal position won’t be any help at all, god knows I’ve tried it long enough.” He stroked her with his hand, gently, straightening her out, almost as though he was ironing her.
“It isn’t something you can dispense, you know,” he said. “You have to let me take my own time.”
He edged over, closer to her now. She could feel his breath against the side of her neck, sharp and cool, and then his face pressing against her, nudging into her flesh, cool; like the muzzle of an animal, curious, and only slightly friendly.
29
They were sitting in a grimy coffee shop around the corner from the hotel. Duncan was counting the rest of his money to see what they could afford to have for breakfast. Marian had undone the buttons of her coat, but was holding it together at the neck. She didn’t want any of the other people to see her red dress: it belonged too obviously to the evening before. She had put Ainsley’s earrings in her pocket.
Between them on the green arborite-surfaced table was an assortment of dirty plates and cups and crumbs and splashes and smears of grease, remnants of the courageous breakfasters who had pioneered earlier into the morning when the arborite surface was innocent as a wilderness, untouched by the knife and fork of man, and had left behind them the random clutter of rejected or abandoned articles typical of such light travellers. They knew they would never pass that way again. Marian looked at their waste-strewn trail with distaste, but she was trying to be casual about breakfast. She didn’t want her stomach to make a scene. I’ll just have coffee and toast, maybe with jelly; surely there will be no objections to that, she thought.
A waitress with harassed hair appeared and began to clear the table. She flapped a dog-eared menu down in front of each of them. Marian opened hers and looked at the column headed “Breakfast Suggestions.”
Last night everything had seemed resolved, even the imagined face of Peter with its hunting eyes absorbed into some white revelation. It had been simple clarity rather than joy, but it had been submerged in sleep; and waking to the sound of water sighing in the pipes and loud corridor voices, she could not remember what it was. She had lain quietly, trying to concentrate on it, on what it might possibly have been, gazing at the ceiling, which was blotched with distracting watermarks; but it was no use. Then Duncan’s head had emerged from beneath the pillow where he had placed it during the night for safe-keeping. He stared at her for a moment as though he didn’t have the least idea who she was or what he was doing in that room. Then “Let’s get out of here,” he said. She had leaned over and kissed him on the mouth, but after she had drawn back he had merely licked his lips, and as though reminded by the action said “I’m hungry. Let’s go for breakfast. You look awful,” he had added.
“You’re not exactly the picture of health yourself,” she replied. His eyes were heavily circled and his hair looked like a raven’s nest. They got out of bed and she examined her own face briefly in the yellowed wavery glass of the bathroom mirror. Her skin