Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [25]
All summer whenever I went to the apartment I had to thread my way through piles of concrete blocks near the entrance to the lobby, around shapes covered with dusty tarpaulins on the floor inside, and sometimes over troughs for plaster and ladders and stacks of pipes on the stairway going up; the elevators aren’t in working order yet. Occasionally I would be stopped by workmen who didn’t know about Peter and who would insist that I couldn’t go in because nobody lived there. We would then have arguments about the existence or non-existence of Mr. Wollander, and once I’d had to take some of them up to the seventh floor with me and produce Peter in the flesh. I knew there wouldn’t be any men working as late as five on Saturday though; and they probably had the whole long weekend off anyway. Generally they seem to go about things in a leisurely manner, which suits Peter. There’s been a strike or a layoff too which has held things up. Peter hopes it will go on: the longer they take, the longer his rent will be low.
Structurally the building was complete, except for the finishing touches. They had all the windows in and had scrawled them with white soap hieroglyphics to keep people from walking through them. The glass doors had been installed several weeks before, and Peter had got an extra set of keys made for me: a necessity rather than just a convenience, since the buzzer-system for letting people in had not yet been connected. Inside, the shiny surfaces – tiled floors, painted walls, mirrors, light fixtures – which would later give the building its expensive gloss, its beetle-hard internal shell, had not yet begun to secrete themselves. The rough grey underskin of subflooring and unplastered wall-surface was still showing, and raw wires dangled like loose nerves from most of the sockets. I went up the stairs carefully, avoiding the dirty bannister, thinking how much I had come to associate weekends with this new-building smell of sawn boards and cement dust. On the floors I passed, the doorways of the future apartments gaped emptily, their doors as yet unhung. It was a long climb up; as I reached Peter’s floor I was breathing hard. I would be glad when the elevators were running.
Peter’s apartment, of course, has been largely finished; he’d never live in a place without proper floors and electricity, no matter how low the rent. His connection uses it as a model of what the rest of the apartments will be like, and shows it to the occasional prospective tenant, always phoning Peter before he arrives. It doesn’t inconvenience Peter much: he’s out a lot and doesn’t mind people looking through his place.
I opened the door, went in, and took the groceries to the refrigerator in the kitchenette. I could tell by the sound of running water that Peter was taking a shower: he often is. I strolled into the living room and looked out of the window. The apartment isn’t far enough up for a good view of the lake or the city – you can only see a mosaic of dingy little streets and narrow backyards, and you aren’t low enough to see clearly what the people are doing in them. Peter hasn’t put much in the living room yet. He’s got a Danish Modern sofa and a chair to match and a hi-fi set, but nothing else. He says he’d rather wait and get good things than clutter the place up with cheap things he doesn’t like. I suppose he is right, but still it will help when he gets more: his two pieces of furniture are made to look very spindly and isolated by the large empty space that surrounds them.
I get restless when I’m waiting for anyone, I tend to pace. I wandered into the bedroom and looked out the window there, though it’s much the same view. Peter has the bedroom nearly done, he’s told me, though for some tastes it might be slightly sparse. He has a good-sized sheepskin on the floor and a plain, solid bed, also good sized, second-hand but in perfect condition, which is always neatly made. Then an austere