Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [46]
“Oh, what is it?” I said, to joggle him out of silence.
“I don’t really know. He won’t even talk about it any more except when he’s loaded, and then no one can understand him. That’s why he keeps tearing it up – he reads it over and he can’t understand any of it himself.”
“And what are you doing yours on?” I couldn’t quite imagine.
“I haven’t got to that point yet. I don’t know when I ever will or what will happen then. I try not to think about it. Right now I’m supposed to be writing an overdue term paper from the year before last. I write a sentence a day. On good days, that is.” The machines clicked into their spin-dry cycle. He stared at them, morosely.
“Well, what’s your term paper on then?” I was intrigued; as much, I decided, by the changing contours of his face as by what he was saying. At any rate I didn’t want him to stop talking.
“You don’t really want to know,” he said. “Pre-Raphaelite pornography. I’m trying to do something with Beardsley, too.”
“Oh.” We both considered in silence the possible hopelessness of this task. “Maybe,” I suggested somewhat hesitantly, “you’re in the wrong business. Maybe you might be happier doing something else.”
He snickered again, then coughed. “I should stop smoking,” he said. “What else can I do? Once you’ve gone this far you aren’t fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You’re overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn’t even make a good ditch-digger, I’d start tearing apart the sewer system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols – pipes, valves, cloacal conduits.… No, no. I’ll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.”
I had no answer. I looked at him and tried to picture him working at a place like Seymour Surveys; even upstairs with the intelligence men; but without success. He definitely wouldn’t fit.
“Are you from out of town?” I asked finally. The subject of graduate school seemed to have been exhausted.
“Of course, we all are; nobody really comes from here, do they? That’s why we’ve got that apartment, god knows we can’t afford it but there aren’t any graduate residences. Unless you count that new pseudo-British joint with the coat of arms and the monastery wall. But they’d never let me in and it would be just as bad as living with Trevor anyway. Trevor’s from Montreal, the family is sort of Westmount and well off; but they had to go into trade after the war. They own a coconut-cookie factory but we aren’t supposed to refer to it around the apartment; it’s awkward though, these mounds of coconut cookies keep appearing and you have to eat them while pretending you don’t know where they come from. I don’t like coconut. Fish was from Vancouver, he keeps missing the sea. He goes down to the lakeshore and wades through the pollution and tries to turn himself on with seagulls and floating grapefruit peels, but it doesn’t work. Both of them used to have accents but now you can’t tell anything from listening to them; after you’ve been in that braingrinder for a while you don’t sound as though you’re from anywhere.”
“Where are you from?”