Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [55]
“What does he do?” asked Marian. She had never heard about the Underwear Man before.
“Oh,” said Lucy, “he’s one of those dirty men who phone women and say filthy things to them. He was doing it last year too.”
“The trouble is,” Mrs. Bogue lamented, still clasping her hands in front of her, “he tells them he’s from our company. Apparently he has a very convincing voice. Very official. He says he’s doing a survey on underwear, and I guess the first questions he asks must sound genuine. Brands and types and sizes and things. Then he gets more and more personal until the ladies get annoyed and hang up. Of course then they phone the company to complain, and sometimes they’ve accused us of all sorts of indecent things before I can explain that he’s not one of our interviewers and our company would never ask questions like that. I wish they’d catch him and ask him to stop, he’s such a nuisance, but of course he’s almost impossible to trace.”
“I wonder why he does it?” Marian speculated.
“Oh, he’s probably one of those sex fiends,” Lucy said with a delicate mauve shiver.
Mrs. Bogue puckered her brow again and shook her head. “But they all say he sounds so nice. So normal and even intelligent. Not at all like those awful people who call you up and breathe at you.”
“Maybe it all proves that some sex fiends are very nice normal people,” Marian said to Lucy when Mrs. Bogue had gone back to her cubicle.
As she put on her coat and drifted out of the office and down the hall and let herself be floated down in the decompression chamber of the elevator, she was still thinking about the Underwear Man. She pictured his intelligent face, his polite, attentive manner, something like that of an insurance salesman, or an undertaker. She wondered what sort of personal questions he asked, and what she would say if he were ever to phone her (Oh, you must be the Underwear Man. I’ve heard so much about you.… I think we must have some friends in common). She saw him as wearing a business suit and a fairly conservative tie, diagonal stripes in brown and maroon; shoes well shined. Perhaps his otherwise normal mind had been crazed into frenzy by the girdle advertisements on the buses: he was a victim of society. Society flaunted these slender laughing rubberized women before his eyes, urging, practically forcing upon him their flexible blandishments, and then refused to supply him with any. He had found when he had tried to buy the garment in question at store counters that it came empty of the promised contents. But instead of raging and fuming and getting nowhere he had borne his disappointment quietly and maturely, and had decided, like the sensible man he was, to go systematically in search of the underwear-clad image he so ardently desired, using for his purposes the handy telecommunications network provided by society. A just exchange: they owed it to him.
As she stepped onto the street a new thought came to her. Maybe it was really Peter. Slipping out from his law office into the nearest phone booth to dial the numbers of housewives in Etobicoke. His protest against something or other – surveys? housewives in Etobicoke? vulcanization? – or his only way of striking back at a cruel world that saddled him with crushing legal duties and prevented him from taking her to dinner. And he had got the company name and the knowledge of official interviewing procedures, of course, from her! Perhaps this was his true self, the core of his personality, the central Peter who had been occupying her mind more and more lately. Perhaps this was what lay hidden under the surface, under the other surfaces, that secret identity which in spite of her many guesses and attempts and half-successes