Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [64]
There had been a difference, of course, in what had come up. In her case it had been another telephone call.
The voice at the other end had said, “This is Duncan.”
“Who?”
“The guy at the laundromat.”
“Oh. Yes.” Now she recognized the voice, though it sounded more nervous than usual.
“I’m sorry I startled you in the movie, but I knew you were dying to know what I was eating.”
“Yes, I was actually,” she said, glancing at the clock and then at the open door of Mrs. Bogue’s cubicle. She had already spent far too much time on the phone that afternoon.
“They were pumpkin seeds. I’m trying to stop smoking, you know, and I find them very helpful. There’s a lot of oral satisfaction in cracking them open. I get them at the pet store, they’re supposed to be for birds, really.”
“Yes,” she said, to fill up the pause that followed.
“It was a crummy movie.”
Marian wondered whether the switchboard girl downstairs was listening in on the conversation, as she had been known to do, and if so, what she was thinking about it; she must have realized by now that it was not a business call. “Mr.… Duncan,” she said in her most official voice, “I’m sort of at the office, and we aren’t supposed to take much time for outside calls; I mean from friends and so on.”
“Oh,” he said. He sounded discouraged, but he made no attempt to clarify the situation.
She pictured him at the other end of the line, morose, hollow-eyed, waiting for the sound of her voice. She had no idea why he had called. Perhaps he needed her, needed to talk to her. “But I would like to talk to you,” she said encouragingly. “Some more convenient time?”
“Well,” he said, “as a matter of fact I sort of need you; right now. I mean I need – what I need is some ironing. I’ve just got to iron something and I’ve already ironed everything in the house, even the dishtowels, and I sort of wondered whether maybe I could come over to your house and maybe iron some of your things.”
Mrs. Bogue’s eve was now definitely upon her. “Why, of course,” she said crisply. Then she suddenly decided that it would be, for some as yet unexamined reason, disastrous if this man were to encounter either Peter or Ainsley. Besides, who could tell what variety of turmoil had broken loose after she had tiptoed out of the house that morning, leaving Len still caught in the toils of vice behind the door ornamented with his own tie? She hadn’t heard from Ainsley all day, which might be either a good or an evil omen. And even if Len had managed to escape safely, the wrath of the lady down below, foiled of its proper object, might very well descend on the head of the harmless ironer as a representative of the whole male species. “Maybe I’d better bring some things to your house,” she said.
“Actually I’d prefer that. It means I can use my own iron; I’m used to it. It makes me uncomfortable to iron with other people’s irons. But please hurry, I really do need it. Desperately.”
“Yes, as soon as I can after work,” she said, trying both to reassure him and to sound, for the benefit of the office, as though she was making a dentist appointment. “About seven.” She realized as soon as she had hung up that this would mean postponing dinner with Peter yet again; but then she could see him any night. The other thing was an emergency.
By the time she had got matters straightened out with Peter she had felt as though she had been trying to unsnarl herself from all the telephone lines in the city. They were prehensile, they were like snakes, they had a way of coiling back on you and getting you all wrapped up.
A nurse was coming towards her, pushing a rubber-wheeled wagon loaded with trays of food. Although her mind was occupied with other things, Marian’s eyes registered the white shape and found it out of place. She stopped and looked around. Wherever else she was going it was not towards the main exit. She had been so involved in the threads of her own plans and reflections that she must have got off the elevator on the wrong floor. She was in a corridor exactly similar to the one she had just come from,