Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [65]
She turned and walked back, trying to remember where the elevator was supposed to be; she seemed to recall having gone around several corners. The nurse had disappeared. Coming towards her now from the far end of the hallway was a figure, a man wearing a green smock, with a white mask over the lower part of his face. She was aware for the first time of the hospital smell, antiseptic, severe.
It must be one of the doctors. She could see now that he had a thin black thing, a stethoscope, around his neck. As he came nearer she looked at him more closely. In spite of the mask there was something familiar about him; it bothered her that she could not tell what it was. But he passed her, staring straight ahead, his eyes expressionless, and opened one of the doors to the right and went in. When he turned she could see that he had a bald spot on the back of his head.
“Well, nobody I know is going bald, at any rate,” she said to herself. She was relieved.
16
She remembered the way to his apartment perfectly, although she couldn’t recall either the number or the street name. She hadn’t been in that district for a long time, in fact ever since the day of the beer interviews. She took the right directions and turnings almost automatically, as though she was trailing somebody by an instinct that was connected not with sight or smell but with a vaguer sense that had to do with locations. But it wasn’t a complicated route: just across the baseball park, up the asphalt ramp and along a couple of blocks; though the way seemed longer now that she was walking in a darkness illuminated only by the dim street lamps rather than the former searing light of the sun. She walked quickly: already her legs were cold. The grass on the baseball park had been grey with frost.
The few times she had thought about the apartment, in idle moments at the office when she had had nothing but a blank sheet of paper in front of her or at other times when she was bending to pick some piece of clutter off the floor, she had never given it any specific place in the city. She had an image in her mind of the inside, the appearance of the rooms, but not of the building itself. Now it was disconcerting to have the street produce it, square and ordinary and anonymous, more or less exactly where it had been before.
She pushed the buzzer of Number Six and slipped through the inside glass door as soon as the mechanism started its chainsaw noise. Duncan opened the door partway. He stared at her suspiciously; in the semi-darkness his eyes gleamed behind his hair. He had a cigarette stub in his mouth, burning dangerously close to his lips.
“Got the stuff?” he asked.
Mutely she held towards him the small cloth bundle she had been carrying under her arm, and he stepped aside to let her come in.
“It’s not very much,” he said, undoing the clothes. There were only two white cotton blouses, recently washed, a pillowcase, and a few guest towels embroidered with flowers, donated by a great-aunt, that were wrinkled from lying underneath everything else on the linen shelf.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “it was really all I had.”
“Well, it’s better than nothing,” he said grudgingly. He turned and walked towards his bedroom.
Marian wasn’t certain whether she was supposed to follow him or whether he expected her to go away now that she had made the delivery. “Can I watch?” she asked, hoping he wouldn’t consider it an invasion of privacy. She didn’t feel like going back to her own apartment right away. There would be nothing to do and she had, after all, sacrificed an evening with Peter.
“Sure, if you want to; though there isn’t much to see.”
She made her way towards the hall. The living room had not been altered since her former visit, except that there were if possible more stray papers lying about. The three chairs were still in the same positions; a slab of board was leaning against an arm of the red plush one. Only one of the lamps, the one