Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [70]
Suddenly he opened his eyes. He stared at her for a minute as though he couldn’t remember who she was and how she happened to be in his bedroom. “Hey,” he said finally in a different voice, “you look sort of like me in that.” He reached out a hand and tugged at the shoulder of the dressing gown, pulling her down. She let herself sink.
The transition from the flat hypnotic voice, and then the realization that he had actual flesh, a body like most other people, startled her at first. She felt her own body stiffen in resistance, begin to draw away; but he had both arms around her now. He was stronger than she had thought. She was not sure what was happening: there was an uneasy suspicion in one corner of her mind that what he was really caressing was his own dressing gown, and that she merely happened to be inside it.
She pulled her face away and gazed down at him. His eyes were closed. She kissed the end of his nose. “I think I ought to tell you something,” she said softly; “I’m engaged.” At that moment she could not recall exactly what Peter looked like, but the memory of his name was accusing her.
His dark eyes opened and looked up at her vacantly. “That’s your problem, then,” he said. “It’s like me telling you I got an A on my Pre-Raphaelite Pornography paper – interesting, but it doesn’t have much of anything to do with anything. Does it?”
“Well, but it does,” she said. The situation was rapidly becoming a matter of conscience. “I’m going to get married, you know. I shouldn’t be here.”
“But you are here.” He smiled. “Actually I’m glad you told me. It makes me feel a lot safer. Because really,” he said earnestly, “I don’t want you to think that all this means anything. It never sort of does, for me. It’s all happening really to somebody else.” He kissed the end of her nose. “You’re just another substitute for the laundromat.”
Marian wondered whether her feelings ought to be hurt, but decided that they weren’t: instead she was faintly relieved. “I wonder what you’re a substitute for, then,” she said.
“That’s the nice thing about me. I’m very flexible, I’m the universal substitute.” He reached up over her head and turned off the light.
Not very much later the front door was opened and closed, admitting a number of heavy footsteps. “Oh, shit,” he said from somewhere inside his dressing gown. “They’re back.” He pushed her upright, turned the light back on, yanked the dressing gown closed around her and slithered off the bed, smoothing his hair down over his forehead with both hands, then straightening his sweater. He stood in the middle of the room for an instant, glaring wildly at the bedroom doorway, then clashed across the room, seized the chessboard, dropped it onto the bed, and sat down facing her. He quickly began to set the toppled pieces upright.
“Hi,” he said calmly a moment later, to someone who had presumably appeared in the doorway. Marian was feeling too dishevelled to look around. “We were just having a game of chess.”
“Oh, good show,” said a dubious voice.
“Why get all upset about it?” Marian said, when whoever it was had gone into the bathroom and shut the door. “It’s nothing to be disturbed about, it’s all perfectly natural, you know. If anything it’s their fault for barging in like that.” She herself was feeling extraordinarily guilty.
“Well, I told you,” he said, staring down at the orderly pattern of chessmen on the board. “They think they’re my parents. You know parents never understand about things like that. They’d think you were corrupting me. They have to be protected from reality.” He reached across the chessboard and took hold of her hand. His fingers were dry and rather cold.
17
Marian gazed down at the small silvery image reflected in the bowl of the spoon: herself upside down, with a huge torso narrowing to a pinhead at the handle end. She tilted the spoon and her forehead swelled, then receded. She felt serene.
She looked fondly across the white tablecloth and the intervening plates and the basket of rolls at Peter, who smiled back