Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [72]
She wondered why restaurants like this one were kept so dark. Probably to keep people from seeing each other very clearly while they were eating. After all, chewing and swallowing are pleasanter for those doing them than for those watching, she thought, and observing one’s partner too closely might dispel the aura of romance that the restaurant was trying to maintain. Or create. She examined the blade of her knife.
The waiter stepped forward from somewhere, soft and deft as a cat on the carpeted floor, and set her order before her: the filet on a wooden platter, oozing juicily within its perimeter of bacon. They both liked it rare: synchronizing the cooking times would never be a problem at any rate. Marian was so hungry she would have liked to devour the steak at one gulp.
She began slicing and chewing, conveying the food to her grateful stomach. She was reconsidering the conversation, trying to get a clearer image of what she had meant by “justice.” She thought that it ought to mean being fair, but even her notion of that became hazy around the edges as she looked at it. Did it mean an eye for an eye? And what good did it do anyway to destroy someone else’s eye if you had lost your own? What about compensation? It seemed to be a matter of money in things like car accidents; you could even be awarded money for having suffered emotional distress. Once on a streetcar she had seen a mother bite a small child because it had bitten her. She gnawed thoughtfully through a tough piece, and swallowed.
Peter, she decided, wasn’t himself today. He had had a difficult case, one that involved a lot of intricate research; he had gone through precedent after precedent only to find that they all favoured the opposition. That was why he was making stern pronouncements: he was frustrated by complications, he wanted simplicity. He should realize though that if the laws weren’t complicated he would never make any money.
She reached for her wineglass, and looked up. Peter was watching her. He was three-quarters finished and she wasn’t even half.
“Thoughtful?” he said mellowly.
“Not really. Just absent-minded.” She smiled at him and returned her attention to the platter.
Lately he had been watching her more and more.
Before, in the summer, she used to think he didn’t often look at her, didn’t often really see her; in bed afterwards he would stretch out beside her and press his face against her shoulder, and sometimes he would go to sleep. These days however he would focus his eyes on her face, concentrating on her as though if he looked hard enough he would be able to see through her flesh and her skull and into the workings of her brain. She couldn’t tell what he was searching for when he looked at her like that. It made her uneasy. Frequently when they were lying side by side exhausted on the bed she would open her eyes and realize that he had been watching her like that, hoping perhaps to surprise a secret expression on that face. Then he would run his hand gently over her skin, without passion, almost clinically, as if he could learn by touch whatever it was that had escaped the probing of his eyes. Or as if he was trying to memorize her. It was when she would begin feeling that she was on a doctor’s examination table that she would take hold of his hand to make him stop.
She picked at her salad, turning the various objects in the wooden bowl over with her fork: she wanted a piece of tomato. Maybe he had got hold of one of those marriage manuals; maybe that was why. It would be just like Peter, she thought with fondness. If you got something new you went out and bought a book that told you how to work it. She thought of the books and magazines on cameras that were part of the collection on the middle shelf in his room, between the law books and the detective novels. And he always kept the car manual in the glove compartment. So it would be according to his brand of logic to go out and buy a book on marriage, now that he was going to get married; one with easy-to-follow