Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [9]
After a preliminary ringing, buzzing and clicking a deep bass voice, accompanied by what sounded like an electric guitar, sang:
Moose, Moose,
From the land of pine and spruce,
Tingly, heady, rough-and-ready….
Then a speaking voice, almost as deep as the singer’s, intoned persuasively to background music,
Any real man, on a real man’s holiday – hunting, fishing, or just plain old-fashioned relaxing – needs a beer with a healthy, hearty taste, a deep-down manly flavour. The first long cool swallow will tell you that Moose Beer is just what you’ve always wanted for true beer enjoyment. Put the tang of the wilderness in YOUR life today with a big satisfying glass of sturdy Moose Beer.
The singer resumed:
Tingly, heady,
Rough-and-ready,
Moose, Moose, Moose, Moose, BEER!!!
and after a climax of sound the record clicked off. It was in satisfactory working order.
I remembered the sketches I’d seen of the visual presentation, scheduled to appear in magazines and on posters: the label was to have a pair of antlers with a gun and a fishing rod crossed beneath them. The singing commercial was a reinforcement of this theme; I didn’t think it was very original but I admired the subtlety of “just plain old-fashioned relaxing.” That was so the average beer-drinker, the slope-shouldered pot-bellied kind, would be able to feel a mystical identity with the plaid-jacketed sportsman shown in the pictures with his foot on a deer or scooping a trout into his net.
I had got to the last page when the telephone rang. It was Peter. I could tell from the sound of his voice that something was wrong.
“Listen, Marian, I can’t make it for dinner tonight.”
“Oh?” I said, wanting further explanation. I was disappointed, I had been looking forward to dinner with Peter to cheer me up. Also I was hungry again. I had been eating in bits and pieces all day and I had been counting on something nourishing and substantial. This meant another of the T. V. dinners Ainsley and I kept for emergencies. “Has something happened?”
“I know you’ll understand. Trigger” – his voice choked – “Trigger’s getting married.”
“Oh,” I said. I thought of saying “That’s too bad,” but it didn’t seem adequate. There was no use in sympathizing as though for a minor mishap when it was really a national disaster. “Would you like me to come with you?” I asked, offering support.
“God no,” he said, “that would be even worse. I’ll see you tomorrow. Okay?”
When he had hung up I reflected upon the consequences. The most obvious one was that Peter would need careful handling the next evening. Trigger was one of Peter’s oldest friends; in fact, he had been the last of Peter’s group of oldest friends still left unmarried. It had been like an epidemic. Just before I’d met him two had succumbed, and in the four months since that another two had gone under without much warning. He and Trigger had found themselves more and more alone on their bachelor drinking sessions during the summer, and when the others did take an evening off from their wives to go along, I gathered from Peter’s gloomy accounts that the flavour of the evening was a synthetic substitute for the irresponsible gaiety of the past. He and Trigger had clutched each other like drowning men, each trying to make the other the reassuring reflection of himself that he needed. Now Trigger had sunk and the mirror would be empty. There were the other law students of course, but most of them were married too. Besides, they belonged to Peter’s post-university silver age rather than to his earlier golden one.
I felt sorry for him, but I knew I would have to be wary. If the other two marriages had been any indication, he’d start seeing me after two or three drinks as a version of the designing siren who had carried off Trigger. I didn’t dare ask how she had done it: he might think I was getting ideas. The best plan would be to distract him.
While I was meditating Lucy came over to my desk. “Do you think you can write a letter to this lady for me?” she asked. “I’m getting a splitting headache and I really can’t