Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [36]
But I wasn’t without social resources. I didn’t take off my clothes and sing in public: I acted in acceptable ways. I smiled, nodded, made conversation, and so forth. I could do a good imitation of a competent young woman. I had a number of friends and acquaintances, both male and female, of the kind that might be accumulated in a life of such transience. They would come for meals, sitting around my card table, drinking bottles of a local wine that dyed the dishcloth red whenever I’d get around to cleaning up. I learned how to make lasagna, a substance that cost little and went far. I also served a thing known as nuts and bolts, made with several kinds of dry cereal mixed with peanuts and Worcester sauce and toasted in the oven. That was a hors d’oeuvre, not a dessert. I had not yet taken up baking, so for dessert there was ice cream, bought at the corner store and so full of seaweed that when it melted it didn’t turn to cream but to a gelatinous blobby substance that maintained its shape and was hard to wash down the drain.
One of the acquaintances who turned up to sit at my card table was a man called Owen. I didn’t know him very well. He would ring the doorbell unannounced – I did have a doorbell – and I would go down the steep staircase and let him in. I might feed him some leftover lasagna, if I had any, or else some nuts and bolts. Then he would sit for long periods, not saying anything, as we both watched the long, lingering northwest summer sunsets turn from peach to pink to dark pink to the dull glowing red of a blown-out match.
Owen wasn’t a lover or even a potential lover: nothing like that. He was in the city temporarily, like me, and had been loaded onto me by a do-gooder mutual connection (concerned, I now suppose, with his state of mind). He was alone, far more alone – I could see – than I myself had ever been. He had a desolation about him that I couldn’t account for: sitting at my card table in the dusk was about the closest he could get to being with anyone.
Why did he keep dropping by? His presence was an enigma. He certainly wasn’t bent on courtship. Neither did he want friendship. He wasn’t demanding anything from me, but he didn’t seem to be offering anything either. If I’d had a more lurid imagination – or if my lurid imagination was of the kind that attached itself to anything in the real world – I might have been afraid of him. I might have pegged him as a potential murderer. But I never made that sort of connection.
Despite the entire nullity of these evenings, it was hard to get Owen to leave. He would sit and sit, barely moving, inert, like a bundle of cloth, though topped with a head that was nevertheless alive, because the eyes moved. It was as if he’d been paralyzed in some appalling accident that had left no outward scars. His muteness was more exhausting than any conversation might have been.
I didn’t want to say “I’m tired, I’m going to bed now.” It seemed indelicate. Subtler hints were lost on him, but he wasn’t a person I could be blunt with. I couldn’t just say “Go home,” as if to a dog. Somehow it would have been cruel. (Where was his home, anyway? Did he even have such a thing?) Eventually, when some inner timer had gone off in him, he’d get to his feet, thank me awkwardly for the lasagna, and trundle off down the stairs.
Finally one evening he told me that his three older brothers had tried to kill him when they were all children. Telling him it was a game, they’d shut him up inside a disused icebox and run away. Luckily their mother had noticed he was missing, and had tracked him down and let him out, just in time: he was already gasping and turning blue in the face. Probably his brothers hadn’t meant to kill him, he said. They couldn’t really have known what they were doing.
Owen related this episode in a flat voice, looking not at me but out the window at the dimming redness of the sunset. I was so thoroughly taken by surprise that I could not immediately think of anything to say. No wonder he was the way