Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [43]
Then Oona had wanted to write another book, a follow-up to the first one. Actually, she’d wanted Nell to write it: she, Oona, would dictate her thoughts into a tape recorder, and Nell could do the useful, necessary work of transmuting these thoughts into print. The book was to be called Femagician’s Box of Tricks, which was – Nell agreed – a good title, even if it did sound a bit like a children’s fantasy adventure. The trouble was that Oona seemed unsure about what she wanted to include in the box. Some days the book sounded like a memoir, other days like a do-it-yourself – how to get white rings off the furniture, what to do about ink spots on the rug – and on yet other days it resembled a manifesto. Of course, it could be all three, Nell said – there were ways of doing that – but Oona had to make some preliminary decisions about goals and intentions. Here Oona had wavered. Couldn’t Nell do that? Because Oona herself was so busy.
During the time of these – what were they? Skirmishes? Pleadings? Negotiations? – Oona had done some confiding in Nell. (Nell thought she was being specially favoured, let in on something very private – Oona had a way of dropping her voice that suggested secrecy – but she found out soon enough that this was not the case. Oona’s secrets were open secrets, her recital of them a frequently repeated ritual.) Her marriage to Tig, said Oona, wasn’t a real marriage any longer. The two of them slept in separate rooms, they’d been doing that for years. They were staying together for the sake of the children: Tig had been wonderful about that. They had a gentleman’s agreement about what Chaucer’s Wife of Bath had called “other company.” Oona had tossed off the reference lightly: a lesser practitioner would have made more out of it, used it perhaps to show off, but Oona was more sophisticated than that.
Sophisticated was the word that came to mind when Nell thought of Oona. Oona had true furniture, a blend of Victorian, with a heirloom aura about it, and pared-down modernist; she also had genuine pictures on the wall, with frames. She had some signed and numbered prints. Nell did not aspire to this level: her one-bedroom apartment had a table and two chairs, one of them a cheap beanbag, and a baggy corduroy-covered sofa, and four bookcases with her accumulation of books, and a single bed with squeaky springs – all thanks to the Salvation Army and the Goodwill shop – and a couple of posters stuck to the walls with tacks. She was saving up her money, though she wasn’t sure what she was saving it for. She’d gone so far as to paint the table orange and add two throw pillows to the sofa, but she saw no point in exerting herself any further because the apartment was only a stopover, like the many other apartments and rooms she’d camped in before it. She wasn’t ready to settle down, she told her friends.
That was one way of putting it. Another way would have been that she had not found anyone to settle down with. There had been several men in her life, but they hadn’t been convincing. They’d been somewhat like her table – quickly acquired, brightened up a little, but temporary. The time for that kind of thing was running out, however. She was tired of renting.
After the conversation about the separate rooms and the gentleman’s agreement, Nell went back to her one-bedroom and sat at her Sally Ann table with her college Chaucer and looked up the Wife of Bath reference, just out of curiosity. The Wife of Bath was not exactly an adulteress, as Oona technically was: the “other company” consisted of men she’d played around with before marriage, not during it. But that was quibbling. Anyway, no one used the word adultery any more; it was not a cool word, and to pronounce it was a social gaffe. It had been banished somewhere around