Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [158]
She goes back to sleep, dreams about her father standing on a black mountain, a mountain of coal or of something burnt, hears Mitch’s alarm go off, hears it go off again, wakes finally. The space beside her is empty. She climbs out of bed, out of the king-sized bed with the brass bedstead in a curving art nouveau design and the raspberry-coloured sheets and duvet cover, onto the aubergine carpet, in the bedroom with its salmon walls and the priceless twenties dresser and mirror, faux Egyptian, and slips into her cream satin robe and pads barefoot into the bathroom. She loves this bathroom! It has everything: shower cubicle, Jacuzzi, bidet, a heated towel rack, His and Hers sinks so the hairs from Roz’s head won’t get mixed up with the stubble from Mitch’s chin. She could live in this bathroom! So could several Southeast Asian families, come to that, she reflects morosely. Guilt sets in.
Mitch is already in here, taking a shower. His pink silhouette looms dimly through the steam and the pebble glass. Years ago – how many? – Roz would have scampered playfully into the shower, too; she would have soaped him all over, rubbed herself against his slippery body, pulled him down onto the tiled bathroom floor; back in the days when his skin fit him exactly, no sags, no bulges, and hers did too, and when he tasted like hazelnuts, a delicious roasted smell; but she doesn’t do such things now, now that she has become more reluctant to be viewed by daylight.
Anyway, if what she suspects is true, this is the wrong time to be putting herself on display. In Mitch’s cosmology Roz’s body represents possessions, solidity, the domestic virtues, hearth and home, long usage. Mother-of-his-children. The den. Whereas whatever other body may currently be occupying his field of vision will have other nouns attached to it: adventure, youth, freedom, the unknown, sex without strings. When the pendulum swings back – when that other body starts representing complications, decisions, demands, sulkiness, and weepy scenes – then it will be Roz’s turn again. This has been the pattern.
Intuition is not one of Roz’s strong suits, but she has intuitions about the onset of Mitch’s attacks. She thinks of them as attacks, as in attacks of malaria; or else as attacks of a different nature, for isn’t Mitch a predator, doesn’t he take advantage of these poor women, who are surely becoming younger and younger as Mitch gets older and older, isn’t it really more like a bear attack, a shark attack, aren’t these women savaged by him? Judging from some of the tearful phone calls Roz has fielded, some of the shoulders she’s patted in her hypocritical, maternal, there-there-ing way, they are.
It’s amazing the way Mitch can just write these women off. Sink his teeth into them, spit them out, and Roz is expected to clean up the mess. Fire of his loins and then wipe, like a blackboard, and after that he can barely remember their names. Roz is the one who remembers. Their names, and everything else about them.
The beginnings of Mitch’s flings are never obvious. He never says blatant things such as “I’m working late at the office”; when he says that, he really is working late at the office. Instead, his habits undergo a subtle change. The numbers of conferences he goes to, the numbers of showers he takes, the amount he whistles in them, the quantity and kind of aftershave he uses and the places where he splashes it – the groin is a sure giveaway – such things are minutely observed by Roz, looking pleasantly out of her indulgent eyes, bristling like a bottle-brush within. He stands up straighter, pulls in his stomach more; she catches him glaring at himself, at his profile, in hall mirrors, in store