Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [164]
She was learning a lot, though. She was watching her father’s style. Outrageous but effective, soft but hard, uproarious but dead serious underneath. He waited for his moment, he waited like a cat on a lawn; then he pounced. He liked to drive bargains, he liked to cut deals. Drive, cut, these verbs had an appeal for him. He liked risk, he liked walking the edge. Blocks of property disappeared into his pocket, then came out magically transformed into office buildings. If he could renovate – if there was something worth saving – he did. Otherwise it was the wrecking ball, despite whatever clutch of woolly-headed protesters might be marching around outside with Save Our Neighbourhood signs, done in crayon and stapled onto rake handles.
Roz had some ideas of her own. She knew she could be good at this stuff if he’d give her the rope. But rope was not given by him, it was earned, so she was putting in her time.
Meanwhile, what about her love life? There was nobody. Nobody suitable. Nobody even close. Nobody who wasn’t either a jerk-off or basically after her money, a factor she had to keep in mind. Her future money, because right then she was only on salary like everybody else, and a fairly measly salary at that. Her father believed you should know just how measly a measly salary was, so you could figure out what a pay-raise negotiation was all about. He thought you should know the price of potatoes. Roz didn’t at the moment because she was still living at home, on account of her measly salary. She’d looked at studio apartments, one room with a mingy kitchenette tucked in the corner and a view into somebody else’s bathroom, but too squalid! What price freedom? Higher than what she was making right then. She would rather stay where she was, in the former servants’ flat over her parents’ three-car garage, and spend her measly salary on new clothes and her own phone line.
She wanted to take a trip to Europe, by herself, but her father wouldn’t let her. He said it was too dangerous. “What goes on over there, you don’t need to know,” he told her. He wanted to keep her walled up behind his money. He wanted to keep her safe.
Mitch was a neophyte lawyer then, working for the firm that papered her father’s deals. The first time she saw him he was walking through the outer office where Roz sat grindstoning her nose. He was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, the end man in the almost-daily suit-and-briefcase parade that followed her father around like a tail. There was a pause at Roz’s desk, handshakes all round: Roz’s father always introduced everyone to everyone else. Mitch shook Roz’s hand, and Roz’s hand shook. She took one look at him and thought, There’s ugly and there’s gorgeous and there’s in-between, but this is gorgeous. Then she’d thought: Dream on, babe. Slobber on your pillow. This is not for you.
But darned if he didn’t phone her up! You didn’t have to be Einstein to get the number, but it would’ve taken more than one step, because Roz had herself listed in the phone book as Rosie O’Grady, having tired of the hate calls that her father’s last name sometimes attracted. The hoardings around the demolition sites didn’t help, Grunwald Developments in foot-high print, she might as well go around with a red X painted on her forehead, Spit here, as list her right name in the phone book.
But all of a sudden there was Mitch on the phone, cool but persuasive, sounding as if he wanted to sell her some life insurance, reminding her of where she’d met him, as if she needed reminding, and he was so stiff at first that she’d wanted to yell at him, Hey, I am not your granny! Slip that poker out of your bum!