Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [168]
Mitch didn’t marry Roz just for her money. She’s sure of that. She remembers their actual honeymoon, in Mexico, all those Day of the Dead sugar skulls in the market, the flowers, the colours, herself giddy with pleasure, her sense of novelty and release because look, she had done it, she wasn’t a potential old maid any more but a bride, a married woman; and during the hot nights the window open to the sea, the curtains blowing, the wind moving over her skin like muslin, and the dark shape of Mitch above her, faceless and intense. It was different when you were in love, it was no longer a game; there was more at stake. She cried afterwards because she was so happy, and Mitch must have felt it too, because you can’t fake that kind of passion completely. Can you?
So it wasn’t only the money. But she could put it this way – he wouldn’t have married her without it. Maybe that’s what keeps him with her, what keeps him anchored. She hopes it’s not the only thing. Mitch raises his glass of white wine to her and says, “To us,” and reaches across the table and takes her left hand, the one with the ring, a modest ring because that’s what he could afford at the time and he’d refused to accept any contribution from her father for a bigger one, and smiles at her, and says, “It hasn’t been so bad, has it? We’re pretty good, together,” and Roz knows he’s consoling himself for hidden disappointments, for time that marches on, for all the worlds he will, now, never be able to conquer, for the fact that there are thousands of nubile young women in the world, millions of them, more every minute, and no matter what he does he will never be able to get into all of them, because art is long and life is brief and mortality looms.
And yes, they are pretty good together. Sometimes. Still. So she beams at him and returns the squeeze, and thinks they are as happy as can be. They are. They are as happy as they can be, given who they are. Though if they’d been different people they might have been happier.
A girl, a pretty girl, a pretty girl in a scoop-neck jersey, appears with a platter of dead fish, from which Mitch selects. He’s having the Catch of the Day, Roz is having the pasta done in sepia, because she has never eaten such a thing before and it sounds so bizarre. Spaghetti in Ink. There’s a salad first, during which Roz sees fit to ask, tentatively enough, whether there’s a specific topic Mitch wants to discuss. At previous lunches there has been one, a business topic usually, a topic having to do with Mitch getting more power on the board of Wise Woman World, of which he is the chairman, oops, chairperson.
But Mitch says no, he was merely feeling that he hasn’t been seeing enough of her lately, without the kids that is, and Roz, eager for scraps as always, laps it up. She will forgive, she will forget. Well anyway, forgive, because what you can or can’t forget isn’t under your control. Maybe Mitch has just been having a middle-aged crisis all these years; though twenty-eight was a little young to begin.
The salad arrives, on a large plate borne by yet another longhaired, scoop-necked lovely, and Roz wonders whether the waitresses are chosen to go with the paintings. With so many nipples around she has the sensation of being watched by a myriad alien eyes. Pink ones. She flashes briefly on some flat-chested woman bringing a discrimination case against this restaurant for refusing to hire her. Even better, a flat-chested man. She’d love to be a fly on the wall.
The waitress bends over, showing deep cleavage, and dishes out the salad, and stands there smiling while Roz takes a bite. “Terrific,” says Roz, meaning the salad.
“Absolutely,” says Mitch, smiling