Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [197]
Roz, for gosh sake, get your big fat foot out of your mouth, thinks Roz. Miss Tact of 1983. “Oh honey, I didn’t mean it that way,” she says.
“No,” says Zenia. “I know. Nobody does. It’s just, I’m so strung out. I’ve been on the edge, I’ve been out there so long; I’ve had to do it alone. I can’t work it out with men, they all want the same thing from me, I just can’t make those kinds of compromises any more. I mean, you’ve got all this, you’ve got a home, a husband, you’ve got your kids. You’re a family, you’ve got solid ground under your feet. I’ve never had any of that, I’ve never fitted in. I’ve lived out of a suitcase, all my life; even now it’s hand-to-mouth, that’s what freelancing means, and I’m running out of energy, you know? There’s just no base, there’s no permanence!”
How badly Roz has misjudged Zenia! Now she sees her in a new light. It’s a tempestuous light, a bleak light, a lonely, rainy light; in the midst of it Zenia struggles on, buffeted by men, blown by the winds of fate. She’s not what she appears, a beautiful and successful career woman. She’s a waif, a homeless wandering waif; she’s faltering by the wayside, she’s falling. Roz opens her heart, and spreads her wings, her cardboard angel’s wings, her invisible dove’s wings, her warm sheltering wings, and takes her in.
“Don’t you worry,” she says, in her most reassuring voice. “We’ll work something out.”
47
Mitch passes Zenia in the front hall as she is leaving and he is coming in. She gives him only the briefest and chilliest of nods.
“Your old friend is certainly hostile,” he says to Roz.
“I don’t think so,” says Roz. “I think she’s just tired.”
She doesn’t want to share Zenia’s dismaying life story with him. It’s a story told just to her, for her, for her ears alone, by one outsider to another. Only Roz can understand it. Not Mitch, because what would he know about being outside?
“Tired?” says Mitch. “She didn’t look too tired.”
“Tired of men coming on to her,” says Roz.
“Don’t believe it,” says Mitch. “Anyway, I wasn’t coming on to her. But I bet she’d like it if I did. She’s an adventuress, she has the look.”
“Poetess, songstress, adventuress,” says Roz lightly. Mitch is such an authority, he can tell what a woman thinks by the shape of her bottom. “Why not just call her an adventurer?” Roz is teasing, she knows the feminist terminology stuff drives him nuts. But also she thinks of herself as an adventurer, at least in some areas of life. The financial ones. Gentleman adventurer was once a term.
“It’s not the same,” says Mitch. “Adventurers live by their wits.”
“And adventuresses?” says Roz.
“By their tits,” says Mitch.
“Point,” says Roz, laughing. He set her up for it.
But he’s wrong, thinks Roz, remembering. It was wits for Zenia also.
That was the beginning of the end of her marriage, although she didn’t realize it at the time. Or maybe it was the end of the end. Who knows? The end must have been a long time coming. These things are not sudden.
Roz wouldn’t have known it from Mitch, though. He made love to her that night with an urgency he hadn’t shown for a long time. No voluptuous ease, no lordly walrus-like wallowing: it was snatch and grab. There was nothing he wanted her to give; instead he wanted to take. Roz finds herself being bitten, and is pleased rather than otherwise. She didn’t know she was still that irresistible.
A week later she arranges an early dinner, at Scaramouche, for herself and Zenia and the current Wise Woman World editor, whose name is BethAnne, and they ingest radicchio salads and exotic parboiled vegetables and clever pastas, and go over Zenia’s résumé and her file of magazine stories. First there are the ones written when she was on staff for a cutting-edge fashion magazine, in England. But she quit that job because she felt too tied down, and also she’d wanted to write about more political things. Libya, Mozambique, Beirut, the Palestinian camps; Berlin,