Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [204]
“No,” says Mitch. He won’t look at her.
“And if you had,” says Roz, hardening herself again, lighting her own cigarette – she won’t ask him to do it, they are way beyond such whimsical courtship gestures, not that he’s leaping forward with arm outstretched – “what would you have done? Beat the shit out of her, or sicked the lawyers onto her, or given her a big sloppy kiss?”
Mitch looks in her direction. He can’t meet her eyes. It’s as if she’s semi-invisible, a kind of hovering blur. “I don’t know,” he says.
“Well, at least that’s honest,” says Roz. “I’m glad you aren’t lying to me.” She’s trying to keep her voice soft, to avoid the bitter cutting edge. He isn’t lying to her, he isn’t doing anything to her. There is no her, as far as he’s concerned; she might as well not be here. Whatever he’s doing is to himself. She has never felt so non-existent in her life. “So, what do you want?” She may as well ask, she may as well find out what’s being demanded of her.
But he shakes his head: he doesn’t know that, either. He isn’t even drinking from the glass she’s poured. It’s as if he can’t take anything from her. Which means there’s nothing she can give him. “Maybe when you figure it out,” she says, “you could let me in on it.”
Now he does finally look at her. God knows who he sees. Some avenging angel, some giantess with a bared arm and a sword – it can’t be Roz, tender and feathery Roz, not the way he’s staring at her. His eyes are frightening because they’re frightened. He’s scared shitless, of her or of someone or something, and she can’t bear the sight. Whatever else has been going on, all those years he played In and Out the Bimbos and she raged at him and wept, she’s always depended on him not to lose his nerve. But now there’s a crack in him, like a crack in glass; a little heat and he’ll shatter. But why should it be Roz’s job to sweep up?
“Just let me stay here,” he says. “Let me stay in the house. I could sleep downstairs, in the family room. I won’t bother you.”
He’s begging, but Roz hears this only in retrospect. At the moment she finds the idea intolerable: Mitch on the floor, in a sleeping bag, like the twins’ friends at group sleepovers, demoted to transience, demoted to adolescence. Locked out of her bedroom, or worse, not wishing to go into it. That’s it – he’s rejecting her, he’s rejecting her big, eager, clumsy, ardent, and solid body; it’s no longer good enough for him, not even as a feather bed, not even as a fallback. He must find her repellent.
But she does have some pride left, though God knows how she’s managed to hang onto it, and if she’s going to let him come back it has to be on full terms. “You can’t treat me like a rest stop,” she says. “Not any more.”
Because that’s exactly what he’d do, he’d move in, she’d dish out the nourishing lunches, feed him, build him up again, and he’d get his strength back and be off, off in his longboat, off in his galleon, scouring the seven seas for the Holy Grail, for Helen of Troy, for Zenia, peering through the spyglass, on the watch for her pirate flag. Roz can see it in his eyes, which are focused on the horizon, not on her. Even if he came back, into her bedroom, in between her raspberry-coloured sheets, into her body, it wouldn’t be her underneath him, on top of him, around him, not ever again. Zenia has stolen something from him, the one thing he always kept safe before, from all women, even from Roz. Call it his soul. She slipped it out of his breast pocket when he wasn’t looking, easy as rolling a drunk, and looked at it, and bit it to see if it was genuine, and sneered at