Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [218]
Maybe that’s what West found so irresistible about Zenia, Tony used to think: that she was raw, that she was raw sex, whereas Tony herself was only the cooked variety. Parboiled to get the dangerous wildness out, the strong fresh-blood flavours. Zenia was gin at midnight, Tony was eggs for breakfast, and in eggcups at that. It’s not the category Tony would have preferred.
All these years Tony had refrained from asking West about Zenia. She hadn’t wanted to upset him; also she was afraid of finding out any more about Zenia’s powers of attraction, about their nature and their extent. But after the return of Zenia she couldn’t help herself. On the edge of the crisis, she had to know.
“Remember Zenia?” she asked West at dinner, two nights ago. They were having fish, a sole à la bonne femme from Tony’s Basic French Cooking book, bought to go with her battlefield-of-Pourrières fish platter.
West stopped chewing, just for a moment. “Of course,” he said.
“What was it?” said Tony.
“What was what?” said West.
“Why you – you know. Why you went with her.” Tony felt herself tensing up all over. Instead of me, she thought. Why you abandoned me.
West shrugged, then smiled. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t remember. Anyway, that was a long time ago. She’s dead now.”
Tony knew that West knew that Zenia was far from dead. “True,” she said. “Was it the sex?”
“The sex?” said West, as if she’d just mentioned some forgotten but unimportant shopping-list item. “No, I don’t think so. Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, not exactly?” said Tony, more sharply than she should have.
“Why are we talking about this?” said West. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“It matters to me,” said Tony in a small voice.
West sighed. “Zenia was frigid,” he said. “She couldn’t help it. She was sexually abused in childhood, by a Greek Orthodox priest. I felt sorry for her.”
Tony’s mouth dropped open. “Greek Orthodox?”
“Well, she was part Greek,” said West. “Greek immigrant. She couldn’t tell anyone about the priest, because nobody would have believed her. It was a very religious community.”
Tony could barely contain herself. She felt a raucous and unseemly merriment building up inside her. Frigid! So that’s what Zenia had told poor West! It does not at all accord with certain confidences Zenia once saw fit to share with Tony on the subject of sex. Sex as a huge plum pudding, a confection of rich delights, whose pleasures she would enumerate while Tony listened, shut out, nose to the glass. Tony could just see white-knight West, dutifully huffing and puffing away, giving it his best shot, trying to save Zenia from the evil spell cast by the wicked, non-existent Greek Orthodox priest, with Zenia having the time of her life. Probably she told him she was faking orgasm to please him. Double the guilt!
It would have been a challenge for him, of course. Warm up the Ice Maiden. The first man ever to successfully explore those polar climes. But of course there was no way he could win, because Zenia’s games were always rigged.
“I never knew that,” she said. She fixed West with her large wide-open eyes, trying to look sympathetic.
“Yeah, well,” said West. “She found it really hard to talk about.”
“Why did you break up with her?” said Tony. “The second time. Why did you move out?” Now that they’d crossed the border into the never-mentioned, now that West was talking, she might as well push her advantage.
West sighed. He looked at Tony with something close to shame. “To be honest,” he said, and stopped.
“Yes?” said Tony.
“Well, to be honest, she kicked me out. She said she found me boring.”
Tony appalled herself by nearly laughing out loud. Maybe Zenia was right: from a certain point of view, West was boring. But one woman’s meat was another woman’s boredom, and West was boring in the same way children were boring, and interesting in the same way, too, and that’s what a woman like Zenia would never see. Anyway, what was true love if it couldn’t put up with a little boredom?
“Are you all right?” West asked.
“Choked on a bone,” said Tony.