Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [48]
“Cream?” says Boyce now. He always inquires, because he deduces Roz’s intermittent diets. He is so courteous!
“Please,” says Roz, and Boyce pours some and then lights her cigarette for her. It’s amazing, she thinks, what you have to do to get treated like a woman in this town. No, not like a woman. Like a lady. Like a lady president. Boyce has a sense of style, that’s what it is, and also a sense of decorum. He respects hierarchies, he appreciates good china, he colours within the lines. He likes the fact that there’s a ladder, with rungs on it, because he wants to go up it. And up is where he’s going, if Roz has anything to say about it, because Boyce has real talent, and she’s perfectly willing to help him. In return for his loyalty, needless to say.
As for what Boyce thinks of her, she has no idea. Though she does hope that, please God, he doesn’t see her as his mother. Maybe he pictures her as a large, soft-bodied man, in drag. Maybe he hates women, maybe he wants to be one. Who cares, as long as he performs?
Roz cares, but she can’t afford to.
Boyce closes the office door to show the rest of the world that Roz is occupied. He pours a coffee for himself, buzzes Suzy to ask her to stop all calls, and gives Roz the first thing she wants to see every morning, namely his rundown of how her remaining stocks are doing.
“What d’you think, Boyce?” says Roz.
“Half a league, half a league, half a league onward, all in the valley of Death rode the Fortune Five Hundred,” says Boyce, who likes both reading and quoting. “Tennyson,” he adds, for Roz’s benefit.
“That one I got,” says Roz. “So it’s bad, eh?”
“Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,” says Boyce. “Yeats.”
“Sell, or hang on?” says Roz.
“The way down is the way up. Eliot,” says Boyce. “How long can you wait?”
“No problem,” says Roz.
“I would,” says Boyce.
What would Roz do without Boyce? He’s becoming indispensable to her. Sometimes she thinks he’s a surrogate son; on the other hand, he might be a surrogate daughter. On rare occasions she’s even weaselled him into going shopping with her – he has such good taste in clothes – though she suspects him of maybe egging her on, just a little, for his own concealed and sardonic amusement. He was implicated, for instance, in the orange bathrobe.
“Ms. Andrews, it’s time to let loose,” was what he said. “Carpe diem.”
“Which means?” said Roz.
“Seize the day,” said Boyce. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. Though myself, I’d rather be the gatheree.”
This surprised Roz, because Boyce never gets that explicit inside the office walls. He must have, of course, another life – an evening life, about which she knows nothing. A private life, into which she is sweetly but firmly not invited.
“What’re you doing tonight?” she was so unwise as to ask him once. (Hoping for what? That he would maybe go to a movie with her, or something. She gets lonely, why not admit it? She gets hugely, cavernously lonely, and then she eats. Eats and drinks and smokes, filling up her inner spaces. As best she can.)
“Some of us are going to see the Clichettes,” said Boyce. “You know. They do lip-sync parodies of songs, they dress up like women.”
“Boyce,” said Roz, “they are women.”
“Well, you know what I mean,” said Boyce.
Who was some of us? A group of men, probably. Young men, young gay men. She worries about Boyce’s health. More specifically, and let’s be frank – could he maybe have AIDS? He’s young enough to have missed it, to have found out about it in time. She didn’t know how to ask, but as usual Boyce divined her need. When she’d commented, once too often, on the flu he’d had trouble shaking last spring, he’d said, “Don’t fret so much, Ms. Andrews. Time will not wither me, nor Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome stale. This little piggy can take care of himself.” Which is only part of an answer, but it’s all the answer she’s going to get.
After the stocks rundown, Roz and Boyce go over this month’s batch of beautifully typed pleas, with embossed letterheads and signatures in real ink (Roz always