Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [67]
“And this is Tony,” says West’s voice. His mouth is behind Zenia’s hair, so it looks like the hair talking. Tony thinks about running: out the kitchen door, between the denim-covered legs in the main room, down the stairs. A stampeding mouse.
“Oh, this is Tony,” says Zenia. She sounds amused. “Hi there, Tony. Do you like our black walls? Please get your cold hands off my stomach,” she adds, to West.
“Cold hands, warm heart,” West mutters.
“Heart,” says Zenia. “Who cares about your heart? It’s not your most useful body part.” She lifts up the bottom of her smock, finds his two big hands, extracts them, and holds them in hers, caressing them, all the time smiling at Tony. “It’s revenge,” she says. Her eyes aren’t black, as Tony thought at first: they’re navy blue. “This is a revenge party. The landlord’s kicking us out, so we thought we’d give the old fucker something to remember us by. It’ll take him more than two coats to cover this up. The lease said we had the right to paint, but it didn’t say what colour. Did you see the toilet?”
“Yes,” says Tony. “It’s very slippery.” She doesn’t mean this to be funny, but Zenia laughs.
“You’re right,” she says to West. “Tony’s a scream.”
Tony hates being talked about in the third person. She’s always hated it; her mother used to do the same thing. West has been discussing her with Zenia, the two of them, analyzing her behind her back, sticking adjectives onto her as if she’s a child, as if she’s anyone at all, as if she’s a topic. It occurs to her also that the only reason West asked her to their party is that Zenia told him to. She sets the beer bottle down on the black stove, noticing that it’s half empty. She must have drunk the other half. How did she do that? “I should be going,” she says, with what she hopes is dignity.
Zenia doesn’t seem to have heard her. Neither does West. He’s peering out now from the burrow of Zenia’s hair; she can see his eyes gleaming in the light from the candles.
Tony’s arms and legs are coming detached from the rest of her, and sounds are slowing down. It’s the beer, she doesn’t usually drink it, she isn’t used to it. Longing sweeps through her. She wishes she knew someone who would bury his face in her own hair like that. She wishes it could be West. But she doesn’t have enough hair for that. He would just hit scalp.
She’s lost something. She’s lost West. Tsol. Reverof. It’s a dumb thought: how can you lose somebody you never really had?
“So, Tony,” says Zenia. She says Tony as if it’s a foreign word, as if it’s in quotes. “West tells me you’re brilliant. What’s your direction?”
Tony thinks that Zenia is asking her where she’s going from here. She could pretend there’s another party, a better one, to which Zenia herself has not been invited. But it’s not likely she would be believed. “I guess I’ll take the subway back,” she says. “I have to work.”
“She’s always working,” says West.
“No,” says Zenia, with a hint of impatience. “I mean, what do you want to do with your life? What’s your obsession?”
Obsession. Tony doesn’t know anyone who talks like that. Only criminals and creepy people have obsessions, and if you have one yourself you aren’t supposed to admit to it. I don’t have to answer, she tells herself. She pictures the girls in the Common Room, and what they would think of obsessions; and what they would think of Zenia, come to that. They would think she was full of it, and also a slut, with her buttons undone like that. They would disapprove of her slutty hair. Usually Tony finds their judgments on other women catty and superficial, but right now she finds them comforting.
She should smile a bored, dismissive smile. She should say, “My what?” and laugh, and act puzzled, as if it’s a stupid question. She knows how to do this, she has watched and listened.
But it isn’t a stupid question, and she knows the answer. “Raw,” she says.
“What?” says Zenia. She’s concentrating on Tony now, as if she is finally interesting. Something worth figuring out. “Did you say