Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [93]
Tony is worried sick about him. She loses sleep. Inky rings appear beneath her eyes, her skin turns to paper. She writes her final exams in a frantic trance rather than with her usual cool rationality, calling upon reserves of stashed-away knowledge she didn’t even know she had.
West on the other hand doesn’t even turn up, at least for the Modern History exam. The vortex is taking him down.
Roz passes Tony in the hallway of McClung and notes her dreadful appearance.
“Hey, Tone,” she says. (She has reverted to this pet name since the defection of Zenia, which she knows about, of course. The grapevine here has many tendrils. Tony without Zenia is no longer viewed with trepidation, and can be treated as a diminutive again.) “Hey, Tone, how’s it goin’? Holy cow, you look awful.” She puts her big warm hand on Tony’s pointy bird-shoulder. “It can’t be that bad. What’s the matter?”
Who else does Tony have to talk to? She can’t talk to West about himself, and Zenia is absent. Once upon a time she would have talked to no one, but ever since Christie’s Coffee Shop she has developed an appreciation for confidences. So they go to Roz’s overstuffed room and sit on Roz’s pillow-covered bed, and Tony disgorges.
She doesn’t tell Roz about the forged term paper or the thousand dollars. In any case they are not the story. The story is about West. Zenia is gone, with West’s soul stuffed into her over-the-shoulder bag, and without it West will die. He will kill himself, and then what will Tony do? How will she live with herself?
This isn’t how she puts it though. She outlines the bare facts, and facts they are. She isn’t being melodramatic. Merely objective.
“Listen, sweetie,” says Roz, when Tony stops talking. “I know you like him, I mean, he seems like a nice enough guy, but is he worth it?”
He is, says Tony. He is, he definitely is, but she is without hope. (He will dwindle and fade, as in ballads. He will pine and wane. Then he will blow off his head.)
“Sounds to me he’s acting like a jerk! Zenia’s a floozie, we all knew that. A couple of years ago she went through half the fraternities – more than half! You never heard that poem about her – ‘Trouble with your penia? Try Zenia!’ He should wake up, eh?” says Roz, who has yet to encounter love, having yet to encounter Mitch. She has however just encountered sex and thinks it’s the new wonder drug, and she’s always had trouble keeping secrets. She lowers her voice. “You should take him to bed,” she says, nodding her head sagely. She’s enjoying the role of wise woman, counsellor to the afflicted. It helps not to be afflicted yourself.
“Me?” says Tony. The girls in McClung Hall, although they talk endlessly about their boyfriends, are never very specific about what they actually do with them. If they go to bed with them they don’t mention it. Zenia is the only person Tony’s ever known who has been at all open about sex, until right now.
“So who else?” says Roz. “You need to make him feel wanted. Give him an interest in life.”
“Oh, I don’t think I could do that,” says Tony. The thought of going to bed with anyone at all is terrifying. What if they rolled over on her by mistake, and she got squashed? Also the thought of giving another person that much power over her makes her flinch. Let alone her reluctance to be pawed and drooled on. Zenia was frank about sex, but she didn’t make it sound all that attractive.
Still, thinking about it, Tony has to admit that if there’s one person she might be able to tolerate, it would be West. Already she holds his hand, on their walks; it’s nice. But the concrete details defeat her. How would she lure West into such a place as bed, and which bed? Not her own narrow bed in McClung Hall – that’s out of the question, too many eyes are on her, you can’t even eat cookies in your room without everyone finding out – and surely not the same bed he’s been sleeping in with Zenia. It wouldn’t be right! Also, she