Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [95]
West goes back to university in the fall and makes up the courses he’s missed. Tony is now in graduate school. They rent a small apartment together and share tidy breakfasts and sweet, kindly nights, and Tony is happier than she’s ever been.
Time passes and they both get their first postgraduate degrees, and both of them acquire teaching assistantships. After a while they get married, at City Hall; the party afterwards is small and intellectual in tone, although Roz is there, married herself already. Her husband Mitch can’t come, she explains; he’s away on a business trip. She gives Tony an enveloping hug and a silver telephone cover, and after she leaves (early), Tony’s historical and West’s musical colleagues ask with ironic eyebrows who on earth that was. Her presence however has reassured Tony: although her own parents’ marriage was a disaster, marriage itself must be possible and even normal if Roz is doing it.
West and Tony move into a larger apartment, and West buys a spinet, to go with his lute. He has a suit now, and several ties, and eyeglasses. Tony buys a coffee grinder and a roasting pan, and a copy of The Joy of Cooking, in which she looks up esoteric recipes. She makes a hazelnut torte, and buys a fondue dish with long forks, and some skewers for making shish kebab.
More time passes. Tony wonders about having babies, but doesn’t bring up the subject because West has never mentioned it. There are peace marches in the streets now, and confused sit-ins at the university. West brings home some marijuana, and they smoke it together, and are frightened together by noises on the street outside, and don’t do it again.
Their love is gentle and discreet. If it were a plant it would be a fern, light green and feathery and delicate; if a musical instrument, a flute. If a painting it would be a water lily by Monet, one of the more pastel renditions, with its liquid depths, its reflections, its different falls of light. “You’re my best friend,” West tells Tony, stroking her hair back from her forehead. “I owe you a lot.” Tony is touched by his gratitude, and too young to be suspicious of it.
They never mention Zenia, Tony because she thinks it will upset West, West because he thinks it will upset Tony. Zenia does not go away, however. She hovers, growing fainter, true, but still there, like the blue haze of cigarette smoke in a room after the cigarette has been put out. Tony can smell her.
One evening Zenia appears at their door. She knocks like anybody else and Tony opens, thinking it is a Girl Guide selling cookies, or else the Jehovah’s Witnesses. When she sees Zenia standing there she can’t think of what to say. She’s holding a skewer in her hand, with chunks of lamb and tomato and green pepper threaded onto it, and for an instant she has a vision of herself plunging the skewer into Zenia, into where her heart should be, but she doesn’t do this. She just stands there with her mouth open, and Zenia smiles at her and says, “Tony darling, it was such work to track you down!” and laughs with her white teeth. She’s thinner now, and even more sophisticated. She’s wearing a black mini-skirt, a black shawl with jet beading and long silken fringes, fishnet tights, and knee-high lace-up high-heeled boots.
“Come in,” says Tony, motioning with her skewer. Lamb blood drips onto the floor.
“Who is it?” calls West from the living room, where he’s playing Purcell on the spinet. He likes to play while Tony is making dinner: it’s one of their little rituals.
Nobody, Tony wants to say. They had the wrong address. They went away. She wants to thrust her hands at Zenia, push her back, slam the door. But Zenia is already over the threshold.
“West! My God!” she says, striding into the living room, holding out her arms to him. “Long time no see!” West can’t believe it. His eyes behind his rimless