Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [60]
Anna’s bikini lay on the dock, crumpled, a shed chrysalis. He picked up the top and began pleating and unpleating the strap. I hadn’t meant to say anything about it, it wasn’t my concern, but I found myself asking him anyway. “Why did you do that?” My voice was neutral and I realized it wasn’t for Anna I was asking, I wasn’t defending her; it was for myself, I needed to understand.
For a moment he acted. “What?” he said, grinning and innocent.
“What you just did to her.”
He looked hard at me to see if I was accusing him but I was untying the canoe, I was impersonal as a wall, a confessional, and that reassured him. “You don’t know what she does to me,” he said with a slight whine. “She asks for it, she makes me do it.” His voice turned crafty. “She goes with other men, she thinks she can get away with it, but she’s too dumb, every time I find out; I can smell it on her. Not that I’d mind if she’d do it openly and be honest about it, God knows, it’s not that I’m jealous.” He smiled broadmindedly. “But she’s devious, I can’t stand that.”
Anna hadn’t told me, she had left something out; or else he was lying. “But she loves you,” I said.
“Bullshit,” he said, “she’s trying to cut my balls off.” His eyes were sad rather than hostile, as though he had once believed better of her.
“She loves you,” I repeated, petals off a daisy; it was the magic word but it couldn’t work because I had no faith. My husband, saying it over and over like a Dial the Weather recording, trying to engrave it on me; and with the same bewilderment, as though I was the one who’d been hurting him and not the other way round. An accident, that’s what he called it.
“She never tells me that,” he said. “I get the impression she wants out, she’s waiting for the chance to leave. But I haven’t asked, we don’t talk much any more except with other people around.”
“Maybe you should,” I said; unconvinced, unconvincing.
He shrugged. “What would we talk about? She’s too dumb, she can’t figure out what I’m saying to her, Jesus, she moves her lips when she watches the T.V. even. She doesn’t know anything, every time she opens her mouth she makes an ass of herself. I know what you’re thinking,” he said, almost pleading, “but I’m all for the equality of women; she just doesn’t happen to be equal and that’s not my fault, is it? What I married was a pair of boobs, she manipulated me into it, it was when I was studying for the ministry, nobody knew any better then. But that’s life.” He wiggled his moustache and gave a Woody Woodpecker laugh, his eyes baffled.
“I think you could work it out,” I said. I braced the paddle across the gunwales and clambered into the canoe. I remembered what Anna had said about emotional commitments: they’ve made one, I thought, they hate each other; that must be almost as absorbing as love. The barometer couple in their wooden house, enshrined in their niche on Paul’s front porch, my ideal; except they were glued there, condemned to oscillate back and forth, sun and rain, without escape. When he saw her next there would be no recantations, no elaborate reconciliation or forgiveness, they were beyond that. Neither of them would mention it, they had reached a balance almost like peace. Our mother and father at the sawhorse behind the cabin, mother holding the tree, white birch, father sawing, sun through the branches lighting their hair, grace.
The canoe pivoted. “Hey,” he said, “where you off to?”
“Oh. … ” I gestured towards the lake.
“Want a stern paddler?” he said. “I’m great, I’ve had lots of practice by now.”
He sounded wistful, as though he needed company, but I didn’t want him with me, I’d have to explain what I was doing and he wouldn’t be able to help. “No,” I said, “thanks just the same.” I knelt, slanting the canoe to one side.
“Okay,” he said, “see you later, alligator.” He unwound his legs and stood up and strolled off the dock towards the cabin, his striped T-shirt flashing between the slats of the trees, receding