Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [71]
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
When I wake up it’s morning, we’re in the bed again. He is awake already, head hovering above me, he was surveying me while I slept. He smiles, a plump smile, contented, his beard puffed up like a singing toad throat, and lowers his face to kiss me. He still doesn’t understand, he thinks he has won, act of his flesh a rope noosed around my neck, leash, he will lead me back to the city and tie me to fences, doorknobs.
“You slept in,” he says. He begins to shift himself over onto me but I look at the sun, it’s late, eight-thirty almost. In the main room I can hear metal on metal, they’re up.
“There’s no hurry,” he says, but I push him away and get dressed.
Anna is making food, scraping a spoon in the frying pan. She has her purple tunic on and her white bellbottoms, urban costume, and her makeup is slabbed down over her face like a visor.
“I thought I’d do it,” she says, “so you two could sleep in.” She must have heard the door opening and closing in the night; she produces a smile, warm, conspiratorial, and I know what circuits are closing in her head: by screwing Joe she’s brought us back together. Saving the world, everyone wants to; men think they can do it with guns, women with their bodies, love conquers all, conquerors love all, mirages raised by words.
She dishes out breakfast. It’s baked beans from a can, the usual morning food is gone.
“Pork and beans and musical fruit, the more you eat the more you toot,” David says and quacks like Daffy Duck, jaunty, mimicking satisfaction.
Anna helps him, co-operative community life; she taps him on the knuckles with her fork and says “Oh you.” Then she remembers and adjusts to her Tragedy mask: “How long will it take you, in the village I mean?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Not very long.”
We pack and I help them carry the baggage down, my own also, caseful of alien words and failed pictures, canvas bundle of clothes, nothing I need. They sit on the dock talking; Anna is smoking, she’s reduced to the last one.
“Christ,” she says, “I’ll be glad to hit the city. Stock up again.”
I go up the steps once more to make sure they haven’t left anything. The jays are there, flowing from tree to tree, voices semaphoring, tribal; they retreat to the upper branches, they still haven’t decided whether I can be trusted. The cabin is the way we found it; when Evans arrives I’ll snap the lock.
“You should take the canoes up before he comes,” I say when I’m back down. “They go in the toolshed.”
“Right,” David says. He consults his watch, but they don’t get up. They have the camera out, they’re discussing the movie; the zipper bag of equipment is beside them, the tripod, the reels of film in their canisters.
“I figure we can start cutting it in two or three weeks,” David says, his version of a pro. “We’ll take it into the lab first thing.”
“There’s part of a reel left,” Anna says. “You should get her, you got me but you never got her.” She looks at me, fumes ascending from her nose and mouth.
“Now that’s an idea,” David says. “The rest of us are in it, she’s the only one who isn’t.” He assesses me. “Where would we fit her in though? We don’t have anyone fucking yet; but I’d have to do it,” he says to Joe, “we need you running the camera.”
“I could run the camera,” Anna says, “you could both do it,” and everyone laughs.
They get up after a while and hoist the red canoe, one at each end, and carry it up the hill. I stay with Anna on the dock.
“Is my nose peeling?” she says, rubbing it. From her handbag she takes a round gilt compact with violets on the cover. She opens it, unclosing her other self, and runs her fingertip around the corners of her mouth, left one, right one; then she unswivels a pink stick and dots her cheeks and blends them, changing her shape, performing the only magic left to her.
Rump on a packsack, harem cushion, pink on the cheeks and black discreetly around the eyes, as red as blood as black as ebony, a seamed and folded imitation