The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [115]
“But you’ll have to let him touch you, you know. It’s not just kissing. You’ll have to let him . . .”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “Leave me alone. I’ve got my eyes open.”
“Like a sleepwalker,” she said. She picked up a container of my dusting powder, opened it, sniffed it, and managed to spill a handful of it onto the floor. “Well, you’ll have nice clothes, anyway,” she said.
I could have hit her. It was, of course, my secret consolation.
After she’d gone, leaving a trail of dusty white footprints, I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at my open steamer trunk. It was a very fashionable one, a pale yellow on the outside but dark blue on the inside, steel-bound, the nail-heads twinkling like hard metallic stars. It was tidily packed, with everything complete for the honeymoon voyage, but it seemed to me full of darkness – of emptiness, empty space.
That’s my trousseau, I thought. All at once it was a threatening word – so foreign, so final. It sounded like trussed – what was done to raw turkeys with skewers and pieces of string.
Toothbrush, I thought.I will need that. My body sat there, inert.
Trousseau came from the French word for trunk. Trousseau. That’s all it meant: things you put into a trunk. So there was no use in getting upset about it, because it just meant baggage. It meant all the things I was taking with me, packed away.
The tango
Here’s the wedding picture:
A young woman in a white satin dress cut on the bias, the fabric sleek, with a train fanned around the feet like spilled molasses. There’s something gangly about the stance, the placement of the hips, the feet, as if her spine is wrong for this dress – too straight. You’d need to have a shrug for such a dress, a slouch,a sinuous curve, a sort of tubercular hunch.
A veil falling straight down on either side of the head, a width of it over the brow, casting too dark a shadow across the eyes. No teeth shown in the smile. A chaplet of small white roses; a cascade of larger roses, pink and white ones mingled with stephanotis, in her white-gloved arms – arms with the elbows a little too far out. Chaplet, cascade – these were the terms used in the newspapers. An evocation of nuns, and of fresh, perilous water. “A Beautiful Bride,” was the caption. They said such things then. In her case beauty was mandatory, with so much money involved.
(I say “her,” because I don’t recall having been present, not in any meaningful sense of the word. I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view – I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can’t see me at all.)
Richard stands beside me, admirable in the terms of that time and place, by which I mean young enough, not ugly, and well-to-do. He looks substantial, but at the same time quizzical: one eyebrow cocked, lower lip thrust a little out, mouth on the verge of a smile, as if at some secret, dubious joke. Carnation in the buttonhole, hair combed back like a shiny rubber bathing cap, stuck to his head with the goo they used to put on back then. But a handsome man despite it. I have to admit that. Debonaire. Man about town.
There are some posed group portraits, too – a background scrum of groomsmen in their formal attire, much the same for weddings as for funerals and headwaiters; a foreground of clean, gleaming bridesmaids, their bouquets foaming with blossom. Laura managed to ruin each of these pictures. In one she’s resolutely scowling, in another she must have moved her head so that her face is a blur, like a pigeon smashing into glass. In a third she’s gnawing on a finger, glancing sideways guiltily, as if surprised with her hand in the till. In a fourth there must have been a defect in the film, because there’s an effect of dappled light, falling not down on her but up, as if she’s standing on the edge of an illuminated swimming pool,