The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [125]
There is however some danger. For him too: more than there was, he’s told her. He thinks he was spotted once, on the street: recognized. Some goon from the Red Squad, maybe. He’d walked through a crowded beer joint, out the back door.
She doesn’t know whether to believe in it or not, this sort of danger: men in dark bulgy suits with their collars turned up, cars on the prowl. Come with us. We’re taking you in. Bare rooms and harsh lights. It seems too theatrical, or else like things that occur only in fog, in black and white. Only in other countries, in other languages. Or if here, not to her.
If caught, she’d renounce him, before the cock crowed even once. She knows that, plainly, calmly. Anyway she’d be let off, her involvement viewed as frivolous dabbling or else a rebellious prank, and whatever turmoil might result would be covered up. She’d have to pay for it privately, of course, but with what? She’s already bankrupt: you can’t get blood from a stone. She’d close herself off, put up the shutters. Out to lunch, permanently.
Lately she’s had the sense of someone watching her, though whenever she reconnoitres there’s nobody there. She’s being more careful; she’s being as careful as she can. Is she afraid? Yes. Most of the time. But her fear doesn’t matter. Or rather, it does matter. It enhances the pleasure she feels with him; also the sense that she’s getting away with it.
The real danger comes from herself. What she’ll allow, how far she’s willing to go. But allowing and willing have nothing to do with it. Where she’ll be pushed, then; where she’ll be led. She hasn’t examined her motives. There may not be any motives as such; desire is not a motive. It doesn’t seem to her that she has any choice. Such extreme pleasure is also a humiliation. It’s like being hauled along by a shameful rope, a leash around the neck. She resents it, her lack of freedom, and so she stretches out the time between, rationing him. She stands him up, fibs about why she couldn’t make it – claims she didn’t see the chalked markings on the park wall, didn’t get the message – the new address of the non-existent dress shop, the postcard signed by an old friend she’s never had, the telephone call for the wrong number.
But in the end, back she comes. There’s no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.
Still, she finds herself wondering about things that never occurred to her at first. How does he do his laundry? One time there were socks drying on the radiator – he’d seen her looking, whipped them out of sight. He tidies things away before her visits, or at least he takes a swipe at it. Where does he eat? He’s told her he doesn’t like to be seen too often in one place. He must move around, from one eatery, one beanery, to another. In his mouth these words have a sleazy glamour. Some days he’s more nervous, he keeps his head down, he doesn’t go out; there are apple cores, in this or that room; there are bread crumbs on the floor.
Where does he get the apples, the bread? He’s oddly reticent about such details – what goes on in his life when she’s not there. Perhaps he feels it might diminish him in her eyes, to know too much. Too many sordid particulars. Perhaps he’s right. (All those paintings of women, in art galleries, surprised at private moments. Nymph Sleeping. Susanna and the Elders. Woman Bathing, one foot in a tin tub – Renoir, or was it Degas? Both, both women plump. Diana and her maidens, a moment before they catch the hunter’s prying eyes. Never any paintings called Man Washing Socks in Sink.)
Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself, through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and snuffles, romance only sighs. Does she want more than that – more