The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [143]
There was a fireplace in the living room. I used to sit in front of it, with Richard, the light flickering on us, and on our glasses, each with its coaster to protect the veneer. Six in the evening, martini time. Richard liked to sum up the day: that’s what he called it. He’d had a habit of putting his hand on the back of my neck – resting it there, just keeping it there lightly while he conducted the summing up. Summing up was what judges did before a case went to the jury. Is that how he saw himself? Perhaps. But his inner thoughts, his motives, were frequently obscure to me.
This was one source of the tension between us: my failure to understand him, to anticipate his wishes, which he set down to my wilful and even aggressive lack of attention. In reality it was also bafflement, and later, fear. As we went on, he became less and less like a man for me, with a skin and working parts, and more and more like a gigantic tangle of string, which I was doomed as if by enchantment to try every day to unravel. I never did succeed.
I stood outside my house, my former house, waiting to have an emotion of any kind at all. None came. Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.
From the chestnut tree on the lawn a pair of legs was dangling, a woman’s legs. I thought for a moment they were real legs, clambering down, escaping, until I looked more closely. It was a pair of pantyhose, stuffed with something – toilet paper, no doubt, or underwear – and thrown out of the upstairs window during some Satanic rite or adolescent prank or homeless revel. Caught in the branches.
It must have been my own window these disembodied legs had been thrown from. My former window. I pictured myself gazing out of that window, long ago. Plotting how I might slip out that way, unnoticed, and climb down through the tree – easing my shoes off, swinging myself over the sill, reaching one stockinged foot down and then the next, clinging on to the handholds. I hadn’t done it though.
Gazing out the window. Hesitating. Thinking, How lost to myself I have become.
Postcards from Europe
The days darken, the trees turn glum, the sun rolls downhill towards the winter solstice, but still it isn’t winter. No snow, no sleet, no howling winds. It’s ominous, this delay. A dun-coloured hush pervades us.
Yesterday I walked as far as the Jubilee Bridge. There’s been talk of rust, of corrosion, of structural weaknesses; there’s been talk of tearing it down. Some nameless, faceless developer lusts to put condos on the public property adjoining it, says Myra – it’s prime land because of the view. Views are worth more than potatoes these days, not that there were ever any potatoes in that exact spot. Rumour has it that a wad of dirty money has changed hands under the table to facilitate the deal, which I’m sure is what happened too when this bridge was first erected, ostensibly to honour Queen Victoria. Some contractor or other must have paid off Her Majesty’s elected representatives in order to get the job, and we continue to respect the old ways in this town: Make a buck no matter what. Those are the old ways.
Strange to think that ladies in ruffles and bustles once strolled over this bridge and leaned on this filigreed railing, to take in the now-costly, soon-to-be-private view: the tumult of the water below, the picturesque limestone cliffs to the west, the factories alongside going full tilt fourteen hours a day, filled with subservient cap-tugging yokels and twinkling in the dusk like gas-lit gambling casinos.
I stood on the bridge and stared over the side, at the water upstream, smooth as taffy, dark and silent, all menacing potential. On the other side were the cascades, the whirlpools, the white noise. It’s a fair distance down. I became conscious of my heart, and of dizziness. Also of breathlessness, as if I were in over my head.