The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [173]
Yeah. I wish you could too, he says. But you can’t. It’s rough over there. He hums in his head:
Stormy weather,
Don’t know why, got no buttons on my fly,
Got a zipper . . .
Get a grip, he tells himself. He feels an effervescence in his head, like ginger ale. Sparkling blood. It’s as if he’s flying – looking down at her from the air. Her lovely distressed face wavers like a reflection in a troubled pool; already dissolving, and soon it will be into tears. But despite her sorrow, she’s never been so luscious. A soft and milky glow surrounds her; the flesh of her arm, where he’s held it, is firm and plumped. He’d like to grab hold of her, haul her up to his room, fuck her six ways to Sunday. As if that would fix her in place.
I’ll wait for you, she says. When you come back I’ll just walk out the front door, and then we can go away together.
Would you really leave? Would you leave him?
Yes. For you, I would. If you wanted. I’d leave everything.
Slivers of neon light come in through the window above them, red, blue, red. She imagines him wounded; it would be one way of making him stay put. She’d like him locked up, tied down, kept for her alone.
Leave him now, he says.
Now? Her eyes widen. Right now? Why?
Because I can’t stand you being with him. I can’t stand the idea of it.
It doesn’t mean anything to me, she says.
It does to me. Especially after I’m gone, when I can’t see you. It’ll drive me crazy – thinking about it will.
But I wouldn’t have any money, she says in a wondering voice. Where would I live? In some rented room, all by myself? Like you, she thinks. What would I live on?
You could get a job, he says helplessly. I could send you some money.
You don’t have any money, none to speak of. And I can’t do anything. I can’t sew, I can’t type. There’s another reason too, she thinks, but I can’t tell him that.
There must be some way. But he doesn’t urge her. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bright idea, her out on her own. Out there in the big bad world, where every guy from here to China could take a crack at her. If anything went wrong, he’d have only himself to blame.
I think I’d better stay put, don’t you? That’s the best thing. Until you come back. You will come back, won’t you? You’ll come back safe and sound?
Sure, he says.
Because if you don’t, I don’t know what I’ll do. If you got yourself killed or anything I’d go completely to pieces. She thinks: I’m talking like a movie. But how else can I talk? We’ve forgotten how else.
Shit, he thinks. She’s working herself up. Now she’ll cry. She’ll cry and I’ll sit here like a lump, and once women start crying there’s no way to make them stop.
Come on, I’ll get your coat, he says grimly. This is no fun. We don’t have much time. Let’s go back to the room.
IX
The laundry
March at last, and a few grudging intimations of spring. The trees are still bare, the buds still hard, cocooned, but in places where the sun hits there’s meltdown. Dog doings unfreeze, then wane, their icy lacework sallow with wornout pee. Slabs of lawn come to light, sludgy and bestrewn. Limbo must look like this.
Today I had something different for breakfast. Some new kind of cereal flake, brought over by Myra to pep me up: she’s a sucker for the writing on the backs of packages. These flakes, it says in candid lettering the colours of lollipops, of fleecy cotton jogging suits, are not made from corrupt, overly commercial corn and wheat, but from little-known grains with hard-to-pronounce names – archaic, mystical. The seeds of them have been rediscovered in pre-Columbian tombs and in Egyptian pyramids; an authenticating detail, though not, when you come to think of it, all that reassuring. Not only will these flakes whisk you out like a pot scrubber, they murmur of renewed vitality, of endless youth, of immortality. The back of the box is festooned with a limber pink intestine; on the front is an eyeless jade mosaic face, which those in charge of publicity