The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood [62]
The Commander was patient when I hesitated, or asked him for a correct spelling. We can always look it up in the dictionary, he said. He said we. The first time, I realized, he'd let me win.
That night I was expecting everything to be the same, including the good-night kiss. But when we'd finished the second game, he sat back in his chair. He placed his elbows on the arms of the chair, the tips of his fingers together, and looked at me.
I have a little present for you, he said.
He smiled a little. Then he pulled open the top drawer of his desk and took something out. He held it a moment, casually enough, between thumb and finger, as if deciding whether or not to give it to me. Although it was upside-down from where I was sitting, I recognized it. They were once common enough. It was a magazine, a women's magazine it looked like from the picture, a model on glossy paper, hair blown, neck scarfed, mouth lipsticked; the fall fashions. I thought such magazines had all been destroyed, but here was one, left over, in a Commander's private study, where you'd least expect to find such a thing. He looked down at the model, who was right-side-up to him; he was still smiling, that wistful smile of his. It was a look you'd give to an almost extinct animal, at the zoo.
Staring at the magazine, as he dangled it before me like fish bait, I wanted it. I wanted it with a force that made the ends of my fingers ache. At the same time I saw this longing of mine as trivial and absurd, because I'd taken such magazines lightly enough once. I'd read them in dentists' offices, and sometimes on planes; I'd bought them to take to hotel rooms, a device to fill in empty time while I was waiting for Luke. After I'd leafed through them I would throw them away, for they were infinitely discardable, and a day or two later I wouldn't be able to remember what had been in them.
Though I remembered now. What was in them was promise. They dealt in transformations; they suggested an endless series of possibilities, extending like the reflections in two mirrors set facing one another, stretching on, replica after replica, to the vanishing point. They suggested one adventure after another, one wardrobe after another, one improvement after another, one man after another. They suggested rejuvenation, pain overcome and transcended, endless love. The real promise in them was immortality.
This was what he was holding, without knowing it. He riffled the pages. I felt myself leaning forward.
It's an old one, he said, a curio of sorts. From the seventies, I think. A Vogue. This like a wine connoisseur dropping a name. I thought you might like to look at it.
I hung back. Fie might be testing me, to see how deep my indoctrination had really gone. It's not permitted, I said.
In here, it is, he said quietly. I saw the point. Having broken the main taboo, why should I hesitate over another one, something minor? Or another, or another; who could tell where it might stop? Behind this particular door, taboo dissolved.
I took the magazine from him and turned it the right way round. There they were again, the images of my childhood: bold, striding, confident, their arms flung out as if to claim space, their legs apart, feet planted squarely on the earth. There was something Renaissance about the pose, but it was princes I thought of, not coiffed and ringleted maidens. Those candid eyes, shadowed with makeup, yes, but like the eyes of cats, fixed for the pounce. No quailing, no clinging there, not in those capes and rough tweeds, those boots that came to the knee. Pirates, these women, with their ladylike briefcases for the loot and their horsy acquisitive teeth.
I felt the Commander watching me as I turned the pages. I knew I was doing something