The Edible Woman

chthonic symbols – pipes, valves, cloacal conduits… No, no. I’ll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.”

I had no answer. I looked at him and tried to picture him working at a place like Seymour Surveys; even upstairs with the intelligence men; but without success. He definitely wouldn’t fit.

“Are you from out of town?” I asked finally. The subject of graduate school seemed to have been exhausted.

“Of course, we all are; nobody really comes from here, do they? That’s why we’ve got that apartment, god knows we can’t afford it but there aren’t any graduate residences. Unless you count that new pseudo-British joint with the coat of arms and the monastery wall. But they’d never let me in and it would be just as bad as living with Trevor anyway. Trevor’s from Montreal, the family is sort of Westmount and well off; but they had to go into trade after the war. They own a coconut-cookie factory but we aren’t supposed to refer to it around the apartment; it’s awkward though, these mounds of coconut cookies keep appearing and you have to eat them while pretending you don’t know where they come from. I don’t like coconut. Fish was from Vancouver, he keeps missing the sea. He goes down to the lakeshore and wades through the pollution and tries to turn himself on with seagulls and floating grapefruit peels, but it doesn’t work. Both of them used to have accents but now you can’t tell anything from listening to them; after you’ve been in that braingrinder for a while you don’t sound as though you’re from anywhere.”

“Where are you from?”

“You’ve never heard of it,” he said curtly.

The machines clicked off. We both got wire laundry-carts and transferred our clothes to the dryers. Then we sat down in the chairs again. Now there wasn’t anything to watch; just the humming and thumping of the dryers to listen to. He lit another cigarette.

A seedy old man shuffled through the door, saw us, and shuffled out again. He was probably looking for a place to sleep.

“The thing is,” he said at last, “it’s the inertia. You never feel you’re getting anywhere; you get bogged down in things, waterlogged. Last week I set fire to the apartment, partly on purpose. I think I wanted to see what they would do. Maybe I wanted to see what I would do. Mostly though I just got interested in seeing a few flames and some smoke, for a change. But they just put it out, and then they ran around in frenzied figure-eights like a couple of armadillos, talking about how I was ‘sick’ and why did I do it, and maybe my inner tensions were getting too much for me and I’d better go see a shrink. That wouldn’t do any good. I know about all of that and none of it does any good. Those types can’t convince me any more, I know too much about it, I’ve been through that already, I’m immune. Setting fire to the apartment didn’t change anything, except now I can’t flex my nostrils without having Trevor squeal and leap a yard and Fischer look me up in his leftover freshman Psych. textbook. They think I’m mad.” He dropped his cigarette stub on the floor and ground it underfoot. “I think they’re mad,” he added.

“Maybe,” I said cautiously, “you should move out.”

He smiled his crooked smile.

“Where could I go? I couldn’t afford it. I’m stuck. Besides, they sort of take care of me, you know.” He hunched his shoulders further up around his neck.

I looked at the side of his thin face, the high stark ridge of his cheekbone, the dark hollow of his eye, marvelling: all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn’t think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle. But sitting there with the plug of a fresh cigarette stoppering his mouth he didn’t appear to be sensing any danger of that kind.

Thinking about it later, I’m surprised at my own detachment. My restlessness of the afternoon had vanished; I felt calm, serene as a stone moon, in control of the whole white space of the laundromat. I could have reached out effortlessly and put my arms around that huddled awkward body and consoled it, rocked it gently. Still, there was something most unchildlike about him, something that suggested rather an unnaturally old man, old far beyond consolation. I thought too, remembering his duplicity about the beer interview, that he was no doubt capable of making it all up. It may have been real enough; but then again, it may have been calculated to evoke just such a mothering reaction, so that he could smile cleverly at the gesture and retreat further into the sanctuary of his sweater, refusing to be reached or touched.

He must have been equipped with a kind of science-fiction extra sense, a third eye or an antenna. Although his face was turned away so that he couldn’t see mine, he said in a soft dry voice, “I can tell you’re admiring my febrility. I know it’s appealing, I practise at it; every woman loves an invalid. I bring out the Florence Nightingale in them. But be careful.” He was looking at me now, cunningly, sideways. “You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal, you know.”

My calmness was shattered. I felt mice-feet of apprehension scurrying over my skin. What exactly was I being accused of? Was I exposed?

I could think of nothing to say.

The dryers whirred to a standstill. I got up. “Thanks for the soap,” I said with formal politeness.

He got up too. He seemed again quite indifferent to my presence. “That’s all right,” he said.

We stood side by side without speaking, pulling the clothes out of the dryers and wadding them into our laundry bags. We shouldered our laundry and walked to the door together, I a little ahead. I paused for an instant at the entrance, but he made no move to open the door for me so I opened it myself.

When we were outside the laundromat we turned, both at once so that we almost collided. We stood facing each other irresolutely for a minute; we both started to say something, and both stopped. Then, as though someone had pulled a switch, we dropped our laundry bags to the sidewalk and took a step forward. I found myself kissing him, or being kissed by him, I still don’t know which. His mouth tasted like cigarettes. Apart from that taste, and an impression of thinness and dryness, as though the body I had my arms around and the face touching mine were really made of tissue paper or parchment stretched on a frame of wire coathangers, I can remember no sensation at all.

We both stopped kissing at the same time, and stepped back. We looked at each other for another minute. Then we picked up our laundry bags, slung them over our shoulders, turned around, and marched away in opposite directions. The whole incident had been ridiculously like the jerky attractions and repulsions of those plastic dogs with magnets on the bottoms I remembered getting as prizes at birthday parties.

I can’t recall anything about the trip back to the apartment, except that on the bus I stared for a long time at an advertisement with a picture of a nurse in a white cap and dress. She had a wholesome, competent face and she was holding a bottle and smiling. The caption said: GIVE THE GIFT OF LIFE.

12

So here I am.

I’m sitting on my bed in my room with the door shut and the window open. It’s Labour Day, a fine cool sunny day like yesterday. I found it strange not to have to go to the office this morning. The highways outside the city will be coagulating with traffic even this early, people already beginning to come back from their weekends at summer cottages, trying to beat the rush. At five o’clock everything will have slowed down to an ooze out there and the air will be filled with the shimmer of sun on miles of metal and the whining of idling motors and bored children. But here, as usual, it’s quiet.

Ainsley is in the kitchen. I’ve hardly seen her today. I can hear her walking about on the other side of the door, humming intermittently. I feel hesitant about opening the door. Our positions have shifted in some way I haven’t yet assessed, and I know I would find it difficult to talk with her.

Friday seems a long time ago, so much has happened since then, but now I’ve gone over it all in my mind I see that my actions were really more sensible than I thought at the time. It was my subconscious getting ahead of my conscious self, and the subconscious has its own logic. The way I went about doing things may have been a little inconsistent with my true personality, but are the results that inconsistent? The decision was a little sudden, but now I’ve had time to think about it I realize it is actually a very good step to take. Of course I’d always assumed