about the wedding, the future apartment, the possible china and glassware, what would be bought and worn.
Lucy asked finally, “I always thought he was the confirmed bachelor type, that’s what you said. How on earth did you ever catch him?”
Marian looked away from the suddenly pathetic too-eager faces poised to snatch at her answer, down at the knives and forks on the plates. “I honestly don’t know,” she said, trying to convey a becoming bridal modesty. She really didn’t know. She was sorry now that she had told them, dangled the effect in front of them that way without being able to offer them a reproducible cause.
Peter phoned almost as soon as they got back to the office. Lucy handed the phone to Marian with a whispered “It’s the man!”, a little awed by the presence of an actual prospective groom at the other end of the line. Marian felt through the air the tensing of three pairs of ear-muscles, the swivelling of three blonde heads, as she spoke into the phone.
Peter’s voice was terse. “Hi honey how are you? Listen, I really can’t make it tonight. A case came up suddenly, something big, and I’ve just got to do some work on it.”
He sounded as though he was accusing her of trying to interfere with his work, and she resented this. She hadn’t even been expecting to see him in mid-week like that until he’d called the day before and asked her to have dinner; since then she’d been looking forward to it. She said rather sharply, “That’s all right, darling. But it would be nice if we could get these things straight before the last minute.”
“I told you it came up
“Well you needn’t bite my head off.”
“I wasn’t,” he said, exasperated. “You know I’d much rather see you, of course, only you’ve got to understand…” The rest of the conversation was a tangle of retractions and conciliations. Well, we have to learn to compromise, Marian thought, and we might as well begin working at it now. She concluded, “Tomorrow then?”
“Look darling,” he said, “I really don’t know. It’ll really all depend, you know how these things are, I’ll let you know, okay?”
When Marian had said good-bye sweetly for the benefit of her audience and had put down the phone she felt exhausted. She must watch how she spoke to Peter, she would have to handle him more carefully, there was evidently a good deal of pressure on him at his office… “I wonder if I’m getting anaemia?” she said to herself as she turned back to the typewriter.
After she had finished the razor-blade questionnaire and had begun to work on a different one, the instructions for a product test of a new dehydrated dog food, the phone rang again. It was Joe Bates. She had been half- expecting the call. She greeted Joe with false enthusiasm: she knew she had been shirking her responsibilities lately, avoiding the Bates’ dinner-invitations even though Clara had been wanting to see her. The pregnancy had gone first one week, then two weeks longer than it was supposed to, and Clara had sounded over the phone as though she herself was being dragged slowly down into the gigantic pumpkin-like growth that was enveloping her body. “I can hardly stand up,” she had groaned. But Marian had not been able to face another evening of contemplating Clara’s belly and speculating with her on the mysterious behaviour of its contents. She had responded the last time only with cheerful but notably uncheering remarks intended to lighten the atmosphere, such as “Maybe it’s got three heads,” and “Maybe it isn’t a baby at all but a kind of parasitic growth, like galls on trees, or elephantiasis of the navel, or a huge bunion…” After that evening she had rationalized that she would do Clara more harm by going to see her than by staying away. In a spurt of solicitude catalysed by guilt, though, she had made Joe promise as she was leaving to let her know as soon as anything happened, even offering heroically to babysit for the others if absolutely necessary; and now his voice was saying, “Well thank god it’s all over. It’s another girl, ten pounds seven ounces, and she only went into the hospital at two last night. We were afraid she was going to have it in the taxi.”
“Well that’s marvellous,” Marian exclaimed, and added various inquiries and congratulations. She got the visiting hours and the room number from Joe and wrote them down on her telephonemessages pad. “Tell her I’ll come down and see her tomorrow,” she said. She was thinking that now Clara was deflating toward her normal size again she would be able to talk with her more freely: she would no longer feel as though she was addressing a swollen mass of flesh with a tiny pinhead, a shape that had made her think of a queen ant, bulging with the burden of an entire society, a semi-person – or sometimes, she thought, several people, a cluster of hidden personalities that she didn’t know at all. She decided on impulse to buy her some roses: a welcoming-back gift for the real Clara, once more in uncontended possession of her own frail body.
She settled the phone in its black cradle and leaned back in her chair. The second-hand on the clock was sweeping around, accompanied by the ticking of typewriters and the click-clack of high-heeled shoes on the hard floor. She could feel time eddying and curling almost visibly around her feet, rising around her, lifting her body in the office chair and bearing her, slowly and circuitously but with the inevitability of water moving downhill, towards the distant, not-so-distant-any-more day they had agreed on – in late March? – that would end this phase and begin another. Somewhere else, arrangements were being gradually made; the relatives were beginning to organize their forces and energies, it was all being taken care of, there was nothing for her to do. She was floating, letting the current hold her up, trusting to it to take her where she was going. Now there was this day to get through: a landmark to be passed on the shore, a tree not much different from any of the others that could be distinguished from the rest only by being here rather than further back or further on, with no other purpose than to measure the distance travelled. She wanted to get it behind her. To help the propelling second hand she typed out the rest of the dog-food questionnaire.
Towards the end of the afternoon Mrs. Bogue sauntered out of her cubicle. The upwardly arranged lines on her brow expressed consternation, but her eyes were level as ever.
“Oh dear,” she said to the office at large – it was part of her human-relations policy to let them in on minor managerial crises – “What a day. Not only that disturbance in the West, but there’s been some trouble with that horrible Underwear Man again.”
“Not that filthy man!” Lucy said, wrinkling her opalescently powdered nose in disgust.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Bogue, “it’s so upsetting.” She wrung her hands together in feminine despair. She was evidently not at all upset. “He seems to have shifted his field of operations to the suburbs, to Etobicoke as a matter of fact. I’ve had two ladies from Etobicoke on the phone this afternoon complaining. Of course he’s probably some nice ordinary man, perfectly harmless, but it’s so nasty for the company’s image.”
“What does he do?” asked Marian. She had never heard about the Underwear Man before.
“Oh,” said Lucy, “he’s one of those dirty men who phone women and say filthy things to them. He was doing it last year too.”
“The trouble is,” Mrs. Bogue lamented, still clasping her hands in front of her, “he tells them he’s from our company. Apparently he has a very convincing voice. Very official. He says he’s doing a survey on underwear, and I guess the first questions he asks must sound genuine. Brands and types and sizes and things. Then he gets more and more personal until the ladies get annoyed and hang up. Of course then they phone the company to complain, and sometimes they’ve accused us of all sorts of indecent things before I can explain that he’s not one of our interviewers and our company would never ask questions like that. I wish they’d catch him and ask him to stop, he’s such a nuisance, but of course he’s almost impossible to trace.”
“I wonder why he does it?” Marian speculated.
“Oh, he’s probably one of those sex fiends,” Lucy said with a delicate mauve shiver.
Mrs. Bogue puckered her brow again and shook her head. “But they all say he sounds so
“Maybe it all proves that some sex fiends are very nice normal people,” Marian said to Lucy when Mrs. Bogue had gone back to her cubicle.
As she put on her coat and drifted out of the office and down the hall and let herself be floated down in the decompression chamber of the elevator, she was still thinking about the Underwear Man. She pictured his intelligent face, his polite, attentive manner, something like that of an insurance salesman, or an undertaker. She wondered what sort of personal questions he asked, and what she would say if he were ever to phone
