get away from me. But now,” she said, hugging herself with both arms, “we’ll have to wait and see. Whether it was all worth it.”
“Yes, well,” Marian said, “would you mind fixing the bed?”
Thinking back on it, she found something ominous about the fact that the lady down below had gone out. It wasn’t like her at all. She’d be much more likely to lurk behind the piano or the velvet curtains while they were creeping down the stairs and spring out upon them just as they had reached the threshold of safety.
He was starting on the second blouse. He seemed to be unaware of everything but the wrinkled white material spread on the board in front of him, poring over it as though it was an ancient and very fragile manuscript that he couldn’t quite translate. Before, she had thought of him as being short, perhaps because of the shrunken child’s face, or because she had mostly seen him sitting down; but now she thought, actually he would be quite tall if he didn’t slouch like that.
As she sat watching him she recognized in herself a desire to say something to him, to intrude, to break through the white cloth surface of his absorption: she did not like being so totally closed out. To avoid the emotion she picked up her purse and went into the bathroom, intending to comb her hair, not because it needed combing but as what Ainsley called a substitution-activity; like a squirrel scratching itself when confronted by hazardous or unobtainable breadcrumbs. She wanted to talk to him, but talking to him now, she thought, might cancel out any therapeutic effects the ironing was having.
The bathroom was ordinary enough. Damp towels were mounded on the racks and a clutter of shaving things and men’s cosmetics covered the various porcelain ledges and surfaces. But the mirror over the basin had been broken. There were only a few jagged pieces of glass left sticking around the edges of the wooden frame. She tried peering into one of them but it wasn’t large enough to be of much use.
When she went back into the room he was doing the pillowcase. He seemed more relaxed: he was ironing with a long easy sweeping motion instead of the exact staccato strokes he had been using on the blouse. He looked up at her as she came in.
“I suppose you’re wondering what happened to the mirror,” he said.
“Well…”
“I smashed it. Last week. With the frying pan.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I got tired of being afraid I’d walk in there some morning and wouldn’t be able to see my own reflection in it. So I went and grabbed the frying pan out of the kitchen and gave it a whack. They both got very upset,” he said meditatively, “particularly Trevor, he was cooking an omelette at the time and I guess I sort of ruined it. Got it all full of broken glass. But I don’t really see why it should disturb them, it was a perfectly understandable symbolic narcissistic gesture, and it wasn’t a good mirror anyway. But they’ve been jittery ever since. Especially Trevor, subconsciously he thinks he’s my mother; it’s rather hard on him. It doesn’t bother me that much, I’m used to it, I’ve been running away from understudy mothers ever since I can remember, there’s a whole herd of them behind me trying to catch up and rescue me, god knows what from, and give me warmth and comfort and nourishment and make me quit smoking, that’s what you get for being an orphan. And they’re quoting things at me: Trevor quotes T. S. Eliot these days and Fish quotes the
“How do you shave then?” Marian asked. She could not quite imagine life without a mirror in the bathroom. She speculated, while she spoke, about whether he even shaved at all. She had never examined him for bristles.
“What?”
“I mean with no mirror.”
“Oh,” he said, grinning, “I’ve got my own private mirror. One I can trust, I know what’s in it. It’s just public ones that I don’t like.” He seemed to lose interest in the subject, and ironed in silence for a minute. “What grisly things,” he said at last; he was doing one of the guest towels. “I can’t stand things with flowers embroidered on them.”
“I know. We never use them.”
He folded the towel, then looked up at her gloomily. “I suppose you believed all that.”
“Well… all what?” she answered cautiously.
“About why I broke the mirror and my reflection and so on. Really I broke it because I felt like breaking something. That’s the trouble with people, they always believe me. It’s too much of an encouragement, I can never resist the temptation. And those brilliant insights about Trevor, how do
“Should I?” She couldn’t tell whether or not he was being serious; his expression revealed nothing. Perhaps this was another labyrinth of words, and if she said the wrong thing, took the wrong turning, she would suddenly find herself face to face with something she could not cope with.
“If you like. But the real truth is, of course” – he waved the iron in the air for emphasis, watching the movement of his hand as he did so – “that I’m a changeling. I got switched for a real baby when young and my parents never discovered the fraud, though I must admit they suspected something.” He closed his eyes, smiling faintly. “They kept telling me my ears were too big; but really I’m not human at all, I come from the underground…” He opened his eyes and began to iron again, but his attention had wandered away from the ironing board. He brought the iron too close to his other hand, and gave a yelp of pain. “Damn,” he said. He set the iron down and stuck his finger in his mouth.
Marian’s first impulse was to go over and see whether it was a bad burn, and suggest remedies, butter or baking soda; but she decided against it. Instead she sat unmoving and said nothing.
He was looking at her now, expectantly but with a trace of hostility. “Aren’t you going to comfort me?” he asked.
“I don’t think,” she said, “that it’s really needed.”
“You’re right; I enjoy it though,” he said sadly. “And it does hurt.” He picked up the iron again.
When he had folded the last towel and pulled the plug out of the wall-socket he said, “That was a vigorous session, thanks for the clothes, but it wasn’t really enough. I’ll have to think of something else to do with the rest of the tension. I’m not a chronic ironer you know, I’m not hooked, it’s not one of the habits I ought to kick, but I go on these binges.” He came over and sat gingerly down beside her on the bed, and lit a cigarette. “This one started the day before yesterday when I dropped my term paper in a puddle on the kitchen floor and I had to dry it out and iron it. It was all typed and I couldn’t face typing it over again, plowing through all that verbiage, I’d start wanting to change everything. It came out okay, nothing blurred, but you could tell it had been ironed, I scorched one of the pages. But they can’t reasonably object, it would sound pretty silly to say, ‘We can’t accept a term paper that’s been ironed.’ So I turned it in and then of course I had to get rid of all that frenzy, so I ironed everything in the house that was clean. Then I had to go to the laundromat and wash some dirty things, that’s why I was sitting in that wretched movie, I was waiting for the clothes to get done. I got bored watching them churning around in there, that’s a bad sign, if I get bored with the laundromat even, what the hell am I going to do when I get bored with everything else? Then I ironed all the things I’d washed, and then I’d run out.”
“And then you phoned me,” Marian said. It irritated her slightly that he went on talking to himself, about himself, without giving much evidence that he even knew she was there.
“Oh. You. Yes. Then I phoned you. At least, I phoned your company. I remembered the name, I guess it was the switchboard girl I got, and I sort of described you to whoever it was for a while, I said you didn’t look like the usual kind of interviewer; and then they figured out who you were. You never told me your name.”
It had not occurred to Marian that she hadn’t told him her name. She had taken it for granted that he knew it all along.
Her introduction of a new subject seemed to have brought him to a standstill. He stared down at the floor, sucking on the end of his cigarette.
She found the silence disconcerting. “Why do you like ironing so much?” she asked. “I mean, apart from relieving tension and all that; but why ironing? Instead of maybe bowling, for instance?”
He drew his thin legs up and clasped his arms around his knees. “Ironing’s nice and simple,” he said. “I get all tangled up in words when I’m putting together those interminable papers, I’m on another one by the way, ‘Sado- Masochistic Patterns in Trollope,’ and ironing – well, you straighten things out and get them flat. God knows it isn’t because I’m neat and tidy; but there’s something about a flat surface…” He had shifted his position and was contemplating her now. “Why don’t you let me touch up that blouse for you a bit while the iron’s still hot?” he said.
