The Edible Woman

tremulous voice called, “Marian? Could you please come here?”

She went into Ainsley’s room, picking her way over the boggy surface of clothes that covered the floor towards the bed where Ainsley had thrown herself. “What’s the matter?” she asked. Ainsley looked dismayed.

“Oh Marian,” she quavered, “it’s too awful. I went to the Clinic tonight. And I was so happy, and I was doing my knitting and everything during the first speaker – he talked about The Advantages of Breast Feeding. They even have an Association for it now. But then they had this psy-psy-psychologist, and he talked about the Father Image.” She was on the verge of tears, and Marian got up and rooted around on the dresser until she unearthed a grubby piece of kleenex, just in case. She was concerned: it wasn’t like Ainsley to cry.

“He says they ought to grow up with a strong Father Image in the home,” she said when she had composed herself. “It’s good for them, it makes them normal, especially if they’re boys.”

“Well, but you sort of knew that before, didn’t you?” Marian asked.

“Oh no Marian, it’s really a lot more drastic. He has all kinds of statistics and everything. They’ve proved it scientifically.” She gulped. “If I have a little boy, he’s absolutely certain to turn into a hoho-ho-homosexual!” At this mention of the one category of man who had never shown the slightest interest in her, Ainsley’s large blue eyes filled with tears. Marian extended the kleenex, but Ainsley waved it away. She sat up and pushed back her hair.

“There’s got to be a way,” she said; her chin lifted, courageously.

21

They were holding hands as they went up the wide stone stairway and through the heavy doors, but they had to let go to pass through the turnstile. Once they were inside it didn’t seem right to take hands again. The churchlike atmosphere created by the high gold-mosaicked dome under which they were standing discouraged any such fleshly attempts, even if they involved only fingers, and the blue-uniformed and white-haired guard had frowned at them as he took her money. Marian connected the frown with dim recollections of two previous visits during all-day educational bus excursions to the city when she was in elementary school: perhaps it came with the price of admission.

“Come on,” Duncan said, almost in a whisper. “I’ll show you my favourite things.”

They climbed the spiral staircase, round and around the incongruous totem pole, up towards the geometrical curved ceiling. Marian had not been in this part of the Museum for so long that it seemed like something remembered from a not altogether pleasant dream, the kind you had when recovering from ether after having your tonsils out. When at university she had attended one class on the basement floor (Geology; it had been the only way to avoid Religious Knowledge, and she had felt surly towards rock specimens ever since), and occasionally she had gone to the Museum Coffee Shop on the main floor. But not up these marble stairs again, into the bowl-shaped space of air that looked almost solid now, shafted with dustmotes whenever the weak winter sunlight became positive enough through the narrow windows high above.

They paused for a minute to look over the balustrade. Down below a batch of schoolchildren was filing through the turnstile and going to pick up folding canvas chairs from the stack at the side of the rotunda, their bodies foreshortened by perspective. The shrill edges of their voices were dulled by the thick encircling space, so that they seemed even further away than they actually were.

“I hope they don’t come up here,” Duncan said as he pushed himself away from the marble railing. He tugged at her coatsleeve, turning and drawing her with him into one of the branching galleries. They walked slowly along the creaking parquet floor past the rows of glass cases.

She had been seeing Duncan frequently during the past three weeks, by collusion rather than by coincidence, as formerly. He was writing another term paper, he had told her, called “Monosyllables in Milton,” which was to be an intensive stylistic analysis done from a radical angle. He had been stuck on the opening sentence, “It is indeed highly significant that…” for two and a half weeks and, having exhausted the possibilities of the laundromat, he had felt a need for frequent escapes.

“Why don’t you find a female graduate student in English?” she had asked once when their two faces, reflected in a store window, had struck her as particularly ill matched. She looked like someone who was hired to take him out for walks.

“That wouldn’t be an escape,” he said, “they’re all writing term papers too; we’d have to discuss them. Besides,” he added morosely, “they don’t have enough breasts. Or,” he qualified after a pause, “some of them have too many.”

Marian was being, she supposed, what they called “used,” but she didn’t at all mind being used, as long as she knew what for: she liked these things to take place on as conscious a level as possible. Of course Duncan was making what they called “demands,” if only on her time and attention; but at least he wasn’t threatening her with some intangible gift in return. His complete self-centredness was reassuring in a peculiar way. Thus, when he would murmur, with his lips touching her cheek, “You know, I don’t even really like you very much,” it didn’t disturb her at all because she didn’t have to answer. But when Peter, with his mouth in approximately the same position, would whisper “I love you” and wait for the echo, she had to exert herself.

She guessed that she was using Duncan too, although her motives eluded her; as all her motives tended to these days. The long time she had been moving through (and it was strange to realize that she had after all been moving: she was due to leave for home in another two weeks, the day after a party Peter was going to give, and two, or was it three, weeks after that she would be married) had been merely a period of waiting, drifting with the current, an endurance of time marked by no real event; waiting for an event in the future that had been determined by an event in the past; whereas when she was with Duncan she was caught in an eddy of present time: they had virtually no past and certainly no future.

Duncan was irritatingly unconcerned about her marriage. He would listen to the few things she had to say about it, grin slightly when she would say she thought it was a good idea, then shrug and tell her neutrally that it sounded evil to him but that she seemed to be managing perfectly well and that anyway it was her problem. Then he would direct the conversation towards the complex and ever-fascinating subject of himself. He didn’t seem to care about what would happen to her after she passed out of the range of his perpetual present: the only comment he had ever made about the time after her marriage implied that he supposed he would have to dig up another substitute. She found his lack of interest comforting, though she didn’t want to know why.

They were passing through the Oriental section. There were many pale vases and glazed and lacquered dishes. Marian glanced at an immense wall-screen that was covered with small golden images of the gods and goddesses, arranged around a gigantic central figure: an obese Buddha-like creature, smiling like Mrs. Bogue controlling by divine will her vast army of dwarfed housewives, serenely, inscrutably.

Whatever the reasons though she was always glad when he telephoned, urgent and distraught, and asked her to meet him. They had to arrange out-of-the-way places – snowy parks, art galleries, the occasional bar (though never the Park Plaza) – which meant that their few embraces had been unpremeditated, furtive, gelid, and much hampered by muffling layers of winter clothing. That morning he had phoned her at work and suggested, or rather demanded, the Museum: “I crave the Museum,” he had said. She had fled the office early, pleading a dental appointment. It didn’t matter anyway, she was leaving at last in a week and her successor was already training for the job.

The Museum was a good place: Peter would never go there. She dreaded having Peter and Duncan encounter each other. An irrational dread because for one thing there was no reason, she told herself, why Peter should be upset – it had nothing to do with him, there was obviously no question of competition or anything silly like that – and, for another, even if they did collide she could always explain Duncan as an old friend from college or something of the sort. She would be safe; but what she really seemed to fear was the destruction, not of anything in her relationship with Peter, but of one of the two by the other; though who would be destroyed by whom, or why, she couldn’t tell, and most of the time she was surprised at herself for having such vague premonitions.

Nevertheless it was for this reason that she couldn’t let him come to her apartment. It would be too great a risk. She had gone to his place several times, but one or both of the roommates had always been there, suspicious and awkwardly resentful. That would make Duncan more nervous than ever and they would leave quickly.

“Why don’t they like me?” she asked. They had paused to look at a suit of intricately embossed Chinese