The Edible Woman

nineteenth century is very hot property these days, you know.” He threw his head back against the chair and closed his eyes; his words rose in a monotonously intoned chant through the black thicket of his beard. “Of course everybody knows Alice is a sexual-identity-crisis book, that’s old stuff, it’s been around for a long time, I’d like to go into it a little deeper though. What we have here, if you only look at it closely, this is the little girl descending into the very suggestive rabbit burrow, becoming as it were pre-natal, trying to find her role,” he licked his lips, “her role as a Woman. Yes, well that’s clear enough. These patterns emerge. Patterns emerge. One sexual role after another is presented to her but she seems unable to accept any of them, I mean she’s really blocked. She rejects Maternity when the baby she’s been nursing turns into a pig, nor does she respond positively to the dominating-female role of the Queen and her castration cries of ‘Off with his head!’ And when the Duchess makes a cleverly concealed lesbian pass at her, sometimes you wonder how conscious old Lewis was, anyway she’s neither aware nor interested; and right after that you’ll recall she goes to talk with the Mock Turtle, enclosed in his shell and his self-pity, a definitely pre-adolescent character; then there are those most suggestive scenes, most suggestive, the one where her neck becomes elongated and she is accused of being a serpent, hostile to eggs, you’ll remember, a rather destructively phallic identity she indignantly rejects; and her negative reaction to the dictatorial Caterpillar, just six inches high, importantly perched on the all-too-female mushroom which is perfectly round but which has the power to make you either smaller or larger than normal, I find that particularly interesting. And of course there’s the obsession with time, clearly a cyclical rather than a linear obsession. So anyway she makes a lot of attempts but she refuses to commit herself, you can’t say that by the end of the book she has reached anything that can be definitely called maturity. She does much better though in Through the Looking Glass, where, as you’ll remember…”

There was a smothered but audible snicker. Marian jumped. Duncan must have been standing in the doorway: she hadn’t noticed him come in.

Fish opened his eyes, blinked, and frowned at Duncan, but before he could make any comment Trevor bustled into the room.

“Has he been going on about those horrid symbols and things again? I don’t approve of that kind of criticism myself, I think style’s so much more important, and Fischer gets much too Viennese, especially when he drinks. He’s very wicked. Besides, he’s so out of date,” he said cattily. “The very latest approach to Alice is just to dismiss it as a rather charming children’s book. I’m almost ready, Duncan could you just help me set the table?”

Fischer sat watching them, sunk in the depths of his chair. They were putting up two card tables, placing the legs carefully in the gaps between the piles of paper, shifting the papers when necessary. Then Trevor spread a white cloth over the two tables and Duncan started to arrange the silverware and dishes. Fish picked up his sherry glass from his board and swallowed the contents at one gulp. He noticed the other glass that was standing there, and emptied that one also.

“There now!” Trevor cried. “Dinner will be served!”

Marian stood up. Trevor’s eyes were glittering and a round red spot of excitement had appeared in the centre of each of his flour-white cheeks. A strand of blond hair had come detached and was hanging limply across his high forehead. He lit the candles on the table, and went around the living room turning off the floorlamps. Finally he removed the board from in front of Fish.

“You sit here, ah, Marian,” he said, and disappeared into the kitchen. She sat down in the card-table chair indicated. She could not get as close to the table as she would have liked, because of the legs. She ran her eyes over the dishes, checking: they were to begin with shrimp cocktail. That was all right. She wondered apprehensively what else would be produced for her body’s consumption. Evidently there would be many more objects: the table bristled with silverware. She noted with curiosity the ornately garlanded silver Victorian salt-cellar and the tasteful flower decoration which stood between the two candles. They were real flowers too, chrysanthemums in an oblong silver dish.

Trevor returned and sat down in the chair nearest the kitchen and they began to eat. Duncan was seated opposite, and Fish to her left, at what she supposed was the foot of the table, or possibly the head. She was glad they were dining by candlelight: it would be easier to dispose of things if necessary. She hadn’t as yet the least idea of how she was going to cope, if coping was going to be required, and it did not look as though Duncan would be much help. He seemed to have retreated into himself; he ate mechanically, and while chewing fixed his gaze on the candle flames, which made his eyes appear to be slightly crossed.

“Your silverware is beautiful,” she said to Trevor.

“Yes, isn’t it,” he smiled. “It’s been in the family for ages. The china too, I think it’s rather heavenly, so much nicer than those stark Danish things everybody is using nowadays.”

Marian inspected the pattern. It was a burgeoning floral design with many scallops, flutings and scrolls. “Lovely,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ve taken far too much trouble.”

Trevor beamed. She was obviously saying the right things. “Oh, no trouble at all. I think eating well is awfully important, why eat just to stay alive as most people do? The sauce is my own, do you like it?” He went on without waiting for an answer. “I can’t stand these bottled things, they’re so standardized; I can get real horseradish at the Market down near the waterfront but of course it’s so difficult to get fresh shrimp in this city…” He cocked his head to one side as though listening, then sprang out of his chair and pivoted round the corner into the kitchenette.

Fischer, who had not said anything since they had sat down, now opened his mouth and began to speak. Since he continued to eat at the same time, the intake of food and the output of words made a rhythm, Marian commented to herself, much like breathing, and he seemed to be able to handle the alternation quite as automatically; which was a good thing because she was sure that if he paused to think about it something would go down the wrong way. It would be more than painful to have a shrimp caught in one’s windpipe; especially with horseradish sauce. She watched him, fascinated. She was able to stare openly because he had his eyes shut most of the time. His fork found its way to his mouth by some mechanism or sense peculiar to himself, she couldn’t imagine how: perhaps batlike supersonic radar waves bounced back from the fork; or perhaps his individual whiskers functioned like antennae. He didn’t break his pace even when Trevor, who had been busily removing the shrimp-cocktail dishes, set his soup plate in front of him, though he opened his eyes long enough to pick up his soup spoon after a preliminary trial with his fork.

“Now my proposed thesis topic,” he had begun. “They may not approve of it, they’re very conservative around here, but even if they turn it down I can always write it up for one of the journals, no human thought is ever wasted; anyway it’s publish or perish these days, if I can’t do it here I can always do it in the States. What I have in mind is something quite revolutionary, ‘Malthus and the Creative Metaphor,’ Malthus being of course merely a symbol for what I want to get at, that’s the inescapable connection between the rise of the birth rate in modern times, say the past two or three centuries, especially the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth, and the change in the way the critics have been thinking about poetry, with the consequent change in the way poets have been writing it, and oh I could safely extend the thing to cover all of the creative arts. It’ll be an interdisciplinary study, a crossing over the presently much too rigid field lines, a blend of say economics, biology, and literary criticism. People get much too narrow, too narrow, they’re specializing too much, that makes you lose sight of a lot of things. Of course I’ll have to get some statistics and draw some graphs; thus far I’ve merely been doing the groundwork thinking, the primary research, the necessary examination of the works of ancient and modern authors…”

They were having sherry with the soup. Fish groped for his sherry glass, almost upsetting it.

Marian was now under crossfire, since as soon as Trevor had sat down again he had begun to talk at her from the other side, telling her about the soup, which was clear and subtly flavoured: how he had extracted its essences, painstakingly, moment by moment, at a very low heat; and since he was the only person at the table who was looking more or less at her she felt obliged to look at him in return. Duncan wasn’t paying any attention to anyone and neither Fish nor Trevor seemed at all disconcerted by the fact that both of them were talking at once. They were evidently used to it. She found however that she could manage by nodding and smiling from time to time and keeping her eyes riveted on Trevor and her ears on Fish, who was continuing, “You see as long as the population, per square mile especially, was low and the infant mortality rate and the death rate in general was high, there was a premium on Birth. Man was in harmony with the purposes, the cyclical rhythms of Nature, and the earth said, Produce, Produce. Be fruitful and multiply, if you’ll recall…”

Trevor sprang up and dashed around the table, removing the soup plates. His voice and his gestures were