The Edible Woman

  "Well, nobody I know is going bald, at any rate," she said to herself. She was relieved.

  16

  She remembered the way to his apartment perfectly, although she couldn't recall either the number or the street name. She hadn't been in that district for a long time, in fact ever since the day of the beer interviews. She took the right directions and turnings almost automatically, as though she was trailing somebody by an instinct that was connected not with sight or smell but with a vaguer sense that had to do with locations. But it wasn't a complicated route: just across the baseball park, up the asphalt ramp and along a couple of blocks; though the way seemed longer now that she was walking in a darkness illuminated only by the dim street lamps rather than the former searing light of the sun. She walked quickly: already her legs were cold. The grass on the baseball park had been grey with frost.

  The few times she had thought about the apartment, in idle moments at the office when she had had nothing but a blank sheet of paper in front of her or at other times when she was bending to pick some piece of clutter off the floor, she had never given it any specific place in the city. She had an image in her mind of the inside, the appearance of the rooms, but not of the building itself. Now it was disconcerting to have the street produce it, square and ordinary and anonymous, more or less exactly where it had been before.

  She pushed the buzzer of Number Six and slipped through the inside glass door as soon as the mechanism started its chainsaw noise. Duncan opened the door partway. He stared at her suspiciously; in the semi-darkness his eyes gleamed behind his hair. He had a cigarette stub in his mouth, burning dangerously close to his lips.

  "Got the stuff?" he asked.

  Mutely she held towards him the small cloth bundle she had been carrying under her arm, and he stepped aside to let her come in.

  "It's not very much," he said, undoing the clothes. There were only two white cotton blouses, recently washed, a pillowcase, and a few guest towels embroidered with flowers, donated by a great-aunt, that were wrinkled from lying underneath everything else on the linen shelf.

  "I'm sorry," she said, "it was really all I had."

  "Well, it's better than nothing," he said grudgingly. He turned and walked towards his bedroom.

  Marian wasn't certain whether she was supposed to follow him or whether he expected her to go away now that she had made the delivery. "Can I watch?" she asked, hoping he wouldn't consider it an invasion of privacy. She didn't feel like going back to her own apartment right away. There would be nothing to do and she had, after all, sacrificed an evening with Peter.

  "Sure, if you want to; though there isn't much to see."

  She made her way towards the hall. The living room had not been altered since her former visit, except that there were if possible more stray papers lying about. The three chairs were still in the same positions; a slab of board was leaning against an arm of the red plush one. Only one of the lamps, the one by the blue chair, was turned on. Marian inferred that both of the roommates were out.

  Duncan's room too was much the same as she remembered it. The ironing board was nearer the centre of the room and the chessmen had been set up in their two opposing rows; the black-and-white chequered board was resting now on top of a stack of books. On the bed were several freshly ironed white shirts on coathangers. Duncan hung them up in the closet before going over to plug in the iron. Marian took off her coat and sat down on the bed.

  He threw his cigarette into one of the crowded ashtrays on the floor, waited for the iron to heat, testing it at intervals on the board, and then began to iron one of the blouses, with slow concentration and systematic attention to collar corners. Marian watched him silently; he obviously didn't want to be interrupted. She found it strange to see someone else ironing her clothes.

  Ainsley had given her a peculiar look when she had come out of her bedroom with her coat on and the bundle under her arm. "Where are you going with those?" she had asked. It was too small a lot for the laundromat.

  "Oh, just out."

  "What'll I say if Peter calls?"

  "He won't call. But just say I'm out." She had plunged down the stairs then, not wishing to explain anything at all about Duncan or even to reveal his existence. She felt it might upset the balance of power. But Ainsley had no time at the moment for anything more than a tepid curiosity: she was too elated by the probable success of her own campaign, and also by what she had called "a stroke of luck."

  Marian had asked, when she had reached the apartment and had found Ainsley in the living room with a paperback on baby and child care, "Well, how did you get the poor thing out of here this morning?"

  Ainsley laughed. "Great stroke of luck," she said. "I was sure the old fossil down there would be lying in wait for us at the bottom of the stairs. I really didn't know what I'd do. I was trying to think of some bluff, like saying he was the telephone man...."

  "She tried to pin me down about it last night," Marian interjected. "She knew perfectly well he was up there."

  "Well for some reason she actually went out. I saw her go from the living-room window; just by chance really. Can you imagine? I didn't think she ever went out, not in the mornings. I skipped work today of course and I was just wandering around having a cigarette. But when I saw her go I got Len up and stuck his clothes on him and hustled him down the stairs and out of there before he was quite awake. He had a terrible hangover too, he just about killed that bottle. All by himself. I don't think he's too sure yet exactly what happened." She smiled with her small pink mouth.

  "Ainsley, you're immoral."

  "Why? He seemed to enjoy it. Though he was terribly apologetic and anxious this morning when we were out having breakfast, and then sort of soothing, as though he was trying to console me or something. Really it was embarrassing. And then, you know, as he got wider and wider awake and soberer and soberer, he couldn't wait to 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 Oxford English Dictionary."

  "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 I know whether they're true? Maybe the real truth is that I want to think that he wants to think he's my mother. Actually I'm not an orphan anyway, I do have some parents, back there somewhere. Can you believe that?"

  "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. "I'll just do the sleeves and the collar. It looks like you missed a few places."

  "You mean the one I have on?"

  "That's the one," he said. He unwound his arms from around his knees and stood up. "Here, you can wear my dressing gown. Don't worry, I won't peek." He took a grey object out of the closet, handed it to her, and turned his back.

  Marian stood for a moment, clutching the grey bundle, uncertain how to act. Doing as he suggested, she knew, was going to make her feel both uneasy and silly; but to say at this point, "No thank you, I'd rather not," when the request was obviously harmless, would have made her feel even sillier. After a minute she found herself undoing the buttons, then slipping on the dressing gown. It was much too large for her: the sleeves came down over her hands and the bottom edge trailed along the floor.

  "Here you are then," she said.

  She watched with a slight anxiety as he wielded the iron. This time the activity seemed more crucial, it was like a dangerous hand moving back and forth slowly an inch away, the cloth had been so recently next to her skin. If he burns it or anything though, she thought, I can always put on one of the others.

  "There," he said, "all done." He unplugged the iron again and draped the blouse over the small end of the ironing board; he seemed to have forgotten that she was supposed to be wearing it. Then, unexpectedly, he came over to the bed, crawled onto it beside her, and stretched himself out on
his back with his eyes closed and his arms behind his head.

  "God," he said, "all these distractions. How does one go on? It's like term papers, you produce all that stuff and nothing is ever done with it, you just get a grade for it and heave it in the trash, you know that some other poor comma-counter is going to come along the year after you and have to do the same thing over again, it's a treadmill, even ironing, you iron the damn things and then you wear them and they get all wrinkled again."

  "Well, and then you can iron them again, can't you?" Marian said soothingly. "If they stayed neat you wouldn't have anything to do."

  "Maybe I'd do something worthwhile for a change," he said. His eyes were still closed. "Production-consumption. You begin to wonder whether it isn't just a question of making one kind of garbage into another kind. The human mind was the last thing to be commercialized but they're doing a good job of it now; what is the difference between the library stacks and one of those used-car graveyards? What bothers me though is that none of it is ever final; you can't ever finish anything. I have this great plan for permanent leaves on trees, it's a waste for them having to produce a new lot each year; and come to think of it there's no reason at all why they have to be green, either; I'd have them white. Black trunks and white leaves. I can hardly wait till it snows, this city in the summer has altogether too much vegetation, it's stifling, and then it all falls off and lies around in the gutters. The thing I like about the place I came from, it's a mining town, there isn't much of anything in it but at least it has no vegetation. A lot of people wouldn't like it. It's the smelting plants that do it, tall smokestacks reaching up into the sky and the smoke glows red at night, and the chemical fumes have burnt the trees for miles around, it's barren, nothing but the barren rock, even grass won't grow on most of it, and there are the slag-heaps too; where the water collects on the rock it's a yellowish-brown from the chemicals. Nothing would grow there even if you planted it, I used to go out of the town and sit on the rocks, about this time of year, waiting for the snow...."