The Edible Woman

  Marian was sitting on the edge of the bed, bending slightly down towards his talking face, only half listening to the monotonous voice. She was studying the contours of his skull under the papery skin, wondering how anyone could be that thin and still remain alive. She did not want to touch him now, she was even slightly repelled by the hollowness of the eye sockets, the angular hinge of the jawbone moving up and down in front of the ear.

  Suddenly he opened his eyes. He stared at her for a minute as though he couldn't remember who she was and how she happened to be in his bedroom. "Hey," he said finally in a different voice, "you look sort of like me in that." He reached out a hand and tugged at the shoulder of the dressing gown, pulling her down. She let herself sink.

  The transition from the flat hypnotic voice, and then the realization that he had actual flesh, a body like most other people, startled her at first. She felt her own body stiffen in resistance, begin to draw away; but he had both arms around her now. He was stronger than she had thought. She was not sure what was happening: there was an uneasy suspicion in one corner of her mind that what he was really caressing was his own dressing gown, and that she merely happened to be inside it.

  She pulled her face away and gazed down at him. His eyes were closed. She kissed the end of his nose. "I think I ought to tell you something," she said softly; "I'm engaged." At that moment she could not recall exactly what Peter looked like, but the memory of his name was accusing her.

  His dark eyes opened and looked up at her vacantly. "That's your problem, then," he said. "It's like me telling you I got an A on my Pre-Raphaelite Pornography paper - interesting, but it doesn't have much of anything to do with anything. Does it?"

  "Well, but it does," she said. The situation was rapidly becoming a matter of conscience. "I'm going to get married, you know. I shouldn't be here."

  "But you are here." He smiled. "Actually I'm glad you told me. It makes me feel a lot safer. Because really," he said earnestly, "I don't want you to think that all this means anything. It never sort of does, for me. It's all happening really to somebody else." He kissed the end of her nose. "You're just another substitute for the laundromat."

  Marian wondered whether her feelings ought to be hurt, but decided that they weren't: instead she was faintly relieved. "I wonder what you're a substitute for, then," she said.

  "That's the nice thing about me. I'm very flexible, I'm the universal substitute." He reached up over her head and turned off the light.

  Not very much later the front door was opened and closed, admitting a number of heavy footsteps. "Oh, shit," he said from somewhere inside his dressing gown. "They're back." He pushed her upright, turned the light back on, yanked the dressing gown closed around her and slithered off the bed, smoothing his hair down over his forehead with both hands, then straightening his sweater. He stood in the middle of the room for an instant, glaring wildly at the bedroom doorway, then clashed across the room, seized the chessboard, dropped it onto the bed, and sat down facing her. He quickly began to set the toppled pieces upright.

  "Hi," he said calmly a moment later, to someone who had presumably appeared in the doorway. Marian was feeling too dishevelled to look around. "We were just having a game of chess."

  "Oh, good show," said a dubious voice.

  "Why get all upset about it?" Marian said, when whoever it was had gone into the bathroom and shut the door. "It's nothing to be disturbed about, it's all perfectly natural, you know. If anything it's their fault for barging in like that." She herself was feeling extraordinarily guilty.

  "Well, I told you," he said, staring down at the orderly pattern of chessmen on the board. "They think they're my parents. You know parents never understand about things like that. They'd think you were corrupting me. They have to be protected from reality." He reached across the chessboard and took hold of her hand. His fingers were dry and rather cold.

  17

  Marian gazed down at the small silvery image reflected in the bowl of the spoon: herself upside down, with a huge torso narrowing to a pinhead at the handle end. She tilted the spoon and her forehead swelled, then receded. She felt serene.

  She looked fondly across the white tablecloth and the intervening plates and the basket of rolls at Peter, who smiled back at her. The angles and curves of his face were highlighted by the orange glow from the shaded candle at the side of the table; in the shadow his chin was stronger, his features not so smooth. Really, she thought, anyone seeing him would find him exceptionally handsome. He was wearing one of his suave winter costumes - dark suit, sombrely opulent tie - not as jaunty as some of his young-man-about-town suits, but more quietly impressive. Ainsley had once called him "nicely packaged," but now Marian decided that she found this quality attractive. He knew how to blend in and stand out at the same time. Some men could never wear dark suits properly, they got flaky on the shoulders and shiny at the back, but Peter never shed and never shone in the wrong places. The sense of proud ownership she felt at being with him there in that more or less public way caused her to reach across the table and take his hand. He put his own hand on top of hers in answer.

  The waiter appeared with the wine, and Peter tasted it and nodded. The waiter poured and stepped back into the darkness.

  That was another nice thing about Peter. He could make that kind of decision so effortlessly. She had fallen into the habit in the last month or so of letting him choose for her. It got rid of the vacillation she had found herself displaying when confronted with a menu: she never knew what she wanted to have. But Peter could make up their minds right away. His taste ran towards steak and roast beef: he did not care for peculiar things like sweetbreads, and he didn't like fish at all. Tonight they were having Filet Mignon. Already it was fairly late, they had spent the earlier hours of the evening at Peter's apartment, and they were both, they had told each other, ravenous.

  Waiting for their food, they resumed the conversation they had begun earlier, while they were getting dressed again, about the proper education of children. Peter talked theoretically, about children as a category, carefully avoiding any application. But she knew perfectly well that it was their own future children they were really discussing: that was why it was so important. Peter thought that all children ought to be punished for breaches of discipline; even physically. Of course no one should ever strike a child in anger; the main thing was to be consistent. Marian was afraid of warping their emotions.

  "Darling, you don't understand these things," Peter said; "you've led a sheltered life." He squeezed her hand. "But I've seen the results, the courts are full of them, juvenile delinquents, and a lot of them from good homes too. It's a complex problem." He compressed his lips.

  Marian was secretly convinced she was right and resented being told she had led a sheltered life. "But shouldn't they be given understanding, instead of ...?"

  He smiled indulgently. "Try giving understanding to some of those little punks: the motorcycle boys and the dope addicts and the draft dodgers up from the States. You've never even seen one up close, I bet; some of them have lice. You think you can solve everything by good will, Marian, but it doesn't work; they have no sense of responsibility at all, they run around smashing things up just because they feel like it. That's how they were brought up, nobody kicked hell out of them when they deserved it. They think the world owes them a living."

  "Perhaps," Marian said primly, "somebody kicked hell out of them when they didn't deserve it. Children are very sensitive to injustice, you know."

  "Oh, I'm all in favour of justice," Peter said. "What about justice for the people whose property they destroy?"

  "You'd teach them not to drive around mowing down other people's hedges, I suppose."

  Peter chuckled warmly. Her disapproval of that incident and his laughter at her for it had become one of the reference points in their new pattern. But Marian's serenity had vanished with her own remark. She looked intently at Peter, trying to see his eyes, but he was glancing down at his wineglas
s, admiring perhaps the liquid richness of the red against the white of the tablecloth. He had leaned back a little in his chair and his face was now in shadow.

  She wondered why restaurants like this one were kept so dark. Probably to keep people from seeing each other very clearly while they were eating. After all, chewing and swallowing are pleasanter for those doing them than for those watching, she thought, and observing one's partner too closely might dispel the aura of romance that the restaurant was trying to maintain. Or create. She examined the blade of her knife.

  The waiter stepped forward from somewhere, soft and deft as a cat on the carpeted floor, and set her order before her: the filet on a wooden platter, oozing juicily within its perimeter of bacon. They both liked it rare: synchronizing the cooking times would never be a problem at any rate. Marian was so hungry she would have liked to devour the steak at one gulp.

  She began slicing and chewing, conveying the food to her grateful stomach. She was reconsidering the conversation, trying to get a clearer image of what she had meant by "justice." She thought that it ought to mean being fair, but even her notion of that became hazy around the edges as she looked at it. Did it mean an eye for an eye? And what good did it do anyway to destroy someone else's eye if you had lost your own? What about compensation? It seemed to be a matter of money in things like car accidents; you could even be awarded money for having suffered emotional distress. Once on a streetcar she had seen a mother bite a small child because it had bitten her. She gnawed thoughtfully through a tough piece, and swallowed.

  Peter, she decided, wasn't himself today. He had had a difficult case, one that involved a lot of intricate research; he had gone through precedent after precedent only to find that they all favoured the opposition. That was why he was making stern pronouncements: he was frustrated by complications, he wanted simplicity. He should realize though that if the laws weren't complicated he would never make any money.

  She reached for her wineglass, and looked up. Peter was watching her. He was three-quarters finished and she wasn't even half.

  "Thoughtful?" he said mellowly.

  "Not really. Just absent-minded." She smiled at him and returned her attention to the platter.

  Lately he had been watching her more and more.

  Before, in the summer, she used to think he didn't often look at her, didn't often really see her; in bed afterwards he would stretch out beside her and press his face against her shoulder, and sometimes he would go to sleep. These days however he would focus his eyes on her face, concentrating on her as though if he looked hard enough he would be able to see through her flesh and her skull and into the workings of her brain. She couldn't tell what he was searching for when he looked at her like that. It made her uneasy. Frequently when they were lying side by side exhausted on the bed she would open her eyes and realize that he had been watching her like that, hoping perhaps to surprise a secret expression on that face. Then he would run his hand gently over her skin, without passion, almost clinically, as if he could learn by touch whatever it was that had escaped the probing of his eyes. Or as if he was trying to memorize her. It was when she would begin feeling that she was on a doctor's examination table that she would take hold of his hand to make him stop.

  She picked at her salad, turning the various objects in the wooden bowl over with her fork: she wanted a piece of tomato. Maybe he had got hold of one of those marriage manuals; maybe that was why. It would be just like Peter, she thought with fondness. If you got something new you went out and bought a book that told you how to work it. She thought of the books and magazines on cameras that were part of the collection on the middle shelf in his room, between the law books and the detective novels. And he always kept the car manual in the glove compartment. So it would be according to his brand of logic to go out and buy a book on marriage, now that he was going to get married; one with easy-to-follow diagrams. She was amused.

  She spiked and devoured a black olive from her salad. That must be it. He was sizing her up as he would a new camera, trying to find the central complex of wheels and tiny mechanisms, the possible weak points, the kind of future performance to be expected: the springs of the machine. He wanted to know what made her tick. If that was what he was looking for ...

  She smiled to herself. Now I'm making things up, she thought.

  He was almost finished. She watched the capable hands holding the knife and fork, slicing precisely with an exact adjustment of pressures. How skilfully he did it: no tearing, no ragged edges. And yet it was a violent action, cutting; and violence in connection with Peter seemed incongruous to her. Like the Moose Beer commercials, which had begun to appear everywhere, in the subway trains, on hoardings, in magazines. Because she had worked on the premarketing survey she felt partially responsible for them; not that they were doing any harm. The fisherman wading in the stream, scooping the trout into his net, was too tidy: he looked as though his hair had just been combed, a few strands glued neatly to his forehead to show he was windblown. And the fish also was unreal; it had no slime, no teeth, no smell; it was a clever toy, metal and enamel. The hunter who had killed a deer stood posed and urbane, no twigs in his hair, his hands bloodless. Of course you didn't want anything in an advertisement to be ugly or upsetting; it wouldn't do, for instance, to have a deer with its tongue sticking out.

  She was reminded of the newspaper that morning, the front page story she had skimmed over without paying much attention. The young boy who had gone berserk with a rifle and killed nine people before he was cornered by the police. Shooting out of an upstairs window. She remembered him now, grey and white, gripped by two darker policemen, the eyes remote, guarded. He wasn't the kind who would hit anyone with his fist or even use a knife. When he chose violence it was a removed violence, a manipulation of specialized instruments, the finger guiding but never touching, he himself watching the explosion from a distance; the explosion of flesh and blood. It was a violence of the mind, almost like magic: you thought it and it happened.

  Watching him operating on the steak like that, carving a straight slice and then dividing it into neat cubes, made her think of the diagram of the planned cow at the front of one of her cookbooks: the cow with lines on it and labels to show you from which part of the cow all the different cuts were taken. What they were eating now was from some part of the back, she thought: cut on the dotted line. She could see rows of butchers somewhere in a large room, a butcher school, sitting at tables, clothed in spotless white, each with a pair of kindergarten scissors, cutting out steaks and ribs and roasts from the stacks of brown-paper cow-shapes before them. The cow in the book, she recalled, was drawn with eyes and horns and an udder. It stood there quite naturally, not at all disturbed by the peculiar markings painted on its hide. Maybe with lots of careful research they'll eventually be able to breed them, she thought, so that they're born already ruled and measured.

  She looked down at her own half-eaten steak and suddenly saw it as a hunk of muscle. Blood red. Part of a real cow that once moved and ate and was killed, knocked on the head as it stood in a queue like someone waiting for a streetcar. Of course everyone knew that. But most of the time you never thought about it. In the supermarket they had it all pre-packaged in cellophane, with name labels and price labels stuck on it, and it was just like buying a jar of peanut butter or a can of beans, and even when you went into a butcher shop they wrapped it up so efficiently and quickly that it was made clean, official. But now it was suddenly there in front of her with no intervening paper, it was flesh and blood, rare, and she had been devouring it. Gorging herself on it.

  She set down her knife and fork. She felt that she had turned rather pale, and hoped that Peter wouldn't notice. "This is ridiculous," she lectured herself. "Everyone eats cows, it's natural; you have to eat to stay alive, meat is good for you, it has lots of proteins and minerals." She picked up her fork, speared a piece, lifted it, and set it down again.

  Peter raised his head, smiling. "Christ I was hungry," h
e said, "I sure was glad to get that steak inside. A good meal always makes you feel a little more human."

  She nodded, and smiled back limply. He shifted his glance to her platter. "What's the matter, darling? You aren't finished."

  "No," she said, "I don't seem to be hungry any more. I guess I'm full." She meant to indicate by her tone of voice that her stomach was too tiny and helpless to cope with that vast quantity of food. Peter smiled and chewed, pleasantly conscious of his own superior capacity. "God," she thought to herself, "I hope it's not permanent; I'll starve to death!"

  She sat twisting her napkin unhappily between her fingers, watching the last of Peter's steak disappear into his mouth.

  18

  Marian was sitting at the kitchen table, disconsolately eating a jar of peanut butter and turning over the pages of her largest cookbook. The day after the filet, she had been unable to eat a pork chop, and since then, for several weeks, she had been making experiments. She had discovered that not only were things too obviously cut from the Planned Cow inedible for her, but that the Planned Pig and the Planned Sheep were similarly forbidden. Whatever it was that had been making these decisions, not her mind certainly, rejected anything that had an indication of bone or tendon or fibre. Things that had been ground up and re-shaped, hot dogs and hamburgers for instance, or lamb patties or pork sausages, were all right as long as she didn't look at them too closely, and fish was still permitted. She had been afraid to try chicken: she had been fond of it once, but it came with an unpleasantly complete skeletal structure, and the skin, she predicted, would be too much like an arm with goose bumps. For protein variety she had been eating omelettes and peanuts and quantities of cheese. The quiet fear, that came nearer to the surface now as she scanned the pages - she was in the "Salads" section - was that this thing, this refusal of her mouth to eat, was malignant; that it would spread; that slowly the circle now dividing the non-devourable from the devourable would become smaller and smaller, that the objects available to her would be excluded one by one. "I'm turning into a vegetarian," she was thinking sadly, "one of those cranks; I'll have to start eating lunch at health bars." She read, with distaste, a column headed Hints For Serving Yoghurt. "For a taste sensation, sprinkle it with chopped nuts!" the editress suggested with glee.