Authors: Margaret Atwood
The subway was closed down, its iron latticed gate pulled across the entrance.
“I guess we could take a bus,” Marian said.
“No; it’s too cold to stand and wait.”
They turned at the next corner and walked south down the wide empty street, past the lighted storefronts. There were few cars and fewer people. It must be really late, she thought. She tried to imagine what was going on at the party – was it over? Had Peter realized yet that she was no longer there? – but all she could picture was a confusion of noises and voices and fragments of faces and flashes of bright light.
She took Duncan’s hand. He wasn’t wearing gloves, so she put both his hand and her own into her pocket. He looked down at her then with an almost hostile expression, but he did not remove his hand. Neither of them spoke. It was getting colder and colder: her toes were beginning to ache.
They walked for what seemed hours, gently downwards toward the frozen lake although they were nowhere near it, past blocks and
blocks that contained nothing but tall brick office buildings and the vacant horizontal spaces of car dealers, with their strings of coloured lights and little flags; not what they were looking for at all. “I think we’re on the wrong street,” Duncan said after a time. “We should be further over.”
They went along a dark narrow cross-street whose sidewalks were treacherous with packed snow and emerged finally on a larger street gaudy with neon signs. “This looks more like it,” said Duncan.
“What are we going to do now?” she asked, conscious of the plaintive tone in her own voice. She felt helpless to decide. He was more or less in charge. After all, he was the one with the money.
“Hell,
I
don’t know how one goes about these things,” he said. “I’ve never done this before.”
“Neither have I,” she said defensively. “I mean, not like this.”
“There must be an accepted formula,” he said, “but I guess we’ll just have to make it up as we go along. We’ll take them in order, from north to south.” He scanned the street. “It looks as though they get crummier as you go down.”
“Oh, I hope it’s not a real dump,” she wailed, “with bugs!”
“Oh, I don’t know, bugs might make it sort of more interesting. Anyway we’ll have to take what we can get.”
He stopped in front of a narrow red-brick building sandwiched between a formal-rental store with a gritty bride in the window and a dusty-looking florist’s. “Royal Massey Hotel,” its dangling neon sign said; underneath the writing there was a coat-of-arms. “You wait here,” Duncan said. He went up the steps.
He came back down the steps. “Door’s locked,” he said.
They walked on. The next one had a more promising aspect. It was dingier, and the stone Grecian-scrolled cornices over the windows were dark grey with soot. “The Ontario Towers,” it said, in a red sign whose preliminary “O” had gone out. “Cheap Rates.” It was open.
“I’ll come in and stand in the lobby,” she said. Her feet were freezing. Besides, she felt a need to be courageous: Duncan was coping so well, she ought to provide at least moral support.
She stood on the dilapidated matting, trying to look respectable, and conscious of her earrings and of the improbability of the attempt. Duncan walked over to the night clerk, a wizened shred of a man who was staring at her suspiciously through his puckers. He and Duncan had a low-voiced conversation; then Duncan came back and took her arm and they walked out.
“What did he say?” she asked when they were outside.
“He said it wasn’t that sort of place.”
“That’s rather presumptuous,” she said. She was offended, and felt quite self-righteous.
Duncan snickered. “Come now,” he said, “no outraged virtue. All it means is that we’ve got to find one that
is
that sort of place.”
They turned a corner and went east along a likely looking street. They passed a few more shabby-genteel establishments before they came to one that was even shabbier, but definitely not genteel. In place of the crumbled brick facade characteristic of the others, it had pink stucco with large signs painted on it: “
BEDS 4$ A NITE
.” “
T.V. IN EVERY ROOM.”
“
VICTORIA AND ALBERT HOTEL
.” “
BEST BARGAIN IN TOWN
.” It was a long building. Further down they could see the “
MEN
” and “
LADIES AND ESCORTS
” sign that signalled a beer parlour, and it seemed to have a tavern too; though both would be closed at this hour.
“I think this is it,” said Duncan.
They went in. The night clerk yawned as he took down the key. “Sort of late buddy, isn’t it?” he said. “That’ll be four.”
“Better late,” Duncan said, “than never.” He took a handful of bills out of his pocket, scattering assorted change over the carpet. As he stooped to pick it up, the night clerk looked over at Marian with
an undisguised though slightly jaded leer. She drooped her eyelids at him. After all, she thought grimly, if I’m dressed like one and acting like one, why on earth shouldn’t he think I really am one?
They ascended the sparsely carpeted stairs in silence.
The room when they finally located it was the size of a large cupboard, furnished with an iron bedstead, a straight-backed chair, and a dresser whose varnish was peeling off. There was a miniature quarter-in-the-slot
T. V
. set bolted to the wall in one corner. On the dresser were a couple of folded threadbare towels in baby blue and pink. The narrow window opposite the bed had a blue neon sign hanging outside it; the sign flashed on and off, making an ominous buzzing noise. Behind the room door was another door that led to a cubbyhole of a bathroom.
Duncan bolted the door behind them. “Well, what do we do now?” he said. “You must know.”
Marian removed her boots, then her shoes. Her toes tingled with the pain of thawing. She looked at the gaunt face peering at her from between an upturned coat collar and a mass of windy hair; the face was dead white, all but the nose, which was red from the cold. As she watched he produced a tattered grey piece of kleenex from some recess in his clothing and wiped it.
God, she thought, what am I doing here? How did I get here anyway? What would Peter say? She walked across the room and stood in front of the window, looking out at nothing in particular.
“Oh boy,” said Duncan behind her, enthusiastically. She turned. He had discovered something new, a large ashtray that had been sitting on the dresser behind the towels. “It’s genuine.” The ashtray was in the form of a seashell, pink china with scalloped edges. “It says A Gift From Burk’s Falls on it,” he told her with glee. He turned it over to look on the bottom and some ashes fell out of it onto the floor. “Made In Japan,” he announced.
Marian felt a surge of desperation. Something had to be done. “Look,” she said, “for heaven’s sake put down that damned ashtray and take off your clothes and get into that bed!”
Duncan hung his head like a rebuked child. “Oh, alright,” he said.
He shed his clothes with such velocity that it looked as though he had concealed zippers somewhere, or one long zipper so his clothes came off together like a single skin. He tossed them in a heap onto the chair and scuttled with alacrity into the bed and lay with the sheets pulled up around his chin, watching her with barely disguised and only slightly friendly curiosity.
With tight-lipped determination she began to undress. It was somewhat difficult to wisp off her stockings in reckless abandon or even a reasonable facsimile of it with those two eyes goggling at her in such a frog-like manner from over the top of the sheet. She scrabbled with her fingers for the zipper at the back of her dress. She could not quite reach it.
“Unzip me,” she said tersely. He complied.
She threw the dress over the back of the chair and struggled out of her girdle.
“Hey!” he said. “A real one! I’ve seen them in the ads but I never got that far in real life, I’ve always wondered how they worked. Can I look at it?”
She handed it over to him. He sat up in bed to examine it, stretching it all of its three ways and flexing the bones. “God, how medieval,” he said. “How can you stand it? Do you have to wear one all the time?” He spoke of it as though it was some kind of unpleasant but necessary surgical appliance: a brace or a truss.
“No,” she said. She was standing in her slip, wondering what to do next. She refused, somewhat prudishly she supposed, to undress the rest of the way with the lights on; but he seemed to be having such a good time at the moment that she didn’t want to interrupt. On the other hand the room was cold and she was beginning to shiver.
She walked doggedly towards the bed, gritting her teeth. It was an assignment that was going to take a lot of perseverance. If she had had any sleeves on she would have rolled them up. “Move over,” she said.
Duncan flung away the girdle and pulled himself back into the bedclothes like a turtle into its shell. “Oh no,” he said, “I’m not letting you into this bed until you go in there and peel that junk off your face. Fornication may be all very well in its way, but if I’m going to come out looking like a piece of flowered wallpaper I reject it.”
She saw his point.
When she returned, scraped more or less clean, she snapped off the light and slithered into bed beside him. There was a pause.
“I guess now I’m supposed to crush you in my manly arms,” Duncan said out of the darkness.
She slid her hand beneath his cool back.
He groped for her head, snuffling against her neck. “You smell funny,” he said.
Half an hour later Duncan said, “It’s no use. I must be incorruptible. I’m going to have a cigarette.” He got up, stumbled the few steps across the room in the dark, located his clothes and rummaged around in them till he had found the pack, and returned. She could see parts of his face now and the china seashell gleaming in the light of the burning cigarette. He was sitting propped against the iron scrollwork at the head of the bed.
“I don’t exactly know what’s wrong,” he said. “Partly I don’t like not being able to see your face; but it would probably be worse if I could. But it’s not just that, I feel like some kind of little stunted creature crawling over the surface of a huge mass of flesh. Not that you’re fat,” he added, “you aren’t. There’s just altogether too much flesh around here. It’s suffocating.” He threw back the covers on his side of the bed. “That’s better,” he said. He rested the arm with the cigarette across his face.
Marian knelt beside him in the bed, holding the sheet around her like a shawl. She could barely trace the outlines of his long white body, flesh-white against bed-white, faintly luminous in the blue light from the street. Somebody in the next room flushed a toilet; the gurgling of the water in the pipes swirled through the air of the room and died away with a sound between a sigh and a hiss.
She clenched her hands on the sheet. She was tense with impatience and with another emotion that she recognized as the cold energy of terror. At this moment to evoke something, some response, even though she could not predict the thing that might emerge from beneath that seemingly passive surface, the blank white formless thing lying insubstantial in the darkness before her, shifting as her eyes shifted trying to see, that appeared to have no temperature, no odour, no thickness and no sound, was the most important thing she could ever have done, could ever do, and she couldn’t do it. The knowledge was an icy desolation worse than fear. No effort of will could be worth anything here. She could not will herself to reach out and touch him again. She could not will herself to move away.
The glow of the cigarette vanished; there was the hard china click of the ashtray being set down on the floor. She could sense that he was smiling in the darkness, but with what expression, sarcasm, malevolence, or even kindness, she could not guess.
“Lie down,” he said.
She sank back, still with the sheet clutched around her and her knees drawn up.
He put his arm around her. “No,” he said, “you have to unbend. Assuming the foetal position won’t be any help at all, god knows I’ve tried it long enough.” He stroked her with his hand, gently, straightening her out, almost as though he was ironing her.
“It isn’t something you can dispense, you know,” he said. “You have to let me take my own time.”
He edged over, closer to her now. She could feel his breath against the side of her neck, sharp and cool, and then his face pressing against her, nudging into her flesh, cool; like the muzzle of an animal, curious, and only slightly friendly.
T
hey were sitting in a grimy coffee shop around the corner from the hotel. Duncan was counting the rest of his money to see what they could afford to have for breakfast. Marian had undone the buttons of her coat, but was holding it together at the neck. She didn’t want any of the other people to see her red dress: it belonged too obviously to the evening before. She had put Ainsley’s earrings in her pocket.
Between them on the green arborite-surfaced table was an assortment of dirty plates and cups and crumbs and splashes and smears of grease, remnants of the courageous breakfasters who had pioneered earlier into the morning when the arborite surface was innocent as a wilderness, untouched by the knife and fork of man, and had left behind them the random clutter of rejected or abandoned articles typical of such light travellers. They knew they would never pass that way again. Marian looked at their waste-strewn trail with distaste, but she was trying to be casual about breakfast. She didn’t want her stomach to make a scene. I’ll just have coffee and toast, maybe with jelly; surely there will be no objections to that, she thought.
A waitress with harassed hair appeared and began to clear the table. She flapped a dog-eared menu down in front of each of them. Marian opened hers and looked at the column headed “Breakfast Suggestions.”
Last night everything had seemed resolved, even the imagined face of Peter with its hunting eyes absorbed into some white revelation. It had been simple clarity rather than joy, but it had been submerged in sleep; and waking to the sound of water sighing in the pipes and loud corridor voices, she could not remember what it was. She had lain quietly, trying to concentrate on it, on what it might possibly have been, gazing at the ceiling, which was blotched with distracting watermarks; but it was no use. Then Duncan’s head had emerged from beneath the pillow where he had placed it during the night for safe-keeping. He stared at her for a moment as though he didn’t have the least idea who she was or what he was doing in that room. Then “Let’s get out of here,” he said. She had leaned over and kissed him on the mouth, but after she had drawn back he had merely licked his lips, and as though reminded by the action said “I’m hungry. Let’s go for breakfast. You look awful,” he had added.