Authors: Margaret Atwood
“Anyway, it’s all ancient history,” says Zenia conversationally. Charis is back in her own body, she’s in control of it, she’s moving it towards
the door. Nothing has happened after all. Surely nothing has happened. She turns and looks at Zenia. Black lines are radiating out from her, like the filaments of a spider web. No. Black lines are converging on her, targeting her; soon she will be ensnarled. In the centre of them her soul flutters, a pale moth. She does have a soul after all.
Charis gathers up all her strength, all her inner light; she calls on it for what she has to do, because it will take a lot of effort. Whatever Zenia has done, however evil she has been, she needs help. She needs help from Charis, on the spiritual plane.
Charis’s mouth opens. “I forgive you,” is what she hears herself saying.
Zenia laughs angrily. “Who do you think you are?” she says. “Why should I give a flying fuck whether you forgive me or not? Stuff your forgiveness! Get a man! Get a life!”
Charis sees her life the way Zenia must see it: an empty cardboard box, overturned by the side of the road, with nobody in it. Nobody worth mentioning. This is somehow the most hurtful thing of all.
She invokes her amethyst geode, closes her eyes, sees crystal. “I have a life,” she says. She straightens her shoulders and turns the doorknob, holding back tears.
Not until she is walking unsteadily across the lobby towards the front door does it cross Charis’s mind that maybe Zenia was lying. Maybe she was lying about Billy, about the chickens, about everything. She has lied to Charis before, and just as convincingly. Why wouldn’t she be doing it now?
R
oz leans sideways and gives Charis a one-armed hug. “Of course she was lying,” she says. “Billy wouldn’t say such a thing.” What does she know from Billy? Not a shred, she never met him, but she’s willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, because what does it cost, and anyway she wants to lighten things up. “Zenia’s just malicious. She says stuff like that just for the heck of it. She only wanted to bother you.”
“But why?” says Charis, on the verge of tears. “Why would she, why did she say that? She was so negative. It really hurt. Now I don’t know what to think.”
“It’s okay, babe,” says Roz, giving Charis another squeeze. “The heck with her! We won’t invite her to our birthday parties, will we?”
“For heaven’s sake,” says Tony, because Roz always goes too far and Tony is finding this scene much too infantile for her taste. “This is critical!”
“Yes,” says Roz, getting a grip, “I know it is.”
“I do have a life,” says Charis, blinking wet eyes.
“You have a rich inner life,” says Tony firmly. “More than most.”
She digs into her bag, finds a crumpled tissue, hands it to Charis. Charis blows her nose.
“Now, here’s me,” says Roz. “Ms. Mature Fuller Figure meets the Queen of the Night. On the enjoyment scale, it didn’t get ten out often.”
Roz is in her office, pacing, pacing. On her desk is a stack of files, project files and charitable-donation files both, the Livers, the Kidneys, the Lungs, and the Hearts all clamouring for attention, not to mention the Bag Ladies and the Battered Wives, but they will all have to wait, because in order to give you have to make, it doesn’t grow on trees. She’s supposed to be thinking about the Rubicon project, as presented by Lookmakers.
Lipsticks for the Nineties
is the concept they’re proposing, which Boyce says translates as Oral Glues for Nonagenarians. But Roz can’t get her teeth into it, she’s too preoccupied. Preoccupied? Frenzied! Her body’s a hormone-fuelled swelter, the inside of her head’s like a car wash, all those brushes whirring around, suds flying, vision obscured. Zenia’s on the prowl, and God knows where! She might be climbing up the side of this building even now, with suckers attached to the bottoms of her feet like a fly.
Roz has eaten all the Mozart Balls, she’s smoked every single cigarette, and one of Boyce’s drawbacks, his only one really, is that he doesn’t smoke, so she can’t bum a fag off him, oops, pardon the pun; his lungs at any rate are pure as the driven. Maybe the new downstairs receptionist – Mitzi, Bambi? – might have a pack tucked away; she could call down, but how demeaning, Ms. Boss clawing the walls for a cig.
She doesn’t want to leave the building right now, because it’s about time for Harriet the detective to call. Roz has asked her to call every afternoon at three to fill her in on progress. “We’re narrowing it down,” was all Harriet said for the first few days. But yesterday
she said, “There’s two possibilities. One’s at the King Eddie, the other one’s at the Arnold Garden. The people we’ve been able to – the people who have kindly agreed to identify the photo – each one of them is sure it’s got to be her.”
“What makes you think you have to choose?” said Roz.
“Pardon?” said Harriet.
“Bet you anything she’s got rooms at both of those hotels,” said Roz. “It would be just like her! Two names, two rooms.”
All foxes dig back doors
. “What’re the room numbers?”
“Let us do a little more checking,” said Harriet cautiously. “I’ll let you know.” She could evidently visualize an undesirable situation: Roz barging into some stranger’s room, hurling furniture and accusations and breathing fire, and Harriet getting hit with a lawsuit for having given her the wrong room number.
So now Roz is on tenterhooks, whatever those are. Something her mother knew about, because it was her expression. She makes a mental note to ask Boyce about it, and shakes herself, and sits down at her desk, and opens up the Lipsticks for the Nineties file that Boyce has annotated for her. She likes the business plan, she likes the projections; but Boyce is right, the name itself is wrong, because they’ll want to expand the line beyond lipsticks. An eye shadow that would also shrink puffy lids would be a breakthrough, she’d buy that, and if she would buy a thing it’s a cinch that a lot of other women would, as well, if the price is right. For another thing,
the Nineties
has to go. The nineties have not been great news so far, even though there’s only been a year of them, so why underline the fact that everyone’s stuck in them?
No, Roz is agreed – reading Boyce’s tidy notes in the margins of the proposal, he has real talent, that boy – that they should opt for time travel, some history, the big H, via the river names tie-in. Women always find it easier to visualize themselves as having a
romantic fling of it in some other age, an age before flush toilets and Jacuzzis and electric coffee grinders, an age in which a bunch of tubercular, prematurely wrinkled servants would have had to wash the men’s undershorts, if any, by hand, and empty the slop pots and heat up the water in big cauldrons, in filthy rat-infested kitchens, and trample the coffee beans underfoot like grapes. Give Roz appliances any day. Appliances with warranties, and dependable household help that comes in twice a week.
As for the ads, she wants a lot of lace in them. Lace, and a wind machine, to blow the hair around for that burning-of-Charleston dramatic-crisis look. It will help to shoot the models on an angle, with the camera slanted up. Statuesque, monumental, as long as you can’t see up their nostrils, which is the problem Roz has always had with bronze heroes on horseback. She’s thought of another river name too, another colour:
Athabasca
. A sort of bronzed pink. Frostbite crossed with exposure. How you get in the North without sunblock.
The phone rings and Roz practically falls on it. “Harriet,” says Harriet. “It’s the Arnold Garden for sure, Room 1409. I went there myself and pretended to be a chambermaid with towels. No doubt about it.”
“Great,” says Roz, and jots down the room number.
“There’s one other thing you ought to know,” says Harriet. “Before you rush in.”
“What, where angels fear to tread?” says Roz impatiently. “What is it?”
“She appears to be having an affair, or something, with … well, with a much younger man. He’s been with her in her room almost every day, according to our source.”
Why is Harriet sounding so coy? thinks Roz. “That wouldn’t surprise me,” she says. “Zenia would rob anything, cradles included. As long as he’s rich.”
“He is,” says Harriet. “So to speak. Or he will be.” There’s a hesitation.
“Why are you telling me this?” says Roz. “I don’t care who she’s screwing!”
“You asked me to find out everything,” says Harriet reproachfully. “I don’t know quite how to put it. The young man in question appears to be your son.”
“What?” says Roz.
After hanging up, she grabs her purse and hits the elevator and then the sidewalk at a fast trot, the nearest she can get to a run, what with her wicked shoes. She makes it to the nearest Becker’s and buys three packs of du Mauriers and tears one open with trembling fingers, and lights up so fast she practically sets fire to her hair. She’ll kill Zenia, she’ll kill her! The effrontery, the brass, the consummate
bad taste
, to go after small helpless Larry, Larry son of Mitch, after doing away with his father! Well, as good as doing away.
Pick on somebody your own size!
And Larry, a sitting duck, poor baby; so lonely, so scrambled. Probably he remembers Zenia from when he was fifteen; probably he had a jerk-off crush on her, back then. Probably he thinks she’s glamorous, and warm and understanding. Zenia has a good line in the glamour and understanding department. Plus, she’ll tell him a few hard-luck stories of her own and he’ll think they’re both orphans of the storm together. Roz can’t stand it!
Smoke percolates through her, and after a while she feels a little calmer. She walks back to the office, her head sizzling slowly. What exactly, what
the fuck
, is she supposed to do now?
She knocks on Boyce’s door. “Boyce? Mind if I pick your brain for a minute?” she says.
Boyce stands up courteously and offers her a chair. “Ask, and it shall be given you,” he says. “God.”
“Don’t I know it,” says Roz, “but I haven’t been getting such great results from God lately, in the answer department.” She sits down, crosses her legs, and takes the cup of coffee Boyce provides. The part in his hair is so straight it’s almost painful, as if done with a knife. His tie has tiny ducks on it. “Let me put a theoretical case to you,” she says.
“I’m all ears,” says Boyce. “Is this about Oral Glues?”
“No,” says Roz. “It’s a story. Once upon a time there was a woman who was married to a guy who used to fool around.”
“Anyone I know?” says Boyce. “The guy, I mean.”
“With other women,” says Roz firmly. “Well, this woman put up with it for the sake of the kids, and anyway these things never lasted long because the other women were just wind-up sex toys, or that’s what the man kept saying. According to him our heroine was the real thing, the apple of his eyes, the fire in his fireplace, and so on. Then one day, along comes this bimbo – excuse me,
this person
about the same age as the woman in question, only, I have to admit it, quite a lot better-looking, though between you and me and the doorpost her tits were fake.”
“She walks in beauty, like the blight,” says Boyce with sympathy. “Byron.”
“Exactly,” says Roz. “She was smart, as well, but if she was a guy you’d have to call her a prick. I mean, there is no female name for it, because
bitch
doesn’t even begin to cover it! She tells some story about being a half-Jewish war orphan rescued from the Nazis, and our heroine, who is all heart, falls for it and gets her a job; and Ms. Dirigible-chest pretends to be our pal’s grateful buddy, and gives the husband the cold shoulder, implying by her body language that she finds him less attractive than a lawn dwarf, which turned out to be the ultimate truth, in the end.
“Meanwhile our two girl chums have a lot of cosy networking lunches together, discussing world affairs and the state of the business.
Then the lady starts having it off with Mr. Susceptible, behind Ms. Numskull’s back. For Ms. Lollapalooza it’s just a
thing –
worse, a tactic – but for him it’s the real item, the grand passion at last. I don’t know how she did it, but she did. Considering it was him, and thousands before her had failed, she was nothing short of brilliant.”
“Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain,” says Boyce sombrely.
“Right,” says Roz. “So she cons everyone into putting her in charge of the business in question, which is a medium-hefty enterprise, and before you know it she’s moved in with Mr. Sticky Fingers, and they’re living together in the Designer Love-nest of the Year, leaving the wee missus to gnaw her stricken little heart out, which she does. But passion wanes, on Vampira’s part, not his, when he finds out she’s been having nooners with some stud on a motorcycle and fusses up about it. So she forges a few cheques – using his signature, copied no doubt from countless drool-covered mash notes – and disappears with the cash. Does that cool his ardour? Do chickens have tits? He goes raving off after her as if his pants were plugged into the light socket.”
“I know the plot,” says Boyce. “Happens in all walks of life.”
“Ms. Lightfingers disappears,” says Roz, “but next thing you know, she turns up in a metal soup can. Seems she’s met with a nasty accident, and now she’s cat food. She gets planted in the cemetery, not that I – not that my friend shed any tears – and Mr. Sorrowful comes creeping back to wee wifey, who stands on her hind legs and refuses to take him in. Well, can you blame her? I mean, enough is enough. So, instead of getting his head shrunk, which was long overdue, or picking up some new little sex gadget, as he has done many times before, what does he do? He’s dying of love, not for Mrs. Domestic but for Ms. Fiery Loins. So he goes out on his boat in a hurricane and gets himself drowned. Maybe he even jumped. Who knows?”
“A waste,” says Boyce. “Bodies are so much nicer alive.”
“There’s more,” says Roz. “It turns out this woman wasn’t dead after all. She was just fooling. She turns up again, and this time she gets her hooks into the only son – the one and only well-beloved son – I mean, can you imagine? She must be fifty! She gets her hooks into the son of the woman she ripped off and the man she as good as killed!”