Margaret Atwood - Stone Mattress - Nine Tales

Serves him right for marrying a youngster. Serves him right for marrying three of them in a row. Serves him right for marrying his graduate students. Serves him right for marrying a bossy, self-appointed custodian of his life and times. Serves him right for marrying.

But at least Reynolds won’t leave him, he’s fairly certain of that. She’s polishing up her widow act; she wouldn’t want it to go to waste. She’s so competitive that she’ll hang in there to make sure neither of the two previous wives can lay claim to any part of him, literary or otherwise. She’ll want to control his narrative, she’ll want to help write the biography, if any. She’ll also want to cut out his two children — one from each ex-wife, and hardly children any longer, since one of them must be fifty-one, or maybe fifty-two. He hadn’t paid much attention to them when they were babies. They and their pastel, urine-soaked paraphernalia had taken up so much space, they’d attracted so much attention that ought to have been his, and he’d decamped in each case before they were three; so they don’t like him much, nor does he blame them, having hated his own father. Nevertheless there’s sure to be some squabbling after the funeral: he’s making sure of that by not finalizing his will. If only he could hover around in mid-air to watch!

Reynolds gives him a final stroke with the lint brush, does up his second-from-the-top shirt button, tugs his collar into place. “There,” she says. “Much better.”

“Who is this girl?” he says. “This girl who’s so interested in my so-called work. Got a cute butt?”

“Stop that,” says Reynolds. “Your whole generation was obsessed with sex. Mailer, Updike, Roth — all of those guys.”

“They were older than me,” says Gavin.

“Not much. It was sex, sex, sex with them, all the time! They couldn’t keep it zipped!”

“Your point being?” says Gavin coolly. He’s relishing this. “Is that bad, sex? Are you a little prude all of a sudden? What else should we have been obsessed with? Shopping?”

“My point being,” says Reynolds. She has to pause, reconsider, rally her inner battalions. “Okay, shopping is a poor substitute for sex, granted. But faut de mieux.”

That hurts, thinks Gavin. “Faut de what?” he says.

“Don’t play dumb, you understood me. My point being, not everything is about butts. This woman’s name is Naveena. She deserves to be treated with respect. She’s already published two papers on the Riverboat years. She happens to be very bright. I believe she’s of Indian extraction.”

Of Indian extraction . Where does she pick up these archaic locutions? When she’s trying to be properly literary she talks like a comic lady in an Oscar Wilde play. “Naveena,” he says. “Sounds like cheese food slices. Or better — like a hair-removal cream.”

“You don’t have to disparage people,” says Reynolds, who used to dote on the fact that he disparaged people, or at least some people; she’d thought it meant that he had a superior intellect and an informed taste. Now she thinks it’s merely nasty, or else a symptom of a vitamin deficiency. “It’s so knee-jerk with you! Running them down doesn’t make you any bigger, you know. Naveena happens to be a serious literary scholar. She has an M.A.”

“And a cute butt, or else I’m not talking to her,” says Gavin. “Every halfwit has an M.A. They’re like popcorn.” He puts Reynolds through this every time — every time she trots out some new aficionado, some new aspirant, some new slave from the salt mines of academe — because he has to put her through something.

“Popcorn?” says Reynolds. Gavin flounders momentarily — now what did he mean by that? He takes a breath. “Tiny little kernels,” he says. “Superheated in the academic cooker. The hot air expands. Poof! An M.A.” Not bad, he thinks. Also true. The universities want the cash, so they lure these kids in. Then they turn them into puffballs of inflated starch, with no jobs to match. Better to have a certificate in plumbing.

Rey laughs, a little sourly: she has an M.A. herself. Then she frowns. “You should be grateful,” she says. Here comes the scolding, the whack with the rolled-up newspaper. Bad Gavvy! “At least someone’s still interested in you! A young person! Some poets would kill for that. The ’60s is hot right now, happily for you. So you can’t complain of being neglected.”

“Since when have I done that?” he says. “I never complain!”

“You complain all the time, about everything,” says Reynolds. She’s reaching the fed-up moment; he shouldn’t take it any further. But he does.

“I should have married Constance,” he says. That’s his ace: plonk! Right down on the table. Those five words are usually very effective: he might score a barrage of hostility, and maybe even some tears. Top marks: a slammed door. Or a projectile. She winged him with an ashtray once.

Reynolds smiles. “Well, you didn’t marry Constance,” she said. “You married me. So suck it up.”

Gavin misses a beat. She’s playing impervious. “Oh, if only I could,” he says, with exaggerated longing.

“Dentures are no impediment,” says Reynolds crisply. She can be a bitch when he pushes her too far. The bitchiness is a thing he admires in her, though reluctantly when it’s turned on him. “Now I’m going to get the tea ready. If you don’t behave yourself when Naveena comes, you won’t get a cookie.” The cookie ploy is a joke, her attempt to lighten things up, but it’s faintly horrifying to him that the threat of being deprived of such a cookie hits home. No cookie! A wave of desolation sweeps through him. Also he’s drooling. Christ. Has it come down to this? Sitting up to beg for treats?

Reynolds marches out to the kitchen, leaving Gavin alone on the sofa gazing at the view, such as it is. There’s a blue sky, there’s a picture window. The window gives onto a fenced enclosure in which there’s a palm tree. Also a jacaranda, or is it a frangipani? He wouldn’t know, they only rent this house.

There’s a swimming pool that he never uses, although it’s heated. Reynolds plunges into it occasionally before he wakes up in the morning, or so she says: she likes to flaunt such examples of her physical agility. Leaves fall into the pool from the jacaranda or whatever it is, and also spiky prongs from the palm. They float around on the surface, swirling in the slow eddy caused by the circulation pump. A girl comes by three times a week and skims them out with a net on a long handle. Her name is Maria; she’s a high school student; she’s included in the rent. She lets herself in through the garden gate with a key and moves over the tiled and slippery patio noiselessly on rubber soles. She has long dark hair and a lovely waist, and may possibly be Mexican; Gavin doesn’t know because he’s never spoken to her. She always wears shorts, light blue denim or darker blue denim, and she bends over in her denim shorts while skimming out the leaves. Her face, when he’s able to see it, is impassive, though verging on the solemn.

Oh Maria, he sighs to himself. Are there troubles in your life? If not, there soon will be. What a trim ass you have. All the better to wig and wag.

Does she ever see him watching her through the picture window? Most likely. Does she think he’s a lecherous old man? Very probably. But he isn’t exactly that. How to convey the mix of longing, wistfulness, and muted regret that he feels? His regret is that he isn’t a lecherous old man, but he wishes he were. He wishes he still could be. How to describe the deliciousness of ice cream when you can no longer taste it?

He’s writing a poem that begins, “Maria skims the dying leaves.” Though technically speaking the leaves are already dead.