Margaret Atwood - Stone Mattress - Nine Tales

No, he does not realize. It’s meant to be a gallantry. He can’t help it, poor man, being partly Hungarian in origin, he claims; so Wilma lets him prattle on, divine breasts here, marble thighs there, and doesn’t comment crisply on his redundancies — as she might once have done — when he relates the same seduction over and over. We have to be kind to one another in here, she tells herself. We’re all we have left.

The bottom line is that Tobias can still see. She can’t afford to be annoyed by the irritating physical attractions of stale-dated stunners as long as Tobias can look out the window and tell her what’s going on down there in the grounds outside the imposing front door of Ambrosia Manor. She likes to be kept in the loop, insofar as there is one.

She squints at her big-numbers clock, then moves it to the side of her head where she can get a better view. It’s later than she thought, as always. She fumbles around on the night table until she locates her bridge and slips it into her mouth.

The little people, waltzing now, don’t even break stride: her fake teeth are of no interest to them. Or to anyone, come to think of it, except Wilma herself and possibly Dr. Stitt, wherever he may be now. It was Dr. Stitt who’d convinced her to have several of her about-to-splinter molars Roto-Rootered out and then to get the implants installed — fourteen or fifteen years ago, that must have been — so she’d have something to attach a bridge to, supposing she needed it in the future. Which he predicted she would, because her teeth, being pre-fluoridation, would shortly be crumbling away like wet plaster.

“You’ll thank me later,” he’d said.

“If I live that long,” she’d replied with a laugh. She’d still been at the age when she’d liked to make death into a conversational flippancy, thus showing what a lively, game old bird she was.

“You’ll live forever,” he’d said. Which had sounded more like a warning than a reassurance. Though maybe he was only anticipating future business from her.

But now it is later, and she does thank Dr. Stitt, silently, every morning. It would be dire to be toothless.

Smooth white smile inserted, she slides out of bed, feels with her toes for her terrycloth slippers, and shuffles her way to the bathroom. The bathroom is still manageable: she knows where everything is in there, and it isn’t as if she can’t see at all. From the corners of her eyes she can still get a working impression, though the central void in her field of vision is expanding, as she’s been told it would. Too much golf without sunglasses, and then there was the sailing — you get a double dose of the rays from the reflection off the water — but who knew anything then? The sun was supposed to be good for you. A healthy tan. They’d covered themselves in baby oil, fried themselves like pancakes. The dark, slick, fricasseed finish looked so good on the legs against white shorts.

Macular degeneration. Macular sounds so immoral, the opposite of immaculate . “I’m a degenerate,” she used to quip right after she’d received the diagnosis. So many brave jokes, once.

Putting her clothes on is still possible as long as there aren’t any buttons: two years ago, or is it longer, she weeded the buttons out of her wardrobe. There’s now Velcro throughout, and zippers too, which are fine as long as they’re end-stop zippers: slotting the little thingy into the other little thingy is no longer possible.

She smooths her hair, feels for stray wisps. Ambrosia Manor has its own salon complete with hairdresser, thank providence, and she relies on Sasha there to keep her trimmed. The most worrisome item during her morning preparation is her face. She can scarcely make it out in the mirror: it’s like one of those face-shaped blanks that once appeared on Internet accounts when you hadn’t added your picture. So no hope for the eyebrow pencil or the mascara, and hardly any for the lipstick, though on optimistic days she pretends to herself she can draw that on sightlessly. Should she chance it today? Maybe she’ll look like a clown. But if so, who would care?

She would. And Tobias might. And the staff, though in a different way. If you look demented they’re more likely to treat you as if you really are. So better to avoid the lipstick.

She finds the cologne bottle where it always resides — the cleaners have strict instructions not to move anything — and dabs herself behind the ears. Attar of Roses, with an undertone of something else, a citrus. She breathes in deeply: thank heavens she can still smell, unlike some of the others. It’s when you can’t smell any more that your appetite goes and you dwindle to nothing.

As she turns away she does manage to catch a glimpse of herself, or of someone: a woman disconcertingly like her own mother as she was in old age, white hair, crumpled tissue-paper skin and all; though, as the eyes are sideways, more mischievous. Possibly more malevolent as well, like an elf gone to the bad. That sideways glance lacks the candour of a full frontal gaze, a thing she will never see again.

Here comes Tobias, punctual as ever. They always have breakfast together.

He knocks first, like the courtly gentleman he purports to be. The time you should wait before entering a lady’s chamber, according to Tobias, is the time it would take the other man to dive under the bed. Appearances should be preserved when it comes to wives, several of whom have been undergone by Tobias. They were cheaters every one, though he doesn’t hold it against them any more because it would be hard to respect a woman who wasn’t desired by other men. He never let the wives know he knew, and he always enticed them back and made sure they were worshipping him again before giving them a sudden boot out the door, with no explanation, because why lower himself by accusing them? A firmly closed door was more dignified. That was the way to deal with wives.

In the case of mistresses, however, spontaneous emotion is likely to take over. A suspicious lover infuriated by jealousy and his own wounded honour is tempted to barge right in without knocking, and then there will be bloodshed, right there on the spot, with a knife or bare hands, or else in the form of duels, later.

“Did you ever kill anyone?” Wilma asked once, during this recitation.

“My lips are sealed,” Tobias replied solemnly. “But a wine bottle — a full wine bottle — can crush in a skull, at the temple. And I was a crack shot.”

Wilma kept her mouth still: she can’t see Tobias, but he can see her, and a smirk would hurt him. She finds these kinds of details rococo, like the vanished gold chocolate boxes, and suspects Tobias of making them up, not out of whole cloth but from creaky, ornate operettas and once-fashionable continental novels and the reminiscences of dandyish uncles. He must think that naive, bland, North American Wilma finds him decadent and glamorous, quite the roué; he must think she swallows this stuff whole. But maybe he believes it himself.

“Come in,” she says now. A blob appears in the doorway. She regards it sideways, sniffs the air. It’s Tobias for sure, it’s his aftershave: Brut, if she’s not mistaken. Has her sense of smell become sharper as her eyesight has faded? Probably not, though it’s comforting to think so. “How lovely to see you, Tobias,” she says.

“Dear lady, you are radiant,” says Tobias. He advances, plants a kiss of greeting upon her cheek with his thin, dry lips. A few bristles: he hasn’t shaved yet, just splashed on the Brut. Like herself, he must be worried about how he smells: that acid, stale odour of aging bodies so noticeable when all the Ambrosiads are assembled in the dining room, their base note of slow decay and involuntary leakage papered over with applied layers of scent — delicate florals on the women, bracing spices on the men, the blooming rose or brusque pirate image inside each of them still fondly cherished.