Margaret Atwood - Stone Mattress - Nine Tales

The soundtrack led them to understand — over a crackling loudspeaker and in lousy iambic pentameter Elizabethan pastiche — that the entire drama they were about to see was unfolding post-mortem from inside Richard’s battered skull. Zoom to an eyehole in the skull, and then right on through it to the inside of the cranium. And blackout.

Whereupon the bedsheet was whisked away and there was Richard in the floodlights, all set to caper and posture, to flounce and denounce. On his back was a preposterously large hump, decorated in a jester’s red and yellow stripes — like Mr. Punch, the program notes had explained, who himself was derived from Punchinello; for the director’s vision was that Shakespeare’s Richard was modelled on commedia dell’arte , a troupe of which had been playing in England at the time. The largeness of the hump was deliberate: the inner core of the play (“As opposed to the outer core,” Gavin had snorted to himself) was all about the props. These were symbols of Richard’s unconscious, which accounted for their enlargement. The director’s thinking must have been that if the audience members were staring at outsized thrones and humps and whatnot and wondering what the fuck they were doing in this play, it wouldn’t bother them so much that they couldn’t hear the words.

So in addition to his gigantic, varicoloured, metonymous hump, Richard had a kingly robe with a sixteen-foot-long train attached to it, carried by two pageboys wearing outsized boar’s heads because Richard’s coat of arms had a boar on it. There was a huge butt of malmsey for Clarence to be drowned in and a couple of swords that were as tall as the actors. For the smothering of the princes in the Tower, performed in dumb show like the play within the play in Hamlet , two enormous pillows were borne in on stretchers like corpses or roasted suckling pigs, with pillowcases that matched the motley of Richard’s hump, just in case the audience missed the point.

Death by hump, thinks Gavin, eyeing the approaching pillows borne towards him by Reynolds. What a fate. And Reynolds as First Murderer. But that would be fitting, all things considered; and Gavin does consider all things. He’s got the time for it.

“Are you awake?” says Reynolds brightly as she clacks across the floor. She’s wearing a black pullover with a silver and turquoise belt cinched around her waist and tight jeans. She’s getting a little flubber on the outsides of her thighs, which otherwise have the heft and contours of a speed skater’s. Should he point out those pockets of flubber? No; better to hold them back for a more strategic moment. And maybe it isn’t flubber, maybe it’s muscle. She works out enough.

“If I wasn’t awake before, I would be now,” says Gavin. “You sound like a wooden railroad.” He dislikes those clogs, and he’s told her so. They do nothing for her legs. But she doesn’t care what he thinks about her legs as much as she used to. She says the clogs are comfortable, and that comfort trumps fashion as far as she’s concerned. Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds — who used to be a passionate Yeats fan — is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point of view, but that was then and social attitudes were different, and in actual fact Yeats is dead.

Reynolds tucks the pillows in behind Gavin, one behind his head, one at the small of his back. This pillow arrangement, she claims, makes him look taller and therefore more impressive. She straightens the plaid car rug that covers his legs and feet, and which she insists on calling his nap blanket. “Oh, Mr. Grumpy!” she says. “Where’s your smile?”

She’s taken to renaming him according to her own analysis of his mood of the day, or his mood of the hour, or his mood of the minute: according to her, he’s moody. Each mood is personified and given an honorific, so he’s Mr. Grumpy, Mr. Sleepy, Dr. Ironic, Sir Sardonic, and sometimes, when she’s being sarcastic or possibly nostalgic, Mr. Romantic. A while back she used to call his penis Mr. Wiggly, but she’s given up on that, and on her attempts to revive his non-existent libido with unguents and sex jellies that taste of strawberry jam and invigorating ginger lemon and toothpaste mint. There was also an adventure with a hair dryer that he would prefer to forget. “It’s quarter to four,” she continues. “Let’s get ready for our company!” Next will come the hairbrush — that’s one thing he’s managed to hold on to, his hair — and then the lint brush. Dog-like, he sheds.

“Who is it this time?” says Gavin.

“A very nice woman,” says Reynolds. “A nice girl. A graduate student. She’s doing her thesis on your work.” She herself had once been doing her thesis on his work: that had been his downfall. It had been very seductive to him, then, to have an attractive young woman paying such concentrated attention to his every adjective.

Gavin groans. “Thesis on my fucking work,” he says. “Christ defend us!”

“Now, Mr. Profanity,” says Reynolds. “Don’t be so mean.”

“What the fuck is this learned scholar doing in Florida?” says Gavin. “She must be a moron.”

“Florida’s not the hick town you keep saying it is,” says Reynolds. “Times have changed; they’ve got good universities now and a great book festival! Thousands of people come to it!”

“Fan-fucking-tastic. I’m impressed,” says Gavin.

“Anyway,” says Reynolds, ignoring him, “she isn’t from Florida. She’s flown in from Iowa just to interview you! People all over are doing work on your work, you know.”

“Iowa, fuck,” says Gavin. Work on your work . Sometimes she talks like a five-year-old.

Reynolds gets going with the lint brush. She attacks his shoulders, then takes a playful swipe in the direction of his crotch. “Let’s see if there’s any lint on Mr. Wiggly!” she says.

“Keep your lustful claws off my private parts,” says Gavin. He feels like saying that of course there’s lint on Mr. Wiggly, or dust at any rate, or maybe rust; what does she expect, because as she is well aware Mr. Wiggly has been on the shelf for some time. But he refrains.

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use , he thinks. Tennyson. Ulysses sets out on his last voyage, lucky him, at least he’ll sink with his boots on. Not that Greeks wore boots. One of the first poems Gavin had to memorize in school; he turned out to be good at memorizing. Shameful to admit, but that’s what turned him on to poetry: Tennyson, an outmoded Victorian windbag, writing about an old man. Things have a habit of coming full circle: a bad habit, to his mind.

“Mr. Wiggly likes my lustful claws,” says Reynolds. How gallant of her to put that in the present tense. It used to be a game of theirs — that Reynolds was the seductress, the dominatrix, the femme fatale, and he was her passive victim. She’d seemed to enjoy that scenario, so he went along. Now it’s no longer a game; none of the old games work. It would only make both of them sad to attempt to revive them.

This isn’t what she signed up for when she married him. She most likely envisioned a fascinating life, filled with glamorous, creative people and stimulating intellectual chit-chat. And that did happen some, when they were first married; that, and the flare-up of his still active hormones. The last kaboom of the firecracker before it fizzled; but now she’s stuck with the burnt-out aftermath. In his more lenient moments, he feels sorry for her.

She must be finding consolation elsewhere. He would if he was her. What does she really do when she goes out to her spinning classes or off to her so-called dancing evenings with her so-called girlfriends? He can imagine, and does. Such imaginings once bothered him, but now he contemplates Reynolds’s possible transgressions — not only possible, but almost certain — with clinical detachment. She’s surely entitled to some of that: she’s thirty years younger than him. He probably has more horns on his head — as the bard would say — than a hundred-headed snail.