Margaret Atwood - The Edible Woman

“What’re you doing?” I asked. I whacked my egg against the side of my dish and got my thumb stuck in it. It wasn’t done after all. I poured it into the dish and stirred it up.

“I’m figuring out my strategy,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice.

“Really Ainsley, I don’t see how you can be so cold-blooded about it,” I said, eyeing the black numbers in their ordered rows.

“But I need a father for my child!” Her tone implied I was trying to snatch bread from the mouths of all the world’s widows and orphans, incarnate for the moment in her.

“Okay, granted, but why Len? I mean it could get complicated with him, after all he is my friend and he’s had a bad time lately; I wouldn’t want to see him upset. Aren’t there lots of others around?”

“Not right now; or at least nobody who’s such a good specimen,” she said reasonably, “and I’d sort of like the baby in the spring. I’d like a spring baby; or early summer. That means he can have his birthday parties outside in the back yard instead of in the house, it’ll be less noisy…”

“Have you investigated his ancestors?” I asked acidly, spooning up the last strand of egg.

“Oh yes,” said Ainsley with enthusiasm, “we had a short conversation just before he made his pass. I found out his father went to college. At least there don’t seem to be any morons on his side of the family, and he doesn’t have any allergies either. I wanted to find out whether he was Rh Negative but that would have been a little pointed, don’t you think? And he is in television, that means he must have something artistic in him somewhere. I couldn’t find out much about the grandparents, but you can’t be too selective about heredity or you’d have to wait around forever. Genetics are deceptive anyway,” she went on; “some real geniuses have children that aren’t bright at all.”

She put a decisive-looking checkmark on the calendar and frowned at it. She bore a chilling resemblance to a general plotting a major campaign.

“Ainsley, what you really need is a blueprint of your bedroom,” I said, “or no, a contour map. Or an aerial photograph. Then you could draw little arrows and dotted lines on it, and an X at the point of conjunction.”

“Please don’t be frivolous,” she said. Now she was counting under her breath.

“When’s it going to be? Tomorrow?”

“Wait a sec,” she said, and counted some more. “No. It can’t be for a while. At least a month anyway. You see, I’ve got to make sure that the first time will do it; or the second.”

“The first time?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’ve got it all worked out. It’s going to be a problem though, you see it all depends on his psychology. I can tell he’s the sort that’ll get scared off if I act too eager. I’ve got to give him lots of rope. Because as soon as he gets anywhere, I can just hear it, he’ll go into the old song-and-dance about maybe we’d better not see each other any more, wouldn’t want this to get too serious, neither of us should get tied down and so on. And he’ll evaporate. I won’t be able to call him up when it’s really essential, he’d accuse me of trying to monopolize his time or of making demands on him or something. But as long as he hasn’t got me,” she said, “I can have him whenever I need him.”

We ruminated together for some moments.

“The place is going to be a problem too,” she said. “It’s all got to seem accidental. A moment of passion. My resistance overcome, swept off my feet and so forth.” She smiled briefly. “Anything prearranged, meeting him at the motel for instance, wouldn’t do at all. So it’s either got to be his place, or here.”

“Here?”

“If necessary,” she said firmly, sliding off her chair. I was silent: the thought of Leonard Slank being undone beneath the same roof that also sheltered the lady down below and her framed family tree was disturbing to me; it would almost be a sacrilege.

Ainsley went into her bedroom, humming busily to herself, taking the calendar with her. I sat thinking about Len. I was again having stirrings of conscience about allowing him to be led flower-garlanded to his doom without even so much as a word of warning. Of course he had asked for it, in a way, I supposed, and Ainsley seemed determined not to make any further claims on whoever she singled out for this somewhat dubious, because anonymous, honour. If Leonard had been merely the standardized ladies’ man I wouldn’t have worried. But surely he was, I reflected as I sipped my coffee, a more complex and delicately adjusted creature. He was a self-consciously lecherous skirt-chaser, granted; but it wasn’t true as Joe had said, that he had no ethical sense. In his own warped way he was a kind of inverted moralist. He liked to talk as though everyone was out for nothing but sex and money, but when anyone provided a demonstration of his theories in real life, he reacted with scalding critical invective. His blend of cynicism and idealism had a lot to do with his preference for “corrupting,” as he called it, greenish girls, as opposed to the more vine-ripened variety. The supposedly pure, the unobtainable, was attractive to the idealist in him; but as soon as it had been obtained, the cynic viewed it as spoiled and threw it away. “She turned out to be just the same as all the rest of them,” he would remark sourly. Women whom he thought of as truly out of his reach, such as the wives of his friends, he treated with devotion. He trusted them to an unrealistic degree simply because he would never be compelled by his own cynicism to put them to the test: they were not only unassailable but too old for him anyway. Clara, for instance, he idolized. At times he showed a peculiar tenderness, almost a sloppy sentimentality, towards the people he liked, who were few in number; but in spite of this he was constantly accused by women of being a misogynist and by men of being a misanthropist, and perhaps he was both.

However, I could think of no specific way in which Ainsley’s making use of him as she had planned could damage him irreparably, or even much at all, so I consigned him to whatever tough-minded, horn-rimmed guardian angels he might possess, finished the granular dregs of my coffee, and went to dress. After that I phoned Clara to tell her the news; Ainsley’s reaction had not been very satisfying.

Clara sounded pleased, but her response was ambiguous. “Oh, good,” she said, “Joe will be delighted. He’s been saying lately that it’s about time you settled down.” I was slightly irritated: after all, I wasn’t thirty-five and desperate. She was talking as though I was simply taking a prudent step. But I reflected that people on the outside of a relationship couldn’t be expected to understand it. The rest of the conversation was about her digestive upsets.

As I was washing the breakfast dishes I heard footsteps coming up our stairs. That was another variation of the door-opening gambit employed by the lady down below: she would let people in quietly without announcing them, usually at times of disintegration like Sunday afternoons, doubtless hoping that we’d be caught in some awkward state, with our hair up in curlers or down in wisps, or lolling about in our bathrobes.

“Hi!” a voice said, halfway, up. It was Peter’s. He had already assumed impromptu visiting privileges.

“Oh hi ,” I answered, making my voice casual but welcoming. “I was just doing the dishes,” I added inanely as his head emerged from the stairwell. I left the rest of the dishes in the sink and dried my hands on my apron.

He came into the kitchen. “Boy,” he said, “judging from the hangover I had when I woke up, I must’ve been pie-eyed last night. I guess I really tied one on. This morning my mouth tasted like the inside of a tennis shoe.” His tone was half proud, half apologetic.