Margaret Atwood - The Edible Woman

They ascended the staircase together, Marian leaning on Peter’s arm. In the hallways of each floor they passed as they went up Marian could see gigantic wooden crates and oblong canvas-covered shapes standing outside the apartment doors: they must be installing the kitchen equipment, the stoves and refrigerators. Soon Peter would no longer be the only person living in the building. Then they would turn the heat up to its full capacity; as it was, the building, all except Peter’s place, was kept almost as cold as the outside air.

“Darling,” she said in a casual tone when they had reached the fifth floor and were pausing for a moment on the landing to catch their breath, “something came up and I’ve invited a few more people. I hope you don’t mind.”

All the way there in the car she had been pondering how she would tell him. It would not be a good thing for those people to arrive with Peter not knowing anything about it, though it had been a great temptation to say nothing, to rely on her ability to cope with the situation when the moment came. In the confusion she would not have to explain how she had come to invite them, she didn’t want to explain, she couldn’t explain, and she dreaded questions from Peter about it. Suddenly she felt totally without her usual skill at calculating his reactions in advance. He had become an unknown quantity; just after she had spoken, blind rage and blind ecstasy on his part seemed equally possible. She took a step away from him and gripped the railing with her free hand: there was no telling what he might do.

But he only smiled down at her, a slight crease of concealed irritation appearing between his eyebrows. “Did you, darling? Well the more the merrier. But I hope you didn’t ask too many: we won’t have enough liquor to go around, and if there’s anything I hate it’s a party that goes dry.”

Marian was relieved. Now he had spoken she saw that it was exactly what he would have said. She was so pleased with him for answering predictably that she pressed his arm. He slid it around her waist, and they began to climb again. “No,” she said, “only about six.” Actually there were nine, but since he had been so polite about it she made the courteous gesture of minimizing.

“Anyone I know?” he asked pleasantly.

“Well… Clara and Joe,” she said, her momentary elation beginning to vanish. “And Ainsley. But not the others: not really…”

“My, my,” he said, teasing, “I wasn’t aware you had that many friends I’ve never met. Been keeping little secrets, eh? I’ll have to make a special point of getting to know them so I can find out all about your private life.” He kissed her ear genially.

“Yes,” Marian said, with feeble cheerfulness. “I’m sure you’ll like them.” Idiot, she raged at herself. Idiot, idiot. How could she have been so stupid? She foresaw how it was going to be. The office virgins would be all right – Peter would just look somewhat askance at them, particularly Emmy; and Clara and Joe would be tolerated. But the others. Duncan would not give her away – or would he? He might think it was funny to drop an insinuating remark; or he might do it out of curiosity. She could take him aside when he arrived though and ask him not to. But the roommates were an insoluble problem. She did not think either of them knew yet that she was engaged, and she could picture Trevor’s shriek of surprise when he found out, the way he would glance at Duncan and say, “But my dear, we thought…” and trail off into a silence weighted with innuendoes that would be even more dangerous than the truth. Peter would be furious, he would think someone had been infringing on his private-property rights, he wouldn’t understand at all, and what would happen then? Why in heaven’s name had she invited them? What a colossal mistake; how could she stop them from coming?

They reached the seventh floor and walked along the corridor towards the door of Peter’s apartment. He had spread several newspapers outside his door for people to put their overshoes and boots on. Marian took off her own boots and stood them neatly beside Peter’s overshoes. “I hope they’ll follow our example,” Peter said. “I just had the floors done, I don’t want them getting all tracked up.” With no others beside them yet, the two pairs looked like black leathery bait in a large empty newspaper trap.

Inside, Peter took off her coat for her. He put his hands on her bare shoulders and kissed her lightly on the back of the neck. “Yum yum,” he said, “new perfume.” Actually it was Ainsley’s, an exotic mixture she had selected to go with the earrings.

He took off his own coat and hung it up in the closet just inside the door. “Take your coat into the bedroom, darling,” he said, “and then come on out to the kitchen and help me get things ready. Women are so much better at arranging things on plates.”

She walked across the living-room floor. The only addition Peter had made to its furniture recently was another matching Danish Modern chair; most of the space was still unoccupied. At least it meant that the guests would have to circulate: there wasn’t room for all of them to sit down. Peter’s friends did not, as a rule, sit on floors until rather late in the evening. Duncan might though. She imagined him cross-legged in the centre of the bare room, a cigarette stuck in his mouth, staring with gloomy incredulity perhaps at one of the soap-men or at one of the Danish Modern sofa legs while the other guests circled around him, not noticing him much but being careful not to step on him, as though he were a coffee table or a conversation piece of some kind: a driftwood-and-parchment mobile. Maybe it wasn’t too late to phone them and ask them not to come. But the phone was in the kitchen and so was Peter.

The bedroom was meticulously neat as always. The books and the guns were in their usual places; four of Peter’s model ships now served as book-ends. Two of the cameras had been taken out of their cases and were standing on the desk. One of them had a flash attachment on it with a blue flashbulb already clipped inside the silver saucer-shaped reflector. More of the blue bulbs were lying near an opened magazine. Marian placed her coat on the bed; Peter had told her that the coat closet by the door wouldn’t be large enough for all the coats and that the women were to put their coats in his bedroom. Her coat then, lying with its arms at its sides, was really more functional than it looked: it was acting as a sort of decoy for the other coats. By it they would see where they were supposed to go.

She turned, and saw herself reflected in the full-length mirror on the back of the cupboard door. Peter had been so surprised and pleased. “Darling, you look absolutely marvellous,” he had said as soon as he had come up through the stairwell. The implication had been that it would be most pleasant if she could arrange to look like that all the time. He had made her turn around so he could see the back, and he had liked that too. Now she wondered whether or not she did look absolutely marvellous. She turned the phrase over in her mind: it had no specific shape or flavour. What should it feel like? She smiled at herself. No, that wouldn’t do. She smiled a different smile, drooping her eyelids; that didn’t quite work either. She turned her head and examined her profile out of the corner of her eye. The difficulty was that she couldn’t grasp the total effect: her attention caught on the various details, the things she wasn’t used to – the fingernails, the heavy earrings, the hair, the various parts of her face that Ainsley had added or altered. She was only able to see one thing at a time. What was it that lay beneath the surface these pieces were floating on, holding them all together? She held both of her naked arms out towards the mirror. They were the only portion of her flesh that was without a cloth or nylon or leather or varnish covering, but in the glass even they looked fake, like soft pinkish-white rubber or plastic, boneless, flexible…