Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

She no longer has lunch with Zenia once a week; Zenia is now too busy. She’s a busy bee, she has a lot of iron maidens in the fire. So, at the next board meeting, Roz pushes her about the shift in content. “This wasn’t the original idea,” she says.

Zenia smiles gently at her. “Most women don’t want to read about other women who achieve,” she says. “It makes them feel unsuccessful.”

Roz finds herself getting angry—surely this is a dig at her—but she controls herself. “What do they want to read about, then?”

“I’m not talking intellectuals,” says Zenia. “I’m talking about the average woman. The average magazine-buying woman. According to our demographics, they want to read about how to look. Oh, and sex, of course. Sex with the right accessories:”

“What are the right accessories?” asks Roz pleasantly. She thinks she’ll choke.

“Men,” says Zenia. The men on the board of directors laugh, Mitch included. So much for Roz. She has a flash of Zenia, wearing black fringed gloves with gauntlets, blowing the smoke off her six-shooter, sliding it back into her holster.

Roz is the majority shareholder. She could pull strings, she could stack the deck, she could force Zenia out. But she can’t do that without looking like a vindictive shrew.

And let’s face it, they’re making money, finally, and money talks.

One day Mitch is gone. He is just gone, in a snap of the fingers, in a wink. No prelude, no hints, no letters left lying around, none of the usual. But looking back, Roz realizes he must have been gone for some time.

Where has he gone? He’s gone to live with Zenia. A whole courtship, a whole romance, has taken place right under Roz’s very nose and she hasn’t noticed a thing. It must have been going on for months.

But no, that isn’t it. Mitch tells her—he seems to want to tell her—that it was all very sudden. Unexpected to him. Zenia came to his office one evening, after work, to consult him about some financials, and then ...

“I don’t want to hear about it,” says Roz, who is familiar with the pleasures of narration. She doesn’t intend to give him the satisfaction.

“I just want you to understand,” says Mitch.

“Why?” says Roz. “Why is that important? Who gives a shit whether I understand or not?”

“I do,” says Mitch. “Because I still love you. I love both of you. This is really difficult for me.”

“Get stuffed,” says Roz.

Mitch came to the house when Roz wasn’t there. He came furtively because he couldn’t face her. He came and went, soft as a thief, and he removed things: his suits from the mirror-door bedroom closet, his boat clothes, his best bottles of wine, his pictures. Roz would come back after work to find these blanks, these piercing eloquent spaces, where something of Mitch’s used ‘ to be. But he left some things behind: an overcoat, his anorak, some books, his old boots, boxes of this and that in the storage room down in the cellar. What was it supposed to mean? That he was of two minds? That he still had one foot in the door? Roz almost wished he would take everything away at once, make a clean sweep. On the other hand, where there were boots there was hope. But hope was the worst. As long as she had hope, how was she supposed to get on with her life? Which was what women in her situation were constantly urged to do.

Mitch didn’t take anything that wasn’t his. He didn’t take anything Roz had bought for the house, bought for them to share. Roz was surprised to discover how little he had actually been involved in all that shopping, how few choices he’d helped her make; or, look at it another way, how little he’d contributed. Well, how could he have helped her? She’d always forestalled him; she’d seen a need or a desire and supplied it instantly, with a wave of her magic chequebook. Maybe it had grated on him after a while, her munificence, her largesse, her heaps of pearls, her outpourings. Ask and it shall be given. Heck, Mitch didn’t even ask! All he had to do was lie on the lawn with his mouth open while Roz climbed the tree and shook down the golden apples.

Maybe that was Zenia’s trick. Maybe she presented herself as vacancy, as starvation, as an empty beggar’s bowl. Maybe the posture she’d assumed was on her knees, hands upstretched for alms. Maybe Mitch wanted the opportunity to do a little coinscattering, an opportunity never provided by Roz. He was tired of being given to, of being forgiven, of being rescued; maybe he wanted to do a little giving and rescuing of his own. Even better than a beautiful woman on her knees would be a grateful beautiful woman on her knees. But hadn’t Roz been grateful enough?

Apparently not.

Roz stoops low. She gives in to her gnawing hunger for dirt and hires a private detective, a woman named Harriet; Harriet the Hungarian, someone she learned about, way back, through Uncle Joe, who had some Hungarian connections. “I just want to know what they’re up to,” she tells Harriet.

“What sort of thing?” asks Harriet.

“Where they’re living, what they do,” says Roz. “Whether she’s real:”

“Real?” says Harriet.

“Where she came from,” says Roz.

Harriet finds out sufficient. Sufficient to make Roz even more miserable than she is. Zenia and Mitch live in a penthouse apartment overlooking the harbour, near where Mitch moors his boat. That way they can go for quick little sails on it, Roz supposes, though she can’t see Zenia putting up with too much of that. Getting wet, chipping her polish. Not as much as Roz put up with. What else do they do? They eat out, they eat in. Zenia goes shopping. What’s to see?

The question of whether Zenia is real or not is more difficult to solve. She doesn’t seem to have been born, at least not under that name; but how can anyone say, since so much of Berlin went up in smoke? Inquiries in Waterloo produce nothing. She didn’t go to school there, or not under her present name. Is she even Jewish? It’s anybody’s guess, says Harriet.

“—‘But what about the picture?” says Roz. “Her family?”

“Oh, Roz,” says Harriet. “Pictures are a dime a dozen. Whose word have you got for it that those people were her family?”

“She knew about my father,” says Roz. She’s reluctant to let go. “So did I,” said Harriet. “Come on, Roz, there are hints about all that in every magazine interview you’ve ever given. What did she tell you about him that any twelve-year-old with an active imagination wouldn’t have been able to make up?”

“You’re right,” sighs Roz, “but there was so much detail.”

“She’s very good,” Harriet agrees.

London proves more fruitful: Zenia did indeed work for a magazine there; she appears to have written some of the articles she’s claimed as hers, though by no means all of them. The ones on clothing, yes; the ones on political hot spots, no. The ones with men’s names actually seem to have been written by the men in question, although three out of the five are dead. She made a brief traverse through the gossip columns when her name was linked with that of a cabinet minister; the phrase “good friend” was used, and marriage was subsequently hinted at but did not take place. Then there was a scandal when it came to light that Zenia had been seeing a Soviet cultural attache at the same time. “Seeing” was a euphemism. There was a lot of political name-calling, and the usual English tabloid fox-hunting and muckraking. After that incident Zenia had dropped out of sight.

“Did she really travel to all those countries?” says Roz. “How much money do you want to spend?” asks Harriet.

Knowing about the flimsiness of Zenia’s fa~ade is no help to Roz at all. She’s stalemated. If she tells Mitch about the lies it will just come across as jealousy.