Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

But the actual scenario is unclear in her mind. Maybe she should shoot Zenia first and then finish her off with the drill: the other way around would be cumbersome, as she would have to sneak up behind Zenia with the drill and then turn it on, and the whirring noise would be a giveaway. She could always do an ambidextrous murder: gun in the left hand, cordless drill in the right, like the rapier-and-dagger arrangements of the late Renaissance. It’s an appealing thought.

The catch is that Zenia is considerably taller than Tony, and Tony would of course be aiming for the head. Symmetrical retaliation: Zenia’s pattern has been to attack her victims at the point of most vulnerability, and the most vulnerable point is the one most prized, and Tony’s most vulnerable point is her brain. That’s how she was trapped by Zenia in the first place: that was the temptation, the bait. Tony got suckered in through her own intellectual vanity. She thought she’d found a friend who was as smart as she was. Smarter was not a category.

Tony’s love for West is her other most vulnerable point, so it stands to reason that it’s through West that Zenia will attack her now. It’s to protect West that she’s doing this, really—he would not survive another slice cut out of his heart.

She hasn’t shared her plans with Roz or Charis. Each of them is a decent person; neither would condone violence. Tony knows that she herself is not a decent person, she’s known that ever since childhood. She does act like one, most of the time, because there’s usually no reason not to, but she has another self, a more ruthless one, concealed inside her. She is not just Tony Fremont, she is also Tnomerf Ynot, queen of the barbarians, and, in theory, capable of much that Tony herself is not quite up to. Bulc egdirb! Bulc egdirb! Take no prisoners, because in order to protect the innocent, some must sacrifice their own innocence. This is one of the rules of war. Men have to do hard things, they have to do hard man-things. Hard-man things. They have to shed blood, so that others may live out their placid lives suckling their infants and rummaging in their gardens and creating unmusical music, free from guilt. Women are not usually called upon to commit such cold-blooded acts, but this does not mean they are incapable of them. Tony clenches her small teeth and invokes her left hand, and hopes that she will rise to the occasion.

In front of her face she holds the Globe and Mail, opened to the business section. She’s not reading, however: she’s watching the lobby for Zenia. Watching, and getting jittery, because it isn’t every day she does something this risky. To cut the tension, to give herself some critical distance, she folds up the paper and takes her lecture notes out of her bag. It will focus her mind to review them, it will refresh her memory: she hasn’t given this lecture since last year.

The lecture is a favourite among her students. It’s the one on the role of female camp-followers through the ages, before and after battles—their handiness as bodies-for-hire, rapees, and producers of cannon fodder, their tension-reducing, nursing, psychiatric, cooking and laundering and post-massacre looting and life-terminating skills—with a digression on venereal diseases. Rumour has it that the students’ nickname for this lecture is “Mother Courage Meets Spotted Dick,” or “Whores ‘n’ Sores”; it usually attracts a contingent of visiting engineers, who come for the visuals, because Tony has an impressive instructional film she always screens. It’s the same one the army showed to its new recruits at the time of the Second World War to promote the use of condoms, and features many a rotted-off nose and green, leaking male organ. Tony is used to the nervous laughter. Put yourself there, she will tell them. Pretend it’s you. Now: less funny?

At that time syphilis was considered to be a self-inflicted wound. Some guys used VD to get themselves invalided home. You could be court-martialled for having a dose, just as you could for shooting yourself in the foot. If the wound was the disease, then the weapon was the whore. Yet another weapon in the war of the sexes, the whore of the sexes, the raw of the sexes, the raw sexes war. A perfect palindrome.

Maybe that’s what West found so irresistible about Zenia, Tony used to think: that she was raw, that she was raw sex, whereas Tony herself was only the cooked variety. Parboiled to get the dangerous wildness out, the strong fresh-blood flavours. Zenia was gin at midnight, Tony was eggs for breakfast, and in eggcups at that. It’s not the category Tony would have preferred.

All these years Tony had refrained from asking West about Zenia. She hadn’t wanted to upset him; also she was afraid of finding out any more about Zenia’s powers of attraction, about their nature and their extent. But after the return of Zenia she couldn’t help herself. On the edge of the crisis, she had to know.

“Remember Zenia?” she asked West at dinner, two nights ago. They were having fish, a sole d la bonne femme from Tony’s

Basic French Cooking book, bought to go with her battlefieldof-Pourrieres fish platter.

West stopped chewing, just for a moment. “Of course,” he said.

“What was it?” said Tony. “What was what?” said West.

“Why you—you know. Why you went with her.” Tony felt herself tensing up all over. Instead of me, she thought. Why you abandoned me.

West shrugged, then smiled. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t remember. Anyway, that was a long time ago. She’s dead now” Tony knew that West knew that Zenia was far from dead. “True,” she said. “Was it the sex?”

“The sex?” said West, as if she’d just mentioned some forgotten but unimportant shopping-list item. “No, I don’t think so. Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, not exactly?” said Tony, more sharply than she should have.

“Why are we talking about this?” said West. “It doesn’t matter now”

“It matters to me,” said Tony in a small voice.

West sighed. “Zenia was frigid,” he said. “She couldn’t help it. She was sexually abused in childhood, by a Greek Orthodox priest. I felt sorry for her.”

Tony’s mouth dropped open. “Greek Orthodox?”

“Well, she was part Greek,” said West. “Greek immigrant. She couldn’t tell anyone about the priest, because nobody would have believed her. It was a very religious community:”

Tony could barely contain herself. She felt a raucous and unseemly merriment building up inside her. Frigid! So that’s what Zenia had told poor West! It does not at all accord with certain confidences Zenia once saw fit to share with Tony on the subject of sex. Sex as a huge plum pudding, a confection of rich delights, whose pleasures she would enumerate while Tony listened, shut out, nose to the glass. Tony could just see whiteknight West, dutifully huffing and puffing away, giving it his best shot, trying to save Zenia from the evil spell cast by the wicked, non-existent Greek Orthodox priest, with Zenia having the time of her life. Probably she told him she was faking orgasm to please him. Double the guilt!

It would have been a challenge for him; of course. Warm up the Ice Maiden. The first man ever to successfully explore those polar climes. But of course there was no way he could win, because Zenia’s games were always rigged.

“I never knew that,” she said. She fixed West with her large wide-open eyes, trying to look sympathetic.

“Yeah, well,” said West. “She found it really hard to talk about.”

“Why did you break up with her?” said Tony. “The second time. Why did you move out?” Now that they’d crossed the border into the never-mentioned, now that West was talking, she might as well push her advantage.