Free The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood Page B

ridges.
    I had expected Peter to be depressed, but though he wasn’t his usual self he certainly wasn’t depressed. I couldn’t quite figure out the bathtub. I thought back to the other two unfortunate marriages. After the first, it had been the sheepskin on his bedroom floor, and after the second a scratchy blanket in a field we’d driven four hours to get to, and where I was made uneasy by thoughts of farmers and cows. I supposed this was part of the same pattern, whatever the pattern was. Perhaps an attempt to assert youthfulness and spontaneity, a revolt against the stale doom of stockings in the sink and bacon fat congealed in pans evoked for him by his friends’ marriages. Peter’s abstraction on these occasions gave me the feeling that he liked doing them because he had read about them somewhere, but I could never locate the quotations. The field was, I guessed, a hunting story from one of the outdoorsy male magazines; I remembered he had worn a plaid jacket. The sheepskin I placed in one of the men’sglossies, the kind with lust in penthouses. But the bathtub? Possibly one of the murder mysteries he read as what he called “escape literature”; but wouldn’t that rather be someone drowned in the bathtub? A woman. That would give them a perfect bit to illustrate on the cover: a completely naked woman with a thin covering of water and maybe a bar of soap or a rubber duck or a bloodstain to get her past the censors, floating with her hair spread out on the water, the cold purity of the bathtub surrounding her body, chaste as ice only because dead, her open eyes staring up into those of the reader. The bathtub as a coffin. I had a fleeting vision: what if we both fell asleep and the tap got turned on accidentally, lukewarm so we wouldn’t notice, and the water slowly rose and killed us? That would be a surprise for the connection when he came to show his next batch of apartment renters around: water all over the floor and two naked corpses clasped in a last embrace. “Suicide,” they’d all say. “Died for love.” And on summer nights our ghosts would be seen gliding along the halls of the Brentview Apartments, Bachelor, Two Bedroom and Luxury, clad only in bath towels.…
    I shifted my head, tired of the swans, and looked instead at the curving silver nozzle of the shower. I could smell Peter’s hair, a clean soap smell. He smelled of soap all the time, not only when he had recently taken a shower. It was a smell I associated with dentists’ chairs and medicine, but on him I found it attractive. He never wore sickly-sweet shaving lotion or the other male substitutes for perfume.
    I could see his arm where it lay across me, the hairs arranged in rows. The arm was like the bathroom: clean and white and new, the skin unusually smooth for a man’s. I couldn’t see his face, which was resting against my shoulder, but I tried to visualize it. He was, as Clara had said, “good-looking”; that was probably what had first attracted me to him. People noticed him, not because he had forceful or peculiar features, but because he was ordinariness raised toperfection, like the youngish well-groomed faces of cigarette ads. But sometimes I wanted a reassuring wart or mole, or patch of roughness, something the touch could fix on instead of gliding over.
    We had met at a garden party following my graduation; he was a friend of a friend, and we had eaten ice-cream in the shade together. He had been quite formal and had asked me what I planned to do. I had talked about a career, making it sound much less vague than it was in my own mind, and he told me later that it was my aura of independence and common sense he had liked: he saw me as the kind of girl who wouldn’t try to take over his life. He had recently had an unpleasant experience with what he called “the other kind.” That was the assumption we had been working on, and it had suited me. We had been taking each other at our face values, which meant we had got