Free Wilderness Tips by Margaret Atwood Page A

feeling desperate.
    It was Selena who was causing this desperation, but he had no name for why. Partly he wanted to get inside her, find that innermost cave where she hid her talent. But she kept him at a distance. Him, and in some way everyone else.
    She read several times. The poems were astonishing again, again unique. Nothing about her grandmother, or about snow, or about childhood; nothing about dying dogs, or family members of any kind. Instead there were regal, tricky women, magical, shape-shifting men; in whom, however, he thought he could recognize the transposed outlines of some of the regulars from The Bohemian Embassy. Was that Max’s white-blond bullet head, his lidded ice-blue eyes? There was another man, a thin intense one with a moustacheand a smouldering Spanish look that set Richard’s teeth on edge. One night he’d announced to the whole table that he’d caught a bad case of crabs, that he’d had to shave himself and paint his groin blue. Could that be his torso, equipped with burning wings? Richard couldn’t tell, and it was driving him crazy.
    (It was never Richard himself though. Never his own stubby features, his own brownish hair and hazel eyes. Never even a line, about him.)
    He pulled himself together, got the papers marked, finished off an essay on the imagery of mechanism in Herrick which he needed in order to haul himself safely from this academic year into the next one. He took Mary Jo to one of the Tuesday poetry evenings. He thought it might neutralize Selena, like an acid neutralizing an alkali; get her out of his head. Mary Jo was not impressed.
    “Where does she
get
those tatty old clothes?” she said.
    “She’s a brilliant poet,” said Richard.
    “I don’t care. That thing looks like a tablecloth. And why does she do her eyes in that phoney way?”
    Richard felt this like a cut, like a personal wound.
    He didn’t want to marry Selena. He couldn’t imagine marriage with her. He could not place her within the tedious, comforting scenery of domesticity: a wife doing his laundry, a wife cooking his meals, a wife pouring his tea. All he wanted was a month, a week, a night even. Not in a motel room, not in the back of a car; these squalid venues left over from his fumbling youth would not do. It would have to be somewhere else, somewhere darker and infinitely more strange. He imagined a crypt, with hieroglyphics; like the last act of
Aida
. The same despair, the same exultation, the same annihilation. From such an experience you would emerge reborn, or not at all.
    It was not lust. Lust was what you felt for Marilyn Monroe, or sometimes for the strippers at the Victory Burlesque. (Selena had a poem about the Victory Burlesque. The strippers, for her, were nota bunch of fat sluts with jiggling, dimpled flesh. They were diaphanous; they were surreal butterflies, emerging from cocoons of light; they were splendid.)
    What he craved was not her body as such. He wanted to be transformed by her, into someone he was not.
    By now it was summer, and the university and the coffee-house were both closed. On rainy days Richard lay on the lumpy bed in his humid, stifling room, listening to the thunder; on sunny ones, which were just as humid, he made his way from tree to tree, staying in the shade. He avoided the library. One more session of sticky near-sex with Mary Jo, with her damp kisses and her nurse-like manipulations of his body, and especially the way she sensibly stopped short of anything final, would leave him with a permanent limp.
    “You wouldn’t want to get me knocked up,” she would say, and she was right, he wouldn’t. For a girl who worked among books, she was breathtakingly prosaic. But then, her forte was cataloguing.
    Richard knew she was a healthy girl with a normal outlook. She would be good for him. This was his mother’s opinion, delivered after he’d made the mistake – just once – of taking her home with him to Sunday dinner. She was like corned beef, cottage