Free Life Before Man by Margaret Atwood Page B

wet themselves. René Lévesque can hardly believe it; he looks as if someone has simultaneously kissed him and kneed him in the groin.
    The cameras cut back and forth between the thin-lipped commentators and the crowds at PQ headquarters, where a wild celebration is going on. Dancing in the streets, jubilant outbursts of song. He tries to remember a similar kind of celebration on his side of the border, but the only thing he can think of is the first Russian-Canadian hockey series, when Paul Henderson scored the winning goal. Men hugged each other and the drunker ones cried. But this is no hockey game. Watching the discomfiture of the defeated Liberals, the stiff upper lips of the English newsmen, Nate grins.
Serves them fucking well right
. This is his own personal vengeance on all the writers of letters to the editors across the country.Repression begets revolution, he thinks, all you stockbrokers.
So eat shit
. Merely a quote from the Prime Minister, he’d say to the old ladies, if that was him up there on the screen.
    Nevertheless, glancing around at the other drinkers, he’s uneasy. His pleasure, he knows, is merely theoretical and quite possibly snobbish. No one here with him is much interested in theory. Not many of the book-writers out tonight, mostly zip-front jackets, and they aren’t taking it well; they’re grumpy and even downright surly, as if they’re watching their next-door neighbors throwing a loud party to which they haven’t been invited. “Fucking frogs,” one of them mutters. “Shoulda kicked them out of the country a long time ago.”
    Someone else says it will mean the end of the economy: Who’ll take the chance of investing? “What economy,” his friend quips. “Anything’s better than stagflation.” A theme the commentators pick up, second-guessing the future between the songs and kisses.
    Nate feels a surge of exhilaration shoot through him, up from the belly, almost sexual, out to the fingers where they hook around his glass. None of them knows, none of the bastards knows. The earth is shifting under their feet and they can’t even feel it, anything can happen!
    But instead of the wizened monkey-face of René Lévesque, who is thanking his supporters in the Paul Sauvé Arena up there on the screen, he sees Lesje, her eyes, her thin hands, floating across from him at the lunch table, veiled in smoke. He can’t remember anything she said; did she even say anything? He doesn’t care, he doesn’t care if she never says anything at all. He just wants to look at her, into her, into those dark eyes which are possibly brown, he can’t remember that either. He remembers the shadow in them, like the cool shadow under a tree. Why did he wait so long, jittering in phone booths, spastic, unable to speak? At lunch he picked rolls apart and talked politics when what he should have done, he should have takenher in his arms, right there in the Varsity Restaurant. Then they would have been transported, they would have been somewhere else. How could he know where, since it would be somewhere he’s never been before? Some place utterly unlike the country inside Elizabeth’s blue dressing gown, or the planet of Martha, predictable, heavy and damp. Holding Lesje would be like holding some strange plant, smooth, thin, with sudden orange flowers.
Exotics
, the florists called them. The light would be odd, the ground underfoot littered with bones. Over which she would have power. She would stand before him, the bearer of healing wisdom, swathed in veils. He would fall to his knees, dissolve.
    Nate, pushing back this image, places it in time: a Saturday matinée of
She
, seen when he was an impressionable twelve and masturbating nightly. His mother used to nag him about those matinées; I’m sure they’re bad for you, she said. All that cowboys and shooting. A woman draped in cheesecloth, terrible actress, he’d shot paper clips and spitballs at her and jeered with the rest, he’d mooned over her