Free Dancing Girls by Margaret Atwood Page A

more. They leaned across the table, questioning, avid, prying; they were enjoying it. This, he realized, was for them the kind of entertainment the city could best afford.
    Afterwards they all went to Louise’s cellar to gather up for her those shreds of her life she had asked them to allow her. Leota found the underwear (surprisingly frilly, most of it purple and black) after an indecently long search through Louise’s bureau drawers; he and Paul tried to decide which of the black notebooks on her desk shewould want. There were eight or nine of them; Paul opened a few and read excerpts at random, though Morrison protested weakly. References to the poles and the circle dated back several months; before he had known her, Morrison thought.
    In her notebooks Louise had been working out her private system, in aphorisms and short poems which were thoroughly sane in themselves but which taken together were not; though, Morrison reflected, the only difference is that she’s taken as real what the rest of us pretend is only metaphorical. Between the aphorisms were little sketches like wiring diagrams, quotations from the English poets, and long detailed analyses of her acquaintances at the university.
    “Here’s you, Morrison,” Paul said with a relishing chuckle. “ ‘Morrison is not a complete person. He needs to be completed, he refuses to admit his body is part of his mind. He can be in the circle possibly, but only if he will surrender his role as a fragment and show himself willing to merge with the greater whole.’ Boy, she must’ve been nutty for months.”
    They were violating her, entering her privacy against her will. “Put that away,” Morrison said, more sharply than he ordinarily dared speak to Paul. “We’ll take the half-empty notebook, that must be the one she meant.”
    There were a dozen or so library books scattered around the room, some overdue: geology and history for the most part, and one volume of Blake. Leota volunteered to take them back.
    As he was about to slip the catch on the inside lock Morrison glanced once more around the room. He could see now where it got its air of pastiche: the bookcase was a copy of the one in Paul’s living-room, the prints and the table were almost identical with those at the Jamiesons’. Other details stirred dim images of objects half-noted in the various houses, at the various but nearly identical get-acquainted parties. Poor Louise had been trying to construct herselfout of the other people she had met. Only from himself had she taken nothing; thinking of his chill interior, embryonic and blighted, he realized it had nothing for her to take.
    He kept his promise and went to see her. His first visit was made with Paul and Leota, but he sensed their resentment: they seemed to think their countrywoman should be permitted to go mad without witness or participation by any Yanks. After that he drove out by himself in his own car.
    On the second visit Louise initially seemed better. They met in a cramped cubicle furnished with two chairs; Louise sat on the edge of hers, her hands folded in her lap, her face polite, withholding. Her English accent was still noticeable, though hard r’s surfaced in it from time to time. She was having a good rest, she said; the food was all right and she had met some nice people but she was eager to get back to her work; she worried about who was looking after her students.
    “I guess I said some pretty crazy things to you,” she smiled.
    “Well …” Morrison stalled. He was pleased by this sign of her recovery.
    “I had it all wrong. I thought I could put the country together by joining the two halves of the city into a circle, using the magnetic currents.” She gave a small disparaging laugh, then dropped her voice. “What I hadn’t figured out though was that the currents don’t flow north and south, like the bridge. They flow east and west, like the river. And I didn’t
need
to form the circle out of a bunch of