Bluebeard's Egg (16 page)

Sally steps away from Ed, smiles at him. “How did you make out with the women today?” she says.

“What women?” says Ed absently, going towards the sink. He knows what women.

“The ones out there, hiding in the forsythia,” says Sally. “I counted at least ten. They were just waiting for a chance.”

She teases him frequently about these troops of women, which follow him around everywhere, which are invisible to Ed but which she can see as plain as day.

“I bet they hang around outside the front door of the hospital,” she will say, “just waiting till you come out. I bet they hide in the linen closets and jump out at you from behind, and then pretend to be lost so you’ll take them by the short cut. It’s the white coat that does it. None of those women can resist the white coats. They’ve been conditioned by Young Doctor Kildare.”

“Don’t be silly,” says Ed today, with equanimity. Is he blushing, is he embarrassed? Sally examines his face closely, like a geologist with an aerial photograph, looking for telltale signs of mineral treasure: markings, bumps, hollows. Everything about Ed means something, though it’s difficult at times to say what.

Now he’s washing his hands at the sink, to get the earth off. In a minute he’ll wipe them on the dish towel instead of using the hand towel the way he’s supposed to. Is that complacency, in the back turned to her? Maybe there really are these hordes of women, even though she’s made them up. Maybe they really do behave that way. His shoulders are slightly drawn up: is he shutting her out?

“I know what they want,” she goes on. “They want to get into that little dark room of yours and climb up onto your table. They think you’re delicious. They’ll gobble you up. They’ll chew you into tiny pieces. There won’t be anything left of you at all, only a stethoscope and a couple of shoelaces.”

Once Ed would have laughed at this, but today he doesn’t. Maybe she’s said it, or something like it, a few times too often. He smiles though, wipes his hands on the dish towel, peers into the fridge. He likes to snack.

“There’s some cold roast beef,” Sally says, baffled.

Sally takes the sauce off the stove and sets it aside for later: she’ll do the last steps just before serving. It’s only two-thirty. Ed has disappeared into the cellar, where Sally knows he will be safe for a while. She goes into her study, which used to be one of the kids’ bedrooms, and sits down at her desk. The room has never been completely redecorated: there’s still a bed in it, and a dressing table with a blue flowered flounce Sally helped pick out, long before the kids went off to university: “flew the coop,” as Ed puts it.

Sally doesn’t comment on the expression, though she would like to say that it wasn’t the first coop they flew. Her house isn’t even the real coop, since neither of the kids is hers. She’d hoped for a baby of her own when she married Ed, but she didn’t want to force the issue. Ed didn’t object to the idea, exactly, but he was neutral about it, and Sally got the feeling he’d had enough babies already. Anyway, the other two wives had babies, and look what happened to them. Since their actual fates have always been vague to Sally, she’s free to imagine all kinds of things, from drug addiction to madness. Whatever it was resulted in Sally having to bring up their kids, at least from puberty onwards. The way it was presented by the first wife was that it was Ed’s turn now. The second wife was more oblique: she said that the child wanted to spend some time with her father. Sally was left out of both these equations, as if the house wasn’t a place she lived in, not really, so she couldn’t be expected to have any opinion.

Considering everything, she hasn’t done badly. She likes the kids and tries to be a friend to them, since she can hardly pretend to be a mother. She describes the three of them as having an easy relationship. Ed wasn’t around much for the kids, but it’s him they want approval from, not Sally; it’s him they respect. Sally is more like a confederate, helping them get what they want from Ed.

When the kids were younger, Sally used to play Monopoly with them, up at the summer place in Muskoka Ed owned then but has since sold. Ed would play too, on his vacations and on the weekends when he could make it up. These games would all proceed along the same lines. Sally would have an initial run of luck and would buy up everything she had a chance at. She didn’t care whether it was classy real estate, like Boardwalk or Park Place, or those dingy little houses on the other side of the tracks; she would even buy train stations, which the kids would pass over, preferring to save their cash reserves for better investments. Ed, on the other hand, would plod along, getting a little here, a little there. Then, when Sally was feeling flush, she would blow her money on next-to-useless luxuries such as the electric light company; and when the kids started to lose, as they invariably did, Sally would lend them money at cheap rates or trade them things of her own, at a loss. Why not? She could afford it.

Ed meanwhile would be hedging his bets, building up blocks of property, sticking houses and hotels on them. He preferred the middle range, respectable streets but not flashy. Sally would land on his spaces and have to shell out hard cash. Ed never offered deals, and never accepted them. He played a lone game, and won more often than not. Then Sally would feel thwarted. She would say she guessed she lacked the killer instinct; or she would say that for herself she didn’t care, because after all it was only a game, but he ought to allow the kids to win, once in a while. Ed couldn’t grasp the concept of allowing other people to win. He said it would be condescending towards the children, and anyway you couldn’t arrange to have a dice game turn out the way you wanted it to, since it was partly a matter of chance. If it was chance, Sally would think, why were the games so similar to one another? At the end, there would be Ed, counting up his paper cash, sorting it out into piles of bills of varying denominations, and Sally, her vast holdings dwindled to a few shoddy blocks on Baltic Avenue, doomed to foreclosure: extravagant, generous, bankrupt.

On these nights, after the kids were asleep, Sally would have two or three more rye-and-gingers than were good for her. Ed would go to bed early – winning made him satisfied and drowsy – and Sally would ramble about the house or read the endings of murder mysteries she had already read once before, and finally she would slip into bed and wake Ed up and stroke him into arousal, seeking comfort.

Sally has almost forgotten these games. Right now the kids are receding, fading like old ink; Ed on the contrary looms larger and larger, the outlines around him darkening. He’s constantly developing, like a Polaroid print, new colours emerging, but the result remains the same: Ed is a surface, one she has trouble getting beneath.

“Explore your inner world,” said Sally’s instructor in
Forms of Narrative Fiction
, a middle-aged woman of scant fame who goes in for astrology and the Tarot pack and writes short stories, which are not published in any of the magazines Sally reads. “Then there’s your outer one,” Sally said afterwards, to her friends. “For instance, she should really get something done about her hair.” She made this trivial and mean remark because she’s fed up with her inner world; she doesn’t need to explore it. In her inner world is Ed, like a doll within a Russian wooden doll, and in Ed is Ed’s inner world, which she can’t get at.

She takes a crack at it anyway: Ed’s inner world is a forest, which looks something like the bottom part of their ravine lot, but without the fence. He wanders around in there, among the trees, not heading in any special direction. Every once in a while he comes upon a strange-looking plant, a sickly plant choked with weeds and briars. Ed kneels, clears a space around it, does some pruning, a little skilful snipping and cutting, props it up. The plant revives, flushes with health, sends out a grateful red blossom. Ed continues on his way. Or it may be a conked-out squirrel, which he restores with a drop from his flask of magic elixir. At set intervals an angel appears, bringing him food. It’s always meatloaf. That’s fine with Ed, who hardly notices what he eats, but the angel is getting tired of being an angel. Now Sally begins thinking about the angel: why are its wings frayed and dingy grey around the edges, why is it looking so withered and frantic? This is where all Sally’s attempts to explore Ed’s inner world end up.

She knows she thinks about Ed too much. She knows she should stop. She knows she shouldn’t ask, “Do you still love me?” in the plaintive tone that sets even her own teeth on edge. All it achieves is that Ed shakes his head, as if not understanding why she would ask this, and pats her hand. “Sally, Sally,” he says, and everything proceeds as usual; except for the dread that seeps into things, the most ordinary things, such as rearranging the chairs and changing the burnt-out lightbulbs. But what is it she’s afraid of? She has what they call everything: Ed, their wonderful house on a ravine lot, something she’s always wanted. (But the hill is jungly, and the house is made of ice. It’s held together only by Sally, who sits in the middle of it, working on a puzzle. The puzzle is Ed. If she should ever solve it, if she should ever fit the last cold splinter into place, the house will melt and flow away down the hill, and then.…) It’s a bad habit, fooling around with her head this way. It does no good. She knows that if she could quit she’d be happier. She ought to be able to: she’s given up smoking.

She needs to concentrate her attention on other things. This is the real reason for the night courses, which she picks almost at random, to coincide with the evenings Ed isn’t in. He has meetings, he’s on the boards of charities, he has trouble saying no. She runs the courses past herself, mediaeval history, cooking, anthropology, hoping her mind will snag on something; she’s even taken a course in geology, which was fascinating, she told her friends, all that magma. That’s just it: everything is fascinating, but nothing enters her. She’s always a star pupil, she does well on the exams and impresses the teachers, for which she despises them. She is familiar with her brightness, her techniques; she’s surprised other people are still taken in by them.

Forms of Narrative Fiction
started out the same way. Sally was full of good ideas, brimming with helpful suggestions. The workshop part of it was anyway just like a committee meeting, and Sally knew how to run those, from behind, without seeming to run them: she’d done it lots of times at work. Bertha, the instructor, told Sally she had a vivid imagination and a lot of untapped creative energy. “No wonder she never gets anywhere, with a name like Bertha,” Sally said, while having coffee afterwards with two of the other night-coursers. “It goes with her outfits, though.” (Bertha sports the macramé look, with health-food sandals and bulky-knit sweaters and hand-weave skirts that don’t do a thing for her square figure, and too many Mexican rings on her hands, which she doesn’t wash often enough.) Bertha goes in for assignments, which she calls learning by doing. Sally likes assignments: she likes things that can be completed and then discarded, and for which she gets marks.

The first thing Bertha assigned was The Epic. They read
The Odyssey
(selected passages, in translation, with a plot summary of the rest); then they poked around in James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, to see how Joyce had adapted the epic form to the modern-day novel. Bertha had them keep a Toronto notebook, in which they had to pick out various spots around town as the ports of call in
The Odyssey
, and say why they had chosen them. The notebooks were read out loud in class, and it was a scream to see who had chosen what for Hades. (The Mount Pleasant Cemetery, McDonald’s, where, if you eat the forbidden food, you never get back to the land of the living, the University Club with its dead ancestral souls, and so forth.) Sally’s was the hospital, of course; she had no difficulty with the trench filled with blood, and she put the ghosts in wheelchairs.

After that they did The Ballad, and read gruesome accounts of murders and betrayed love. Bertha played them tapes of wheezy old men singing traditionally, in the Doric mode, and assigned a newspaper scrapbook, in which you had to clip and paste up-to-the-minute equivalents. The
Sun
was the best newspaper for these. The fiction that turned out to go with this kind of plot was the kind Sally liked anyway, and she had no difficulty concocting a five-page murder mystery, complete with revenge.

But now they are on Folk Tales and the Oral Tradition, and Sally is having trouble. This time, Bertha wouldn’t let them read anything. Instead she read to them, in a voice, Sally said, that was like a gravel truck and was not conducive to reverie. Since it was the Oral Tradition, they weren’t even allowed to take notes; Bertha said the original hearers of these stories couldn’t read, so the stories were memorized. “To recreate the atmosphere,” said Bertha, “I should turn out the lights. These stories were always told at night.” “To make them creepier?” someone offered. “No,” said Bertha. “In the days, they worked.” She didn’t do that, though she did make them sit in a circle.

“You should have seen us,” Sally said afterwards to Ed, “sitting in a circle, listening to fairy stories. It was just like kindergarten. Some of them even had their mouths open. I kept expecting her to say, ‘If you need to go, put up your hand.’ ” She was meaning to be funny, to amuse Ed with this account of Bertha’s eccentricity and the foolish appearance of the students, most of them middle-aged, sitting in a circle as if they had never grown up at all. She was also intending to belittle the course, just slightly. She always did this with her night courses, so Ed wouldn’t get the idea there was anything in her life that was even remotely as important as he was. But Ed didn’t seem to need this amusement or this belittlement. He took her information earnestly, gravely, as if Bertha’s behaviour was, after all, only the procedure of a specialist. No one knew better than he did that the procedures of specialists often looked bizarre or incomprehensible to onlookers. “She probably has her reasons,” was all he would say.