Lady Oracle

by Margaret Atwood

  From this soggy domestic atmosphere the Royal Porcupine was a welcome escape. He didn't make many demands; with him it was easy come, easy go. I began to get careless. I started calling him from the apartment when Arthur was out, and then when Arthur was merely in the next room. My work was suffering too: I'd completely lost interest in Costume Gothics. What did I need them for now?

  When I finally went on Sturgess' trans-Canada tour, the Royal Porcupine came along, and we had a lot of fun smuggling him into the motel rooms. Sometimes we dressed up in middle-aged tourist outfits, bought at the Crippled Civilians, and registered under assumed names. In Toronto I started going to parties, not exactly with him, but five minutes before or after. We'd get other people to introduce us to each other. These games were childish, but a relief.

  It was at one of these parties that I met Fraser Buchanan. He came up to me, glass in hand, and stood smirking while I asked the Royal Porcupine what he did for a living.

  "I'm a mortician," he said. We both thought this was funny.

  "Excuse me, Ms. Foster," Fraser Buchanan said, extending his hand. "My name is Fraser Buchanan. Perhaps you've heard of me." He was a short man, tidily dressed in a tweed jacket and turtle-neck sweater, with sideburns that he obviously found daring, as he turned his head often to give you the benefit of a side view.

  "I'm afraid I haven't," I said. I smiled at him; I was feeling good. "This is the Royal Porcupine, the con-create poet."

  "I know," said Fraser Buchanan, giving me an oddly intimate smile. "I'm familiar with his ... work. But really, Ms. Foster, I'm more interested in you." He sidled closer, wedging himself between me and the Royal Porcupine. I leaned backward a little. "Tell me," he said in a half-whisper, "how is it that I never saw any of your work in print before Lady Oracle? Most poets, or should I say poetesses, go through an, ah, an apprentice period. In the little magazines and so forth. I follow them closely, but I never saw anything of yours."

  "Are you a journalist?" I asked.

  "No, no," he said. "I used to write a little poetry myself." His tone suggested that he had since outgrown this. "You might call me an interested observer. A lover," he smirked, "of the arts."

  "Well," I said, "I guess I just never thought any of my stuff was good enough to be published. I never sent any of it in." I gave what I hoped was a modest laugh and looked over his shoulder at the Royal Porcupine, hoping for rescue. Fraser Buchanan's thigh was resting ever so lightly against my own.

  "So then you sprang fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus," he said. "Or rather, from the head of John Morton. That man certainly has a nose for young talent."

  I couldn't put my finger on it, but there was some very unpleasant insinuation going on. I laughed again and told him I was going to get another drink. It occurred to me that I'd seen him before, front row center at a television talk show, taking notes in a little book. Several talk shows. Several out-of-town talk shows. A motel lobby.

  "Who is that strange little man?" I asked the Royal Porcupine later, as we lay exhausted on his mattress. "What does he do?"

  "He knows everyone," he said. "He used to be with the CBC, I guess everyone did. Then he started a literary magazine called Reject; the idea was that it would print only stuff that'd been rejected by other literary magazines, the more the merrier, plus the rejection slips. He was going to give a prize for the best rejection slip, he said it was an art. But it flopped because nobody wanted to admit they'd been rejected. He printed a lot of his own stuff in the first issue, though. I think he's English. He goes to all the parties, he goes to every party he can get into. He used to go around saying, 'Hello, I'm Fraser Buchanan, the Montreal Poet.' I think he once lived in Montreal."

  "But how come you know him?"

  "I submitted stuff to Reject," the Royal Porcupine said. "That was when I was still doing words. He rejected it. He hates my stuff, he thinks it's too far out."

  "I think he's been following me around," I said. What I thought was worse: he's been following us around.

  "He's freaky," said the Royal Porcupine. "He has this thing about celebrities. He says he's writing a history of our times."

  That evening I took a taxi home early. I was suffering again from self-doubt. The difficulty was that I found each of my lives perfectly normal and appropriate, but only at the time. When I was with Arthur, the Royal Porcupine seemed like a daydream from one of my less credible romances, with an absurdity about him that I tried to exclude from my fictions. But when I was with the Royal Porcupine, he seemed plausible and solid. Everything he did and said made sense in his own terms, whereas it was Arthur who became unreal; he faded to an insubstantial ghost, a washed-out photo on some mantelpiece I'd long ago abandoned. Was I hurting him, was I being unfaithful? How could you hurt a photograph?

  When I walked into the apartment that evening, I was still thinking about this. The Resurgence crowd was there in force; something exciting was going on. Sam was the only one who said hello. They had a captive union organizer there, a real one, backed into the corner. He called them "you kids."

  "If you kids want to get involved, okay," he was saying, "but if the workers want to spit on policemen, let them spit on policemen. It's their jobs. You kids can go to jail, you don't have steady jobs, you can miss some time, but for them it's different."

  Don started to argue that this was precisely why they and not the workers should do it, but the union organizer waved his hand in dismissal. "No, no," he said. "I know you kids mean well, but believe me. Sometimes the wrong kind of help is worse than no help at all."

  "What's going on?" I asked Sam.

  "It's a strike down at a mattress factory," Sam said. "Trouble is, most of the workers are Portuguese, and they don't buy our line all that much. Canadian nationalism means bugger all to them, you know? Not that we can get it across to them, we're still looking for an interpreter."

  "Who spit on a policeman?"

  "Arthur did," Sam said, and I could tell from the smug yet chastised look on Arthur's face that indeed he had. For some reason this annoyed me.

  If I hadn't just come from the Royal Porcupine's, I wouldn't have said anything; but he thought politics were boring, especially Canadian nationalism. "Art is universal," he'd say. "They're just trying to get attention."

  When I was with Arthur, I believed in the justice of his cause, his causes, every one of them; how could I live with him otherwise? But the Royal Porcupine took the edge off causes. It was the Cavaliers and the Roundheads all over again.

  "Oh, for heaven's sake," I said to Arthur. "I suppose you can hardly wait to be arrested. But what'll that solve, not a damn thing. You don't live in the real world, you won't join any kind of a political party and go out there and really change things, instead you sit around and argue and attack each other. You're like the Plymouth Brethren, all you're interested in is defining your own purity by excluding everyone else. And then you go out and make some useless, meaningless gesture like spitting on a policeman."

  No one said anything; everyone was too stunned. I was the last person they'd have expected such a tirade from, and come to think of it, who was I to talk? I was hardly saving the world myself.

  "Joan's right," Marlene said, in a voice cold with tactics. "But let's hear what kind of useful, meaningful gesture she'd like to suggest instead."

  "Oh, I don't know," I said. I immediately started backing up and apologizing. "I mean, it's really none of my business, I don't know all that much about politics. Maybe you could blow up the Peace Bridge or something."

  I was horrified to see that they were taking me seriously. The next evening a small deputation arrived at the apartment. Marlene, Don, Sam and a couple of the younger Resurgenites.

  "We've got it out there in the car," Marlene said.

  "Got what?" I asked. I'd just washed my hair, I hadn't been expecting them. Arthur was off teaching his night class in Canadian Literature; he'd barely spoken to me that day, and I wasn't happy about that.

  "Th
e dynamite," she said. She was quite excited. "My father's in construction, it was easy to pinch it, plus the detonator and a couple of blasting caps."

  "Dynamite? What're you doing with dynamite?"

  "We talked over your idea," she said. "We decided it wasn't such a bad one. We're going to blow up the Peace Bridge, as a gesture. It's the best one to blow up, because of the name."

  "Wait a minute," I said, "you might hurt someone."

  "Marlene says we'll do it at night," Don said quickly. "We won't blow it all up anyway, it's more like a symbol. A gesture, like you said."

  They wanted me to hide the dynamite for them. They'd even thought out a plan. They wanted me to buy a used car, under an assumed name, using a fake address, the apartment of a new Resurgenite who was going away for a couple of months anyway. Then I had to put the dynamite in the trunk of the car and move the car around every day, from one street to another, from one all-night parking lot to the next.

  "A used car costs money," I said slowly.

  "Look, it was your idea," Marlene said. "The least you can do is help us out. Besides, you can get a cheap one for a couple of hundred."

  "Why me?"

  "They'd never suspect you," Marlene said. "You don't look much like the dynamite type."

  "How long will I have to do this?" I asked.

  "Only till we get the plan together. Then we'll take over the car."

  "All right, I'll do it," I said. "Where's the dynamite?"

  "Here," Don said, handing me a cardboard carton.

  I never had any intention of carrying out their plan. The next day I took a taxi to the Royal Porcupine's and stowed the box in the cellar. There were a lot of crates and boxes there anyway. I told him it was an ugly statue I'd got for a wedding present and I couldn't bear to have it in the house any longer.

  "I'd rather you didn't open it," I said. "For sentimental reasons."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Royal Porcupine couldn't let well enough alone. That was one of the things I liked about him: he didn't believe in well enough, he believed in cataclysmic absolutes.

  "Where'd you get the dynamite?" he said. We were lying on his mattress; he always kept serious questions till afterwards.

  "I asked you not to open that box," I said.

  "Come on, you knew I would. You know I love ugly statues. Where'd you get it?"

  "It's not my dynamite," I said. "It belongs to some other people."

  "I've never seen any of that stuff go off," he said thoughtfully. "I always liked Victoria Day though, that was my favorite holiday. That and Hallowe'en."

  "If you're thinking of blowing anything up," I said, "forget it. You'd get me in deep trouble if they found out it was missing."

  "We could replace it," he said, "with other dynamite."

  "No," I said. I was remembering the time he'd almost electrocuted us. He'd heard from one of his friends, also a con-create artist, that if you got a string of Christmas tree lights, plugged it in, unscrewed one of the lights, and stuck your finger in the socket at the moment of ejaculation, not only you but your partner would have the greatest orgasm in the world. His friend's recipe also included several joints, but the Royal Porcupine had given up dope. "Jejune," he called it. "Fred Astaire didn't smoke dope, right?" He'd spent days trying to persuade me to perform this act, or "art-if-act," as he called it; the "if" stood for the element of chance. He'd even bought a third-hand string of Christmas tree lights. "I refuse to turn myself into an electric toaster to satisfy one of your demented whims," I told him; so he'd hidden the lights under the mattress and plugged them in just before my next visit. He was planning to sneak his finger into the socket without my knowing, at the crucial moment; but we'd hardly begun before wisps of smoke began to curl out from under the mattress. I was afraid something similar would happen with the dynamite.

  As usual, the more I resisted, the more excited he became. He got up off the mattress and started pacing the room. He put his fur hat on, a recent one, with Mountie earflaps. "Come on," he said, "it would be terrific! We wouldn't blow anything up, we'd just set it off, at night somewhere, and watch it go. Wow, it'd be sensational. It would be, like, an event, and we'd be the only audience, it would be all for us. Ka-boom. It's the only chance you'll ever get, how could you pass up something like that?"

  "Easily," I said. "I don't like loud meaningless noises."

  "Then you're with the wrong man," he said. He started licking my ear.

  "Chuck, be reasonable."

  "Reasonable," he said sullenly. "If I was reasonable, you wouldn't love me. Everyone else's reasonable." He took off his fur hat and flung it across the room. "And don't call me Chuck" (I'd recently found out that his real name was Chuck Brewer, and he even had a job: he was a part-time commercial artist, specializing in layout and design. He told me this in deepest confidence, as if it were disreputable.)

  Five days later we were walking across High Park, looking for a suitable place. It was eleven at night, it was the middle of March; there was still ice in the ponds and snow under the trees, it was a late spring. The Royal Porcupine had on one of his fur coats and his fur hat with the earflaps down. Under his coat he was carrying the dynamite in the cardboard box, with the fuse and detonator. He said he'd found out how to work it. I didn't believe him; also I didn't trust his motives.

  "I'm not going along with this if you blow up any people," I said.

  "I told you, I won't."

  "Or any animals. Or any houses, or any trees."

  "You still don't get it," he said impatiently. "The point isn't to blow anything up, it's just to blow up the dynamite. It's a pure act."

  "I don't believe in pure acts," I said.

  "Then you don't have to come with me," he said craftily, but I felt if I didn't he might break his promise and blow up something important, like a reservoir or the Gzowski Memorial down by the lakefront, which he'd mentioned in passing.

  After inspecting a few likely sites, he settled on a stretch of open ground near a medium-sized pond. There didn't seem to be any structures nearby and it was quite far from the road, so I approved it. I crouched shivering in a clump of bushes while he fiddled with the dynamite, attaching the blasting cap and unraveling the wire.

  "Are we far enough away?" I asked.

  "Oh, sure," he said. Though when he set off the charge, it made an impressive enough WHUMP, and we were showered with bits of earth and a few small stones.

  "Hah!" cried the Royal Porcupine. "Did you see that!"

  I hadn't seen anything, as I'd closed my eyes and covered them with my mittened hands. "It was great," I said admiringly.

  "Great," he said. "Is that all you can say? It was fuckin' terrific, it's the best art-if-act I've ever done!" He pulled me into his fur coat and began undoing buttons.

  "We've got to get out of here," I protested. "Someone must've heard it, the police will come, they patrol this park."

  "Come on," he begged, and I couldn't refuse, it was obviously so important to him. We made seismographic love inside his coat, listening for the sound of sirens, which never arrived.

  "You're one in a million," he said. "Nobody else would've done that. I think I'm in love with you." I should've felt ironic about this, but I didn't. I kissed him gratefully, I must admit.

  He was a little disappointed that the explosion didn't make the front page. For a whole day it didn't even make the newspapers, but on the second day he located a paragraph buried in the Star.

  MYSTERIOUS EXPLOSION IN HIGH PARK

  Police were puzzled by a small blast Wednesday, apparently caused by dynamite. No one was injured, although the sewer system of a nearby park restaurant was temporarily disrupted. There was no apparent reason for the blast; vandalism is suspected.

  The Royal Porcupine was enthralled by this report, which he read out loud to me several times. "No apparent reason," he crowed. "Fabulous!" He took the clipping to a photo blow-up service, had it enlarged, framed it in a carved frame from the Crippled Civ
vies, and mounted it beside the Queen.

  For weeks after the explosion, Marlene and Don and the rest believed that I was moving the dynamite around the city, in a 1968 powder-blue Chevy. Meanwhile they were debating their contemplated act. Not how to do it, for they never got that far. They didn't even get as far as maps and strategy, they were stuck at the level of pure theory: would they be blowing up the right thing? It would be a nationalist act, true, but was it nationalist enough, and if so, would it serve the people? Some decisive act was necessary, Don argued; otherwise they would be outflanked. Already ideas they'd thought were theirs alone were beginning to appear in newspaper editorials, and the Gallup poll showed a swing in their direction. They viewed these developments with alarm: the revolution was getting into the wrong hands.

  I didn't mind moving their imaginary dynamite around the city. It gave me a perfect chance to leave the apartment any time I felt like it. "Time to move the dynamite," I'd say cheerfully, and there wasn't much Arthur could say. In fact he was even proud of me. "You've got to admit she's intrepid," Sam said. They felt I was being very cool.

  Most of the time I'd go over to the Royal Porcupine's. But something was changing. The lace tablecloth in which I waltzed with him was turning itself back into a lace tablecloth, with a rip in it; the black pointed boots were no longer worth the pain they inflicted. Motels became motels, and what they meant to me now was hard work and embarrassment. Sturgess was sending me on yet more trips, to Sudbury, to Windsor, and it was costing me more and more to get through the interviews.

  Afterward I would go back to the motel and wash out my underwear and pantyhose in the bathroom sinks, squeezing them in towels and draping them over coat hangers. In the mornings they were never quite dry but I would put them on anyway, feeling the clammy grub-gray touch against my skin. It was like dressing in the used breath of other people. While the Royal Porcupine sat on the bed's edge, white and skinny as a root, and asked me questions.

  "What's he like?"

  "Who?"

  "You know, Arthur. How often do you...."

  "Chuck, it's none of your business."

  "It is my business," he said. He didn't pick up on the name; he was becoming less and less like the Royal Porcupine and more and more like Chuck. "I don't ask you those things about your lady friends."