Life Before Man

by Margaret Atwood

  Hence this afternoon hotel. They've come to it by subway, since neither of them owns a car. This fact also rules out necking on side streets, which is what they should be doing at this preliminary stage, in Lesje's opinion. They have in fact necked on side streets, but it's been uncomfortable: feet freezing in slush, passing cars splattering them with brown sludge, arms hugging the bolster shapes of each others' winter coats. But no groping in the front seat.

  Lesje considers groping in the front seat almost an essential. The only other affairs she's had have been with William, champion groper, and before him a geologist in fourth-year university who even then, in 1970, had a crew cut. Neither of these affairs was exactly romantic; both had been based on mutual interests, of a sort. It was hard for Lesje to find men who were as monomaniacal about their subjects as she was about hers. They existed, but they tended to go out with Home Economics types. After a day of pondering surds and pingoes they wanted to put their feet up and eat grated carrot and marshmallow salads. They didn't want to talk about Megalosaurus tibias or whether the pterosaurs had three-chambered or four-chambered hearts, which was what she wanted to talk about. The geologist had been fine; they could compromise on rock strata. They went on hikes with their little picks and kits, and chipped samples off cliffs; then they ate jelly sandwiches and copulated in a friendly way behind clumps of goldenrod and thistles. She found this pleasurable but not extremely so. She still has a collection of rock chips left over from this relationship; looking at it does not fill her with bitterness. He was a nice boy but she wasn't in love with him. She is not exactly a paradigm of modish chic, she knows that, but she could never quite fall in love with a man who says "wow."

  As for William, what they have in common is an interest in extinction. She confines it to dinosaurs, however. William applies it to everything. Except cockroaches; a cockroach has been found living in a nuclear reactor. The next age, according to William, will be the age of the insects. On most days he's quite cheerful about this.

  Lesje isn't sure what she means by in love. Once she thought she was in love with William, since it upset her that he did not ask her to marry him. But recently she's begun to question this. At first she welcomed the relative simplicity, even the bareness, of their life together. They were both committed to their jobs, and they had, it seemed, easily met expectations and only minor areas of friction. But Nate has changed things, he has changed William. What was once a wholesome absence of complications is now an embarrassing lack of complexity. For instance, William would have lunged as soon as they were inside the door. Not so Nate.

  They sit on either side of the large double bed which looms like fate in the center of the room, each with a cigarette, drinking out of the hotel glasses which contain Scotch from Nate's pocket flask mixed with tap water. Gazing across the bed as if it's a fathomless gulf, while Nate apologizes, Lesje listens, veiling her face with her hand, smoke making her squint. Nate doesn't want just an affair, he says. Lesje is touched by this; she doesn't think to ask what he does want. William has never been at such pains to explain himself.

  Lesje feels that something momentous is about to take place. Her life is about to change: things will not be as they have been before. The walls of the hotel, patterned with greenish lozenges, are dissolving, she is moving through the open air, no longer snow-filled and tinged with exhaust fumes but clean and sunny; on the horizon there's the glimmer of water. Why then doesn't Nate stub out his cigarette, stand up, take her in his arms? Now that he has her in this tacky bedroom.

  But instead he pours himself another drink and continues to explain. He wants everything to be clear at the beginning. He doesn't want Lesje to think she's breaking up a marriage. As she no doubt knows, Elizabeth has had other lovers, the most recent of whom was Chris. Elizabeth has never made any secret of that. She thinks of Nate as the father of her children but not as her husband. They haven't lived together, he means slept together, for several years, he isn't sure how many. They've stayed in the same house together because of the children. Neither of them can stand the thought of living apart from the children. So naturally Elizabeth will have no objection to his doing what Lesje wishes he would hurry up and do.

  The mention of Elizabeth startles Lesje, who realizes that she hasn't been thinking about her at all. She ought to be thinking about her. You don't just stroll into another woman's life and take over her husband. Everyone in the women's group agreed, in theory at least, on the reprehensibility of such behavior, although they also agreed that married people should not be viewed as each other's property but as living, growing organisms. What it boiled down to was that man-stealing was out but personal growth was commendable. You had to have the right attitude and be honest with yourself. These convolutions had discouraged Lesje; she hadn't understood why so much time was being spent on them. But at that point she'd never been in such a situation, and now she is.

  She certainly doesn't want to play Other Woman in some conventional, boring triangle. She doesn't feel like an other woman; she isn't wheedling or devious, she doesn't wear negligees or paint her toenails. William may think she's exotic, but she isn't really; she's straightforward, narrow and unadorned, a scientist; not a web-spinner, expert at the entrapment of husbands. But Nate no longer seems like Elizabeth's husband. His family is surely external to him; in himself he's single, a free agent. And Elizabeth is therefore not the wife of Nate, she isn't a wife at all. Instead she's a widow, Chris's widow if anyone's, moving unpaired and grieving down an autumn avenue, leaves from the over-arching trees falling on her faintly disheveled hair. Lesje consigns her to this mournfully romantic picture, frames her, and then forgets about her.

  William is another matter. William will mind; he will definitely mind in one way or another. But Lesje doesn't intend to tell him about this, at least not yet. Nate has implied that although Elizabeth would give the seal of approval to what he's doing and may even be pleased for him, since in a way they are good friends, now is not the right time to tell her. Elizabeth has been making an adjustment, not as quick an adjustment as he'd like to see but definitely an adjustment. He wants her to finish doing that before he gives her something new that she has to adjust to. It has something to do with the children.

  So if Nate is going to protect Elizabeth and the children from Lesje, Lesje is entitled to protect William from Nate. She feels tender towards William when she considers his need for protection. He's never needed it before. But now she reflects upon the unconscious nape of his neck, the vulnerability of the hollow at the angle of his collarbone, his jugular veins, so perilously close to the skin, his inability to tan instead of burn, the wax in his ears unseen by him, his childlike pomposity. She has no desire to hurt William.

  Nate puts down his glass, grinds his cigarette into the hotel ashtray. He's come to the end of ethics. He negotiates the perimeter of the blue bed, walks to Lesje, kneels in front of her where she sits in her Danish Modern chair. He takes her hand away from her mouth, kisses her. She has never been touched with such gentleness. William's style has a lot of adolescent roughhouse, she now realizes, and the geologist was always in a hurry. Nate isn't in a hurry. They've been here two hours and she still has all her clothes on.

  He picks her up, places her on the bed, lies down beside her. He kisses her again, tentatively, lingeringly. Then he asks what time it is. He himself has no watch. Lesje tells him it's five-thirty. He sits up. Lesje is beginning to feel slightly unattractive. Are her teeth too large, is that it?

  "I have to phone home," he says. "I'm supposed to be taking the kids to dinner at my mother's."

  He lifts the telephone from the table and dials. The cord trails across Lesje's chest. "Hello, love," he says, and Lesje knows it's Elizabeth. "Just checking in. I'll pick them up at six, okay?"

  The words "home," "love," and "mother" have disturbed Lesje. A vacuum forms around her heart, spreads; it's as if she doesn't exist. When Nate puts down the phone, she begins to cry. He folds his arms around her, soothing he
r, smoothing her hair. "There's lots of time, love," he says. "Next time will be better."

  Don't call me that, she wants to say. She sits on the bed, feet over the side, hands dangling from her wrists, while Nate gets their coats, puts his own on, holds hers out for her. She wants to be the one going to dinner with him. To his mother's. She doesn't want to stay here on the blue bed alone, or walk out into the street alone, or go back to her apartment where she will also be alone whether William is there or not. She wants to pull Nate back onto the bed with her. She doesn't believe there is lots of time. There is no time, surely she will never see him again. She doesn't understand why her heart is beating so painfully, gulping for oxygen in the blackness of this outer space. He's taking something away from her. If he loves her, why has she been exiled?

  Saturday, January 15, 1977

  NATE

  Jackass, Nate whispers. Ninny. Fraud. He's reading the editorial in The Globe and Mail, and he usually says such things while doing this, but right now he means himself. Idiot.

  He sees himself hunched forward on the hotel room chair, raving about his scruples while Lesje sits across the room from him, unattainable, shining like a crescent moon. He doesn't know why he didn't want to, couldn't. He was afraid. He doesn't want to hurt her, that's it. But she was hurt anyway. Why did she cry?

  His hands are still shaking. Luckily there's a drink left in his pocket flask. He slides it out from beneath his sweater, gulps quickly, then lights a cigarette to hide the smell. His mother, virtuous woman, does not drink. She doesn't smoke either, but Nate knows which is lower on her point system of moral crimes. Sometimes she buys beer for him but she draws the line at spirits. Poisoning the system.

  The children are out in the tiny kitchen with her, sitting up on the counter, watching her mash the potatoes. She does this by hand; she doesn't have an electric mixer. She beats eggs by hand, whips cream by hand. One of his earliest memories of his mother is of her elbow, whirling around like a strange fleshy wind machine. Her television set is black and white and even more primitive than his. She wears aprons, printed ones with bibs.

  From the cellar below him the pathos of his childhood rises to engulf him: down there are his baseball glove, the leather cracked, three pairs of outgrown running shoes, his skates, his goalie pads, carefully embalmed in trunks. Though she gives away almost everything else, his mother keeps these objects as if they're relics, as if he's already dead. In fairness Nate has to admit that if she hadn't, he might have kept them himself. The goalie pads, anyway.

  He's read that goalies get ulcers; it figures. He wasn't heavy enough to play anything else, he didn't have the weight to check. He remembers the anxiety, everyone expecting him to hurl himself in front of a frozen rubber bullet traveling at the speed of light; the despair when he missed. But he loved it. It was pure: you won or you lost and it was obvious which. When he said this to Elizabeth she thought it was childish. Her own concepts of winning and losing are greyer and more snarled. Is this because she's female? But his children understand it, so far; Nancy, anyway.

  He can see the children over the top of his Globe and Mail, their small heads framed by his mother's red-starred map of world-wide civil-rights violations. Beside it there's a new poster which reads: ONE FLASH AND YOU'RE ASH. His mother has added the abolition of nuclear energy to her long list of crusades. Oddly enough, it's not a trip she lays on the children. Nor does she tell them to eat up their dinners because of the starving children in Europe, or Asia, or India. (Himself, guiltily stuffing down bread crusts under his mother's blue benevolent gaze.) She doesn't ask if they are saving their allowances for the Bandage Campaign. She doesn't drag them through services at the Unitarian Church, with its noncommittal interior and its idealistic hymns about the Brotherhood of Man and its icon of a small black boy beside a trash can where most churches have God. The last time they had dinner with his mother, Nate almost choked on his turnips when Nancy began to tell a Newfie joke. But his mother actually laughed. She lets the children tell all kinds of jokes to her: moron jokes, Moby Dick jokes, and many more of dubious taste. "What's blue and covered with cookies and flies? A dead Girl Guide."

  Nate would have been told it wasn't nice to make fun of morons or whales or Girl Guides: all were worthy. Much less Newfies. Is it because Nancy and Janet are girls and therefore not expected to reach the level of high seriousness that was and still is expected of him? Or is it merely because his mother is now a grandmother and these are her grandchildren? In any case, she spoils them rotten. She even gives them candy. Although he loves her for it, Nate finds himself resenting it. He can hear his mother laughing now, above the sound of the potato masher. He wishes she'd laughed more with him.

  She smiled though. She was raised a Quaker, and Quakers, from what he'd seen of them, were smilers rather than laughers. Nate isn't sure why she switched to the Unitarians. He's heard Unitarianism called a featherbed for falling Christians, but his mother doesn't seem like a woman who has fallen anywhere. (Where is the featherbed for falling Unitarians? he wonders. Such as himself.)

  He tries not to discuss theology with his mother. She still believes that goodness will win.

  She's always used the war as an example, virtue triumphant, despite the fact that it killed his father. He can't remember whether it was before or after this death that she took up part-time nursing at the veterans' hospital where she still works, the legless and armless men that were young when she started there aging along with her, becoming, she tells him, more and more bitter, fading one by one, dying. She should leave such a depressing job, get something more cheerful; he's advised her to do that. But "Everyone else has forgotten them," she says, looking at him reproachfully. "Why should I?" For some reason her pious sacrifices infuriate him. Why shouldn't you, you're human, Nate has wanted to reply. But never has.

  His father, no amputee but a simple dead man, smiles down at him now from the mantelpiece, a young face framed by the severe lines of a uniform. Violator of his mother's pacifist ideals, nevertheless a hero. It had taken Nate a long time to find out exactly how his father had died. "He was a hero," was all that his mother would say, leaving him with visions of rescues on the beach, his father wiping out enemy machine-gun nests single-handed or floating like a dark bat over some blacked-out town, his parachute billowing like a cape behind him.

  Finally, on his sixteenth birthday, he'd asked again and this time - convinced perhaps that he was ready for the facts of life - she'd told him. His father had died in England, of hepatitis, without ever reaching the real war.

  "I thought you said he was a hero," he'd said, disgusted.

  His mother's eyes grew round and bluer. "But Nathanael. He was."

  Still and all, he wishes he'd known sooner; he would have felt less overshadowed. It's hard to compete with any dead man, he knows, much less a hero.

  "Dinner, Nate," his mother calls. She enters carrying the potatoes, the girls follow with knives and forks, and they all crowd around the diminutive oval table at one end of his mother's living room. Nate has asked earlier if there was anything he could do, but since he got married his mother has banished him to the living room during mealtime preparations. She won't even let him wash the dishes any more.

  They're the same dishes, beige with orange nasturtiums, he used to wash so endlessly, grudgingly. They depress Elizabeth, which is one of the reasons she almost never participates in these visits. Elizabeth says his mother's things invariably look as if she ordered them out of a stamp catalogue, and there's some truth to this. Everything in his mother's house is serviceable and, he has to admit, rather ugly. Her table has a plastic finish, her chairs are wipable, her dishes garish, her glassware will bounce on the floor. She doesn't have the time for frills, she says, or the money either. Another thing that bothers her about the wooden toys he makes is the price. "Only rich people can afford them, Nate," she says accusingly.

  They eat hamburger patties fried in leftover bacon fat, mashed potatoes, and canned beets with
margarine, while Nate's mother asks the children about school and laughs gaily at their terrible jokes. Nate feels his stomach go cold; the canned beets sink, mix uneasily with his furtive Scotch. They are, all three of them, so unsuspecting, so innocent. It's as if he's looking at them through a lighted window: inside, peace and tranquil domesticity, this house, the tastes, the smells even, so familiar to him. Good, unassuming. And outside, darkness, thunder, the storm, himself a wolflike monster in tattered clothes, fingernails ragged, lurking red-eyed and envious, snout pressed to the glass. He alone knows the darkness of the human heart, the secrets of evil. Kaboom.

  "Ninny," he whispers to himself.

  "What did you say, dear?" his mother asks, turning her bright blue eyes full upon him. Older now, with crinkles behind spectacles, but the same eyes, shining, earnest, always on the verge of some emotion he cannot quite face: disappointment, joy. The perpetual spotlight in which he's always lived, alone on the stage, the star performer.

  "I was talking to myself," he says.

  "Oh," his mother laughs, "I do that all the time. You must have inherited it."

  After dessert, which is canned peaches, the three of them wash the dishes and Nate is again exiled to the living room to do whatever it is that men are supposed to do after dinner. Nate wonders whether, if his father had lived, his mother would have gone in for Women's Liberation. As it is she doesn't have to. She does, of course, on the theoretical level, and she's fond of pointing out the almost innumerable ways in which women's basic human rights have been cropped, stunted, mutilated and destroyed by men. But if he had slippers she'd bring them for him.