Life Before Man

by Margaret Atwood

  When he'd finally been allowed in, the event was over. There was a baby where no baby had been. Elizabeth, depleted, was lying propped up in a white hospital gown, a plastic name on her wrist. She looked at him dully, as if he were a salesman or a census-taker.

  "Is it all right?" he said, noticing immediately that he'd said "it" rather than "you" or "she." He hadn't even said, "Was it all right." It must have been; she was here, in front of him, she wasn't dead. They all overestimated it.

  "They didn't give me the needle in time," Elizabeth said.

  He looked down at the baby, wrapped like a sausage roll, held by one of Elizabeth's arms. He felt relieved and grateful, and cheated. She told him several times afterwards that he had no idea of what it was like, and she was right, he hadn't. But she acted also as if this was his fault.

  He thinks they were closer before the birth of Janet, but he can't remember. He can't remember what close means, or rather what it would have meant once with Elizabeth. She used to make omelettes for him at night after he was finished studying and they would eat them together, sitting in the double bed. He remembers that time as good. Love food, she called it.

  Nate scrapes leftover boeuf bourguignon into a bowl; later he will put it down the Garb-all. His lapses of memory are beginning to bother him. It's not only Elizabeth, the way (he deduces) she must have been, that's slipping away from him. He loved her, he wanted to marry her, they got married, and he can recall only fragments. Almost a year of law school is gone now; his adolescence is hazy. Martha, once so firm and tangible, is transparent, her face wobbles; soon she will dissolve completely.

  And the children. What did they look like, when did they walk, what did they say, how did he feel? He knows events have taken place, important events of which he is now ignorant. What will happen to this day, to Elizabeth's disastrous dinner party, the remains of which are now being ground to shreds by the metal teeth under the sink?

  Nate starts the dishwasher, wipes his hands on his pantlegs. He goes to the stairs, quietly before remembering: the children are away for the night. Lesje too is gone, fleeing almost directly from the bathroom, stopping only to snatch her coat, her young man in tow. The bun-faced young man whose name Nate can't at the moment recall.

  Instead of going to his own cubicle, his cell, he pauses at the children's door, then walks into their room. He knows now that he will leave; it feels, instead, as though they have left him. Here are the dolls, the scattered paint sets, the scissors, the odd socks and rabbit-faced slippers they've forgotten in their haste to pack. Already they are on a train, a plane, headed for some unknown destination, being carried away from him at the speed of light.

  He knows they will be back tomorrow morning in time for Sunday brunch, that tomorrow anyway everything will go on the same, that he will stand at the kitchen table dishing out scrambled eggs on toast for himself and the girls and for Elizabeth, who will be wrapped in her blue terry-cloth bathrobe, hair only half-brushed. He will dish out the scrambled eggs and Elizabeth will ask him to pour her a second cup of coffee, and it will seem even to him as though nothing is about to happen.

  Yet he kneels; tears come to his eyes. He should have held on, he should have held on more tightly. He picks up one of Nancy's blue rabbit slippers, stroking the fur. It's his own eventual death he cradles. His lost, his kidnapped children, gone from him, kept hostage. Who has done this? How has he allowed it to happen?

  Tuesday, February 8, 1977

  LESJE

  Lesje drifts along the street with the drifting snow. Cars in their chains jingle past her, their tires locked in ruts; slush clogs their fenders. In the night there's been a blizzard. She doesn't care that her feet are cold: she has no feet. The trees she passes are heavy with ice. Each twig glitters in the weak sunlight, lit from within; the world glows. Lesje stretches her arms out, feels the blood flow along them to explode in purple at each hand. She knows the blaze of light she sees is only a mitten. But it is a mitten transfigured, its acrylic fibers shining with their own atomic light. Dazzled, she squints her eyes. She's weightless, all pores, the universe accepts her finally, nothing bad can happen. Has she ever felt like this before?

  It's only two o'clock. She left the office early, telling Dr. Van Vleet she felt she was coming down with something. Really it's Nate who is coming down with something: he phoned from his house, nasal, forlorn, he has to see her. Lesje walks to the rescue in her gum-soled snowboots, a nurse hurrying over frozen Siberia, driven on by love. She will put her hand on his forehead and miraculously he will revive. By the time she reaches his front steps and stamps her way up them her nose is running.

  Nate opens the door, draws her inside quickly, shuts the door before enfolding her. Lesje is pressed against his brown wool dressing gown, which smells of old smoke and burnt toast. His mouth comes down on hers; sniffling, they kiss. He half-lifts her, then thinks better of it and sets her down.

  "My boots will drip," she says, and bends to unzip them. She tugs at her boot heels, her eyes at the level of Nate's knees. He's wearing work socks, grey with red stripes around the top and white toes and heels. These socks, for some reason, fill her with tenderness and lust: her body is with her again.

  In their stocking feet they tiptoe along the hall and up the stairs. Nate leads her by the hand.

  "In here," he says. Although there is no one home, they whisper.

  Nate folds back the Indian spread. Lesje can hardly see: the room is a blur around her, vision a shaft of light illuminating tigers, off-red tigers in a purplish jungle. Under the tigers there are flowered sheets. Wordlessly Nate undresses her, lifting her arms, bending her elbows as if he's undressing a doll or a child; Lesje stands still. He eases her sweater over her head, presses his cheek against her stomach while he kneels to slide down her jeans. Lesje raises one foot and then the other, stepping out, obedient. There's cold air, a draft somewhere in the room. Her skin contracts. Gently he pulls her onto the bed. She sinks into a hollow, petals flow over her.

  He's on top of her, both of them impelled now by fear, the sun moving across the sky, the feet walking inexorably towards them, the sound of a door which has not yet opened, boots on the stairs.

  Lesje is lying semipropped on two pillows. His head rests on her belly. The world is again the world, she can see detail, the luminous blur has faded. Nevertheless she's happy. She does not see this happiness as having any necessary result.

  Nate moves, reaches for a Kleenex from the night table. "What time is it?" he says. They talk in normal voices now.

  Lesje checks her watch. "I'd better leave," she says. She would rather not have Elizabeth or the children come back to find her naked in Nate's bed.

  Nate rolls onto his side, rests on an elbow while she sits up, slides her legs over the side of the bed. With one hand she gropes for her underpants, lost somewhere in the flowers. She bends to look on the floor. Two shoes are there, on the oval braided rug, black ones, side by side.

  "Nate," she says. "Whose room is this?"

  He looks at her, he doesn't answer.

  "This is Elizabeth's room," she says.

  She stands up and begins to dress, covering herself as fast as she can. This is horrible, this is a violation. She feels grubby; it's almost like incest. Elizabeth's husband is one thing, Elizabeth's bed quite another.

  Nate doesn't understand. He explains that his own bed is too narrow for both of them.

  This is not the point. She thinks: The bed had no choice.

  He helps her pull the tiger bedspread up and smooth the pillows. How can she tell him? She doesn't know why she is so upset. Perhaps it's the suggestion that it doesn't matter, that she and Elizabeth are interchangeable. Or his feeling that Elizabeth's bed is still in some sense his also, he can do whatever he wants in it. Lesje feels for the first time that she has wronged Elizabeth, that she has trespassed.

  Lesje sits in the kitchen, elbows on the kitchen table, chin on her hands; Nate lights her cigarette for her. He's baffled. He
offers her a Scotch, then a cup of tea. Smoke screens her face.

  On the refrigerator there's a child's painting, held in place by a magnetic plastic tomato and a cob of corn. It's of a girl, hair a yellow blob, eyes fringed with enormous lashes, a manic red grin. The sky is a blue line at the top of the page, the sun a bursting lemon.

  All the molecular materials now present in the earth and its atmosphere were present at the creation of the earth itself, whether that creation took place by the explosion of a larger body or by condensation of gaseous debris. These molecular materials have merely combined, disintegrated, recombined. Although a few molecules and atoms have escaped into space, nothing has been added.

  Lesje contemplates this fact, which she finds soothing. She is only a pattern. She is not an immutable object. There are no immutable objects. Some day she will dissolve.

  Nate strokes her hand. He is dismayed but she cannot comfort him.

  "What are you thinking about, love?" he says.

  Thursday, August 28, 1975

  NATE

  Nate is down in the cellar. He's cutting out heads on the scroll saw, heads and necks for four-wheeled horses. Each horse will have a string on the front. When the string is pulled, the horse will roll along, head and tail moving in graceful rhythm. Or so he hopes.

  As he works, he pauses to wipe sweat from his forehead. His beard is dank; altogether he feels like a mildewed mattress. It's a lot cooler down here than it is upstairs, though just as humid. Outside it must be ninety. In the morning the cicadas began their rasping songs well before eight.

  "A scorcher," Nate remarked when he'd encountered Elizabeth in the kitchen. She was wearing a light blue dress with a smudge on the back, at the level of the rib cage. "Did you know you have smudge on your dress?" he asked. She liked to be told about such lapses: undone zippers, unhooked hooks, hairs on the shoulders, labels sticking out of necklines. "Oh, do I?" she said. "I'll change it." But she'd left for work in the same dress. Unlike her to forget.

  Nate wants a cold beer. He switches off the saw and turns towards the stairway, and it's then that he sees the head, upside down in the square mud-pocked cellar window, staring in at him. It's Chris Beecham. He must be lying on the gravel outside, his neck twisted at right angles so he can get his head down into the window well. He smiles. Nate motions upstairs, hoping Chris will understand and go to the back door.

  When Nate opens the door, Chris is already there. He's still smiling. "I was banging on the window," he says.

  "I had the scroll saw on," Nate says. Chris gives no explanation of why he's here. Nate steps back to let him in, offers a beer. Chris accepts and walks behind him to the kitchen.

  "I took this afternoon off," he says. "It's too hot to work. It's not like they have air conditioning."

  This is only the fourth or fifth time Nate has ever seen Chris. The first time was when Elizabeth invited him to Christmas dinner. "He knows hardly anyone," she'd said. Elizabeth has a habit of doing that, inviting people to dinner who know hardly anyone. Sometimes these stray eggs for which Elizabeth plays hen are women, but more often they are men. Nate doesn't mind. He approves, more or less, even though this is the kind of thing his mother would do if she thought of it. As it is, she runs more to letters than to dinners. Elizabeth's waifs are usually nice enough, and the children like to have guests, especially around Christmas. Janet says it makes it more like a party.

  Chris got a little drunk, Nate remembers. They'd had Christmas crackers, and Nate had found a prize eye in his, a plastic eye with a red iris.

  "What is it?" Nancy asked.

  "An eye," Nate said. Usually it was whistles or small mono-colored figures. This was the first year anyone had found an eye.

  "What's it for?"

  "I don't know," Nate said. He put it on the side of his plate. Somewhat later Chris reached across and took it and stuck it in the center of his forehead. He then began singing "The Streets of Laredo" in a lugubrious voice. The children thought he was funny.

  Since then, Nate has come up from the cellar on several occasions to find Chris in his living room, having a drink with Elizabeth. They've been sitting at opposite sides of the room, not saying much. Nate has always poured himself a drink and joined them. He seldom turns down the chance for a sociable drink. One thing has puzzled Nate: although Elizabeth invites lame ducks for festive dinners, she rarely has people over for a drink unless their position at the Museum is either on a par with hers or higher. There's no way Chris fits either of these categories. As far as Nate can figure out, he's a taxidermist of some sort, a glorified custodian of dead owls. A technician, not an executive. Nate doesn't rule out the possibility that Elizabeth and Chris are lovers - Chris wouldn't be the first - but before this she's always told him. Sooner or later. He'll wait for that before believing. Things aren't particularly good between them, but they're still possible.

  Nate opens two Carling Red Caps and they sit at the kitchen table. He asks Chris if he wants a glass; Chris says no. What he wants, instead, is to have Nate drive over to his place with him for a game of chess. Nate is a little taken aback by this. He explains that he doesn't play chess very well, hasn't played much for years.

  "Elizabeth says you're good," Chris says.

  "That's because Elizabeth can't play at all," Nate says modestly.

  But Chris insists. It will cheer him up, he says. He's been feeling down lately. Nate cannot resist this appeal to his Samaritan instincts. He goes upstairs to their room to put on a clean T-shirt. When he comes down, Chris is spinning one of the beer bottles on the kitchen table.

  "Ever play spin the bottle?" he asks. As a matter of fact, Nate hasn't.

  They take Chris's car, which is illegally parked across the street. It's an old Chevy convertible, once white, a '67 or '68 model. Nate's grip on car models is slipping. He himself no longer has a car, having sold it to finance his scroll saw, his bench saw, his belt-disc sander and other necessary machines.

  Chris's car is missing a muffler. He exploits this aggressively, revving the engine like a thunder gun at each stoplight. They fart their way along Davenport, trailing clouds of noise pollution, gathering dirty looks. The top of the convertible is down and the sun, filtered through layers of spent exhaust, beats on their heads. By the time they reach Winchester and Parliament and Chris parks, again illegally, Nate is dizzy. He asks Chris, to make conversation, if there's much prostitution around here. He already knows there is. Chris gives him a look of undisguised dislike and says yes, there is. "I don't mind it though," he says. "They know I'm not in the market. We pass the time of day."

  Nate wants to get out of this. He wants to say he has a headache, a backache, any sort of ache severe enough to spring him. He isn't feeling up to having a chess game in ninety-degree weather with a man he barely knows. But Chris is now brisk, almost businesslike. He marches them across the street and lets them into his apartment building, marches them across the stained mosaic-tile entryway and up the stairs, three flights. Nate, panting, lags behind. In the face of such certainty he hesitates to offer his dim excuses.

  Chris unlocks his door and goes in. Nate, plunging, follows. The apartment is cooler; it's wood-paneled, must once have been intended for the semi-rich. Although it has two rooms, a wide arched doorway between them makes it seem like one. It smells of darkness: corners, dry-rot, a chemical smell. The chess table is already set up, in the room that also contains Chris's bed. There are two chairs, placed carefully on opposite sides of the chessboard. Nate realizes that this invitation was not a spur-of-the-moment whim.

  "Want a drink?" Chris produces a mickey of Scotch from the glass-doored cupboard, pours some into a small tumbler decorated with tulips. Jelly jar, Nate thinks; he recognizes it from ten years ago. The Scotch is bad but Nate drinks; he doesn't wish to antagonize. Chris, it seems, will drink from the bottle. He sets it beside the chess table, gives Nate a peanut butter jar lid for his cigarette ashes, takes a white pawn and a black one from the table and shuffles them
behind his back. He holds out his fists, huge, thick-knuckled.

  "Left," Nate says.

  "Tough luck," Chris says. They sit down to play. Chris opens with an insulting attempt at fool's mate, which Nate counters easily. Chris grins and pours Nate another drink. They settle down to play in earnest. Nate knows Chris will win, but out of pride he wants this victory to take a decent amount of time. He plays defensively, grouping his men in tight clumps, taking no chances.

  Chris plays like a Cossack, swooping forward, picking at Nate's outposts, retreating to puzzling new positions. He jiggles one foot against the floor impatiently while Nate ponders his moves. They're both sweating. Nate's T-shirt sticks to his skin; he'd like an open window, a draft, but it's hotter outside than in here. Nate knows he's drinking more bad Scotch than he should, but the game is getting to him.

  Finally he makes a good move. Chris will either have to take his queen's knight and lose his own knight, or he'll lose a rook. Now it's Nate's turn to sit back and stare intimidatingly while Chris worries his choices. Nate sits back, but instead of staring he tries to keep himself from wondering what he's doing here, which would be bad for his game.

  He glances around the room. It's almost bare, yet manages to give the impression of disorder. It isn't the objects in the room that do this, but their relation to each other. Nothing seems to be in the right place. The table beside the bed, for instance, is about a foot too far away from it.

  And on the table, which is otherwise empty, is something he now knows he was meant to see. It's a little fish, silver, with blue enameled scales. He's last noticed it hanging on a chain around Elizabeth's neck.

  Or one very like it. He can't be sure. He looks at Chris and Chris is gazing at him, the muscles of his face rigid, his eyes still. Fear shoots through Nate, the hairs on his arms rise, his scrotum contracts, the ends of his fingers tingle. He thinks: Chris is drunk. He finds himself wondering whether Chris really has Indian blood in him as Elizabeth implies, he's never been able to place that slight accent; then he's appalled at himself, falling into a cliche like that. Besides, Chris has hardly been drinking at all, it's he himself who's killed three-quarters of that poisonous mickey.