Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

by Margaret Atwood

  “Okay, I’m game,” Jack said. It was make-believe at that point. The three of them were humouring him – giving him a break, pretending to acknowledging his claim to talent, opening up a pathway to fiscal rectitude for him, if only a theoretical one. That was their story later: that they’d colluded in order to give him a boost up, lead him believe that they believed in him, toss him some validation. Then he might actually get off his ass and do something, not that they expected this to actually happen. It wasn’t their fault that it had worked, and so spectacularly.

  Rod was the one who drew up the contract. Rent for three months plus one – the three Jack hadn’t paid in the past, and the one that was about to happen. In return, the shares of the proceeds from his yet-to-be-completed novel were divided into four, with a quarter going to each of them, including Jack. It would be negatively motivating if there was no upside built in for Jack himself. With nothing to gain he might not feel energized about finishing the thing, said Rod, who was a believer Economic Man. He sniggered at this last point, since he didn’t think Jack would finish it anyway.

  Would Jack have signed such a contract if he hadn’t been so hung over? Probably. He didn’t want to be evicted. He didn’t want to land on the street, or, worse, back in his parents’ rec room in Don Mills, besieged by hand-wringing and pot roasts from his mother and tut-tutting lectures from his dad. So he’d agreed to every term, and signed, and breathed a sigh of relief, and, at Irena’s urging, had eaten a couple of forkfuls of noodle casserole because it was best to get something into his stomach, and had gone upstairs to take a nap.

  But then he had to write the fucker.

  No hope with the four student characters living in the Victorian row house. It was clear they’d refuse to get their paralyzed asses off the third-hand kitchen chairs onto which their anuses were at present stuck like the suckers of a collective octopus, even if he lit their feet on fire. He’d have to try something else, something very different; and fast, because writing the novel – any novel – had become a matter of pride. He couldn’t allow Jaffrey and Rod to continue jeering at him; he could no longer endure the pitying, dismissive look in Irena’s lovely blue eyes.

  Please, please, he prayed to the gelid, fume-filled air. Help me out here! Anything, whatever! Anything that will sell!

  In such ways are devil’s bargains made.

  And there, suddenly, shimmering before him like a phosphorescent toadstool, was the vision of The Hand, fully formed: all he needed to do was more or less write it down, or so he said later on talk shows. Where did it come from, The Dead Hand Loves You? Who knows? Out of desperation. Out from under the bed. Out of his childhood nightmares. More possibly, out from the gruesome black-and-white comic books he used to filch from the corner drugstore when he was twelve: detached, dried-up, self-propelling body parts were a regular feature of those.

  The plot was simple. Violet, a beautiful but cold-hearted girl who bore a resemblance to Irena, but an Irena even thinner of waist and plumper of boob, threw over her lovelorn fiancé, William, a handsome, sensitive young man at least six inches taller than Jack but with the same hair colour. She did this for crass motives: her other suitor, Alf, a dead ringer for Jaffrey as far as appearance went, was rich as stink.

  Violet did her act of jilting in the most humiliating way possible. Straight-arrow William had a date with Violet and had arrived at her moderately substantial house to pick her up. But Alf was there before him, and William caught Violet and Alf locked in a hot and immodest clinch on the porch swing. Worse, Alf had his hand up Violet’s skirt, a liberty William had never even attempted, the fool.

  Outraged and shocked, William angrily challenged the two of them, but this got him nowhere. After scornfully flinging William’s hand-gathered bouquet of meadow daisies and wild roses down on the sidewalk along with the plain gold engagement band that had cost him two months’ earnings from his job at the encyclopedia company, Violet marched emphatically away on her audacious, red, high-heeled shoes, and she and Alf drove off in Alf’s silver Alfa Romeo convertible, a vehicle he had bought on a whim because it fitted with his name: he could afford flamboyant gestures like that. Their mocking laughter echoed in poor William’s ears; and to cap it off, the engagement band rolled along the street and clinked down through a sewer grating.

  William was mortally wounded. His dreams were shattered, his image of perfect womanhood destroyed. He moped along to his cheap but clean rooming house, where he wrote down his will: he wanted his right hand cut off and buried separately from him, beside the park bench where he and Violet had spent so many idyllic evenings necking smooching tenderly embracing. Then he shot himself in the head with a service revolver inherited from his dead father – for William was an orphan – and used by the father, heroically, during the Second World War. That detail added a note of symbolic nobility, Jack felt.

  William’s landlady, a kindly widow with a European accent and gypsy intuition, saw to it that his wish about the cut-off hand was honoured. In fact, she crept into the funeral parlour at night and severed the appendage herself with a fretsaw from her departed husband’s woodworking bench, a scene that, in the film – both films, the original and the remake – allowed for some ominous shadows and an eerie glow coming from the hand. That glow gave the landlady quite a turn, but she carried on. Then she buried the hand beside the park bench, deep enough so that it would not be dug up by skunks. She placed her crucifix on top of it; for, being from the old country, she was superstitious.

  Violet didn’t come to the funeral, being a hardhearted bitch, and she didn’t know about the severed hand. Nobody knew about it except the landlady, who shortly thereafter moved far away to Croatia, where she became a nun in order to expunge from her soul the possibly satanic act she had committed.

  Time passed. Violet was now engaged to Alf. Their lavish wedding was being planned. Violet felt a little guilty about William and a little sorry for him, but all in all she gave him scarcely a passing thought. She was too busy trying on expensive new clothes and showing off the various diamond and sapphire objects bestowed on her by crass Alf, whose motto was that the way to a girl’s heart was through jewellery: dead right, in the case of Violet.

  Jack diddled around with the next part of the story. Should he keep the Hand hidden right up to the wedding itself? Should he conceal it in the long satin wedding-dress train and have it follow Violet up the aisle, only to pop forth and cause a sensation just before she said, I do? No, too many witnesses. They’d all chase it around the church like an escaped monkey, and the effect would be farcical rather than terrifying. Best to have it catch Violet alone; and, if possible, in a state of undress.

  Several weeks before the wedding was to take place, a child at play in the park saw the housekeeper’s crucifix glittering in the sun, picked it up, and took it home with her, thus nullifying its protective role. (In the film – the first film, not the remake – this scene was accompanied by an ominous, retro soundtrack. In the remake the child was replaced by a dog that carried the religious trinket to its owner, who, not being versed in any kind of useful lore, tossed it into a shrub.)

  Then, on the night of the next full moon, up through the soil beside the park bench came William’s hand, emerging like a sand crab or a mutated daffodil shoot. It was the worse for wear: brown and shrivelled, with long fingernails. It crept out of the park and down into a culvert, only to reappear with the callously discarded gold engagement band encircling its little finger.

  It groped and scuttled its way to Violet’s house and shimmied up the ivy and in through Violet’s bedroom window, where it hid behind the dainty floral-patterned skirts of her dressing table and leered at her as she was taking off her clothes. Could it see? No, because it didn’t have eyes. But it had a kind of visionless vision, since it was animated by the spirit of William. Or by part of that spirit: not the nicer part.

  (The ancient Freudian critic at that session of the Modern Language Association dedicated to Dead Hand, thir
teen or was it fifteen years ago, said that the Hand meant the Return of the Repressed. The Jungian critic took issue with this interpretation, citing many instances of cut-off hands in myth and magic: the Hand, she said, was an echo of the Hand of Glory cut from a hanged criminal’s corpse and pickled, then set alight with embedded candles, long used in break-and-entering charms. It was known in French as main de gloire, thus giving its name to mandragore, or mandrake. The Freudian expert said this folkloric information was both obsolete and beside the point. Voices were raised. Jack, the honourary guest, excused himself and went for a smoke; that was when he was still smoking, and had not yet been ordered by his heart doctor to quit or die.)

  While the Hand peeping-tommed from under the dressing table, Violet divested herself of all her clothing, then disported herself in the shower, leaving the door to her ensuite bathroom ajar to afford both the Hand and the reader a tantalizing view. Pink sumptuousness was described, curvaceous voluptuousness. Jack overwrote this part, he knows that now, but twenty-two-year-old guys go for broke on such details. (The director of the first film shot the shower scene as a homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, all the more appropriate as the first Violet was played by SueEllen Blake, a blond stunner who was a cross between Janet Leigh and Tippi Hedren, and whom Jack pursued relentlessly only to be disappointed: SueEllen was narcissistic enough to relish the preliminary gifts and acts of worship, but she didn’t like sex per se and hated getting her makeup smeared.)

  Irena in her student days had not been a wearer of makeup, probably because it cost money, but the effect had been a fresh pink delicacy, unadorned and honestly itself, like a shucked oyster. Also she left no beige and red smears on pillowcases. Jack has come to appreciate this, in retrospect.)

  The Hand, watching Violet soaping various parts of her body, could barely contain itself. But it did not choose this moment to tip its hand, so to speak. Instead it waited patiently as adjective after adjective was applied to Violet. Hand, reader, and Violet admired Violet’s body as she patted it dry and teasingly rubbed aromatic lotion over its flawless, creamy surfaces. Then she slithered into a clinging, gold-sequined gown, outlined her lush mouth with ruby lipstick, clasped a glittering necklace around her sinuous, chokeable neck, draped a priceless white fur around her soft, inviting shoulders, and lilted out of the room with a jaw-dropping hip swivel. The Hand, of course, did not have a jaw that could be dropped, but it suffered from erotic frustration in its own way, signalled in both of the film versions by a fit of truly repulsive writhing.

  Once Violet was out of the room, the Hand rummaged through her writing desk. It discovered her distinctive pink notepaper, embossed with her initials. Then, with her own silver fountain pen, it wrote a note, using the handwriting of the departed William, which needless to say it remembered.

  I will love you forever, my darling Violet. Even after death. Yours everlastingly, William.

  It placed this note on Violet’s pillow along with a red rose it had plucked from the bouquet on her dressing table. The bouquet was fresh, since Alf of the Alfa Romeo sent her a dozen red roses every day.

  Then the Hand scurried into Violet’s closet and hid in a shoebox to await developments. The shoes in that box were the very same audacious red high heels Violet had been wearing while heartlessly spurning William, and the symbolism was not lost on the Hand. It ran its dried-up, long-nailed fingers over the red shoes in a manner both gloating and fetishistic. (This scene has come in for much analysis in the academic articles – largely French, but also Spanish – that have treated the film – the original, not the remake, which is dismissed with scorn by European cinéastes – as a late example of Puritanical American Neo-surrealism. Jack could give a fuck about that: he’d just wanted a dead hand getting it off with a pair of kinky shoes. Though he’s willing to admit it might amount to the same thing.)

  The Hand waited for hours in the shoebox. It did not mind waiting: it had nothing else that it wanted to do. In the film (the original, not the remake), it occasionally drummed its fingers, indicating its impatience, but this was an afterthought, added at the request of the director – Stanislaus Ludz, an odd duck who thought of himself as a sort of Mozart of horror, and who later jumped off a tugboat – in the belief that watching a hand in a box doing nothing was not suspenseful.

  In both of the films, the action cut back and forth between the Hand in the shoebox and Violet and Alf in a nightclub, dancing cheek to cheek and thigh to thigh, with Alf fingering Violet’s jewel-bestrewn neck in a possessive way while whispering, “Soon you’ll be mine.” Jack hadn’t written the nightclub scene in the book, but he would have if he’d thought of it; and he did think of it when he was writing the screenplay – both screenplays – so it was almost the same thing.

  After enough of this dancing, fingering, and waiting in a box, Violet returned to her room, having swilled down several glasses of champagne with close-ups of her neck swallowing, and threw herself into bed without even a glance at the Hand’s carefully composed love note and the rose on her pillow. She had two pillows, and the note and the rose were on the other one, which is why she neither saw the note nor got stuck with rose thorns.

  What emotions was the Hand feeling, now that it had been overlooked once more? Sorrow or anger, or some of each? Hard to tell with a hand.

  Stealthily it sidled out of the closet and made its way up via the carelessly flung bedspread to Violet in her peek-a-boo nightie as she lay in dishevelled slumber. Was it going to strangle her? Its gruesome fingers hesitated above her neck – screams from the film audiences here – but no, it still loved her. It began to stroke her hair, tenderly, longingly, lingeringly; then, unable to restrain itself, it stroked her cheek.

  This wakened Violet, who in the shadowy but moonlit room found something like a huge five-legged spider on her pillow. More screams, this time from Violet. The startled Hand made itself scarce, so by the time that Violet, gibbering with fright, managed to turn on the bedside lamp, it was cowering under the bed and thus nowhere in sight.

  In tears, Violet phoned Alf and babbled incoherently, as a girl does under such circumstances, and Alf manfully soothed her by telling her she must have been having a nightmare. Comforted, she hung up and prepared to switch off the light; but then, what should catch her eye but the rose, and then the note, written in William’s unmistakable and once beloved handwriting?

  Wide eyes. Terrified gasp. This could not be happening! Not daring to remain in the room long enough to phone Alf again, Violet locked herself in the bathroom, where she spent a restless night huddled in the tub, covered inadequately with towels. (In the book she had some torturing memories of William, but it was decided not to show these in either of the films, so their place was taken by an episode of anguished finger-biting and stifled sobbing.)

  In the morning, Violet cautiously emerged into a room flooded with cheerful sunlight. No pink note was to be seen, the Hand having done away with it. The rose was residing once more in its accustomed vase.

  Deep breath. Sigh of relief. Only a nightmare, after all. Nonetheless Violet was spooked, and cast several nervous backward glances as she and her expensively sheath-skirted ass prepared to go off for lunch with Alf.

  Now the Hand busied itself once more. It riffled through Violet’s diary and practised copying her writing. It stole several more sheets of her pink notepaper, and penned a torrid and obscene love letter to another man, proposing yet one more pre-marriage tryst at their usual meeting place, a seedy hooker-frequented motel on the outskirts of town right beside a wholesale carpet outlet. “Darling, I know it’s a risk, but I can’t stay away,” it said. It made disparaging remarks about Alf and his inadequate lovemaking, with particular reference to the size of his dick. The note concluded by anticipating the delights in store once rich Alf had been married to Violet and then disposed of. A little antimony in his martini should do the trick, said the note, before ending with a paragraph of hotblooded longing for the moment when the invented lover’s elec
tric eel would slide once more into Violet’s moist and palpitating nest of seaweed.

  (You couldn’t use such euphemisms now, you’d have to name the names; but there was a limit in those days as to which unprintable words you could actually print. Jack regrets the lifting of those old taboos: they spurred inventive metaphors. With the young writers now it’s F and C all day long, which he, personally, finds boring. Is he becoming a fogey? No: objectively speaking, it is boring.)

  The pretend lover was called Roland. There was a real Roland, who had been an earlier admirer of Violet’s, though an unsuccessful one. Violet had preferred handsome William to him, and no wonder, because Roland was not only a yawn-making economist, but a mean-minded, shrivel-souled, corkscrew-hearted prick, sort of like Rod with his navy-blue notebook. He was a dork, a dink, a dong …

  This sounded too musical, so Jack scratched it out. Then he went into a caffeine-induced reverie: why should the male member be used as a term of abuse? No man hated his own dorkdinkdong, quite the opposite. But maybe it was an affront that any other man had one. That must be the truth. He should brush up this thesis and haul it out for display purposes at the next house party when the intellectual sparring got too annoying.

  That way procrastination lay. Jack had pages to type before he slept. He had blood to spill.

  “I brought you some soup,” said Irena, who’d come silently up the stairs to Jack’s crow’s-nest. She slid a plate and bowl onto the bridge table Jack was using as a writing desk. The soup was mushroom, and there were crackers.

  “Thanks,” Jack said. This was more like it in the nurturing department. He thought about making a grab for Irena’s be-aproned torso, overcoming her with impetuous and urgent élan vital, and pinning her to the floor, where she would swoon in surrender. But now was not the time: Roland needed to be massacred, Alf destroyed, Violet terrified out of her wits. First things first.