Bluebeard's Egg

by Margaret Atwood

  While he talks, Loulou nods and smiles. She isn't sure how old he is. Young, she thinks, though he tries to make himself look older by wearing silver-rimmed glasses. She thinks he has nice hands, not like an accountant's at all, not spindly. The second time, he went out into the main store and came back with cups of tea, which Loulou found thoughtful. Then he asked her advice about a carpet. Already she felt sorry for him. He hardly even goes out for lunch, she's discovered; mostly he just gets take-out from the deli across the street. She's considered bringing him some muffins.

  These topics - carpets, weight-lifting, food - are easy for Loulou. What is more difficult is that he's decided she's not just a potter but an artist, and his idea of an artist does not at all accord with Loulou's view of herself. He wants her to be wispy and fey, impractical, unearthly almost; he talks, embarrassingly, about "the creative impulse." This is far too close to the poets for Loulou. She's tried to explain that she works with clay, which is hardly ethereal. "It's like mud pies," she said, but he didn't want to hear that. Nor could she find the words to make him understand what she meant: that when she's throwing a pot she feels exhilaration, exactly the same kind she felt as a child while making a terrible mess of her mother's back porch. If he could see her the way she really is when she's working, guck all over her hands, he'd know she's not exactly essence of roses.

  The second time she saw him, the accountant said he envied her freedom. He would like to do something more creative himself, he said, but you have to make a living. Loulou refrained from pointing out that she seems to be doing a sight better at it than he is. She's much more tactful with him than she's ever been with the poets. The fact is that she's starting to enjoy his version of her. Sometimes she even believes it, and thinks she might be on the verge of learning something new about herself. She's beginning to find herself mysterious. It's partly for this reason she wants to sleep with the accountant; she thinks it will change her.

  The poets would laugh if they knew, but then she's not about to tell them. She did announce his advent though, that first night, while the poets were all sitting around the table eating chicken and discussing something they called "the language." They do this frequently these days and Loulou is getting bored with it. "The language" is different from just words: it has this mystical aura around it, like religion, she can tell by the way their voices drop reverently whenever they mention it. That night they had all just finished reading a new book. "I'm really getting into the language," one said, and the others chewed in silent communion.

  "I've got myself an accountant," Loulou said loudly, to break the spell.

  "You've got him, but have you had him yet?" Bob said. The others laughed, all except Calvin, and began discussing the accountant's chances of escape from Loulou, which they rated at nil. They went on to detail the positions and locations in which Loulou could be expected to finally entrap him - under the desk, on top of the filing cabinet - and the injuries he would sustain. They pictured him fending her off with pens.

  Loulou gnawed grimly at a chicken leg. They didn't believe any of this would happen, of course. They were too conceited: having known them, how could she stoop so low? Little did they know.

  Loulou approaches the door of the dry-goods store, whistling Mozart between her teeth. Partly she's thinking about the accountant and what his body might be like under his suit, but partly she's thinking about tomorrow, when she has to start work on an order of twelve slab planters for one of her good customers. Either way, it's a question of the right placement of the feet. Like a judo expert, which she is not, Loulou is always conscious of the position of her feet in relation to the rest of her.

  The accountant is waiting for her, shadowy behind the dust-filmed glass of the door. It's after six and the store is closed. Loulou said, slyly, that she couldn't make it any earlier. She didn't want the little bald-headed man lurking around.

  The accountant unlocks the door and lets her in. They go back through the smell of wool and freshly torn cotton into his office, and Loulou dumps out her bag of receipts (done up in bundles, with elastic bands: she's not without a sense of decency), all over his desk. He looks pleased, and says they certainly do have a lot of things to catch up on.

  He brings in some cups of tea, sits down, picks up a newly sharpened pencil, and asks her how much of her living space can be written off as working space. Loulou explains about the coach-house. She doesn't use any of the actual house herself, she says, not for working, because the poets are always using it. Sometimes they live there too, though it depends.

  "On what?" says the accountant, frowning a little.

  "On whether they're living anywhere else," says Loulou.

  When he hears that they don't pay rent, the accountant makes a tut-tutting sound and tells Loulou that she should not let things go on like this. Loulou says that the poets never have any money, except sometimes from grants. The accountant gets out of his chair and paces around the room, which is difficult for him because Loulou is taking up a lot of space in it. He says that Loulou is allowing herself to be imposed upon and she should get herself out of this situation, which is doing her no good at all.

  Loulou may have felt this herself from time to time, but hearing the accountant say it right out in the open air disturbs her. Where would the poets go? Who would take care of them? She doesn't wish to dwell on this right now, it's far too complicated, and perhaps even painful. Instead she stands up, plants her feet firmly apart, intercepts the accountant as he strides past, and, with a tug here and a little pressure there, ends up with his arms more or less around her. She backs herself up against the desk for balance, puts one hand behind her, and upsets his cup of tea into the wastepaper basket. He doesn't notice a thing; luckily it isn't hot.

  After a short time the accountant takes off his silver-rimmed glasses, and after another short time he says, in a voice half an octave lower than his normal one, "I wasn't expecting this." Loulou says nothing - she lies only when absolutely necessary - and starts undoing his vest buttons. When she's down to the shirt he lifts his head, glances around the room, and murmurs, "Not here." Which is just as well, because he hasn't got his carpet yet and the floor is painted concrete.

  He leads her into the darkened dry-goods store and begins sorting through the bolts of cloth. Loulou can't figure out what he's doing until he selects a roll of dark-pink velvet, unfurls it, and lays it out on the floor behind the counter, with a little flourish, like a cloak over a mud puddle. Loulou admires the way he does this; he's too deft not to have done it before. She lies down on the pink velvet, reaches up for him, and after a few minutes of shaky-fingered fumbling with the clothes they make love, somewhat rapidly. This floor is concrete too and the pink velvet isn't very thick. Loulou worries about his knees.

  "Well," says the accountant. Then he sits up and starts putting on his clothes. He does this very skilfully. Loulou wishes he would wait a few minutes - it would be friendlier - but already he's doing up his buttons. Maybe he's afraid someone will come in. He rolls up the pink velvet and inserts the bolt back into its proper slot on the shelf. They go back to his office and he locates his glasses and puts them on, and tells her he'll have some figures for her in maybe two weeks. He doesn't say anything about seeing her in the meantime: perhaps his image of her as a delicate artistic flower has been shaken. He kisses her good-bye, though. The last thing he says to her is, "You shouldn't let people take advantage of you." Loulou knows he thinks he's just done this very thing himself. He's like the poets: he thinks she can't see through him.

  Loulou decides to walk back to her house, which is at least a mile away, instead of taking the streetcar. She needs time to calm down. On the one hand she's elated, as she always is when she accomplishes something she's set out to do, but on the other hand she's disoriented. Is she different now, or not? Apart from the actual sex, which Loulou would never knock, and it was fine though a little on the swift side, what has it all boiled down to? She doesn't feel more known, more understoo
d. Instead she feels less understood. She feels nameless. It's as if all those words which the poets have attached to her over the years have come undone and floated off into the sky, like balloons. If she were one of the poets, she would get something out of this: this is exactly the sort of thing they like to write about. A non-event, says Phil, is better to write about than an event, because with a non-event you can make up the meaning yourself, it means whatever you say it means. For the poets nothing is wasted, because even if it is, they can write about the waste. What she ought to do is throw them all out on their ears.

  Loulou reaches her three-storey red-brick house and notes, as she always does, the mangy state of the lawn. The poets are divided on the subject of the lawn: some of them think lawns are bourgeois, others think that to say lawns are bourgeois is outdated. Loulou says she'll be damned if she'll cut it herself. The lawn is a stand-off. She goes up the front walk, not whistling, and unlocks her front door. In the hallway the familiar smell of the house envelops her, but it's like a smell from childhood. It's the smell of something left behind.

  The poets are in the kitchen, sitting around the table, which is littered with papers and coffee cups and plates with crumbs and smears of butter on them. Loulou looks from one poet to another as if they are figures in a painting, as if she's never seen them before. She could walk out of this room, right this minute, and never come back, and fifty years later they would all still be in there, with the same plates, the same cups, the same crumby butter. Only she doesn't know where she would go.

  "We're out of muffins," says Bob.

  Loulou stares at him. "Piss on the muffins," she says at last, but without conviction. He looks tired, she thinks. He is showing signs of age, they all are. This is the first time she's noticed it. They won't go on forever.

  "Where've you been?" says Calvin. "It's past seven-thirty." This is his way of saying they want their dinner.

  "My God, you're helpless," says Loulou. "Why didn't you just phone out for some pizza?" To her knowledge they have never phoned out for pizza. They've never had to.

  She sits down heavily at the table. The life she's led up to now seems to her entirely crazed. How did she end up in this madhouse? By putting one foot in front of the other and never taking her eyes off her feet. You could end up anywhere that way. It isn't that the accountant is normal, any more than the poets are; nor is he a possible alternative. She won't even sleep with him again, not on purpose anyway. But he is other, he is another. She too could be other. But which other? What, underneath it all, is Loulou really like? How can she tell? Maybe she is what the poets say she is, after all; maybe she has only their word, their words, for herself.

  "Pizza" Bob is beginning, in an injured tone. "Pig of a dog...." But the others shut him up. They can see that something is wrong, and they very much don't want to know what.

  "Reify the pizza," says Calvin to Phil. "You use phone. Is modern western invention of technology." Now they're pretending to be foreigners of some kind. This is a game they play more frequently when there is tension in the air than when there isn't.

  "Insert finger in possible small hole," says Calvin. "Twist wrist."

  "With anchovies then," says Bob, not joining in. Loulou hears their voices coming to her across space, as if they're in another room. What she sees is the grain of the wood in the table right by her hand.

  "Loulou thinks to reify means to make real," says Phil to everyone, when he's hung up the phone. They're always talking about her in the third person like that, telling each other what she thinks. The truth is that she's never heard the word before in her life.

  "So what is it, smartass?" says Loulou with an effort, squeezing out a little belligerence to set them at ease.

  "If Loulou didn't exist, God would have to invent her," says Bob.

  "God, hell," says Phil. "We would. We did it the first time, right?"

  This is going too far for Loulou. Nobody invented her, thank you very much. They make things up about her, but that's a whole other story. "Up your nose," says Loulou.

  "To reify is to make into a thing," says Phil, "which, as I'm sure most of us will agree, is hardly the same."

  Loulou looks around the room. They are all in place, they're all watching her, to see what she will say next. She sticks out her chin at them. "Why not?" she says. "What's the big difference?" and they relax, they laugh, they give each other little punches on the shoulder as if they're part of a team and they've just scored a point. That, they tell each other, is just like Loulou, and suddenly she sees that this is what they require of her, possibly all they require: that she should be just like Loulou. No more, but certainly no less. Maybe it's not so bad.

  Uglypuss

  Joel hates November. As far as he's concerned they could drop it down the chute and he wouldn't complain. Drizzle and chill, everyone depressed, and then the winter to go through afterwards. The landlord has turned down the heat again, which means Joel has to either let his buns solidify and break off or use the electric heater, which means more money, because the electricity's extra. The landlord does this to spite him, Joel, personally. Just for that, Joel refuses to move. He tells other people he likes the building, which he does: it's a golden oldie, a mansion that's seen better days, with an arched entrance-way and stained glass. But also he won't give the old rent-gouger the satisfaction. Becka could handle him, when she was still living here. All she'd had to do was lean over the banister while the old bugger was standing below, and use her good voice, the furry one, and up went the temperature; a trick that's not possible for Joel.

  He'd like to be someplace warm, but who can afford it? Too bad they made grants taxable, not that he's likely to get another one the ways things are going.

  Things are not going too well. He's beginning to think street theatre should stay in California: up here you can only do it three months of the year, and some of that is too hot, they steam inside those outsize masks. Even directing is no picnic. Last summer he got a sunburn, on the top of his head, where he's beginning to go bald. It was right after this that Becka caught him in the bathroom, standing with his back to the mirror, looking at his head from behind with a plastic violet-framed hand mirror, hers. She wouldn't let up on that for weeks. "Checked out your manly beauty this morning?" "Thought about Hair-Weeve?" "You'd look cute as a blonde. It would go with the skull." "Chest wigs yet?" "You could cut off some of your beard and glue it on the top, right?" Maybe he had it coming; he remembered getting onto her about spending twenty-five dollars at the hairdresser's once, soon after she'd moved in with him. It was her twenty-five dollars, but they were supposed to be sharing expenses. He'd called it an indulgence. She remembered that he remembered, of course. She has a memory like a rat-trap: full of rats.

  Joel's fingers are cold. The apartment is like a football game in the rain. He puts down the black Bic ball-point with which he hasn't written anything for the past half hour, stretches, scratches his head. He recalls, for an instant and with irritation, the Italian calligraphy pen Becka affected for awhile: an affectation that has gone the way of all the others. Then he turns back to square one.

  The piece they're working on is for two weeks from now: the Crucifixion according to Solemate Sox, with management as Judas. They're going to do it right beside the picket lines, which will cheer the picketers up, or that was the general idea. Joel isn't too sure about this piece, and there's been a certain amount of debate about it within the group. The concept was Becka's: she justified it by saying they should pick symbolism the workers can tune into, and most of these workers are Portuguese, they'll know all about Judas, you only have to look at the statues on their lawns, all those bleeding plaster Jesuses and Virgin Marys with their creepy-looking babies. Though for the same reason some of the others felt that Christ as a large knitted sock, in red and white stripes, might turn out to be too much for them. There could be a communications breakdown. Joel himself had been uneasy, but he'd voted on Becka's side, because they'd still been trying to work
it out then and he knew what hell there would be to pay if he'd come out against her. Just another example, she would have said, of how he would never let her express herself.

  He hopes it won't rain: if it does, the giant sock will get waterlogged, among other things. Maybe they should scrap it, try for another approach. Whatever they do, though, they'll probably have the assistant manager and the old boy himself coming outside and accusing them of anti-Semitism. This happens to Joel a lot; it's escalated after the piece on Lebanon and arms sales to South Africa they did outside the Beth Tzedec on Yom Kippur. Possibly the portable canvas mass grave, filled with baby dolls and splashed with red paint, had been going too far. A couple of the troupe members had wondered whether it was in bad taste, but Joel had said that bad taste was just an internalized establishment enforcer.

  Joel doesn't believe in pulling punches. And if you punch, they punch back. It's getting so he can hardly go to parties any more. Though it's not all parties he should avoid, only certain kinds, the kinds where he will find his own second cousins and men he went to shul with, who are now dentists or have gone into business. Even before the Lebanon piece, they were none too polite. At the last party, a woman he didn't know at all, an older woman, came up to him and said, "Instead of shaking your hand I should kick you in the stomach."

  "What for?" said Joel.

  "You know what for," the woman said. "You've got a nerve. Eating our food. Better you should choke."

  "Don't you think there should be an open discussion of the situation?" said Joel. "Like they do in Israel?"

  "Goys have no right," said the woman.

  "So who's a goy?" said Joel.

  "You," said the woman. "You're not a real Jew."

  "All of a sudden you're some kind of self-appointed committee on racial purity?" said Joel. "Anyway, read the Torah. They used to stone the prophets."