Bluebeard's Egg

by Margaret Atwood

  (Ed isn't the Bluebeard: Ed is the egg. Ed Egg, blank and pristine and lovely. Stupid, too. Boiled, probably. Sally smiles fondly.)

  But how can there be a story from the egg's point of view, if the egg is so closed and unaware? Sally ponders this, doodling on her pad of lined paper. Then she resumes the search for her nail file. Already it's time to begin getting ready for her dinner party. She can sleep on the problem of the egg and finish the assignment tomorrow, which is Sunday. It's due on Monday, but Sally's mother used to say she was a whiz at getting things done at the last minute.

  After painting her nails with Nuit Magique, Sally takes a bath, eating her habitual toasted English muffin while she lies in the tub. She begins to dress, dawdling; she has plenty of time. She hears Ed coming up out of the cellar; then she hears him in the bathroom, which he has entered from the hall door. Sally goes in through the other door, still in her slip. Ed is standing at the sink with his shirt off, shaving. On the weekends he leaves it until necessary, or until Sally tells him he's too scratchy.

  Sally slides her hands around his waist, nuzzling against his naked back. He has very smooth skin, for a man. Sally smiles to herself: she can't stop thinking of him as an egg.

  "Mmm," says Ed. It could be appreciation, or the answer to a question Sally hasn't asked and he hasn't heard, or just an acknowledgement that she's there.

  "Don't you ever wonder what I think about?" Sally says. She's said this more than once, in bed or at the dinner table, after dessert. She stands behind him, watching the swaths the razor cuts in the white of his face, looking at her own face reflected in the mirror, just the eyes visible above his naked shoulder. Ed, lathered, is Assyrian, sterner than usual; or a frost-covered Arctic explorer; or demihuman, a white-bearded forest mutant. He scrapes away at himself, methodically destroying the illusion.

  "But I already know what you think about," says Ed.

  "How?" Sally says, taken aback.

  "You're always telling me," Ed says, with what might be resignation or sadness; or maybe this is only a simple statement of fact.

  Sally is relieved. If that's all he's going on, she's safe.

  Marylynn arrives half an hour early, her pearl-coloured Porsche leading two men in a delivery truck up the driveway. The men install the keyhole desk, while Marylynn supervises: it looks, in the alcove, exactly as Marylynn has said it would, and Sally is delighted. She sits at it to write the cheque. Then she and Marylynn go into the kitchen, where Sally is finishing up her sauce, and Sally pours them each a Kir. She's glad Marylynn is here: it will keep her from dithering, as she tends to do just before people arrive. Though it's only the heart men, she's still a bit nervous. Ed is more likely to notice when things are wrong than when they're exactly right.

  Marylynn sits at the kitchen table, one arm draped over the chairback, her chin on the other hand; she's in soft grey, which makes her hair look silver, and Sally feels once again how banal it is to have ordinary dark hair like her own, however well-cut, however shiny. It's the confidence she envies, the negligence. Marylynn doesn't seem to be trying at all, ever.

  "Guess what Ed said today?" Sally says.

  Marylynn leans further forward. "What?" she says, with the eagerness of one joining in a familiar game.

  "He said, 'Some of these femininists go too far,' " Sally reports. " 'Femininists.' Isn't that sweet?"

  Marylynn holds the pause too long, and Sally has a sudden awful thought: maybe Marylynn thinks she's showing off, about Ed. Marylynn has always said she's not ready for another marriage yet; still, Sally should watch herself, not rub her nose in it. But then Marylynn laughs indulgently, and Sally, relieved, joins in.

  "Ed is unbelievable," says Marylynn. "You should pin his mittens to his sleeves when he goes out in the morning."

  "He shouldn't be let out alone," says Sally.

  "You should get him a seeing-eye dog," says Marylynn, "to bark at women."

  "Why?" says Sally, still laughing but alert now, the cold beginning at the ends of her fingers. Maybe Marylynn knows something she doesn't; maybe the house is beginning to crumble, after all.

  "Because he can't see them coming," says Marylynn. "That's what you're always telling me."

  She sips her Kir; Sally stirs the sauce. "I bet he thinks I'm a femininist," says Marylynn.

  "You?" says Sally. "Never." She would like to add that Ed has given no indication of thinking anything at all about Marylynn, but she doesn't. She doesn't want to take the risk of hurting her feelings. The wives of the heart men admire Sally's sauce; the heart men talk shop, all except Walter Morly, who is good at by-passes. He's sitting beside Marylynn, and paying far too much attention to her for Sally's comfort. Mrs. Morly is at the other end of the table, not saying much of anything, which Marylynn appears not to notice. She keeps on talking to Walter about St. Lucia, where they've both been.

  So after dinner, when Sally has herded them all into the living room for coffee and liqueurs, she takes Marylynn by the elbow. "Ed hasn't seen our desk yet," she says, "not up close. Take him away and give him your lecture on nineteenth-century antiques. Show him all the pigeon-holes. Ed loves pigeon-holes." Ed appears not to get this.

  Marylynn knows exactly what Sally is up to. "Don't worry," she says, "I won't rape Dr. Morly; the poor creature would never survive the shock," but she allows herself to be shunted off to the side with Ed.

  Sally moves from guest to guest, smiling, making sure everything is in order. Although she never looks directly, she's always conscious of Ed's presence in the room, any room; she perceives him as a shadow, a shape seen dimly at the edge of her field of vision, recognizable by the outline. She likes to know where he is, that's all. Some people are on their second cup of coffee. She walks towards the alcove: they must have finished with the desk by now.

  But they haven't, they're still in there. Marylynn is bending forward, one hand on the veneer. Ed is standing too close to her, and as Sally comes up behind them she sees his left arm, held close to his side, the back of it pressed against Marylynn, her shimmering upper thigh, her ass to be exact. Marylynn does not move away.

  It's a split second, and then Ed sees Sally and the hand is gone; there it is, on top of the desk, reaching for a liqueur glass.

  "Marylynn needs more Tia Maria," he says. "I just told her that people who drink a little now and again live longer." His voice is even, his face is as level as ever, a flat plain with no signposts.

  Marylynn laughs. "I once had a dentist who I swear drilled tiny holes in my teeth, so he could fix them later," she says.

  Sally sees Ed's hand outstretched towards her, holding the empty glass. She takes it, smiling, and turns away. There's a roaring sound at the back of her head; blackness appears around the edges of the picture she is seeing, like a television screen going dead. She walks into the kitchen and puts her cheek against the refrigerator and her arms around it, as far as they will go. She remains that way, hugging it; it hums steadily, with a sound like comfort. After a while she lets go of it and touches her hair, and walks back into the living room with the filled glass.

  Marylynn is over by the french doors, talking with Walter Morly. Ed is standing by himself, in front of the fireplace, one arm on the mantelpiece, his left hand out of sight in his pocket.

  Sally goes to Marylynn, hands her the glass. "Is that enough?" she says.

  Marylynn is unchanged. "Thanks, Sally," she says, and goes on listening to Walter, who has dragged out his usual piece of mischief: some day, when they've perfected it, he says, all hearts will be plastic, and this will be a vast improvement on the current model. It's an obscure form of flirtation. Marylynn winks at Sally, to show that she knows he's tedious. Sally, after a pause, winks back.

  She looks over at Ed, who is staring off into space, like a robot which has been parked and switched off. Now she isn't sure whether she really saw what she thought she saw. Even if she did, what does it mean? Maybe it's just that Ed, in a wayward intoxicated moment, put his hand on the ne
arest buttock, and Marylynn refrained from a shriek or a flinch out of good breeding or the desire not to offend him. Things like this have happened to Sally.

  Or it could mean something more sinister: a familiarity between them, an understanding. If this is it, Sally has been wrong about Ed, for years, forever. Her version of Ed is not something she's perceived but something that's been perpetrated on her, by Ed himself, for reasons of his own. Possibly Ed is not stupid. Possibly he's enormously clever. She thinks of moment after moment when this cleverness, this cunning, would have shown itself if it were there, but didn't. She has watched him so carefully. She remembers playing Pick Up Sticks, with the kids, Ed's kids, years ago: how if you moved one stick in the tangle, even slightly, everything else moved also.

  She won't say anything to him. She can't say anything: she can't afford to be wrong, or to be right either. She goes back into the kitchen and begins to scrape the plates. This is unlike her - usually she sticks right with the party until it's over - and after a while Ed wanders out. He stands silently, watching her. Sally concentrates on the scraping: dollops of sauce supreme slide into the plastic bag, shreds of lettuce, rice, congealed and lumpy. What is left of her afternoon.

  "What are you doing out here?" Ed asks at last.

  "Scraping the plates," Sally says, cheerful, neutral. "I just thought I'd get a head start on tidying up."

  "Leave it," says Ed. "The woman can do that in the morning." That's how he refers to Mrs. Rudge, although she's been with them for three years now: the woman. And Mrs. Bird before her, as though they are interchangeable. This has never bothered Sally before. "Go on out there and have a good time."

  Sally puts down the spatula, wipes her hands on the hand towel, puts her arms around him, holds on tighter than she should. Ed pats her shoulder. "What's up?" he says; then, "Sally, Sally." If she looks up, she will see him shaking his head a little, as if he doesn't know what to do about her. She doesn't look up.

  Ed has gone to bed. Sally roams the house, fidgeting with the debris left by the party. She collects empty glasses, picks up peanuts from the rug. After a while she realizes that she's down on her knees, looking under a chair, and she's forgotten what for. She goes upstairs, creams off her make-up, does her teeth, undresses in the darkened bedroom and slides into bed beside Ed, who is breathing deeply as if asleep. As if.

  Sally lies in bed with her eyes closed. What she sees is her own heart, in black and white, beating with that insubstantial moth-like flutter, a ghostly heart, torn out of her and floating in space, an animated valentine with no colour. It will go on and on forever; she has no control over it. But now she's seeing the egg, which is not small and cold and white and inert but larger than a real egg and golden pink, resting in a nest of brambles, glowing softly as though there's something red and hot inside it. It's almost pulsing; Sally is afraid of it. As she looks it darkens: rose-red, crimson. This is something the story left out, Sally thinks: the egg is alive, and one day it will hatch. But what will come out of it?

  Spring Song of the Frogs

  Women's lips are paler again. They wax and wane, from season to season. They haven't been this pale for years; not for fifteen or twenty years at least. Will can't remember when it was, when he last saw those shades of rich vanilla, of melting orange sherbet, of faded pink satin, on women's mouths. Some time before he started really noticing. All this past winter the lips were dark instead, mulberry, maroon, so that the mouths looked like the mouths of old-fashioned dolls, sharply defined against the china white of the skin. Now the skins are creamier, except on the ones who have ignored whatever wordless decree has gone out and have begun to tan.

  This woman, whose name is Robyn, has a mouth the colour of a fingernail, the wan half-moon at the base. Her own fingernails are painted to match: someone has decided that they should no longer look as if they've been dipped in blood. She has on a loose cool dress, cotton in a pink so faint it's like something that's run in the wash, with buttons down the front, the top three undone. By the way she's glanced down once or twice, she's wondering if she's gone too far.

  Will smiles at her, looking into her eyes, which are possibly blue; he can't tell in this light. She smiles back. She won't be able to keep staring him in the eye for long. After she blinks and shifts, she'll have three choices. The menu, on grey paper with offset handwriting, French style, which she's already studied; the view off to the side, towards the door, but it's too early for that; or the wall behind him. Will knows what's on it: a framed poster advertising a surrealist art show of several years back, with a drawing on it, fleshy pink with pinky-grey shadows, which suggests a part of the body, though it's difficult to say which part. Something about to grow hair, become sexual in a disagreeable way. Either she'll react to it or she won't see it all. Instead she'll glance at her own reflection in the glass, checking herself out as if she's a stranger she might consider picking up: a deep look, brief but sincere.

  The waitress arrives, a thin girl in a red brushcut, with a purple feather earring dangling from one ear. She stands as though her head is fixed on a hook and the rest of her body is drooping down from it, with no tendons. She's wearing what could be tuxedo pants. The restaurant is in a district of second-hand clothing stores, where foreign-looking women with stumpy legs and black hair pulled back into buns come to shuffle through the racks, and also where girls like this one get their outlandish costumes. The belt is wide red plastic, and could be either twenty-five years old or brand new; the shirt is a man's dress shirt, with pleats, the sleeves rolled to the elbow. The girl's arms, bone-skinny and white, come out of the puffs of cloth like the stems of peonies that have been grown in darkness.

  Her thighs will be much the same. Will can remember the thighs in the ancient men's magazines, the ones that were passed around when he was at school, black-and-white photos on cheap paper, with no air-brushing, the plump women posed in motel rooms, the way the garters would sink into the flesh of thighs and rump. Now there's no flesh, the thighs have shrivelled up, they're all muscle and bone. Even the Playboy centrefolds look as if they're made of solid gristle. It's supposed to be sexy to show them in leg warmers.

  Will asks Robyn if she'd like something to drink.

  "A Perrier with a twist," says Robyn, looking up, giving the waitress the same smile she's just given Will.

  Will orders a Bloody Mary and wonders if he's made a mistake. Possibly this waitress is a man. He's been here several times before, never without a slight but enjoyable sense of entering forbidden territory. Any place with checked tablecloths gives him this feeling, which is left over from when he was a student and thought he would end up being something other than what he has become. In those days he drew illustrations for the campus newspaper, and designed sets. For a while he kept up the drawing, as a hobby, or that's what his ex-wife called it. Maybe later he'll go back to it, when he has the time. Some days he wanders into the galleries down here, to see what the young kids are up to. The owners approach him with cynical deference, as if all he has to offer, to them or anyone else, is his money. He never buys anything.

  The waitress returns with the drinks, and Will, in view of the two slight bumps visible on her ribcage, decides that she really is a woman after all.

  "I thought for a minute she was a man," he says to Robyn.

  "Really?" Robyn says. She glances at the waitress, now at the next table. "Oh no," she says, as if it's a mistake she herself would never have made. "No. Definitely a woman."

  "Some bread?" Will says. The bread here is placed in tiny baskets, suspended over the tables by a sort of rope-and-pulley arrangement. To get to the bread you have to either stand up or lower the basket by unhitching the rope from where it's fastened on the wall; which is awkward, but Will enjoys doing it. Maybe the theory is that your food will appeal to you more if you're allowed to participate in it, or maybe the baskets are just some designer's fiasco. He always has bread here.

  "Pardon?" says Robyn, as if bread is a word she's never heard be
fore. "Oh. No thanks." She gives a little shudder, as if the thought of it is slightly repulsive. Will is annoyed, but determined to have bread anyway. It's good bread, thick, brown, and warm. He turns to the wall, undoes the rope, and the basket creaks downwards.

  "Oh, that's very cute," says Robyn. He catches it then, the look she's giving herself in the glass behind him. Now they are going to have to make their way through the rest of the lunch somehow. Why does he keep on, what's he looking for that's so hard to find? She has generous breasts, that's what impelled him: the hope of generosity.

  The waitress comes back and Robyn, pursing her pastel-coloured lips, orders a spinach salad without the dressing. Will is beginning to sweat; he's feeling claustrophobic and is anxious to be gone. He tries to think about running his hand up her leg and around her thigh, which might be full and soft, but it's no good. She wouldn't enjoy it.

  Cynthia is white on white. Her hair is nearly blonde, helped out, Will suspects: her eyebrows and eyelashes are darker. Her skin is so pale it looks powdered. She's not wearing the hospital gown but a white nightgown with ruffles, childish, Victorian, reminiscent of lacey drawers and Kate Greenaway greeting cards. Under the cloth, Will thinks, she must be translucent; you would be able to see her veins and intestines, like a guppy's. She draws the sheet up to her chest, backing away from him, against the headboard of the bed, a position that reminds him of a sickly Rosetti madonna, cringing against the wall while the angel of the Annunciation threatens her with fullness.

  Will smiles with what he hopes is affability. "How are you doing, Cynthia?" he says. There's a basket on the night table, with oranges and an apple; also some flowers.

  "Okay," she says. She smiles, a limp smile that denies the message. Her eyes are anxious and cunning. She wants him to believe her and go away.