The Edible Woman Page 5

  I took the bus, got off at the subway station, paused to note down my fare as "Transportation" on my expenses time-sheet, and crossed the street. Then I went down a slope into the flat treeless park spread out opposite the station. There was a baseball diamond in one corner, but nobody was playing on it. The rest of the park was plain grass, which had turned yellow; it crackled underfoot. This day was going to be like the one before, windless and oppressive. The sky was cloudless but not clear: the air hung heavily, like invisible steam, so that the colours and outlines of objects in the distance were blurred.

  At the far side of the park was a sloping asphalt ramp, which I climbed. It led to a residential street lined with small, rather shabby houses set close together, the two-storey shoe-box kind with wooden trim round the windows and eaves. Some of the houses had freshly painted trimmings, which merely accentuated the weather-beaten surfaces of the shingled fronts. The district was the sort that had been going downhill for some decades but had been pushed uphill again in the past few years. Several refugees from the suburbs had bought these city houses and completely refinished them, painting them a sophisticated white and adding flagstone walks and evergreens in cement planters and coachlamps by the doors. The redone houses looked flippant beside the others, as though they had chosen to turn their backs with an irresponsible light-heartedness upon the problems of time and shabbiness and puritan weather. I resolved to avoid the transformed houses when I began to interview. I wouldn't find the right sort of people there: they would be the martini set.

  There is something intimidating about a row of closed doors if you know you have to go up and knock on them and ask what amounts to a favour. I straightened my dress and my shoulders and assumed what I hoped was an official but friendly expression, and walked as far as the next block practising it before I had worked up resolution enough to begin. At the end of the block I could see what looked like a fairly new apartment building. I made it my goal: it would be cool inside, and might supply me with any missing interviews.

  I rang the first doorbell. Someone scrutinized me briefly through the white semi-transparent curtains of the front window; then the door was opened by a sharp-featured woman in a print apron with a bib. Her face had not a vestige of makeup on it, not even lipstick, and she was wearing those black shoes with laces and thick heels that make me think of the word "orthopaedic" and that I associate with the bargain-basements of department stores.

  "Good morning, I represent Seymour Surveys," I said, smiling falsely. "We're doing a little survey and I wonder if your husband would be kind enough to answer a few questions for me?"

  "You selling anything?" she asked, glancing at my papers and pencil.

  "Oh, no! We have nothing to do with selling. We're a market research company, we merely ask questions. It helps improve the products," I added lamely. I didn't think I was going to find what I was looking for.

  "What's it about?" she asked, the corners of her mouth tightening with suspicion.

  "Well, actually it's about beer," I said in a tinsel-bright voice, trying to make the word sound as skim-milk-like as possible.

  Her face changed expression. She was going to refuse, I thought. But she hesitated, then stepped aside and said in a voice that reminded me of cold oatmeal porridge, "Come in."

  I stood in the spotless tiled hallway, inhaling the smell of furniture polish and bleach, while she disappeared through a door farther on, closing it behind her. There was a murmured conversation; then the door opened again and a tall man with grey hair and a severe frown came through it, followed by the woman. The man wore a black coat even though the day was so warm.

  "Now young lady," he said to me, "I'm not going to chastise you personally because I can see you are a nice girl and only the innocent means to this abominable end. But you will be so kind as to give these tracts to your employers. Who can tell but that their hearts may yet be softened? The propagation of drink and of drunkenness to excess is an iniquity, a sin against the Lord."

  I took the pamphlets he handed me, but felt enough loyalty to Seymour Surveys to say, "Our company doesn't have anything to do with selling the beer, you know."

  "It is the same thing," he said sternly, "it is all the same thing, 'Those who are not with me are against me, saith the Lord.' Do not try to whiten the sepulchres of those traffickers in human misery and degradation." He was about to turn away, but said to me as an afterthought, "You might read those yourself, young lady. Of course you never pollute your lips with alcohol, but no soul is utterly pure and proof against temptation. Perhaps the seed will not fall by the wayside, nor yet on stony ground."

  I said a faint "Thank you," and the man extended the edges of his mouth in a smile. His wife, who had been watching the small sermon with frugal satisfaction, stepped forward and opened the door for me, and I went out, resisting the reflex urge to shake both of them by the hand as though I was coming out of church.

  It was a bad beginning. I looked at the tracts as I walked to the next house. "TEMPERANCE," commanded one. The other was titled, more stirringly, "DRINK AND THE DEVIL." He must be a minister, I thought, though certainly not Anglican, and probably not even United. One of those obscure sects.

  No one was at home in the next house, and at the one after that the door was opened by a chocolate-smeared urchin who informed me that her daddy was still in bed. At the next one though I soon knew that I had come at last to a good place for head-hunting. The main door was standing open, and the man I could see coming towards me several moments after I had rung was of medium height but very thickly built, almost fat. When he opened the screen door I could see that he had only his socks on his feet, no shoes; he was wearing an undershirt and a pair of Bermuda shorts. His face was brick-red.

  I explained my errand and showed him the card with the average-beer-consumption-per-week scale on it. Each average is numbered, and the scale runs from 0 to 10. The company does it that way because some men are shy about naming their consumption in so many words. This man picked No. 9, the second from the top. Hardly anybody chooses No. 10: everyone likes to think there's a chance that somebody else drinks more than he does.

  When we had got that far the man said, "Come on into the living room and sit down. You must be tired walking around in all that heat. My wife's just gone to do the shopping," he added irrelevantly.

  I sat down in one of the easy chairs and he turned down the sound on the T. V. set. I saw a bottle of one of Moose Beer's competitors standing on the floor by his chair, half empty. He sat down opposite me, smiling and mopping his forehead with his handkerchief, and answered the preliminary questions with the air of an expert delivering a professional verdict. After he had listened to the telephone commercial he scratched the hair on his chest thoughtfully and gave the sort of enthusiastic response for which a whole seminary of admen had no doubt been offering daily prayers. When we finished and I had written down the name and address, which the company needs so it won't re-interview the same people, got up, and began to thank him, I saw him lurching out of his chair towards me with a beery leer. "Now what's a nice little girl like you doing walking around asking men all about their beer?" he said moistly. "You ought to be at home with some big strong man to take care of you."

  I pressed the two Temperance pamphlets into his damp outstretched hand and fled.

  I shuffled through four more complete interviews without much incident, discovering in the process that the questionnaire needed the addition of a "Does not have phone ... End interview" box and a "Does not listen to radio" one, and that men who approved of the chest-thumping sentiments of the commercial tended to object to the word "Tingly" as being "Too light," or, as one of them put it, "Too fruity." The fifth interview was with a spindly balding man who was so afraid of expressing any opinions at all that getting words out of him was like pulling teeth with a monkey-wrench. Every time I asked him a new question he flushed, bobbed his Adam's apple, and contorted his face in a wince of agony. He was speechless for several minutes af
ter he had listened to the commercial and I had asked him, "How did you like the commercial? Very Much; Only Moderately; or Not Very Much?" At last he managed to whisper, feebly, "Yes."

  I had now only two more interviews to get. I decided to skip the next few houses and go to the square apartment building. I got in by the usual method, pressing all the buttons at once until some deluded soul released the inner door.

  The coolness was a relief. I went up a short flight of stairs whose carpeting was just beginning to wear thin, and knocked at the first door, which was numbered Six. I found this curious because from its position it should have been numbered One.

  Nothing happened when I knocked. I knocked again more loudly, waited, and was about to go on to the next apartment when the door swung inward noiselessly and I found myself being looked at by a young boy whom I judged to be about fifteen.

  He rubbed one of his eyes with a finger, as if he had just got up. He was cadaverously thin; he had no shirt on, and the ribs stuck out like those of an emaciated figure in a medieval woodcut. The skin stretched over them was nearly colourless, not white but closer to the sallow tone of old linen. His feet were bare; he was wearing only a pair of khaki pants. The eyes, partly hidden by a rumpled mass of straight black hair that came down over the forehead, were obstinately melancholy, as though he was assuming the expression on purpose.

  We stared at each other. He was evidently not going to say anything, and I could not quite begin. The questionnaires I was carrying had suddenly become unrelated to anything at all, and at the same time obscurely threatening. Finally I managed to say, feeling very synthetic as I did so, "Hello there, is your father in?"

  He continued to stare at me without a tremor of expression. "No. He's dead," he said.

  "Oh." I stood, swaying a little; the contrast with the heat outside had made me dizzy. Time seemed to have shifted into slow motion; there seemed to be nothing to say; but I couldn't leave or move. He continued to stand in the doorway.

  Then after what seemed hours it occurred to me that he might not actually be as young as he looked. There were dark circles under his eyes, and some fine thin lines at the outer corners. "Are you really only fifteen?" I asked, as though he had told me he was.

  "I'm twenty-six," he said dolefully.

  I gave a visible start, and as if the answer had stepped on some hidden accelerator in me I babbled out a high-speed version of the blurb about being from Seymour Surveys and not selling anything and improving products and wanting to ask a few simple questions about how much beer he drank in an average week, thinking while I did so that he didn't look as though he ever drank anything but water, with the crust of bread they tossed him as he lay chained in the dungeon. He seemed gloomily interested, much as one would be interested (if at all) in a dead dog, so I extended the average-weekly-consumption card towards him and asked him to pick his number. He looked at it a minute, turned it over and looked at the back, which was blank, closed his eyes, and said "Number six."

  That was seven to ten bottles per week, high enough to qualify him for the questionnaire, and I told him so. "Come in then," he said. I felt a slight sensation of alarm as I stepped over the threshold and the door closed woodenly behind me.

  We were in a living room of medium size, perfectly square, with a kitchenette opening off it on one side and the hallway to the bedrooms on the other. The slats of the venetian blind on the one small window were closed, making the room dim as twilight. The walls, as far as I could tell in the semi-darkness, were a flat white; there were no pictures on them. The floor was covered by a very good Persian carpet with an ornate design of maroon and green and purple scrolls and flowers, even better, I thought, than the one in the lady down below's parlour which had been left her by her paternal grandfather. One wall had a bookcase running its whole length, the kind people make themselves out of boards and bricks. The only other pieces of furniture were three huge, ancient and overstuffed easy chairs, one red plush, one a worn greenish-blue brocade, and one a faded purple, each with a floor lamp beside it. All exposed surfaces of the room were littered with loose papers, notebooks, books opened face-down and other books bristling with pencils and torn slips of paper stuck in them as markers.

  "Do you live here alone?" I asked.

  He fixed me with his lugubrious eyes. "It depends what you mean," he intoned, "by 'alone'."

  "Oh, I see," I said politely. I walked across the room, trying to preserve my air of cheerful briskness while picking my way unsteadily over and around the objects on the floor. I was heading towards the purple chair, which was the only one that didn't have a rat's nest of papers in it.

  "You can't sit there," he said behind me in a tone of slight admonishment, "that's Trevor's chair. He wouldn't like you sitting in his chair."

  "Oh. Is the red one all right then?"

  "Well," he said, "that's Fish's, and he wouldn't mind if you sat in it; at least I don't think he would. But he's got his papers in it and you might mess them up." I didn't see how by merely sitting on them I could possibly disorganize them any more, but I didn't say so. I was wondering whether Trevor and Fish were two imaginary playmates that this boy had made up, and also whether he had lied about his age. In this light his face could have been of a ten-year-old. He stood gazing at me solemnly, shoulders hunched, arms folded across his torso, holding his own elbows.

  "And I suppose yours is the green one then."

  "Yes," he said, "but I haven't sat in it myself for a couple of weeks. I've got everything all arranged in it."

  I wanted to go over and see exactly what he had got all arranged in it, but I reminded myself that I was there on business. "Where are we going to sit then?"

  "The floor," he said, "or the kitchen, or my bedroom."

  "Oh, not the bedroom," I said hurriedly. I made my way back across the expanse of paper and peered around the corner into the kitchenette. A peculiar odour greeted me - there seemed to be garbage bags in every corner, and the rest of the space was taken up by large pots and kettles, some clean, others not. "I don't think there's room in the kitchen," I said. I stooped and began to skim the papers off the surface of the carpet, much as one would skim scum from a pond.

  "I don't think you'd better do that," he said. "Some of them aren't mine. You might get them mixed up. We'd better go into the bedroom." He slouched across to the hall and through an open doorway. Of necessity I followed him.

  The room was a white-walled oblong box, dark as the living room: the venetian blind was down here too. It was bare of furniture except for an ironing board with an iron on it, a chess set with a few scattered pieces in a corner of the room, a typewriter sitting on the floor, a cardboard carton which seemed to have dirty laundry in it and which he kicked into the closet as I came in, and a narrow bed. He pulled a grey army blanket over the tangle of sheets on the bed and crawled onto it, where he settled himself cross-legged, backed into the corner formed by the two walls. He switched on the reading lamp over the bed, took a cigarette from a pack which he replaced in his back pocket, lit it, and sat holding the cigarette before him, his hands cupped, like a starved buddha burning incense to itself.

  "All right," he said.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed - there were no chairs - and began to go through the questionnaire with him. After I had asked each question he would lean his head back against the wall, close his eyes, and give the answer; then he would open his eyes again and watch me with barely perceptible signs of concentration while I asked the next.

  When we got to the telephone commercial he went to the phone in the kitchen to dial the number. He stayed out there for what seemed to me a long time. I went to check, and found him listening with the receiver pressed to his ear and his mouth twisted in something that was almost a smile.

  "You're only supposed to listen once," I said reproachfully.

  He put down the receiver with reluctance. "Can I phone it after you go and listen some more?" he asked in the diffident but wheedling voice of a small chi
ld begging an extra cookie.

  "Yes," I said, "but not next week, okay?" I didn't want him blocking the line for the interviewers.

  We went back to the bedroom and resumed our respective postures. "Now I'm going to repeat some of the phrases from the commercial to you, and for each one I would like you to tell me what it makes you think of," I said. This was the free-association part of the questionnaire, meant to test immediate responses to certain key phrases. "First, what about 'Deep-down manly flavour'?"

  He threw his head back and closed his eyes. "Sweat," he said, considering. "Canvas gym shoes. Underground locker rooms and jockstraps."

  An interviewer is always supposed to write down the exact words of the answer, so I did. I thought about slipping this interview into the stack of real ones, to vary the monotony for one of the women with the crayons - Mrs. Weemers, perhaps, or Mrs. Gundridge. She'd read it out loud to the others, and they would remark that it took all kinds; the topic would be good for at least three coffee breaks.

  "Now what about 'Long cool swallow'?"

  "Not much. Oh, wait a moment. It's a bird, white, falling from a great height. Shot through the heart, in winter; the feathers coming off, drifting down.... This is just like those word-game tests the shrink gives you," he said with his eyes open. "I always liked doing them. They're better than the ones with pictures."