He’s holding Tony’s hands, at the kitchen table. She withdraws them and gets up and goes into her study, and shuts the door, and immerses herself in the Battle of Waterloo. After it was over the victorious soldiers celebrated, and drank all night, and roasted the flesh of the butchered cavalry horses on the metal breastplates of the dead, leaving the wounded to moan and scream in the background. Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.
How well she did it, thinks Tony. How completely she took us in. In the war of the sexes, which is nothing like a real war but is instead a kind of confused scrimmage in which people change allegiances at a moment’s notice, Zenia was a double agent. Or not even that, because Zenia wasn’t working for one side or the other. She was on no side but her own. It’s even possible that her antics—Tony is old enough, now, to think of them as antics—had no motive other than her own whim, her own Byzantine notions of pleasure. Maybe she hed and tortured just for the fun of it.
Though part of what Tony feels is admiration. Despite her disapproval, her dismay, all her past anguish, there’s a part of her that has wanted to cheer Zenia on, even to encourage her. To make her into a saga. To participate in her daring, her contempt for almost everything, her rapacity and lawlessness. It’s like the time her mother disappeared downhill on the toboggan. No! No! On! On!
But the recognition of that came later. At the time of West’s defection she was devastated. (Devastate, verb, to lay waste, to render desolate; a familiar enough term in the literature of war, thinks Tony in the cellar, surveying her sand-table and the ruins of Otto’s army, and eating another clove.) She refused to cry, she refused to howl. She listened to West’s footsteps as he tiptoed around the apartment, as if in a hospital. When she heard the apartment door shut behind him she scuttled out and double-locked it, and put on the chain. Then she went into the bathroom and locked that door, too. She took off her wedding ring (simple, gold, no diamonds), intending to drop it down the toilet, but instead she placed it on a cabinet shelf, next to the disinfectant. Then she subsided onto the bathroom floor.
American Standard, said the toilet. Dradnats Nacirema. A Bulgarian skin ointment.
After a while she came out of the bathroom because the phone was ringing. She stood there looking at it, it and its bridal silver telephone cover; it continued to Ping. She lifted it. then dropped it down again. There was nobody she wanted to talk to. She wandered into the kitchen but there was nothing she wanted to eat.
Some hours later she found herself opening the box of old Christmas decorations where she also kept her father’s German pistol, wrapped in red tissue paper. There were even some bullets for it, in a metal cough-drop tin. She’d never shot a gun in her life, but she knew the theory.
You need some sleep, she told herself She could not stand the idea of sleeping in her desecrated bed, so she went to sleep finally in the living room, underneath the spinet. She had some thoughts of destroying it, with something—the meat cleaver?—but decided that could wait until morning.
When she woke up it was noon, and someone was pounding on the door. Probably it was West, .come back because he’d forgotten something. (His underwear was gone from the drawer, his neatly arranged socks, washed by Tony and folded carefully in pairs. He’d taken a suitcase.)
Tony went to the door. “Go away,” she said.
“Sweetie, it’s me,” said Roz on the other side. “Open the door, honey, I really need to go to the can, I’m about to flood this entire floor.”
Tony didn’t want to let Roz in because she didn’t want to let anyone in, but she could not turn away a friend in urinary need. So she took off the chain and undid the locks and in waddled Roz, pregnant with her first baby. “This is just what I needed,” she said ruefully, “a bigger body. Hey! I’m eating for five!” Tony didn’t laugh. Roz looked at Tony’s face, then put her fattening arms around Tony. “Oh honey;” she said; then, with new-found knowledge, both personal and political, “Men are such pigs!”
Tony had a twinge of indignation. West was not a pig. He wasn’t even shaped like one. An ostrich, perhaps. It’s not West’s fault, she wanted to say. It’s her. I loved him but he never really loved me. How could he? He was occupied territory,—all along. But she couldn’t say anything about this, because she couldn’t speak. Also she couldn’t breathe. Or rather she could only breathe in. She breathed in and in and finally made a sound, a wail, a long wail that went on and on, like a distant siren. Then she burst into tears. Burst, like a paper bag full of water. She couldn’t have burst like that if the tears hadn’t been there all along, a huge unfelt pressure behind her eyes. The tears cascaded down her cheeks; she licked her lips, she tasted them. In the Middle Ages they thought that only those without souls could not cry. Therefore she had a soul. It was no comfort.
“He’ll come back,” said Roz. “I know he will. What does she need him for? She’ll just take one bite out of him and throw him away.” She rocked Tony back and forth, back and forth, the most mother that Tony had ever had.
Roz moved into Tony’s apartment, just until Tony could function. She had a housekeeper, and her husband Mitch was away again, so she didn’t need to be at her own house. She phoned the university and cancelled Tony’s classes, saying that Tony had strep throat. She ordered in groceries, and fed Tony canned chicken noodle soup, caramel pudding, peanut butter and banana sandwiches, grapejuice: baby food. She made her take a lot of baths and played soothing music to her, and told her jokes. She wanted to install Tony in her Rosedale mansion, but Tony didn’t want to leave the apartment, even for a second. What if West should come back? She didn’t know what would happen if he did, but she knew she needed to be there. She needed to have the choice of slamming the door in his face or falling into his arms. She didn’t want to choose, though. She wanted to do both.
“He called you, didn’t he?” said Tony after a few days of this, when she was feeling less gutted.
“Yeah,” said Roz. “You know what he said? He said he was worried about you. That’s kind of cute:”
Tony didn’t think it was cute. She thought it was Zenia, putting him up to it. Twisting the knife.
It was Roz who suggested Tony should give up the apartment and buy a house. “The prices are great right now! You’ve got the down payment—just cash in some of those bonds. Look—think of it as an investment. Anyway, you should move out of here. Who needs the bad memories, eh?” She got Tony a good real estate agent, drove around with her from house to house, clambered panting up and down the stairs, peering at furnaces and dry rot and wiring. “Now this—this is a deal,” she whis=pered to Tony. “Ask low—see what they say! A few repairs and this could be gorgeous! Your study goes in the tower, just ditch the fake wood panelling, get rid of that linoleum—it’s maple underneath, I looked. It’s buried treasure, trust me! Once you’re out of the old place, things will be tons better.” She got a much bigger charge out of buying the house than Tony did. She found Tony a decent contractor, and dictated the paint colours. Even at the best of times Tony would have been incapable of making such arrangements herself.
After Tony moved in, things were indeed better. She liked the house, though not for any reasons that Roz would have approved. Roz wanted the house to be the centre of the new, outgoing life she envisaged for Tony, but for Tony it was more like a convent. A convent of one. She didn’t belong in the land of the adults, the land of the giants. She shut herself up in her house like a nun, and went out only for supplies.