The problem was that Mitch was simply too good-looking. The shoulders, the blue eyes, the bone structure—he looked like a movie mag starlet, male version, too good to be true:’ Roz was awed by this—nobody should be allowed out in public looking like that, it might cause car crashes—and by his aroma of decorum, and by his posture, bolt upright with squared corners, like a frozen fish fillet. She wouldn’t be able to let herself go with him, crack jokes, fool around. She would worry about whether there were things caught in her teeth.
Plus, she would be so squirrelly with desire—out with it, Lust, capital L, the best of the Seven Deadlies—that she’d scarcely be able to sit still. She wasn’t usually so out of control, but Mitch was off the top of the charts in the looks department.
Heads would turn, people would stare, they’d wonder what such a dreamboat was doing with the runner-up in the Miss Polish Turnip Contest. All in all it was shaping up to be a purgatorial evening. Get me through this, God, and I’ll scrub a million toilets for you! Not that you’d be interested, because in Heaven, who shits?
Things started out every bit as dreadful as Roz had expected. Mitch brought her flowers, not very many flowers but flowers, how old-fashioned could you get, and she didn’t know what to do with the darn things, so she took them out to the kitchen—was she supposed to put them in a vase or what? Why hadn’t he settled for chocolates?—and there was her mother brooding darkly over a cup of tea, in her dressing gown and metal curlers and hairnet, because she had to go out later to some banquet or other with Roz’s father, some business thing, her mother hated that stuff, and she looked at Roz with the stricken gaze she’d been putting on ever since they got rich and moved into that barn of a house on Dunvegan, right near Upper Canada College, where male scions like Mitch were sent to be brainwashed and to have their spines fused so their pelvises would never move again, and she said to Roz, “Are you going out?” as in. “Are you dying?”
And Roz had left Mitch standing in the cavernous living room, in the centre of the half-acre of broadloom, surrounded by. three truckloads of furniture in her mother’s impeccable bad taste, it cost a mint but it looked straight out of a funeral parlour mail-order catalogue, in addition to which every single surface was covered with doilies, which didn’t help, her mother had a doily fetish, she’d been deprived of them in youth, and what if Mitch were to follow Roz out to the kitchen and find Roz’s mother sitting there and be given the once-over, the aim of which was to determine religious affiliation and financial prospects, in that order? So Roz dumped the flowers into the sink, she’d deal with them later, and kissed her mother on the firming cream, too little too late, and frog-marched Mitch out of the house before he could get waylaid by Roz’s father, who would put him through the same third degree he put all of Roz’s dates through if he could catch them—where were they going, what would they be doing, when would they be back, that was too late—and tell him cryptic ethnic parables illustrating Life. “Two cripples do not make one dancer,” he would say to them, shooting out a meaningful look from underneath the bushy eyebrows, and what were the poor goofs supposed to think? “Papa, I wish you wouldn’t say that,” she’d tell him afterwards. That was another thing, she had to call him Papa, he wouldn’t answer to Dad. “So?” he would say, grinning at her. “It’s true, or not?”
Once they’d made it past the door it turned out that Mitch didn’t have a car, and what was the etiquette? Was she supposed to offer hers, or what? She couldn’t see the man of her dreams taking a bus; much less could she see herself taking one. What was the use of upward mobility if you had to take a bus anyway? There were limits! She was about to suggest a taxi when it occurred to her in a blinding flash that maybe Mitch didn’t have the money for one.
In the end they took Roz’s car, a little red Austin, a birthday present, Roz would’ve preferred a jag but her father said that would have been spoiling her. Mitch didn’t protest much when Roz gushingly urged the car keys on him so he could drive, because a man being driven by a woman might have felt diminished, she’d read the women’s magazine articles about all the ways you could unwittingly diminish a man, it was terrible how easily they shrank, and though she usually liked to drive her own car herself she didn’t want to scare Mitch off. This way too she could just sit back and admire his profile. He drove well—decisively, aggressively, but not without courtesy, and she liked that. She herself was a fast driver; a barger-in, a honker.
But watching Mitch drive, she could see that there were smoother ways of getting where you wanted to go.
The dinner was at a small quasi-French restaurant, with a red plush decor like a turn-of-the-century, whorehouse and not very good food. Roz had the onion soup, which was a mistake because of the filaments of stringy cheese that came looping down from each spoonful. She did what she could with it, but she felt she was not passing the gracefulness test. Mitch didn’t seem to notice; he was talking to her about his law firm.
He doesn’t like me, she thought, this is a fiasco, so she had another glass of white wine, and then she thought, What the hell, and told him a joke, the one about the girl who told another girl she’d got raped that summer, yes, and after that it was just rape rape rape, all summer long, and Mitch smiled at her slowly, and his eyes closed up a little like a cat when you stroke its ears, maybe despite the tin-soldier posture he had a hormone or two after all, maybe the WASPY fa~ade was just that, a fa~ade, and if it was she would be eternally grateful, and then she felt his hand on her knee, under the table, and that was the end of her self-control, she thought she was going to melt like a warm Popsicle, all over the red plush restaurant seat.
After dinner they did start out in the direction of the movie, but somehow they ended up necking in Roz’s car; and after that they were in Mitch’s apartment, a three-bedroom he shared with two other law students who were conveniently out—Did he plan this? Roz thought fleetingly, because exactly who was seducing whom—and Roz was all set to wrestle with her panty girdle, having helped Mitch get the top half of her clothes offno lady should ever be without a panty girdle, said her mother and the magazines both, control unsightly jiggle and you wouldn’t want men to think you were a loose woman with a floppy bum, though the darn things were built like rat traps, pure cast-iron elastic, it was like trying to get out of a triple-wrapped rubber band—when Mitch took hold of her shoulders and gazed deeply into her eyes and told her he respected her too much. “I don’t want to just make love with you,” he said. “I want to marry you.” Roz felt like protesting that these categories were not mutually exclusive, but that would have been immodest, in Mitch’s eyes at least, and anyway she was—too overcome with happiness, or was it fear, because was this a proposal?
“What?” she said.
He repeated the marrying part.
“But I hardly know you,” Roz stammered.
“You’ll get to know me better,” said Mitch calmly. He was right about that.
And this is how things went on: mediocre dinners, heavy petting, delayed gratification. If Roz had been able to get it over with, get Mitch out of her system, maybe she wouldn’t have married him. Wrong: she would have, because after that first evening she was in over her depth and no was not an option. But the fact that he reduced her to a knee-wobbling jelly every time they went out, then gripped her hands when she tried to unzip him, added a certain element of suspense. For suspense read frustration. Read also abject humiliation. She felt like a big loose floozie, she felt like a puppy being whacked with a newspaper for trying to climb up trouser legs.