The Handmaid's Tale , Margaret Atwood - Marta Dvořák Page 0,96
me and confer together about other things. My disguise performs its function.
He retains hold of my arm, and as he talks his spine straightens imperceptibly, his chest expands, his voice assumes more and more the sprightliness and jocularity of youth. It occurs to me he is showing off. He is showing me off, to them, and they understand that, they are decorous enough, they keep their hands to themselves, but they review my breasts, my legs, as if there’s no reason why they shouldn’t. But also he is showing off to me. He is demonstrating, to me, his mastery of the world. He’s breaking the rules, under their noses, thumbing his nose at them, getting away with it. Perhaps he’s reached that state of intoxication which power is said to inspire, the state in which you believe you are indispensable and can therefore do anything, absolutely anything you feel like, anything at all. Twice, when he thinks no one is looking, he winks at me.
It’s a juvenile display, the whole act, and pathetic; but it’s something I understand.
When he’s done enough of this he leads me away again, to a puffy flowered sofa of the kind they once had in hotel lobbies; in this lobby, in fact, it’s a floral design I remember, dark blue background, pink art nouveau flowers. “I thought your feet might be getting tired,” he says, “in those shoes.” He’s right about that, and I’m grateful. He sits me down, and sits himself down beside me. He puts an arm around my shoulders. The fabric of his sleeve is raspy against my skin, so unaccustomed lately to being touched.
“Well?” he says. “What do you think of our little club?”
I look around me again. The men are not homogeneous, as I first thought. Over by the fountain there’s a group of Japanese, in lightish-grey suits, and in the far corner there’s a splash of white: Arabs, in those long bathrobes they wear, the headgear, the striped sweatbands.
“It’s a club?” I say.
“Well, that’s what we call it, among ourselves. The club.”
“I thought this sort of thing was strictly forbidden,” I say.
“Well, officially,” he says. “But everyone’s human, after all.”
I wait for him to elaborate on this, but he doesn’t, so I say, “What does that mean?”
“It means you can’t cheat Nature,” he says. “Nature demands variety, for men. It stands to reason, it’s part of the procreational strategy. It’s Nature’s plan.” I don’t say anything, so he goes on. “Women know that instinctively. Why did they buy so many different clothes, in the old days? To trick the men into thinking they were several different women. A new one each day.”
He says this as if he believes it, but he says many things that way. Maybe he believes it, maybe he doesn’t, or maybe he does both at the same time. Impossible to tell what he believes.
“So now that we don’t have different clothes,” I say, “you merely have different women.” This is irony, but he doesn’t acknowledge it.
“It solves a lot of problems,” he says, without a twitch.
I don’t reply to this. I am getting fed up with him. I feel like freezing on him, passing the rest of the evening in sulky wordlessness. But I can’t afford that and I know it. Whatever this is, it’s still an evening out.
What I’d really like to do is talk with the women, but I see scant chance of that.
“Who are these people?” I ask him.
“It’s only for officers,” he says. “From all branches; and senior officials. And trade delegations, of course. It stimulates trade. It’s a good place to meet people. You can hardly do business without it. We try to provide at least as good as they can get elsewhere. You can overhear things too; information. A man will sometimes tell a woman things he wouldn’t tell another man.”
“No,” I say, “I mean the women.”
“Oh,” he says. “Well, some of them are real pros. Working girls” – he laughs – “from the time before. They couldn’t be assimilated; anyway, most of them prefer it here.”
“And the others?”
“The others?” he says. “Well, we have quite a collection. That one there, the one in green, she’s a sociologist. Or was. That one was a lawyer, that one was in business, an executive position; some sort of fast-food chain or maybe it was hotels. I’m told you can have quite a good conversation with her if all you feel like is talking. They prefer it here, too.”