The Robber Bride (48 page)

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 truck-loads 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 onceover, 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 décor 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 façade was just that, a façade, 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 off – no 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.

When the time came – not in a church, not in a synagogue – considering the mixtures involved, in one of the banquet rooms of the Park Plaza Hotel – Roz didn’t think she’d make it all the way down the aisle. She thought there might be an unseemly incident. But Mitch would never have forgiven her if she’d jumped him in public, or even given him a big smooch during the kiss-the-bride routine. He’d made it clear by then that there were jumpers and jumpees, kissers and kissees, and he was to be the former and she the latter.

Sex-role stereotyping, thinks Roz now, having learned a thing or two in the interim. The cunning bastard. He held out on me, he wore me down. He knew exactly what he was doing. Probably had a
little side dish for himself tucked away in some typing pool so he wouldn’t get gangrene of the male member. But he pulled it off, he married me. He got the brass ring. She knows by this time that her money has to have been a factor.

Her father was suspicious about that even at the time. “How much is he making?” he queried Roz.

“Papa, that is not the
point!”
cried Roz, in an excess of anti-materialism. Anyway, wasn’t Mitch the golden boy? Guaranteed to do well? Wasn’t he about to rise in his law firm like a soap bubble?

“All I’m asking is, do I need to support him?” said her father. To Mitch he said, “Two cripples do not make one dancer,” glowering out from under his eyebrows.

“Pardon me, sir?” said Mitch, with urbanity, too much urbanity, urbanity that bordered on condescension and that meant he was willing to overlook Roz’s parents, the immigrant taint of the one, the boiled-potato doily-ridden rooming-house aftertaste of the other. Roz was new money, Mitch was old money; or he would have been old money if he’d had any money. His own father was dead, somewhat too early and too vaguely for total comfort. How was Roz to know then that he’d blown the family fortune on a war widow he’d run away with and then jumped off a bridge? She was not a mind-reader, and Mitch didn’t tell her, not for years, not for years and years. Neither did his prune of a mother, who was not dead yet but (thinks Roz, in the cellar) might as well have been. Roz has never forgiven her those delicate, cutting post-bridal hints about toning down her wardrobe and the proper way to set a dinner table.

“Papa, I am not a cripple!” Roz said to her father afterwards. “I mean, that is
so
insulting!”

“One cripple and one who is not a cripple don’t make a dancer either,” said her father.

What was he trying to tell me? thinks Roz, at this distance. What had he seen, what crack or fault line, what incipient limp?

But Roz wasn’t listening then, she was holding her hands over her ears, she didn’t want to hear. Her father gave her a long, sombre look. “You know what you’re doing?”

Roz thought she did; or rather she didn’t care whether she did or not, because this was it, this was
It
, and she was floating finally, she was up there on cloud nine, light as a feather despite her big raw bones. Her mother was on her side, because Roz was almost twenty-three now and any marriage was better than no marriage as far as she was concerned; though once she saw it was really going to happen, she became scornful of Mitch’s good manners –
la-di-da and excuse me, and who does he think he is –
and made it known that she would have preferred a Catholic to an Anglican. But having married Roz’s father, who was not exactly the Pope, she couldn’t put up much of an argument.

Mitch didn’t marry Roz just for her money. She’s sure of that. She remembers their actual honeymoon, in Mexico, all those Day of the Dead sugar skulls in the market, the flowers, the colours, herself giddy with pleasure, her sense of novelty and release because look, she had done it, she wasn’t a potential old maid any more but a bride, a married woman; and during the hot nights the window open to the sea, the curtains blowing, the wind moving over her skin like muslin, and the dark shape of Mitch above her, faceless and intense. It was different when you were in love, it was no longer a game; there was more at stake. She cried afterwards because she was so happy, and Mitch must have felt it too, because you can’t fake that kind of passion completely. Can you?

So it wasn’t only the money. But she could put it this way – he wouldn’t have married her without it. Maybe that’s what keeps him with her, what keeps him anchored. She hopes it’s not the only thing.
Mitch raises his glass of white wine to her and says, “To us,” and reaches across the table and takes her left hand, the one with the ring, a modest ring because that’s what he could afford at the time and he’d refused to accept any contribution from her father for a bigger one, and smiles at her, and says, “It hasn’t been so bad, has it? We’re pretty good, together,” and Roz knows he’s consoling himself for hidden disappointments, for time that marches on, for all the worlds he will, now, never be able to conquer, for the fact that there are thousands of nubile young women in the world, millions of them, more every minute, and no matter what he does he will never be able to get into all of them, because art is long and life is brief and mortality looms.

And yes, they are pretty good together. Sometimes. Still. So she beams at him and returns the squeeze, and thinks they are as happy as can be. They are. They are as happy as they can be, given who they are. Though if they’d been different people they might have been happier.

A girl, a pretty girl, a pretty girl in a scoop-neck jersey, appears with a platter of dead fish, from which Mitch selects. He’s having the Catch of the Day, Roz is having the pasta done in sepia, because she has never eaten such a thing before and it sounds so bizarre. Spaghetti in Ink. There’s a salad first, during which Roz sees fit to ask, tentatively enough, whether there’s a specific topic Mitch wants to discuss. At previous lunches there has been one, a business topic usually, a topic having to do with Mitch getting more power on the board of
Wise Woman World
, of which he is the chairman, oops, chairperson.

But Mitch says no, he was merely feeling that he hasn’t been seeing enough of her lately, without the kids that is, and Roz, eager for scraps as always, laps it up. She will forgive, she will forget. Well anyway, forgive, because what you can or can’t forget isn’t under
your control. Maybe Mitch has just been having a middle-aged crisis all these years; though twenty-eight was a little young to begin.