The Edible Woman Read Online Free Page B

group of oldest friends still left unmarried. It had been like an epidemic. Just before I’d met him two had succumbed, and in the four months since that another two had gone under without much warning. He and Trigger had found themselves more and more alone on their bachelor drinking sessions during the summer, and when the others did take an evening off from their wives to go along, I gathered from Peter’s gloomy accounts that theflavour of the evening was a synthetic substitute for the irresponsible gaiety of the past. He and Trigger had clutched each other like drowning men, each trying to make the other the reassuring reflection of himself that he needed. Now Trigger had sunk and the mirror would be empty. There were the other law students of course, but most of them were married too. Besides, they belonged to Peter’s post-university silver age rather than to his earlier golden one.
    I felt sorry for him, but I knew I would have to be wary. If the other two marriages had been any indication, he’d start seeing me after two or three drinks as a version of the designing siren who had carried off Trigger. I didn’t dare ask how she had done it: he might think I was getting ideas. The best plan would be to distract him.
    While I was meditating Lucy came over to my desk. “Do you think you can write a letter to this lady for me?” she asked. “I’m getting a splitting headache and I really can’t think of a thing to say.” She pressed one elegant hand to her forehead; with the other she handed me a note written in pencil on a piece of cardboard. I read it:
    Dear Sir, The cereal was fine but I found this in with the raisins. Yours Truly
, (
Mrs
.)
Ramona Baldwin
.
    A squashed housefly was scotch-taped to the bottom of the letter.
    “It was that raisin-cereal study,” Lucy said faintly. She was playing on my sympathies.
    “Oh, all right,” I said; “have you got her address?”
    I made several trial drafts:
    Dear Mrs. Baldwin; We are extremely sorry about the object in your cereal but these little mistakes will happen. Dear Mrs. Baldwin; We are so sorry to have inconvenienced you; we assure you however that the entire contents of the package was absolutely sterile. Dear Mrs. Baldwin; We are grateful to you for calling this
matter to our attention as we always like to know about any errors we may have made
.
    The main thing, I knew, was to avoid calling the housefly by its actual name.
    The phone rang again; this time it was an unexpected voice.
    “Clara!” I exclaimed, conscious of having neglected her. “How
are
you?”
    “Shitty, thanks,” Clara said. “But I wonder if you can come to dinner. I’d really like to see an outside face.”
    “I’d love to,” I said, my enthusiasm half genuine: it would be better than a T. V . dinner. “About what time?”
    “Oh, you know,” Clara said. “Whenever you come. We aren’t what you’d call punctual around here.” She sounded bitter.
    Now I was committed I was thinking rapidly of what this would involve: I was being invited as an entertainer and confidante, someone who would listen to a recital of Clara’s problems, and I didn’t feel like it. “Do you think I could bring Ainsley too?” I said. “That is, if she isn’t doing anything.” I told myself it would be good for Ainsley to have a wholesome dinner – she had only had a coffee at the coffee break – but secretly I wanted her along to take off a bit of the pressure. She and Clara could talk about child psychology.
    “Sure, why not?” Clara said. “The more the merrier, that’s our motto.”
    I called Ainsley at work, carefully asking her whether she was doing anything for dinner and listening to her accounts of the two invitations she had received and turned down – one from the toothbrush murder trial witness, the other from the dentistry student of the night before. To the latter she had been quite rude: she was never going out with him again. She claimed he had told her there