ALSO BY MARGARET ATWOOD
NOVELS
The Edible Woman
Surfacing
Lady Oracle
Life Before Man
Bodily Harm
The Handmaid's Tale Cat's Eye
The Robber Bride
Alias Grace
The Blind Assassin Oryx and Crake
The Penelopiad
The Year of the Flood MaddAddam
SHORTER FICTION
Dancing Girls
Murder in the Dark Bluebeard's Egg
Wilderness Tips
Good Bones and Simple Murders The Tent
Moral Disorder
Stone Mattress
POETRY
Double Persephone The Circle Game
The Animals in That Country The Journals of Suanna Moodie Procedures for Underground Power Politics
You Are Happy
Selected Poems: 1965-1975
Two-Headed Poems
True Stories
Interlunar
Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New, 1976-1986
Morning in the Burned House Eating Fire: Selected Poetry, 1965-1995
The Door
NONFICTION
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature Days of the Rebels 1815-1840
Second Words
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing Moving Targets: Writing with Intent 1982-2004
Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose, 1983-2005
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination
FOR CHILDREN
Up in the Tree
Anna's Pet (with Joyce Barkhouse) For the Birds
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda Wandering Wenda
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright (c) 2015 O.W. Toad Ltd.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
www.nanatalese.com
Doubleday is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Originally published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart Ltd., Toronto Cover design by David Mann
Cover photograph (c) Klaus Lahnstein/The Image Bank/Getty Images
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Atwood, Margaret, [date]
The heart goes last : a novel / Margaret Atwood. - First American edition.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-0-385-54035-3 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-38554036-0 (eBook)
I. Title.
PR9199.3.A8H43 2015
813'.54 - dc23
2015016476
eBook ISBN 9780385540360
v4.1
ep
Contents
Cover
Also by Margaret Atwood
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
I | Where?
Cramped
Where?
II | Pitch
Brew
Stumped
Pitch
III | Switch
Gateway
Night Out
Twin City
A Meaningful Life
I'm Starved for You
Switch
Tidy
IV | The Heart Goes Last
Haircut
Duty
The Heart Goes Last
Scooter
Pushover
V | Ambush
Town Meeting
Ambush
Chat Room
Choke Collar
Human Resources
Houseboy
VI | Valentine's Day
Limbo
Turban
Shuffle
Threat
Valentine's Day
Sandbag
VII | White Ceiling
White Ceiling
Hood
Cherry Pie
Headgame
Choice
VIII | Erase Me
Binned
Teatime
Coffeetime
Ajar
Erase Me
IX | Possibilibots
Lunch
Egg Cup
Tour
Black Suit
Tiptoe Through the Tulips
X | Grief Therapy
Handcreep
Quality Control
Sacrifice
Perfect
Grief Therapy
Dressups
XI | Ruby Slippers
Flirt
Shipped
Fetish
Malfunction
Unpacked
Ruby Slippers
XII | Escort
Elvisorium
Why Suffer?
Escort
Requisition
XIII | Green Man
Green Man
Gong for Hire
In Flight
XIV | Snatch
Snatch
Flamed
Charm
Floral
XV | There
There
Gift
Acknowledgements
For Marian Engel (1933-1985),
Angela Carter (1940-1992), and
Judy Merril (1923-1997).
And for Graeme, as ever.
...with wonderful craftsmanship he sculpted a gleaming white ivory statue....It appeared to be a real living girl, poised on the brink of motion but modestly holding back - so artfully did his artistry conceal itself....He kissed her, convinced himself that she kissed him back, spoke to her, embraced her....
- Ovid, "Pygmalion and Galatea," Book X, Metamorphoses
"When it gets down to it, these things just don't feel right. They're made of a rubbery material that feels absolutely nothing like anything resembling a human body part. They try to make up for that by instructing you to soak them in warm water first and then using a shitload of lube...."
- Adam Frucci, "I Had Sex With Furniture," Gizmodo, 10/17/09
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends.
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
I | WHERE?
CRAMPED
Sleeping in the car is cramped. Being a third-hand Honda, it's no palace to begin with. If it was a van they'd have more room, but fat chance of affording one of those, even back when they thought they had money. Stan says they're lucky to have any kind of a car at all, which is true, but their luckiness doesn't make the car any bigger.
Charmaine feels that Stan ought to sleep in the back because he needs more space - it would only be fair, he's larger - but he has to be in the front in order to drive them away fast in an emergency. He doesn't trust Charmaine's ability to function under those circumstances: he says she'd be too busy screaming to drive. So Charmaine can have the more spacious back, though even so she has to curl up like a snail because she can't exactly stretch out.
They keep the windows mostly closed because of the mosquitoes and the gangs and the solitary vandals. The solitaries don't usually have guns or knives - if they have those kinds of weapons you have to get out of there triple fast - but they're more likely to be bat-shit crazy, and a crazy p
erson with a piece of metal or a rock or even a high-heeled shoe can do a lot of damage. They'll think you're a demon or the undead or a vampire whore, and no kind of reasonable thing you might do to calm them down will cancel out that opinion. The best thing with crazy people, Grandma Win used to say - the only thing, really - is to be somewhere else.
With the windows shut except for a crack at the top, the air gets dead and supersaturated with their own smells. There aren't many places where they can grab a shower or wash their clothes, and that makes Stan irritable. It makes Charmaine irritable too, but she tries her best to stamp on that feeling and look on the bright side, because what's the use of complaining?
What's the use of anything? she often thinks. But what's the use of even thinking What's the use? So instead she says, "Honey, let's just cheer up!"
"Why?" Stan might say. "Give me one good fucking reason to cheer the fuck up." Or he might say, "Honey, just shut it!" mimicking her light, positive tone, which is mean of him. He can lean to the mean when he's irritated, but he's a good man underneath. Most people are good underneath if they have a chance to show their goodness: Charmaine is determined to keep on believing that. A shower is a help for the showing of the goodness in a person, because, as Grandma Win was in the habit of saying, Cleanliness is next to godliness and godliness means goodliness.
That was among the other things she might say, such as Your mother didn't kill herself, that was just talk. Your daddy did the best he could but he had a lot to put up with and it got too much. You should try hard to forget those other things, because a man's not accountable when he's had too much to drink. And then she would say, Let's make popcorn!
And they would make the popcorn, and Grandma Win would say, Don't look out the window, sugar pie, you don't want to see what they're doing out there. It isn't nice. They yell because they want to. It's self-expression. Sit here by me. It all worked out for the best, because look, here you are and we're happy and safe now!
That didn't last, though. The happiness. The safeness. The now.
WHERE?
Stan twists in the front seat, trying to get comfortable. Not much fucking chance of that. So what can he do? Where can they turn? There's no safe place, there are no instructions. It's like he's being blown by a vicious but mindless wind, aimlessly round and round in circles. No way out.
He feels so lonely, and sometimes having Charmaine with him makes him feel lonelier. He's let her down.
He has a brother, true, but that would be a last resort. He and Conor had followed different paths, was the polite way of saying it. A drunken midnight fight, with dickheads and douchebags and shit-for-brains freely exchanged, would be the impolite way of saying it, and it was in fact the way Conor had chosen during their last encounter. To be accurate, Stan had chosen that way too, though he'd never had as foul a mouth as Con.
In Stan's view - his view at that time - Conor was next door to a criminal. But in Con's view Stan was a dupe of the system, an ass-kisser, a farce, and a coward. Balls of a tadpole.
Where's slippery Conor now, what's he doing? At least he won't have lost his job in the big financial-crash business-wrecking meltdown that turned this part of the country into a rust bucket: you can't lose your job if you don't have one. Unlike Stan, he hasn't been expelled, cast out, condemned to a life of frantic, grit-in-the-eyes, rancid-armpit wandering. Con always lived off what he could mooch or filch from others, ever since he was a kid. Stan hasn't forgotten his Swiss Army knife that he'd saved up for, his Transformer, his Nerf gun with the foam bullets: magical disappearances all, with Con's younger-brother head going shake shake shake from side to side, no way, who, me?
Stan wakes at night thinking for a moment that he's home in bed, or at least in a bed of some sort. He reaches for Charmaine, but she isn't there beside him and he finds himself inside the stinking car, needing a piss but afraid to unlock the door because of the voices yammering toward him and the footsteps crunching on gravel or thudding on asphalt, and maybe a fist thumping on the roof and a scarred, partly toothed face grinning in the window: Lookit what we got! Cockfodder! Let's open 'er up! Gimme the crowbar!
And then Charmaine's terrified little whisper: "Stan! Stan! We need to go! We need to go right now!" As if he couldn't figure that out for himself. He keeps the key in the ignition, always. Rev of motor, screech of tires, yelling and jeering, pounding of heart, and then what? More of the same in some other parking lot or sidestreet, somewhere else. It would be nice if he had a machine gun: nothing any smaller would even come close. As it is, his only weapon is flight.
He feels pursued by bad luck, as if bad luck is a feral dog, lurking along behind him, following his scent, lying in wait around corners. Peering out from under bushes to fix him with its evil yellow eye. Maybe what he needs is a witch doctor, some serious voodoo. Plus a couple of hundred bucks so they could spend a night in a motel, with Charmaine beside him instead of out of reach in the back seat. That would be the bare minimum: to wish for any more would be pushing it.
Charmaine's commiseration makes it worse. She tries so hard. "You are not a failure," she says. "Just because we lost the house and we're sleeping in the car, and you got..." She doesn't want to say fired. "And you haven't given up, at least you're looking for a job. Those things like losing the house, and, and...those things have happened to a lot of people. To most people."
"But not to everyone," Stan would say. "Not to fucking everyone."
Not to rich people.
--
They'd started out so well. They both had jobs then. Charmaine was in the Ruby Slippers Retirement Homes and Clinics chain, doing entertainment and events - she had a special touch with the elderly, said the supervisors - and she was working her way up. He was doing well too: junior quality control at Dimple Robotics, testing the Empathy Module in the automated Customer Fulfillment models. People didn't just want their groceries bagged, he used to explain to Charmaine: they wanted a total shopping experience, and that included a smile. Smiles were hard; they could turn into grimaces or leers, but if you got a smile right, they'd spend extra for it. Amazing to remember, now, what people would once spend extra for.
They'd had a small wedding - just friends, since there wasn't much family left on either side, their parents being dead one way or another. Charmaine said she wouldn't have invited hers anyway, though she didn't elaborate because she didn't like to talk about them, but she wished her Grandma Win could have been there. Who knew where Conor was? Stan didn't look for him, because if he turned up he would probably have tried to grope Charmaine or do some other attention-grabbing stunt.
Then they had a beach honeymoon in Georgia. That was a high point. There are the two of them in the photos, golden and smiling, sunlight all over them like mist, raising their glasses of - what had that been, some tropical cocktail heavy on the lime cordial - raising their glasses to their new life. Charmaine in a retro flower-patterned halter top with a sarong skirt and a hibiscus blossom tucked behind her ear, her blond hair shining, ruffled by the breeze, him in a green shirt with penguins on it that Charmaine had picked out for him, and a panama; well, not a real panama, but that idea. They look so young, so untouched. So eager for the future.
Stan sent one of those photos to Conor to show that there was, finally, a girl of Stan's that Con couldn't poach; also as an example of the success Con himself might expect to have if he'd settle down, go straight, stop doing minor time, quit fooling around on the fringes. It's not that Con wasn't smart: he was too smart. Always playing the angles.
Con sent a message back: Nice T&A, big brother. Can she cook? Dumb penguins though. Typical: Con had to sneer, he had to disparage. That was before he'd cut the lines, dumped his email, refused to share his address.
--
Back up north, they'd made a down payment on a house, a starter two-bedroom in need of a little love but with room for the growing family, said the agent with a wink. It seemed affordable, but in retrospect the decision to buy was a mistake - th
ere were the renovations and repairs, and that meant extra debt on top of the mortgage. They told themselves they could handle it: they weren't big spenders, they worked hard. That's the killer: the hard work. He'd busted his ass. He might as well not have bothered, in view of the fuck-all he's been left with. It makes him cross-eyed to remember how hard he'd worked.
Then everything went to ratshit. Overnight, it felt like. Not just in his own personal life: the whole card castle, the whole system fell to pieces, trillions of dollars wiped off the balance sheets like fog off a window. There were hordes of two-bit experts on TV pretending to explain why it had happened - demographics, loss of confidence, gigantic Ponzi schemes - but that was all guesswork bullshit. Someone had lied, someone had cheated, someone had shorted the market, someone had inflated the currency. Not enough jobs, too many people. Or not enough jobs for middle-of-the-road people like Stan and Charmaine. The northeast, which was where they were, was the hardest hit.
The Ruby Slippers branch where Charmaine worked ran into trouble: it was upscale, so a lot of families could no longer afford to park their old folks in there. Rooms emptied, overheads were cut. Charmaine applied for a transfer - the chain was still doing well on the West Coast - but that didn't happen, and she was made redundant. Then Dimple Robotics packed up and moved west, and Stan was out without a parachute.
They sat in their newly bought home on their newly bought sofa with the flowered throw pillows that Charmaine had taken such trouble to match, and hugged each other, and said they loved each other, and Charmaine cried, and Stan patted her and felt useless.