Life Before Man by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online

exposure. His hands have decided it’s time for him to be someone else.
    He rinses his face. He doesn’t have any after-shave – it’s so long since he’s used it – so he rubs some of Elizabeth’s glycerine and rose-water over his new-mown skin. The face that looks back at him from the bathroom mirror is more vulnerable, but also younger andgrimmer, the jaw clearly visible now, its furry wisdom gone. A man stroking his beard is one thing, a man stroking his jaw is another.
    Before leaving the house he goes into his own room and scrabbles through the piles of coins on his bureau, looking for dimes. Then he changes his socks. He doesn’t expect to be taking his socks off this evening; it’s highly unlikely that he will. However. His feet are white and rootlike, the toenails greyish yellow from the cellar life they’re forced to lead. He sees his feet for an instant, browned and running, on sand, on sun-warmed rock. Far from here.

Sunday, October 31, 1976
LESJE
    L esje and William are having a game of cribbage. They sit at a card table, the same card table on which they eat meals when they eat together, beside their picture window, which has a breathtaking view of the picture window in the apartment building opposite theirs. This window is lighted, since it’s dark, and two people are sitting behind it, eating what Lesje takes to be spaghetti. On the streets below, Lesje assumes, it’s all happening. That was why she wanted to live here, at the crux, in the heart: because it would all be happening. “It” and “all” are words that have, however, retained their abstractness. She hasn’t yet found either of them.
    Lesje has stuck a paper jack-o’-lantern, purchased at Woolworth’s, to the inside of their own picture window. Last year she bought some candy, hoping to be visited by a parade of little children in costumes; but no children, it appears, can penetrate to the fourteenth floor of this apartment building. The people who live here, whom she sees only in the elevators, appear to be young and either single or childless.
    Lesje would like to be out roaming the streets herself, watching. But William has suggested cribbage, which relaxes his mind.
    “Fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six and a pair is eight,” says William. He moves his plastic toothpick. Lesje has a mere fifteen two in the crib, a pair of aces she put there herself. She shuffles and cuts, William deals. He picks up his cards and his lips purse. He’s frowning, deciding what to set aside for himself.
    Lesje’s hand is so bad there’s not much choice. She permits herself a walk by moonlight, along a path trampled by the giant but herbivorous iguanodons; she can see the three-toed prints of their hind feet in the mud. She follows their trail until the trees thin and there, in the distance, is the lake, silvery, its surface broken here and there by a serpentine head, the curve of a plunging back. That she should be so privileged. How will she ever convince the others of what she has seen?
    (The lake, of course, is Lake Gladys, marked clearly on the chart on page 202 of
The Lost World
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Lesje read this book at the age of ten. It was filed in the school library under Geology, and she’d been doing a project on rocks. Rocks had been her big thing before dinosaurs. Her friends at school read Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames the stewardess. Lesje hadn’t cared much for those stories. She didn’t as a rule like stories that weren’t factual. But
The Lost World
was different. They’d found a plateau in South America on which the life forms of the Upper Jurassic had continued to survive, along with other, more modern forms. She can’t remember which came first, her passion for fossils or this book; she thinks it was the book. No matter that all those on the expedition had been men. She’d fallen in love, not with Professor Challenger, the loud-mouthed assertive one, or even the young reporter or the