Wilderness Tips by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online Page B

embroidered with lilies, fuzzy covers on the toilet seats.
    The magazine itself got off to a rocky start. Although Kat had lots of lovely money to play with, and although it was a challenge to be working in colour, she did not have the free hand Gerald had promised her. She had to contend with the company board of directors, who were all men, who were all accountants or indistinguishable from them, who were cautious and slow as moles.
    “It’s simple,” Kat told them. “You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You’re working with the gap between reality and perception. That’s why you have to hit them with something new, something they’ve never seen before, something they aren’t. Nothing sells like anxiety.”
    The board, on the other hand, felt that the readership should simply be offered more of what they already had. More fur, moresumptuous leather, more cashmere. More established names. The board had no sense of improvisation, no wish to take risks; no sporting instincts, no desire to put one over on the readers just for the hell of it. “Fashion is like hunting,” Kat told them, hoping to appeal to their male hormones, if any. “It’s playful, it’s intense, it’s predatory. It’s blood and guts. It’s erotic.” But to them it was about good taste. They wanted Dress-for-Success. Kat wanted scattergun ambush.
    Everything became a compromise. Kat had wanted to call the magazine
All the Rage
, but the board was put off by the vibrations of anger in the word “rage.” They thought it was too feminist, of all things. “It’s a
forties
sound,” Kat said. “Forties is
back
. Don’t you get it?” But they didn’t. They wanted to call it
Or
. French for
gold
, and blatant enough in its values, but without any base note, as Kat told them. They sawed off at
Felice
, which had qualities each side wanted. It was vaguely French-sounding, it meant “happy” (so much less threatening than rage), and, although you couldn’t expect the others to notice, for Kat it had a feline bouquet which counteracted the laciness. She had it done in hot-pink lipstick-scrawl, which helped some. She could live with it, but it had not been her first love.
    This battle has been fought and refought over every innovation in design, every new angle Kat has tried to bring in, every innocuous bit of semi-kink. There was a big row over a spread that did lingerie, half pulled off and with broken glass perfume bottles strewn on the floor. There was an uproar over the two nouveau-stockinged legs, one tied to a chair with a third, different-coloured stocking. They had not understood the man’s three-hundred-dollar leather gloves positioned ambiguously around a neck.
    And so it has gone on, for five years.
    After Gerald has left, Kat paces her living room. Pace, pace. Her stitches pull. She’s not looking forward to her solitary dinner ofmicrowaved leftovers. She’s not sure now why she came back here, to this flat burg beside the polluted inland sea. Was it Ger? Ludicrous thought but no longer out of the question. Is he the reason she stays, despite her growing impatience with him?
    He’s no longer fully rewarding. They’ve learned each other too well, they take short-cuts now; their time together has shrunk from whole stolen rolling and sensuous afternoons to a few hours snatched between work and dinner-time. She no longer knows what she wants from him. She tells herself she’s worth more, she should branch out; but she doesn’t see other men, she can’t, somehow. She’s tried once or twice but it didn’t work. Sometimes she goes out to dinner or a flick with one of the gay designers. She likes the gossip.
    Maybe she misses London. She feels caged, in this country, in this city, in this room. She could start with the room, she could open a window. It’s too stuffy in here. There’s an undertone of formaldehyde, from Hairball’s bottle. The flowers she