The Handmaid's Tale Passage, Margaret Atwood, Pages 87-88

The Commander sits down and crosses his legs, watched by us. The bookmarks are in place. He opens the book. He clears his throat a little, as if embarrassed.

    “Could I have a drink of water?” he says to the air. “Please,” he adds.

    Behind me, one of them, Cora or Rita, leaves her space in the tableau and pads of towards the kitchen. The Commander sits, looking down. The Commander sighs, takes out a pair of reading glasses from his inside jacket pocket, gold rims, slips them on. Now he looks like a shoemaker in an old fairy-tale book. Is there no end to his disguises, of benevolence?

    We watch him: every inch, every flicker.

 

To be a man, watched by women. It must be entirely strange. To have them watching him all the time. To have them wondering, What’s he going to do next? To have them flinch when he moves, even if it’s a harmless enough move, to reach for an ashtray perhaps. To have them sizing him up. To have them thinking, He can’t do it, he won’t do, he’ll have to do, this last as if he were a garment, out of style or shoddy, which must nevertheless be put on because there’s nothing else available.

    To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out, while he himself puts them on, like a sock over a foot, onto the stub of himself, his extra, sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug’s eye, which extrudes, expands, winces, and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again, bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf, into them, avid for vision. To achieve vision in this way, this journey into a darkness while he himself strains blindly forward.

    She watches him from within. We’re all watching him. It’s the one thing we can really do, and it is not for nothing: if he were to falter, fail, or die, what would become of us? No wonder he’s like a boot, hard on the outside, giving shape to a pulp of tenderfoot. That’s just a wish. I’ve been watching him for some time and he’s given no evidence, of softness.

    But watch out, Commander, I tell him in my head. I’ve got my eye on you. One false move and I’m dead.

    Still, it must be hell, to be a man, like that.

    It must be just fine.

    It must be hell.

    It must be very silent.

 

The water appears, the Commander drinks it. “Thank you,” he  says. Cora rustles back into place.

    The Commander pauses, looking down, scanning the page. He takes his time, as if unconscious of us. He’s like a man toying with a steak, behind a restaurant window, pretending not to see the eyes watching him from hungry darkness not three feet from his elbow. We lean towards him a little, iron fillings to his magnet. He has something we don’t have, he had the word. How we squandered it, once.