Cat's Eye

by Margaret Atwood

  Jesus has trouble looking like a real baby because his arms and legs are too long and spindly. Even when he does look like a baby, he's never newborn. I've seen newborn babies, with their wizened dried-apricot look, and these Jesuses are nothing like them. It's as if they've been born at the age of one year, or else are shriveled men. There's a lot of red and blue in these pictures, and a lot of breast-feeding.

  The dry voice from the darkness concentrates on the formal properties of the compositions, the arrangement of cloth in folds to accentuate circularity, the rendering of textures, the uses of perspective in archways and in the tiles underfoot. We skim over the breast-feeding: the pointer emerging from nowhere never alights on these bared breasts, some of which are an unpleasant pinky-green or veiny, or have a hand pressing the nipple and even real milk. There is some shifting in the seats at this: nobody wants to think about breast-feeding, not the professor and certainly not the girls. Over coffee they shiver: they themselves are fastidious, they will bottle-feed, which is anyway more sanitary.

  "The point of the breast-feeding," I say, "is that the Virgin is humble enough to do it. Most women then got their kids wet-nursed by somebody else, if they could afford it." I have read this in a book, dug up from the depths of the stacks, in the library.

  "Oh, Elaine," they say. "You're such a brain."

  "The other point is that Christ came to earth as a mammal," I say. "I wonder what Mary did for diapers? Now that would be a relic: the Sacred Diaper. How come there are no pictures of Christ on the potty? I know there's a piece of the Holy Foreskin around, but what about the Holy Shit?"

  "You're awful!"

  I grin, I cross my ankle over my knee, I put my elbows on the table. I enjoy pestering the girls in this minor, trivial way: it shows I am not like them.

  This is one life, my life of daytimes. My other, my real life, takes place at night.

  I've been watching Susie closely, and paying attention to what she does. Susie is not in fact my age, she is two years older and more, she's almost twenty-one. She doesn't live at home with her parents, but in a bachelorette apartment in one of the new high-rise buildings on Avenue Road, north of St. Clair. It is thought her parents pay for this. How else could she afford it? These buildings have elevators in them, and wide foyers with plants, and are called things like The Monte Carlo. Living in them is a daring and sophisticated thing to do, though scoffed at by the painters: trios of nurses live there. The painters themselves live on Bloor Street or Queen, above hardware stores and places that sell suitcases wholesale, or on side streets where there are immigrants.

  Susie stays after class, she turns up early, she hangs around; during the class itself she looks at Mr. Hrbik only sideways, furtively. I meet her coming out of his office and she jumps and smiles at me, then turns and calls, artificially and too loudly, "Thank you, Mr. Hrbik! See you next week!" She gives a little wave, although the door is partly closed and he can't possibly see her: the wave is for me. I now guess what I should have spotted right away: she is having a love affair with Mr. Hrbik. Also, she thinks nobody has figured this out.

  In this she is wrong. I overhear Marjorie and Babs discussing it in an oblique way: "Listen, kid, it's one way to pass the course," is what they say. "Wish I could do it just by flipping on my back." "Don't you wish! Those days are long gone, eh?" And they laugh in a comfortable way, as if what is going on is nothing at all, or funny.

  I don't think this love affair is at all funny. Love affair is how I think of it; I can't detach the word affair from the word love, although which of them loves the other is not clear. I decide that it's Mr. Hrbik who loves Susie. Or he doesn't really love her: he's besotted by her. I like this word besotted, suggestive as it is of sogginess, soppiness, flies drunk on syrup. Susie herself is incapable of love, she's too shallow. I think of her as the conscious one, the one in control: she's toying with him, in a hard, lacquered way straight out of forties movie posters. Hard as nails, and I even know what color of nails: Fire and Ice. This, despite her easily hurt look, her ingratiating ways. She throws off guilt like a sweet aroma, and Mr. Hrbik staggers besotted toward his fate.

  After she realizes the people in the class know--Babs and Marjorie have a way of conveying their knowledge--Susie becomes bolder. She starts referring to Mr. Hrbik by his first name, and popping him into sentences: Josef thinks, Josef says. She always knows where he is. Sometimes he is in Montreal for the weekend, where they have much better restaurants and decent wines. She's definite about this, although she's never been there. She throws out inside tidbits of information about him: he was married in Hungary, but his wife didn't come with him and now he's divorced. He has two daughters whose pictures he keeps in his wallet. It kills him to be separated from them--"It just kills him," she says softly, her eyes misting.

  Marjorie and Babs gobble this up. Already she's losing her floozie status with them, she's entering the outskirts of domesticity. They egg her on: "Listen, I don't blame you! I think he's just cute as a button!" "I could eat him up! But that would be robbing the cradle, eh?" In the washroom the two of them sit side by side in separate cubicles, talking over the noise of gushing pee, while I stand in front of the mirror, listening in. "I just hope he knows what he's doing. A nice kid like her." What they mean is that he should marry her. Or perhaps they mean that he should marry her if she gets pregnant. That would be the decent thing.

  The painters, on the other hand, turn rough on her. "Jeez, will you shut up about Josef! You'd think the sun shines out of his ass!" But she can't shut up. She resorts to craven, apologetic giggling, which annoys them further, and me also. I've seen that saturated, brimming look before.

  I feel that Mr. Hrbik needs protecting, or even rescuing. I don't yet know that a man can be admirable in many ways but a jerk in others. Also I haven't yet learned that chivalry in men is idiocy in women: men can get out of a rescue a lot more easily, once they get into it.

  52

  I am still living at home, which is humiliating; but why should I pay extra to live in a dormitory, when the university is in the same city? This is my father's view, and the reasonable one. Little does he know it isn't a dormitory I have in mind, but a crumbling walk-up above a bakery or cigar store, with streetcars rumbling by outside and the ceilings covered with egg cartons painted black.

  But I no longer sleep in my childhood room with the vanilla-colored light fixture and the window curtains. I've retreated to the cellar, claiming I can study better. Down there in a dim storage room adjacent to the furnace I've set up a realm of ersatz squalor. From the cupboardful of old camping equipment I've excavated one of the army surplus cots and a lumpy khaki sleeping bag, short-circuiting my mother's plans to move my bed down to the cellar so I can have a proper mattress. On the walls I've taped theater posters, from local productions--Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Sartre's No Exit--with deliberate fingerprints and inkstain-black lettering on them, and shadowy figures that look as if they've run in the wash; also several of my careful drawings of feet. My mother thinks the theater posters are gloomy, and doesn't understand the feet at all: feet should have a body. I narrow my eyes at her, knowing better.

  As for my father, he thinks my talent for drawing is impressive, but wasted. It would have been better applied to cross sections of stems and the cells of algae. For him I am a botanist manque.

  His view of life has darkened since Mr. Banerji returned to India. There is some obscurity around this: it is not talked of much. My mother says he was homesick, and hints at a nervous breakdown, but there was more to it than that. "They wouldn't promote him," says my father. There's a lot behind they (not we), and wouldn't (not didn't). "He wasn't properly appreciated." I think I know what this means. My father's view of human nature has always been bleak, but scientists were excluded from it, and now they aren't. He feels betrayed.

  My parents' footsteps pace back and forth above my head; the sounds of the household, the Mixmaster and the telephone and the distant news, filter down to me as
if in illness. I emerge, blinking, for meals and sit in stupor and demi-silence, picking at my chicken fricassee and mashed potatoes, while my mother comments on my lack of appetite and pallor and my father tells me useful and interesting things as if I am still young. Do I realize that nitrogen fertilizers are destroying fish life by fostering an overgrowth of algae? Have I heard of the new disease which will turn us all into deformed cretins unless the paper companies are forced to stop dumping mercury into the rivers? I do not realize, I have not heard.

  "Are you getting enough sleep, dear?" says my mother.

  "Yes," I say untruthfully.

  My father has noticed an ad in the paper, for an atomic radiation monster insect movie. "As you know," he says, "those giant grasshoppers could never actually exist. At that size their respiratory systems would collapse."

  I do not know.

  *

  In April, while I'm studying for exams and before the buds come out, my brother Stephen gets arrested. This happens the way it would.

  Stephen has not been here as he should have been to help me out at the dinner table, he hasn't been home all year. Instead he's running around loose in the world. He's studying Astrophysics at a university in California, having finished his undergraduate degree in two years instead of four. Now he is doing graduate work.

  I have no clear picture of California, having never been there, but I think of it as sunny, and warm all the time. The sky is a vibrant aniline blue, the trees a preternatural green. I populate it with tanned, handsome men in sunglasses and sports shirts with palm trees on them, and with real palm trees, and with blond, long-legged women, also tanned, with white convertibles.

  Among these sunglassed, fashionable people my brother is an anomaly. After he left his boys' school he reverted to his old, unkempt ways, and goes around in his moccasins and his sweaters with the worn-through elbows. He doesn't get a haircut unless reminded, and who is there to remind him? He walks among the palm trees, oblivious, whistling, his head sheathed in a halo of invisible numbers. What do the Californians make of him? They think he is a kind of tramp.

  On this particular day he takes his binoculars and his butterfly book and heads out into the countryside on his secondhand bicycle, to look for Californian butterflies. He comes to a promising field, descends, locks up the bike: he is prudent enough within limits. He heads into the field, which must have tall grass in it and some smallish bushes. He sees two exotic Californian butterflies and starts in pursuit of them, pausing to scan them with his binoculars; but at this distance he can't identify them, and every time he moves forward they take off.

  He follows them to the end of the field, where there is a chain-link fence. They fly through it, he climbs over. On the other side there's another field, a flatter one with less vegetation. There's a dirt road crossing it, but he disregards this and follows the butterflies, red and white and black in color, with an hourglass pattern, something he's never seen before. At the other side of this field there's another fence, a higher one, and he scales this too. Then, when the butterflies have finally stopped, on a low tropical bush with pink flowers, and he's down on one knee focusing his binoculars, three uniformed men in a jeep drive up.

  "What're you doing in here?" they say.

  "In where?" says my brother. He's impatient with them, they've disturbed the butterflies, which have flown off again.

  "Didn't you see the signs?" they say. "The ones that said DANGER, KEEP OUT?"

  "No," says my brother. "I was chasing those butterflies."

  "Butterflies?" says one. The second one makes a twirling motion beside his ear, with his finger, denoting craziness. "Wacko," he says. The third one says, "You expect us to believe that?"

  "What you believe is your own concern," says my brother. Or something of the sort.

  "Wise guy," they say, because this is what Americans say in comic books. I add some cigarettes, in the sides of their mouths, a few pistols and other hardware, and boots.

  It turns out they are the military and this is a military testing zone. They take my brother back to their headquarters and lock him up. Also they confiscate his binoculars. They don't believe he's a graduate student in Astrophysics out chasing butterflies, they think he's a spy, although they can't figure out why he would have been so open about it. Spy novels, as I and the military know but my brother does not, are crawling with spies who pretend to be harmless butterfly fanciers.

  Finally they allow him to make a phone call, and his graduate supervisor from the university has to come and bail him out. When he goes back to retrieve his bike, it's been pinched.

  I get the bare bones of this from my parents over the beef stew. They don't know whether to be amused or alarmed. From my brother, however, I hear nothing of the sort. Instead I get a letter, written in pencil on a page torn from a loose-leaf notebook. His letters always begin without greeting and end without signature, as if they're part of one single letter, unrolling through time like an endless paper towel.

  He's writing this letter, he says, from the top of a tree, where he's watching the football game over the stadium wall--cheaper than buying a ticket--and eating a peanut butter sandwich, cheaper than eating in a restaurant: he doesn't like monetary transactions. There are in fact several grease spots on the paper. He says he can see a bunch of pom-pom-covered capons jumping up and down. These must be the cheerleaders. He's living in a student dormitory with a lot of mucus membranes who do nothing but drool over girls and get pissed on American beer. In his opinion this takes some doing, as the stuff is weaker than shampoo and tastes like it into the bargain. In the mornings he eats prefrozen reheated fried eggs, which are square in shape and have ice crystals in the yolks. A triumph of modern technology, he says.

  Apart from that he's enjoying himself, as he is hard at work on The Nature of the Universe. The burning question is: is the universe more like a giant ever-enlarging blimp, or does it pulsate, does it expand and contract? Probably the suspense is killing me, but I will just have to wait a few years till he works out the final answer. TUNE IN FOR THE NEXT THRILLING INSTALLMENT, he writes, in block letters.

  I hear you've gone into the picture business, he continues in normal-sized writing. I used to do that sort of thing when I was younger. I hope you're taking your cod liver oil pills and keeping out of trouble. And that is the end of the letter.

  I think of my brother sitting at the top of a tree, in California. He no longer knows who he's writing to, because I have surely changed beyond all recognition. And I no longer know who's writing. I think of him as staying always the same, but of course this can't be true. He must know things by now that he didn't know before, as I do.

  Also: if he's eating a sandwich and writing a letter both at the same time, how is he holding on? He seems happy enough, up there in his perch of a sniper. But he should be more careful. What I have always assumed in him to be bravery may be merely an ignorance of consequences. He thinks he is safe, because he is what he says he is. But he's out in the open, and surrounded by strangers.

  53

  I sit in a French restaurant with Josef, drinking white wine and eating snails. They're the first snails I have ever eaten, this is the first French restaurant I have ever been in. It's the only French restaurant in Toronto, according to Josef. It's called La Chaumiere, which Josef says means "thatched cottage." La Chaumiere is not, however, a thatched cottage, but a prosaic, dowdy building like other Toronto buildings. The snails themselves look like large dark pieces of snot; you eat them with a two-pronged fork. I think they are quite good, though rubbery.

  Josef says they aren't fresh snails but have come out of a tin. He says this sadly, with resignation, as if it means the end, though the end of what is not clear; this is how he says many things.

  It was the way he first said my name, for instance. That was back in May, in the last week of Life Drawing. Each of us was supposed to meet with Mr. Hrbik for an individual evaluation, to discuss our progress during the year. Marjorie and Babs were a
head of me, standing in the hall with take-out coffees. "Hi, kid," they said. Marjorie was telling a story about how a man exposed himself to her in Union Station, where she had gone to meet her daughter on the train from Kingston. Her daughter was my age, and going to Queen's.

  "He had on a raincoat, would you believe," said Marjorie.

  "Oh God," said Babs.

  "So I looked him in the eye--the eye--and I said, 'Can't you do any better than that?' I mean, talk about weenies. No wonder the poor boob runs around in train stations trying to get somebody to look at it!"

  "And?"

  "Listen, what goes up must come down, eh?"

  They snorted, spewing droplets of coffee, coughing out smoke. As usual I found them slightly disreputable: making jokes about things that were no joking matter.

  Susie came out of Mr. Hrbik's office. "Hi, you guys," she said, trying for cheer. Her eyeshadow was smudged, her eyes pinkish. I'd been reading modern French novels, and William Faulkner as well. I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession, with undertones of nausea. Susie was the sort of girl who would go in for this kind of love. She would be abject, she would cling and grovel. She would lie on the floor, moaning, hanging on to Mr. Hrbik's legs, her hair falling like blond seaweed over the black leather of his shoes (he would have his shoes on, being about to stalk out of the door). From this angle, Mr. Hrbik was cut off at the knees and Susie's face was invisible. She would be squashed by passion, obliterated.

  I was not sorry for her, however. I was a little envious.

  "Poor bunny rabbit," Babs said behind her retreating back.

  "Europeans," said Marjorie. "I don't believe for a minute he was ever divorced."

  "Listen, maybe he was never even married."

  "What about those kids of his?"

  "Most likely his nieces or something."

  I scowled at them. Their voices were way too loud; Mr. Hrbik would hear them.

  After they had gone it was my turn. I went in, and stood while Mr. Hrbik sat, going through my portfolio, which was spread out on his desk. I thought it was this that was making me nervous.