Cat's Eye

by Margaret Atwood

  He flipped through the pages, hands, heads, bottoms, in silence, chewing his pencil. "This is nice," he said at last. "You have made progress. This is more relaxed, this line here."

  "Where?" I said, leaning my hand on the desk, bending forward. He turned his head to the side, toward me, and there were his eyes. They were not purple after all but dark brown.

  "Elaine, Elaine," he said sadly. He put his hand over mine. Cold shot up my arm, into my stomach; I stood there frozen, revealed to myself. Is this what I'd been angling for, with my notions of rescue?

  He shook his head, as if he'd given up or had no choice, then drew me down, between his knees. He didn't even stand up. So I was on the floor, on my knees, with my head tilted back, his hands caressing the back of my neck. I'd never been kissed that way before. It was like a perfume ad: foreign and dangerous and potentially degrading. I could get up and run for it, but if I stayed put, even for one more minute, there would be no more groping in car seats or movie theaters, no skirmishes over brassiere hooks. No nonsense, no fooling around.

  We went to Josef's apartment in a taxi. In the taxi Josef sat quite far apart from me, although he kept his hand on my knee. I was not used to taxis then, and thought the driver was looking at us in the rearview mirror.

  Josef's apartment was on Hazelton Avenue, which was not quite a slum although close to it. The houses there are old, close together, with frumpy little front gardens and pointed roofs and moldering wooden scrollwork around the porches. There were cars parked bumper to bumper along the sidewalk. Most of the houses were in pairs, attached together down one side. It was in one of these crumbling, pointy-roofed twin houses that Josef lived. He had the second floor.

  A fat older man in shirtsleeves and suspenders was rocking on the porch of the house next to Josef's. He stared as Josef paid the taxi, then as we came up the front walk. "Nice day," he said.

  "Isn't it?" I said. Josef paid no attention. He put his hand lightly on the back of my neck as we went up the narrow inner stairs. Everywhere he touched me felt heavy.

  His apartment was three rooms: a front room, a middle room with a kitchenette, and a back room. The rooms were small, and there was little furniture. It was as if he'd just moved in, or was moving out. His bedroom was painted mauve. On the walls were several prints, which were of elongated figures, murkily colored. There was nothing else in this room but a mattress on the floor, covered with a Mexican blanket. I looked at it, and thought I was seeing adult life.

  Josef kissed me, standing up this time, but I felt awkward. I was afraid someone would see in through the window. I was afraid he would ask me to take off my own clothes, that he would then turn me this way and that, looking at me from a distance. I didn't like being looked at from behind: it was a view over which I had no control. But if he asked this I would have to do it, because any hesitation on my part would place me beneath consideration.

  He lay down on the mattress, and looked up as if waiting. After a moment I lay down beside him and he kissed me again, gently undoing my buttons. The buttons were on an outsized cotton shirt, which was what had replaced the turtlenecks now that it was warm. I put my arms around him, and thought: he was in the war.

  "What about Susie?" I said. As soon as I said it I realized it was a high school question.

  "Susie?" Josef asked, as if trying to remember her name. His mouth was against my ear; the name was like a regretful sigh.

  The Mexican blanket was scratchy, which did not bother me: sex was supposed to be unpleasant the first time. I expected the smell of rubber too, and the pain; but there was not as much pain, and not nearly as much blood as everyone said.

  Josef was not expecting the pain. "This is hurting you?" he said at one point. "No," I said, flinching, and he did not stop. He was not expecting the blood either. He would have to get his blanket cleaned, but he didn't mention this. He was considerate, and stroked my thigh.

  *

  Josef has gone on all summer. Sometimes he takes me to restaurants, with checked tablecloths and candles stuck in Chianti bottles; sometimes to foreign films about Swedes and Japanese, in small uncrowded theaters. But we always end up back at his apartment, under or on top of the Mexican blanket. His love-making is unpredictable; sometimes he is avid, sometimes routine, sometimes absent-minded, as if doodling. It's partly the unpredictability that keeps me hooked. This and his need, which seems to me at times helpless and beyond his control.

  "Don't leave me," he says, running his hands over me; always before, not after. "I couldn't bear it." This is an old-fashioned thing to say, and in another man I would find it comical, but not in Josef. I am in love with his need. Only to think of it makes me feel suffused, inert, like the flesh of a watermelon. For this reason I've canceled my plans to return to the Muskoka resort, to work as I did last summer. Instead I've taken a job at the Swiss Chalet on Bloor Street. This is a place that serves nothing but chicken, "broasted," as it says on the sign. Chicken and dipping sauce, and coleslaw and white buns, and one flavor of ice cream: Burgundy Cherry, which is a striking shade of purple. I wear a uniform with my name stitched on the pocket, as in high school gym class.

  Josef sometimes picks me up there, after work. "You smell of chicken," he murmurs in the taxi, his face against my neck. I've lost all modesty in taxis; I lean against him, his hand around me, under my arm, on my breast, or I lie down along the seat, head in his lap.

  Also I have moved out of home. On the nights when I'm with him, Josef wants me to stay all night. He wants to wake up with me asleep beside him, start to make love to me without waking me up. I've told my parents it's only for the summer, so I can be closer to the Swiss Chalet. They think it's a waste of money. They are racketing around up north somewhere and I would have the house to myself; but my idea of myself and my parents' idea of me no longer belong in the same place.

  If I'd gone to Muskoka I wouldn't be living at home this summer either, but not living at home in the same city is different. Now I live with two of the other Swiss Chalet girls, student workers like myself, in a corridor-shaped apartment on Harbord Street. The bathroom is festooned with stockings and underpants; hair rollers perch on the kitchen counter like bristly caterpillars, dishes cake in the sink.

  I see Josef twice a week, and know enough not to try calling him or seeing him at other times. Either he won't be there or he will be with Susie, because he hasn't stopped seeing her, not at all. But we are not to tell her about me; we are to keep it secret. "She would be so terribly hurt," he says. It's the last one in line who must bear the burden of knowing: if anyone is to be hurt it will have to be me. But I feel entrusted by him: we are in this together, this protecting of Susie. It's for her good. In this there is the satisfaction of all secrets: I know something she doesn't.

  She's found out somehow that I'm working at the Swiss Chalet--probably it's Josef who's told her, casually, skirting discovery, probably he finds it exciting to think of us together--and once in a while she comes in for a cup of coffee, late in the afternoon when there's nobody much around. She's gained a little weight, and the flesh of her cheeks is puffy. I can see what she'll look like in fifteen years, if she isn't careful.

  I am nicer to her than I ever have been. Also I'm a little wary of her. If she finds out, will she lose whatever grip on herself is left and go for me with a steak knife?

  She wants to talk. She wants us to get together sometime. She still says "Josef and me." She looks forlorn.

  Josef talks to me about Susie as if discussing a problem child. "She wants to get married," he says. He implies she is being unreasonable, but that to deny her this thing, this too-expensive toy, wounds him deeply just the same. I have no wish to put myself in the same category: irrational, petulant. I don't want to marry Josef, or anyone else. I have come to think of marriage as dishonorable, a crass trade-off rather than a free gift. And even the idea of marriage would diminish Josef, spoil him; this is not his place in the scheme of things. His place is to be a lover, with his secrecy a
nd his almost-empty rooms, and his baleful memories and bad dreams. Anyway, I've put myself beyond marriage. I can see it back there, innocent and beribboned, like a child's doll: irretrievable. Instead of marriage I will be dedicated to my painting. I will end up with my hair dyed, wearing outlandish clothes and heavy, foreign silver jewellery. I will travel a lot. Possibly I will drink.

  (There is of course the specter of pregnancy. You can't get a diaphragm unless you're married, rubbers are sold under the counter and only to men. There are those girls who went too far in back seats and got knocked up and dropped out of high school, or had strange, never-explained accidents. There are jocular terms for it: up the spout, bun in the oven. But such washroom notions have nothing to do with Josef and his experienced mauve bedroom. They also have nothing to do with me, wrapped as I am in dense minor-key enchantment. But I make little checkmarks on my pocket calendar, all the same.)

  On the days when I have time off, when I'm not seeing Josef, I try to paint. Sometimes I draw with colored pencils. What I draw is the furniture in the apartment: the overstuffed sofa from the Sally Ann strewn with shed clothing, the bulbous lamp lent by a roommate's mother, the kitchen stool. More often I don't have the energy, and end up reading murder mysteries in the bathtub.

  Josef won't tell me about the war, or about how he got out of Hungary during the revolution. He says these things are too disturbing for him and he wants only to forget them. He says there are many ways to die and some are less pleasant than others. He says I am lucky I will never have to know things like this. "This country has no heroes," he says. "You should keep it that way." He tells me I am untouched. This is the way he wants me, he says. When he says these things he runs his hands over my skin as if he's erasing me, rubbing me smooth.

  But he tells me his dreams. He's very interested in these dreams, and they are in fact like no dreams I can remember hearing about. There are red velvet curtains in them, red velvet sofas, red velvet rooms. There are white silk ropes in them, with tassels on the ends; there's a lot of attention to fabrics. There are decaying teacups.

  He dreams of a woman wrapped up in cellophane, even over her face, and of another walking along the railing of a balcony dressed in a white shroud, and of another lying facedown in the bathtub. When he tells me these dreams, he doesn't look at me exactly; it's as if he's looking at a point several inches inside my head. I don't know how to respond, so I smile weakly. I'm a little jealous of these women in his dreams: none of them are me. Josef sighs and pats my hand. "You are so young," he says.

  There is nothing that can be said in reply to this, although I don't feel young. Right now I feel ancient, and overworked and too warm. The constant odor of broasting chicken is taking away my appetite. It's late July, the Toronto humidity hangs like swamp gas over the city, and the air-conditioning at the Swiss Chalet broke down today. There were complaints. Someone upset a platter of quarters with buns and dipping sauce onto the kitchen floor, causing skids. The chef called me a stupid bitch.

  "I have no country," says Josef mournfully. He touches my cheek tenderly, gazing into my eyes. "You are my country now."

  I eat another tinned, inauthentic snail. It strikes me with no warning that I am miserable.

  54

  Cordelia has run away from home. This is not how she puts it.

  She's tracked me down through my mother. I meet her for coffee, during my afternoon break, not at the Swiss Chalet. I could get the coffee free, but by now I want to be out of there as much as possible, away from the sickly back-room odor of raw poultry, the rows of naked chickens like dead babies, the mushed-up, lukewarm, dog dish debris of customers' meals. So instead we are in Murray's, down the street in the Park Plaza Hotel. It's medium clean, and although there's no air-conditioning there are ceiling fans. At least here I don't know what goes on in the kitchen.

  Cordelia is thinner now, almost gaunt. The cheekbones of her long face are visible, her gray-green eyes are big in her face. Around each one of them is drawn a green line. She is tanned, her lips an understated orangey-pink. Her arms are angular, her neck elegant; her hair is pulled back like a ballerina's. She's wearing black stockings although it's summer, and sandals, although the sandals are not dainty women's summer sandals, but thick-soled and artistic, with primitive peasant buckles. Also a scoop-neck short-sleeved black jersey top that shows off her breasts, a full cotton skirt of a dull blue-green with abstract black swirls and squares on it, a wide black belt. She has on two heavy rings, one with a turquoise, and chunky square earrings, and a silver bracelet: Mexican silver. You would not say beautiful about her, but you would stare, as I am doing: for the first time in her life she looks distinguished.

  We greeted each other on sight with the outstretched hands, the demi-hugs, the cries of surprise and delight that women are supposed to make who haven't seen each other for a while. Now I slump in Murray's, drinking wishy-washy coffee, while Cordelia talks and I wonder why I have agreed to this. I am at a disadvantage: I'm in my crumpled, gravy-spotted Swiss Chalet uniform, my armpits are sweaty, my feet hurt, my hair in this humidity is unruly and dank and curling like singed wool. There are dark circles under my eyes, because last night was one of Josef's nights.

  Cordelia on the other hand is showing herself off to me. She wants me to see what has become of her, since her days of sloth and overeating and failure. She has reinvented herself. She's cool as a cucumber, and brimming with casual news.

  What she is doing is working at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival. She is a bit-part player. "Very minor things," she says, waving her bracelet and rings dismissively, which means less minor than she says. "You know. Spear carrying, though of course I don't carry spears." She laughs, and lights a cigarette. I wonder if Cordelia has ever eaten snails, decide she is most likely on familiar terms with them; a depressing thought.

  The Stratford Shakespearean Festival is quite famous by now. It was started several years ago in the town of Stratford, which has an Avon River running through it, and swans of both colors. I have read all this in magazines. People go there on the train, in buses, or in cars with picnic baskets; sometimes they stay all weekend and see three or four Shakespeare plays, one after the other. At first this festival was held in a big tent, like a circus. But now there is a real building, a strange, modern building, circular in shape. "So you have to project to three sides. It's such a strain on the voice," Cordelia says with a deprecating smile, as if she is projecting and straining her voice all in the line of work. She is like someone making herself up as she goes along. She's improvising.

  "What do your parents think?" I say. This has been on my own mind lately: what parents think.

  Her face closes down for a moment. "They're pleased I'm doing something," she says.

  "What about Perdie and Mirrie?"

  "You know Perdie," she says tightly. "Always the little put-downs. But that's enough about me. What do you think of me?" This is an old joke of hers, and I laugh. "Seriously, what are you up to these days?" It's the tone I remember: polite but not too interested. "Since the last time I saw you."

  I remember this last time with guilt. "Oh, nothing much," I say. "Going to school. You know." Right now it does look like nothing much. What have I really done all year? A smattering of art history, messing around with charcoal. There's nothing to show. There's Josef, but he's not exactly an accomplishment and I decide not to mention him.

  "School!" says Cordelia. "Was I glad to see the end of school. God, what boredom." Stratford is only on in the summers, though. She will have to think of something else for the winter. Maybe the Earle Grey Players, going around to high schools. Maybe she will be ready for that.

  She got the job at Stratford with the help of one of the Earle Grey cousins, who rememered her from her bedsheet days at Burnham. "People who know people," she says. She is one of Prospero's attendant spirits in The Tempest, and has to wear a body stocking, with a gauzy costume over top, sprinkled with dried leaves and spangles. "Obscene," she says. She'
s also a mariner in the first scene; she can get away with this because of her height. She's a court lady in Richard III, and she's the chief nun in Measure for Measure. In this one she actually speaks some lines. She recites for me, in a honey-colored Englishy voice:

  Then, if you speak, you must not show your face,

  Or, if you show your face, you must not speak.

  "At rehearsal I kept getting mixed up," she says. She counts on her fingers. "Speak, hide face, show face, shut up." She puts her hands together in an attitude of prayer, bows forward, lowering her head. Then she gets up and does a full court curtsy out of Richard III, with the women shoppers having tea in Murray's gawking at her. "What I'd like to do next year is the First Witch in 'The Tartans.' 'When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?' The Old Man says I might be ready for it. He thinks it would be brilliant to have a young First Witch."

  The Old Man, it turns out, is Tyrone Guthrie the director, from England and so famous I can't pretend not to have heard of him. "That's great," I say.

  "Remember 'The Tartans' at Burnham? Remember that cabbage?" she says. "I was so humiliated."

  I don't want to remember. The past has become discontinuous, like stones skipped across water, like postcards: I catch an image of myself, a dark blank, an image, a blank. Did I ever wear bat-wing sleeves and velveteen slippers, did I wear dresses like tinted marshmallows to formal dances, shuffle around the floor with some stranger's groin digging into mine? The dried corsages were thrown out long ago, the diplomas and class pins and photos must be down in my mother's cellar, in the steamer trunk along with the tarnishing silver. I glimpse those photos, rows and rows of lipsticked, spit-curled children. I would never smile, for those pictures. I would gaze stony-faced into the distance, beyond such adolescent diversions.

  I remember my mean mouth, I remember how wise I thought I was. But I was not wise then. Now I am wise.