Cat's Eye

by Margaret Atwood

  As for Jon, I know what he offers. He offers escape, running away from the grown-ups. He offers fun, and mess. He offers mischief.

  I consider telling him about Josef, to see what would happen. But the danger in this would be of a different order. He would laugh at me for sleeping with Josef, whom he considers ridiculous as well as old. He would not understand how I could take such a man seriously, he would not understand the compulsion. He would think less of me.

  Jon's apartment over the luggage store is long and narrow and smells of acrylic and used socks, and has only two rooms plus the bathroom. The bathroom is purple, with red footprints painted up the wall, across the ceiling and down the opposite wall. The front room is painted stark white, the other one--the bedroom--is glossy black. Jon says this is to get back at the landlord, who is a prick. "When I move out, it'll take him fifteen coats to cover that up," he says.

  Sometimes Jon lives in this apartment by himself; sometimes another person will be there, sometimes two, camping out on the floor in sleeping bags. These are other painters, on the lam from irate landlords or between odd jobs. When I ring the downstairs doorbell I never know who will open the door or what will be going on: the morning remains of an all-night party, a multiple argument, someone tossing their cookies in the toilet. "Tossing their cookies" is what Jon calls it. He thinks it's funny.

  Different women pass me on the stairs, going up or down; or they are found hovering around the far end of the white room, where there's an improvised kitchen consisting of a hot plate and an electric kettle. It's never clear who these women are paired with; occasionally they are other art students, dropping in to talk. They don't talk much to one another though. They talk to the men, or are silent.

  Jon's pictures hang in the white room or are stacked against the walls. They change almost weekly: Jon is productive. He paints very swiftly, in violent eye-burning acrylics, reds and pinks and purples, in frenzied loops and swirls. I feel I should admire these paintings, because I'm incapable of painting that way myself, and I do admire them, in monosyllables. But secretly I don't like them very much: I've seen things like this beside the highway, when something's been run over.

  However, the pictures are not supposed to be pictures of anything you would recognize. They are a moment of process, trapped on the canvas. They are pure painting.

  Jon is big on purity, but only in art: it doesn't apply to his housekeeping, which is an exuberant protest against all mothers and especially his own. He washes the dishes, when he washes them, in the bathtub, where scraps of crust and kernels of canned corn are to be seen caught in the drain. His living room floor is like a beach after the weekend. His bedsheets are a moment of process in themselves, but a moment that has gone on for some time. I prefer the top of his sleeping bag, which is less septic. The bathroom is like the bathrooms of service stations, on out-of-the-way roads, up north: a brown ring around the toilet bowl, which is likely to contain floating cigarette butts, handprints on the towels, if any, nondescript pieces of paper here and there on the floor.

  At the moment I make no moves toward cleanliness. To do so would be to overstep the bounds, and to display a bourgeois lack of cool. "What are you, my mom?" I've heard him say, to one of the hovering women who was making feeble attempts to corral some of the moldier clutter. I don't want to be his mom, but rather a fellow conspirator.

  Making love with Jon is not the leisurely, agonizing trance it is with Josef, but rambunctious, like puppies in mud. It's dirty, as in street fighting, as in jokes. Afterward we lie on top of his sleeping bag, eating potato chips out of the bag and giggling about nothing. Jon doesn't think women are helpless flowers, or shapes to be arranged and contemplated, as Josef does. He thinks they are smart or stupid. These are his categories. "Listen, pal," he says to me. "You've got more brains than most." This pleases me, but also dismisses me. I can take care of myself.

  Josef begins asking me where I've been, what I've been doing. I am casual and sly. I hold Jon against him like an ace: if he can be duplicitous, then so can I. But he does not talk about Susie any more.

  The last time I saw her was in late August, before I left the Swiss Chalet. She came in and had dinner by herself, a half chicken and some Burgundy Cherry ice cream. She'd been neglecting her hair, which was darker and straighter; her body had grown stubby, her face round. She ate in a mechanical way, as if eating was a chore, but she finished everything. It could be that she was eating for consolation, because of Josef: whatever else might happen, he would never marry her, and she must have known that. I assumed she was there to talk to me about him and I evaded her, brushing her away with a neutral smile. Her table wasn't one of mine.

  But before she left she walked right up to me. "Have you seen Josef?" she asked. Her voice was plaintive, which annoyed me.

  I lied, not well. "Josef?" I said, flushing. "No. Why would I?"

  "I just thought you might know where he is," she said. She wasn't reproachful, but hopeless. She walked out, slumping like a middle-aged woman. With such an ass end, I thought, no wonder Josef's keeping away. He didn't like scrawny women but there was a limit in the other direction too. Susie was letting herself go.

  Now, however, she calls me. It's late afternoon and I'm studying in the cellar when my mother summons me to the phone.

  Susie's voice on the line is a soft, desperate wail. "Elaine," she says. "Please come over."

  "What's the matter?" I say.

  "I can't tell you. Just come over."

  Sleeping pills, I think. That would be her style. And why me, why hasn't she phoned Josef? I feel like slapping her.

  "Are you all right?" I say.

  "No," she says, her voice rising. "I'm not all right. Something's gone wrong."

  It doesn't occur to me to call a taxi. Taxis are for Josef; I'm used to going everywhere on buses and streetcars, and the subway. It takes me nearly an hour to get over to The Monte Carlo. Susie didn't tell me her apartment number and I didn't think to ask, so I have to locate the superintendent. When I knock on the door, nobody answers, and I resort to the superintendent again.

  "I know she's in there," I say, when he's reluctant to unlock the door for me. "She called me. It's an emergency."

  When I finally get in, the apartment is dark; the drapes are drawn, the windows are closed, and there's an odd smell. Clothes are scattered here and there, jeans, winter boots, a black shawl I've seen Susie wearing. The furniture looks as if it's been picked out by her parents: a square-armed off-green sofa, a wheat-colored carpet, a coffee table, two lamps with the cellophane still on the shades. None of it goes with Susie as I've imagined her.

  On the carpet there's a dark footprint.

  Susie is behind the curtain that closes off the sleeping area. She's lying on the bed in her pink nylon shortie nightie, white as an uncooked chicken, eyes closed. The top covers of the bed and the pink tufted spread are on the floor. Underneath her, across the sheet, is a great splotch of fresh blood, spreading out like bright red wings to either side of her.

  Desolation sweeps through me: I feel, for no good reason, that I have been abandoned.

  Then I feel sick. I run into the bathroom and throw up. It's worse because the toilet bowl is dark red with blood. There are footprints of blood on the white and black tiled floor, fingerprints on the sink. The wastebasket is crammed with sopping sanitary pads.

  I wipe my mouth on Susie's baby-blue towel, wash my hands in the blood-spattered sink. I don't know what to do next; whatever this is, I don't want to be involved. I have the fleeting, absurd idea that if she's dead I will be accused of murder. I think of sneaking out of the apartment, closing the door behind me, covering my tracks.

  Instead I go back to the bed and feel Susie's pulse. I know that this is what you're supposed to do. Susie is still alive.

  I find the superintendent, who calls an ambulance. I also call Josef, who is not there.

  I ride to the hospital with Susie, in the back of the ambulance. She is now semiconscious,
and I hold her hand, which is cold and small. "Don't tell Josef," she whispers to me. The pink nightie brings it home to me: she is none of the things I've thought about her, she never has been. She's just a nice girl playing dress-ups.

  But what she's done has set her apart. It belongs to the submerged landscape of the things that are never said, which lies beneath ordinary speech like hills under water. Everyone my age knows about it. Nobody discusses it. Rumors are down there, kitchen tables, money exchanged in secret; evil old women, illegal doctors, disgrace and butchery. Down there is terror.

  The two attendants are casual, and scornful. They have seen this before.

  "What'd she use, a knitting needle?" one says. His tone is accusing: he may think I was helping her.

  "I have no idea," I say. "I hardly even know her." I don't want to be implicated.

  "That's what it usually is," he says. "Stupid kids. You'd think they'd have more sense."

  I agree with him that she's been stupid. At the same time I know that in her place I would have been just as stupid. I would have done what she has done, moment by moment, step by step. Like her I would have panicked, like her I would not have told Josef, like her I would not have known where to go. Everything that's happened to her could well have happened to me.

  But there is also another voice; a small, mean voice, ancient and smug, that comes from somewhere deep inside my head: It serves her right.

  *

  Josef, when he is finally located, is devastated. "The poor child, the poor child," he says. "Why didn't she tell me?"

  "She thought you'd get mad at her," I say coldly. "Like her parents. She thought you'd kick her out, for getting pregnant."

  Both of us know this is a possibility. "No, no," Josef says uncertainly. "I would have taken care of her." This could mean several things.

  He calls the hospital, but Susie refuses to see him. Something has changed in her, hardened. She tells him she might never be able to have babies. She doesn't love him. She doesn't want to see him ever again.

  Now Josef wallows. "What have I done to her?" he moans, tugging his hair.

  He becomes more melancholy than ever; he doesn't want to go out for dinner, he doesn't want to make love. He stays in his apartment, which is no longer neat and empty but is filling up with disorganized parts of his life: take-out Chinese food containers, unwashed sheets.

  He says he will never get over it, what he has done to Susie. This is how he thinks of it: something he's done, to Susie, to her inert and innocent flesh. At the same time he has been wounded by her: how can she treat him like this, cut him out of her life?

  He expects me to console him, for his own guilt and the damage that's been done to him. But I am not good at this. I am beginning to dislike him.

  "It was my child," he says.

  "Would you have married her?" I ask. The spectacle of his suffering does not make me compassionate, but ruthless.

  "You are cruel to me," says Josef. This was something he used to say before, in a sexual context, teasing. Now he means it. Now he is right.

  Without Susie, whatever has been keeping us in equilibrium is gone. The full weight of Josef rests on me, and he is too heavy for me. I can't make him happy, and I resent my failure: I am not enough for him, I am inadequate. I see him as weak now, clinging, gutted like a fish. I can't respect a man who can allow himself to be reduced to such rubble by women. I look at his doleful eyes and feel contempt.

  I make excuses, over the phone. I tell him I am very busy. One evening I stand him up. This is so deeply gratifying that I do it again. He tracks me down at the university, rumpled and unshaven and suddenly too old, and pleads with me as I walk between classes. I'm angered by this overlap of worlds.

  "Who was that?" say the girls in the cashmere twin sets.

  "Just someone I used to know," I say lightly.

  Josef waylays me outside the museum and announces I have driven him to despair: because of the way I've treated him, he is leaving Toronto forever. He does not fool me: he was planning to do this anyway. My mean mouth takes over.

  "Good," I say.

  He gives me a pained, reproachful stare, drawing himself up into the proud, theatrical, poker-up-the-bum stance of a matador.

  I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this act of walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.

  I do not dream about Josef. Instead I dream about Susie, in her black turtleneck and jeans but shorter than she really is, her hair cut into a pageboy. She's standing on a street I know but do not recognize, among piles of smoldering autumn leaves, holding a coiled skipping rope, licking one half of an orange Popsicle.

  She is not drained and boneless, as I've last seen her. Instead she is sly-eyed, calculating. "Don't you know what a twin set is?" she says spitefully.

  She continues to lick her Popsicle. I know I have done something wrong.

  58

  Time passes, and Susie fades. Josef does not reappear.

  This leaves me with Jon. I have the sense that, like one of a pair of bookends, he is incomplete by himself. But I feel virtuous, because I'm no longer hiding anything from him. This makes no difference to him, however, since he didn't know I was hiding anything in the first place. He doesn't know why I am less casual about what he does with the rest of his time.

  I decide I'm in love with him. Though I am too cagey to say it: he might object to the vocabulary, or think he's being pinned down.

  I still go over to his long white and black apartment, still end up on top of his sleeping bag, although haphazardly: Jon isn't big on planning in advance, or on remembering. Sometimes when I arrive at his downstairs door there's no answer. Or else his phone gets cut off because he hasn't paid the bill. We are a couple, in a way, though nothing is explicit between us. When he's with me he's with me: that's about as far as he'll go in his definition of what is not yet called our relationship.

  There are murky, smoky parties, with the lights turned out and candles flickering in bottles. The other painters are there, and assorted turtlenecked women, who have begun to appear in long, straight hair, parted in the middle. They sit in clumps, on the floor, in the dark, listening to folksongs about women being stabbed with daggers, and smoking marijuana cigarettes, which is what people do in New York. They refer to these as "dope" or "pot," and claim they loosen up your art.

  Cigarettes of any kind make me choke, so I don't smoke them. Some nights I wind up in the back hall with one or another of the painters, because I would rather not see what Jon may be getting up to with the straight-haired girls. Whatever it is, I wish he would do it in secret. But he doesn't feel the need to hide anything: sexual possessiveness is bourgeois, and just a hangover from notions about the sanctity of private property. Nobody owns anybody.

  He doesn't say all this. All he says is, "Hey, you don't own me."

  Sometimes the other painters are merely stoned, or drunk, but sometimes they want to tell me their problems. They do this fumblingly, in starts and stops, in short words. Their problems are mostly about their girlfriends. Soon they will be bringing me their socks to darn, their buttons to sew on. They make me feel like an aunt. This is what I do instead of jealousy, in which there is no future. Or so I think.

  Jon has given up on his paintings of swirls and innards. He says they are too romantic, too emotional, too sloppy, too sentimental. Now he's doing pictures in which all the shapes are either straight lines or perfect circles. He uses masking tape to get the lines straight. He works in blocks of flat color, no impasto showing.

  He calls these paintings things like Enigma: Blue and Red, or Variation: Black and White, or Opus 36. They make your eyes hurt when you look at them. Jon says this is the point.

  *

  In the daytime I go to school.

  Art and Archaeology is murkier and more velvety than last year, and filled with impasto and chiaroscuro. There are still Madonnas, but their bodies have lost their previous quality of suffused light
and are more likely to be seen at night. There are still saints, though they no longer sit in quiet rooms or deserts, with their memento mori skulls and their doglike lions resting at their feet; instead they writhe in contorted poses, stuck full of arrows or tied to stakes. Biblical subjects tilt toward violence: Judith cutting off the head of Holofernes is now popular. There are a lot more classical gods and goddesses. There are wars, fights and slaughters, as before, but more confused and with intertwined arms and legs. There are still portraits of rich people, although in darker clothing.

  As we run through the centuries, new things appear: ships by themselves, animals by themselves, such as dogs and horses. Peasants by themselves. Landscapes, with or without houses. Flowers by themselves, plates of fruit and cuts of meat, with or without lobsters. Lobsters are a favorite, because of the color.

  Naked women.

  There is considerable overlap: a naked goddess wreathed in flowers, with a couple of dogs standing by; biblical people with or without clothes, plus or minus animals, trees, and ships. Rich people pretending to be gods and goddesses. Fruit and slaughters are not usually combined, nor are gods and peasants. The naked women are presented in the same manner as the plates of meat and dead lobsters, with the same attention to the play of candlelight on skin, the same lusciousness, the same sensuous and richly rendered detail, the same painterly delight in tactility. (Richly rendered, I write. Painterly delight in tactility.) They appear served up.

  I don't like these shadowy, viscous pictures. I prefer the earlier ones, with their daytime clarity, their calm arrested gestures. I have given up, too, on oil paints; I have come to dislike their thickness, their obliteration of line, their look of licked lips, the way they call attention to the brushstrokes of the painter. I can make nothing of them. What I want instead is pictures that seem to exist of their own accord. I want objects that breathe out light; a luminous flatness.