Cat's Eye

by Margaret Atwood

  "Remember how we used to pinch things?" says Cordelia. "That was the only thing I really liked about that whole time."

  "Why?" I say. I had not liked it much. I was always afraid of getting caught.

  "It was something I could have," she says, and I'm not sure what she means.

  Cordelia takes her sunglasses out of her shoulder bag and puts them on. There I am in her mirror eyes, in duplicate and monochrome, and a great deal smaller than life-sized.

  *

  Cordelia gets me a free ticket to Stratford, so I can see her in action. I go on the bus. It's a matinee: I can get there, see the show, then take the bus back in time for my evening shift at the Swiss Chalet. The play is The Tempest. I watch for Cordelia, and when Prospero's attendants come on, with music and jittery lighting effects, I peer hard, trying to see which one she is, behind the disguise of costume. But I can't tell.

  55

  Josef is rearranging me. "You should wear your hair loose," he says, unpinning it from its ramshackle bun, running his hands throught it to make it fluff out. "You look like a marvelous gypsy." He presses his mouth to my collarbone, untucks the bedsheet he's draped me in.

  I stand still and let him do this. I let him do what he likes. It's August and too hot to move. Haze hangs over the city like wet smoke; it covers my skin with an oily film, seeps into my flesh. I move through the days like a zombie, going from one hour to the next without direction. I've stopped drawing the furniture at the apartment; I fill the bathtub with cool water and get into it, but I no longer read in there. Soon it will be time to go back to school. I can hardly think about it.

  "You should wear purple dresses," says Josef. "It would be an improvement." He places me against the twilight of the window, turns me, stands back a little, running his hand up and down my side. I no longer care whether anyone can see in. I feel my knees begin to give, my mouth loosen. In our time together he does not pace or tug his hair; he moves slowly, gently, with great deliberation.

  Josef takes me to the Park Plaza Hotel Roof Garden, in my new purple dress. It has a tight bodice, a low neck, a full skirt; it brushes against my bare legs as I walk. My hair is loose, and damp. I think it looks like a mop. But I catch a glimpse of myself, without expecting it, in the smoked-mirror wall of the elevator as we go up, and I see for an instant what Josef sees: a slim woman with cloudy hair, pensive eyes in a thin white face. I recognize the style: late nineteenth century. Pre-Raphaelite. I should be holding a poppy.

  We sit on the outside patio, drinking Manhattans and looking over the stone balustrade. Josef has recently discovered a taste for Manhattans. This is one of the tallest buildings around. Below us Toronto festers in the evening heat, the trees spreading like worn moss, the lake zinc in the distance.

  Josef tells me he once shot a man in the head; what disturbed him was how easy it was to do it. He says he hates the Life Drawing class, he will not go on with it forever, cooped up in this provincial deadwater teaching the rudiments to morons. "I come from a country that no longer exists," he says, "and you come from a country that does not yet exist." Once I would have found this profound. Now I wonder what he means.

  As for Toronto, he says, it has no gaiety or soul. In any case, painting itself is a hangover from the European past. "It is no longer important," he says, waving it away with one hand. He wants to be in films, he wants to direct, in the United States. He will go there as soon as it can be arranged. He has good connections. There's a whole network of Hungarians, for instance. Hungarians, Poles, Czechoslovakians. There is more opportunity in films down there, to say the least, since the only films made in this country are short ones that come on before real movies, about leaves spiraling downward into pools or flowers opening in time-lapse photography, to flute music. The other people he knows are doing well in the United States. They will get him in.

  I hold Josef's hand. His lovemaking these days is ruminative, as if he is thinking of something else. I discover I am somewhat drunk; also that I am afraid of heights. I have never been this high up in the air before. I think of standing close to the stone balustrade, toppling slowly over. From here you can see the United States, a thin fuzz on the horizon. Josef says nothing about me going there with him. I ask nothing.

  Instead he says, "You are very silent." He touches my cheek. "Mysterious." I do not feel mysterious, but vacant.

  "Would you do anything for me?" he says, gazing into my eyes. I sway toward him, far away from the earth. Yes would be so easy.

  "No," I say. This is a surprise to me. I don't know where it has come from, this unexpected and stubborn truthfulness. It sounds rude.

  "I did not think so," he says sadly.

  Jon appears one afternoon in the Swiss Chalet. I don't recognize him at first because I don't look at him. I'm wiping off the table with a dishrag, every movement an effort, my arm heavy with lethargy. Last night I was with Josef, but tonight I won't be because it's not my night, it's Susie's night.

  These days Josef rarely mentions Susie. When he does, it's with nostalgia, as if she's already a thing of the past, or beautifully dead, like someone in a poem. But this may be only his way of speaking. They may spend prosaic domestic evenings together, him reading the paper while she serves up a casserole. Despite his claim that I am a secret, they may discuss me the way Josef and I used to discuss Susie. This is not a comfortable thought.

  I prefer to think of Susie as a woman shut inside a tower, up there in The Monte Carlo on Avenue Road, gazing out the window over the top of her painted sheet metal balcony, weeping feebly, waiting for Josef to appear. I can't imagine her having any other life apart from that. I can't see her washing out her underpants, for instance, and wringing them in a towel, hanging them on the bathroom towel rack, as I do. I can't imagine her eating. She is limp, without will, made spineless by love; as I am.

  "Long time no see," says Jon. He leaps into focus beyond my wiping arm, grinning at me, his teeth white in a face more tanned than I remember. He's leaning on the table I'm wiping, wearing a gray T-shirt, old jeans cut off above the knees, running shoes with no socks. He looks healthier than he did in the winter. I've never seen him in the daytime before.

  I'm conscious of my stained uniform: do I smell of underarm sweat, of chicken fat? "How did you get in here?" I say.

  "Walked," he says. "How about a coffee?"

  He has a summer job, with the Works Department, filling in potholes in the roads, tarring over the cracks made by frost heave; he does have a faint tarry smell about him. He's not what you would call clean. "How about a beer, later?" he says. This is a thing he's said often before: he wants a passport to the Ladies and Escorts, as usual. I'm not doing anything, so I say, "Why not? But I'll have to change."

  After work I take the precaution of a shower and put on my purple dress. I meet him at the Maple Leaf and we go into the Ladies and Escorts. We sit there in the gloom, which is at least cool, and drink draft beer. It's awkward with just him: before there was always a group of them. Jon asks me what I've been up to and I say nothing much. He asks me if I've seen Uncle Joe around anywhere, and I say no.

  "Probably he's disappeared into Susie's knickers," he says. "The lucky shit." He's still treating me like an honorary boy, still saying crude things about women. I'm surprised at the word knickers. He must have picked it up from Colin the Englishman. I wonder if he knows about me as well, whether he's making remarks about my knickers behind my back. But how could he?

  He says the Works Department is good money, but he doesn't let on to the other guys that he's a painter, especially not to the old regulars. "They might think I'm a fruit or something," he says.

  I drink more draft beer than I should, and then the lights flicker on and off and it's closing time. We walk out onto the hot night summer street, and I don't want to go home by myself.

  "Can you get back all right?" says Jon. I say nothing. "Come on, I'll walk you," he says. He puts his hand on my shoulder and I smell his smell of tar and outdoors dust and sunn
y skin, and I begin to cry. I stand in the street, with the drunks staggering out of the Men Only, my hands pressed to my mouth, crying and feeling stupid.

  Jon is startled. "Hey, pal," he says, patting me awkwardly. "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing," I say. Being called pal makes me cry even more. I feel like a wet sock; I feel ugly. I hope he will think I've had too much to drink.

  He puts an arm around me, gives a squeeze. "Come on," he says. "We'll go for coffee."

  I stop crying as we walk along the street. We walk to a door beside a wholesale suitcase store, he takes out a key, and we go up the stairs in the dark. Inside the upstairs door he kisses me, with his tarry, beery mouth. There are no lights on. I put my arms around his waist and hold on as if I'm sinking into mud, and he lifts me like that and carries me through the dark room, bumping into the walls and furniture, and we fall together onto the floor.

  PART

  ELEVEN

  FALLING

  WOMEN

  56

  I continue east along Queen Street, still a little dizzy from the wine at lunch. Tipsy was once the word. Alcohol's a depressant, it will let me down later, but right now I'm jaunty, I hum to myself, mouth slightly open.

  Right here there's a group of statues, coppery-green, with black smears running down them like metal blood: a seated woman, holding a scepter, with three young soldiers marching forward grouped around her, their legs wound with bandagelike puttees, defending the Empire, their faces earnest, doomed, frozen into time. Above them on a stone tablet stands another woman, this time with angel wings: Victory or Death, or maybe both. This monument is in honor of the South African War, ninety years ago, more or less. I wonder if anyone remembers that war, or if anyone in all these cars barging forward ever even looks.

  I head north on University Avenue, past the sterility of hospitals, along the old route of the Santa Claus Parade. The Zoology Building has been torn down, it must have been years ago. The window ledge where I once watched the soggy fairies and chilblained snowflakes, breathing in the smell of snakes and antiseptic and mice, is now empty air. Who else remembers where it used to be?

  There are fountains up and down this roadway now, and squared-off beds of flowers, and new, peculiar statues. I follow the curve around the Parliament Building with its form of a squatting Victorian dowager, darkish pink, skirts huffed out, stolid. The flag I could never draw, demoted to the flag of a province, flies before it, bright scarlet, with the Union Jack in the top corner and all those impossible beavers and leaves encrested lower down. The new national flag flutters there as well, two red bands and a red maple leaf rampant on white, looking like a trademark for margarine of the cheaper variety, or an owl kill in snow. I still think of this flag as new, although they changed it long ago.

  I cross the street, cut in behind a small church, left stranded here when they redeveloped. Sunday's sermon is announced on a billboard identical to the kind for supermarket specials: Believing Is Seeing. A vertical wave of plate glass breaks against it. Behind the polished facades, bouquets of teased cloth, buffed leather, cunning silver trinkets. Pasta to die for. Theology has changed, over the years: just deserts used to be what everyone could expect to get, in the end. Now it's a restaurant specializing in cakes. All they had to do was abolish guilt, and add an S.

  I turn a corner, onto a side street, a double row of expensive boutiques: hand knits and French maternity outfits and ribbon-covered soaps, imported tobaccos, opulent restaurants where the wineglasses are thin-stemmed and they sell you location and overhead. The designer jeans emporium, the Venetian paper knickknack shop, the stocking boutique with its kicking neon leg.

  These houses used to be semihovels; Josef's old territory, where beer-saturated fat men sat on the front porches, sweating in the August heat, while their children screamed and their dogs lay panting with frayed ropes tethering them to the fence, and paint peeled from their woodwork and the dispirited cat pee marigolds wilted along their cracked walkways. A few thousand dollars in the right place then and you'd be a millionaire today, but who could have guessed? Not me, going up the narrow stairs to Josef's second floor, with my breath quickening and his hand weighing on the small of my back, in the dying light of summer evenings: slow-paced, forbidden, sadly delicious.

  I know more things about Josef now than I did then. I know them because I'm older. I know about his melancholy, his ambition, his desperation, the corners of emptiness in him that needed to be filled. I know the dangers.

  What for instance was he doing with two women fifteen years younger than himself? If one of my daughters fell in love with such a man, I'd be frantic. It would be like the time Sarah and her best friend came rushing home from school, to tell me they'd seen their first flasher in the park. "Mummy, Mummy, a man had his pants down!"

  To me it meant fear, and a ferocious anger. Touch them and I'll kill you. But to them it was merely noteworthy, and hilarious.

  Or the first time I saw my own kitchen, after I had Sarah. I brought her home from the hospital and thought: All those knives. All those sharp things and hot things. All I could see was what might hurt her.

  Maybe one of my daughters has a man like Josef, or a man like Jon, hidden away in her life, in secret. Who knows what grubby or elderly boys they are bending to their own uses, or to counterpoint me? All the while protecting me from themselves, because they know I would be horrified.

  I see words on the front pages of newspapers that never used to be said out loud, much less printed--sexual intercourse, abortion, incest--and I want to hide their eyes, even though they are grown-up, or what passes for it. Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked; as I never was when I was not one.

  I should get a little present for each of them, as I always did when they were younger and I went away. Once I knew by instinct what they would like. I don't any more. It's hard for me to remember exactly what age they've reached. I used to resent it when my mother would forget I was an adult, but I'm approaching the maundering phase myself, digging out the yellowing baby pictures, mooning over locks of hair.

  I'm squinting into a window at some Italian silk scarves, wonderful indeterminate colors, gray-blue, sea-green, when I feel a touch on my arm, a chilly jump of the heart.

  "Cordelia," I say, turning.

  But it's not Cordelia. It's nobody I know. It's a woman, a girl really, Middle Eastern of some kind: a long full skirt to above the ankles, printed cotton, Canadian gum-soled boots incongruous beneath; a short jacket buttoned up, a kerchief folded straight across the forehead with a pleat at either side, like a wimple. The hand that touches me is lumpy in its northern mitten, the skin of the wrist between mitten and jacket cuff brownish, like coffee with double cream. The eyes are large, as in painted waifs.

  "Please," she says. "They are killing many people." She doesn't say where. It could be a lot of places, or in between places; homelessness is a nationality now. Somehow the war never ended after all, it just broke up into pieces and got scattered, it gets in everywhere, you can't shut it out. Killing is endless now, it's an industry, there's money in it, and the good side and the bad side are pretty hard to tell apart.

  "Yes," I say. This is the war that killed Stephen.

  "Some are here. They have no, they have nothing. They would be killed ..."

  "Yes," I say. "I see." This is what I get for walking. In a car you're more insulated. And how do I know she is what she purports to be? She could be a dope addict. In the soft touch market, scams abound.

  "I have with me a family of four. Two children. They are with me, it is my, it is my own responsibility." She stumbles a little on responsibility, but she gets it out. She's shy, she doesn't like what she's doing, this grabbing people on the street.

  "Yes?"

  "I am doing it." We look at each other. She is doing it. "Twenty-five dollars can feed a family of four for a month."

  What can they be eating? Stale bread, cast-off doughnuts? Does she mean a week? If she can believe this, she de
serves my money. I take off my glove, raid my purse, rustle bills, pink ones, blue ones, purple. It's obscene to have such power; also to feel so powerless. Probably she hates me.

  "Here," I say.

  She nods. She's not grateful, merely confirmed, in her opinion of me, or of herself. She takes off her bulky-knit mitten to receive the cash. I look at our hands, her smooth one, the nails pale moons, mine with its tattered cuticles, its skin of incipient toad. She tucks the bills in between the buttons of her jacket. She must have a purse in there, out of the reach of snatching. Then she slips on the mitt, dark red with a pink wool embroidered leaf.

  "God will bless you," she says. She doesn't say Allah. Allah I might believe.

  I walk away from her, pulling on my glove. Every day there's more of it, more of that silent wailing, those starving outstretched hands, need need, help help, there's no end.

  57

  In September I leave the Swiss Chalet and return to school. I also return to the cellar of my parents' house, because I can't afford not to. Both of these locations are hazardous: my life is now multiple, and I am in fragments. But I'm no longer lethargic. On the contrary I am alert, I crackle with adrenaline, despite the late-summer heat. It's treachery that does this for me, keeping on top of my own deceptions: I need to hide Josef from my parents, and Jon from all of them. I sneak around, heart in my mouth, dreading revelations; I avoid late nights, I evade and tiptoe. Strangely enough, this does not make me feel more insecure, but safer.

  Two men are better than one, or at least they make me feel better. I am in love with both, I tell myself, and having two means that I don't have to make up my mind about either of them.

  Josef offers me what he has always offered, plus fear. He tells me, casually, in the same way he told me about shooting a man in the head, that in most countries except this one a woman belongs to a man: if a man finds his woman with another man, he kills both of them and everyone excuses him. He says nothing about what a woman does, in the case of another woman. He tells me this while running his hand up my arm, over my shoulder, lightly across the neck, and I wonder what he suspects. He has taken to demanding speech from me; or else he puts his hand over my mouth. I close my eyes and feel him as a source of power, nebulous and shifting. I suspect there would be something silly about him, if I could see him objectively. But I can't.