Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

There’s a lot of neo-black in here, some of it leather, some shiny vinyl. I’ve come prepared this time, I have my black cotton turtleneck and my black trenchcoat with the button-on hood, but I’m not the right texture. Also not the right age: everyone in here is twelve. This place was Jon’s suggestion. Trust him to cling to the surfboard as it upends in the froth of the latest wave.

He always made a fetish of lateness, to indicate that his life was crammed with many things, all of them more important than I was, and today is no exception. Thirty minutes later than agreed he breezes in. This time however he apologizes. Has he learned something, or does his new wife run a tighter ship? Funny I still think of her as new.

“That’s all right, I programmed for it,” I say. “I’m glad you could come out to play.” A small preliminary kick at the wife.

“Having lunch with you hardly qualifies as play,” he says, grinning.

He’s still up to it. We look each other over. In four years he’s achieved more wrinkles, and the sideburns and mustache are graying further. “Don’t mention the bald spot,” he says.

“What bald spot?” I say, meaning I’ll overlook his physical degeneration if he’ll overlook mine. He’s up to that one, too.

“You’re looking better than ever,” he says. “Selling out must agree with you.”

“Oh, it does,” I say. “It’s so much better than licking bums and hacking up women’s bodies in screw-and-spew movies.” Once this would have drawn blood, but he must have accepted his lot in life by now. He shrugs, making the best of it; but he looks tired.

“Live long enough and the licker becomes the lickee,” he says. “Ever since the exploding eyeball I can do no wrong. Right now I’m head-to-toe saliva.”

The possibility for crude sexual innuendo is there, but I duck it. Instead I think, he’s right: we are the establishment now, such as it is. Or that’s what we must look like. Once the people I knew died of suicide and motorcycle crashes and other forms of violence. Now it’s diseases: heart attacks, cancer, the betrayals of the body. The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies-drive them on?

“How’s your real work going?” I say, relenting, letting him know I still take him seriously. This bothers him. “All right,” he says. “I haven’t been able to get to it much lately.”

We are silent, considering shortfalls. There’s not much time left, for us to become what we once intended. Jon had potential, but it’s not a word that can be used comfortably any more. Potential has a shelf life.

We talk about Sarah, easily and without competing, as if we are her aunt and uncle. We talk about my show.

“I guess you saw that hatchet job in the paper,” I say.

“Was that a hatchet job?” he says.

“It’s my fault. I was rude to the interviewer,” I say, with what I try to pass off as penitence. “I’m well on my way to becoming a cantankerous old witch.”

“I’d be disappointed in you if you weren’t,” he says. “Make ‘em sweat, it’s what they’re paid for.” We both laugh. He knows me. He knows what a shit I can be.

I look at him with the nostalgic affection men are said to feel for their wars, their fellow veterans. I think, I once threw things at this man. I threw a glass ashtray, a fairly cheap one which didn’t break. I threw a shoe (his) and a handbag (mine), not even snapping the handbag shut first, so that he was showered with a metal rain of keys and small change. The worst thing I threw was a small portable television set, standing on the bed and heaving it at him with the aid of the bouncy springs, although the instant I let fly I thought, Oh God, let him duck! I once thought I was capable of murdering him. Today I feel only a mild regret that we were not more civilized with each other at the time. Still, it was amazing, all those explosions, that recklessness, that Technicolor wreckage. Amazing and agonizing and almost lethal. Now that I’m more or less safe from him, and him from me, I can recall him with fondness and even in some detail, which is more than I can say for several others. Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings, then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines. What will be left of them when I’m seventy? None of the baroque ecstasy, none of the grotesque compulsion. A word or two, hovering in the inner emptiness. Maybe a toe here, a nostril there, or a mustache, floating like a little curl of seaweed among the other flotsam.

Across from me at the night-black table, Jon, though diminishing, still moves and breathes. There’s a sliver of pain, of longing in me: Don’t go yet! It’s not time! Don’t go! It would be stupid, as always, to reveal my own sentimentality, my weakness to him.

What we eat is vaguely Thai: chicken, spicy and succulent, a salad of exotic foliage, red leaves, tiny splinters of purple. Gaudy food. This is the kind of thing people eat now, people who eat in places like this: Toronto is no longer the land of chicken pot pie, beef stew, overboiled vegetables. I recall my first avocado, when I was twenty-two. It was like my father’s first symphony orchestra. Perversely I long for the desserts of my childhood, the desserts of war, simple and inexpensive and bland: tapioca pudding, with its gelatinous fish eyes, Jell-O caramel pudding, Junket. Junket was made with white tablets that came out of a tube, and served with a dollop of grape jelly on the top. Probably it’s vanished by now. Jon has ordered a bottle, no glass-by-glass for him. It’s a hint of the old bombast, the old peacock tail, and reassuring.

“How’s your wife?” I ask him.

“Oh,” he says, looking down, “Mary Jean and I have decided to try it apart for a while.”

This may explain the herbal tea: some younger, more vegetarian influence, in the studio, on the sly. “I suppose you’ve got some little number,” I say. “They say ”he goes’ instead of “he says,” have you noticed?“

“As a matter of fact,” he says, “Mary Jean was the one who left.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. And immediately I am, I’m indignant, how could she do that to him, the cold unfeeling bitch. I side with him, despite the fact that I did the same thing to him myself, years ago.

“I guess I’m partly to blame,” he says. This is not something he ever would have admitted before. “She said she couldn’t get through to me.”

I bet that isn’t all she said. He’s lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He’s come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he’s up-to-date?

Maybe men shouldn’t have been told about their own humanity. It’s only made them uncomfortable. It’s only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read.

“If you hadn’t been so crazy,” I say, “it could have worked out. With us, I mean.”

That perks him up. “Who was crazy?” he says, grinning again. “Who drove who to the hospital?”

“If it hadn’t been for you,” I say, “I wouldn’t have needed to be driven to the hospital.”

“That’s not fair and you know it,” he says.

“You’re right,” I say. “It’s not fair. I’m glad you drove me to the hospital.”

Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.

“I’ll walk you where you’re going,” he says when we’re out on the sidewalk. I would like that. We’re getting along so well, now there’s nothing at stake. I can see why I fell in love with him. But I don’t have the energy for it now.