Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

The two older women in Life Drawing notice my transformation as well. “So who died?” they ask me. Their names are Babs and Marjorie, and they are professionals. They both do portraits, Babs of children, Marjorie of dog owners and their dogs; they are doing Life Drawing as a refresher course, they say. They themselves do not wear black turtlenecks, but smocks, like pregnant women. They call each other

“kid” and make raucous comments about their work, and smoke in the washroom, as if it’s naughty. Because they are my mother’s age, it embarrasses me to be in the same room with them and the naked model both together. At the same time I find them undignified. They remind me less of my mother, however, than of Mrs. Finestein from next door.

Mrs. Finestein has taken to wearing fitted red suits and jaunty pillbox hats trimmed with matching cherries. She catches sight of me in my new getup and is disappointed. “She looks like an Italian widow,”

she tells my mother. “She’s letting herself go. Such a shame. With a good haircut and a little makeup, she could be stunning.” My mother reports this to me, smiling as if it’s funny, but I know it’s her way of expressing concern. I am verging on grubbiness. Letting yourself go is an alarming notion; it is said of older women who become frowzy and fat, and of things that are sold cheap. Of course there is something to it. I am letting myself go.

Chapter 50

I ‘m in a beer parlor, drinking ten-cent draft beer, with the other students from Life Drawing. The grumpy waiter comes, balancing a circular tray on one hand, and plonks down the glasses, which are like ordinary water glasses only full of beer. Froth slops over. I don’t like the taste of beer much, but by now I know how to drink it. I even know enough to sprinkle salt on the top, to cut down the foam. This beer parlor has a dingy red carpet and cheesy black tables and plastic-upholstered chairs and scant lighting, and reeks of car ashtray; the other beer parlors we drink in are similar. They are called things like Lundy’s Lane and The Maple Leaf Tavern, and they’re all dark, even in daytime, because they aren’t allowed to have windows you can see in through from the street. This is to avoid corrupting minors. I am a minor myself—the legal drinking age is twenty-one—but none of the waiters ever asks for my I.D. Jon says I look so young they think I’d never have the nerve to try it unless I was really overage. The beer parlors are divided into two sections. The Men Only sections are where the rowdy drunks and rubby-dubs hang out; they’re floored with sawdust, and the smell of spilled beer and old urine and sickness wafts out from them. Sometimes you can hear shouts and the crash of glass from within, and see a man being ejected by two wrestler-sized waiters, his nose bleeding, his arms flailing. The Ladies and Escorts sections are cleaner and quieter and more genteel, and smell better. If you’re a man you can’t go into them without a woman, and if you’re a woman you can’t go into the Men Onlys. This is supposed to keep prostitutes from bothering men, and to keep the male hard drinkers from bothering women. Colin, who is from England, tells us about pubs, where there are fireplaces and you can play darts and stroll around and even sing, but none of that is allowed in beer parlors. They are for drinking beer, period. If you laugh too much you can be asked to leave. The Life Drawing students prefer Ladies and Escorts, but they need a woman to get in. This is why they invite me: they even buy me free beers. I am their passport. Sometimes I’m the only one available after class, because Susie, the girl my age, frequently begs off, and Marjorie and Babs go home. They have husbands, and are not taken seriously. The boys call them “lady painters.”

“If they’re lady painters, what does that make me?” I say.

“A girl painter,” Jon says, joking.

Colin, who has manners of a sort, explains: “If you’re bad, you’re a lady painter. Otherwise you’re just a painter.” They don’t say “artist.” Any painter who would call himself an artist is an asshole, as far as they’re concerned.

I’ve given up on going out on dates in the old way: somehow it’s no longer a serious thing to do. Also I haven’t been asked that often since the advent of the black turtle-necks: boys of the blazer-and-white-shirt variety know what’s good for them. In any case they are boys, not men. Their pink cheeks and group sniggering, their good-girl and bad-girl categories, their avid, fumbling attempts to push back the frontiers of garter belt and brassiere no longer hold my attention. Mustaches of long standing do, and nicotine-stained fingers; experienced wrinkles, heavy eyelids, a world-weary tolerance; men who can blow cigarette smoke out through their mouths and breathe it in through their nostrils without a second thought. I’m not sure where this picture has come from. It seems to have arrived fully formed, out of nowhere.

The Life Drawing students aren’t like this, though they don’t wear blazers either. With their deliberately shoddy and paint-stained clothing, their newly sprouted facial hair, they are a transitional form. Although they talk, they distrust words; one of them, Reg from Saskatchewan, is so inarticulate he’s practically mute, and this wordlessness of his gives him a special status, as if the visual has eaten up part of his brain and left him an idiot saint. Colin the Englishman is distrusted because he talks not too much but too well. Real painters grunt, like Marlon Brando.

But they can make their feelings known. There are shrugs, mutterings, half-finished sentences, hand movements: jabs, fists, openings of the fingers, jerky sculptings of the air. Sometimes this sign language is about other people’s painting: “It sucks,” they say, or very occasionally, “Fan-fuckin‘-tastic.” They don’t approve of much. Also they think Toronto is a dump. “Nothing’s happening here,” is what they say, and many of their conversations revolve around their plans for escape. Paris is finished, and even Colin the Englishman doesn’t want to go back to England. “They all paint yellowy-green there,” he says.

“Yellowy-green, like goose turds. Bloody depressing.” Nothing but New York will do. That’s where everything is happening, that’s where the action is.

When they’ve had several beers they might talk about women. They refer to their girlfriends, some of whom live with them; these are called “my old lady.” Or they make jokes about the models in Life Drawing, who change from night to night. They speak of going to bed with them, as if this depends only on their inclination or lack of it. There are two possible attitudes to this: lip smacking or nauseated revulsion. “A cow,” they say. “A bag.” “What a discard.” Sometimes they do this with an eye toward me, looking to see how I will take it. When the descriptions of body parts get too detailed—“Cunt like an elephant’s arse,” “How would you know, eh, screw elephants much?”—they shush one another, as if in front of mothers; as if they haven’t decided who I am.

I don’t resent any of this. Instead I think I am privileged: I am an exception, to some rule I haven’t even identified.

I sit in the dankness and beer fug and cigarette smoke, getting a little dizzy, keeping my mouth shut, my eyes open. I think I can see them clearly because I expect nothing from them. In truth I expect a lot. I expect to be accepted.

There’s one thing they do that I don’t like: they make fun of Mr. Hrbik. His first name is Josef and they call him Uncle Joe, because he has a mustache and an Eastern European accent and is authoritarian in his opinions. This is unfair, since I know—all of us know by now—that he was shunted around in four different countries, because of the upheavals of the war, and got trapped behind the Iron Curtain and lived on garbage and almost starved, and escaped during the Hungarian Revolution, probably with danger to his life. He has never mentioned the exact circumstances. In fact he has mentioned none of this, in class. Nevertheless it is known.