Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

“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 outsize 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 lovemaking 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,

“breasted,” 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 and 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.