Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

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 deserves 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.

Chapter 57

I n 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.

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.