Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

However, the pictures are not supposed to be pictures of anything you would recognize. They are a moment of process, trapped on the canvas. They are pure painting.

Jon is big on purity, but only in art: it doesn’t apply to his housekeeping, which is an exuberant protest against all mothers and especially his own. He washes the dishes, when he washes them, in the bathtub, where scraps of crust and kernels of canned corn are to be seen caught in the drain. His living room floor is like a beach after the weekend. His bedsheets are a moment of process in themselves, but a moment that has gone on for some time. I prefer the top of his sleeping bag, which is less septic. The bathroom is like the bathrooms of service stations, on out-of-the-way roads, up north: a brown ring around the toilet bowl, which is likely to contain floating cigarette butts, handprints on the towels, if any, nondescript pieces of paper here and there on the floor.

At the moment I make no moves toward cleanliness. To do so would be to overstep the bounds, and to display a bourgeois lack of cool. “What are you, my mom?” I’ve heard him say, to one of the hovering women who was making feeble attempts to corral some of the moldier clutter. I don’t want to be his mom, but rather a fellow conspirator.

Making love with Jon is not the leisurely, agonizing trance it is with Josef, but rambunctious, like puppies in mud. It’s dirty, as in street fighting, as in jokes. Afterward we lie on top of his sleeping bag, eating potato chips out of the bag and giggling about nothing. Jon doesn’t think women are helpless flowers, or shapes to be arranged and contemplated, as Josef does. He thinks they are smart or stupid. These are his categories. “Listen, pal,” he says to me. “You’ve got more brains than most.” This pleases me, but also dismisses me. I can take care of myself.

Josef begins asking me where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing. I am casual and sly. I hold Jon against him like an ace: if he can be duplicitous, then so can I. But he does not talk about Susie any more. The last time I saw her was in late August, before I left the Swiss Chalet. She came in and had dinner by herself, a half chicken and some Burgundy Cherry ice cream. She’d been neglecting her hair, which was darker and straighter; her body had grown stubby, her face round. She ate in a mechanical way, as if eating was a chore, but she finished everything. It could be that she was eating for consolation, because of Josef: whatever else might happen, he would never marry her, and she must have known that. I assumed she was there to talk to me about him and I evaded her, brushing her away with a neutral smile. Her table wasn’t one of mine.

But before she left she walked right up to me. “Have you seen Josef?” she asked. Her voice was plaintive, which annoyed me.

I lied, not well. “Josef?” I said, flushing. “No. Why would I?”

“I just thought you might know where he is,” she said. She wasn’t reproachful, but hopeless. She walked out, slumping like a middle-aged woman. With such an ass end, I thought, no wonder Josef’s keeping away. He didn’t like scrawny women but there was a limit in the other direction too. Susie was letting herself go.

Now, however, she calls me. It’s late afternoon and I’m studying in the cellar when my mother summons me to the phone.

Susie’s voice on the line is a soft, desperate wail. “Elaine,” she says. “Please come over.”

“What’s the matter?” I say.

“I can’t tell you. Just come over.”

Sleeping pills, I think. That would be her style. And why me, why hasn’t she phoned Josef? I feel like slapping her.

“Are you all right?” I say.

“No,” she says, her voice rising. “I’m not all right. Something’s gone wrong.”

It doesn’t occur to me to call a taxi. Taxis are for Josef; I’m used to going everywhere on buses and streetcars, and the subway. It takes me nearly an hour to get over to The Monte Carlo. Susie didn’t tell me her apartment number and I didn’t think to ask, so I have to locate the superintendent. When I knock on the door, nobody answers, and I resort to the superintendent again.

“I know she’s in there,” I say, when he’s reluctant to unlock the door for me. “She called me. It’s an emergency.”

When I finally get in, the apartment is dark; the drapes are drawn, the windows are closed, and there’s an odd smell. Clothes are scattered here and there, jeans, winter boots, a black shawl I’ve seen Susie wearing. The furniture looks as if it’s been picked out by her parents: a square-armed off-green sofa, a wheat-colored carpet, a coffee table, two lamps with the cellophane still on the shades. None of it goes with Susie as I’ve imagined her.

On the carpet there’s a dark footprint.

Susie is behind the curtain that closes off the sleeping area. She’s lying on the bed in her pink nylon shortie nightie, white as an uncooked chicken, eyes closed. The top covers of the bed and the pink tufted spread are on the floor. Underneath her, across the sheet, is a great splotch of fresh blood, spreading out like bright red wings to either side of her.

Desolation sweeps through me: I feel, for no good reason, that I have been abandoned. Then I feel sick. I run into the bathroom and throw up. It’s worse because the toilet bowl is dark red with blood. There are footprints of blood on the white and black tiled floor, fingerprints on the sink. The wastebasket is crammed with sopping sanitary pads.

I wipe my mouth on Susie’s baby-blue towel, wash my hands in the blood-spattered sink. I don’t know what to do next; whatever this is, I don’t want to be involved. I have the fleeting, absurd idea that if she’s dead I will be accused of murder. I think of sneaking out of the apartment, closing the door behind me, covering my tracks.

Instead I go back to the bed and feel Susie’s pulse. I know that this is what you’re supposed to do. Susie is still alive.

I find the superintendent, who calls an ambulance. I also call Josef, who is not there. I ride to the hospital with Susie, in the back of the ambulance. She is now semiconscious, and I hold her hand, which is cold and small. “Don’t tell Josef,” she whispers to me. The pink nightie brings it home to me: she is none of the things I’ve thought about her, she never has been. She’s just a nice girl playing dress-ups.

But what she’s done has set her apart. It belongs to the submerged landscape of the things that are never said, which lies beneath ordinary speech like hills under water. Everyone my age knows about it. Nobody discusses it. Rumors are down there, kitchen tables, money exchanged in secret; evil old women, illegal doctors, disgrace and butchery. Down there is terror.

The two attendants are casual, and scornful. They have seen this before.

“What’d she use, a knitting needle?” one says. His tone is accusing: he may think I was helping her.

“I have no idea,” I say. “I hardly even know her.” I don’t want to be implicated.

“That’s what it usually is,” he says. “Stupid kids. You’d think they’d have more sense.”

I agree with him that she’s been stupid. At the same time I know that in her place I would have been just as stupid. I would have done what she has done, moment by moment, step by step. Like her I would have panicked, like her I would not have told Josef, like her I would not have known where to go. Everything that’s happened to her could well have happened to me.

But there is also another voice; a small, mean voice, ancient and smug, that comes from somewhere deep inside my head: It serves her right.

Josef, when he is finally located, is devastated. “The poor child, the poor child,” he says. “Why didn’t she tell me?”