Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

“She thought you’d get mad at her,” I say coldly. “Like her parents. She thought you’d kick her out, for getting pregnant.”

Both of us know this is a possibility. “No, no,” Josef says uncertainly. “I would have taken care of her.”

This could mean several things.

He calls the hospital, but Susie refuses to see him. Something has changed in her, hardened. She tells him she might never be able to have babies. She doesn’t love him. She doesn’t want to see him ever again. Now Josef wallows. “What have I done to her?” he moans, tugging his hair. He becomes more melancholy than ever; he doesn’t want to go out for dinner, he doesn’t want to make love. He stays in his apartment, which is no longer neat and empty but is filling up with disorganized parts of his life: take-out Chinese food containers, unwashed sheets.

He says he will never get over it, what he has done to Susie. This is how he thinks of it: something he’s done, to Susie, to her inert and innocent flesh. At the same time he has been wounded by her: how can she treat him like this, cut him out of her life?

He expects me to console him, for his own guilt and the damage that’s been done to him. But I am not good at this. I am beginning to dislike him.

“It was my child,” he says.

“Would you have married her?” I ask. The spectacle of his suffering does not make me compassionate, but ruthless.

“You are cruel to me,” says Josef. This was something he used to say before, in a sexual context, teasing. Now he means it. Now he is right.

Without Susie, whatever has been keeping us in equilibrium is gone. The full weight of Josef rests on me, and he is too heavy for me. I can’t make him happy, and I resent my failure: I am not enough for him, I am inadequate. I see him as weak now, clinging, gutted like a fish. I can’t respect a man who can allow himself to be reduced to such rubble by women. I look at his doleful eyes and feel contempt. I make excuses, over the phone. I tell him I am very busy. One evening I stand him up. This is so deeply gratifying that I do it again. He tracks me down at the university, rumpled and unshaven and suddenly too old, and pleads with me as I walk between classes. I’m angered by this overlap of worlds.

“Who was that?” say the girls in the cashmere twin sets.

“Just someone I used to know,” I say lightly.

Josef waylays me outside the museum and announces I have driven him to despair: because of the way I’ve treated him, he is leaving Toronto forever. He does not fool me: he was planning to do this anyway. My mean mouth takes over.

“Good,” I say.

He gives me a pained, reproachful stare, drawing himself up into the proud, theatrical, poker-up-the-bum stance of a matador.

I walk away from him. It’s enormously pleasing to me, this act of walking away. It’s like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.

I do not dream about Josef. Instead I dream about Susie, in her black turtleneck and jeans but shorter than she really is, her hair cut into a pageboy. She’s standing on a street I know but do not recognize, among piles of smoldering autumn leaves, holding a coiled skipping rope, licking one half of an orange Popsicle.

She is not drained and boneless, as I’ve last seen her. Instead she is sly-eyed, calculating. “Don’t you know what a twin set is?” she says spitefully.

She continues to lick her Popsicle. I know I have done something wrong.

Chapter 58

T ime passes, and Susie fades. Josef does not reappear.

This leaves me with Jon. I have the sense that, like one of a pair of bookends, he is incomplete by himself. But I feel virtuous, because I’m no longer hiding anything from him. This makes no difference to him, however, since he didn’t know I was hiding anything in the first place. He doesn’t know why I am less casual about what he does with the rest of his time.

I decide I’m in love with him. Though I am too cagey to say it: he might object to the vocabulary, or think he’s being pinned down.

I still go over to his long white and black apartment, still end up on top of his sleeping bag, although haphazardly: Jon isn’t big on planning in advance, or on remembering. Sometimes when I arrive at his downstairs door there’s no answer. Or else his phone gets cut off because he hasn’t paid the bill. We are a couple, in a way, though nothing is explicit between us. When he’s with me he’s with me: that’s about as far as he’ll go in his definition of what is not yet called our relationship. There are murky, smoky parties, with the lights turned out and candles flickering in bottles. The other painters are there, and assorted turtlenecked women, who have begun to appear in long, straight hair, parted in the middle. They sit in clumps, on the floor, in the dark, listening to folksongs about women being stabbed with daggers, and smoking marijuana cigarettes, which is what people do in New York. They refer to these as “dope” or “pot,” and claim they loosen up your art. Cigarettes of any kind make me choke, so I don’t smoke them. Some nights I wind up in the back hall with one or another of the painters, because I would rather not see what Jon may be getting up to with the straight-haired girls. Whatever it is, I wish he would do it in secret. But he doesn’t feel the need to hide anything: sexual possessiveness is bourgeois, and just a hangover from notions about the sanctity of private property. Nobody owns anybody.

He doesn’t say all this. All he says is, “Hey, you don’t own me.”

Sometimes the other painters are merely stoned, or drunk, but sometimes they want to tell me their problems. They do this fumblingly, in starts and stops, in short words. Their problems are mostly about their girlfriends. Soon they will be bringing me their socks to darn, their buttons to sew on. They make me feel like an aunt. This is what I do instead of jealousy, in which there is no future. Or so I think. Jon has given up on his paintings of swirls and innards. He says they are too romantic, too emotional, too sloppy, too sentimental. Now he’s doing pictures in which all the shapes are either straight lines or perfect circles. He uses masking tape to get the lines straight. He works in blocks of flat color, no impasto showing.

He calls these paintings things like Enigma: Blue and Red, or Variation: Black and White, or Opus 36. They make your eyes hurt when you look at them. Jon says this is the point. In the daytime I go to school.

Art and Archaeology is murkier and more velvety than last year, and filled with impasto and chiaroscuro. There are still Madonnas, but their bodies have lost their previous quality of suffused light and are more likely to be seen at night. There are still saints, though they no longer sit in quiet rooms or deserts, with their memento mori skulls and their doglike lions resting at their feet; instead they writhe in contorted poses, stuck full of arrows or tied to stakes. Biblical subjects tilt toward violence: Judith cutting off the head of Holofernes is now popular. There are a lot more classical gods and goddesses. There are wars, fights and slaughters, as before, but more confused and with intertwined arms and legs. There are still portraits of rich people, although in darker clothing.

As we run through the centuries, new things appear: ships by themselves, animals by themselves, such as dogs and horses. Peasants by themselves. Landscapes, with or without houses. Flowers by themselves, plates of fruit and cuts of meat, with or without lobsters. Lobsters are a favorite, because of the color. Naked women.

There is considerable overlap: a naked goddess wreathed in flowers, with a couple of dogs standing by; biblical people with or without clothes, plus or minus animals, trees, and ships. Rich people pretending to be gods and goddesses. Fruit and slaughters are not usually combined, nor are gods and peasants. The naked women are presented in the same manner as the plates of meat and dead lobsters, with the same attention to the play of candlelight on skin, the same lusciousness, the same sensuous and richly rendered detail, the same painterly delight in tactility. ( Richly rendered, I write. Painterly delight in tactility. ) They appear served up.