Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

  The iron lungs were used to frighten us, and as reasons why we couldn't do things we wanted to. No public swimming pools, no crowds in summer. Do you want to spend the rest of your life in an iron lung? they would say. A stupid question; though for me such a life, with its inertia and pity, had its secret attractions.

  Cordelia in an iron lung, then, being breathed, as an accordian is played. A mechanical wheezing sound comes from around her. She is fully conscious, but unable to move or speak. I come into the room, moving, speaking. Our eyes meet.

  Cordelia must be living somewhere. She could be within a mile of me, she could be right on the next block. But finally I have no idea what I would do if I bumped into her by accident, on the subway for instance, sitting across from me, or waiting on the platform reading the ads. We would stand side by side, looking at a large red mouth stretching itself around a chocolate bar, and I would turn to her and say: Cordelia. It's me, it's Elaine. Would she turn, give a theatrical shriek? Would she ignore me?

  Or would I ignore her, given the chance? Or would I go up to her wordlessly, throw my arms around her? Or take her by the shoulders, and shake and shake.

  I've been walking for hours it seems, down the hill to the downtown, where the streetcars no longer run. It's evening, one of those gray watercolor washes, like liquid dust, the city comes up with in fall. The weather at any rate is still familiar.

  Now I've reached the place where we used to get off the streetcar, stepping into the curbside mounds of January slush, into the grating wind that cut up from the lake between the flat-roofed dowdy buildings that were for us the closest thing to urbanity. But this part of the city is no longer flat, dowdy, shabby-genteel. Tubular neon in cursive script decorates the restored brick facades, and there's a lot of brass trim, a lot of real estate, a lot of money. Up ahead there are huge oblong towers, all of glass, lit up, like enormous gravestones of cold light. Frozen assets.

  I don't look much at the towers though, or the people passing me in their fashionable getups, imports, handcrafted leather, suede, whatever. Instead I look down at the sidewalk, like a tracker.

  I can feel my throat tightening, a pain along the jawline. I've started to chew my fingers again. There's blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange Popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.

  PART

  TWO

  SILVER

  PAPER

  3

  I'm lying on the floor, on a futon, covered by a duvet. Futon, duvet: this is how far we've come. I wonder if Stephen ever figured out what futons and duvets were. Most likely not. Most likely if you'd said futon to him, he'd have looked at you as if he was deaf or you were brain-damaged. He did not exist in the futon dimension.

  When there were no futons and no duvets, the price of an ice cream cone was five cents. Now it's a dollar if you're lucky, and not as big either. That's the bottom-line difference between then and now: ninety-five cents.

  This is the middle of my life. I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance.

  But since coming back here I don't feel weightier. I feel lighter, as if I'm shedding matter, losing molecules, calcium from my bones, cells from my blood; as if I'm shrinking, as if I'm filling with cold air, or gently falling snow.

  With all this lightness I do not rise, I descend. Or rather I am dragged downward, into the layers of this place as into liquefied mud.

  The fact is that I hate this city. I've hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it.

  Once it was fashionable to say how dull it was. First prize a week in Toronto, second prize two weeks in Toronto, Toronto the Good, Toronto the Blue, where you couldn't get wine on Sundays. Everyone who lived here said those things: provincial, self-satisfied, boring. If you said that, it showed you recognized these qualities but did not partake of them yourself.

  Now you're supposed to say how much it's changed. World-class city is a phrase they use in magazines these days, a great deal too much. All those ethnic restaurants, and the theater and the boutiques. New York without the garbage and muggings, it's supposed to be. People from Toronto used to go to Buffalo for the weekends, the men to watch girlie shows and drink after-hours beer, the women to shop; they'd come back jumped-up and pissed and wearing several layers of clothes to smuggle them through Customs. Now the weekend traffic is the other way around.

  I've never believed either version, the dull, the world-class. Toronto was never dull, for me. Dull isn't a word you'd use to describe such misery, and enchantment.

  And I can't believe it's changed. Driving in from the airport yesterday in the taxi, past the flat neat factories and warehouses that were once flat neat farms, mile after mile of caution and utilitarianism, and then through the center of the city with the glitz and the European-style awnings and the paving stones, I could see it's still the same. Underneath the flourish and ostentation is the old city, street after street of thick red brick houses, with their front porch pillars like the off-white stems of toadstools and their watchful, calculating windows. Malicious, grudging, vindictive, implacable.

  In my dreams of this city I am always lost.

  Apart from all this, I do of course have a real life. I sometimes have trouble believing in it, because it doesn't seem like the kind of life I could ever get away with, or deserve. This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

  I live in a house, with window curtains and a lawn, in British Columbia, which is as far away from Toronto as I could get without drowning. The unreality of the landscape there encourages me: the greeting-card mountains, of the sunset-and-sloppy-message variety, the cottagy houses that look as if they were built by the Seven Dwarfs in the thirties, the giant slugs, so much larger than a slug needs to be. Even the rain is overdone, I can't take it seriously. I suppose these things are as real, and as oppressive, to the people who grew up there as this place is to me. But on good days it still feels like a vacation, an evasion. On bad days I don't notice it, or much else.

  I have a husband, not my first, whose name is Ben. He is not any sort of an artist, for which I am thankful. He runs a travel agency, specializing in Mexico. Among his other sterling qualities are cheap tickets to the Yucataan. The travel agency is why he hasn't come with me on this trip: the months before Christmas are a hectic time in the travel business.

  I also have two daughters, by now grown up. Their names are Sarah and Anne, good sensible names. One of them is almost a doctor, the other an accountant. These are sensible choices. I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own. Also in sensible names for children, because look what happened to Cordelia.

  Alongside my real life I have a career, which may not qualify as exactly real. I am a painter. I even put that on my passport, in a moment of bravado, since the other choice would have been housewife. It's an unlikely thing for me to have become; on some days it still makes me cringe. Respectable people do not become painters: only overblown, pretentious, theatrical people. The word artist embarrasses me; I prefer painter, because it's more like a valid job. An artist is a tawdry, lazy sort of thing to be, as most people in this country will tell you. If you say you are a painter, you will be looked at strangely. Unless you paint wildlife, or make a lot of money at it, of course. But I only make enough to generate envy, among other painters, not enough so I can tell everyone else to stuff it.

  Most of the time, though, I exult, and think I have had a narrow escape.

  My career is why I'm here, on this futon, under this duvet. I'm having a retrospective, my first. The name of the gallery is Sub-Versions, one of those puns that used to delight me before they became so fashionable. I ought to be pleased by this retrospective, but my feelings are mixed; I don't like admittin
g I'm old enough and established enough to have such a thing, even at an alternative gallery run by a bunch of women. I find it improbable, and ominous: first the retrospective, then the morgue. But also I'm cheesed off because the Art Gallery of Ontario wouldn't do it. Their bias is toward dead, foreign men.

  The duvet is in a studio that belongs to my first husband, Jon. It interests me that he would have a duvet here, although his house is elsewhere. So far I've restrained myself from going through his medicine cabinet, in search of hairpins and female deodorants, as I once would have done. This is none of my business any longer, I can leave the hairpins to his iron-clad wife.

  Staying here is possibly a silly thing to do, too retrospective. But we've always kept in touch because of Sarah, who is his daughter also, and after we got through the shouting and the broken glass we settled into being friends of a sort, by long distance, which is always easier than up close. When he heard about the retrospective, he offered. The price of a hotel in Toronto, he said, even a second-rate hotel, is becoming offensive. Sub-Versions would have put me up, but I didn't mention that. I don't like the neatness of hotels, the squeaky-clean bathtubs. I don't like hearing my own voice echo in there, especially at night. I prefer the shedding and disorder and personal dirt of people like myself, people like Jon. Transients and nomads.

  Jon's studio is down on King Street, near the waterfront. King Street used to be one of those places you never went, a place of dingy warehouses and rumbling trucks and dubious alleyways. Now it's come up in the world. Artists have infested it; in fact the first wave of artists has almost come and gone, and brass lettering and heating pipes painted fire-engine red and firms of lawyers are taking over. Jon's studio, on the fifth and top floor of one of the warehouses, doesn't have long to live in its present form. Track lighting is spreading over the ceilings, the lower floors are being stripped of their old linoleum, smelling of Pine Sol with an obscure base note of ancient throwup and pee, and the wide boards underneath are being sandblasted. I know all this because I walk up the five floors; they haven't got around to an elevator yet.

  Jon left me the key in an envelope under the mat, and a note saying Blessings, which is a measure of how much he's softened, or mellowed. Blessings was not his former style. He's temporarily in Los Angeles, doing a chain-saw murder, but he'll be back before my opening.

  I last saw him at Sarah's college graduation four years ago. He flew out to the coast, luckily without the wife, who is not fond of me. Although we haven't met, I know about her lack of fondness. During the proceedings, the ritual mumbo-jumbo and the tea and cookies afterward, we acted like responsible, grownup parents. We took both the girls out to dinner and behaved ourselves. We even dressed the way we knew Sarah wanted us to: I had on an outfit, matching shoes and all, and Jon wore a suit and an actual tie. I told him he looked like an undertaker.

  But the next day we snuck out to lunch, alone, and got plastered. That word, plastered, on the brink of obsolescence, indicates to me what sort of an event that was. It was a retrospective. And I still think of it as sneaking out, though of course Ben knew all about it. Though he would never go to lunch with his own first wife.

  "You've always said it was such a disaster," Ben said to me, puzzled.

  "It was," I said. "It was horrible."

  "Then why would you want to have lunch with him?"

  "That's hard to explain," I said, though it may not be. What we share, Jon and I, may be a lot like a traffic accident, but we do share it. We are survivors, of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.

  In the old days Jon did constructions. He made them out of bits of wood and leather he'd pick out of people's trash, or else he'd smash things--violins, glassware--and glue the pieces into the position of the smash; shatter patterns, he called them. At one time he wrapped pieces of colored tape around tree trunks and took photographs of them, at another he made a replica of a mold-covered loaf of bread that breathed in and out with the aid of a small electric motor. The mold was made from the hair clippings of himself and friends. I think there's even some of my hair on that loaf of bread; I caught him snitching some out of my hairbrush.

  He does special effects for movies now, to support his artist habit. The studio is scattered with his half-finished doings. On the workbench where he keeps his paints, glues, knives, and pliers, there's a hand and arm, done in plastic resin, arteries worming from the cut end, straps to strap it on. There are hollow casts of legs and feet standing around on the floor like elephant-foot umbrella stands; in one of them there's an umbrella. Also there's part of a face, with the skin blackened and withered, made to fit over the actor's real face. A monster, warped by others, bent on revenge.

  Jon has told me he isn't sure this hacked-up body-part stuff is the sort of thing he should be doing. It's too violent, it doesn't contribute to human goodness. He's coming to believe in human goodness in his old age, which is certainly a change; I've even found some herbal tea in the cupboard. He claims he'd rather make friendly animals for children's shows. But as he says, you have to eat, and there's just more demand for cut-off limbs.

  I wish he were here, or Ben, or any man I know. I'm losing the appetite for strangers. Once I would have focused on the excitement, the hazard; now it's the mess, the bother. Getting your clothes off gracefully, always such an impossibility; thinking up what to say afterward, without setting the echoes going in your head. Worse, the encounter with another set of particularities: the toenails, the ear holes, the nosehairs. Perhaps at this age we return to the prudishness we had as children.

  I get up off the duvet, feeling as if I haven't slept. I riffle through the herbal tea bags in the kitchenette, Lemon Mist, Morning Thunder, and bypass them in favor of some thick, jolting, poisonous coffee. I find myself standing in the middle of the main room, not knowing exactly how I got in here from the kitchenette. A little time jump, a little static on the screen, probably jet lag: up too late at night, drugged in the morning. Early Alzheimer's.

  I sit at the window, drinking my coffee, biting my fingers, looking down the five stories. From this angle the pedestrians appear squashed from above, like deformed children. All around are flat-roofed, boxy warehouse buildings, and beyond them the flat railroad lands where the trains used to shunt back and forth, once the only entertainment available here on Sundays. Beyond that is flat Lake Ontario, a zero at the beginning and a zero at the end, slate-gray and brimming with venoms. Even the rain from it is carcinogenic.

  I wash in Jon's tiny, greasy bathroom, resisting the medicine cabinet. The bathroom is smeared with fingerprints and painted dingy white, not the most flattering light. Jon wouldn't feel like an artist without a certain amount of dinge around. I squint into the mirror, preparing my face: with my contact lenses in I'm too close to the mirror, without them I'm too far away. I've taken to doing these mirror things with one lens in my mouth, glassy and thin like the tag end of a lemon drop. I could choke on it by mistake, an undignified way to die. I should get bifocals. But then I'd look like an old biddy.

  I pull on my powder-blue sweatsuit, my disguise as a non-artist, and go down the four flights of stairs, trying to look brisk and purposeful. I could be a businesswoman out jogging, I could be a bank manager, on her day off. I head north, then east along Queen Street, which is another place we never used to go. It was rumored to be the haunt of grubby drunks, rubby-dubs we called them; they were said to drink rubbing alcohol and sleep in telephone booths and vomit on your shoes in the streetcar. But now it's art galleries and bookshops, boutiques filled with black clothing and weird footgear, the saw-toothed edge of trend.

  I decide I'll go and have a look at the gallery, which I have never seen because all of this has been arranged by phone and mail. I don't intend to go in, make myself known, not yet. I just want to look at it from the outside. I'll walk past, glance casually, pretending to be a housewife, a tourist, someone window shopping. Galleries are frightening places, places of evaluat
ion, of judgment. I have to work up to them.

  But before I reach the gallery I come to a wall of plywood, concealing a demolition. On it is spray-painted, in defiance of squeaky-clean Toronto: It's Bacon or Me, Babe. And underneath: What Is This Bacon and Where Can I Get Some? Beside this there's a poster. Or not a poster, more like a flier: a violent shade of purple, with green accents and black lettering. RISELY IN RETROSPECT, it says; just the last name, like a boy. The name is mine and so is the face, more or less. It's the photo I sent the gallery. Except that now I have a mustache.

  Whoever drew this mustache knew what he was doing. Or she: nothing precludes that. It's a curled, flowing mustache, like a cavalier's, with a graceful goatee to match. It goes with my hair.

  I suppose I should be worried about this mustache. Is it just doodling, or is it political commentary, an act of aggression? Is it more like Kilroy Was Here or more like Fuck Off? I can remember drawing such mustaches myself, and the spite that went into them, the desire to ridicule, to deflate, and the feeling of power. It was defacing, it was taking away someone's face. If I were younger I'd resent it.

  As it is, I study the mustache and think: That looks sort of good. The mustache is like a costume. I examine it from several angles, as if I'm considering buying one for myself. It casts a different light. I think about men and their facial hair, and the opportunities for disguise and concealment they have always at their disposal. I think about mustache-covered men, and about how naked they must feel with the thing shaved off. How diminished. A lot of people would look better in a mustache.

  Then, suddenly, I feel wonder. I have achieved, finally, a face that a mustache can be drawn on, a face that attracts mustaches. A public face, a face worth defacing. This is an accomplishment. I have made something of myself, something or other, after all.