Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
I look at him uncertainly. What he says is a trespass: people don't talk about bodies unless they're discussing illnesses, or about souls except in church, or about passion unless they mean sex. But Mr. Hrbik is a stranger, and can't be expected to know this.
"You are an unfinished voman," he adds in a lower voice, "but here you will be finished." He doesn't know that finished means over and done with. He intends to be encouraging.
49
I sit in the darkened auditorium, downstairs at the Royal Ontario Museum, leaning back in the hard seat covered with scratchy plush and breathing in the smell of dust and airlessness and stale upholstery and the sweetish face powder of the other students. I feel my eyes getting rounder and rounder, the pupils enlarging like an owl's: for an hour I've been looking at slides, yellowy, sometimes unfocused slides of white marble women with flat-topped heads. These heads are holding up stone entablatures, which look very heavy; no wonder the tops of their heads are flat. These marble women are called caryatids, which orginally referred to the priestesses of Artemis at Caryae. But they are no longer priestesses; they are now ornamental devices doubling as supporting columns.
There are many slides of columns as well, various kinds of columns from various periods: Doric, Ionic, Corinthian. Doric columns are the strongest and simplest, Corinthian ones are the lightest and most ornate, adorned with rows of acanthus leaves giving rise to graceful volutes and helices. A long pointer, emerging from the area of no light beside the screen, rests on the volutes and helices, indicating which is which. I will need these words later, when I have to regurgitate them for exams, so I attempt to write them in my notebook, bending my head down close to the paper in order to see. I spend a lot of time now writing obscure words in the dark.
I expect things to be better next month, when we'll get away from the Greeks and Romans and into Mediaeval and Renaissance. Classical has come to mean, for me, bleached-out and broken. Most of the Greek and Roman things have body parts missing, and the general armlessness, leglessness, and noselessness is getting to me, not to mention the snapped-off penises. Also the grayness and whiteness, although I have learned to my surprise that all the marble statues used to be painted, in bright colors, with yellow hair and blue eyes and flesh tones, and sometimes dressed up in real clothing, like dolls.
This class is a survey course. It's supposed to orient us in time, in preparation for later, more specialized courses. It's part of Art and Archaeology at the University of Toronto, which is the only sanctioned pathway that leads anywhere close to art. Also the only thing I can afford: I have won a scholarship to university, which was no more than expected. "You should use the brains God gave you," my father is in the habit of saying, though we both know he thinks this gift was really bestowed by him. If I left university, threw over my scholarship, he would not see his way clear to putting up the cash for anything else.
When I first told my parents I was not going into Biology after all but was going to be an artist, they reacted with alarm. My mother said that was fine if it was what I really wanted to do, but they were worried about how I would make a living. Art was not somthing that could be depended on, though all right for a hobby, like shellwork or wood carving. But Art and Archaeology was reassuring to them: I could veer off in the archaeology direction and take to digging things up, which was more serious.
At the very least I will come out of it with a degree, and with a degree you can always teach. I have private reservations about this: I think of Miss Creighton, the Art Appreciation teacher at Burnham High, pudgy and beleaguered, who routinely got locked into the supply closet where the paper and paints were kept by some of the greasier and more leathery boys.
One of my mother's friends tells her that art is something you can always do at home, in your spare time.
The other students in Art and Archaeology are all girls but one, just as the professors are all men but one. The student who is not a girl and the professor who is not a man are considered strange; the first has an unfortunate skin condition, the second a nervous stammer. None of the girl students wants to be an artist; instead they want to be teachers of art in high schools, or, in one case, a curator in a gallery. Or else they are vague about their wants, which means they intend to get married before any of these other things becomes necessary.
What they wear is cashmere twin sets, camel's-hair coats, good tweed skirts, pearl button earrings. They wear tidy medium-heel pumps and tailored blouses, or jumpers, or little weskits with matching skirts and buttons. I wear these things too, I try to blend in. Between classes I drink cups of coffee with them and eat doughnuts, sitting in various common rooms and butteries and coffee shops. They discuss clothes, or talk about the boys they are going out with, licking the doughnut sugar off their fingers. Two of them are already pinned. Their eyes during these conversations look dewy, blurred, pulpy, easily hurt, like the eyes of blind baby kittens; but also sly and speculative, and filled with greed and deceit.
I feel ill at ease with them, as if I am here under false pretences. Mr. Hrbik and the tactility of the body do not fit into Art and Archaeology; my botched attempts at drawing naked women would be seen as a waste of time. Art has been accomplished, elsewhere. All that remains to be done with it is the memory work. The entire Life Drawing class would be viewed as pretentious, and also ludicrous.
But it is my lifeline, my real life. Increasingly I begin to eliminate whatever does not fit in with it, paring myself down. To the first class I made the mistake of wearing a plaid jumper and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, but I learn quickly. I switch to what the boys wear, and the other girl: black turtlenecks and jeans. This clothing is not a disguise, like other clothing, but an allegiance, and in time I work up the courage to wear these things even in the daytime, to Art and Archaeology; all except the jeans, which nobody wears. Instead I wear black skirts. I grow out my high school bangs and pin my hair back off my face, hoping to look austere. The girls at university, in their cashmere and pearls, make jokes about arty beatniks and talk to me less.
The two older women in Life Drawing notice my transformation as well. "So who died?" they ask me. Their names are Babs and Marjorie, and they are professionals. They both do portraits, Babs of children, Marjorie of dog owners and their dogs; they are doing Life Drawing as a refresher course, they say. They themselves do not wear black turtlenecks, but smocks, like pregnant women. They call each other "kid" and make raucous comments about their work, and smoke in the washroom, as if it's naughty. Because they are my mother's age, it embarrasses me to be in the same room with them and the naked model both together. At the same time I find them undignified. They remind me less of my mother, however, than of Mrs. Finestein from next door.
Mrs. Finestein has taken to wearing fitted red suits and jaunty pillbox hats trimmed with matching cherries. She catches sight of me in my new getup and is disappointed. "She looks like an Italian widow," she tells my mother. "She's letting herself go. Such a shame. With a good haircut and a little makeup, she could be stunning." My mother reports this to me, smiling as if it's funny, but I know it's her way of expressing concern. I am verging on grubbiness. Letting yourself go is an alarming notion; it is said of older women who become frowzy and fat, and of things that are sold cheap.
Of course there is something to it. I am letting myself go.
50
I'm in a beer parlor, drinking tencent draft beer, with the other students from Life Drawing. The grumpy waiter comes, balancing a circular tray on one hand, and plonks down the glasses, which are like ordinary water glasses, only full of beer. Froth slops over. I don't like the taste of beer much, but by now I know how to drink it. I even know enough to sprinkle salt on the top, to cut down the foam.
This beer parlor has a dingy red carpet and cheesy black tables and plastic-upholstered chairs and scant lighting, and reeks of car ashtray; the other beer parlors we drink in are similar. They are called things like Lundy's Lane and The Maple Leaf Tavern, and they're all dark
The beer parlors are divided into two sections. The Men Only sections are where the rowdy drunks and rubby-dubs hang out; they're floored with sawdust, and the smell of spilled beer and old urine and sickness wafts out from them. Sometimes you can hear shouts and the crash of glass from within, and see a man being ejected by two wrestler-sized waiters, his nose bleeding, his arms flailing.
The Ladies and Escorts sections are cleaner and quieter and more genteel, and smell better. If you're a man you can't go into them without a woman, and if you're a woman you can't go into the Men Onlys. This is supposed to keep prostitutes from bothering men, and to keep the male hard drinkers from bothering women. Colin, who is from England, tells us about pubs, where there are fireplaces and you can play darts and stroll around and even sing, but none of that is allowed in beer parlors. They are for drinking beer, period. If you laugh too much you can be asked to leave.
The Life Drawing students prefer Ladies and Escorts, but they need a woman to get in. This is why they invite me: they even buy me free beers. I am their passport. Sometimes I'm the only one available after class, because Susie, the girl my age, frequently begs off, and Marjorie and Babs go home. They have husbands, and are not taken seriously. The boys call them "lady painters."
"If they're lady painters, what does that make me?" I say.
"A girl painter," Jon says, joking.
Colin, who has manners of a sort, explains: "If you're bad, you're a lady painter. Otherwise you're just a painter." They don't say "artist." Any painter who would call himself an artist is an asshole, as far as they're concerned.
I've given up on going out on dates in the old way: somehow it's no longer a serious thing to do. Also I haven't been asked that often since the advent of the black turtlenecks: boys of the blazer-and-white-shirt variety know what's good for them. In any case they are boys, not men. Their pink cheeks and group sniggering, their good-girl and bad-girl categories, their avid, fumbling attempts to push back the frontiers of garter belt and brassiere no longer hold my attention. Mustaches of long standing do, and nicotine-stained fingers; experienced wrinkles, heavy eyelids, a world-weary tolerance; men who can blow cigarette smoke out through their mouths and breathe it in through their nostrils without a second thought. I'm not sure where this picture has come from. It seems to have arrived fully formed, out of nowhere.
The Life Drawing students aren't like this, though they don't wear blazers either. With their deliberately shoddy and paint-stained clothing, their newly sprouted facial hair, they are a transitional form. Although they talk, they distrust words; one of them, Reg from Saskatchewan, is so inarticulate he's practically mute, and this wordlessness of his gives him a special status, as if the visual has eaten up part of his brain and left him an idiot saint. Colin the Englishman is distrusted because he talks not too much but too well. Real painters grunt, like Marlon Brando.
But they can make their feelings known. There are shrugs, mutterings, half-finished sentences, hand movements: jabs, fists, openings of the fingers, jerky sculptings of the air. Sometimes this sign language is about other people's painting: "It sucks," they say, or very occasionally, "Fan-fuckin'-tastic." They don't approve of much. Also they think Toronto is a dump. "Nothing's happening here," is what they say, and many of their conversations revolve around their plans for escape. Paris is finished, and even Colin the Englishman doesn't want to go back to England. "They all paint yellowy-green there," he says. "Yellowy-green, like goose turds. Bloody depressing." Nothing but New York will do. That's where everything is happening, that's where the action is.
When they've had several beers they might talk about women. They refer to their girlfriends, some of whom live with them; these are called "my old lady." Or they make jokes about the models in Life Drawing, who change from night to night. They speak of going to bed with them, as if this depends only on their inclination or lack of it. There are two possible attitudes to this: lip smacking or nauseated revulsion. "A cow," they say. "A bag." "What a discard." Sometimes they do this with an eye toward me, looking to see how I will take it. When the descriptions of body parts get too detailed--"Cunt like an elephant's arse," "How would you know, eh, screw elephants much?"--they shush one another, as if in front of mothers; as if they haven't decided who I am.
I don't resent any of this. Instead I think I am privileged: I am an exception, to some rule I haven't even identified.
I sit in the dankness and beer fug and cigarette smoke, getting a little dizzy, keeping my mouth shut, my eyes open. I think I can see them clearly because I expect nothing from them. In truth I expect a lot. I expect to be accepted.
There's one thing they do that I don't like: they make fun of Mr. Hrbik. His first name is Josef and they call him Uncle Joe, because he has a mustache and an Eastern European accent and is authoritarian in his opinions. This is unfair, since I know--all of us know by now--that he was shunted around in four different countries, because of the upheavals of the war, and got trapped behind the Iron Curtain and lived on garbage and almost starved, and escaped during the Hungarian Revolution, probably with danger to his life. He has never mentioned the exact circumstances. In fact he has mentioned none of this, in class. Nevertheless it is known.
But it cuts no ice with the boys. Drawing sucks and Mr. Hrbik is a throwback. They call him a D.P., which means displaced person, an old insult I remember from high school. It was what you called refugees from Europe, and those who were stupid and uncouth and did not fit in. They mimic his accent, and the way he talks about the body. They only take Life Drawing because it's a requirement. Life Drawing is not what's happening, Action Painting is, and for that you sure as hell don't need to know how to draw. In particular you don't need to know how to draw a cow with no clothes on. Nevertheless they sit in Life Drawing, scratching away with the charcoal and turning out rendering after rendering of breasts and buttocks, thighs and necks, and some nights nothing but feet, as I do, while Mr. Hrbik strides up and down, tugging at his hair and despairing.
The faces of the boys are impassive. To me their contempt is obvious, but Mr. Hrbik doesn't notice. I feel sorry for him, and grateful to him, for letting me into the class. Also I admire him. The war is far enough away now to be romantic, and he has been through it. I wonder if he has any bullet holes in him, or other marks of grace.
Tonight, in the Ladies and Escorts of the Maple Leaf Tavern, it isn't just the boys and me. Susie is here too.
Susie has yellow hair, which I can tell she rolls and sets and then dishevels, and tips ash-blond at the ends. She wears jeans and black turtlenecks too, but her jeans are skintight and she's usually got something around her neck, a silver chain or a medallion. She does her eyes with a heavy black line over the lid like Cleopatra, and black mascara and smoky dark-blue eye shadow, so her eyes are blue-rimmed, bruise-colored, as if someone's punched her; and she uses white face powder and pale pink lipstick, which makes her look ill, or as if she's been up very late every night for weeks. She has full hips, and breasts that are too large for her height, like a rubber squeaky toy that's been pushed down on the top of the head and has bulged out in these places. She has a little breathless voice and a startled little laugh; even her name is like a powder puff. I think of her as a silly girl who's just fooling around at art school, too dumb to get into university, although I don't make judgments like this about the boys.
"Uncle Joe was raving tonight," says Jon. Jon is tall, with sideburns and big hands. He has a denim jacket with a lot of snap fasteners on it. Besides Colin the Englishman, he's the most articulate one. He uses words like purity and the picture plane, but only among two or three, never with the whole group.
"Oh," says Susie
This irritates me: because she's said something I should have said myself and didn't have the guts to, but also because she's made even this defense come out like a cat rubbing against a leg, an admiring hand on a bicep.
"Pompous old fart," says Colin, to get some of her attention for himself.
Susie turns her big blue-rimmed eyes on him. "He's not old," she says solemnly. "He's only thirty-five." Everyone laughs.
But how does she know? I look at her and wonder. I remember the time I went early to class. The model wasn't there yet, I was in the room by myself, and then Susie walked in with her coat already off, and right after that Mr. Hrbik.
Susie came over to where I was sitting and said, "Don't you just hate the snow!" Ordinarily she didn't talk to me. And I was the one who'd been out in the snow: she looked warm as toast.
51
In the daytime it's February. The gray museum auditorium steams with wet coats and the slush melting from winter boots. There's a lot of coughing.
We've finished the Mediaeval period, with its reliquaries and elongated saints, and are speeding through the Renaissance, hitting the high points. Virgin Marys abound. It's as if one enormous Virgin Mary has had a whole bunch of daughters, most of which look something like her but not entirely. They've shed their gold-leaf halos, they've lost the elongated, flat-chested look they had in stone and wood, they've filled out more. They ascend to Heaven less frequently. Some are dough-faced and solemn, sitting by fireplaces or in chairs of the period, or by open windows, with roof work going on in the background; some are anxious-looking, others are milk-fed and pinky-white, with wire-thin halos and fine gold tendrils of hair escaping from their veils and clear Italian skies in the distance. They bend over the cradle of the Nativity, or they hold Jesus on their laps.