Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
999 Queen is both a real place and high school shorthand for all funny farms, booby hatches, and nuthouses that could possibly be imagined. We had to imagine them, then, never having seen one. "999 Queen," we would say, sticking our tongues out the sides of our mouths, crossing our eyes, making circles near our ears with our forefingers. Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.
I am waiting for Cordelia. Or I think it will be Cordelia: her voice on the phone did not sound like her, but slower and somehow damaged. "I saw you," is what she said, as if we had been talking together only five minutes before. But in fact it had been seven years, or eight, or nine: the summer she worked at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, the summer of Josef. "In the paper," she added. And then a pause, as if this was a question.
"Right," I said. Then, because I knew I should, "Why don't we get together?"
"I can't go out," Cordelia said, in the same slowed-down voice. "You'll have to come here."
And so I am here.
Cordelia comes through a door at the far end of the room, walking carefully, as if balancing, or lame. But she is not lame. Behind her is another woman, with the optimistic, false, toothy smile of a paid attendant.
It takes me a moment to recognize Cordelia, because she doesn't look at all the same. Or rather she doesn't look the way she did when I last saw her, in her wide cotton skirt and barbaric bracelet, elegant and confident. She is in an earlier phase, or a later one: the soft green tweeds and tailored blouses of her good-taste background, which now appear matronly on her, because she has put on weight. Or has she? Flesh has been added, but it has slid down, toward the middle of her body, like mud sliding down a hill. The long bones have risen to the surface of her face, the skin tugged downward on them as if by irresistible gravitational pull. I can see how she'll be when she's old.
Someone has done her hair. Not her. She would never make it in tight little waves like that.
Cordelia stands uncertainly, squinting a little, head poking forward and swinging imperceptibly from side to side, the way an elephant's does, or some slow, bewildered animal. "Cordelia," I say, standing up.
"There's your friend," says the woman, smiling relentlessly. She takes Cordelia by the arm and gives a small tug, to start her in the right direction. "There you are," I say, falling already into the trap of addressing her like a child. I come forward, give her an awkward kiss. I find to my surprise that I'm glad to see her.
"Better late than never," Cordelia says, with the same hesitation, the thickness in her voice I've heard over the phone. The woman steers her to the chair across from mine, settles her down into it with a little push, as if she's elderly, and stubborn.
Suddenly I'm outraged. No one has a right to treat Cordelia this way. I scowl at the woman, who says, "How nice of you to come! Cordelia enjoys a visit, don't you, Cordelia?"
"You can take me out," Cordelia says. She looks up at the woman, for approval.
"Yes, that's right," says the woman. "For tea or something. If you promise to bring her back, that is!" She gives a cheery laugh, as if this is a joke.
I take Cordelia out. The Dorothy Lyndwick Rest Home is in High Park, a suburb where I've never been before and don't know my way around, but there's a corner cafe a few blocks along. Cordelia knows it, and her way there. I don't know whether I should take her arm or not, and so I don't; I walk along beside her, watchful at crossings as if she's blind, slowing my pace to hers.
"I don't have any money," says Cordelia. "They won't let me have any. They even get my cigarettes for me."
"That's all right," I say.
We ease into a booth, order coffee and two toasted Danishes. I give the order: I don't want the waitress staring. Cordelia fumbles, produces a cigarette. Her hand, lighting it, is shaky. "Great flaming blue-headed balls of Jesus," she says, making an effort with the syllables. "It's good to be out of there." She tries to laugh, and I laugh with her, feeling culpable and accused.
I should ask her things: what has she been doing, for these years we've skipped? What about her acting, what became of that? Did she get married, have children? What exactly has been going on, to bring her where she is? But all of this is beside the point. It's detachable, it's been added on. The main thing is Cordelia, the fact of her now.
"What the shit have they got you on?" I say.
"Some sort of tranquilizers," she says. "I hate them. They make me drool."
"What for?" I say. "How did you end up in that nuthatch anyway? You aren't any crazier than I am."
Cordelia looks at me, blowing out smoke. "Things weren't working out very well," she says after a while.
"So?" I say.
"So. I tried pills."
"Oh, Cordelia." Something goes through me with a slice, like watching a child fall, mouth-down on rock. "Why?"
"I don't know. It just came over me. I was tired," she says.
There is no point telling her she shouldn't have done such a thing. I do what I'd do in high school: I ask for the details. "So did you conk out?"
"Yes," she said. "I checked into a hotel, to do it. But they figured it out--the manager or someone. I had to get my stomach pumped. That was revolting. Vomit-making, you could say."
She does what would be a laugh, except that her face is so rigid. I think I may cry. At the same time I'm angry with her, though I don't know why. It's as if Cordelia has placed herself beyond me, out of my reach, where I can't get at her. She has let go of her idea of herself. She is lost.
"Elaine," she says, "get me out."
"What?" I say, brought up short.
"Help me get out of there. You don't know what it's like. You have no privacy." This is the closest to pleading she's ever come.
A phrase comes to me, a remnant left over from boys, from Saturday afternoons, reading the comics: Pick on somebody your own size. "How could I do that?" I say.
"Visit me tomorrow and we'll go in a taxi." She sees me hesitate. "Or just lend me the money. That's all you have to do. I can hide the pills in the morning, I won't take them. Then I'll be all right. I know it's those pills that're keeping me like this. Just twenty-five dollars is all I need."
"I don't have a lot of money with me," I say, which is true enough, but an evasion. "They'd catch you. They'd know you were off the pills. They could tell."
"I can fool them any day," Cordelia says, with a flicker of her old cunning. Of course, I think, she's an actress. Or was. She can counterfeit anything. "Anyway, those doctors are so dumb. They ask all these questions, they believe anything I tell them, they write it all down."
There are doctors, then. More than one. "Cordelia, how can I take the responsibility? I haven't even talked, I haven't talked to anyone."
"They're all assholes," she says. "There's nothing wrong with me. You know, you said yourself." There's a frantic child in there, behind that locked, sagging face.
I have an image of spiriting Cordelia away, rescuing her. I could do it, or something like it; but then where would she end up? Hiding out in our apartment, sleeping on an improvised bed like the draft dodgers, a refugee, a displaced person, smoking up the kitchen with Jon wondering who the hell she is and why she's there. Things are uneven between us as it is; I'm not sure I can afford Cordelia. She'd be one more sin of mine, to be chalked up to the account he's keeping in his head. Also I am not feeling totally glued together myself.
And there's Sarah to think of. Would she take to this Auntie Cordelia? How is Cordelia with small children? And exactly how sick in the head is she, anyway? How long before I'd come back and find her out cold on the bathroom floor, or worse? In the middle of a bright red sunset. Jon's work table is an arsenal, there are little saws lying around, little chisels. Maybe it would just be melodrama, a skin-deep slash or two, her old theatricality; though perhaps theatrical people are not less risky, but more. In the interests of the role they'll sacrifice anything.
"I can't Cordelia," I say gently. But I
The waitress brings the bill. "Are you sufficiently sophonsified?" I say to Cordelia, trying for lightness, and a change of subject. But Cordelia has never been stupid.
"So you won't," she says. And then, forlornly: "I guess you've always hated me."
"No," I say. "Why would I? No!" I am shocked. Why would she say such a thing? I can't remember ever hating Cordelia.
"I'll get out anyway," she says. Her voice is not thick now, or hesitant. She has that stubborn, defiant look, the one I remember from years ago. So?
I walk her back, deposit her. "I'll come to visit you," I say. I intend to, but know at the same time that the chances are slim. She'll be all right, I tell myself. She was like this at the end of high school, and then things got better. They could again.
On the streetcar going back, I read the advertisements: a beer, a chocolate bar, a brassiere turning into a bird. I imitate relief. I feel free, and weightless.
But I am not free, of Cordelia.
I dream Cordelia falling, from a cliff or bridge, against a background of twilight, her arms outspread, her skirt open like a bell, making a snow angel in the empty air. She never hits or lands; she falls and falls, and I wake with my heart pounding and gravity cut from under me, as in an elevator plummeting out of control.
I dream her standing in the old Queen Mary schoolyard. The school is gone, there is nothing but a field, and the hill behind with the scrawny evergreen trees. She is wearing her snowsuit jacket, but she is not a child, she's the age she is now. She knows I have deserted her, and she is angry.
After a month, two months, three, I write Cordelia a note, on flowered notepaper of the sort that doesn't leave much space for words. I purchase this notepaper specially. My note is written with such false cheerfulness I can barely stand to lick the flap of the envelope. In it I propose another visit.
But my note comes back in the mail, with address unknown scrawled across it. I examine this writing from every angle, trying to figure out if it could be Cordelia's, disguised. If it isn't, if she's no longer at the rest home, where has she gone? She could ring the doorbell at any minute, call on the phone. She could be anywhere.
I dream a mannequin statue, like one of Jody's in the show, hacked apart and glued back together. It's wearing nothing but a gauze costume, covered with spangles. It ends at the neck. Underneath its arm, wrapped in a white cloth, is Cordelia's head.
PART
TWELVE
ONE
WING
64
In the corner of a parking lot, among the sumptuous boutiques, they've reconstructed a forties diner. 4-D's Diner, it's called. Not a renovation, brand-new.
They couldn't tear this stuff down fast enough, once.
Inside it's pretty authentic, except that it looks too clean; and it's less forties than early fifties. They have a soda fountain countertop, with stools along it topped in acid lime-green, and vinyl-padded booths in a shade of shiny purple that looks like the skin of an early shark-finned convertible. A jukebox, chrome coat trees, grainy black-and-white photos on the walls, of real forties diners. The waitresses have white uniforms with black tab trim, although the shade of their red lipstick isn't quite right and they should have run it around the edges of their mouths. The waiters have those soda jerk caps set at an angle, and the right haircuts, a close shave up the back of the neck. They're doing a roaring business. Kids in their twenties, mostly.
Really it's like Sunnysides, done over as a museum. They could have Cordelia and me in here, in our bat-wing sleeves and cinch belts, stuffed and mounted or made of wax, drinking our milkshakes, looking as bored as we could.
The last time I saw Cordelia, she was going through the door of the rest home. That was the last time I talked to her. Although it wasn't the last time she talked to me.
There are no avocado and sprout sandwiches, the coffee is not espresso, the pie is coconut cream and no worse than it was then. This is what I have, coffee and pie, sitting in one of the purple booths, watching young people exclaim over what they think is the quaintness of the past.
The past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
They have Elvis Presley zucchini molds now: you clamp them around your zucchini while it's young, and as it grows it's deformed into the shape of Elvis Presley's head. Is this why he sang? To become a zucchini? Vegetarianism and reincarnation are in the air, but that's taking it too far. I'd rather come back as a sow bug, myself; or a stir-fried shrimp. Though I suppose the whole idea's more lenient than Hell.
"You've done it well," I say to the waitress. "Of course the prices are wrong. It was ten cents for a coffee, then."
"Really," she says, not as a question. She gives me a dutiful smile: Boring old frump. She is half my age, living, already, a life I can't imagine. Whatever her guilts are, her hates and terrors, they are not the same. What do they do about AIDS, these girls? They can't just roll around in the hay, the way we did. Is there a courtship ritual that involves, perhaps, an exchange of doctors' telephone numbers? For us it was pregnancy that was the scary item, the sexual booby trap, the thing that could finish you off. Not any more.
I pay the bill, overtip, gather up my packages, an Italian scarf for each of my daughters, a fountain pen for Ben. Fountain-pens are coming back. Somewhere in Limbo, all the old devices and appliances and costumes are lined up, waiting their turn for reentry.
*
I walk up the street, along to the corner. The next street is Josef's. I count houses: this one must be his. The front's been ripped out and glassed over, the lawn is paving stone. There's an antique child's rocking horse in the window, a threadbare quilt, a wooden-headed doll with a battered face. Onetime throwouts, recycled as money. Nothing so indiscreet as a price tag, which means outrageous.
I wonder what became of Josef, eventually. If he's still alive he must be sixty-five, or more. If he was a dirty old man then, how dirty is he now?
He did make a film. I think it was him; in any case, the director's name was the same. I saw it by accident, at a film festival. This was a lot later, when I was already living in Vancouver.
It was about two women with nebulous personalities and cloudy hair. They wandered through fields with the wind blowing their thin dresses against their thighs, and gazed inscrutably. One of them took apart a radio and dropped the pieces into a stream, ate a butterfly, and cut the throat of a cat, because she was deranged. These things wouldn't have been as appealing if she had been ugly, instead of blond and ethereal. The other one made little slashes on the skin of her thigh, using an old-fashioned straight razor that had belonged to her grandfather. Toward the end she jumped off a railway overpass, into a river, her dress fluttering like a window curtain. Except for the colors of their hair, it was hard to tell the two of them apart.
The man in this film was in love with both of them and couldn't make up his mind. Hence their craziness. This is what convinced me that it must have been Josef: it wouldn't have occurred to him that they might have had reasons of their own for being crazy, apart from men.
None of the blood in this film was real blood. Women were not real to Josef, any more than he was real to me. This was why I could treat his sufferings with such scorn and unconcern: he wasn't real. The reason I've never dreamed about him was that he belonged already to the world of dreams: discontinuous, irrational, obsessive.
I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.
I can't blame Josef for his film. He was entitled to his own versions, his own conju
There is Life Drawing, for instance, hanging right now on the gallery wall, Josef preserved in aspic and good enough to eat. He is on the left side of the picture, stark-naked but turned with a twist half away from the viewer, so what you get is the ass end, then the torso in profile. On the right side is Jon, in the same position. Their bodies are somewhat idealized: less hairy than they really were, the muscle groups in higher definition, the skin luminous. I thought about putting Jockey shorts on them, in deference to Toronto, but decided against it. Both of them have wonderful bums.
Each of them is painting a picture, each picture is on an easel. Josef's is of a voluptuous but not overweight woman, sitting on a stool with a sheet draped between her legs, her breasts exposed; her face is Pre-Raphaelite, brooding, consciously mysterious. Jon's painting is a series of intestinal swirls, in hot pink, raspberry ripple red and Burgundy Cherry purple.
The model is seated on a chair between them, face front, bare feet flat on the floor. She's clothed in a white bedsheet, wrapped around her below the breasts. Her hands are folded neatly in her lap. Her head is a sphere of bluish glass.
I sit with Jon at a table in the roof bar of the Park Plaza Hotel, drinking white wine spritzers. My suggestion: I wanted to see it again. Outside, the skyline has changed: the Park Plaza is no longer the tallest building around, but a squat leftover, dwarfed by the svelte glassy towers that rise around it. Due south is the CN Tower, lifting up like a huge inverted icicle. This is the sort of architecture you used to see only in science fiction comic books, and seeing it pasted flat against the monotone lake-sky I feel I've stepped not forward in time but sideways, into a universe of two dimensions.
But inside the bar not a lot has changed. The place still looks like a high-class Regency bordello. Even the waiters, with their good-grooming hair and air of harried discretion, look the same, and probably are. The management used to keep ties in the coat check, for gentlemen who'd forgotten them. Forgotten was the word, because surely no gentleman would deliberately choose to go tieless. It was a big thing when this place was cracked by women in pant suits. A chic black model did it: they couldn't refuse to let her in, she could have hit them with racism. Even this memory dates me, and the little thrill of triumph that goes with it: what woman, now, would think of a pant suit as liberation?