Cat's Eye

Chapter 47

There are several diseases of the memory. Forgetfulness of nouns, for instance, or of numbers. Or there are more complex amnesias. With one, you can lose your entire past; you start afresh, learning how to tie your shoelaces, how to eat with a fork, how to read and sing. You are introduced to your relatives, your oldest friends, as if you’ve never met them before; you get a second chance with them, better than forgiveness because you can begin innocent. With another form, you keep the distant past but lose the present. You can’t remember what happened five minutes ago. When someone you’ve known all your life goes out of the room and then comes back in, you greet them as if they’ve been gone for twenty years; you weep and weep, with joy and relief, as if at a reunion with the dead. I sometimes wonder which of these will afflict me, later; because I know one of them will. For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

I sit in the harsh ultrablack of the Quasi, drinking red wine, staring out the window. On the other side of the glass, Cordelia drifts past; then melts and reassembles, changing into someone else. Another mistaken identity.

Why did they name her that? Hang that weight around her neck. Heart of the moon, jewel of the sea, depending on which foreign language you’re using. The third sister, the only honest one. The stubborn one, the rejected one, the one who was not heard. If she’d been called Jane, would things have been different?

My own mother named me after her best friend, as women did in those days. Elaine, which I once found too plaintive. I wanted something more definite, a monosyllable: Dot or Pat, like a foot set down. Nothing you could make a mistake about; nothing watery. But my name has solidified around me, with time. I think of it as tough but pliable now, like a well-worn glove.

There’s a lot of neo-black in here, some of it leather, some shiny vinyl. I’ve come prepared this time, I have my black cotton turtleneck and my black trenchcoat with the button-on hood, but I’m not the right texture. Also not the right age: everyone in here is twelve. This place was Jon’s suggestion. Trust him to cling to the surfboard as it upends in the froth of the latest wave.

He always made a fetish of lateness, to indicate that his life was crammed with many things, all of them more important than I was, and today is no exception. Thirty minutes later than agreed he breezes in. This time however he apologizes. Has he learned something, or does his new wife run a tighter ship? Funny I still think of her as new.

“That’s all right, I programmed for it,” I say. “I’m glad you could come out to play.” A small preliminary kick at the wife.

“Having lunch with you hardly qualifies as play,” he says, grinning.

He’s still up to it. We look each other over. In four years he’s achieved more wrinkles, and the sideburns and mustache are graying further. “Don’t mention the bald spot,” he says.

“What bald spot?” I say, meaning I’ll overlook his physical degeneration if he’ll overlook mine. He’s up to that one, too.

“You’re looking better than ever,” he says. “Selling out must agree with you.”

“Oh, it does,” I say. “It’s so much better than licking bums and hacking up women’s bodies in screw-and-spew movies.” Once this would have drawn blood, but he must have accepted his lot in life by now. He shrugs, making the best of it; but he looks tired.

“Live long enough and the licker becomes the lickee,” he says. “Ever since the exploding eyeball I can do no wrong. Right now I’m head-to-toe saliva.”

The possibility for crude sexual innuendo is there, but I duck it. Instead I think, he’s right: we are the establishment now, such as it is. Or that’s what we must look like. Once the people I knew died of suicide and motorcycle crashes and other forms of violence. Now it’s diseases: heart attacks, cancer, the betrayals of the body. The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies-drive them on?

“How’s your real work going?” I say, relenting, letting him know I still take him seriously. This bothers him. “All right,” he says. “I haven’t been able to get to it much lately.”

We are silent, considering shortfalls. There’s not much time left, for us to become what we once intended. Jon had potential, but it’s not a word that can be used comfortably any more. Potential has a shelf life.

We talk about Sarah, easily and without competing, as if we are her aunt and uncle. We talk about my show.

“I guess you saw that hatchet job in the paper,” I say.

“Was that a hatchet job?” he says.

“It’s my fault. I was rude to the interviewer,” I say, with what I try to pass off as penitence. “I’m well on my way to becoming a cantankerous old witch.”

“I’d be disappointed in you if you weren’t,” he says. “Make ‘em sweat, it’s what they’re paid for.” We both laugh. He knows me. He knows what a shit I can be.

I look at him with the nostalgic affection men are said to feel for their wars, their fellow veterans. I think, I once threw things at this man. I threw a glass ashtray, a fairly cheap one which didn’t break. I threw a shoe (his) and a handbag (mine), not even snapping the handbag shut first, so that he was showered with a metal rain of keys and small change. The worst thing I threw was a small portable television set, standing on the bed and heaving it at him with the aid of the bouncy springs, although the instant I let fly I thought, Oh God, let him duck! I once thought I was capable of murdering him. Today I feel only a mild regret that we were not more civilized with each other at the time. Still, it was amazing, all those explosions, that recklessness, that Technicolor wreckage. Amazing and agonizing and almost lethal. Now that I’m more or less safe from him, and him from me, I can recall him with fondness and even in some detail, which is more than I can say for several others. Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings, then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines. What will be left of them when I’m seventy? None of the baroque ecstasy, none of the grotesque compulsion. A word or two, hovering in the inner emptiness. Maybe a toe here, a nostril there, or a mustache, floating like a little curl of seaweed among the other flotsam.

Across from me at the night-black table, Jon, though diminishing, still moves and breathes. There’s a sliver of pain, of longing in me: Don’t go yet! It’s not time! Don’t go! It would be stupid, as always, to reveal my own sentimentality, my weakness to him.

What we eat is vaguely Thai: chicken, spicy and succulent, a salad of exotic foliage, red leaves, tiny splinters of purple. Gaudy food. This is the kind of thing people eat now, people who eat in places like this: Toronto is no longer the land of chicken pot pie, beef stew, overboiled vegetables. I recall my first avocado, when I was twenty-two. It was like my father’s first symphony orchestra. Perversely I long for the desserts of my childhood, the desserts of war, simple and inexpensive and bland: tapioca pudding, with its gelatinous fish eyes, Jell-O caramel pudding, Junket. Junket was made with white tablets that came out of a tube, and served with a dollop of grape jelly on the top. Probably it’s vanished by now. Jon has ordered a bottle, no glass-by-glass for him. It’s a hint of the old bombast, the old peacock tail, and reassuring.

“How’s your wife?” I ask him.

“Oh,” he says, looking down, “Mary Jean and I have decided to try it apart for a while.”

This may explain the herbal tea: some younger, more vegetarian influence, in the studio, on the sly. “I suppose you’ve got some little number,” I say. “They say ”he goes’ instead of “he says,” have you noticed?“

“As a matter of fact,” he says, “Mary Jean was the one who left.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. And immediately I am, I’m indignant, how could she do that to him, the cold unfeeling bitch. I side with him, despite the fact that I did the same thing to him myself, years ago.

“I guess I’m partly to blame,” he says. This is not something he ever would have admitted before. “She said she couldn’t get through to me.”

I bet that isn’t all she said. He’s lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He’s come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he’s up-to-date?

Maybe men shouldn’t have been told about their own humanity. It’s only made them uncomfortable. It’s only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read.

“If you hadn’t been so crazy,” I say, “it could have worked out. With us, I mean.”

That perks him up. “Who was crazy?” he says, grinning again. “Who drove who to the hospital?”

“If it hadn’t been for you,” I say, “I wouldn’t have needed to be driven to the hospital.”

“That’s not fair and you know it,” he says.

“You’re right,” I say. “It’s not fair. I’m glad you drove me to the hospital.”

Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.

“I’ll walk you where you’re going,” he says when we’re out on the sidewalk. I would like that. We’re getting along so well, now there’s nothing at stake. I can see why I fell in love with him. But I don’t have the energy for it now.

“That’s okay,” I say. I don’t want to admit that I don’t know where I’m going. “Thanks for the studio. Let me know if you need anything out of it.” Though I know he won’t come over while I’m there, it’s still too awkward, and hazardous, for us to be together behind a door that locks.

“Maybe we could have a drink, later,” he says.

I say, “Maybe we could.”

After leaving Jon I walk east along Queen, past the street dealers selling risqué T-shirts, past the garter belts and satin underpants in the windows. What I’m thinking about is a picture I painted, years ago now. Falling Women, it was called. A lot of my paintings then began in my confusion about words. There were no men in this painting, but it was about men, the kind who caused women to fall. I did not ascribe any intentions to these men. They were like the weather, they didn’t have a mind. They merely drenched you or struck you like lightning and moved on, mindless as blizzards. Or they were like rocks, a line of sharp slippery rocks with jagged edges. You could walk with care along between the rocks, picking your steps, and if you slipped you’d fall and cut yourself, but it was no use blaming the rocks. That must be what was meant by fallen women. Fallen women were women who had fallen onto men and hurt themselves. There was some suggestion of downward motion, against one’s will and not with the will of anyone else. Fallen women were not pulled-down women or pushed women, merely fallen. Of course there was Eve and the Fall; but there was nothing about falling in that story, which was only about eating, like most children’s stories.

Falling Women showed the women, three of them, falling as if by accident off a bridge, their skirts opened into bells by the wind, their hair streaming upward. Down they fell, onto the men who were lying unseen, jagged and dark and without volition, far below.

Chapter 48

I’m staring at a naked woman. In a picture she would be a nude, but she is not in a picture. This is the first live naked woman I’ve ever seen, apart from myself in the mirror. The girls in the high school locker room always had their underwear on, which is not the same thing, and neither are the women in stretch Lycra one-piece bathing suits with modesty panels, in magazine ads.

Even this woman is not entirely naked, as she has a sheet draped over her left thigh and tucked in between her legs: no hair shows. She’s sitting on a stool, her buttocks squashing out sideways; her stocky back is curved, her right leg is crossed over her left at the knee, her right elbow rests on her right knee, her left arm is placed behind her with the hand on the stool. Her eyes are bored, her head droops forward, the way it has been put. She looks cramped and uncomfortable, and also cold: I can see the goose bumps on her upper arms. She has a thick neck. Her hair is frizzly and short, red with darker roots, and I suspect she is chewing gum: every once in a while there is a slow, furtive, sideways motion of her jaw. She is not supposed to move.

I am trying to draw this woman, with a piece of charcoal. I am trying for fluidity of line. This is how the teacher has arranged her: for fluidity of line. I would rather be using a hard pencil; the charcoal gets on my fingers and smears, and is no good for hair. Also this woman frightens me. There is a lot of flesh to her, especially below the waist; there are folds across her stomach, her breasts are saggy and have enormous dark nipples. The harsh fluorescent light, falling straight down on her, turns her eye sockets to caverns, emphasizes the descending lines from nose to chin; but the massiveness of her body makes her head look like an afterthought. She is not beautiful, and I am afraid of turning into that. This is a night class. It’s called Life Drawing, and is held on Tuesdays at the Toronto College of Art, in a large bare room, beyond which is a utilitarian stairway, then McCaul Street, then Queen with its drunks and streetcar tracks, and beyond that square, boxy Toronto. There are a dozen of us in the room, with our hopeful, almost-new Bristol drawing boards and our black-tipped fingers; two older women, eight young men, another girl my own age, and me. I am not a student here, but even those who aren’t students can sign up for this class, under certain circumstances. The circumstances are that you have to convince the teacher you are serious. It’s not clear however how long I will last. The teacher is Mr. Hrbik. He is in his mid-thirties, with dark thickly curled hair, a mustache, an eagle nose, and eyes that look almost purple, like mulberries. He has a habit of staring at you without saying anything, and, it seems, without blinking.

It was the eyes I noticed first, when I went for my interview with him. He was sitting in his tiny paper-covered office at the college, leaning back in his chair and chewing the end of a pencil. When he saw me he put the pencil down.

“How old are you?” he said.

“Seventeen,” I said. “Almost eighteen.”

“Ah,” he said, and sighed as if this was bad news. “What have you done?”

This made it sound as if he was accusing me of something. Then I saw what he meant: I was supposed to bring something called “a portfolio of recent work,” which meant pictures, so he could judge me. But I didn’t have much work to bring. About the only contact I’d had with art was in high school, in the Art Appreciation class we had to take in Grade Nine, where we listened to the Moonlight Sonata and interpreted it with wavy crayon lines, or drew a tulip in a vase. I’d never been to an art gallery, though I’d read an article on Picasso, in Life magazine.

Over the past summer, when I’d had a job making beds and cleaning toilets at a resort in Muskoka to earn extra money, I’d bought a small oil painting set in one of the tourist shops. The names on the little tubes were like passwords: Cobalt Blue, Burnt Umber, Crimson Lake. On my time off I’d take this set out along the shore, and sit with my back against a tree with the pine needles digging into me from underneath, and mosquitoes collecting around me, looking out across the flat sheet metal water, the varnished mahogany inboards moving across it, little flags at their sterns. In these boats were sometimes other chambermaids, the kind who went to illegal parties in people’s rooms to drink rye and ginger ale out of paper cups, and were rumored to go all the way. There had been tearful confrontations in the laundry room, over the folded sheets.

I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin. After a while I’d painted a picture of a beer bottle minus the label, and a tree shaped like a damaged whisk, and several uncertain, sludge-colored pictures of rocks, with a violently blue lake in the background. Also a sunset, which came out looking like something you might spill on yourself.

I produced these from the black file folder in which I’d been carrying them. Mr. Hrbik frowned and twiddled his pencil and said nothing. I was discouraged, and also in awe of him, because he had power over me, the power to shut me out. I could see he thought my paintings were bad. They were bad.

“Any more?” he said. “Any drawings?”

Out of desperation I’d included some of my old Biology drawings, in hard lead pencil with colored shadings. I knew I could draw better than I could paint, I’d been doing it longer. I had nothing to lose and so I brought them out.

“What is it you call this?” he said, holding the top one upside-down.

“It’s the inside of a worm,” I said.

He did not show surprise. “This?”

“It’s a planaria. In stained section.”

“And this?”

“It’s the reproductive system of a frog. A male frog,” I added.

Mr. Hrbik stared up at me with his shining purple eyes. “Why do you want to take this class?” he said.

“It’s the only one I can get into,” I said. Then I realized how bad that sounded. “It’s my only hope. I don’t know anyone else who can teach me.”

“Why do you want to learn?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Mr. Hrbik picked up his pencil and stuck the end of it into the side of his mouth, like a cigarette. Then he took it out again. He twirled his fingers in his hair. “You are a complete amateur,” he said. “But sometimes this is better. We can begin from nothing.” He smiled at me, the first time. He had uneven teeth. “We will see what we can make of you,” he said.

Mr. Hrbik paces the room. He despairs of us, all of us, including the model, whose surreptitious gum chewing maddens him. “Keep still,” he says to her, tugging at his hair. “Enough gum.” The model shoots him a malevolent look and clenches her jaw. He takes her arms and her sulky-faced head and rearranges them, as if she is a mannequin. “We will try again.”

He strides up and down among us, looking over our shoulders and grunting to himself, as the room fills with the sandy rasping noise of charcoal on paper. “No, no,” he says to a young man. “This is a body. ”

He pronounces it “bowdy.” “This is not an automobile. You must think of the fingers, touching this flesh, or the running of the hand over. This must be tactile.” I try to think the way he wants me to, but recoil. I have no wish to run my fingers over this woman’s goose-pimply flesh.

To one of the older women he says, “We do not want pretty. The bowdy is not pretty like a flower. Draw what is there.” He stops behind me, and I cringe, waiting. “We are not making a medical textbook,” he says to me. “What you have made is a corpse, not a woman.” He pronounces it “voman.”

I look at what I have drawn, and he is right. I am careful and accurate, but I have drawn a person-shaped bottle, inert and without life. Courage, which has brought me here, flows out of me. I have no talent.

But at the end of the class, when the model has risen stiffly to her feet and has clutched her sheet around her and padded off to dress, when I am putting away my charcoal, Mr. Hrbik comes to stand beside me. I rip out the drawings I have made, intending to crumple them up, but he puts his hand quickly on mine.

“Save these,” he says.

“Why?” I say. “They’re no good.”

“You will look at them later,” he says, “and you will see how far you have come. You can draw objects very well. But as yet you cannot draw life. God first made the bowdy out of dirt, and after he breathed in the soul. Both are necessary. Dirt and soul.” He gives me a brief smile, squeezes my upper arm. “There must be passion.”

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.

Chapter 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 originally 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, bleachedout 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 these 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 something 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 got routinely 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.

Chapter 50

I’m in a beer parlor, drinking ten-cent 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, even in daytime, because they aren’t allowed to have windows you can see in through from the street. This is to avoid corrupting minors. I am a minor myself—the legal drinking age is twenty-one—but none of the waiters ever asks for my I.D. Jon says I look so young they think I’d never have the nerve to try it unless I was really overage. 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 turtle-necks: 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, with a tiny, gaspy laugh, as if the air is going into her instead of out, “that’s mean! You shouldn’t call him that!”

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.

Chapter 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.

Jesus has trouble looking like a real baby because his arms and legs are too long and spindly. Even when he does look like a baby, he’s never newborn. I’ve seen newborn babies, with their wizened dried-apricot look, and these Jesuses are nothing like them. It’s as if they’ve been born at the age of one year, or else are shriveled men. There’s a lot of red and blue in these pictures, and a lot of breast-feeding.

The dry voice from the darkness concentrates on the formal properties of the compositions, the arrangement of cloth in folds to accentuate circularity, the rendering of textures, the uses of perspective in archways and in the tiles underfoot. We skim over the breast-feeding: the pointer emerging from nowhere never alights on these bared breasts, some of which are an unpleasant pinky-green or veiny, or have a hand pressing the nipple and even real milk. There is some shifting in the seats at this: nobody wants to think about breast-feeding, not the professor and certainly not the girls. Over coffee they shiver: they themselves are fastidious, they will bottle-feed, which is anyway more sanitary.

“The point of the breast-feeding,” I say, “is that the Virgin is humble enough to do it. Most women then got their kids wet-nursed by somebody else, if they could afford it.” I have read this in a book, dug up from the depths of the stacks, in the library.

“Oh, Elaine,” they say. “You’re such a brain.”

“The other point is that Christ came to earth as a mammal,” I say. “I wonder what Mary did for diapers?

Now that would be a relic: the Sacred Diaper. How come there are no pictures of Christ on the potty? I know there’s a piece of the Holy Foreskin around, but what about the Holy Shit?”

“You’re awful!”

I grin, I cross my ankle over my knee, I put my elbows on the table. I enjoy pestering the girls in this minor, trivial way: it shows I am not like them.

This is one life, my life of daytimes. My other, my real life, takes place at night. I’ve been watching Susie closely, and paying attention to what she does. Susie is not in fact my age, she is two years older and more, she’s almost twenty-one. She doesn’t live at home with her parents, but in a bachelorette apartment in one of the new high-rise buildings on Avenue Road, north of St. Clair. It is thought her parents pay for this. How else could she afford it? These buildings have elevators in them, and wide foyers with plants, and are called things like The Monte Carlo. Living in them is a daring and sophisticated thing to do, though scoffed at by the painters: trios of nurses live there. The painters themselves live on Bloor Street or Queen, above hardware stores and places that sell suitcases wholesale, or on side streets where there are immigrants.

Susie stays after class, she turns up early, she hangs around; during the class itself she looks at Mr. Hrbik only sideways, furtively. I meet her coming out of his office and she jumps and smiles at me, then turns and calls, artificially and too loudly, “Thank you, Mr. Hrbik! See you next week!” She gives a little wave, although the door is partly closed and he can’t possibly see her: the wave is for me. I now guess what I should have spotted right away: she is having a love affair with Mr. Hrbik. Also, she thinks nobody has figured this out.

In this she is wrong. I overhear Marjorie and Babs discussing it in an oblique way: “Listen, kid, it’s one way to pass the course,” is what they say. “Wish I could do it just by flipping on my back.” “Don’t you wish! Those days are long gone, eh?” And they laugh in a comfortable way, as if what is going on is nothing at all, or funny.

I don’t think this love affair is at all funny. Love affair is how I think of it; I can’t detach the word affair from the word love, although which of them loves the other is not clear. I decide that it’s Mr. Hrbik who loves Susie. Or he doesn’t really love her: he’s besotted by her. I like this word besotted, suggestive as it is of sogginess, soppiness, flies drunk on syrup. Susie herself is incapable of love, she’s too shallow. I think of her as the conscious one, the one in control: she’s toying with him, in a hard, lacquered way straight out of forties movie posters. Hard as nails, and I even know what color of nails: Fire and Ice. This, despite her easily hurt look, her ingratiating ways. She throws off guilt like a sweet aroma, and Mr. Hrbik staggers besotted toward his fate.

After she realizes the people in the class know—Babs and Marjorie have a way of conveying their knowledge—Susie becomes bolder. She starts referring to Mr. Hrbik by his first name, and popping him into sentences: Josef thinks, Josef says. She always knows where he is. Sometimes he is in Montreal for the weekend, where they have much better restaurants and decent wines. She’s definite about this, although she’s never been there. She throws out inside tidbits of information about him: he was married in Hungary, but his wife didn’t come with him and now he’s divorced. He has two daughters whose pictures he keeps in his wallet. It kills him to be separated from them—“It just kills him,” she says softly, her eyes misting.

Marjorie and Babs gobble this up. Already she’s losing her floozie status with them, she’s entering the outskirts of domesticity. They egg her on: “Listen, I don’t blame you! I think he’s just cute as a button!”

“I could eat him up! But that would be robbing the cradle, eh?” In the washroom the two of them sit side by side in separate cubicles, talking over the noise of gushing pee, while I stand in front of the mirror, listening in. “I just hope he knows what he’s doing. A nice kid like her.” What they mean is that he should marry her. Or perhaps they mean that he should marry her if she gets pregnant. That would be the decent thing.

The painters, on the other hand, turn rough on her. “Jeez, will you shut up about Josef! You’d think the sun shines out of his ass!” But she can’t shut up. She resorts to craven, apologetic giggling, which annoys them further, and me also. I’ve seen that saturated, brimming look before. I feel that Mr. Hrbik needs protecting, or even rescuing. I don’t yet know that a man can be admirable in many ways but a jerk in others. Also I haven’t yet learned that chivalry in men is idiocy in women: men can get out of a rescue a lot more easily, once they get into it.

Chapter 52

I am still living at home, which is humiliating; but why should I pay extra to live in a dormitory, when the university is in the same city? This is my father’s view, and the reasonable one. Little does he know it isn’t a dormitory I have in mind, but a crumbling walk-up above a bakery or cigar store, with streetcars rumbling by outside and the ceilings covered with egg cartons painted black. But I no longer sleep in my childhood room with the vanilla-colored light fixture and the window curtains. I’ve retreated to the cellar, claiming I can study better. Down there in a dim storage room adjacent to the furnace I’ve set up a realm of ersatz squalor. From the cupboardful of old camping equipment I’ve excavated one of the army surplus cots and a lumpy khaki sleeping bag, short-circuiting my mother’s plans to move my bed down to the cellar so I can have a proper mattress. On the walls I’ve taped theater posters, from local productions—Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Sartre’s No Exit—with deliberate fingerprints and inkstain-black lettering on them, and shadowy figures that look as if they’ve run in the wash; also several of my careful drawings of feet. My mother thinks the theater posters are gloomy, and doesn’t understand the feet at all: feet should have a body. I narrow my eyes at her, knowing better.

As for my father, he thinks my talent for drawing is impressive, but wasted. It would have been better applied to cross sections of stems and the cells of algae. For him I am a botanist manqué. His view of life has darkened since Mr. Banerji returned to India. There is some obscurity around this: it is not talked of much. My mother says he was homesick, and hints at a nervous breakdown, but there was more to it than that. “They wouldn’t promote him,” says my father. There’s a lot behind they (not we), and wouldn’t (not didn’t). “He wasn’t properly appreciated.” I think I know what this means. My father’s view of human nature has always been bleak, but scientists were excluded from it, and now they aren’t. He feels betrayed.

My parents’ footsteps pace back and forth above my head; the sounds of the household, the Mixmaster and the telephone and the distant news, filter down to me as if in illness. I emerge, blinking, for meals and sit in stupor and demi-silence, picking at my chicken fricassee and mashed potatoes, while my mother comments on my lack of appetite and pallor and my father tells me useful and interesting things as if I am still young. Do I realize that nitrogen fertilizers are destroying fish fife by fostering an overgrowth of algae?

Have I heard of the new disease which will turn us all into deformed cretins unless the paper companies are forced to stop dumping mercury into the rivers? I do not realize, I have not heard.

“Are you getting enough sleep, dear?” says my mother.

“Yes,” I say untruthfully.

My father has noticed an ad in the paper, for an atomic radiation monster insect movie. “As you know,”

he says, “those giant grasshoppers could never actually exist. At that size their respiratory systems would collapse.”

I do not know.

In April, while I’m studying for exams and before the buds come out, my brother Stephen gets arrested. This happens the way it would.

Stephen has not been here as he should have been to help me out at the dinner table, he hasn’t been home all year. Instead he’s running around loose in the world. He’s studying Astrophysics at a university in California, having finished his undergraduate degree in two years instead of four. Now he is doing graduate work.

I have no clear picture of California, having never been there, but I think of it as sunny, and warm all the time. The sky is a vibrant aniline blue, the trees a preternatural green. I populate it with tanned, handsome men in sunglasses and sports shirts with palm trees on them, and with real palm trees, and with blond, long-legged women, also tanned, with white convertibles.

Among these sunglassed, fashionable people my brother is an anomaly. After he left his boys’ school he reverted to his old, unkempt ways, and goes around in his moccasins and his sweaters with the worn-through elbows. He doesn’t get a haircut unless reminded, and who is there to remind him? He walks among the palm trees, oblivious, whistling, his head sheathed in a halo of invisible numbers. What do the Californians make of him? They think he is a kind of tramp.

On this particular day he takes his binoculars and his butterfly book and heads out into the countryside on his secondhand bicycle, to look for Californian butterflies. He comes to a promising field, descends, locks up the bike: he is prudent enough within limits. He heads into the field, which must have tall grass in it and some smallish bushes. He sees two exotic Californian butterflies and starts in pursuit of them, pausing to scan them with his binoculars; but at this distance he can’t identify them, and every time he moves forward they take off.

He follows them to the end of the field, where there is a chain-link fence. They fly through it, he climbs over. On the other side there’s another field, a flatter one with less vegetation. There’s a dirt road crossing it, but he disregards this and follows the butterflies, red and white and black in color, with an hourglass pattern, something he’s never seen before. At the other side of this field there’s another fence, a higher one, and he scales this too. Then, when the butterflies have finally stopped, on a low tropical bush with pink flowers, and he’s down on one knee focusing his binoculars, three uniformed men in a jeep drive up.

“What’re you doing in here?” they say.

“In where?” says my brother. He’s impatient with them, they’ve disturbed the butterflies, which have flown off again.

“Didn’t you see the signs?” they say. “The ones that said, DANGER, KEEP OUT?”

“No,” says my brother. “I was chasing those butterflies.”

“Butterflies?” says one. The second one makes a twirling motion beside his ear, with his finger, denoting craziness. “Wacko,” he says. The third one says, “You expect us to believe that?”

“What you believe is your own concern,” says my brother. Or something of the sort.

“Wise guy,” they say, because this is what Americans say in comic books. I add some cigarettes, in the sides of their mouths, a few pistols and other hardware, and boots.

It turns out they are the military and this is a military testing zone. They take my brother back to their headquarters and lock him up. Also they confiscate his binoculars. They don’t believe he’s a graduate student in Astrophysics out chasing butterflies, they think he’s a spy, although they can’t figure out why he would have been so open about it. Spy novels, as I and the military know but my brother does not, are crawling with spies who pretend to be harmless butterfly fanciers.

Finally they allow him to make a phone call, and his graduate supervisor from the university has to come and bail him out. When he goes back to retrieve his bike, it’s been pinched. I get the bare bones of this from my parents over the beef stew. They don’t know whether to be amused or alarmed. From my brother, however, I hear nothing of the sort. Instead I get a letter, written in pencil on a page torn from a loose-leaf notebook. His letters always begin without greeting and end without signature, as if they’re part of one single letter, unrolling through time like an endless paper towel. He’s writing this letter, he says, from the top of a tree, where he’s watching the football game over the stadium wall—cheaper than buying a ticket—and eating a peanut butter sandwich, cheaper than eating in a restaurant: he doesn’t like monetary transactions. There are in fact several grease spots on the paper. He says he can see a bunch of pom-pom-covered capons jumping up and down. These must be the cheerleaders. He’s living in a student dormitory with a lot of mucus membranes who do nothing but drool over girls and get pissed on American beer. In his opinion this takes some doing, as the stuff is weaker than shampoo and tastes like it into the bargain. In the mornings he eats prefrozen reheated fried eggs, which are square in shape and have ice crystals in the yolks. A triumph of modern technology, he says. Apart from that he’s enjoying himself, as he is hard at work on The Nature of the Universe. The burning question is: is the universe more like a giant ever-enlarging blimp, or does it pulsate, does it expand and contract? Probably the suspense is killing me, but I will just have to wait a few years till he works out the final answer. TUNE IN FOR THE NEXT THRILLING INSTALLMENT, he writes, in block letters. I hear you’ve gone into the picture business, he continues in normal-sized writing. I used to do that sort of thing when I was younger. I hope you’re taking your cod liver oil pills and keeping out of trouble. And that is the end of the letter.

I think of my brother sitting at the top of a tree, in California. He no longer knows who he’s writing to, because I have surely changed beyond all recognition. And I no longer know who’s writing. I think of him as staying always the same, but of course this can’t be true. He must know things by now that he didn’t know before, as I do.

Also: if he’s eating a sandwich and writing a letter both at the same time, how is he holding on? He seems happy enough, up there in his perch of a sniper. But he should be more careful. What I have always assumed in him to be bravery may be merely an ignorance of consequences. He thinks he is safe, because he is what he says he is. But he’s out in the open, and surrounded by strangers.

Chapter 53

I sit in a French restaurant with Josef, drinking white wine and eating snails. They’re the first snails I have ever eaten, this is the first French restaurant I have ever been in. It’s the only French restaurant in Toronto, according to Josef. It’s called La Chaumière, which Josef says means “thatched cottage.” La Chaumière, is not however a thatched cottage, but a prosaic, dowdy building like other Toronto buildings. The snails themselves look like large dark pieces of snot; you eat them with a two-pronged fork. I think they are quite good, though rubbery.

Josef says they aren’t fresh snails but have come out of a tin. He says this sadly, with resignation, as if it means the end, though the end of what is not clear; this is how he says many things. It was the way he first said my name, for instance. That was back in May, in the last week of Life Drawing. Each of us was supposed to meet with Mr. Hrbik for an individual evaluation, to discuss our progress during the year. Marjorie and Babs were ahead of me, standing in the hall with takeout coffees.

“Hi, kid,” they said. Marjorie was telling a story about how a man exposed himself to her in Union Station, where she had gone to meet her daughter on the train from Kingston. Her daughter was my age, and going to Queen’s.

“He had on a raincoat, would you believe,” said Marjorie.

“Oh God,” said Babs.

“So I looked him in the eye—the eye—and I said, ”Can’t you do any better than that?“ I mean, talk about weenies. No wonder the poor boob runs around in train stations trying to get somebody to look at it!”

“And?”

“Listen, what goes up must come down, eh?”

They snorted, spewing droplets of coffee, coughing out smoke. As usual I found them slightly disreputable: making jokes about things that were no joking matter.

Susie came out of Mr. Hrbik’s office. “Hi, you guys,” she said, trying for cheer. Her eyeshadow was smudged, her eyes pinkish. I’d been reading modern French novels, and William Faulkner as well. I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession, with undertones of nausea. Susie was the sort of girl who would go in for this kind of love. She would be abject, she would cling and grovel. She would lie on the floor, moaning, hanging onto Mr. Hrbik’s legs, her hair falling like blond seaweed over the black leather of his shoes (he would have his shoes on, being about to stalk out of the door). From this angle, Mr. Hrbik was cut off at the knees and Susie’s face was invisible. She would be squashed by passion, obliterated.

I was not sorry for her, however. I was a little envious.

“Poor bunny rabbit,” Babs said behind her retreating back.

“Europeans,” said Marjorie. “I don’t believe for a minute he was ever divorced.”

“Listen, maybe he was never even married.”

“What about those kids of his?”

“Most likely his nieces or something.”

I scowled at them. Their voices were way too loud; Mr. Hrbik would hear them. After they had gone it was my turn. I went in, and stood while Mr. Hrbik sat, going through my portfolio, which was spread out on his desk. I thought it was this that was making me nervous. He flipped through the pages, hands, heads, bottoms, in silence, chewing his pencil. “This is nice,” he said at last. “You have made progress. This is more relaxed, this line here.”

“Where?” I said, leaning my hand on the desk, bending forward. He turned his head to the side, toward me, and there were his eyes. They were not purple after all but dark brown.

“Elaine, Elaine,” he said sadly. He put his hand over mine. Cold shot up my arm, into my stomach; I stood there frozen, revealed to myself. Is this what I’d been angling for, with my notions of rescue?

He shook his head, as if he’d given up or had no choice, then drew me down, between his knees. He didn’t even stand up. So I was on the floor, on my knees, with my head tilted back, his hands caressing the back of my neck. I’d never been kissed that way before. It was like a perfume ad: foreign and dangerous and potentially degrading. I could get up and run for it, but if I stayed put, even for one more minute, there would be no more groping in car seats or movie theaters, no skirmishes over brassiere hooks. No nonsense, no fooling around.

We went to Josef’s apartment in a taxi. In the taxi Josef sat quite far apart from me, although he kept his hand on my knee. I was not used to taxis then, and thought the driver was looking at us in the rearview mirror.

Josef’s apartment was on Hazelton Avenue, which was not quite a slum although close to it. The houses there are old, close together, with frumpy little front gardens and pointed roofs and moldering wooden scrollwork around the porches. There were cars parked bumper to bumper along the sidewalk. Most of the houses were in pairs, attached together down one side. It was in one of these crumbling, pointy-roofed twin houses that Josef lived. He had the second floor.

A fat older man in shirtsleeves and suspenders was rocking on the porch of the house next to Josef’s. He stared as Josef paid the taxi, then as we came up the front walk. “Nice day,” he said.

“Isn’t it?” I said. Josef paid no attention. He put his hand lightly on the back of my neck as we went up the narrow inner stairs. Everywhere he touched me felt heavy.

His apartment was three rooms: a front room, a middle room with a kitchenette, and a back room. The rooms were small, and there was little furniture. It was as if he’d just moved in, or was moving out. His bedroom was painted mauve. On the walls were several prints, which were of elongated figures, murkily colored. There was nothing else in this room but a mattress on the floor, covered with a Mexican blanket. I looked at it, and thought I was seeing adult life.

Josef kissed me, standing up this time, but I felt awkward. I was afraid someone would see in through the window. I was afraid he would ask me to take off my own clothes, that he would then turn me this way and that, looking at me from a distance. I didn’t like being looked at from behind: it was a view over which I had no control. But if he asked this I would have to do it, because any hesitation on my part would place me beneath consideration.

He lay down on the mattress, and looked up as if waiting. After a moment I lay down beside him and he kissed me again, gently undoing my buttons. The buttons were on an outsize cotton shirt, which was what had replaced the turtlenecks now that it was warm. I put my arms around him, and thought: he was in the war.

“What about Susie?” I said. As soon as I said it I realized it was a high school question.

“Susie?” Josef asked, as if trying to remember her name. His mouth was against my ear; the name was like a regretful sigh.

The Mexican blanket was scratchy, which did not bother me: sex was supposed to be unpleasant the first time. I expected the smell of rubber too, and the pain; but there was not as much pain, and not nearly as much blood as everyone said.

Josef was not expecting the pain. “This is hurting you?” he said at one point. “No,” I said, flinching, and he did not stop. He was not expecting the blood either. He would have to get his blanket cleaned, but he didn’t mention this. He was considerate, and stroked my thigh.

Josef has gone on all summer. Sometimes he takes me to restaurants, with checked tablecloths and candles stuck in Chianti bottles; sometimes to foreign films about Swedes and Japanese, in small uncrowded theaters. But we always end up back at his apartment, under or on top of the Mexican blanket. His lovemaking is unpredictable; sometimes he is avid, sometimes routine, sometimes absent-minded, as if doodling. It’s partly the unpredictability that keeps me hooked. This and his need, which seems to me at times helpless and beyond his control.

“Don’t leave me,” he says, running his hands over me; always before, not after. “I couldn’t bear it.” This is an old-fashioned thing to say, and in another man I would find it comical, but not in Josef. I am in love with his need. Only to think of it makes me feel suffused, inert, like the flesh of a watermelon. For this reason I’ve canceled my plans to return to the Muskoka resort, to work as I did last summer. Instead I’ve taken a job at the Swiss Chalet on Bloor Street. This is a place that serves nothing but chicken,

“breasted,” as it says on the sign. Chicken and dipping sauce, and coleslaw and white buns, and one flavor of ice cream: Burgundy Cherry, which is a striking shade of purple. I wear a uniform with my name stitched on the pocket, as in high school gym class.

Josef sometimes picks me up there, after work. “You smell of chicken,” he murmurs in the taxi, his face against my neck. I’ve lost all modesty in taxis; I lean against him, his hand around me, under my arm, on my breast, or I lie down along the seat, head in his lap.

Also I have moved out of home. On the nights when I’m with him, Josef wants me to stay all night. He wants to wake up with me asleep beside him, start to make love to me without waking me up. I’ve told my parents it’s only for the summer, so I can be closer to the Swiss Chalet. They think it’s a waste of money. They are racketing around up north somewhere and I would have the house to myself; but my idea of myself and my parents’ idea of me no longer belong in the same place. If I’d gone to Muskoka I wouldn’t be living at home this summer either, but not living at home in the same city is different. Now I live with two of the other Swiss Chalet girls, student workers like myself, in a corridor-shaped apartment on Harbord Street. The bathroom is festooned with stockings and underpants; hair rollers perch on the kitchen counter like bristly caterpillars, dishes cake in the sink. I see Josef twice a week, and know enough not to try calling him or seeing him at other times. Either he won’t be there or he will be with Susie, because he hasn’t stopped seeing her, not at all. But we are not to tell her about me; we are to keep it secret. “She would be so terribly hurt,” he says. It’s the last one in line who must bear the burden of knowing: if anyone is to be hurt it will have to be me. But I feel entrusted by him: we are in this together, this protecting of Susie. It’s for her good. In this there is the satisfaction of all secrets: I know something she doesn’t.

She’s found out somehow that I’m working at the Swiss Chalet—probably it’s Josef who’s told her, casually, skirting discovery, probably he finds it exciting to think of us together—and once in a while she comes in for a cup of coffee, late in the afternoon when there’s nobody much around. She’s gained a little weight, and the flesh of her cheeks is puffy. I can see what she’ll look like in fifteen years, if she isn’t careful.

I am nicer to her than I ever have been. Also I’m a little wary of her. If she finds out, will she lose whatever grip on herself is left and go for me with a steak knife?

She wants to talk. She wants us to get together sometime. She still says “Josef and me.” She looks forlorn.

Josef talks to me about Susie as if discussing a problem child. “She wants to get married,” he says. He implies she is being unreasonable, but that to deny her this thing, this too-expensive toy, wounds him deeply just the same. I have no wish to put myself in the same category: irrational, petulant. I don’t want to marry Josef, or anyone else. I have come to think of marriage as dishonorable, a crass trade-off rather than a free gift. And even the idea of marriage would diminish Josef, spoil him; this is not his place in the scheme of things. His place is to be a lover, with his secrecy and his almost-empty rooms, and his baleful memories and bad dreams. Anyway, I’ve put myself beyond marriage. I can see it back there, innocent and beribboned, like a child’s doll: irretrievable. Instead of marriage I will be dedicated to my painting. I will end up with my hair dyed, wearing outlandish clothes and heavy, foreign silver jewellery. I will travel a lot. Possibly I will drink.

(There is of course the specter of pregnancy. You can’t get a diaphragm unless you’re married, rubbers are sold under the counter and only to men. There are those girls who went too far in back seats and got knocked up and dropped out of high school, or had strange, never-explained accidents. There are jocular terms for it: up the spout, bun in the oven. But such washroom notions have nothing to do with Josef and his experienced mauve bedroom. They also have nothing to do with me, wrapped as I am in dense minor-key enchantment. But I make little checkmarks on my pocket calendar, all the same.) On the days when I have time off, when I’m not seeing Josef, I try to paint. Sometimes I draw with colored pencils. What I draw is the furniture in the apartment: the overstuffed sofa from the Sally Ann strewn with shed clothing, the bulbous lamp lent by a roommate’s mother, the kitchen stool. More often I don’t have the energy, and end up reading murder mysteries in the bathtub. Josef won’t tell me about the war, or about how he got out of Hungary during the revolution. He says these things are too disturbing for him and he wants only to forget them. He says there are many ways to die and some are less pleasant than others. He says I am lucky I will never have to know things like this.

“This country has no heroes,” he says. “You should keep it that way.” He tells me I am untouched. This is the way he wants me, he says. When he says these things he runs his hands over my skin as if he’s erasing me, rubbing me smooth.

But he tells me his dreams. He’s very interested in these dreams, and they are in fact like no dreams I can remember hearing about. There are red velvet curtains in them, red velvet sofas, red velvet rooms. There are white silk ropes in them, with tassels on the ends; there’s a lot of attention to fabrics. There are decaying teacups.

He dreams of a woman wrapped up in cellophane, even over her face, and of another walking along the railing of a balcony dressed in a white shroud, and of another lying facedown in the bathtub. When he tells me these dreams, he doesn’t look at me exactly; it’s as if he’s looking at a point several inches inside my head. I don’t know how to respond, so I smile weakly. I’m a little jealous of these women in his dreams: none of them are me. Josef sighs and pats my hand. “You are so young,” he says. There is nothing that can be said in reply to this, although I don’t feel young. Right now I feel ancient, and overworked and too warm. The constant odor of breasting chicken is taking away my appetite. It’s late July, the Toronto humidity hangs like swamp gas over the city, and the air-conditioning at the Swiss Chalet broke down today. There were complaints. Someone upset a platter of quarters with buns and dipping sauce onto the kitchen floor, causing skids. The chef called me a stupid bitch.

“I have no country,” says Josef mournfully. He touches my cheek tenderly, gazing into my eyes. “You are my country now.”

I eat another tinned, inauthentic snail. It strikes me with no warning that I am miserable.

Chapter 54

Cordelia has run away from home. This is not how she puts it. She’s tracked me down through my mother. I meet her for coffee, during my afternoon break, not at the Swiss Chalet. I could get the coffee free, but by now I want to be out of there as much as possible, away from the sickly back-room odor of raw poultry, the rows of naked chickens like dead babies, the mushed-up, lukewarm, dog dish debris of customers’ meals. So instead we are in Murray‘s, down the street in the Park Plaza Hotel. It’s medium clean, and although there’s no air-conditioning there are ceiling fans. At least here I don’t know what goes on in the kitchen. Cordelia is thinner now, almost gaunt. The cheekbones of her long face are visible, her gray-green eyes are big in her face. Around each one of them is drawn a green line. She is tanned, her lips an understated orangey-pink. Her arms are angular, her neck elegant; her hair is pulled back like a ballerina’s. She’s wearing black stockings although it’s summer, and sandals, although the sandals are not dainty women’s summer sandals, but thick-soled and artistic, with primitive peasant buckles. Also a scoop-neck short-sleeved black jersey top that shows off her breasts, a full cotton skirt of a dull blue-green with abstract black swirls and squares on it, a wide black belt. She has on two heavy rings, one with a turquoise, and chunky square earrings, and a silver bracelet: Mexican silver. You would not say beautiful about her, but you would stare, as I am, doing: for the first time in her life she looks distinguished. We greeted each other on sight with the outstretched hands, the demi-hugs, the cries of surprise and delight that women are supposed to make who haven’t seen each other for a while. Now I slump in Murray‘s, drinking wishy-washy coffee, while Cordelia talks and I wonder why I have agreed to this. I am at a disadvantage: I’m in my crumpled, gravy-spotted Swiss Chalet uniform, my armpits are sweaty, my feet hurt, my hair in this humidity is unruly and dank and curling like singed wool. There are dark circles under my eyes, because last night was one of Josef’s nights.

Cordelia on the other hand is showing herself off to me. She wants me to see what has become of her, since her days of sloth and overeating and failure. She has reinvented herself. She’s cool as a cucumber, and brimming with casual news.

What she is doing is working at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival. She is a bit-part player. “Very minor things,” she says, waving her bracelet and rings dismissively, which means less minor than she says.

“You know. Spear carrying, though of course I don’t carry spears.” She laughs, and lights a cigarette. I wonder if Cordelia has ever eaten snails, decide she is most likely on familiar terms with them; a depressing thought.

The Stratford Shakespearean Festival is quite famous by now. It was started several years ago in the town of Stratford, which has an Avon River running through it, and swans of both colors. I have read all this in magazines. People go there on the train, in buses, or in cars with picnic baskets; sometimes they stay all weekend and see three or four Shakespeare plays, one after the other. At first this festival was held in a big tent, like a circus. But now there is a real building, a strange, modern building, circular in shape. “So you have to project to three sides. It’s such a strain on the voice,” Cordelia says with a deprecating smile, as if she is projecting and straining her voice all in the line of work. She is like someone making herself up as she goes along. She’s improvising.

“What do your parents think?” I say. This has been on my own mind lately: what parents think. Her face closes down for a moment. “They’re pleased I’m doing something,” she says.

“What about Perdie and Mirrie?”

“You know Perdie,” she says tightly. “Always the little put-downs. But that’s enough about me. What do you think of me?” This is an old joke of hers, and I laugh. “Seriously, what are you up to these days?”

It’s the tone I remember: polite but not too interested. “Since the last time I saw you.”

I remember this last time with guilt. “Oh, nothing much,” I say. “Going to school. You know.” Right now it does look like nothing much. What have I really done all year? A smattering of art history, messing around with charcoal. There’s nothing to show. There’s Josef, but he’s not exactly an accomplishment and I decide not to mention him.

“School!” says Cordelia. “Was I glad to see the end of school. God, what boredom.” Stratford is only on in the summers, though. She will have to think of something else for the winter. Maybe the Earle Grey Players, going around to high schools. Maybe she will be ready for that. She got the job at Stratford with the help of one of the Earle Grey cousins, who remembered her from her bedsheet days at Burnham. “People who know people,” she says. She is one of Prospero’s attendant spirits in The Tempest, and has to wear a body stocking, with a gauzy costume over top, sprinkled with dried leaves and spangles. “Obscene,” she says. She’s also a mariner in the first scene; she can get away with this because of her height. She’s a court lady in Richard III, and she’s the chief nun in Measure for Measure. In this one she actually speaks some lines. She recites for me, in a honey-colored Englishy voice:

“At rehearsal I kept getting mixed up,” she says. She counts on her fingers. “Speak, hide face, show face, shut up.” She puts her hands together in an attitude of prayer, bows forward, lowering her head. Then she gets up and does a full court curtsy out of Richard III, with the women shoppers having tea in Murray‘s gawking at her. “What I’d like to do next year is the First Witch in ”The Tartans.“ ”When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?“ The Old Man says I might be ready for it. He thinks it would be brilliant to have a young First Witch.”

The Old Man, it turns out, is Tyrone Guthrie the director, from England and so famous I can’t pretend not to have heard of him. “That’s great,” I say.

“Remember ”The Tartans’ at Burnham? Remember that cabbage?“ she says. ”I was so humiliated.“

I don’t want to remember. The past has become discontinuous, like stones skipped across water, like postcards: I catch an image of myself, a dark blank, an image, a blank. Did I ever wear bat-wing sleeves and velveteen slippers, did I wear dresses like tinted marshmallows to formal dances, shuffle around the floor with some stranger’s groin digging into mine? The dried corsages were thrown out long ago, the diplomas and class pins and photos must be down in my mother’s cellar, in the steamer trunk along with the tarnishing silver. I glimpse those photos, rows and rows of lipsticked, spit-curled children. I would never smile, for those pictures. I would gaze stony-faced into the distance, beyond such adolescent diversions.

I remember my mean mouth, I remember how wise I thought I was. But I was not wise then. Now I am wise.

“Remember how we used to pinch things?” says Cordelia. “That was the only thing I really liked about that whole time.”

“Why?” I say. I had not liked it much. I was always afraid of getting caught.

“It was something I could have,” she says, and I’m not sure what she means. Cordelia takes her sunglasses out of her shoulder bag and puts them on. There I am in her mirror eyes, in duplicate and monochrome, and a great deal smaller than life-size.

Cordelia gets me a free ticket to Stratford, so I can see her in action. I go on the bus. It’s a matinee: I can get there, see the show, then take the bus back in time for my evening shift at the Swiss Chalet. The play is The Tempest. I watch for Cordelia, and when Prospero’s attendants come on, with music and jittery lighting effects, I peer hard, trying to see which one she is, behind the disguise of costume. But I can’t tell.

Chapter 55

Josef is rearranging me. “You should wear your hair loose,” he says, unpinning it from its ramshackle bun, running his hands through it to make it fluff out. “You look like a marvelous gypsy.” He presses his mouth to my collarbone, untucks the bedsheet he’s draped me in.

I stand still and let him do this. I let him do what he likes. It’s August and too hot to move. Haze hangs over the city like wet smoke; it covers my skin with an oily film, seeps into my flesh. I move through the days like a zombie, going from one hour to the next without direction. I’ve stopped drawing the furniture at the apartment; I fill the bathtub with cool water and get into it, but I no longer read in there. Soon it will be time to go back to school. I can hardly think about it.

“You should wear purple dresses,” says Josef. “It would be an improvement.” He places me against the twilight of the window, turns me, stands back a little, running his hand up and down my side. I no longer care whether anyone can see in. I feel my knees begin to give, my mouth loosen. In our time together he does not pace or tug his hair, he moves slowly, gently, with great deliberation. Josef takes me to the Park Plaza Hotel Roof Garden, in my new purple dress. It has a tight bodice, a low neck, a full skirt; it brushes against my bare legs as I walk. My hair is loose, and damp. I think it looks like a mop. But I catch a glimpse of myself, without expecting it, in the smoked-mirror wall of the elevator as we go up, and I see for an instant what Josef sees: a slim woman with cloudy hair, pensive eyes in a thin white face. I recognize the style: late nineteenth century. Pre-Raphaelite. I should be holding a poppy.

We sit on the outside patio, drinking Manhattans and looking over the stone balustrade. Josef has recently discovered a taste for Manhattans. This is one of the tallest buildings around. Below us Toronto festers in the evening heat, the trees spreading like worn moss, the lake zinc in the distance. Josef tells me he once shot a man in the head; what disturbed him was how easy it was to do it. He says he hates the Life Drawing class, he will not go on with it forever, cooped up in this provincial deadwater teaching the rudiments to morons. “I come from a country that no longer exists,” he says, “and you come from a country that does not yet exist.” Once I would have found this profound. Now I wonder what he means.

As for Toronto, he says, it has no gaiety or soul. In any case, painting itself is a hangover from the European past. “It is no longer important,” he says, waving it away with one hand. He wants to be in films, he wants to direct, in the United States. He will go there as soon as it can be arranged. He has good connections. There’s a whole network of Hungarians, for instance. Hungarians, Poles, Czechoslovakians. There is more opportunity in films down there, to say the least, since the only films made in this country are short ones that come on before real movies, about leaves spiraling downward into pools or flowers opening in time-lapse photography, to flute music. The other people he knows are doing well in the United States. They will get him in.

I hold Josef’s hand. His lovemaking these days is ruminative, as if he is thinking of something else. I discover I am somewhat drunk; also that I am afraid of heights. I have never been this high up in the air before. I think of standing close to the stone balustrade, toppling slowly over. From here you can see the United States, a thin fuzz on the horizon. Josef says nothing about me going there with him. I ask nothing. Instead he says, “You are very silent.” He touches my cheek. “Mysterious.” I do not feel mysterious, but vacant.

“Would you do anything for me?” he says, gazing into my eyes. I sway toward him, far away from the earth. Yes would be so easy.

“No,” I say. This is a surprise to me. I don’t know where it has come from, this unexpected and stubborn truthfulness. It sounds rude.

“I did not think so,” he says sadly.

Jon appears one afternoon in the Swiss Chalet. I don’t recognize him at first because I don’t look at him. I’m wiping off the table with a dishrag, every movement an effort, my arm heavy with lethargy. Last night I was with Josef, but tonight I won’t be because it’s not my night, it’s Susie’s night. These days Josef rarely mentions Susie. When he does, it’s with nostalgia, as if she’s already a thing of the past, or beautifully dead, like someone in a poem. But this may be only his way of speaking. They may spend prosaic domestic evenings together, him reading the paper while she serves up a casserole. Despite his claim that I am a secret, they may discuss me the way Josef and I used to discuss Susie. This is not a comfortable thought.

I prefer to think of Susie as a woman shut inside a tower, up there in The Monte Carlo on Avenue Road, gazing out the window over the top of her painted sheet metal balcony, weeping feebly, waiting for Josef to appear. I can’t imagine her having any other life apart from that. I can’t see her washing out her underpants, for instance, and wringing them in a towel, hanging them on the bathroom towel rack, as I do. I can’t imagine her eating. She is limp, without will, made spineless by love; as I am.

“Long time no see,” says Jon. He leaps into focus beyond my wiping arm, grinning at me, his teeth white in a face more tanned than I remember. He’s leaning on the table I’m wiping, wearing a gray T-shirt, old jeans cut off above the knees, running shoes with no socks. He looks healthier than he did in the winter. I’ve never seen him in the daytime before.

I’m conscious of my stained uniform: do I smell of underarm sweat, of chicken fat? “How did you get in here?” I say.

“Walked,” he says. “How about a coffee?”

He has a summer job, with the Works Department, filling in potholes in the roads, tarring over the cracks made by frost heave; he does have a faint tarry smell about him. He’s not what you would call clean.

“How about a beer, later?” he says. This is a thing he’s said often before: he wants a passport to the Ladies and Escorts, as usual. I’m not doing anything, so I say, “Why not? But I’ll have to change.”

After work I take the precaution of a shower and put on my purple dress. I meet him at the Maple Leaf and we go into the Ladies and Escorts. We sit there in the gloom, which is at least cool, and drink draft beer. It’s awkward with just him: before there was always a group of them. Jon asks me what I’ve been up to and I say nothing much. He asks me if I’ve seen Uncle Joe around anywhere, and I say no.

“Probably he’s disappeared into Susie’s knickers,” he says. “The lucky shit.” He’s still treating me like an honorary boy, still saying crude things about women. I’m surprised at the word knickers. He must have picked it up from Colin the Englishman. I wonder if he knows about me as well, whether he’s making remarks about my knickers behind my back. But how could he?

He says the Works Department is good money, but he doesn’t let on to the other guys that he’s a painter, especially not to the old regulars. “They might think I’m a fruit or something,” he says. I drink more draft beer than I should, and then the lights flicker on and off and it’s closing time. We walk out onto the hot night summer street, and I don’t want to go home by myself.

“Can you get back all right?” says Jon. I say nothing. “Come on, I’ll walk you,” he says. He puts his hand on my shoulder and I smell his smell of tar and outdoors dust and sunny skin, and I begin to cry. I stand in the street, with the drunks staggering out of the Men Only, my hands pressed to my mouth, crying and feeling stupid.

Jon is startled. “Hey, pal,” he says, patting me awkwardly. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I say. Being called pal makes me cry even more. I feel like a wet sock; I feel ugly. I hope he will think I’ve had too much to drink.

He puts an arm around me, gives a squeeze. “Come on,” he says. “We’ll go for coffee.”

I stop crying as we walk along the street. We walk to a door beside a wholesale suitcase store, he takes out a key, and we go up the stairs in the dark. Inside the upstairs door he kisses me, with his tarry, beery mouth. There are no lights on. I put my arms around his waist and hold on as if I’m sinking into mud, and he lifts me like that and carries me through the dark room, bumping into the walls and furniture, and we fall together onto the floor.