Cat's eye (33 page)

“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.

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.