Cat's eye (34 page)

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.

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.

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.