Cat's eye (36 page)

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.

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.