Cat's eye (45 page)

I have an image of spiriting Cordelia away, rescuing her. I could do it, or something like it; but then where would she end up? Hiding out in our apartment, sleeping on an improvised bed like the draft dodgers, a refugee, a displaced person, smoking up the kitchen with Jon wondering who the hell she is and why she’s there. Things are uneven between us as it is; I’m not sure I can afford Cordelia. She’d be one more sin of mine, to be chalked up to the account he’s keeping in his head. Also I am not feeling totally glued together myself.

And there’s Sarah to think of. Would she take to this Auntie Cordelia? How is Cordelia with small children? And exactly how sick in the head is she, anyway? How long before I’d come back and find her out cold on the bathroom floor, or worse? In the middle of a bright red sunset. Jon’s work table is an arsenal, there are little saws lying around, little chisels. Maybe it would just be melodrama, a skin-deep slash or two, her old theatricality; though perhaps theatrical people are not less risky, but more. In the interests of the role they’ll sacrifice anything.

“I can’t, Cordelia,” I say gently. But I don’t feel gentle toward her. I am seething, with a fury I can neither explain nor express.
How dare you ask me?
I want to twist her arm, rub her face in the snow. The waitress brings the bill. “Are you sufficiently sophonsified?” I say to Cordelia, trying for lightness, and a change of subject. But Cordelia has never been stupid.

“So you won’t,” she says. And then, forlornly: “I guess you’ve always hated me.”

“No,” I say. “Why would I? No!” I am shocked. Why would she say such a thing? I can’t remember ever hating Cordelia.

“I’ll get out anyway,” she says. Her voice is not thick now, or hesitant. She has that stubborn, defiant look, the one I remember from years ago.
So?

I walk her back, deposit her. “I’ll come to visit you,” I say. I intend to, but know at the same time that the chances are slim. She’ll be all right, I tell myself. She was like this at the end of high school, and then things got better. They could again.

On the streetcar going back, I read the advertisements: a beer, a chocolate bar, a brassiere turning into a bird. I imitate relief. I feel free, and weightless.

But I am not free, of Cordelia.

I dream Cordelia falling, from a cliff or bridge, against a background of twilight, her arms outspread, her skirt open like a bell, making a snow angel in the empty air. She never hits or lands; she falls and falls, and I wake with my heart pounding and gravity cut from under me, as in an elevator plummeting out of control.

I dream her standing in the old Queen Mary schoolyard. The school is gone, there is nothing but a field, and the hill behind with the scrawny evergreen trees. She is wearing her snowsuit jacket, but she is not a child, she’s the age she is now. She knows I have deserted her, and she is angry. After a month, two months, three, I write Cordelia a note, on flowered notepaper of the sort that doesn’t leave much space for words. I purchase this notepaper specially. My note is written with such false cheerfulness I can barely stand to lick the flap of the envelope. In it I propose another visit. But my note comes back in the mail, with
address unknown
scrawled across it. I examine this writing from every angle, trying to figure out if it could be Cordelia’s, disguised. If it isn’t, if she’s no longer at the rest home, where has she gone? She could ring the doorbell at any minute, call on the phone. She could be anywhere.

I dream a mannequin statue, like one of Jody’s in the show, hacked apart and glued back together. It’s wearing nothing but a gauze costume, covered with spangles. It ends at the neck. Underneath its arm, wrapped in a white cloth, is Cordelia’s head.

Twelve – One Wing

I
n the corner of a parking lot, among the sumptuous boutiques, they’ve reconstructed a forties diner. 4-D’s Diner, it’s called. Not a renovation, brand-new.

They couldn’t tear this stuff down fast enough, once.

Inside it’s pretty authentic, except that it looks too clean; and it’s less forties than early fifties. They have a soda fountain countertop, with stools along it topped in acid lime-green, and vinyl-padded booths in a shade of shiny purple that looks like the skin of an early shark-finned convertible. A jukebox, chrome coat trees, grainy black-and-white photos on the walls, of real forties diners. The waitresses have white uniforms with black tab trim, although the shade of their red lipstick isn’t quite right and they should have run it around the edges of their mouths. The waiters have those soda jerk caps set at an angle, and the right haircuts, a close shave up the back of the neck. They re doing a roaring business. Kids in their twenties, mostly.

Really it’s like Sunnysides, done over as a museum. They could have Cordelia and me in here, in our bat wing sleeves and cinch belts, stuffed and mounted or made of wax, drinking our milkshakes, looking as bored as we could.

The last time I saw Cordelia, she was going through the door of the rest home. That was the last time I talked to her. Although it wasn’t the last time she talked to me.

There are no avocado and sprout sandwiches, the coffee is not espresso, the pie is coconut cream and no worse than it was then. This is what I have, coffee and pie, sitting in one of the purple booths, watching young people exclaim over what they think is the quaintness of the past. The past isn’t quaint while you’re in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as decor, not as the shape your life’s been squeezed into.

They have Elvis Presley zucchini molds now: you clamp them around your zucchini while it’s young, and as it grows it’s deformed into the shape of Elvis Presley’s head. Is this why he sang? To become a zucchini? Vegetarianism and reincarnation are in the air, but that’s taking it too far. I’d rather come back as a sow bug, myself; or a stir-fried shrimp. Though I suppose the whole idea’s more lenient than Hell.

“You’ve done it well,” I say to the waitress. “Of course the prices are wrong. It was ten cents for a coffee, then.”

“Really,” she says, not as a question. She gives me a dutiful smile:
Boring old frump.
She is half my age, living, already, a life I can’t imagine. Whatever her guilts are, her hates and terrors, they are not the same. What do they do about AIDS, these girls? They can’t just roll around in the hay, the way we did. Is there a courtship ritual that involves, perhaps, an exchange of doctors’ telephone numbers? For us it was pregnancy that was the scary item, the sexual booby trap, the thing that could finish you off. Not any more.

I pay the bill, overtip, gather up my packages, an Italian scarf for each of my daughters, a fountain pen for Ben. Fountain-pens are coming back. Somewhere in Limbo, all the old devices and appliances and costumes are lined up, waiting their turn for re-entry.

I walk up the street, along to the corner. The next street is Josef’s. I count houses: this one must be his. The front’s been ripped out and glassed over, the lawn is paving stone. There’s an antique child’s rocking horse in the window, a threadbare quilt, a wooden-headed doll with a battered face. Onetime throw-outs, recycled as money. Nothing so indiscreet as a price tag, which means outrageous. I wonder what became of Josef, eventually. If he’s still alive he must be sixty-five, or more. If he was a dirty old man then, how dirty is he now?

He did make a film. I think it was him; in any case, the director’s name was the same. I saw it by accident, at a film festival. This was a lot later, when I was already living in Vancouver. It was about two women with nebulous personalities and cloudy hair. They wandered through fields with the wind blowing their thin dresses against their thighs, and gazed inscrutably. One of them took apart a radio and dropped the pieces into a stream, ate a butterfly, and cut the throat of a cat, because she was deranged. These things wouldn’t have been as appealing if she had been ugly, instead of blond and ethereal. The other one made little slashes on the skin of her thigh, using an old-fashioned straight razor that had belonged to her grandfather. Toward the end she jumped off a railway overpass, into a river, her dress fluttering like a window curtain. Except for the colors of their hair, it was hard to tell the two of them apart.

The man in this film was in love with both of them and couldn’t make up his mind. Hence their craziness. This is what convinced me that it must have been Josef: it wouldn’t have occurred to him that they might have had reasons of their own for being crazy, apart from men.

None of the blood in this film was real blood. Women were not real to Josef, any more than he was real to me. This was why I could treat his sufferings with such scorn and unconcern: he wasn’t real. The reason I’ve never dreamed about him was that he belonged already to the world of dreams: discontinuous, irrational, obsessive.

I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it’s one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.

I can’t blame Josef for his film. He was entitled to his own versions, his own conjurings; as I am. I may have served his ends, but he served mine as well.

There is
Life Drawing,
for instance, hanging right now on the gallery wall, Josef preserved in aspic and good enough to eat. He is on the left side of the picture, stark-naked but turned with a twist half away from the viewer, so what you get is the ass end, then the torso in profile. On the right side is Jon, in the same position. Their bodies are somewhat idealized: less hairy than they really were, the muscle groups in higher definition, the skin luminous. I thought about putting Jockey shorts on them, in deference to Toronto, but decided against it. Both of them have wonderful bums.

Each of them is painting a picture, each picture is on an easel. Josef’s is of a voluptuous but not overweight woman, sitting on a stool with a sheet draped between her legs, her breasts exposed; her face is Pre-Raphaelite, brooding, consciously mysterious. Jon’s painting is a series of intestinal swirls, in hot pink, raspberry ripple red and Burgundy Cherry purple.

The model is seated on a chair between them, face front, bare feet flat on the floor. She’s clothed in a white bedsheet, wrapped around her below the breasts. Her hands are folded-neatly in her lap. Her head is a sphere of bluish glass.

I sit with Jon at a table in the roof bar of the Park Plaza Hotel, drinking white wine spritzers. My suggestion: I wanted to see it again. Outside, the skyline has changed: the Park Plaza is no longer the tallest building around, but a squat leftover, dwarfed by the svelte glassy towers that rise around it. Due south is the CN Tower, lifting up like a huge inverted icicle. This is the sort of architecture you used to see only in science fiction comic books, and seeing it pasted flat against the monotone lake-sky I feel I’ve stepped not forward in time but sideways, into a universe of two dimensions. But inside the bar not a lot has changed. The place still looks like a high-class Regency bordello. Even the waiters, with their good-grooming hair and air of harried discretion, look the same, and probably are. The management used to keep ties in the coat check, for gentlemen who’d forgotten them.
Forgotten
was the word, because surely no gentleman would deliberately choose to go tieless. It was a big thing when this place was cracked by women in pant suits. A chic black model did it: they couldn’t refuse to let her in, she could have hit them with racism. Even this memory dates me, and the little thrill of triumph that goes with it: what woman, now, would think of a pant suit as liberation?

I didn’t used to come here with Jon. He would have sneered, then, at the upholstered period chairs, the looped drapes, the men and women cut from a glossy whisky ad. It was Josef I came with, Josef whose hand I touched, across the surface of the table. Not Jon’s, as now.

It’s only the ends of the fingers, only lightly. This time we don’t say much: there’s none of the verbal prodding there was at lunch. There’s a shared vocabulary, of monosyllable and silence; we know why we’re here. Going down in the elevator, I look into the smoked-mirror wall and see my face in the dark glass obscured by time, as a stone overgrown. I could be any age.

We take a taxi back to the warehouse, our hands resting side by side on the seat. We go up the stairs to the studio, slowly, so we won’t get out of breath: neither one of us wants to be caught out by the other in a middle-aged wheeze. Jon’s hand is on my waist. It’s familiar there; it’s like knowing where the light switch is, in a house you once lived in but haven’t been back to for years. When we reach the door, before we go in, he pats me on the shoulder, a gesture of encouragement, and of wistful resignation.

“Don’t turn on the light,” I say.

Jon puts his arms around me, his face in the angle of my neck. It’s a gesture less of desire than of fatigue. The studio is the purplish gray of autumn twilight. The plaster casts of arms and legs glimmer whitely, like broken statues in a ruin. There’s a scatter of my clothes in the corner, empty cups dotted here and there, on the work counter, by the window, marking my daily trails, claiming space. This room seems like mine now, as if I’ve been living here all along, no matter where else I’ve been or what else I’ve been doing. It’s Jon who has been away, and has returned at last.

We undress each other, as we used to do at first; but more shyly. I don’t want to be awkward. I’m glad it’s dusk; I’m nervous about the backs of my thighs, the wrinkling above my knees, the soft fold across my stomach, not fatness exactly but a pleat. The hair on his chest is gray, a shock. I avoid looking at the small beer belly that’s grown on him, though I’m aware of it, of the changes in his body, as he must be of mine.

When we kiss, it’s with a gravity we lacked before. Before we were avid, and selfish. We make love for the comfort of it. I recognize him, I could recognize him in total darkness. Every man has his own rhythm, which remains the same. In this there is the relief of greeting. I don’t feel I’m being disloyal to Ben, only loyal to something else; which predates him, which has nothing to do with him. An old score.