Cat's eye (50 page)

I put a lot of work into that imagined body, white as a burdock root, flabby as pork fat. Hairy as the inside of an ear, I labored on it, with, I now see, considerable malice. But these pictures are not only mockery, not only desecration. I put light into them too. Each pallid leg, each steel-rimmed eye, is there as it was, as plain as bread. I have said,
Look.
I have said,
I see.
It’s the eyes I look at now. I used to think these were self-righteous eyes, piggy and smug inside their wire frames; and they are. But they are also defeated eyes, uncertain and melancholy, heavy with unloved duty. The eyes of someone for whom God was a sadistic old man; the eyes of a small town threadbare decency. Mrs. Smeath was a transplant to the city, from somewhere a lot smaller. A displaced person; as I was.

Now I can see myself, through these painted eyes of Mrs. Smeath: a frazzle-headed ragamuffin from heaven knows where, a gypsy practically, with a heathen father and a feckless mother who traipsed around in slacks and gathered weeds. I was unbaptized, a nest for demons: how could she know what germs of blasphemy and unfaith were breeding in me? And yet she took me in. Some of this must be true. I have not done it justice, or rather mercy. Instead I went for vengeance. An eye for an eye leads only to more blindness.

I move to the west wall, where the new paintings are. They are larger than my usual format, and space out the wall nicely.

The first one is called
Picoseconds.
“A
jeu d’esprit,
” says Charna, “which takes on the Group of Seven and reconstructs their vision of landscape in the light of contemporary experiment and postmodern pastiche.”

It is in fact a landscape, done in oils, with the blue water, the purple underpainting, the craggy rocks and windswept raggedy trees and heavy impasto of the twenties and thirties. This landscape takes up much of the painting. In the lower right-hand corner, in much the same out-of-the-way position as the disappearing legs of Icarus in the painting by Bruegel, my parents are making lunch. They have their fire going, the billy tin suspended over it. My mother in her plaid jacket bends over, stirring, my father adds a stick of wood to the fire. Our Studebaker is parked in the background. They are painted in another style: smooth, finely modulated, realistic as a snapshot. It’s as if a different light falls on them; as if they are being seen through a window which has opened in the landscape itself, to show what lies behind or within it.

Underneath them, like a subterranean platform, holding them up, is a row of iconic-looking symbols painted in the flat style of Egyptian tomb frescoes, each one enclosed in a white sphere: a red rose, an orange maple leaf, a shell. They are in fact the logos from old gas pumps of the forties. By their obvious artificiality, they call into question the reality of landscape and figures alike. The second painting is called
Three Muses.
Charna has had some trouble with this one. “Risley continues her disconcerting deconstruction of perceived gender and its relationship to perceived power, especially in respect to numinous imagery,” she says. If I hold my breath and squint, I can see where she gets that: all Muses are supposed to be female, and one of these is not. Maybe I should have called it
Dancers,
and put her out of her misery. But they are not dancers.

To the right is a short woman, dressed in a flowered housecoat and mules with real fur. On her head is a red pillbox hat with cherries. She has black hair and large golden earrings, and is carrying a round object the size of a beach ball, which is in fact an orange.

To the left is an older woman with blue-gray hair, wearing a waltz-length lavender silk gown. In her sleeve is tucked a lace handkerchief, over her nose and mouth is a gauze nurse’s mask. Above the mask her bright blue eyes look out, crinkly at the edges and sharp as tacks. In her hands she holds a globe of the world.

In the middle is a thin man with medium-brown skin and white teeth, smiling an uncertain smile. He is wearing a richly worked gold and red oriental costume reminiscent of Balthazar’s in Jan Gossaert’s
Adoration of the Magi,
but without the crown and scarf. He too holds out a round object: it’s flat like a disc and appears to be made of purple stained glass. On its surface are arranged, seemingly at random, several bright pink objects not unlike those to be found in abstract paintings. They are in fact spruce budworm eggs, in section; though I would not expect anyone but a biologist to recognize them. The arrangement of the figures recalls that of classical Graces, or else of the different-colored children wreathed around Jesus on the front of my old Sunday school paper. But those were facing in, and these are facing out. They hold their gifts forward, as if presenting them to someone who sits or stands outside the painting.

Mrs. Finestein, Miss Stuart from school, Mr. Banerji. Not as they were, to themselves: God knows what they really saw in their own lives, or thought about. Who knows what death camp ashes blew daily through the head of Mrs. Finestein, in those years right after the war? Mr. Banerji probably could not walk down a street here without dread, of a shove or some word whispered or shouted. Miss Stuart was in exile, from plundered Scotland still declining, three thousand miles away. To them I was incidental, their kindness to me casual and minor; I’m sure they didn’t give it a second thought, or have any idea of what it meant. But why shouldn’t I reward them, if I feel like it? Play God, translate them into glory, in the afterlife of paint. Not that they’ll ever know. They must be dead by now, or elderly. Elsewhere. The third picture is called
One Wing.
I painted it for my brother, after his death. It’s a triptych. There are two smaller, flanking side panels. In one is a World War Two airplane, in the style of a cigarette card; in the other is a large pale-green luna moth. In the larger, central panel, a man is falling from the sky. That he is falling and not flying is clear from his position, which is almost upside-down, slantwise to the few clouds; nevertheless he appears calm. He is wearing a World War Two RCAF uniform. He has no parachute. In his hand is a child’s wooden sword. This is the kind of thing we do, to assuage pain.

Charna thinks it’s a statement about men, and the juvenile nature of war. The fourth painting is called
Cat’s Eye.
It’s a self-portrait, of sorts. My head is in the right foreground, though it’s shown only from the middle of the nose up: just the upper half of the nose, the eyes looking outward, the forehead and the topping of hair. I’ve put in the incipient wrinkles, the little chicken feet at the corners of the lids. A few gray hairs. This is cheating, as in reality I pull them out. Behind my half-head, in the center of the picture, in the empty sky, a pier glass is hanging, convex and encircled by an ornate frame, In it, a section of the back of my head is visible; but the hair is different, younger.

At a distance, and condensed by the curved space of the mirror, there are three small figures, dressed in the winter clothing of the girls of forty years ago. They walk forward, their faces shadowed, against a field of snow.

The last painting is
Unified Field Theory.
It’s a vertical oblong, larger than the other paintings. Cutting across it a little over a third up is a wooden bridge. To either side of the bridge are the tops of trees, bare of leaves, with a covering of snow on them, as after a heavy moist snowfall. This snow is also on the railing and struts of the bridge.

Positioned above the top railing of the bridge, but so her feet are not quite touching it, is a woman dressed in black, with a black hood or veil covering her hair. Here and there on the black of her dress or cloak there are pinpoints of light. The sky behind her is the sky after sunset; at the top of it is the lower half of the moon. Her face is partly in shadow.

She is the Virgin of Lost Things. Between her hands, at the level of her heart, she holds a glass object: an oversized cat’s eye marble, with a blue center.

Underneath the bridge is the night sky, as seen through a telescope. Star upon star, red, blue, yellow, and white, swirling nebulae, galaxy upon galaxy: the universe, in its incandescence and darkness. Or so you think. But there are also stones down there, beetles and small roots, because this is the underside of the ground.

At the lower edge of the painting the darkness pales and merges to a lighter tone, the clear blue of water, because the creek flows there, underneath the earth, underneath the bridge, down from the cemetery. The land of the dead people.

I go to the bar, ask for another glass of wine. It’s better quality than the rotgut we used to buy for such affairs.

I walk the room, surrounded by the time I’ve made; which is not a place, which is only a blur, the moving edge we live in; which is fluid, which turns back upon itself, like a wave. I may have thought I was preserving something from time, salvaging something; like all those painters, centuries ago, who thought they were bringing Heaven to earth, the revelations of God, the eternal stars, only to have their slabs of wood and plaster stolen, mislaid, burnt, hacked to pieces, destroyed by rot and mildew. A leaky ceiling, a match and some kerosene would finish all this off. Why does this thought present itself to me, not as a fear but as a temptation?

Because I can no longer control these paintings, or tell them what to mean. Whatever energy they have came out of me. I’m what’s left over.

N
ow Charna hustles toward me in mauve leather, clanking with ersatz gold. She whisks me into the back office: she doesn’t want me dangling around in the empty gallery, at loose ends while the first revelers trickle in, she doesn’t want me looking unsuccessful and too eager. She will make an entrance with me, later, when the noise level is high enough.

“You can relax here,” she says; which is unlikely. In her office I drink my second drink, pacing the empty space. This is like birthday parties, with streamers and balloons at the ready and the hot dogs waiting in the kitchen, but what if nobody comes? Which will be worse: if they don’t come, or if they do? Soon the door will open, and in will crowd a horde of snide and treacherous little girls, whispering and pointing, and I will be servile, grateful.

My hands begin to sweat. I think another drink will calm me down, which is a bad sign. I will go out there and flirt, just for the hell of it, to see if I can still interest anyone. But there may not be anyone to flirt with. In which case I will get drunk. Maybe I will throw up in the toilet, with or without the excess alcohol. I’m not like this in other places, not this bad. I shouldn’t have come back here, to this city that has it in for me. I thought I could stare it down. But it still has power; like a mirror that shows you only the ruined half or your face.

I think about escaping, out the back way. I could send a telegram later, claiming illness. That would start a good rumor: a lingering, invisible illness, which would get me out of such things forever. But Charna reappears through the door in time, flushed with excitement. “There’s lots of people here already,” she says. “They’re dying to meet you. We’re all very proud of you.” This is so much like what a family would say, a mother or an aunt, that I’m thrown off guard. Who is this family, and whose family is it? I’ve been framed: the recalcitrant child before the piano recital, or, more like it, the bullet-scarred war horse, veteran of early, barely remembered battles, about to be presented with a gold watch and a handshake and a heartfelt vote of thanks. A fading halo of blue ink clings round me. Suddenly Charna reaches over to me, gives me a quick metallic hug. Maybe that warmth is genuine, maybe I should be ashamed of my dour, cynical thoughts. Maybe she really does like me, wish me well. I can almost believe it.

I stand in the main gallery, black from neck to toes, with my third glass of red wine. Charna is off now, rummaging in the crowd for people who are dying to meet me. I am at her disposal. I crane my neck, peering through the crowd, which has blotted out the paintings; only a few tops of heads are visible, a few skies, a few backgrounds and clouds. I keep expecting, or fearing, that people I should know, have known, will appear, and I will only half recognize them. They will stride forward, hands outstretched, girls from high school bloated or diminished, skins crinkled, frowns permanent, smooth-fleshed boyfriends of thirty years ago who’ve gone bald or grown mustaches or shrunk.
Elaine! What the beck! Good to see
you!
They will have the advantage of me, it’s my face on the poster. My smile will be welcoming, my mind frantic as I scramble through the past, trying to locate their names. Really it’s Cordelia I expect, Cordelia I want to see. There are things I need to ask her. Not what happened, back then in the time I lost, because now I know that. I need to ask her why. If she remembers. Perhaps she’s forgotten the bad things, what she said to me, what she did. Or she does remember them, but in a minor way, as if remembering a game, or a single prank, a single trivial secret, of the kind girls tell and then forget.

She will have her own version. I am not the center of her story, because she herself is that. But I could give her something you can never have, except from another person: what you look like from outside. A reflection. This is the part of herself I could give back to her.

We are like the twins in old fables, each of whom has been given half a key. Cordelia will walk toward me through the opening crowd, a woman of wavering age, dressed in Irish tweed of a muted green, mother-of-pearl earrings circled with gold, beautiful shoes; well-groomed, soignée as they used to say. Taking care of herself, as I am. Her hair will be gently frosted, her smile quizzical. I won’t know who she is.

There are a lot of women in this room, several other painters, some rich people. Mostly it’s the rich people Charna drags over. I shake their hands, watch their mouths move. Elsewhere I have more stamina for these things, these acts of self-exposure; I could brazen them out. But here I feel scraped naked. In the gap between rich people, a young girl pushes her way through. She’s a painter, it goes without saying, but she says it anyway. She’s in a miniskirt and tight leggings and flat clumpy black shoes with laces, her hair is shaved up the back the way my brother’s used to be, a late forties squareboy’s cut. She is post everything, she is what will come after
post.
She is what will come after me.