Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [106]
My brother Stephen treats these boys with scorn. As far as he’s concerned they are dimwits and unworthy of my serious consideration. He laughs at them behind their backs and makes fun of their names. They are not George but Georgie-Porgie, not Roger but Rover. He makes bets as to how long each one will last. “Three months for him,” he’ll say, after seeing the boy for the first time; or, “When are you going to throw him over?”
I don’t dislike my brother for this. I expect it of him, because he’s partly right. I don’t feel about these boys the way girls do in true romance comic books. I don’t sit around wondering when they’ll call. I like them but I don’t fall in love with them. None of the teenage magazine descriptions of girls moping, one tear on each cheek like pearl earrings, applies to me. So partly the boys are not a serious matter. But at the same time they are.
The serious part is their bodies. I sit in the hall with the cradled telephone, and what I hear is their bodies. I don’t listen much to the words but to the silences, and in the silences these bodies re-create themselves, are created by me, take form. When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that. Let me have that. What power they have over me is held through the eyes, and when I’m tired of them it’s an exhaustion partly physical, but also partly visual.
Only some of this has to do with sex; although some of it does. Some of the boys have cars, but others do not, and with them I go on buses, on streetcars, on the newly opened Toronto subway that is clean and uneventful and looks like a long pasteltiled bathroom. These boys walk me home, we walk the long way around. The air smells of lilac or mown grass or burning leaves, depending on the season. We walk over the new cement footbridge, with the willow trees arching overhead, the sound of running water from the creek beneath. We stand in the dim light coming from the lampposts on the bridge and lean back against the railing, their arms around me and mine around them. We lift each other’s clothing, run our hands over each other’s backbones, and I feel the backbone tensed and strung to breaking. I feel the length of the whole body, I touch the face, amazed. The faces of the boys change so much, they soften, open up, they ache. The body is pure energy, solidified light.
44
A girl is found murdered, down in the ravine. Not the ravine near our house, but a larger branch of it, farther south, past the brickworks, where the Don River, willow-bordered, junk-strewn and dingy, winds sluggishly toward the lake. Such things are not supposed to happen in Toronto, where people leave their back doors unlocked, their windows unlatched at night; but they do happen, it seems. It’s on the front pages of all the papers.
This girl is our age. Her bicycle has been found near her. She has been strangled, and also molested. We know what molested means. There are photos of her when alive, which already have that haunted look such photos usually take years to acquire, the look of vanished time, unrecoverable, unredeemed. There are extensive descriptions of her clothing. She was wearing an angora sweater, and a little fur collar with pom-poms, of the sort that is currently fashionable. I don’t have a collar like this, but would like one. Hers was white but