Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [119]
I am trying to draw this woman, with a piece of charcoal. I am trying for fluidity of line. This is how the teacher has arranged her: for fluidity of line. I would rather be using a hard pencil; the charcoal gets on my fingers and smears, and is no good for hair. Also this woman frightens me. There is a lot of flesh to her, especially below the waist; there are folds across her stomach, her breasts are saggy and have enormous dark nipples. The harsh fluorescent light, falling straight down on her, turns her eye sockets to caverns, emphasizes the descending lines from nose to chin; but the massiveness of her body makes her head look like an afterthought. She is not beautiful, and I am afraid of turning into that.
This is a night class. It’s called Life Drawing, and is held on Tuesdays at the Toronto College of Art, in a large bare room, beyond which is a utilitarian stairway, then McCaul Street, then Queen with its drunks and streetcar tracks, and beyond that square, boxy Toronto. There are a dozen of us in the room, with our hopeful, almost-new Bristol drawing boards and our black-tipped fingers; two older women, eight young men, another girl my own age, and me. I am not a student here, but even those who aren’t students can sign up for this class, under certain circumstances. The circumstances are that you have to convince the teacher you are serious. It’s not clear, however, how long I will last.
The teacher is Mr. Hrbik. He is in his mid-thirties, with dark thickly curled hair, a mustache, an eagle nose, and eyes that look almost purple, like mulberries. He has a habit of staring at you without saying anything, and, it seems, without blinking.
It was the eyes I noticed first, when I went for my interview with him. He was sitting in his tiny paper-covered office at the college, leaning back in his chair and chewing the end of a pencil. When he saw me he put the pencil down.
“How old are you?” he said.
“Seventeen,” I said. “Almost eighteen.”
“Ah,” he said, and sighed as if this was bad news. “What have you done?”
This made it sound as if he was accusing me of something. Then I saw what he meant: I was supposed to bring something called “a portfolio of recent work,” which meant pictures, so he could judge me. But I didn’t have much work to bring. About the only contact I’d had with art was in high school, in the Art Appreciation class we had to take in Grade Nine, where we listened to the Moonlight Sonata and interpreted it with wavy crayon lines, or drew a tulip in a vase. I’d never been to an art gallery, though I’d read an article on Picasso, in Life magazine.
Over the past summer, when I’d had a job making beds and cleaning toilets at a resort in Muskoka to earn extra money, I’d bought a small oil painting set in one of the tourist shops. The names on the little tubes were like passwords: Cobalt Blue, Burnt Umber, Crimson Lake. On my time off I’d take this set out along the shore, and sit with my back against a tree with the pine needles digging into me from underneath, and mosquitoes collecting around me, looking out across the flat sheet metal water, the varnished mahogany inboards moving across it, little flags at their sterns. In these boats were sometimes other chambermaids, the kind who went to illegal parties in people’s rooms to drink rye and ginger ale out of paper cups, and were rumored to go all the way. There had been tearful confrontations in the laundry room, over the folded sheets.
I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin. After a while I’d painted a picture of a beer bottle minus the label, and a tree shaped like a damaged whisk, and several uncertain, sludge-colored pictures of rocks, with a violently blue lake in the background. Also a sunset, which came out looking like something you might spill on yourself.
I produced these from the black file folder in which I’d been carrying them. Mr. Hrbik frowned