Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [125]
“Oh,” says Susie, with a tiny, gaspy laugh, as if the air is going into her instead of out, “that’s mean! You shouldn’t call him that!”
This irritates me: because she’s said something I should have said myself and didn’t have the guts to, but also because she’s made even this defense come out like a cat rubbing against a leg, an admiring hand on a bicep.
“Pompous old fart,” says Colin, to get some of her attention for himself.
Susie turns her big blue-rimmed eyes on him. “He’s not old,” she says solemnly. “He’s only thirty-five.” Everyone laughs.
But how does she know? I look at her and wonder. I remember the time I went early to class. The model wasn’t there yet, I was in the room by myself, and then Susie walked in with her coat already off, and right after that Mr. Hrbik.
Susie came over to where I was sitting and said, “Don’t you just hate the snow!” Ordinarily she didn’t talk to me. And I was the one who’d been out in the snow: she looked warm as toast.
51
In the daytime it’s February. The gray museum auditorium steams with wet coats and the slush melting from winter boots. There’s a lot of coughing.
We’ve finished the Mediaeval period, with its reliquaries and elongated saints, and are speeding through the Renaissance, hitting the high points. Virgin Marys abound. It’s as if one enormous Virgin Mary has had a whole bunch of daughters, most of which look something like her but not entirely. They’ve shed their gold-leaf halos, they’ve lost the elongated, flat-chested look they had in stone and wood, they’ve filled out more. They ascend to Heaven less frequently. Some are dough-faced and solemn, sitting by fireplaces or in chairs of the period, or by open windows, with roof work going on in the background; some are anxious-looking, others are milk-fed and pinky-white, with wire-thin halos and fine gold tendrils of hair escaping from their veils and clear Italian skies in the distance. They bend over the cradle of the Nativity, or they hold Jesus on their laps.
Jesus has trouble looking like a real baby because his arms and legs are too long and spindly. Even when he does look like a baby, he’s never newborn. I’ve seen newborn babies, with their wizened dried-apricot look, and these Jesuses are nothing like them. It’s as if they’ve been born at the age of one year, or else are shriveled men. There’s a lot of red and blue in these pictures, and a lot of breast-feeding.
The dry voice from the darkness concentrates on the formal properties of the compositions, the arrangement of cloth in folds to accentuate circularity, the rendering of textures, the uses of perspective in archways and in the tiles underfoot. We skim over the breast-feeding: the pointer emerging from nowhere never alights on these bared breasts, some of which are an unpleasant pinky-green or veiny, or have a hand pressing the nipple and even real milk. There is some shifting in the seats at this: nobody wants to think about breast-feeding, not the professor and certainly not the girls. Over coffee they shiver: they themselves are fastidious, they will bottle-feed, which is anyway more sanitary.
“The point of the breast-feeding,” I say, “is that the Virgin is humble enough to do it. Most women then got their kids wet-nursed by somebody else, if they could afford it.” I have read this in a book, dug up from the depths of the stacks, in the library.
“Oh, Elaine,” they say. “You’re such a brain.”
“The other point is that Christ came to earth as a mammal,” I say. “I wonder what Mary did for diapers? Now that would be a relic: the Sacred Diaper. How come there are no pictures of Christ on the potty? I know there’s a piece of the Holy Foreskin around, but what about the Holy Shit?”
“You’re awful!”
I grin, I cross my ankle over my knee, I put my elbows on the table. I enjoy pestering