Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [126]
This is one life, my life of daytimes. My other, my real life, takes place at night.
I’ve been watching Susie closely, and paying attention to what she does. Susie is not in fact my age, she is two years older and more, she’s almost twenty-one. She doesn’t live at home with her parents, but in a bachelorette apartment in one of the new high-rise buildings on Avenue Road, north of St. Clair. It is thought her parents pay for this. How else could she afford it? These buildings have elevators in them, and wide foyers with plants, and are called things like The Monte Carlo. Living in them is a daring and sophisticated thing to do, though scoffed at by the painters: trios of nurses live there. The painters themselves live on Bloor Street or Queen, above hardware stores and places that sell suitcases wholesale, or on side streets where there are immigrants.
Susie stays after class, she turns up early, she hangs around; during the class itself she looks at Mr. Hrbik only sideways, furtively. I meet her coming out of his office and she jumps and smiles at me, then turns and calls, artificially and too loudly, “Thank you, Mr. Hrbik! See you next week!” She gives a little wave, although the door is partly closed and he can’t possibly see her: the wave is for me. I now guess what I should have spotted right away: she is having a love affair with Mr. Hrbik. Also, she thinks nobody has figured this out.
In this she is wrong. I overhear Marjorie and Babs discussing it in an oblique way: “Listen, kid, it’s one way to pass the course,” is what they say. “Wish I could do it just by flipping on my back.” “Don’t you wish! Those days are long gone, eh?” And they laugh in a comfortable way, as if what is going on is nothing at all, or funny.
I don’t think this love affair is at all funny. Love affair is how I think of it; I can’t detach the word affair from the word love, although which of them loves the other is not clear. I decide that it’s Mr. Hrbik who loves Susie. Or he doesn’t really love her: he’s besotted by her. I like this word besotted, suggestive as it is of sogginess, soppiness, flies drunk on syrup. Susie herself is incapable of love, she’s too shallow. I think of her as the conscious one, the one in control: she’s toying with him, in a hard, lacquered way straight out of forties movie posters. Hard as nails, and I even know what color of nails: Fire and Ice. This, despite her easily hurt look, her ingratiating ways. She throws off guilt like a sweet aroma, and Mr. Hrbik staggers besotted toward his fate.
After she realizes the people in the class know—Babs and Marjorie have a way of conveying their knowledge—Susie becomes bolder. She starts referring to Mr. Hrbik by his first name, and popping him into sentences: Josef thinks, Josef says. She always knows where he is. Sometimes he is in Montreal for the weekend, where they have much better restaurants and decent wines. She’s definite about this, although she’s never been there. She throws out inside tidbits of information about him: he was married in Hungary, but his wife didn’t come with him and now he’s divorced. He has two daughters whose pictures he keeps in his wallet. It kills him to be separated from them—“It just kills him,” she says softly, her eyes misting.
Marjorie and Babs gobble this up. Already she’s losing her floozie status with them, she’s entering the outskirts of domesticity. They egg her on: “Listen, I don’t blame you! I think he’s just cute as a button!” “I could eat him up! But that would be robbing the cradle, eh?” In the washroom the two of them sit side by side in separate cubicles, talking over the noise of gushing pee, while I stand in front of the mirror, listening in. “I just hope he knows what he’s doing. A nice kid like her.” What they mean is that he should marry her. Or perhaps they mean that he should marry her if she gets pregnant. That would be the decent thing.
The painters, on the other hand, turn rough on her. “Jeez, will you shut up about Josef! You’d think the sun