Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [129]
Apart from that he’s enjoying himself, as he is hard at work on The Nature of the Universe. The burning question is: is the universe more like a giant ever-enlarging blimp, or does it pulsate, does it expand and contract? Probably the suspense is killing me, but I will just have to wait a few years till he works out the final answer. TUNE IN FOR THE NEXT THRILLING INSTALLMENT, he writes, in block letters.
I hear you’ve gone into the picture business, he continues in normal-sized writing. I used to do that sort of thing when I was younger. I hope you’re taking your cod liver oil pills and keeping out of trouble. And that is the end of the letter.
I think of my brother sitting at the top of a tree, in California. He no longer knows who he’s writing to, because I have surely changed beyond all recognition. And I no longer know who’s writing. I think of him as staying always the same, but of course this can’t be true. He must know things by now that he didn’t know before, as I do.
Also: if he’s eating a sandwich and writing a letter both at the same time, how is he holding on? He seems happy enough, up there in his perch of a sniper. But he should be more careful. What I have always assumed in him to be bravery may be merely an ignorance of consequences. He thinks he is safe, because he is what he says he is. But he’s out in the open, and surrounded by strangers.
53
I sit in a French restaurant with Josef, drinking white wine and eating snails. They’re the first snails I have ever eaten, this is the first French restaurant I have ever been in. It’s the only French restaurant in Toronto, according to Josef. It’s called La Chaumiére, which Josef says means “thatched cottage.” La Chaumiére is not, however, a thatched cottage, but a prosaic, dowdy building like other Toronto buildings. The snails themselves look like large dark pieces of snot; you eat them with a two-pronged fork. I think they are quite good, though rubbery.
Josef says they aren’t fresh snails but have come out of a tin. He says this sadly, with resignation, as if it means the end, though the end of what is not clear; this is how he says many things.
It was the way he first said my name, for instance. That was back in May, in the last week of Life Drawing. Each of us was supposed to meet with Mr. Hrbik for an individual evaluation, to discuss our progress during the year. Marjorie and Babs were ahead of me, standing in the hall with take-out coffees. “Hi, kid,” they said. Marjorie was telling a story about how a man exposed himself to her in Union Station, where she had gone to meet her daughter on the train from Kingston. Her daughter was my age, and going to Queen’s.
“He had on a raincoat, would you believe,” said Marjorie.
“Oh God,” said Babs.
“So I looked him in the eye—the eye—and I said, ‘Can’t you do any better than that?’ I mean, talk about weenies. No wonder the poor boob runs around in train stations trying to get somebody to look at it!”
“And?”
“Listen, what goes up must come down, eh?”
They snorted, spewing droplets of coffee, coughing out smoke. As usual I found them slightly disreputable: making jokes about things that were no joking matter.
Susie came out of Mr. Hrbik’s office. “Hi, you guys,” she said, trying for cheer. Her eyeshadow was smudged, her eyes pinkish. I’d been reading modern French novels, and William Faulkner as well. I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession, with undertones of nausea. Susie was the sort of girl who would go in for this kind of love. She would be