Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [131]
“What about Susie?” I said. As soon as I said it I realized it was a high school question.
“Susie?” Josef asked, as if trying to remember her name. His mouth was against my ear; the name was like a regretful sigh.
The Mexican blanket was scratchy, which did not bother me: sex was supposed to be unpleasant the first time. I expected the smell of rubber too, and the pain; but there was not as much pain, and not nearly as much blood as everyone said.
Josef was not expecting the pain. “This is hurting you?” he said at one point. “No,” I said, flinching, and he did not stop. He was not expecting the blood either. He would have to get his blanket cleaned, but he didn’t mention this. He was considerate, and stroked my thigh.
• • •
Josef has gone on all summer. Sometimes he takes me to restaurants, with checked tablecloths and candles stuck in Chianti bottles; sometimes to foreign films about Swedes and Japanese, in small uncrowded theaters. But we always end up back at his apartment, under or on top of the Mexican blanket. His love-making is unpredictable; sometimes he is avid, sometimes routine, sometimes absent-minded, as if doodling. It’s partly the unpredictability that keeps me hooked. This and his need, which seems to me at times helpless and beyond his control.
“Don’t leave me,” he says, running his hands over me; always before, not after. “I couldn’t bear it.” This is an old-fashioned thing to say, and in another man I would find it comical, but not in Josef. I am in love with his need. Only to think of it makes me feel suffused, inert, like the flesh of a watermelon. For this reason I’ve canceled my plans to return to the Muskoka resort, to work as I did last summer. Instead I’ve taken a job at the Swiss Chalet on Bloor Street. This is a place that serves nothing but chicken, “broasted,” as it says on the sign. Chicken and dipping sauce, and coleslaw and white buns, and one flavor of ice cream: Burgundy Cherry, which is a striking shade of purple. I wear a uniform with my name stitched on the pocket, as in high school gym class.
Josef sometimes picks me up there, after work. “You smell of chicken,” he murmurs in the taxi, his face against my neck. I’ve lost all modesty in taxis; I lean against him, his hand around me, under my arm, on my breast, or I lie down along the seat, head in his lap.
Also I have moved out of home. On the nights when I’m with him, Josef wants me to stay all night. He wants to wake up with me asleep beside him, start to make love to me without waking me up. I’ve told my parents it’s only for the summer, so I can be closer to the Swiss Chalet. They think it’s a waste of money. They are racketing around up north somewhere and I would have the house to myself; but my idea of myself and my parents’ idea of me no longer belong in the same place.
If I’d gone to Muskoka I wouldn’t be living at home this summer either, but not living at home in the same city is different. Now I live with two of the other Swiss Chalet girls, student workers like myself, in a corridor-shaped apartment on Harbord Street. The bathroom is festooned with stockings and underpants; hair rollers perch on the kitchen counter like bristly caterpillars, dishes cake in the sink.
I see Josef twice a week, and know enough not to try calling him or seeing him at other times. Either he won’t be there or he will be with Susie, because he hasn’t stopped seeing her, not at all. But we are not to tell her about me; we are to keep it secret. “She would be so terribly hurt,” he says. It’s the last one in line who must bear the burden of knowing: if anyone is to be hurt it will have to be me. But I feel entrusted by him: we are in this together, this protecting of Susie. It’s for her good. In this there is the satisfaction of all secrets: I know something she doesn’t.
She