Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [132]
I am nicer to her than I ever have been. Also I’m a little wary of her. If she finds out, will she lose whatever grip on herself is left and go for me with a steak knife?
She wants to talk. She wants us to get together sometime. She still says “Josef and me.” She looks forlorn.
Josef talks to me about Susie as if discussing a problem child. “She wants to get married,” he says. He implies she is being unreasonable, but that to deny her this thing, this too-expensive toy, wounds him deeply just the same. I have no wish to put myself in the same category: irrational, petulant. I don’t want to marry Josef, or anyone else. I have come to think of marriage as dishonorable, a crass trade-off rather than a free gift. And even the idea of marriage would diminish Josef, spoil him; this is not his place in the scheme of things. His place is to be a lover, with his secrecy and his almost-empty rooms, and his baleful memories and bad dreams. Anyway, I’ve put myself beyond marriage. I can see it back there, innocent and beribboned, like a child’s doll: irretrievable. Instead of marriage I will be dedicated to my painting. I will end up with my hair dyed, wearing outlandish clothes and heavy, foreign silver jewellery. I will travel a lot. Possibly I will drink.
(There is of course the specter of pregnancy. You can’t get a diaphragm unless you’re married, rubbers are sold under the counter and only to men. There are those girls who went too far in back seats and got knocked up and dropped out of high school, or had strange, never-explained accidents. There are jocular terms for it: up the spout, bun in the oven. But such washroom notions have nothing to do with Josef and his experienced mauve bedroom. They also have nothing to do with me, wrapped as I am in dense minor-key enchantment. But I make little checkmarks on my pocket calendar, all the same.)
On the days when I have time off, when I’m not seeing Josef, I try to paint. Sometimes I draw with colored pencils. What I draw is the furniture in the apartment: the overstuffed sofa from the Sally Ann strewn with shed clothing, the bulbous lamp lent by a roommate’s mother, the kitchen stool. More often I don’t have the energy, and end up reading murder mysteries in the bathtub.
Josef won’t tell me about the war, or about how he got out of Hungary during the revolution. He says these things are too disturbing for him and he wants only to forget them. He says there are many ways to die and some are less pleasant than others. He says I am lucky I will never have to know things like this. “This country has no heroes,” he says. “You should keep it that way.” He tells me I am untouched. This is the way he wants me, he says. When he says these things he runs his hands over my skin as if he’s erasing me, rubbing me smooth.
But he tells me his dreams. He’s very interested in these dreams, and they are in fact like no dreams I can remember hearing about. There are red velvet curtains in them, red velvet sofas, red velvet rooms. There are white silk ropes in them, with tassels on the ends; there’s a lot of attention to fabrics. There are decaying teacups.
He dreams of a woman wrapped up in cellophane, even over her face, and of another walking along the railing of a balcony dressed in a white shroud, and of another lying facedown in the bathtub. When he tells me these dreams, he doesn’t look at me exactly; it’s as if he’s looking at a point several inches inside my head. I don’t know how to respond, so I smile weakly. I’m a little jealous of these women in his dreams: none of them are me. Josef sighs and pats my hand. “You are so young,” he says.
There is nothing that can