Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [135]
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Cordelia gets me a free ticket to Stratford, so I can see her in action. I go on the bus. It’s a matinee: I can get there, see the show, then take the bus back in time for my evening shift at the Swiss Chalet. The play is The Tempest. I watch for Cordelia, and when Prospero’s attendants come on, with music and jittery lighting effects, I peer hard, trying to see which one she is, behind the disguise of costume. But I can’t tell.
55
Josef is rearranging me. “You should wear your hair loose,” he says, unpinning it from its ramshackle bun, running his hands throught it to make it fluff out. “You look like a marvelous gypsy.” He presses his mouth to my collarbone, untucks the bedsheet he’s draped me in.
I stand still and let him do this. I let him do what he likes. It’s August and too hot to move. Haze hangs over the city like wet smoke; it covers my skin with an oily film, seeps into my flesh. I move through the days like a zombie, going from one hour to the next without direction. I’ve stopped drawing the furniture at the apartment; I fill the bathtub with cool water and get into it, but I no longer read in there. Soon it will be time to go back to school. I can hardly think about it.
“You should wear purple dresses,” says Josef. “It would be an improvement.” He places me against the twilight of the window, turns me, stands back a little, running his hand up and down my side. I no longer care whether anyone can see in. I feel my knees begin to give, my mouth loosen. In our time together he does not pace or tug his hair; he moves slowly, gently, with great deliberation.
Josef takes me to the Park Plaza Hotel Roof Garden, in my new purple dress. It has a tight bodice, a low neck, a full skirt; it brushes against my bare legs as I walk. My hair is loose, and damp. I think it looks like a mop. But I catch a glimpse of myself, without expecting it, in the smoked-mirror wall of the elevator as we go up, and I see for an instant what Josef sees: a slim woman with cloudy hair, pensive eyes in a thin white face. I recognize the style: late nineteenth century. Pre-Raphaelite. I should be holding a poppy.
We sit on the outside patio, drinking Manhattans and looking over the stone balustrade. Josef has recently discovered a taste for Manhattans. This is one of the tallest buildings around. Below us Toronto festers in the evening heat, the trees spreading like worn moss, the lake zinc in the distance.
Josef tells me he once shot a man in the head; what disturbed him was how easy it was to do it. He says he hates the Life Drawing class, he will not go on with it forever, cooped up in this provincial deadwater teaching the rudiments to morons. “I come from a country that no longer exists,” he says, “and you come from a country that does not yet exist.” Once I would have found this profound. Now I wonder what he means.
As for Toronto, he says, it has no gaiety or soul. In any case, painting itself is a hangover from the European past. “It is no longer important,” he says, waving it away with one hand. He wants to be in films, he wants to direct, in the United States. He will go there as soon as it can be arranged. He has good connections. There’s a whole network of Hungarians, for instance. Hungarians, Poles, Czechoslovakians. There is more opportunity in films down there, to say the least, since the only films made in this country are short ones that come on before real movies, about leaves spiraling downward into pools or flowers opening in time-lapse photography, to flute music. The other people he knows are doing well in the United States. They will get him in.
I hold Josef’s hand. His lovemaking these days is ruminative, as if he is thinking of something else. I discover I am somewhat drunk; also that I am afraid of heights. I have never been this high up in the air before. I think of standing close to the stone balustrade, toppling slowly over. From here you can see the United States, a thin fuzz on the horizon. Josef says nothing