Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [136]
Instead he says, “You are very silent.” He touches my cheek. “Mysterious.” I do not feel mysterious, but vacant.
“Would you do anything for me?” he says, gazing into my eyes. I sway toward him, far away from the earth. Yes would be so easy.
“No,” I say. This is a surprise to me. I don’t know where it has come from, this unexpected and stubborn truthfulness. It sounds rude.
“I did not think so,” he says sadly.
Jon appears one afternoon in the Swiss Chalet. I don’t recognize him at first because I don’t look at him. I’m wiping off the table with a dishrag, every movement an effort, my arm heavy with lethargy. Last night I was with Josef, but tonight I won’t be because it’s not my night, it’s Susie’s night.
These days Josef rarely mentions Susie. When he does, it’s with nostalgia, as if she’s already a thing of the past, or beautifully dead, like someone in a poem. But this may be only his way of speaking. They may spend prosaic domestic evenings together, him reading the paper while she serves up a casserole. Despite his claim that I am a secret, they may discuss me the way Josef and I used to discuss Susie. This is not a comfortable thought.
I prefer to think of Susie as a woman shut inside a tower, up there in The Monte Carlo on Avenue Road, gazing out the window over the top of her painted sheet metal balcony, weeping feebly, waiting for Josef to appear. I can’t imagine her having any other life apart from that. I can’t see her washing out her underpants, for instance, and wringing them in a towel, hanging them on the bathroom towel rack, as I do. I can’t imagine her eating. She is limp, without will, made spineless by love; as I am.
“Long time no see,” says Jon. He leaps into focus beyond my wiping arm, grinning at me, his teeth white in a face more tanned than I remember. He’s leaning on the table I’m wiping, wearing a gray T-shirt, old jeans cut off above the knees, running shoes with no socks. He looks healthier than he did in the winter. I’ve never seen him in the daytime before.
I’m conscious of my stained uniform: do I smell of underarm sweat, of chicken fat? “How did you get in here?” I say.
“Walked,” he says. “How about a coffee?”
He has a summer job, with the Works Department, filling in potholes in the roads, tarring over the cracks made by frost heave; he does have a faint tarry smell about him. He’s not what you would call clean. “How about a beer, later?” he says. This is a thing he’s said often before: he wants a passport to the Ladies and Escorts, as usual. I’m not doing anything, so I say, “Why not? But I’ll have to change.”
After work I take the precaution of a shower and put on my purple dress. I meet him at the Maple Leaf and we go into the Ladies and Escorts. We sit there in the gloom, which is at least cool, and drink draft beer. It’s awkward with just him: before there was always a group of them. Jon asks me what I’ve been up to and I say nothing much. He asks me if I’ve seen Uncle Joe around anywhere, and I say no.
“Probably he’s disappeared into Susie’s knickers,” he says. “The lucky shit.” He’s still treating me like an honorary boy, still saying crude things about women. I’m surprised at the word knickers. He must have picked it up from Colin the Englishman. I wonder if he knows about me as well, whether he’s making remarks about my knickers behind my back. But how could he?
He says the Works Department is good money, but he doesn’t let on to the other guys that he’s a painter, especially not to the old regulars. “They might think I’m a fruit or something,” he says.
I drink more draft beer than I should, and then the lights flicker on and off and it’s closing time. We walk out onto the hot night summer street, and I don’t want to go home by myself.
“Can you get back all right?” says Jon. I say nothing. “Come on, I’ll walk you,” he says. He puts his hand on my shoulder and I smell his smell of tar and outdoors dust and sunny skin, and I begin to cry. I stand in the street, with the drunks staggering out of the Men Only, my hands pressed