Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [137]
Jon is startled. “Hey, pal,” he says, patting me awkwardly. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I say. Being called pal makes me cry even more. I feel like a wet sock; I feel ugly. I hope he will think I’ve had too much to drink.
He puts an arm around me, gives a squeeze. “Come on,” he says. “We’ll go for coffee.”
I stop crying as we walk along the street. We walk to a door beside a wholesale suitcase store, he takes out a key, and we go up the stairs in the dark. Inside the upstairs door he kisses me, with his tarry, beery mouth. There are no lights on. I put my arms around his waist and hold on as if I’m sinking into mud, and he lifts me like that and carries me through the dark room, bumping into the walls and furniture, and we fall together onto the floor.
PART
ELEVEN
FALLING
WOMEN
56
I continue east along Queen Street, still a little dizzy from the wine at lunch. Tipsy was once the word. Alcohol’s a depressant, it will let me down later, but right now I’m jaunty, I hum to myself, mouth slightly open.
Right here there’s a group of statues, coppery-green, with black smears running down them like metal blood: a seated woman, holding a scepter, with three young soldiers marching forward grouped around her, their legs wound with bandagelike puttees, defending the Empire, their faces earnest, doomed, frozen into time. Above them on a stone tablet stands another woman, this time with angel wings: Victory or Death, or maybe both. This monument is in honor of the South African War, ninety years ago, more or less. I wonder if anyone remembers that war, or if anyone in all these cars barging forward ever even looks.
I head north on University Avenue, past the sterility of hospitals, along the old route of the Santa Claus Parade. The Zoology Building has been torn down, it must have been years ago. The window ledge where I once watched the soggy fairies and chilblained snowflakes, breathing in the smell of snakes and antiseptic and mice, is now empty air. Who else remembers where it used to be?
There are fountains up and down this roadway now, and squared-off beds of flowers, and new, peculiar statues. I follow the curve around the Parliament Building with its form of a squatting Victorian dowager, darkish pink, skirts huffed out, stolid. The flag I could never draw, demoted to the flag of a province, flies before it, bright scarlet, with the Union Jack in the top corner and all those impossible beavers and leaves encrested lower down. The new national flag flutters there as well, two red bands and a red maple leaf rampant on white, looking like a trademark for margarine of the cheaper variety, or an owl kill in snow. I still think of this flag as new, although they changed it long ago.
I cross the street, cut in behind a small church, left stranded here when they redeveloped. Sunday’s sermon is announced on a billboard identical to the kind for supermarket specials: Believing Is Seeing. A vertical wave of plate glass breaks against it. Behind the polished façades, bouquets of teased cloth, buffed leather, cunning silver trinkets. Pasta to die for. Theology has changed, over the years: just deserts used to be what everyone could expect to get, in the end. Now it’s a restaurant specializing in cakes. All they had to do was abolish guilt, and add an S.
I turn a corner, onto a side street, a double row of expensive boutiques: hand knits and French maternity outfits and ribbon-covered soaps, imported tobaccos, opulent restaurants where the wineglasses are thin-stemmed and they sell you location and overhead. The designer jeans emporium, the Venetian paper knickknack shop, the stocking boutique with its kicking neon leg.
These houses used to be semihovels; Josef’s old territory, where beer-saturated fat men sat on the front porches, sweating in the August heat, while their children screamed and their dogs lay panting with frayed ropes tethering them to the fence, and paint peeled from their woodwork and the dispirited cat pee marigolds wilted along their cracked walkways.