Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [142]
But there is also another voice; a small, mean voice, ancient and smug, that comes from somewhere deep inside my head: It serves her right.
• • •
Josef, when he is finally located, is devastated. “The poor child, the poor child,” he says. “Why didn’t she tell me?”
“She thought you’d get mad at her,” I say coldly. “Like her parents. She thought you’d kick her out, for getting pregnant.”
Both of us know this is a possibility. “No, no,” Josef says uncertainly. “I would have taken care of her.” This could mean several things.
He calls the hospital, but Susie refuses to see him. Something has changed in her, hardened. She tells him she might never be able to have babies. She doesn’t love him. She doesn’t want to see him ever again.
Now Josef wallows. “What have I done to her?” he moans, tugging his hair.
He becomes more melancholy than ever; he doesn’t want to go out for dinner, he doesn’t want to make love. He stays in his apartment, which is no longer neat and empty but is filling up with disorganized parts of his life: take-out Chinese food containers, unwashed sheets.
He says he will never get over it, what he has done to Susie. This is how he thinks of it: something he’s done, to Susie, to her inert and innocent flesh. At the same time he has been wounded by her: how can she treat him like this, cut him out of her life?
He expects me to console him, for his own guilt and the damage that’s been done to him. But I am not good at this. I am beginning to dislike him.
“It was my child,” he says.
“Would you have married her?” I ask. The spectacle of his suffering does not make me compassionate, but ruthless.
“You are cruel to me,” says Josef. This was something he used to say before, in a sexual context, teasing. Now he means it. Now he is right.
Without Susie, whatever has been keeping us in equilibrium is gone. The full weight of Josef rests on me, and he is too heavy for me. I can’t make him happy, and I resent my failure: I am not enough for him, I am inadequate. I see him as weak now, clinging, gutted like a fish. I can’t respect a man who can allow himself to be reduced to such rubble by women. I look at his doleful eyes and feel contempt.
I make excuses, over the phone. I tell him I am very busy. One evening I stand him up. This is so deeply gratifying that I do it again. He tracks me down at the university, rumpled and unshaven and suddenly too old, and pleads with me as I walk between classes. I’m angered by this overlap of worlds.
“Who was that?” say the girls in the cashmere twin sets.
“Just someone I used to know,” I say lightly.
Josef waylays me outside the museum and announces I have driven him to despair: because of the way I’ve treated him, he is leaving Toronto forever. He does not fool me: he was planning to do this anyway. My mean mouth takes over.
“Good,” I say.
He gives me a pained, reproachful stare, drawing himself up into the proud, theatrical, poker-up-the-bum stance of a matador.
I walk away from him. It’s enormously pleasing to me, this act of walking away. It’s like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.
I do not dream about Josef. Instead I dream about Susie, in her black turtleneck and jeans but shorter than she really is, her hair cut into a pageboy. She’s standing on a street I know but do not recognize, among piles of smoldering autumn leaves, holding a coiled skipping rope, licking one half of an orange Popsicle.
She is not drained and boneless, as I’ve last seen her. Instead she is sly-eyed, calculating. “Don’t you know what a twin set is?” she says spitefully.
She continues to lick her Popsicle. I know I have done something wrong.
58
Time passes, and Susie fades. Josef does not reappear.
This leaves me with Jon. I have the sense that, like one of a pair of bookends, he is incomplete by himself. But I feel virtuous, because I’m no longer hiding anything from him. This makes no difference to him, however, since he didn’t know I was hiding anything in the first place. He doesn’t know why I am less casual about what he