Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [162]
None of the blood in this film was real blood. Women were not real to Josef, any more than he was real to me. This was why I could treat his sufferings with such scorn and unconcern: he wasn’t real. The reason I’ve never dreamed about him was that he belonged already to the world of dreams: discontinuous, irrational, obsessive.
I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it’s one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.
I can’t blame Josef for his film. He was entitled to his own versions, his own conjurings; as I am. I may have served his ends, but he served mine as well.
There is Life Drawing, for instance, hanging right now on the gallery wall, Josef preserved in aspic and good enough to eat. He is on the left side of the picture, stark-naked but turned with a twist half away from the viewer, so what you get is the ass end, then the torso in profile. On the right side is Jon, in the same position. Their bodies are somewhat idealized: less hairy than they really were, the muscle groups in higher definition, the skin luminous. I thought about putting Jockey shorts on them, in deference to Toronto, but decided against it. Both of them have wonderful bums.
Each of them is painting a picture, each picture is on an easel. Josef’s is of a voluptuous but not overweight woman, sitting on a stool with a sheet draped between her legs, her breasts exposed; her face is Pre-Raphaelite, brooding, consciously mysterious. Jon’s painting is a series of intestinal swirls, in hot pink, raspberry ripple red and Burgundy Cherry purple.
The model is seated on a chair between them, face front, bare feet flat on the floor. She’s clothed in a white bedsheet, wrapped around her below the breasts. Her hands are folded neatly in her lap. Her head is a sphere of bluish glass.
I sit with Jon at a table in the roof bar of the Park Plaza Hotel, drinking white wine spritzers. My suggestion: I wanted to see it again. Outside, the skyline has changed: the Park Plaza is no longer the tallest building around, but a squat leftover, dwarfed by the svelte glassy towers that rise around it. Due south is the CN Tower, lifting up like a huge inverted icicle. This is the sort of architecture you used to see only in science fiction comic books, and seeing it pasted flat against the monotone lake-sky I feel I’ve stepped not forward in time but sideways, into a universe of two dimensions.
But inside the bar not a lot has changed. The place still looks like a high-class Regency bordello. Even the waiters, with their good-grooming hair and air of harried discretion, look the same, and probably are. The management used to keep ties in the coat check, for gentlemen who’d forgotten them. Forgotten was the word, because surely no gentleman would deliberately choose to go tieless. It was a big thing when this place was cracked by women in pant suits. A chic black model did it: they couldn’t refuse to let her in, she could have hit them with racism. Even this memory dates me, and the little thrill of triumph that goes with it: what woman, now, would think of a pant suit as liberation?
I didn’t used to come here with Jon. He would have sneered, then, at the upholstered period chairs, the looped drapes, the men and women cut from a glossy whisky ad. It was Josef I came with, Josef whose hand I touched, across the surface of the table. Not Jon’s, as now.
It’s only the ends of the fingers, only lightly. This time we don’t say much: there’s none of the verbal prodding there was at lunch. There’s a shared vocabulary, of monosyllable and silence; we know why we’re here. Going down in the elevator, I look into the smoked-mirror wall and see my face in the dark glass obscured