Cat's Eye Page 9

  All these things--the flags, the pitch pipe songs, the British Empire and the princesses, the war orphans, even the strappings--are superimposed against the ominous navy-blue background of Miss Lumley's invisible bloomers. I can't draw the Union Jack or sing "God Save the King" without thinking about them. Do they really exist, or not? Will I ever be in the classroom when she puts them on or--unthinkable--takes them off?

  I'm not afraid of snakes or worms but I am afraid of these bloomers. I know it will be the worse for me if I ever actually catch sight of them. They're sacrosanct, at the same time holy and deeply shameful. Whatever is wrong with them may be wrong with me also, because although Miss Lumley is not what anyone thinks of as a girl, she is also not a boy. When the brass handbell clangs and we line up outside our GIRLS door, whatever category we are in also includes her.

  PART

  FOUR

  DEADLY

  NIGHTSHADE

  16

  I walk along Queen Street, past used comic book stores, windows full of crystal eggs and sea-shells, a lot of sulky black clothing. I wish I were back in Vancouver, in front of the fireplace with Ben, looking out over the harbor, while the giant slugs munch away at the greenery in the back garden. Fireplaces, back gardens: I wasn't thinking about them when I used to come down here to visit Jon, over the wholesale luggage store. Around the corner was the Maple Leaf Tavern, where I drank draft beer in the dark, two stoplights away from the art school where I drew naked women and ate my heart out. The streetcars rattled the front windows. There are still streetcars.

  "I don't want to go," I said to Ben.

  "You don't have to," he said. "Call it off. Come down to Mexico."

  "They've gone to all the trouble," I said. "Listen, you know how hard it is to get a retrospective anywhere, if you're female?"

  "Why is it important?" he said. "You sell anyway."

  "I have to go," I said. "It wouldn't be right." I was brought up to say please and thank you.

  "Okay," he said. "You know what you're doing." He gave me a hug.

  I wish it were true.

  Here is Sub-Versions, between a restaurant supply store and a tattoo parlor. Both of these will go, in time: once places like Sub-Versions move in, the handwriting's on the wall.

  I open the gallery door, walk in with that sinking feeling I always have in galleries. It's the carpets that do it to me, the hush, the sanctimoniousness of it all: galleries are too much like churches, there's too much reverence, you feel there should be some genuflecting going on. Also I don't like it that this is where paintings end up, on these neutral-toned walls with the track lighting, sterilized, rendered safe and acceptable. It's as if somebody's been around spraying the paintings with air freshener, to kill the smell. The smell of blood on the wall.

  This gallery is not totally sterilized, there are touches of cutting edge: a heating pipe shows, one wall is black. I don't give a glance to what's still on the walls, I hate those neo-expressionist dirty greens and putrid oranges, post this, post that. Everything is post these days, as if we're all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.

  Several of my own paintings have been uncrated and are leaning against the wall. They've been tracked down, requested, gathered in from whoever owns them. Whoever owns them is not me; worse luck, I'd get a better price now. The owners' names will be on little white cards beside the paintings, along with mine, as if mere ownership is on a par with creation. Which they think it is.

  If I cut off my ear, would the market value go up? Better still, stick my head in the oven, blow out my brains. What rich art collectors like to buy, among other things, is a little vicarious craziness.

  Face out is a piece I painted twenty years ago: Mrs. Smeath, beautifully rendered in egg tempera, with her gray hairpin crown and her potato face and her spectacles, wearing nothing but her flowered one-breast bib apron. She's reclining on her maroon velvet sofa, rising to Heaven, which is full of rubber plants, while a moon shaped like a doily floats in the sky. Rubber Plant: The Ascension, it's called. The angels around her are 1940s Christmas stickers, laundered little girls in white, with rag-set curly hair. The word Heaven is stenciled at the top of the painting with a child's school stencil set. I thought that was a nifty thing to do, at the time.

  I caught some shit for that piece, as I recall. But not because of the stencil.

  I don't look at this painting for very long, or at any of them. If I do I'll start finding things wrong with them. I'll want to take an Exacto knife to them, torch them, clear the walls. Begin again.

  A woman strides toward me from the back, in a modified blond porcupine haircut, a purple jumpsuit and green leather boots. I know immediately that I should not have worn this powder-blue jogging outfit. Powder blue is lightweight. I should've worn nun black, Dracula black, like all proper female painters. I should have some clotted-neck vampire lipstick, instead of wimping out with Rose Perfection. But that really would make me look like Haggis McBaggis. At this age the complexion can't stand those grape-jelly reds, I'd look all white and wrinkly.

  But I will tough out the jogging suit, I'll pretend I meant it. It could be iconoclasm, how do they know? A powder-blue jogging suit lacks pretensions. The good thing about being out of fashion is that you're never in fashion either, so you can never be last year's model. That's my excuse for my painting too; or it was for years.

  "Hi," says the woman. "You must be Elaine! You don't look much like your picture." What does that mean, I think: better or worse? "We've talked a lot on the phone. My name is Charna." Toronto didn't used to have names like Charna. My hand gets crunched, this woman's got about ten heavy silver rings strung onto her fingers like knuckle dusters. "We were just wondering about the order." There are two more women; each of them looks five times more artistic than I do. They have abstract art earrings, hair arrangements. I am feeling dowdy.

  They've got take-out gourmet sprout and avocado sandwiches and coffee with steamed milk, and we eat those and drink that while we discuss the arrangement of the pictures. I say I favor a chronological approach, but Charna has other ideas; she wants things to go together tonally and resonate and make statements that amplify one another. I get more nervous, this kind of talk makes me twitch. I'm putting some energy into silence, resisting the impulse to say I have a headache and want to go home. I should be grateful, these women are on my side, they planned this whole thing for me, they're doing me an honor, they like what I do. But still I feel outnumbered, as if they are a species of which I am not a member.

  Jon comes back tomorrow, from Los Angeles and his chain-saw murder. I can hardly wait. We'll circumvent his wife, go out for lunch, both of us feeling sneaky. But it's merely a civilized thing to do, having lunch with an ex-husband in a comradely way: a good coda to all that smashed crockery and mayhem. We've known each other since the year zot; at my age, our age, that's becoming important. And from here he looks like relief.

  Someone else comes in, another woman. "Andrea!" says Charna, stalking over to her. "You're late!" She gives Andrea a kiss on the cheek and walks her over to me, holding her arm. "Andrea wants to do a piece on you," she says. "For the opening."

  "I wasn't told about this," I say. I've been ambushed.

  "It came up at the last minute," says Charna. "Lucky for us! I'll put you two in the back room, okay? I'll bring you some coffee. Getting the word out, they call it," she adds, to me, with a wry smile. I allow myself to be herded down the corridor; I can still be bossed around by women like Charna.

  "I thought you would be different," says Andrea as we settle.

  "Different how?" I ask.

  "Bigger," she says.

  I smile at her. "I am bigger."

  *

  Andrea checks out my powder-blue jogging suit. She herself is wearing black, approved, glossy black, not early-sixties holdover as mine would be. She has red hair out of a spray can and no apologies, cut into a cap like an acorn. She's upsettingly young; to me s
he doesn't look more than a teenager, though I know she must be in her twenties. Probably she thinks I'm a weird middle-aged frump, sort of like her high school teacher. Probably she's out to get me. Probably she'll succeed.

  We sit across from each other at Charna's desk and Andrea sets down her camera and fiddles with her tape recorder. Andrea writes for a newspaper. "This is for the Living section," she says. I know what that means, it used to be the Women's Pages. It's funny that they now call it Living, as if only women are alive and the other things, such as the Sports, are for the dead.

  "Living, eh?" I say. "I'm the mother of two. I bake cookies." All true. Andrea gives me a dirty look and flicks on her machine.

  "How do you handle fame?" she says.

  "This isn't fame," I say. "Fame is Elizabeth Taylor's cleavage. This stuff is just a media pimple."

  She grins at that. "Well, could you maybe say something about your generation of artists--your generation of woman artists--and their aspirations and goals?"

  "Painters, you mean," I say. "What generation is that?"

  "The seventies, I suppose," she says. "That's when the women's--that's when you started getting attention."

  "The seventies isn't my generation," I say.

  She smiles. "Well," she says, "what is?"

  "The forties."

  "The forties?" This is archaeology as far as she's concerned. "But you couldn't have been ..."

  "That was when I grew up," I say.

  "Oh right," she says. "You mean it was formative. Can you talk about the ways, how it reflects in your work?"

  "The colors," I say. "A lot of my colors are forties colors." I'm softening up. At least she doesn't say like and you know all the time. "The war. There are people who remember the war and people who don't. There's a cut-off point, there's a difference."

  "You mean the Vietnam War?" she says.

  "No," I say coldly. "The Second World War." She looks a bit scared, as if I've just resurrected from the dead, and incompletely at that. She didn't know I was that old. "So," she says. "What is the difference?"

  "We have long attention spans," I say. "We eat everything on our plates. We save string. We make do."

  She looks puzzled. That's all I want to say about the forties. I'm beginning to sweat. I feel as if I'm at the dentist, mouth gracelessly open while some stranger with a light and mirror gazes down my throat at something I can't see.

  Brightly and neatly she veers away from the war and back toward women, which was where she wanted to be in the first place. Is it harder for a woman, was I discriminated against, undervalued? What about having children? I give unhelpful replies: all painters feel undervalued. You can do it while they're at school. My husband's been terrific, he gives me a lot of support, some of which has been financial. I don't say which husband.

  "So you don't feel it's sort of demeaning to be propped up by a man?" she says.

  "Women prop up men all the time," I say. "What's wrong with a little reverse propping?"

  What I have to say is not altogether what she wants to hear. She'd prefer stories of outrage, although she'd be unlikely to tell them about herself, she's too young. Still, people my age are supposed to have stories of outrage; at least insult, at least put-down. Male art teachers pinching your bum, calling you baby, asking you why there are no great female painters, that sort of thing. She would like me to be furious, and quaint.

  "Did you have any female mentors?" she asks.

  "Female what?"

  "Like, teachers, or other woman painters you admired."

  "Shouldn't that be mentresses?" I say nastily. "There weren't any. My teacher was a man."

  "Who was that?" she says.

  "Josef Hrbik. He was very kind to me," I add quickly. He'd fit the bill for her, but she won't hear that from me. "He taught me to draw naked women."

  That startles her. "Well, what about, you know, feminism?" she says. "A lot of people call you a feminist painter."

  "What indeed," I say. "I hate party lines, I hate ghettos. Anyway, I'm too old to have invented it and you're too young to understand it, so what's the point of discussing it at all?"

  "So it's not a meaningful classification for you?" she says.

  "I like it that women like my work. Why shouldn't I?"

  "Do men like your work?" she asks slyly. She's been going through the back files, she's seen some of those witch-and-succubus pieces.

  "Which men?" I say. "Not everyone likes my work. It's not because I'm a woman. If they don't like a man's work it's not because he's a man. They just don't like it." I am on dubious ground, and this enrages me. My voice is calm; the coffee seethes within me.

  She frowns, diddles with the tape recorder. "Why do you paint all those women then?"

  "What should I paint, men?" I say. "I'm a painter. Painters paint women. Rubens painted women, Renoir painted women, Picasso painted women. Everyone paints women. Is there something wrong with painting women?"

  "But not like that," she says.

  "Like what?" I say. "Anyway, why should my women be the same as everyone else's women?" I catch myself picking at my fingers, and stop. In a minute my teeth will be chattering like those of cornered mice. Her voice is getting farther and farther away, I can hardly hear her. But I see her, very clearly: the ribbing on the neck of her sweater, the fine hairs of her cheek, the shine of a button. What I hear is what she isn't saying. Your clothes are stupid. Your art is crap. Sit up straight and don't answer back.

  "Why do you paint?" she says, and I can hear her again as clear as anything. I hear her exasperation, with me and my refusals.

  "Why does anyone do anything?" I say.

  17

  The light fades earlier; on the way home from school we walk through the smoke from burning leaves. It rains, and we have to play inside. We sit on the floor of Grace's room, being quiet because of Mrs. Smeath's bad heart, and cut out rolling pins and frying pans and paste them around our paper ladies.

  But Cordelia makes short work of this game. She knows, instantly it seems, why Grace's house has so many Eaton's Catalogues in it. It's because the Smeaths get their clothes that way, the whole family--order them out of the Eaton's Catalogue. There in the Girls' Clothing section are the plaid dresses, the skirts with straps, the winter coats worn by Grace and her sisters, three colors of them, in lumpy, serviceable wool, with hoods: Kelly Green, Royal Blue, Maroon. Cordelia manages to convey that she herself would never wear a coat ordered from the Eaton's Catalogue. She doesn't say this out loud though. Like the rest of us, she wants to stay on the good side of Grace.

  She bypasses the cookware, flips through the pages. She turns to the brassieres, to the elaborately laced and gusseted corsets--foundation garments, they're called--and draws mustaches on the models, whose flesh looks as if it's been painted over with a thin coat of beige plaster. She pencils hair in, under their arms, and on their chests between the breasts. She reads out the descriptions, snorting with stifled laughter: " 'Delightfully trimmed in dainty lace, with extra support for the mature figure.' That means big bazooms. Look at this--cup sizes! Like teacups!"

  Breasts fascinate Cordelia, and fill her with scorn. Both of her older sisters have them by now. Perdie and Mirrie sit in their room with its twin beds and sprigged-muslin flounces, filing their nails, laughing softly; or they heat brown wax in little pots in the kitchen and take it upstairs to spread on their legs. They look into their mirrors, making sad faces--"I look like Haggis McBaggis! It's the curse!" Their wastebaskets smell of decaying flowers.

  They tell Cordelia there are some things she's too young to understand, and then they tell these things to her anyway. Cordelia, her voice lowered, her eyes big, passes on the truth: the curse is when blood comes out between your legs. We don't believe her. She produces evidence: a sanitary pad, filched from Perdie's wastebasket. On it is a brown crust, like dried gravy. "That's not blood," Grace says with disgust, and she's right, it's nothing like when you cut your finger. Cordelia is indignant. But she
can prove nothing.

  I haven't thought much about grown-up women's bodies before. But now these bodies are revealed in their true, upsetting light: alien and bizarre, hairy, squashy, monstrous. We hang around outside the room where Perdie and Mirrie are peeling the wax off their legs while they utter yelps of pain, trying to see through the keyhole, giggling: they embarrass us, although we don't know why. They know they're being laughed at and come to the door to shoo us away. "Cordelia, why don't you and your little friends bug off!" They smile a little ominously, as if they know already what is in store for us. "Just wait and see," they say.

  This frightens us. Whatever has happened to them, bulging them, softening them, causing them to walk rather than run, as if there's some invisible leash around their necks, holding them in check--whatever it is, it may happen to us too. We look surreptitiously at the breasts of women on the street, of our teachers; though not of our mothers, that would be too close for comfort. We examine our legs and underarms for sprouting hairs, our chests for swellings. But nothing is happening: so far we are safe.

  Cordelia turns to the back pages of the catalogue, where the pictures are in gray and black and there are crutches and trusses and prosthetic devices. "Breast pumps," she says. "See this? It's for pumping your titties up bigger, like a bicycle pump." And we don't know what to believe.

  We can't ask our mothers. It's hard to imagine them without clothes, to think of them as having bodies at all, under their dresses. There's a great deal they don't say. Between us and them is a gulf, an abyss, that goes down and down. It's filled with wordlessness. They wrap up the garbage in several layers of newspaper and tie it with string, and even so it drips onto the freshly waxed floor. Their clotheslines are strung with underpants, nighties, socks, a display of soiled intimacy, which they have washed and rinsed, plunging their hands into the gray curdled water. They know about toilet brushes, about toilet seats, about germs. The world is dirty, no matter how much they clean, and we know they will not welcome our grubby little questions. So instead a long whisper runs among us, from child to child, gathering horror.