Cat's eye (44 page)

Next to this is
White Gift,
which is in four panels. In the first one, Mrs. Smeath is wrapped up in white tissue paper like a can of Spam or a mummy, with just her head sticking out, her face wearing its closed half-smile. In the next three she’s progressively unwrapped: in her print dress and bib apron, in her back-of-the-catalogue
Eaton’s
flesh-colored foundation garment—although I don’t expect she possessed one—and finally in her saggy-legged cotton underpants, her one large breast sectioned to show her heart. Her heart is the heart of a dying turtle: reptilian, dark-red, diseased. Across the bottom of this panel is stenciled: THE•KINGDOM•OF•GOD•IS•WITHIN•YOU.

It’s still a mystery to me, why I hate her so much.

I look away from Mrs. Smeath, and there is another Mrs. Smeath, only this one is moving. She’s just inside the door and heading toward me. She’s the same age as she was. It’s as if she’s stepped down off the wall, the walls: the same round raw potato face, the hulky big-boned frame, the glittering spectacles and hairpin crown. My gut clenches in fear; then there’s that rancid hate, flashing up in an instant. But of course this can’t be Mrs. Smeath, who must be much older by now. And it isn’t. The hairpin crown was an optical illusion: it’s just hair, graying and cropped short. It’s Grace Smeath, charmless and righteous, in shapeless, ageless clothing, dun in color; she is ringless and without ornament. By the way she stalks, rigid and quivering, lips pinched, the freckles standing out on her root-white skin like bug bites, I can see that this will not be transformed into a light social occasion by any weak-chinned smiling of mine.

I try anyway. “Is it Grace?” I say. Several nearby people have stopped in mid-word. This is not the sort of woman who usually frequents gallery openings, of any kind.

Grace clumps relentlessly forward. Her face is fatter than it used to be. I think of orthopedic shoes, lisle stockings, underwear laundered thin and gray, coal cellars. I am afraid of her. Not of anything she could do to me, but of her judgment. And here it comes.

“You are disgusting,” she says. “You are taking the Lord’s name in vain. Why do you want to hurt people?”

What is there to be said? I could claim that Mrs. Smeath is not Grace’s mother but a composition. I could mention the formal values, the careful use of color. But
White Gift
is not a composition, it’s pictures of Mrs. Smeath, and indecent pictures at that. It’s washroom graffiti raised to a higher order. Grace is staring past me at the wall: there are not just one or two foul pictures to be appalled by, there are many. Mrs. Smeath in metamorphosis, from frame to frame, naked, exposed and desecrated, along with the maroon velvet chesterfield, the sacred rubber plant, the angels of God. I have gone way too far. Grace’s hands are fists, her fatted chin is trembling, her eyes are pink and watery, like a laboratory rabbit’s. Is that a tear? I am aghast, and deeply satisfied. She is making a spectacle of herself, at last, and I am in control.

But I look again, more closely: this woman is not Grace. She doesn’t even look like Grace. Grace is my age, she would not be this old. There’s a generic resemblance, that’s all. This woman is a stranger.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” says the woman who is not Grace. Her eyes narrow behind her glasses. She raises her fist, and I drop my glass of wine. Red splashes the wall and floor. What she has in her clenched hand is a bottle of ink. With a shaky twist she unscrews the top, and I hold my breath, with fright but also curiosity: is it me she’ll throw it at? For throwing is clearly her intention. There are gasps around us, this is happening fast, Carolyn and Jody are pushing forward. The woman who is not Grace hurls the ink, bottle and all, straight at
White Gift.
The bottle careens and thuds to the carpet, ink pours down over the skyscape, veiling Mrs. Smeath in Parker’s Washable Blue. The woman gives me a triumphant smile and turns, not stalking now but scurrying, heading for the door. I have my hands over my mouth, as if to scream. Carolyn envelops me, hugging. She smells like a mother. “I’ll call the police,” she says.

“No,” I say. “It will come off.” And it probably will, because
White Gift
is varnished, and painted on wood. Maybe there won’t even be a dent.

There are women gathering around me, the rustle of their feathers, a cooing. I am soothed and consoled, patted, cherished as if in shock. Maybe they mean it, maybe they like me after all. It’s so hard for me to tell, with women.

“Who was that?” they ask.

“Some religious nut case,” says Jody. “Some reactionary.”

I will be looked at, now, with respect: paintings that can get bottles of ink thrown at them, that can inspire such outraged violence, such uproar and display, must have an odd revolutionary power. I will seem audacious, and brave. Some dimension of heroism has been added to me. FEATHERS FLY AT FEMINIST FRACAS, says the paper. The picture is of me cringing, hands over my mouth, Mrs. Smeath bare-naked and dripping with ink in the background. This is how I learn that women fighting is news. There’s something titillating about it, upended and comic, like men in evening gowns and high heels.
Hen fighting,
it’s called.

The show itself attracts bad adjectives: “abrasive,” “aggressive” and “shrill.” It’s mostly Jody’s statues and Carolyn’s quilts that are called these things. Zillah’s lintscapes are termed “subjective,” “introverted”

and “flimsy.” Compared with the rest of them, I get off easy: “naive surrealism with a twist of feminist lemon.”

Carolyn makes a bright yellow banner with the words “abrasive,” “aggressive” and “shrill” on it in red, arid hangs it outside the door. A great many people come.

I
‘m waiting, in a waiting room. The waiting room has several nondescript blondwood chairs in it, with seats upholstered in olive green, and three end tables. This furniture is a clunky imitation of the early Scandinavian furniture of ten or fifteen years ago, now drastically out of style. On one of the tables there are some thumbed
Reader’s Digest
and
Maclean’s
magazines, and on another an ashtray, white with a rosebud trim. The carpet is an orangey-green, the walls an off-yellow. There is one picture, a lithoprint of two coy, grisly children in pseudo-peasant costume, vaguely Austrian, using a mushroom for an umbrella. The room smells of old cigarette smoke, old rubber, the worn intimacy of cloth too long against flesh. On top of that, an overlay of floor wash antiseptic, seeping in from the corridors beyond. There are no windows. This room sets me on edge, like fingernails on a blackboard. Or like a dentist’s waiting room, or the room where you’d wait before a job interview, for a job you didn’t want to get. This is a discreet private loony bin. A rest home, it’s called: The Dorothy Lyndwick Rest Home. The sort of place well-off people use for stowing away those members of their families who are not considered fit to run around in public, in order to keep them from being carted off to 999 Queen, which is neither discreet nor private.

999 Queen is both a real place and high school shorthand for all funny farms, booby hatches, and nuthouses that could possibly be imagined. We had to imagine them, then, never having seen one. “999

Queen,” we would say, sticking our tongues out the sides of our mouths, crossing our eyes, making circles near our ears with our forefingers. Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.

I am waiting for Cordelia. Or I think it will be Cordelia: her voice on the phone did not sound like her, but slower and somehow damaged. “I saw you,” is what she said, as if we had been talking together only five minutes before. But in fact it had been seven years, or eight, or nine: the summer she worked at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, the summer of Josef. “In the paper,” she added. And then a pause, as if this was a question.

“Right,” I said. Then, because I knew I should, “Why don’t we get together?”

“I can’t go out,” Cordelia said, in the same slowed-down voice. “You’ll have to come here.”

And so I am here.

Cordelia comes through a door at the far end of the room, walking carefully, as if balancing, or lame. But she is not lame. Behind her is another woman, with the optimistic, false, toothy smile of a paid attendant. It takes me a moment to recognize Cordelia, because she doesn’t look at all the same. Or rather she doesn’t look the way she did when I last saw her, in her wide cotton skirt and barbaric bracelet, elegant and confident. She is in an earlier phase, or a later one: the soft green tweeds and tailored blouses of her good-taste background, which now appear matronly on her, because she has put on weight. Or has she?

Flesh has been added, but it has slid down, toward the middle of her body, like mud sliding down a hill. The long bones have risen to the surface of her face, the skin tugged downward on them as if by irresistible gravitational pull. I can see how she’ll be when she’s old. Someone has done her hair. Not her. She would never make it in tight little waves like that. Cordelia stands uncertainly, squinting a little, head poking forward and swinging imperceptibly from side to side, the way an elephant’s does, or some slow, bewildered animal. “Cordelia,” I say, standing up.

“There’s your friend,” says the woman, smiling relent lessly. She takes Cordelia by the arm and gives a small tug, to start her in the right direction. “There you are,” I say, falling already into the trap of addressing her like a child. I come forward, give her an awkward kiss. I find to my surprise that I’m glad to see her.

“Better late than never,” Cordelia says, with the same hesitation, the thickness in her voice I’ve heard over the phone. The woman steers her to the chair across from mine, settles her down into it with a little push, as if she’s elderly, and stubborn.

Suddenly I’m outraged. No one has a right to treat Cordelia this way. I scowl at the woman, who says,

“How nice of you to come! Cordelia enjoys a visit, don’t you, Cordelia?”

“You can take me out,” Cordelia says. She looks up at the woman, for approval.

“Yes, that’s right,” says the woman. “For tea or something. If you promise to bring her back, that is!”

She gives a cheery laugh, as if this is a joke.

I take Cordelia out. The Dorothy Lyndwick Rest Home is in High Park, a suburb where I’ve never been before and don’t know my way around, but there’s a corner café a few blocks along. Cordelia knows it, and her way there. I don’t know whether I should take her arm or not, and so I don’t; I walk along beside her, watchful at crossings as if she’s blind, slowing my pace to hers.

“I don’t have any money,” says Cordelia. “They won’t let me have any. They even get my cigarettes for me.”

“That’s all right,” I say.

We ease into a booth, order coffee and two toasted Danishes. I give the order: I don’t want the waitress staring. Cordelia fumbles, produces a cigarette. Her hand, lighting it, is shaky. “Great flaming blue-headed balls of Jesus,” she says, making an effort with the syllables. “It’s good to be out of there.”

She tries a laugh, and I laugh with her, feeling culpable and accused. I should ask her things: what has she been doing, for these years we’ve skipped? What about her acting, what became of that? Did she get married, have children? What exactly has been going on, to bring her where she is? But all of this is beside the point. It’s detachable, it’s been added on. The main thing is Cordelia, the fact of her now.

“What the shit have they got you on?” I say.

“Some sort of tranquilizers,” she says. “I hate them. They make me drool.”

“What for?” I say. “How did you end up in that nuthatch anyway? You aren’t any crazier than I am.”

Cordelia looks at me, blowing out smoke. “Things weren’t working out very well,” she says after a while.

“So?” I say.

“So. I tried pills.”

“Oh, Cordelia.” Something goes through me with a slice, like watching a child fall, mouth down on rock.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It just came over me. I was tired,” she says.

There is no point telling her she shouldn’t have done such a thing, I do what I’d do in high school: I ask for the details. “So did you conk out?”

“Yes,” she said. “I checked into a hotel, to do it. But they figured it out—the manager or someone. I had to get my stomach pumped. That was revolting. Vomit-making, you could say.”

She does what would be a laugh, except that her face is so rigid. I think I may cry. At the same time I’m angry with her, though I don’t know why. It’s as if Cordelia has placed herself beyond me, out of my reach, where I can’t get at her. She has let go of her idea of herself. She is lost.

“Elaine,” she says, “get me out.”

“What?” I say, brought up short.

“Help me get out of there. You don’t know what it’s like. You have no privacy.” This is the closest to pleading she’s ever come.

A phrase comes to me, a remnant left over from boys, from Saturday afternoons, reading the comics:
Pick on somebody your own size.
“How could I do that?” I say.

“Visit me tomorrow and we’ll go in a taxi.” She sees me hesitate. “Or just lend me the money. That’s all you have to do. I can hide the pills in the morning, I won’t take them. Then I’ll be all right. I know it’s those pills that’re keeping me like this. Just twenty-five dollars is all I need.”

“I don’t have a lot of money with me,” I say, which is true enough, but an evasion. “They’d catch you. They’d know you were off the pills. They could tell.”

“I can fool them any day,” Cordelia says, with a flicker of her old cunning. Of course, I think, she’s an actress. Or was. She can counterfeit anything. “Anyway, those doctors are so dumb. They ask all these questions, they believe anything I tell them, they write it all down.”

There are doctors, then. More than one. “Cordelia, how can I take the responsibility? I haven’t even talked, I haven’t talked to anyone.”

“They’re all assholes,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with me. You know, you said yourself.” There’s a frantic child in there, behind that locked, sagging face.