The faces of the boys are impassive. To me their contempt is obvious, but Mr. Hrbik doesn’t notice. I feel sorry for him, and grateful to him, for letting me into the class. Also I admire him. The war is far enough away now to be romantic, and he has been through it. I wonder if he has any bullet holes in him, or other marks of grace.
Tonight, in the Ladies and Escorts of the Maple Leaf Tavern, it isn’t just the boys and me. Susie is here too.
Susie has yellow hair, which I can tell she rolls and sets and then dishevels, and tips ash-blond at the ends. She wears jeans and black turtlenecks too, but her jeans are skintight and she’s usually got something around her neck, a silver chain or a medallion. She does her eyes with a heavy black line over the lid like Cleopatra, and black mascara and smoky dark-blue eye shadow, so her eyes are blue-rimmed, bruise-colored, as if someone’s punched her; and she uses white face powder and pale pink lipstick, which makes her look ill, or as if she’s been up very late every night for weeks. She has full hips, and breasts that are too large for her height, like a rubber squeaky toy that’s been pushed down on the top of the head and has bulged out in these places. She has a little breathless voice and a startled little laugh; even her name is like a powder puff. I think of her as a silly girl who’s just fooling around at art school, too dumb to get into university, although I don’t make judgments like this about the boys.
“Uncle Joe was raving tonight,” says Jon. Jon is tall, with sideburns and big hands. He has a denim jacket with a lot of snap fasteners on it. Besides Colin the Englishman, he’s the most articulate one. He uses words like purity and the picture plane, but only among two or three, never with the whole group.
“Oh,” says Susie, with a tiny, gaspy laugh, as if the air is going into her instead of out, “that’s mean! You shouldn’t call him that!”
This irritates me: because she’s said something I should have said myself and didn’t have the guts to, but also because she’s made even this defense come out like a cat rubbing against a leg, an admiring hand on a bicep.
“Pompous old fart,” says Colin, to get some of her attention for himself. Susie turns her big blue-rimmed eyes on him. “He’s not old,” she says solemnly. “He’s only thirty-five.”
Everyone laughs.
But how does she know? I look at her and wonder. I remember the time I went early to class. The model wasn’t there yet, I was in the room by myself, and then Susie walked in with her coat already off, and right after that Mr. Hrbik.
Susie came over to where I was sitting and said, “Don’t you just hate the snow!” Ordinarily she didn’t talk to me. And I was the one who’d been out in the snow: she looked warm as toast.
Chapter 51
In the daytime it’s February. The gray museum auditorium steams with wet coats and the slush melting from winter boots. There’s a lot of coughing.
We’ve finished the Mediaeval period, with its reliquaries and elongated saints, and are speeding through the Renaissance, hitting the high points. Virgin Marys abound. It’s as if one enormous Virgin Mary has had a whole bunch of daughters, most of which look something like her but not entirely. They’ve shed their gold-leaf halos, they’ve lost the elongated, flat-chested look they had in stone and wood, they’ve filled out more. They ascend to Heaven less frequently. Some are dough-faced and solemn, sitting by fireplaces or in chairs of the period, or by open windows, with roof work going on in the background; some are anxious-looking, others are milk-fed and pinky-white, with wire-thin halos and fine gold tendrils of hair escaping from their veils and clear Italian skies in the distance. They bend over the cradle of the Nativity, or they hold Jesus on their laps.
Jesus has trouble looking like a real baby because his arms and legs are too long and spindly. Even when he does look like a baby, he’s never newborn. I’ve seen newborn babies, with their wizened dried-apricot look, and these Jesuses are nothing like them. It’s as if they’ve been born at the age of one year, or else are shriveled men. There’s a lot of red and blue in these pictures, and a lot of breast-feeding.
The dry voice from the darkness concentrates on the formal properties of the compositions, the arrangement of cloth in folds to accentuate circularity, the rendering of textures, the uses of perspective in archways and in the tiles underfoot. We skim over the breast-feeding: the pointer emerging from nowhere never alights on these bared breasts, some of which are an unpleasant pinky-green or veiny, or have a hand pressing the nipple and even real milk. There is some shifting in the seats at this: nobody wants to think about breast-feeding, not the professor and certainly not the girls. Over coffee they shiver: they themselves are fastidious, they will bottle-feed, which is anyway more sanitary.
“The point of the breast-feeding,” I say, “is that the Virgin is humble enough to do it. Most women then got their kids wet-nursed by somebody else, if they could afford it.” I have read this in a book, dug up from the depths of the stacks, in the library.
“Oh, Elaine,” they say. “You’re such a brain.”
“The other point is that Christ came to earth as a mammal,” I say. “I wonder what Mary did for diapers?
Now that would be a relic: the Sacred Diaper. How come there are no pictures of Christ on the potty? I know there’s a piece of the Holy Foreskin around, but what about the Holy Shit?”
“You’re awful!”
I grin, I cross my ankle over my knee, I put my elbows on the table. I enjoy pestering the girls in this minor, trivial way: it shows I am not like them.
This is one life, my life of daytimes. My other, my real life, takes place at night. I’ve been watching Susie closely, and paying attention to what she does. Susie is not in fact my age, she is two years older and more, she’s almost twenty-one. She doesn’t live at home with her parents, but in a bachelorette apartment in one of the new high-rise buildings on Avenue Road, north of St. Clair. It is thought her parents pay for this. How else could she afford it? These buildings have elevators in them, and wide foyers with plants, and are called things like The Monte Carlo. Living in them is a daring and sophisticated thing to do, though scoffed at by the painters: trios of nurses live there. The painters themselves live on Bloor Street or Queen, above hardware stores and places that sell suitcases wholesale, or on side streets where there are immigrants.
Susie stays after class, she turns up early, she hangs around; during the class itself she looks at Mr. Hrbik only sideways, furtively. I meet her coming out of his office and she jumps and smiles at me, then turns and calls, artificially and too loudly, “Thank you, Mr. Hrbik! See you next week!” She gives a little wave, although the door is partly closed and he can’t possibly see her: the wave is for me. I now guess what I should have spotted right away: she is having a love affair with Mr. Hrbik. Also, she thinks nobody has figured this out.
In this she is wrong. I overhear Marjorie and Babs discussing it in an oblique way: “Listen, kid, it’s one way to pass the course,” is what they say. “Wish I could do it just by flipping on my back.” “Don’t you wish! Those days are long gone, eh?” And they laugh in a comfortable way, as if what is going on is nothing at all, or funny.