“What about Perdie and Mirrie?”
“You know Perdie,” she says tightly. “Always the little put-downs. But that’s enough about me. What do you think of me?” This is an old joke of hers, and I laugh. “Seriously, what are you up to these days?”
It’s the tone I remember: polite but not too interested. “Since the last time I saw you.”
I remember this last time with guilt. “Oh, nothing much,” I say. “Going to school. You know.” Right now it does look like nothing much. What have I really done all year? A smattering of art history, messing around with charcoal. There’s nothing to show. There’s Josef, but he’s not exactly an accomplishment and I decide not to mention him.
“School!” says Cordelia. “Was I glad to see the end of school. God, what boredom.” Stratford is only on in the summers, though. She will have to think of something else for the winter. Maybe the Earle Grey Players, going around to high schools. Maybe she will be ready for that. She got the job at Stratford with the help of one of the Earle Grey cousins, who remembered her from her bedsheet days at Burnham. “People who know people,” she says. She is one of Prospero’s attendant spirits in The Tempest, and has to wear a body stocking, with a gauzy costume over top, sprinkled with dried leaves and spangles. “Obscene,” she says. She’s also a mariner in the first scene; she can get away with this because of her height. She’s a court lady in Richard III, and she’s the chief nun in Measure for Measure. In this one she actually speaks some lines. She recites for me, in a honey-colored Englishy voice:
“At rehearsal I kept getting mixed up,” she says. She counts on her fingers. “Speak, hide face, show face, shut up.” She puts her hands together in an attitude of prayer, bows forward, lowering her head. Then she gets up and does a full court curtsy out of Richard III, with the women shoppers having tea in Murray‘s gawking at her. “What I’d like to do next year is the First Witch in ”The Tartans.“ ”When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?“ The Old Man says I might be ready for it. He thinks it would be brilliant to have a young First Witch.”
The Old Man, it turns out, is Tyrone Guthrie the director, from England and so famous I can’t pretend not to have heard of him. “That’s great,” I say.
“Remember ”The Tartans’ at Burnham? Remember that cabbage?“ she says. ”I was so humiliated.“
I don’t want to remember. The past has become discontinuous, like stones skipped across water, like postcards: I catch an image of myself, a dark blank, an image, a blank. Did I ever wear bat-wing sleeves and velveteen slippers, did I wear dresses like tinted marshmallows to formal dances, shuffle around the floor with some stranger’s groin digging into mine? The dried corsages were thrown out long ago, the diplomas and class pins and photos must be down in my mother’s cellar, in the steamer trunk along with the tarnishing silver. I glimpse those photos, rows and rows of lipsticked, spit-curled children. I would never smile, for those pictures. I would gaze stony-faced into the distance, beyond such adolescent diversions.
I remember my mean mouth, I remember how wise I thought I was. But I was not wise then. Now I am wise.
“Remember how we used to pinch things?” says Cordelia. “That was the only thing I really liked about that whole time.”
“Why?” I say. I had not liked it much. I was always afraid of getting caught.
“It was something I could have,” she says, and I’m not sure what she means. Cordelia takes her sunglasses out of her shoulder bag and puts them on. There I am in her mirror eyes, in duplicate and monochrome, and a great deal smaller than life-size.
Cordelia gets me a free ticket to Stratford, so I can see her in action. I go on the bus. It’s a matinee: I can get there, see the show, then take the bus back in time for my evening shift at the Swiss Chalet. The play is The Tempest. I watch for Cordelia, and when Prospero’s attendants come on, with music and jittery lighting effects, I peer hard, trying to see which one she is, behind the disguise of costume. But I can’t tell.
Chapter 55
Josef is rearranging me. “You should wear your hair loose,” he says, unpinning it from its ramshackle bun, running his hands through it to make it fluff out. “You look like a marvelous gypsy.” He presses his mouth to my collarbone, untucks the bedsheet he’s draped me in.
I stand still and let him do this. I let him do what he likes. It’s August and too hot to move. Haze hangs over the city like wet smoke; it covers my skin with an oily film, seeps into my flesh. I move through the days like a zombie, going from one hour to the next without direction. I’ve stopped drawing the furniture at the apartment; I fill the bathtub with cool water and get into it, but I no longer read in there. Soon it will be time to go back to school. I can hardly think about it.
“You should wear purple dresses,” says Josef. “It would be an improvement.” He places me against the twilight of the window, turns me, stands back a little, running his hand up and down my side. I no longer care whether anyone can see in. I feel my knees begin to give, my mouth loosen. In our time together he does not pace or tug his hair, he moves slowly, gently, with great deliberation. Josef takes me to the Park Plaza Hotel Roof Garden, in my new purple dress. It has a tight bodice, a low neck, a full skirt; it brushes against my bare legs as I walk. My hair is loose, and damp. I think it looks like a mop. But I catch a glimpse of myself, without expecting it, in the smoked-mirror wall of the elevator as we go up, and I see for an instant what Josef sees: a slim woman with cloudy hair, pensive eyes in a thin white face. I recognize the style: late nineteenth century. Pre-Raphaelite. I should be holding a poppy.
We sit on the outside patio, drinking Manhattans and looking over the stone balustrade. Josef has recently discovered a taste for Manhattans. This is one of the tallest buildings around. Below us Toronto festers in the evening heat, the trees spreading like worn moss, the lake zinc in the distance. Josef tells me he once shot a man in the head; what disturbed him was how easy it was to do it. He says he hates the Life Drawing class, he will not go on with it forever, cooped up in this provincial deadwater teaching the rudiments to morons. “I come from a country that no longer exists,” he says, “and you come from a country that does not yet exist.” Once I would have found this profound. Now I wonder what he means.
As for Toronto, he says, it has no gaiety or soul. In any case, painting itself is a hangover from the European past. “It is no longer important,” he says, waving it away with one hand. He wants to be in films, he wants to direct, in the United States. He will go there as soon as it can be arranged. He has good connections. There’s a whole network of Hungarians, for instance. Hungarians, Poles, Czechoslovakians. There is more opportunity in films down there, to say the least, since the only films made in this country are short ones that come on before real movies, about leaves spiraling downward into pools or flowers opening in time-lapse photography, to flute music. The other people he knows are doing well in the United States. They will get him in.
I hold Josef’s hand. His lovemaking these days is ruminative, as if he is thinking of something else. I discover I am somewhat drunk; also that I am afraid of heights. I have never been this high up in the air before. I think of standing close to the stone balustrade, toppling slowly over. From here you can see the United States, a thin fuzz on the horizon. Josef says nothing about me going there with him. I ask nothing. Instead he says, “You are very silent.” He touches my cheek. “Mysterious.” I do not feel mysterious, but vacant.