Cat's eye полностью

Cordelia’s family moves to a different, larger house, in a ritzier neighborhood farther north. Some Dutch people move into her old house. They plant a lot of tulips. That seems to be the end of her. I write the final Grade Thirteen exams, subject after subject, day after day, sitting at a desk in the gymnasium. The leaves are fully out, the irises are in bloom, there’s a heat wave; the gymnasium heats up like an oven and we all sit in there, superheated, writing away, while the gymnasium exudes its smell of bygone athletes. The teachers police the aisles. Several girls faint. One boy keels over and is found afterward to have drunk a pitcher of tomato juice out of the refrigerator which was really Bloody Marys for his mother’s bridge club. As the bodies are carried out I scarcely look up from the page. I know I’ll do well in the two Biology exams. I can draw anything: the insides of crayfish ears, the human eye, frogs’ genitalia, the blossom of the snapdragon ( Antirrhinum majus) in cross section. I know the difference between a raceme and a rhizome, I explicate photosynthesis, I can spell Scrofulariaciae. But in the middle of the Botany examination it comes to me, like a sudden epileptic fit, that I’m not going to be a biologist, as I have thought. I am going to be a painter. I look at the page, where the life cycle of the mushroom from spore to fruiting body is taking shape, and I know this with absolute certainty. My life has been changed, soundlessly, instantaneously. I continue my explication of tubers, bulbs, and legumes, as if nothing has happened.

One night, just after the exams have finished, the phone rings. It’s Cordelia. I realize I’ve been expecting this.

“I’d like to see you,” she says. I don’t want to see her, but I know I will. What I hear is not like but need.

The next afternoon I take the subway and then the bus, northward through the heated city, to where Cordelia now lives. I’ve never been up here before. The streets wind in and around, the houses are large, ponderous, Georgian, set off with weighty shrubbery. I see or think I see Cordelia’s face, pale and indistinct, behind the front window as I come up the walk. She opens the door before I have time to ring.

“Well, hi there,” she says. “Long time no see.” This is false heartiness and we both know it, because Cordelia is a wreck. Her hair is lusterless, the flesh of her face pasty. She’s gained a lot of weight, not solid-muscled weight, but limp weight, bloated and watery. She’s gone back to the too-vivid orange-red lipstick, which turns her yellowish. “I know,” she says. “I look like Haggis McBaggis.”

The house is cool inside. The front hall floor is white and black squares; there’s a graceful central staircase. A flower arrangement with gladioli sits on a polished table beside it. The house is silent, except for a clock chiming in the living room. Nobody else seems to be home. We don’t go into the living room but back past the stairs and through a door into the kitchen, where Cordelia makes me a cup of instant coffee. The kitchen is beautiful, perfectly arranged, pale-colored and peaceful. The refrigerator and stove are white. Some people now have colored refrigerators, pale-green or pink, but I don’t like these colors and I’m pleased that Cordelia’s mother doesn’t either. There’s a lined school notebook open on the kitchen table, which I recognize as the dining table from their other house with the two middle leaves taken out. That means they must have a new dining table. It appals me to discover that I want to see this new dining table more than I want to see Cordelia. Cordelia rummages in the fridge and brings out an opened package of store doughnuts. “I’ve been waiting for an excuse to eat the rest of these,” she says. But as soon as she’s taken her first bite she lights a cigarette.

“So,” she says. “What are you up to these days?” It’s her too-bright voice, the one she used to use on boys. Right now it frightens me.

“Oh, just the usual,” I say. “You know. Finishing exams.” We look at each other. Things are bad for her, that much is clear. I don’t know whether she wants me to ignore this or not. “What about you?” I say.

“I have a tutor,” she says. “I’m supposed to be studying. For summer courses.” We both know without mentioning it that she must have failed her year, despite the new school. She must have failed badly. Unless she passes whatever subjects she failed, at the next set of exams or sometime or other, she’ll be locked out of university forever.

“Is the tutor nice?” I say, as if I’m asking about a new dress.

“I guess so,” says Cordelia. “Her name is Miss Dingle. It really is. She blinks all the time, she has watery eyes. She lives in this squalid apartment. She has salmon-colored lingerie, I see it hanging over the shower curtain rod in her squalid bathroom. I can always get her off the subject by asking about her health.”

“Off what subject?” I ask.