Cat's eye полностью

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.

Chapter 63