Cat's eye полностью

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.