Cat's eye полностью

I think, What if she’s bad a heart attack? I look: there’s blood on her forehead, not much, but a cut. She must have hit her head falling. And no one’s stopping, and she’s lying there on her back, a bulky fifty-odd woman in a poor-person green coat, gabardine, and lamentable shoes all cracked, her arms outflung. The tanned-looking skin around her brown eyes is red and puffy, her long black and gray hair is splayed across the sidewalk.

“Lady,” she says, or something, it’s a mumble, but she’s got me now.

I look over my shoulder to see if anyone else will do this, but there are no takers. I kneel, say to her,

“Are you all right?” What a stupid question, she so obviously isn’t. Vomit and alcohol are around here somewhere. I have visions of myself taking her for coffee, and then where? I won’t be able to get rid of her, she’ll follow me back to the studio, throw up in the bathtub, sleep on the futon. They get me every time, they can spot me coming, pick me out of the crowd no matter how hard I frown. Sidewalk rap artists, Moonies, guitar-playing young men who ask me for subway tokens. In the clutch of the helpless I am helpless.

“She’s only drunk,” a man says in passing. What does he mean, only? It’s hell enough.

“Here,” I say, “I’ll help you up.” Wimp, I tell myself. She’ll ask you for money and you’ll give it to her, and she’ll spend it on cheap sweet wine. But I have her on her feet now, she’s slumped against me. If I can lug her over to the nearest wall I can prop her up, dust her off a little, think how to get away.

“There,” I say. But she won’t lean against the wall, she’s leaning against me instead. Her breath smells like a bad accident. She’s crying now, the shameless abandoned weeping of a child; her fingers clutch my sleeve.

“Don’t leave me,” she says. “Oh God. Don’t leave me all alone.” Her eyes are closed, her voice is pure neediness, pure woe. It hits the weakest, most sorrowing part of me; but I am only a surrogate, for who knows what lack, what loss. There’s nothing I can do.

“Here,” I say. I fumble in my purse, find a ten, crumple it into her hand, paying her off. I’m a sucker, I’m a bleeding heart. There’s a cut in my heart, it bleeds money.

“Bless you,” she says. Her head rolls from side to side, back against the wall. “God bless you lady, Our Lady bless you.” It’s a slurred blessing, but who’s to say I don’t need it? She must be a Catholic. I could find a church, slide her in through the door like a packet. She’s theirs, let them deal with her.

“I have to go now,” I say. “You’ll be all right.” Lying through my teeth. She opens her eyes wide, trying to focus. Her face goes quiet.

“I know about you,” she says. “You’re Our Lady and you don’t love me.”

Full-blown booze madness, and absolutely the wrong person. I draw my hand back from her as if she’s a live socket. “No,” I say. She’s right, I don’t love her. Her eyes are not brown but green. Cordelia’s. I walk away from her, guilt on my hands, absolving myself: I’m a good person. She could have been dying. Nobody else stopped.

I’m a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good.

I know too much to be good. I know myself.

I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly.

Chapter 29

W e come back in September. In the north the nights are cold and the leaves are beginning to turn, but the city is still hot, still damp. It’s astonishingly noisy and stinks of gasoline and the tar of melting roads. The air inside our house is stale and flat, air that’s been locked up in the heat all summer. The water’s rusty at first, coming out of the taps. I take a bath in the reddish lukewarm water. Already my body is stiffening, emptying itself of feeling. The future is closing on me like a door.

Cordelia has been waiting for me. I know this as soon as I see her standing at the school bus stop. Before the summer she would alternate between kindness and malice, with periods of indifference; but now she’s harsher, more relentless. It’s as if she’s driven by the urge to see how far she can go. She’s backing me toward an edge, like the edge of a cliff: one step back, another step, and I’ll be over and falling.