I shudder at her idea of a rave; and what does she mean, we? But she’s pleased: I’ve graduated from Living to Entertainment, this is a good sign. I remember when I had ideas about eternal greatness, when I wanted to be Leonardo da Vinci. Now I’m in with the rock groups and the latest movie. Art is what you can get away with, said somebody or other, which makes it sound like shoplifting or some other minor crime. And maybe that’s all it ever was, or is: a kind of stealing. A hijacking of the visual. I know it will be bad news. Still, I can’t resist. I pull on my clothes, go down in search of the nearest paper box. I do have the decency to wait until I get upstairs before I open the paper. The bold print says: CROTCHETY ARTIST STILL HAS POWER TO DISTURB. I take note: artist instead of painter, the foreboding still, sign-pointing the way to senility. Andrea the acorn-headed ingénue getting her own back. I’m surprised she’d use an old-fashioned word like crotchety. It manages to suggest both crotches and crocheting, both of which seem appropriate. But probably she didn’t write the headline.
There are indeed three photos. One is of my head, shot a little from beneath so it looks as if I have a double chin. The other two are of paintings. One is of Mrs. Smeath, bare-naked, flying heavily through the air. The church spire with the onion on it is in the distance. Mr. Smeath is stuck to her back like an asparagus beetle, grinning like a maniac; both of them have shiny brown insect wings, done to scale and meticulously painted. Erbug, The Annunciation, it’s called. The other is of Mrs. Smeath by herself, with a sickle-moon paring knife and a skinless potato, unclad from the waist up and the thighs down. This is from the Empire Bloomers series. The newspaper photos don’t do these paintings justice, because there’s no color. They look too much like snapshots. I know that in real life the bloomers on Mrs. Smeath are an intense indigo blue that took me weeks to get right, a blue that appears to radiate a dark and stifling light.
I scan the first paragraph: “Eminent artist Elaine Risley returns to hometown Toronto this week for a long overdue retrospective.” Eminent, the mausoleum word. I might as well climb onto the marble slab right now and pull the bedsheet over my head. There are the usual misquotations, nor does my blue jogging suit escape comment. “Elaine Risley, looking anything but formidable in a powder-blue jogging suit that’s seen better days, nevertheless can come out with a few pungent and deliberately provocative comments on women today.”
I suck in some coffee, skip to the last paragraph: the inevitable eclectic, the obligatory post-feminist, a however and a despite. Good old Toronto bet hedging and qualification. A blistering attack would be preferable, some flying fur, a little fire and brimstone. That way I would know I’m still alive. I think savagely of the opening. Perhaps I should be deliberately provocative, perhaps I should confirm their deepest suspicions. I could strap on some of Jon’s axmurder special effects, the burnt face with its one peeled bloodshot eye, the plastic blood-squirting arm. Or slip my feet into the hollow casts of feet and lurch in like something from a mad scientist movie.
I won’t do these things, but thinking about them is soothing. It distances the entire thing, reduces it to a farce or prank, in which I have no involvement aside from mockery.
Cordelia will see this piece in the paper, and maybe she will laugh. Even though she’s not in the phone book, she must still be around here somewhere. It would be like her to have changed her name. Or maybe she’s married; maybe she’s married more than once. Women are hard to keep track of, most of them. They slip into other names, and sink without a trace.
At any rate she’ll see this. She’ll know it’s Mrs. Smeath, she’ll get a kick out of that. She’ll know it’s me, and she’ll come. She’ll come in the door and she’ll see herself, titled, framed, and dated, hanging on the wall. She will be unmistakable: the long line of jaw, the slightly crooked lip. She appears to be in a room, alone; a room with walls of a pastel green.
This is the only picture I ever did of Cordelia, Cordelia by herself. Half a Face, it’s called: an odd title, because Cordelia’s entire face is visible. But behind her, hanging on the wall, like emblems in the Renaissance, or those heads of animals, moose or bear, you used to find in northern bars, is another face, covered with a white cloth. The effect is of a theatrical mask. Perhaps. I had trouble with this picture. It was hard for me to fix Cordelia in one time, at one age. I wanted her about thirteen, looking out with that defiant, almost belligerent stare of hers. So?
But the eyes sabotaged me. They aren’t strong eyes; the look they give the face is tentative, hesitant, reproachful. Frightened.
