Cat's eye

I don’t look much at the towers though, or the people passing me in their fashionable getups, imports, handcrafted leather, suede, whatever. Instead I look down at the sidewalk, like a tracker. I can feel my throat tightening, a pain along the jawline. I’ve started to chew my fingers again. There’s blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange Popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.

Two – Silver Paper

Chapter 3

I‘ m lying on the floor, on a futon, covered by a duvet. Futon, duvet: this is how far we’ve come. I wonder if Stephen ever figured out what futons and duvets were. Most likely not. Most likely if you’d said futon to him, he’d have looked at you as if he was deaf or you were brain-damaged. He did not exist in the futon dimension.

When there were no futons and no duvets, the price of an ice cream cone was five cents. Now it’s a dollar if you’re lucky, and not as big either. That’s the bottom-line difference between then and now: ninety-five cents.

This is the middle of my life. I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I’m supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I’m supposed to be a person of substance. But since coming back here I don’t feel weightier. I feel lighter, as if I’m shedding matter, losing molecules, calcium from my bones, cells from my blood; as if I’m shrinking, as if I’m filling with cold air, or gently falling snow.

With all this lightness I do not rise, I descend. Or rather I am dragged downward, into the layers of this place as into liquefied mud.

The fact is that I hate this city. I’ve hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it. Once it was fashionable to say how dull it was. First prize a week in Toronto, second prize two weeks in Toronto, Toronto the Good, Toronto the Blue, where you couldn’t get wine on Sundays. Everyone who lived here said those things: provincial, self-satisfied, boring. If you said that, it showed you recognized these qualities but did not partake of them yourself.

Now you’re supposed to say how much it’s changed. World-class city is a phrase they use in magazines these days, a great deal too much. All those ethnic restaurants, and the theater and the boutiques. New York without the garbage and muggings, it’s supposed to be. People from Toronto used to go to Buffalo for the weekends, the men to watch girlie shows and drink after-hours beer, the women to shop; they’d come back jumped-up and pissed and wearing several layers of clothes to smuggle them through Customs. Now the weekend traffic is the other way around.

I’ve never believed either version, the dull, the world-class. Toronto was never dull, for me. Dull isn’t a word you’d use to describe such misery, and enchantment.

And I can’t believe it’s changed. Driving in from the airport yesterday in the taxi, past the flat neat factories and warehouses that were once flat neat farms, mile after mile of caution and utilitarianism, and then through the center of the city with the glitz and the European-style awnings and the paving stones, I could see it’s still the same. Underneath the flourish and ostentation is the old city, street after street of thick red brick houses, with their front porch pillars like the off-white stems of toadstools and their watchful, calculating windows. Malicious, grudging, vindictive, implacable. In my dreams of this city I am always lost.

Apart from all this, I do of course have a real life. I sometimes have trouble believing in it, because it doesn’t seem like the kind of life I could ever get away with, or deserve. This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise. I live in a house, with window curtains and a lawn, in British Columbia, which is as far away from Toronto as I could get without drowning. The unreality of the landscape there encourages me: the greeting-card mountains, of the sunset-and-sloppy-message variety, the cottagy houses that look as if they were built by the Seven Dwarfs in the thirties, the giant slugs, so much larger than a slug needs to be. Even the rain is overdone, I can’t take it seriously. I suppose these things are as real, and as oppressive, to the people who grew up there as this place is to me. But on good days it still feels like a vacation, an evasion. On bad days I don’t notice it, or much else.

I have a husband, not my first, whose name is Ben. He is not any sort of an artist, for which I am thankful. He runs a travel agency, specializing in Mexico. Among his other sterling qualities are cheap tickets to the Yucatán. The travel agency is why he hasn’t come with me on this trip: the months before Christmas are a hectic time in the travel business.