Cat's Eye

The narrative jumps back to 17-year-old Elaine in a life drawing class staring at a naked woman for the first time. She tries to draw her but is intimidated by the sight of her unbeautiful body. Elaine is afraid of becoming like her. The class is taught by Josef Hrbik, who is not very impressed with her artwork and tells her she is an “unfinished woman.”

Elaine is studying “Art and Archeology” at the University of Toronto, a course her parents approved of. Her class is almost entirely female, and the teachers are almost entirely male. The girls in the class want to be teachers or to get married, and Elaine tries to dress and act like them.

Soon she starts wearing all black instead, not as a disguise but to show an allegiance to the boys in her life drawing class, who also wear black. Mrs. Finestein tells Elaine’s mother that Elaine is letting herself go.

Elaine goes to beer parlors with the other life drawing students. The boys mock the girls in the class and Josef Hrbik’s background as a refugee from Eastern Europe. Elaine wants this rowdy male group to accept her.

On one particular night, they are at the beer parlor with Susie, another life drawing student. Like the boys, Elaine looks down on Susie because she thinks she is not a serious artist. However, Susie’s intimate knowledge of Josef Hrbik suddenly makes it obvious to Elaine that the two are engaged in an affair.

Elaine’s class studies depictions of the Virgin Mary. The classes are evasive about depictions of her breastfeeding, but Elaine confronts it head on, to the shock of the other girls.

Elaine watches Susie and Josef Hrbik closely. Soon everyone in the class knows about the affair, and the boys look down on Susie even more. Two older classmates, Babs and Marjorie, find it a source of great hilarity, but Elaine thinks that Susie is using Josef Hrbik.

Elaine has relocated to her parents’ basement. Her father is depressed because Dr. Banerji has moved back to India after the university refused to promote him. He constantly talks about climate disasters and new diseases.

Elaine’s family get word that Stephen, who is studying astrophysics in California, has been arrested after accidentally trespassing on a military testing site. He had been chasing butterflies. The siblings now only communicate through letters, and Stephen’s postcards don’t give much detail as to his life.

In a French restaurant, Elaine eats snails with Josef Hrbik. He made advances on her during her personal evaluation and she went to his apartment. They had sex, and though it was painful and Elaine bled, it was less painful and bloody than she had feared. She asked him about Susie, and he appeared not to understand the question.

They have been seeing each other all summer, and Elaine has moved into her own apartment and started working at a restaurant. Josef buys her expensive meals and asks her not to leave him, and Elaine finds this endearing.

They see each other twice a week and hide their relationship from Susie, who wants to marry Josef. Elaine worries about pregnancy and tries to paint, often depictions of furniture in the apartment. Josef tells Elaine that he has no country and that she is his country. She realizes, as she eats snails, that she is not happy.

Cordelia reappears, having run away from home and tracked Elaine down. Elaine feels like she is trying to impress her when she tells her about her new job at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival. Elaine does not want to remember the past. Cordelia puts her sunglasses on and Elaine sees herself reflected in the lenses.

Cordelia gets her a ticket to the Shakespearean festival and Elaine goes, but she cannot recognize Cordelia in the crowd of actors on the stage.

Josef starts to change how Elaine dresses and wears her hair. They go for dinner at the Park Plaza Hotel Roof Garden, and he tells her that he once shot a man. When he asks Elaine if she would do anything for him, she says no.

Jon, a boy from her life drawing class, finds Elaine at work and they go for a beer together. Walking home, Elaine starts to cry and he kisses her. She goes to his apartment and they have sex.

In the present, Elaine walks past a monument to the South African War and wonders if anyone remembers it. She remembers how downtrodden this area used to be when Josef Hrbik lived there. She thinks about their relationship and wonders why he was with a girl 15 years younger. If her own daughters had a relationship like that she would have panicked. She thinks about buying the girls a gift but realizes she has no idea what they would want.

Elaine encounters a young Middle Eastern woman who wants money for her family. She tells Elaine that her people are being killed, and Elaine knows that she is suffering because of the same war that killed Stephen. Elaine gives the woman some money, and the woman says that God will bless her. Elaine thinks about how there is more and more suffering in the world every day and no end to the need.

The young Elaine leaves her job at the restaurant and moves home. She is still seeing both Josef and Jon and feels like she loves both of them. When she goes to Jon’s house it is chaotic, busy, and messy and full of his violent, abstract paintings. Elaine wants to clean his apartment for him but doesn’t want him to see her in a maternal light.

Josef begins to be suspicious of what Elaine is doing when they are not together, but she refuses to feel guilty given that he has been seeing Susie the whole time. One afternoon, Susie phones her sounding desperate and asks her to come to her house. When Elaine arrives, Susie doesn’t answer the door. Elaine gets the superintendent to unlock the door and finds Susie lying in a pool of her own blood: She tried to give herself an abortion.

Elaine takes Susie to the hospital but feels smug, as if Susie deserved what has happened to her. When Josef finds out he is devastated and becomes melancholy. Elaine starts to resent him and avoids spending time with him. Eventually, he decides to leave Toronto and Elaine is pleased. She dreams about Susie licking a popsicle and looking at Elaine in a way that she knows means Elaine has done something wrong.

Now that Elaine does not have to hide Josef from Jon, she feels virtuous. She decides she is in love with him but doesn’t tell him in case he objects. He continues to go out with other women, believing monogamy is a bourgeois concept.

Elaine paints more often now and experiments with egg tempera. Jon would look down on her work as just illustration. She is particularly interested in effects on glass and the mirror reflection in Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage. Instead of her life drawing class, she now takes a class on advertising art where the students want paying jobs when they graduate.

Elaine graduates and tries to get a job at an ad agency. Her parents move north, where her father returns to his research job. She does not miss them and enjoys living on her own.

Stephen sends postcards from all over the world, including one from New York saying he got married and one some years later saying he is now divorced. When he visits Toronto to give a lecture, Elaine attends. She understands very little of what he says except during the introduction, which talks about how looking at the sky at night involves looking at fragments of the past. After the lecture, Elaine and Stephen talk, but it is obvious that Stephen remembers little of their shared childhood. He only remembers hiding his marbles under the bridge, but he still won’t reveal where.

Jon has started to paint images that look like commercial illustrations. He stays at Elaine’s apartment because his is full of American draft dodgers. Elaine finds out she is pregnant. She is afraid to tell Jon and feels numb and like she is exploding into space. She dreams she is in bed at her old house.

Elaine begin painting things from her childhood, including three sofas, a jar of nightshade flowers, and Mrs. Smeath. Sometimes she has to turn her paintings of Mrs. Smeath to face the wall.

The narrative jumps forward to Elaine walking a young Sarah in her stroller. She and Jon are married. Elaine struggles to adjust to her new body and to the changing society. Jon and Elaine both love Sarah fiercely but have started to have fights that sometimes turn violent. They both want to remain young but have both become adults.

Jon has given up painting and started making abstract constructions of found objects. Elaine attends a meeting of feminists who express their anger at men. Elaine feels out of place because she is married, a mother, and less radical than some of the other women, who have experienced serious male violence.

Elaine begins to paint at night. She paints the Virgin Mary with the head of a lioness and Christ as a cub. She paints her descending, carrying paper bags of groceries, and calls it Our Lady of Perpetual Help (365). Jon objects to her painting at night, but Elaine wonders when else she could do it. She knows he would prefer her not to paint at all.

Jon and Elaine begin to throw things at each other, and Elaine sees how the line between fighting and murder could be crossed. Jon tells a friend that Elaine is mad about being a woman, which she disputes.

Elaine puts on an art show with three women from the feminist group. A journalist writing about the opening jokes that they should burn some bras for him. Ellen feels like her work doesn’t make a statement. She realizes that she has no close female friends and hasn’t seen Cordelia for years.

Most of Elaine’s paintings depict Mrs. Smeath, including one of her lying on the sofa, one called Leprosy that shows her in front of a mirror with half her face peeling off, and a set of four in which she is wrapped in tissue that slowly unravels to reveal a rotten heart. On this is written “The Kingdom of God is Within You” (372). Elaine is unsure why she hates Mrs. Smeath so much.

A woman approaches Elaine. She thinks for a moment it is Grace Smeath, but it is just an angry religious woman. The woman throws an ink bottle at Elaine’s painting, and this makes the show big news.

Elaine visits Cordelia in a psychiatric hospital. She attempted to overdose on pills and her parents committed her. Cordelia saw Elaine in the newspaper and suggested they meet. Elaine hardly recognizes her; she seems as if she is on tranquilizers. They go for lunch and Cordelia asks Elaine to help her escape. Elaine refuses and Cordelia says that Elaine always hated her. Elaine is surprised, as she cannot remember hating her.

That night, Elaine dreams that Cordelia is falling from a bridge. She sends her a note but it is returned unopened. She dreams of a mannequin holding Cordelia’s head draped in white cloth.

In present-day Toronto, Elaine goes to a diner designed to evoke those of the mid-20th century. The last time she saw Cordelia was when she dropped her back off at the rest home, but that wasn’t the last time she heard her voice.

Elaine thinks that the past is not quaint while you are living it. She picks up the presents she bought for her family, including a fountain pen for Ben. She thinks about how things that are old must wait in limbo until they come back into fashion.

She walks past Josef’s old street, wondering what became of him. She once saw a film he made that seemed like it was about her and Susie. She thinks she was unfair to him but also thinks that unfairness is one of the only defenses women have. She too made art about him: a painting of him and Jon, both naked, painting a life model with a blue marble instead of a head.

Elaine meets Jon at the Park Plaza Hotel, and after dinner they go back to Jon’s apartment and sleep together. Elaine doesn’t feel like she is betraying Ben but rather that she is being loyal to something older than her relationship with him. She asks Jon to go to her gallery opening but he refuses.

Back in time, Jon and Elaine’s relationship deteriorates. Elaine realizes Jon is having affairs. They fight and Jon brings up her relationship with Josef. Elaine gets sick and paints less, afraid she will fall short of the expectations of her feminist friends.

One night, lying in bed, Elaine feels nothingness overcome her. She feels like she has done something wrong but is unsure what. She hears a voice tell her to cut herself with an Exacto knife. Jon finds her but she insists it was an accident. She feels cleansed and realizes the voice was that of a nine-year-old child.

Elaine leaves Jon and goes to Vancouver. She sees a therapist who only wants to talk about her very early childhood and asks her if she has orgasms. She makes friends with other single mothers and shows her work in some small shows. Jon visits her, as do her parents. Stephen sends postcards.

Elaine’s art suddenly becomes popular and starts to sell well. She has various relationships with men but finds them difficult to balance with work and her responsibilities. She meets Ben in a supermarket and is compelled by his simplicity. They visit Mexico and start to build a life together. Elaine has another daughter, Anne. Ben believes Elaine to be fragile, and she begins to enjoy her life in Vancouver, although the past still feels like a heavy burden.