Dancing Girls and Other Stories Part 11

Julia moved her head. The blood trickled gently down the back of her throat, thick and purple-tasting. She had been sitting there in front of the phone, trying to figure out the instructions for calling long distance through the hotel op-erator, when she'd sneezed and the page in front of her had been suddenly spattered with blood. Totally unprovoked. And Bernie would be hanging around at home, waiting for her to call. Intwo hours she had to give the reading. A gracious introduction, she would rise and move to the mi-crophone, smiling, she would open her mouth and blood would start to drip from her nose. Would they clap? Would they pretend not to notice? Would they think it was part of the poem? She would have to start rooting around in her purse for a Kleenex, or, better still, she'd faint, and someone else would have to cope.

(But everyone would think she was drunk.) How upsetting for the committee. Would they pay her anyway?

She could imagine them discussing it. She raised her head a little, to see if it had stopped.

Something that felt like a warm slug crawled down towards her upper lip. She licked, tasting salt. How was she going to get to the phone? On her back, creeping supine across the floor, using her elbows and pushing with her feet, a swim-ming motion, like a giant aquatic insect. She shouldn't be calling Bernie, she should be calling a doctor. But it wasn't serious enough. Something like this always happened when she had to give a reading, something painful but too minor for a doctor. Besides, it was always out of town, she never knew any doctors. Once it was a bad cold; her voice had sounded as if it was coming through a layer of mud. Once her hands and ankles had swelled up. Headaches were stan-dard: she never got headaches at home. It was as if some-thing was against these readings and was trying to keep her from giving them.

She was waiting for it to take a more drastic form, paralysis of the jaw muscles, temporary blind-ness, fits.

This was what she thought about during the in-troductions, always: herself on a stretcher, the waiting ambulance, then waking up, safe and cured, with Bernie sit-ting beside the bed. He would smile at her, he would kiss her forehead, he would tell her-what? Some magical thing. They had won the Wintario Lottery. He'd been left a lot of money. The gallery was solvent. Something that would mean she didn't have to do this any more.

That was the problem: they needed the money. They had always needed the money, for the whole four years they had lived together, and they still needed it. At first it hadn't seemed so important. Bernie was on a grant then, painting, and after that he got a renewal. She had a part-time job, cataloguing in a library. Then she had a book pub-lished, by one of the medium-sized houses, and got a grant herself. Of course she quit her job, to make the best use of the time. But Bernie ran out of money, and he had trouble selling paintings.

Even when he did sell one, the dealer got most of it. The dealer system was wrong, he told her, and he and two other painters opened a co-operative artists' gal-lery which, after a lot of talk, they decided to call The Notes from Underground. One of the other painters had money, but they didn't want to take advantage of him; they would go strict thirds. Bernie explained all this to her, and he was so enthusiastic it had seemed natural to lend him half of her grant money, just to get things going. As soon as they be-gan to show a profit, he said, he would pay her back. He even gave her two shares in the gallery. They hadn't started to show a profit yet, though, and, as Bernie pointed out, she didn't really need the money back right at the moment. She could get some more. She now had a reputation; a small one, but still, she could earn money easier and faster than he could, travelling around and giving readings on college cam-puses. She was "promising," which meant that she was cheaper than those who were more than promising. She got enough invitations to keep them going, and though she de-bated the merits of each one with Bernie, hoping he would veto, he had never yet advised her to turn one down. But to be fair, she had never told him quite how much she hated it, the stares of the eyes, her own voice detached and floating, the one destructive question that was sure to lurk there among all the blank ones. I mean, do you really think you have anything to say?

Deep in February, deep in the snow, bleeding on the tiles of this bathroom floor. By turning her head she could see them, white hexagons linked like a honeycomb, with a single black tile at regular intervals.

For a measly hundred and twenty-five dollars-but it's half the rent, don't forget that-and twenty-five a day for ex-penses. Had to take the morning plane, no seats in the after-noon, who the h.e.l.l goes to Sudbury in February? A bunch of engineers. Practical citizens, digging out the ore, making a bundle, two cars and a swimming pool. They don't stay at this place, anyway. Diningroom at lunchtime almost empty. Just me and a very old man who talked to himself out loud. What's wrong with him? I said to the waitress. Is he crazy?

In a whisper I said it. It's okay, he's deaf, she said. No, he's just lonely, he's been real lonely ever since his wife died. He lives here. I guess it's better than an old-age home, you know? There are more people here in the summertime. And we get a lot of men who're separating from their wives. You can always tell them, by what they order.

Didn't pursue that. Should have though, now I'll never know. What they order. Was looking as usual for the cheap-est thing on the menu. Need that whole hundred and twenty-five, why waste it on food? This food. The menu a skewed effort to be Elizabethan, everything spelled with an "e" at the end. Got the Anne Boleyn Special, a hamburger with no bun, garnished with a square of red Jell-O and fol-lowed by "a gla.s.s of skime milke." Do they know that Anne Boleyn's head was cut off? Is that why the hamburger has no bun?What goes on in people's minds? Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the hu-man head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted. The symbolism of the menu, for G.o.d's sake, why am I even thinking about it? The menu has no symbolism, it's just some dimwit's ill-informed attempt to be cute. Isn't it?

You're too complicated, Bernie used to tell her, when they were still stroking and picking at each other's psyches. You should take it easy. Lie back. Eat an orange. Paint your toenails.

All very well for him.

Maybe he wasn't even up yet. He used to take naps in the afternoons, he'd be lying there under the heaped-up blan-kets of their Queen Street West apartment (over the store that had once sold hardware but was now a weaving bou-tique, and the rent was climbing), face down, arms flung out to either side, his socks on the floor where he'd discarded them, one after the other, like deflated feet or stiffened blue footprints leading to the bed. Even in the mornings he would wake up slowly and fumble his way to the kitchen for some coffee, which she would already have made. That was one of their few luxuries, real coffee. She'd have been up for hours, crouching at the kitchen table, worrying away at a piece of paper, gnawing words, shredding the language. He would place his mouth, still full of sleep, on hers, and perhaps pull her back into the bedroom and down into the bed with him, into that liquid pool of flesh, his mouth slid-ing over her, furry pleasure, the covers closing over them as they sank into weightlessness. But he hadn't done that for some time. He had been waking earlier and earlier; she, on the other hand, had been having trouble getting out of bed. She was losing that compulsion, that joy, whatever had nagged her out into the cold morning air, driven her to fill all those notebooks, all those printed pages. Instead she would roll herself up in the blankets after Bernie got up, tucking in all the corners, m.u.f.fling herself in wool. She had begun to have the feeling that nothing was waiting for her outside the bed's edge. Not emptiness but nothing, the zero with legs in the arithmetic book.

"I'm off," he'd say to her groggy bundled back. She'd be awake enough to hear this; then she would lapse back into a humid sleep. His absence was one more reason for not getting up. He would be going to The Notes from Un-derground, which was where he seemed to spend most of his time now. He was pleased with the way it had been going, they'd had several interviews in the papers, and it was easy for her to understand how something could be thought of as a qualified success and still not make money, since the same thing had happened to her book. But she worried a little because he wasn't doing very much painting any more. His last picture had been a try at Magic Realism. It was her, sitting at the kitchen table, wrapped in the plaid rug off the foot of the bed, with her hair in a sleazy bun at the back of her neck, looking like some kind of famine vic-tim. Too bad the kitchen was yellow; it made her skin green. He hadn't finished it though. Paper work, he would say. That was what he spent his mornings at the gallery doing, that and answering the phone. The three of them were supposed to take turns and he should have been off at twelve, but he usually ended up there in the afternoons, too. The gallery had attracted a few younger painters, who sat around drinking plastic cups of Nescafe and cans of beer and arguing about whether or not anyone who bought a share in the gallery should be able to have a show there and whether the gallery should take commissions, and if not how it was going to survive. They had various schemes, and they'd recently hired a girl to do public relations, posters and mailings and bothering the media. She was freelance and did it for two other small galleries and one commercial photographer. She was just starting out, Bernie said. She talked about building them up. Her name was Marika; Julia had met her at the gallery, back in the days when she'd been in the habit of dropping around in the afternoons. That seemed a long time ago.

Marika was a peach-cheeked blonde, about twenty-two or three, anyway no more than five or six years younger than Julia. Although her name suggested the exotic, a Hun-garian perhaps, her accent was flat Ontario and her last name was Hunt. Either a fanciful mother or a name-chang-ing father, or perhaps Marika had adopted the name herself. She had been very friendly to Julia. "I've read your book," she said.

"I don't find time to read too many books, but I got yours out of the library because of Bernie. I didn't think I was going to like it, but actually it's quite good." Julia was grateful, Bernie said too grateful, to people who said they liked her work or who had even read it. Nevertheless, she heard a voice inside her head saying, p.i.s.s right off. It was the way Marika offered her compliment: like a biscuit to a dog, part reward, part bribe, and condescending.

Since then they'd had coffee together several times. It was always Marika who dropped over, on some errand or other from Bernie. They sat in the kitchen and talked, but no real connections were made. They were like two mothers at a birthday party, sitting on the sidelines while their chil-dren whooped and gobbled: they were polite to each other, but the real focus of their attention was elsewhere. Once Marika had said, "I've always thought I might like to write myself," and Julia had felt a small red explosion at the back of herneck and had almost thrown her cup of coffee at her, until she realized Marika didn't mean it that way, she was just trying to appear interested. "Aren't you afraid you'll run out of material?"

"Not material, energy," she'd said, making it sound like a joke; but it had been true, that was her fear.

Weren't they the same thing? "According to Einstein," she said, and Marika, having missed the connection, gave her a funny look and changed the subject to films.

The last time Marika came over, Julia wasn't even out of bed. She had no excuse, no explanation. She almost told her to go away, but Bernie needed his black notebook, the one with the phone numbers, so she had to let her in. Marika leaned in the bedroom doorway, trim in her little layered look, dangling her handwoven bag, while Julia, with un-washed hair straggling over the shoulders of her nightgown, mossmouthed and blurryminded, knelt on the floor and scrabbled through Bernie's discarded pockets. For the first time in their life she wished he would b.l.o.o.d.y well pick up his clothes. She felt exposed by them, though she shouldn't, they weren't her clothes, she hadn't dropped them. Marika exuded surprise, embarra.s.sment and a certain glee, as if Bernie's dirty socks and trampled jeans were Julia's soft un-derbelly, which she'd always wanted to get a look at.

"I don't know where he's put it," Julia said, irritated. "He's supposed to pick them up himself," and added, far too defensively she knew, "We share everything."

"Of course, with your work and all," Marika said. She was scanning the room, the greyish bed, Julia's sweater slumped in the corner chair, the avocado with brown-edged leaves on the windowsill, their only plant. She'd grown it from the pit of a celebration avocado-she could no longer remember the reason for the rejoicing-but there was some-thing wrong with it. Tea-leaves, you were supposed to put tea-leaves on them, or was it charcoal?

The notebook was finally under the bed. Julia pulled it out; a dustball clung to it. She saw in her mind a small plaque, like the ones on historical houses: DUSTBALL. Once the property of Julia Morse, Poetess. With a few bored schoolchildren looking at it through the gla.s.s of a case. That was the future, if there was a future, if she kept on writing, if she became at least marginally significant, an obligatory footnote in someone's thesis. Fragments left over after the general decay, cla.s.sified, gathering dust, like the vertebrae of dinosaurs. Bloodless.

She handed the notebook over. "Would you like some coffee?" she asked, in a voice meant to discourage.

"I don't want to put you out," Marika said, but she had some anyway, chatting brightly about their plans for a col-lective show, to be called "Up from Under." Her eyes shifted around the kitchen, taking in the dripping tap, the smelly J cloth draped over it, the ancient toaster with the crumbs around its base like the debris from a tiny landslide. "I'm really glad we can be friends," she said just before leaving. "Bernie says we have nothing in common, but I think we get on real well. They're mostly men down there." This could have been some ersatz variety of women's lib, Julia thought, but it wasn't: Marika's voice stank of bridge club. "Real well." How incongruous, with those three-inch platforms, that trendy b.u.m. Marika's visits made her feel like a welfare case. She wondered how she could get her to stop coming, without being too rude.

She begrudged the time, too, she could be using it for work. Though increas-ingly there was no work.

Bernie didn't seem to notice that she was doing next to nothing. He no longer asked to read what she might have written during the day. When he came home for dinner he would talk obsessively about the gallery, eating plate after plate of spaghetti and, it seemed to her, whole loaves of bread. His appet.i.te had increased, and they had recently be-gun to argue about the food bills and who was supposed to do the cooking and shopping. In the beginning they had shared everything, that was the agreement. Julia wanted to point out that since he was now eating twice as much as she was, he really ought to do more of the shopping and pay more than half, but she felt it would be mingy of her to say this. Especially since, whenever they talked about money, he would say, "Don't worry, you'll get paid off," as if she begrudged him the gallery loan. Which she supposed she did.

What time is it? Lift the wrist: six-thirty. The blood seems to have slowed down, but it's still there, a thickening like sludge at the back of the throat. A teacher, once, in public school, who came into the cla.s.sroom with her teeth out-lined in blood. She must have been to the dentist and then not checked in the mirror, but we were all so afraid of her none of us said anything and we spent the afternoon draw-ing three tulips in a vase, presided over by that bloodthirsty smile: Have to remember to brush my teeth and clean my face carefully, a drop of blood on the chin might be dis-turbing to the audience. Blood, the elemental fluid, the juice of life, byproduct of birth, prelude to death. The red badge of courage. The people's flag. Maybe I could get a job writ-ing political speeches, if all else fails. But when it comes out of your nose, not magic or even symbolic, just ridiculous. Pinned by the nose to the geometric net of this bathroom floor. Don't becompletely stupid, get started. Stand up carefully: if the blood keeps flowing, call off the reading and get on the plane. (Leaving a trail of clots?) I could be home tonight. Bernie's there now, waiting for me to call, it's past the time.

She pulled herself up, slowly, holding on to the sink, and walked into the bedroom with her head tilted back pre-cariously. She groped for the phone and picked it up. She dialled 0 and got the operator to place the call for her. She listened to the outer-s.p.a.ce noises the phone made, antici-pating Bernie's voice, feeling his tongue already on the in-side of her mouth. They would go to bed and after that they would have a late supper, the two of them in the kitchen with the gas oven lit and open to keep them warm, the way they used to. (Her mind skipped the details of what they would eat. She knew there had been nothing in the refriger-ator when she left but a couple of aging weiners. Not even any buns.) Things would get better, time would reverse it-self, they would talk, she would tell him how much she had missed him (for surely she had been away much longer than a day), silence would open, language would flow again.

The line was busy.

She did not want to think about her disappointment. She would phone later. There was no more blood, though she could feel it crusted inside her head. So she would stay, she would do the reading, she would collect the fee and use it to pay the rent. What else was possible?

It was dinnertime and she was hungry, but she couldn't afford another meal. Sometimes they took the poet out for dinner, sometimes they gave a party afterwards where she could fill up on crackers and cheese. Here there was noth-ing. They picked her up at the airport, that was it. She could tell there had been no posters, no advance publicity. A small audience, nervous because they were there and n.o.body else was, caught out attending the wrong reading. And she didn't even look like a poet, she was wearing a neat navy-blue pantsuit, easy for stairs and cars. Maybe a robe would help, something flowing and ethereal.

Bangles, a scarf?

She sat on the edge of the straightbacked chair, facing a picture of two dead ducks and an Irish setter.

There was time to be filled. No television set. Read the Gideon Bible?

No, nothing too strenuous, she didn't want to start bleeding again. In half an hour they would come to pick her up. Then the eyes, the polite hands, the fixed smiles. Afterwards everyone would murmur. "Don't you feel exposed up there?" a young girl had asked her once. "No," she'd said, and she didn't, it wasn't her, she read only her most sooth-ing poems, she didn't want to disturb anyone. But they dis-trusted her anyway.

At least she never got drunk beforehand the way a lot of the others did. She wanted to be nice, and everyone approved of that.

Except the few hungry ones, the ones who wanted to know the secret, who believed there was a secret.

They would straggle up afterwards, she knew, hanging around the edges, behind the murmuring committee members, clutch-ing little packets of poems, extending them to her gingerly, as if the pages were raw flesh they could not bear to have touched. She could remember when she had felt like that. Most of the poems would be dismal, but now and then there would be one that had something, the energy, the thing that could not be defined. Don't do it, she wanted to tell them, don't make the mistake I made. But what was her mistake? Thinking she could save her soul, no doubt. By the word alone.

Did I really believe that? Did I really believe that language could seize me by the hair and draw me straight up, out into the free air? But if you stop believing, you can't do it any longer, you can't fly. So I'm stuck here on this chair. A sixty-year-old smiling public man. Crisis of faith? Faith in what? Resurrection, that's what is needed. Up from under. Get rid of these haunts, these fictions, he said, she said, counting up points and grievances; the dialogues of shad-ows. Otherwise there will be nothing left but the rest of my life. Something is frozen. Bernie, save me. He was so nice this morning, before she left.

The phone again, the voice flies through the darkness of s.p.a.ce. Hollow ringing, a click.

"Hi." A woman's voice, Marika, she knew who it would be.

"Could I please speak to Bernie?" Stupid to act as though she didn't recognize the voice.

"Hi, Julia," Marika said. "Bernie's not here right now. He had to go away for a couple of days, but he knew you'd be calling tonight so he asked me to come over. So you wouldn't worry or anything. He said to have a good read-ing, and don't forget to water the plant when you get back."

"Oh, thanks, Marika," she said. As if she was his secre-tary, leaving her with messages for the idiot wife while he. ... She couldn't ask where he had gone. She herself went away, why couldn't he? If he wanted her to know where, he'd tell her. She said goodbye. As she put down the phone, she thought she heard something. A voice, a laugh?

He hasn't gone anywhere. He's there, in the apartment, I can see it, it must have been going on forweeks, months, down at the gallery, I've read your book, checking out the compet.i.tion. I must be feeble-minded, everyone knew but me. Trotting over to have coffee with me, casing the joint. Hope they have the grace to change the sheets. Didn't have the guts to talk to me himself, water the plant my a.s.s, it's dead anyway. Melodrama in a parking lot, long stretches of asphalt with here and there a splotch of crushed animal, is that what my life has become?

Rock bottom in this room among the slagheaps, outer s.p.a.ce, on the dead moon, with two slaughtered ducks and a stuffed dog, why did you have to do it that way, when I'm out here, you know it cripples me, these ordeals, walking through the eyes, couldn't you have waited? You set it up so well, I'll come back and yell and scream, and you'll deny it all, you'll look at me, very cool, and say, What are you talking about?

And what will I be talking about, maybe I'm wrong, I'll never know. Beautiful. It's almost time.

They will arrive, the two young men who are polite and who do not yet have tenure. She will get into the front seat of their Volvo, and all the way to the reading, as they drive between the snowdrifts piled halfway up the telephone poles, the two young men will discuss the virtues of this car and the relative virtues of the car belonging to the one who is not driving but who is sitting in the back seat with his legs doubled like a gra.s.shopper's.

She will not be able to say anything at all. She will watch the snow coming at the windshield and being wiped away by the windshield wipers, and it will be red, it will be like a solid red wall. A violation, this is what she hates, they had promised never to lie.

Stomach full of blood, head full of blood, burning red, she can feel it at last, this rage that has been going on for a long time, energy, words swarming behind her eyes like spring bees. Something is hungry, something is coiling it-self. A long song coils and uncoils itself just in front of the windshield, where the red snow is falling, bringing every-thing to life. They park the virtuous car and she is led by the two young men into the auditorium, grey cinderblock, where a gathering of polite faces waits to hear the word. Hands will clap, things will be said about her, nothing astonishing, she is supposed to be good for them, they must open their mouths and take her in, like vitamins, like bland medicine. No. No sweet ident.i.ty, she will clench herself against it. She will step across the stage, words coiled, she will open her mouth and the room will explode in blood.

Dancing Girls The first sign of the new man was the knock on the door. It was the landlady, knocking not at Ann's door, as she'd thought, but on the other door, the one east of the bathroom. Knock, knock, knock; then a pause, soft footsteps, the sound of unlocking. Ann, who had been reading a book on ca.n.a.ls, put it down and lit herself a cigarette. It wasn't that she tried to overhear: in this house you couldn't help it.

"Hi!" Mrs. Nolan's voice loud, overly friendly. "I was wondering, my kids would love to see your native costume. You think you could put it on, like, and come down?"

A soft voice, unintelligible.

"Gee, that's great! We'd sure appreciate it!"

Closing and locking, Mrs. Nolan slip-slopping along the hall in, Ann knew, her mauve terry-cloth scuffles and flowered housecoat, down the stairs, hollering at her two boys. "You get into this room right now!" Her voice came up through Ann's hot air register as if the grate were a PA system. It isn't those kids who want to see him, she thought. It's her. She put out the cigarette, reserving the other half for later, and opened her book again. What costume? Which land, this time?

Unlocking, opening, soft feet down the hall. They sounded bare. Ann closed the book and opened her own door. A white robe, the back of a brown head, moving with a certain stealth or caution toward the stairs. Ann went into the bathroom and turned on the light. They would share it; the person in that room always shared her bathroom. She hoped he would be better than the man before, who always seemed to forget his razor and would knock on the door while Ann was having a bath. You wouldn't have to worry about getting raped or anything in this house though, that was one good thing. Mrs. Nolan was better than any bur-glar alarm, and she was always there.

That one had been from France, studying Cinema. Be-fore him there had been a girl, from Turkey, studying Com-parative Literature. Lelah, or that was how it was p.r.o.nounced. Ann used to find her beautiful long auburn hairs in the washbasin fairly regularly; she'd run her thumb and index finger along them, enviously, before discarding them. She had to keep her own hair chopped off at ear level, as it was brittle and broke easily. Lelah also had a gold tooth, right at the front on the outside where it showed when shesmiled. Curiously, Ann was envious of this tooth as well. It and the hair and the turquoise-studded earrings Lelah wore gave her a gypsy look, a wise look that Ann, with her beige eyebrows and delicate mouth, knew she would never be able to develop, no matter how wise she got. She herself went in for "cla.s.sics," tailored skirts and Shetland sweaters; it was the only look she could carry off. But she and Lelah had been friends, smoking cigarettes in each other's rooms, commiserating with each other about the difficulties of their courses and the loudness of Mrs. Nolan's voice. So Ann was familiar with that room; she knew what it looked like inside and how much it cost. It was no luxury suite, certainly, and she wasn't surprised at the high rate of turnover. It had an even more direct pipe-line to the sounds of the Nolan family than hers had.

Lelah had left because she couldn't stand the noise.

The room was smaller and cheaper than her room, though painted the same depressing shade of green.

Unlike hers, it did not have its own tiny refrigerator, sink and stove; you had to use the kitchen at the front of the house, which had been staked out much earlier by a small enclave of mathematicians, two men and one woman, from Hong Kong. Whoever took that room either had to eat out all the time or run the gamut of their conversation, which even when not in Chinese was so rarefied as to be unintelligible. And you could never find any s.p.a.ce in the refrigerator, it was always full of mushrooms. This from Lelah; Ann her-self never had to deal with them since she could cook in her own room. She could see them, though, as she went in and out. At mealtimes they usually sat quietly at their- kitchen table, discussing surds, she a.s.sumed.

Ann suspected that what Lelah had really resented about them was not the mushrooms: they simply made her feel stupid.

Every morning, before she left for cla.s.ses, Ann checked the bathroom for signs of the new man-hairs, cosmetics- but there was nothing. She hardly ever heard him; some-times there was that soft, barefooted pacing, the click of his lock, but there were no radio noises, no coughs, no conver-sations. For the first couple of weeks, apart from that one glimpse of a tall, billowing figure, she didn't even see him. He didn't appear to use the kitchen, where the mathemati-cians continued their mysteries undisturbed; or if he did, he cooked while no one else was there. Ann would have for-gotten about him completely if it hadn't been for Mrs. No-lan.

"He's real nice, not like some you get," she said to Ann in her piercing whisper. Although she shouted at her husband, when he was home, and especially at her children, she always whispered when she was talking to Ann, a hoa.r.s.e, avid whisper, as if they shared disreputable secrets. Ann was standing in front of her door with the room key in her hand, her usual location during these confidences. Mrs. No-lan knew Ann's routine. It wasn't difficult for her to pre-tend to be cleaning the bathroom, to pop out and waylay Ann, Ajax and rag in hand, whenever she felt she had some-thing to tell her. She was a short, barrel-shaped woman: the top of her head came only to Ann's nose, so she had to look up at Ann, which at these moments made her seem oddly childlike.

"He's from one of them Arabian countries. Though I thought they wore turbans, or not turbans, those white things, like. He just has this funny hat, sort of like the Shriners. He don't look much like an Arab to me. He's got these tattoo marks on his face.... But he's real nice."

Ann stood, her umbrella dripping onto the floor, wait-ing for Mrs. Nolan to finish. She never had to say anything much; it wasn't expected. "You think you could get me the rent on Wednesday?" Mrs. Nolan asked. Three days early; the real point of the conversation, probably. Still, as Mrs. Nolan had said back in September, she didn't have much of anyone to talk to. Her husband was away much of the time and her children escaped outdoors whenever they could. She never went out herself except to shop, and for Ma.s.s on Sundays.

"I'm glad it was you took the room," she'd said to Ann. "I can talk to you. You're not, like, foreign. Not like most of them. It was his idea, getting this big house to rent out. Not that he has to do the work or put up with them. You never know what they'll do."

Ann wanted to point out to her that she was indeed foreign, that she was just as foreign as any of the others, but she knew Mrs. Nolan would not understand. It would be like that fiasco in October. Wear your native costumes. She had responded to the invitation out of a sense of duty, as well as one of irony. Wait till they get a load of my native costume, she'd thought, contemplating snowshoes and a parka but actually putting on her good blue wool suit. There was only one thing native costume reminded her of: the cover picture on the Missionary Sunday School paper they'd once handed out, which showed children from all the countries of the world dancing in a circle around a smil-ing white-faced Jesus in a bedsheet. That, and the poem in the Golden Windows Reader: Little Indian, Sioux or Cree, Oh, don't you wish that you were me?

The awful thing, as she told Lelah later, was that she was the only one who'd gone. "She had all this foodready, and not a single other person was there. She was really upset, and I was so embarra.s.sed for her. It was some Friends of Foreign Students thing, just for women: students and the wives of students. She obviously didn't think I was foreign enough, and she couldn't figure out why no one else came." Neither could Ann, who had stayed far too long and had eaten platefuls of crackers and cheese she didn't want in order to soothe her hostess' thwarted sense of hospitality. The woman, who had tastefully-streaked ash-blonde hair and a livingroom filled with polished and satiny traditional surfaces, had alternately urged her to eat and stared at the door, as if expecting a parade of foreigners in their native costumes to come trooping gratefully through it.

Lelah smiled, showing her wise tooth. "Don't they know any better than to throw those things at night?"

she said. "Those men aren't going to let their wives go out by themselves at night. And the single ones are afraid to walk on the streets alone, I know I am."

"I'm not," Ann said, "as long as you stay on the main ones, where it's lighted."

"Then you're a fool," Lelah said. "Don't you know there was a girl murdered three blocks from here?

Left her bathroom window unlocked. Some man climbed through the window and cut her throat."

"I always carry my umbrella," Ann said. Of course there were certain places where you just didn't go.

Scollay Square, for instance, where the prost.i.tutes hung out and you might get followed, or worse. She tried to explain to Lelah that she wasn't used to this, to any of this, that in Toronto you could walk all over the city, well, almost any-where, and never have any trouble. She went on to say that no one here seemed to understand that she wasn't like them, she came from a different country, it wasn't the same; but Lelah was quickly bored by this. She had to get back to Tolstoy, she said, putting out her cigarette in her unfinished cup of instant coffee. (Not strong enough for her, I suppose, Ann thought.) "You shouldn't worry," she said. "You're well off. At least your family doesn't almost disown you for doing what you want to do." Lelah's father kept writing her letters, urging her to return to Turkey, where the family had de-cided on the perfect husband for her. Lelah had stalled them for one year, and maybe she could stall them for one more, but that would be her limit. She couldn't possibly finish her thesis in that time.

Ann hadn't seen much of her since she'd moved out. You lost sight of people quickly here, in the ever-shifting population of hopeful and despairing transients.

No one wrote her letters urging her to come home, no one had picked out the perfect husband for her.

On the contrary. She could imagine her mother's defeated look, the greying and sinking of her face, if she were suddenly to announce that she was going to quit school, trade in her ambitions for fate, and get married. Even her father wouldn't like it. Finish what you start, he'd say, I didn't and look what happened to me. The bungalow at the top of Ave-nue Road, beside a gas station, with the roar of the express-way always there, like the sea, and fumes blighting the Chinese elm hedge her mother had planted to conceal the pumps. Both her brothers had dropped out of high school; they weren't the good students Ann had been. One worked in a print shop now and had a wife; the other had drifted to Vancouver, and no one knew what he did. She remembered her first real boyfriend, beefy, easygoing Bill Decker, with his two-tone car that kept losing the m.u.f.fler. They'd spent a lot of time parked on side streets, rubbing against each other through all those layers of clothes. But even in that sensual mist, the coc.o.o.n of breath and skin they'd spun around each other, those phone conversations that existed as a form of touch, she'd known this was not something she could get too involved in. He was probably flabby by now, settled. She'd had relationships with men since then, but she had treated them the same way. Circ.u.mspect.

Not that Mrs. Nolan's back room was any step up. Out one window there was a view of the funeral home next door; out the other was the yard, which the Nolan kids had sc.r.a.ped clean of gra.s.s and which was now a bog of half-frozen mud. Their dog, a mongrelized German shepherd, was kept tied there, where the kids alternately hugged and tormented it. ("Jimmy! Donny! Now you leave that dog alone!" "Don't do that, he's filthy! Look at you!" Ann cov-ering her ears, reading about underground malls.) She'd tried to fix the room up, she'd hung a Madras spread as a curtain in front of the cooking area, she'd put up several prints, Braque still-lifes of guitars and soothing Cubist fruit, and she was growing herbs on her windowsill; she needed surroundings that at least tried not to be ugly. But none of these things helped much. At night she wore earplugs. She hadn't known about the scarcity of good rooms, hadn't re-alized that the whole area was a student slum, that the rents would be so high, the available places so dismal. Next year would be different; she'd get here early and have the pick of the crop. Mrs. Nolan's was definitely a leftover. You could do much better for the money; you could even have a whole apartment, if you were willing to live in the real slum that spread in narrow streets of three-storey frame houses, fading mustard yellow and soot grey, nearer the river. Though Ann didn't think she was quite up to that. Something in one of the good old houses, on a quiet back street, with a little stained gla.s.s, would be more like it. Her friend Jetske had a place like that.But she was doing what she wanted, no doubt of that. In high school she had planned to be an architect, but while finishing the preliminary courses at university she had real-ized that the buildings she wanted to design were either impossible-who could afford them?-or futile. They would be lost, smothered, ruined by all the other buildings jammed inharmoniously around them. This was why she had decided to go into Urban Design, and she had come here because this school was the best. Or rumoured to be the best. By the time she finished, she intended to be so well-qualified, so armoured with qualifications, that no one back home would dare turn her down for the job she cov-eted. She wanted to rearrange Toronto. Toronto would do for a start.

She wasn't yet too certain of the specific details. What she saw were s.p.a.ces, beautiful green s.p.a.ces, with water flowing through them, and trees. Not big golf-course lawns, though; something more winding, something with sudden turns, private niches, surprising vistas. And no formal flower beds. The houses, or whatever they were, set un.o.b-trusively among the trees, the cars kept... where? And where would people shop, and who would live in these places? This was the problem: she could see the vistas, the trees and the streams or ca.n.a.ls, quite clearly, but she could never visualize the people. Her green s.p.a.ces were always empty.

She didn't see her next-door neighbour again until Febru-ary. She was coming back from the small local supermarket where she bought the food for her cheap, carefully balanced meals. He was leaning in the doorway of what, at home, she would have called a vestibule, smoking a cigarette and star-ing out at the rain, through the gla.s.s panes at the side of the front door. He should have moved a little to give Ann room to put down her umbrella, but he didn't. He didn't even look at her. She squeezed in, shook her deflated umbrella and checked her mail box, which didn't have a key. There weren't usually any letters in it, and today was no excep-tion. He was wearing a white shirt that was too big for him and some greenish trousers. His feet were not bare, in fact he was wearing a pair of prosaic brown shoes. He did have tattoo marks, though, or rather scars, a set of them running across each cheek. It was the first time she had seen him from the front. He seemed a little shorter than he had when she'd glimpsed him heading towards the stairs, but perhaps it was because he had no hat on. He was curved so listlessly against the doorframe, it was almost as if he had no bones.

There was nothing to see through the front of Mrs. No-lan's door except the traffic, sizzling by the way it did every day. He was depressed, it must be that. This weather would depress anyone. Ann sympathized with his loneliness, but she did not wish to become involved in it, implicated by it. She had enough trouble dealing with her own. She smiled at him, though since he wasn't looking at her this smile was lost. She went past him and up the stairs.

As she fumbled in her purse for her key, Mrs. Nolan stumped out of the bathroom. "You see him?" she whis-pered.

"Who?" Ann said.

"Him." Mrs. Nolan jerked her thumb. "Standing down there, by the door. He does that a lot. He's bothering me, like. I don't have such good nerves."

"He's not doing anything," Ann said.

"That's what I mean," Mrs. Nolan whispered omi-nously. "He never does nothing. Far as I can tell, he never goes out much. All he does is borrow my vacuum cleaner."

"Your vacuum cleaner?" Ann said, startled into re-sponding.

"That's what I said." Mrs. Nolan had a rubber plunger which she was fingering. "And there's more of them. They come in the other night, up to his room. Two more, with the same marks and everything, on their faces. It's like some kind of, like, a religion or something. And he never gave the vacuum cleaner back till the next day."

"Does he pay the rent?" Ann said, trying to switch the conversation to practical matters. Mrs. Nolan was letting her imagination get out of control.

"Regular," Mrs. Nolan said. "Except I don't like the way he comes down, so quiet like, right into my house. With Fred away so much."

"I wouldn't worry," Ann said in what she hoped was a soothing voice. "He seems perfectly nice."

"It's always that kind," Mrs. Nolan said.

Ann cooked her dinner, a chicken breast, some peas, a digestive biscuit. Then she washed her hair in the bathroom and put it up in rollers. She had to do that, to give it body. With her head encased in the plastic hood of her portable dryer she sat at her table, drinking instant coffee, smoking her usual half cigarette, and attempting to read a book about Roman aqueducts, from which she hoped to get some novel ideas for her current project. (An aqueduct, going right through the middle of the obligatory shopping centre? Wouldanyone care?) Her mind kept flicking, though, to the problem of the man next door. Ann did not often try to think about what it would be like to be a man. But this particular man ... Who was he, and what was happening to him? He must be a student, everyone here was a student. And he would be intelligent, that went without saying. Probably on scholarship. Everyone here in the graduate school was on scholarship, except the real Americans, who sometimes weren't. Or rather, the women were, but some of the men were still avoiding the draft, though President Johnson had announced he was going to do away with all that. She herself would never have made it this far without scholarships; her parents could not have afforded it.

So he was here on scholarship, studying something practical, no doubt, nuclear physics or the construction of dams, and, like herself and the other foreigners, he was ex-pected to go away again as soon as he'd learned what he'd come for. But he never went out of the house; he stood at the front door and watched the brutish flow of cars, the winter rain, while those back in his own country, the ones that had sent him, were confidently expecting him to return some day, crammed with knowledge, ready to solve their lives.... He's lost his nerve, Ann thought. He'll fail. It was too late in the year for him ever to catch up.

Such failures, such paralyses, were fairly common here, especially among the foreigners. He was far from home, from the lan-guage he shared, the wearers of his native costume; he was in exile, he was drowning.

What did he do, alone by himself in his room at night?