Michael Hoffman

First segment

Debi Asher. Somewhere in this world there's a girl – a woman she'd be now, of course, and not a young one! – named Debi Asher. Is Debi a nickname for Deborah? I never knew. It didn't matter then. No reason why it should matter now... except that it happened to occur to me.

Should I find her? Dedicate the rest of my life to trying to find her? I could spend the time left me in worse ways. Supposing I did take up this... this quest. How would I begin? The only address I have for her is forty-three years old. 1473 Broadview Road, Davis, Calif. That's the address written – the handwriting is hers; it is big and bold, exactly the opposite of her small, shy self; or was she small and shy? – on the last page of the red notebook. And a phone number: (916) 743-1628. What if I dialed the number? Forty-three years ago! She was eighteen then. We went to a bar and they wouldn't serve her; the legal drinking age in British Columbia was nineteen. We pleaded with the waiter: "Come on, man, her nineteenth birthday is three weeks away!" "No dice, sorry." I remember still how disappointed we were; "disappointed" hardly seems the word. She'd be sixty-one now. And I'm sixty-two. Should I call? Of course the number, assuming it's still in service, would have nothing to do with her... but it might! Probably not, but it might! What's the harm in trying? "Hello, is Debi there please?" "Debi?" "Debi Asher." "You have the wrong number." "Oh – sorry." That's the worst that can happen. At best, the home is still in the family; if she herself isn't there, whoever is will know where she is, will know her phone number... What time is it? Half past eleven; half past eight in California.

It's funny how the mind works. The red notebook, of course, has been in my possession all these years, all my adult life; I hadn't forgotten about it; I knew it existed, knew where it was, and yet I scarcely thought about it, never mused to myself, "Gee, wouldn't it be fun to have a look at it..." Why now, why all of a sudden? Well, one reaches a stage in life – the beginning of the end, I suppose you can call it - where one does begin to think about... well, about the end of the beginning, the end of childhood, the beginning of manhood, adulthood. The year was 1972. What nineteen-year-old wasn't on the road that summer? If you lived in the east, you went west; if you lived in the west you went east. That was the goal – to be somewhere else, somewhere other than where you were. The word we used at the time was "self-transcendence." Self-transcendence. Now, at sixty-two, it make me smile, but let me tell you something: if I had a son or a daughter, and words like that, dimly understood perhaps but radiant in a way that transcends (there I go again with my "transcendence"!)... that transcends understanding... if words like that were not on his lips, did not animate his heart, I would wonder why, and conclude that something essential and wonderful was missing from his life (or hers, of course). Yes, the young need illusion, need it as much as they need reality, maybe more, and our illusion in those days was that, by standing on a highway with thumb extended to indicate you wanted a ride that would take you somewhere else, you were knocking at the gates of infinity, demanding admission.

The red notebook was my inseparable companion. Inseparable. It is a thick, pocket-book-sized notebook with a wire binding and a red cardboard cover on which is printed, in thick black block letters: RED NOTEBOOK. I began writing in it two days before I left, recording my thoughts, my feelings, my slightest action, and continued right through to the end of the trip. Some entries, written in the back of pick-up trucks, are illegible, the jerks of the handwriting reflecting the bouncing of the vehicle on rutted country roads. I was always writing in those days, always. Everyone on the road had a diary of course, but I don't think anyone was the compulsive scribbler I was. It was as if only writing could confer existence on something that happened. I was a budding writer then. I was going to be a writer. Nothing came of it; I went into the family business instead. Ladies' wear, the family business was. My father had built it from the ground up: three stores in Montreal, one in Ottawa, one in Fredericton, N.B. I was an only son, and my father, though he understood (he said) that I might have other ambitions, was nonetheless in quite visible despair at the thought of it not staying in the family. (I am less sentimental, or maybe it's just that I have no children; anyway, I sold the business last year for a sum that guarantees me a comfortable retirement however long I may live, and I confess that the transaction cost me not a pang of whatever feeling my father was prey to. Draw your own conclusions.)

Actually, it was not so much my father's despair that moved me to join him in the business as a chance remark of my mother's over dinner one evening. "Aren't there enough books in the world?" she said. "There are certainly enough for you," I retorted – a snide reference to the fact that if my mother read a book a year it was a lot. But her words came back to haunt me. They recurred every time I walked into a book store or a library. My God! When you thought about it, the sheer profusion of books was almost frightening. "Words, words!" Hamlet said – I forget in what context. All right, father, I said. Ladies' wear it is. P. Marcus & Son.

It had always been P. Marcus & Son, even before the son climbed on board, and P. Marcus & Son it remained, although P. Marcus died thirty-five years ago. I, S. Marcus (Steven – Steve), never thought to change it.

Strange – or perhaps not. Those last few lines, which would scarcely fill a page in the Red Notebook, constitute, in effect, my autobiography, the story of my life. I stopped writing, went into my father's ladies' wear business, prospered, sold the business, and am now retired. I never married. I traveled little, somewhere else having (I suppose) lost its allure. A teenage infatuation with Dostoevsky plunged me into the study of Russian, with a succession of private teachers, and I speak the language well, though Dostoevsky no longer interests me.

***

"My God!" I wrote on June 10, 1972 in Moose Jaw, Sask., "I'll never forget these people, never!"

What people would my nineteen-year-old self never forget? I am thumbing through the Red Notebook, not really reading, just picking up whatever happens to leap off the page at me. Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. That would be roughly half way between my point of departure in Montreal and my meeting in Vancouver with Debi Asher. Well, who would I never forget? A New Yorker named Charlie, a German named Gerritt, and a girl (woman?) from France named Isabelle Meursault. "Meursault, like Camus' L'Etranger, you know?" I certainly did know, and the fact that I spoke French gave me a decided advantage with her over Charlie and Gerritt. Where did we meet? On the road? In the bar in which the supposedly unforgettable revelry unfolded? God help me, I've forgotten. Charlie, Gerritt, Isabelle – nothing; the names conjure up nothing. I've forgotten everything. Well, it's all recorded, all written down. Flipping back to June 9, I find our meeting took place in a youth hostel in Regina, 100-odd km to the east. Charlie and Isabelle had been together since Winnipeg. Four people hitchhiking together don't have much chance, so we split up, Charlie and Isabelle together, Gerritt and I separately, and just imagine our surprise and delight (it's all recorded!) when we came together again, quite by chance, in Moose Jaw of all wretched, rundown places! In the celebration that followed, my drunken effusions in French had a decidedly winning effect on Isabelle. Well? What happened? Did I lose my virginity in some delightfully sordid hotel room? Was my knock on the gates of infinity answered at last? Was I taken by the hand and ushered somewhere else?

I close the Red Notebook, close my eyes. Goodbye, Charlie, auf wiedersein, Gerritt, salud, Isabelle. No, it was not to be. When the bar closed and it was time to go, Isabelle and Charlie staggered arm in arm down the corridor, still a couple, still laughing, though brokenly, over the fun we'd had... I shared a room with Gerritt, whose snoring kept me awake all night. The Red Notebook registers no disappointment, no sense of defeat. Its theme throughout is enrichment, enrichment by experience. Thanks to the unforgettable Charlie, Gerritt and Isabelle, I was one experience the richer, even if... well, "even if" nothing! One experience the richer. Even Gerritt's snoring was an experience to be savored. "Never have I heard such snoring!" I wrote, marveling that he himself was undisturbed by it. "I'll ask him about his dreams when he wakes up," I wrote. "They can only be of war, of violent uprooting – surely it is no sweet and pleasant dream that generates such appalling noise!"

Did I ask him? Shall I read on? What time is it? Ten to one; ten to ten in California. Should I call? If so it has to be now; you can't call a total stranger after ten o'clock at night. Even ten to ten is borderline late. I myself, in my retirement, seem to have returned to the nocturnal habits of my student days, but who knows what hours are kept at 1473 Broadview Road, Davis, Calif.?

Strange, my irresolution. Why don't I just pick up the phone and dial the number? As a businessman I was known in my circles for decisiveness – even, when necessary, aggressiveness – but in my private life I am painfully, painfully shy, yes, even at sixty-two, absurd though that may seem! Instead of reaching for the phone I content myself with trying to conjure up Debi's face. Small and shy, I said, but the face that takes shape in my imagination is bold, mocking – Isabelle's face, perhaps? What did Isabelle look like? Who is her mockery directed at – me? For being so timid, for shrinking from snatching her out of Charlie's arms, though she clearly wanted me to? – after all, Charlie couldn't speak French, not a word!

I open my eyes, shake off this idiotic vision; I go to the liquor cabinet and pour myself a splash of scotch. No soda, no rocks. Ah! Do you know, I have sometimes thought of this solution to all the ills of mankind: If the United Nations or some other world organization would declare a worldwide moment of silence, during which every adult man and woman on earth would have a sip of scotch – yes, I sometimes catch myself thinking, that would do it! War would give way to peace, hatred to love, unhappiness to joy. What am I – a fool? Maybe – but have a sip of scotch yourself; sip it slowly, savoringly; and then ask yourself: Isn't it worth a try?

Debi. Debi Asher. She'd have married, of course; she'd have children, grandchildren. I close my eyes and hear childish voices clamoring, 'Grandma, read me a story!' – and it is Debi they are clamoring to, Debi, the same Debi who, after the waiter declined to serve her, went out with me into the drizzling night and threw herself into my arms, burying her face in the hollow of my shoulder, sobbing, sobbing as if her heart would break... why? Because they wouldn't give her a beer? For some other reason? Did this really happen?

The moment has come. What's the number? (916) 743-1628. One ring. Two. Three. This is bad – they're all asleep at 1473... "Hello? Hello, is... is Debi there please? I mean... Excuse me, I hope... I hope I didn't wake you, I'm trying to get in touch with Debi Asher, would you happen to... hello?"

The line is dead. Well, that's that. I can't even say I'm disappointed; the possibility was so remote, after all, that anything would come of it. Well, never mind... but surely there is some way to find her? I'm no detective, God knows, but... well, how about this? I get hold of the Davis, Calif. phone book and look up Asher! I'll call all the Ashers in Davis. Surely one of them would be a family connection! Of course, of course. First thing in the morning I'll go to the library, which stocks phone books from all over the world, and see what I can find.

***

I swallow a sleeping pill, sensing I won't get to sleep otherwise. What time is it? Good heavens – nearly eleven o'clock! Half the day's gone, and a beautiful day it is too, I see as I fling open the curtains, a beautiful day in mid-May, the sunshine streaming through the windows almost unnaturally bright, the birdsong not so much joyous as urgent somehow, as though those tiny things with their melodious little voices were trying to sound an alarm. Nonsense! What thoughts come into a man's head! I yawn, stretch, pat my slightly protruding belly and smile, I fancy, a bit ruefully. "I'm three months pregnant," I murmur to myself; it wouldn't do me any harm to get into shape. I'm not in bad shape, mind you, but why shouldn't I be in good shape? In the shopping mall where the library is there's a gym; maybe I'll drop in there too, see what sort of programs they have.

Cereal and milk for breakfast – my breakfast all my life, as far back as I can remember. Sitting down at the table, I am a child again. "Hurry up," says my mother, "you'll be late for school." Have I mentioned that I am living in my childhood home? I don't think I have. For years I rented it out, having a perfectly comfortable apartment of my own; but when the people who were renting it moved out last year, rather than advertise for a new tenant or sell it (I probably could have made a bundle, too, real estate prices having gone through the roof), I suddenly felt an urge to live there myself. If there's a reasonable explanation for that urge, it escapes me – I'm sure any psychiatrist could come up with half a dozen! – but that's all right, I don't have to explain my actions to anyone, even to myself, and when a whim seizes hold of me and there is no clear reason to resist it, I follow it. Case closed.

My BMW sits in the driveway; but it's such a beautiful day, I think I'll walk. The mall is only eight blocks away – five long blocks, three short. See that park over there? I used to play there as a child. That house with the sloping green roof? Howie Levine, my best friend, lived there; wonder where he is now. There's my high school, which is no longer a high school but a senior citizens' community center, or something; I'm not sure. And here's the mall. They put it up when I was about ten, on a swampy field where Howie and I had once captured a frog, which I brought home, to my mother's horror. Horror is the word; evidently she had never so much as dreamed that creatures like frogs were fellow inhabitants of this planet of ours, third from the sun. Poor mother. I was not an easy child. She brought out a certain malicious streak in me. Ah, well. Perhaps this afternoon I'll make a pilgrimage to her grave, with my greetings and apologies.

The library is full, as usual, though the children are all in school. Full of who? Of retirees like myself, men and women, mostly men, some wearing skull caps, poring through enormously thick spectacles over newspapers, magazines, books. My own eyesight is good, thank God, my step brisk, my body, relatively speaking, trim. Strange, how few of these people I know. Maybe I do know them, but age has changed them out of recognition. Maybe they know me. There's a man right now, peering at me as though I look somehow familiar to him. He might be the father of an old classmate, or a friend of my parents'... But he looks away, unable to place me, no doubt telling himself, probably rightly, that he's mistaken. Never mind. The phone books, the phone books. "Pardon me, where would the telephone books be?" The young lady at the desk points to a shelf. Ah, yes, there they are; thank you.

In the city of Davis, Calif., there are seven Asher families. Seven Asher households, I should say. Maybe they're all one family. I go back to the desk to ask for a pen and paper, when suddenly I get an idea. "Never mind," I say to the woman, in my excitement quite oblivious to the impression I must be leaving. I stride out of the library. There's a stationery store somewhere in the mall; here it is, next to the hardware store; it sells mostly greeting cards but perhaps, just possibly... "Excuse me." The girl minding the shop looks young enough to be in school... well, it's no business of mine. "Do you have any notebooks?" She seems delighted at my question. Yes, of course they have notebooks, and though she could just have easily have pointed, or indicated them with a movement of her head, she insists on leading me in person to the spot. "Thank you." I can see at a glance that they don't have what I'm looking for. "Forgive me for troubling you... you see, I have a specific kind of notebook in mind. I wonder if they still make them. A notebook about the size of a paperback novel, with a red cover, and "Red Notebook" printed on it in thick black block letters." The girl frowns slightly; she has very thick eyebrows, which her frown causes to ripple slightly and to almost come together. "Red notebook," she muses thoughtfully. After a moment's silence she says, "No, I don't think I've ever seen..." Her voice trails off. How stupid of me not to have brought it with me, I think to myself. "I'm afraid these are all we have," she says. She seems almost to understand my disappointment, and to share it. Clearly she wants to help. "We're just a small branch store," she says. "You might have better luck at our main outlet..." "And where," I ask, "is your main outlet?" "Metcalfe and de Maisonneuve." Suddenly she brightens. "Let me call them for you. It'll save you making a special trip. If they have it they can send it here..."

Should I? Why not? "Thank you," I say. "You're very kind."

"Not at all."

From her handbag under the counter she withdraws a cell phone, and makes the call. She speaks into it in French. Her French is perfect, as natural as her English, not a trace of an accent. She gets the details exactly right, omitting nothing – red cover, size of paperback novel, with "Red Notebook" printed in black block letters. She listens... there's that frown again." I'm sorry," she says. I smile. "That's life," I say. "What can you do? But thank you, thank you for trying. I appreciate it."

I exit the mall, my eyes dazzled by the sun. My sudden idea was, of course, to open a new Red Notebook, beginning it with the telephone numbers of the seven Asher households of Davis, Calif. Couldn't I have written them down on any scrap of paper? Of course, but... well, I think to myself, starting homeward, let me try a few other stationery stores. If I can't find a Red Notebook, if they don't make that particular style anymore, which after all is more than likely, then I'll give up – but if they do make them, if it is possible to get my hands on one, how foolish to forgo it in advance. Anyway, that'll be my project over the next couple of days: to find The Red Notebook, Vol. II.

 

Second segment

"May 29, 1972. One day before departure. Twenty-odd hours separating me from – what? The next three months: a monolithic blank, on which I will inscribe... the story of my life!" So I had written, in my youthful enthusiasm, on the day before May 30, 1972, when, my heart in knots, I took leave of my parents, my home, my community – took leave, in short, of everything I knew in the world, with the express aim of confronting, all by myself, everything I didn't know in the world.

"Stay," I hear myself saying to my nineteen-year-old self. "Sit down. Talk to me. Tell me about yourself. You might also tell me, in passing as it were, what you think of me. How do I strike you? As old, of course – but I mean otherwise. Do I surprise you? Could you have imagined yourself turning into me?"

He doesn't answer, and when I open my eyes he is gone. Does his unceremonious departure indicate disgust? "It's true," I tell him, though he is no longer there, "that I never wrote anything, that I never married, never had children... Still, if I can say, in all honesty, that I've been happy, doesn't that count for anything?"

No, my happiness means nothing to him. He sought greatness, and despised everything else, happiness above all. Better poverty, better misery, better despair than the ultimate sin in his eyes: happy mediocrity. In those years, there was a tattered paperback in every knapsack; it was Jack Kerouac's On the Road. But in his knapsack was a different paperback: Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. "I teach you the Superman. Man is something that must be mastered. What have you done to master him?"

"Listen," I say. "When you're nineteen, that sort of pose comes easily. But a normal person grows up. I know your Nietzsche. I've read him too – maybe more carefully than you have, though I admit, probably with less passion. Nietzsche was not a normal person. He didn't grow up. He never got past adolescence. An adolescent, that's what he was. An adolescent with genius, but an adolescent all the same. Won't you answer me? Why shouldn't we have a nice long talk, you and I? I have no children – you can be my child. No? Well, maybe one day you'll change your mind."

***

I found a red notebook; a red notebook, not the red notebook. Should I buy it? It is smaller than the original, and thinner, with "Notebook," not "Red Notebook," written on its red cover. After four days of making the rounds of stationery shops all over the city, showing them my Red Notebook, and being informed in various tones ranging from mockery to condescension that they no longer make them in quite that style, I am ready to compromise. All right. Give me two – no, three. There are only two red ones in stock; will a blue one do? No, a blue one will not do. The transaction complete at last, I walk out of the store clutching my plastic bag, not sure whether to be pleased with my purchase or disappointed. There are no real grounds for disappointment, I tell myself; it is, after all, nearly half a century later; styles change; what's important is the blank paper within, and what you inscribe on it. Yes, yes. Perfectly reasonable beings are governed by perfectly reasonable arguments, but who among us is a perfectly reasonable being?

The traffic is unusually heavy. A light drizzle is falling, and I switch on the windshield wipers. I turn on the radio. Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, the Pastorale; I recognize it immediately. I close my eyes. A horn beeps behind me. Sorry.

At the library, I go straight to the phone books, and pull out the one for Davis. I take it to a table, and am just pulling back a chair when a shy voice at my elbow says, "Hello." My mind is so full of Debi Asher that it is all I can do not to cry out, "Debi!" It is the girl at the greeting card shop. My astonishment is ridiculous. What is so surprising, after all? Later, over coffee, she explains: She is a student at McGill, and between classes sometimes stands in for her mother at the shop. Her mother is the owner. What is she studying? I ask. Anthropology. How interesting. Yes, she says, even as a child she was fascinated by cavemen and primitive art and the like, and now that she's older her interest has crystallized into a haunting question: What makes man human? It's not a career-oriented line of study, she acknowledges, and her mother is worried about her future, but as far as she herself is concerned, her primary goal is knowledge, not financial security. "That's admirable," I tell her, "and if I had a daughter I would encourage her to have precisely that attitude."

"How many sons do you have?" she asks.

"None."

"Oh – " She seems embarrassed, afraid of blundering into a stranger's personal life.

"I'm single. A lifelong bachelor. 'Not the marrying kind,' as they used to say."

"My parents are divorced."

"Sometimes I wonder if the family as an institution has a future."

"What would the alternative be?"

"Something like Plato's Republic maybe, where children are produced and raised by the state."

***

My third phone call to Davis, Calif. connects me with a Mrs. Harriet Asher who is a widow, has grown children, lives alone, and is more than happy to talk – to anyone, about anything. Montreal! It started out as such an ordinary evening, and now all of a sudden she is on the phone chatting to someone from Montreal! What time is it there? Is there still snow on the ground? Just imagine – she has never been to Canada, though she has been to Europe any number of times and to India once. I hang up as she launches into a description of the Taj Mahal. I close my eyes. I am utterly weary. It is not normal fatigue. It is weariness beyond bearing. I am subject to it occasionally. There might be a medical term for it; maybe I really should consult a doctor. To sum it up in a phrase, a clumsy, layman's phrase, it is the absence of a will to live. Put a gun within my reach, and I will shoot myself – oh yes, I will, without hesitation, without a second thought. It is not a death wish. I am in no danger of slitting my wrists, or of overdosing on pills, or anything that requires a determination to die. I have no such determination. No, but if a gun were lying on the table, loaded, I would pick it up, put the barrel to my temple, and press the trigger the way we casually press a button, in this push-button age, to achieve some result that is desirable only because it requires no effort.

Debi Asher no longer interests me. What a fool I am! Chasing around all over town looking for red notebooks, phoning total strangers at the other end of the continent...Is this sanity? And supposing I succeeded in locating Debi Asher, or Debi whatever-her-name-is-now. What would I say to her? "Hi Debi, this is Steve! Steve who? Why, Steve Marcus, we met in Vancouver forty-three years ago, don't you remember? You ordered a beer and they wouldn't serve you..."

Where is the Red Notebook? I don't know the precise word for what I'm feeling – shame? rage? – but I know what it makes me want to do. Consign the Red Notebook to the flames. Set it on fire. Burn it. Where is it? In the bedroom, by the phone... yes, all three red notebooks are here, one old and full, the other two new and empty, apart from the phone numbers of seven Ashers in Davis, Calif. Burn all three together. A match, a lighter. There are no matches; I don't smoke. Never mind. There's an all-night convenience store on Kilkenny Road. I snatch the notebooks and march out of the house. I'd walk, but it's raining. Well, that's what cars are for. The BMW starts like a dream. I don't know anything about cars, but I've owned a few over the years, and the way this one starts, not so much roaring to life as purring, and yet it's a purr suggestive not of weakness but of suppressed power... What am I babbling about? I am driving to the convenience store to buy a lighter to set my notebooks on fire! Any rusted, beaten-up jalopy would do just as well; I'll sing the praises of my BMW some other time.

The convenience store is ablaze with lights. The parking lot is full of cars, motorbikes, and kids hanging around, some standing (if their round-shouldered, stooped-back posture deserves to be called standing!), some squatting on the pavement. Most of the cars have their engines on. Most of the kids are smoking. If I had a kid he'd probably be here – or she; and what could I, as their father, do about it? Nothing. Not a thing. Well, it's a worry I very wisely spared myself by not having children – so why am I worrying? These kids have parents – let them worry. On the other hand, there are young people like Linda, that girl I had coffee with this afternoon, the girl from the stationery shop. She wouldn't be hanging around here; she'd be home, studying, thinking – about "the origins of man," and what it means to be human. You can't generalize about "kids." There are all kinds.

Without forming the conscious intention to do so I drive on. I am a kilometer or so past the scene before I reflect on it. In my mind's eye I see myself parking the BMW, making my way past the throng into that store whose garish lighting makes it look like it's on fire, with recorded music suggestive of agony rather than repose – no thank you, I can get a lighter somewhere else. Besides, I no longer want to set the notebooks on fire. What do I want to do? Go home? No. Drive? Why not? Driving is one of those things you do when you don't feel like doing anything. I switch on the radio: jazz. It's nice, but doesn't quite suit my mood. Beethoven's Sixth Symphony – that's what I feel like listening to. True, I heard part of it earlier in the day, but my enjoyment of it was distracted. Now I can relax, let it carry me away, to a place only it can take me. It should be in the glove compartment. I have a whole library of CDs there. It was only relatively late in life that I developed an interest in music. As a kid – well, rock'n roll, of course; but basically I was not musical. I had no ear for music. Even listening to rock, it was the words I focused on, and it was the words that determined whether I liked a song or not. To me, no tune was beautiful enough to compensate for insipid lyrics. Those endless guitar solos that were all the rage then bored me silly, to the disgust of my friends. Hopelessly square, I seemed to them. I like them better now, strangely enough – the solos, I mean; when I am in the mood for that sort of thing. Which I am not now. I pull over and open the glove compartment. Beethoven's Third, Mozart, Haydn, Mozart... Here we are, the Pastorale, Berlin Phil. Well, let's go for a little drive, shall we?

***

The Trans-Canada Highway. All the way across the country it goes, and I seem to have it all to myself. There are headlights and taillights scattered here and there, but they do not impinge on my solitude, do not constitute a presence. My instrument panel glows fireplace-orange; my only companion is Beethoven, and if an artist's genius is measured in terms of his ability to lift you out of physical space and time, Beethoven's only peer, for me, is Dostoevsky. When did I fall out of love with Dostoevsky? I'm no longer sure. It was a long time ago. Maybe I'll try to rediscover him. I own the full set of his works, in Russian. Once I thought of going to Russia, to St. Petersburg, just to walk the streets that he and Raskolnikov walked. Nothing came of it. Maybe I'll go yet.

The Pastorale ends, and I find, to my surprise, that I have crossed the border into Ontario. What time is it? The car's digital clock is positioned prominently enough, but I have not noticed it; now I do: 11:23. Turn back? I don't want to, somehow. Keep going? What for? Where to?

"Hawkesbury, 30 km," says a sign. Hawkesbury! That's the first place name west of Montreal to be recorded in the Red Notebook. I spent my first night on the road there, at a youth hostel. Yes, of course. I got a ride out of Montreal with somebody going as far as Hawkesbury; I arrived at about lunchtime, had a bite at some hamburger place – and then couldn't get out of town! All afternoon I stood there with my thumb out – in vain! No one would stop for me!

Yes, yes, I see it all, see the spot where I stood, nondescript though it was; I can see the clouds gathering in the sky, the sun fading like a light about to go out forever; I remember how lonely I felt, how I thought of turning back, going home, freeing myself once and for all of this mad aimlessness I had saddled myself with, like Christian and his burden of sin in Pilgrim's Progress...

The mood passed, and as it grew dark I figured I'd better see about finding a place to stay. Hawkesbury! To leave Montreal with the west coast as your destination, and to get no further than Hawkesbury!

I wonder if the youth hostel is still there. Expecting it to be is a little like expecting to find an identical Red Notebook four decades later. Still, you never know. Here's a gas station... is it open? Yes, it is. Maybe they'll know.

"Hi." Friendly fellow, can't wait to attack my windshield. "Excuse me," I say. "There used to be a youth hostel in Hawkesbury. I'm wondering if it's still there."

"Youth hostel?" He reins in his squeegee and turns thoughtful. "There is a youth hostel, but I don’t know how long it's been there."

He fills my tank, washes my windows, and gives me directions to the hostel – which, he assures me, is practically right downtown and just about impossible to miss.

Impossible to miss, and yet somehow I am missing it. Here's the street, it should be on this corner... Nothing looks at all familiar; there's not a soul in sight. An uninhabited ghost town. Enough of this, let's go home. It's not 1972, I'm not nineteen...

"Looking for something?"

What the hell? A cop! What ether did he materialize out of? A policeman, sticking his head into the window of my car...

"What's wrong?" he says.

"Nothing." I pull myself together. "You startled me. Sorry. I'm looking for... someone told me there's a youth hostel around here."

"Around here?" The policeman shakes his head, puckers his thick lips, shrugs. He's built on a massive scale; I'm thinking of the harm he could do if he wanted to. I hope he doesn't want to. "Not around here. Who told you there's a youth hostel around here?"

"Gas station down the road."

He's still shaking his head. "Not around here," he says again. "Nearest youth hostel's over on Alexandria Street. But wouldn't you be more comfortable at a hotel?"

Alexandria Street! That rings a bell! I remember thinking of Alexandria in Egypt; the Alexandria Library; Alexander the Great...

"I stayed there forty-three years ago," I say. "I just want to see it."

If this surprises him, or strikes him as strange, he shows no sign. He tells me how to get there and, before vanishing, by way of farewell, gives the roof of my car an affectionate little pat.

It's not far. Go left on Main Street to Alexandria, turn left on Alexandria, go up the hill, and the hostel is right at the top, on your right. That must be it, though there's nothing particularly distinctive about it, unless the Canadian flag on the lawn is distinctive. It certainly is prominent. The porch light is on. A pink clapboard house, with a broad balcony on which are two rocking chairs. No sign? I don't see one. Any lights in the window? Not right in the window, but through the window I see that somewhere in the house a light is on. What would you do, if you were me? Would you ring the bell, at... what time is it? – 11:53? No, of course you wouldn’t, you'd be sensible, you'd turn the car around and go home to bed. Which is more or less what I decide to do when suddenly the door of the house opens. A man steps out onto the balcony, a rather elderly man, as best I can make out, and he seems to have no particular business; no, apparently he just stepped out for a moment to enjoy the night air; now he's looking up at the stars. This is a youth hostel? It can't possibly be. Well, why not go and introduce myself, since I'm here? I switch off the engine and get out of the car. The man is naturally regarding me curiously as I make my way along the walk. "Excuse me," I say, "I was given directions here; is this a youth hostel?"

"Sure is," says the man. He seems an agreeable enough fellow, not at all put out by my intrusion; in fact, even welcoming it, though without effusion.

"I may be mistaken," I say, "but I seem to remember staying here... probably I am mistaken. How long have you been in business?"

"Long enough," the man says with a grin. "Be forty-nine years in June."

"No kidding. I was here in '72."

"So was I."

"I was nineteen at the time."

"I was... 1972? Twenty-eight. I'm Isaiah."

"You?"

He smiled. It was more a movement of his eyes than of his lips, and the effect was of myriad cracks appearing in an old vase that had been dropped not quite violently enough to shatter it. "What the years do to a man, eh?" he said.

My startled exclamation was tactless, but maybe pardonable; the situation is, after all, somewhat startling. Isaiah. Imagine a late-sixties-early-seventies hippy, and whatever image comes to mind, if you lived through the period, will be Isaiah, more or less. Shoulder-length hair, tie-dyed T-shirt, faded blue jeans, copiously patched, flaring over sandaled feet, medallion dangling from neck to symbolize higher consciousness, etc. The sort of man whose portrait is easily sketched. I remember with embarrassment how cool I thought him. I envied him. I wanted to look like him. I would have exchanged my appearance for his any day of the week. Of course I too had long hair – everybody did – but it grew and grew without making me look like anything other than what I was, a sheltered, middle-class kid growing up all too slowly in the suburbs. "Joint, man?" asked Isaiah as soon as I'd laid my pack down on the bed he designated as mine. He lit up, and we passed the joint back and forth, me thinking, "This is it! This is liberation! This is cool! This is somewhere else!

He doesn't remember me, of course. What was there for him to remember? He and his establishment were a milestone of sorts in my life; I was none in his. Still, he's friendly, apparently touched, and ushers me inside. "Nineteen seventy-two, you say." He switches on a lamp, which dimly illuminates a seemingly vast hallway. The hallway is such a random assortment of disconnected objects and empty space that it is impossible to characterize it. Parts of the floor are covered by small unmatching rugs; from the parts that are bare I see it is of wood. The lamp rests on a roll-top desk that immediately puts me in mind, I'm not quite sure why, of Charles Dickens. Across from the desk is an old and dirty but quite good eighteen-speed bicycle, and beside it is a worn sofa whose cushions suggest endless depths. I may be mistaken but I seem to remember that sofa. On the sofa are two stuffed animals, a bear and an elephant. Isaiah, meanwhile, has pulled open a filing cabinet beside the desk. "Nineteen seventy-two, nineteen seventy-two," he muses. "Here we are." He pulls out a black ledger-like notebook. "Here we are." He hands the book to me and points to the place. It's a guestbook; he's showing me where I signed it. "Steve Marcus, Montreal, Que., My first stop on the road to..." I feel myself redden at the banality of the thought, the corniness of those pseudo-suggestive three dots.

"Where is everybody?" I ask.

"It's not like it used to be," he says.

"No."

Suddenly I am possessed by a feverish impatience to be out of here. A kind of horror seizes me, a horror I can't explain, for it makes no sense, but anyone who has ever felt it knows it's no less real for that. Fear. Yes – I am afraid of this bland old man; more than afraid, terrified – of him, of the room, of all the objects in it. It's weird. Even as the fear is upon me I'm thinking to myself, "This is weird, this is crazy."

"I have to go," I say. "It's nice... I'm glad to've seen you again, glad to see you're still... still well..."

He takes my sudden departure in stride, seeing nothing odd in it, making no effort to detain me. "I think I left my door unlocked," I say, casting about for an excuse for something that, as far as he's concerned, needs no excusing. But it's true; I think I really did leave without locking the door. I only left, after all, to go round the corner for a lighter, and here I've come... Never mind. "Goodbye, goodbye."

"Come again some time during the day," says Isaiah. "We'll have us a nice talk."

I get into the car and drive off. Disoriented, confused – it's as though that joint Isaiah gave me forty-three years ago is now starting to work for real – I make wrong turns, get lost, have trouble finding the highway, and when I finally do, I realize when I see a sign for a town called Alfred that I am heading west, towards Ottawa, instead of east, towards Montreal.

 

Third segment

Waking up, I am not sure where I am. I'd had a dream, a dream so vivid... was it a dream? Helen, a little girl I used to play with sometimes when no one else was around, she lived across the street, she was two years younger than me, and once... I kissed her. I don't remember exactly how it happened, but the dim picture my memory serves up is of us on a patch of dirt under her backyard porch, in what we called our "house" – we were playing house, a girl's game, and in the course of playing daddy to her mummy, I kissed her, and she said when we grew up we would get married. For my part, I felt such a surge of shame, horror, disgust, loathing... I scarcely know what to call it; I was convinced I had damaged myself irreparably. If violence had not been utterly foreign to my nature I would have killed her. As it was, I mumbled "I have to go" and fled... Yes, it must be the episode with Isaiah that's bringing all this back; or maybe it was the subconscious memory that suddenly made me feel so strange at Isaiah's. In the dream... in the dream I did kill her. I did. I strangled her with my bare hands. She gasped, struggled; her eyes rolled back in her head, but I in my rage only squeezed harder. We were not children, we were fully grown, though there was no mistaking her; her face was the same, her little face with its pinpoint freckles, framed by that silky curtain of pale blonde, almost white hair. A final shudder passed through her entire body, and then she went limp; she was dead. I released my grip, she fell to the floor, and I woke up.

Where am I? At home, in my bed; everything is familiar, everything is as it should be. A car engine starts. It too is familiar. Doug Crawford off to work. That means it's ten minutes to nine. On the dot. He works for the government, in the tax office, and his routine is set in stone. It is the subject of our small talk when we happen to run into each other. He laughs at himself. "If I leave the house at eleven minutes to nine, or at nine minutes to nine, my whole day goes off the rails."

I'm home, but with no memory of getting here. I remember Hawkesbury, and Alfred, but not turning around and returning home. Well, obviously I did, since I'm here... Helen. The house Helen used to live in is the house Doug Crawford lives in now. So? So nothing. My God, what a horrible dream! I don't usually have nightmares. Why this one, why now? What does it mean?

Where would Helen be now, I wonder. Maybe still in town – who knows? Maybe I saw her on the street yesterday without recognizing her – without consciously recognizing her, but we all know there's such a thing as subconscious recognition. Maybe that's where the dream came from.

Well, never mind that. It's morning now, a new day, a beautiful spring day – what shall I do with it? Anything, anything I want. But what do I want? I have all the time in the world, all the money I need; I have a car that'll take me anywhere... why not go somewhere? All right, but where?

To the library. I will spend the day reading Hamlet. That's it. I have made up my mind. When I retired from business, it was with the intention of plunging into the serious reading my business had left me no time for. And yet, strangely enough, in the year I've been free I've done very little reading. My concentration is poor. I must work on that. It's a matter of discipline. Yes, I must deepen my understanding of life, and the key to a deeper understanding of life is serious literature. Hamlet – why Hamlet, specifically? No reason. The name happened to pop into my head. I remember how it bored me when I studied it in college, and how guilty I felt, yes, guilty, for being bored by one of the greatest works of perhaps the greatest literary genius who ever lived; how I concealed my guilt beneath a show of bravado: "Shakespeare's overrated; we say he's great because his name overwhelms our critical faculty; if we could read him without knowing it was him, if we could read him objectively, would we be so enthralled? Probably not.

To the library, then. They'll have Hamlet, and not only Hamlet, they'll have books about Hamlet, books by great critics, thinkers who can guide a casual reader like me to the concealed depths, so to speak. Yes, yes, now we're on the right track. To hell with the Red Notebook! Now is the time to embark on a different kind of journey, a journey beyond the scope of a nineteen-year-old boy, a journey fit for a man of sixty-two!

Over my cereal and milk I peruse the Gazette. Should I cancel my subscription? War here, famine there, corruption in high places, indifference in low, and suffering, always suffering. This is what the news amounts to. What has changed over the past forty-three years? The names, that’s all. Is it important to know the names? Maybe at a certain stage of life it is – an early stage of life. Not at mine. At mine, I should be getting to know the truth behind the names. Yes, all right, settled – I will cancel my subscription. On the masthead above the editorial is a telephone number. I dial it while my determination is fresh; never mind my cereal getting soggy in the bowl. Hello? Yes... I wish to cancel my subscription... I seem to have hurt the woman's feelings. Is anything wrong? Do I have a grievance? Perhaps she can be of assistance? She would be most pleased... No, no, I say, nothing like that, no grievance at all, it's just... you see, I'm going on a trip, yes, a trip, I'll be traveling, I don't know for how long; anyway, as soon as I come back I will be sure to resume my subscription; I was born in this city, I'm a lifelong reader, I will definitely resume... yes, thank you, thank you very much... There! It's done!

A beautiful day, I said, but as I prepare to leave the house the sun goes behind a cloud, and peering out the window I see that, though patches of blue sky remain, clouds, heavy, gray clouds, are massing to stake their claim. Hm. Didn't the Gazette weather forecast say sunny and warm? I check – sure enough, there's the emblematic bright yellow sun. Well, the climate is changing, growing more unpredictable each day. Irrational – does it make sense to call the climate irrational? In Shakespeare, as I recall, the weather portended this or that; human upheavals were accompanied by storms, reconciliation by sunshine and soft breezes. In our day there's no such connection. The weather goes its way, we go ours. Should I stay home? I can read Hamlet at home, I have it, I know exactly where it is on the shelf in the upstairs room I call my study. I can curl up on the sofa – No. I don't want to stay home. I am surprised, in fact, at the sudden access of distaste I feel at the idea. Maybe I was wrong to move back here. Maybe I'll sell the house. Yes, maybe I will. "Now that I've cancelled my Gazette subscription I'm free to do so," I say out loud, sharing a smile at the patent absurdity of the thought with the enlarged photograph of my grinning six-year-old self hanging in the hallway.

Instead of walking, I drive to the library. Actually, I could have walked. The clouds are not so menacing after all; the sun, recovering from its momentary weakness, is regaining lost ground; the clouds are scattering in confusion. I don't get enough exercise. I mustn't let myself go. From now on I'll walk five miles every day, rain or shine.

"Where's the Shakespeare?" I demand brusquely of the young lady at the desk. I feel myself redden. My rudeness is unpardonable, of course, but yesterday I asked this same woman about phone books, today I'm asking about Shakespeare – what would she be thinking? It's embarrassment that makes me rude, and my rudeness redoubles my embarrassment. If she sees me here every day she'll take me for just another oldster hanging around, killing time, nothing else to do, nowhere else to go... And what do I care what this total stranger thinks of me? Supposing, with not much else to do herself, she makes a habit of surveying the people in her field of vision, seizing on this clue or that clue and forming ideas in her head about what kind of people they are; supposing she does that with me, and concludes that I am... well, for example, not in my right mind. Why should that matter to me? What effect will it have on my life? None, none whatever.

"Shakespeare?" she echoes, as if hearing the name for the first time.

"Yes, Shakespeare," I say sarcastically. "A British playwright of the Elizabethan period. He wrote Hamlet, among other great works. It's Hamlet in particular I – "

"Fourth row to your right, middle shelf."

"I'm sorry. Thank you." In my confusion, I scarcely know what I am saying. I scurry off like a scared rabbit – no, like a child, a small child whose teacher has contemptuously dismissed him after mercilessly puncturing his pretensions in front of the whole class. He can't get away fast enough, and neither can I. Why didn't I stay home? I have Hamlet at home. Yes, I'll sell the house, go off somewhere. It's ridiculous to grow old in the same place you grew up. Ridiculous.

***

I look for a vacant chair. With my armload of books I feel like a student, and enjoy the feeling. It takes me back to pleasant days. My first year at college I spent most of my free time in the library. Being among books was what I loved best. My social life took a decided back seat. Did I even have a social life? My best friend was Dostoevsky; my girlfriend was Sonya, the holy prostitute in Crime and Punishment. On Friday nights I would borrow the family car on the pretext of going to a party, a coffee house, a movie – and go to the library instead, to read until closing time. Next morning my parents would ask me if I'd had a good time. Who had I been with? What had I done? I lived a double life – the life I invented for their benefit, and my real, secret life. Most precious among my discoveries in the university library stacks were the volumes of Dostoevsky's notebooks, chock full of random jottings, of primitive versions of scenes and episodes I knew by heart in their developed form, of snatches of practice dialogue, of plans for future works... Here was a master – the master – of the art to which I myself had dedicated my life; here was his secret laboratory, and here was I, with secret access to it! Yes, those were heady days – perhaps, now that I think of it, the days of the only unalloyed happiness I have ever known. Strange...

Ah, here's a place at a table for four. Two old women and one old man. They won't bother me. I lower my books onto the table and take my seat. The man, a skullcap perched on his thick gray hair (I wish my hair was that thick!), is reading a newspaper through a magnifying glass. The women are leafing through magazines. Do they know each other? I find myself wondering, quite against my will. "To hell with them!" I am angry not at them but at myself. How does one keep the mind from straying to matters of no concern to it? It's a question of discipline. Zen – isn't that a technique for disciplining the mind? Or yoga? Maybe I'll look into it.

The books I brought are Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice and King Lear, plus three works of scholarly criticism. I figure I'll leaf through the three plays, then decide which one to read seriously. Among the critical volumes is a collection of Coleridge's essays on Shakespeare. It is remarkable that a suburban library would have such a volume. Could that young woman I was unpardonably rude to be the chief librarian? If so, she evidently knows her business. Even if she's not – my rudeness rankles. It is so unlike me! Before I leave I will apologize to her.

It is no use. I can't read! What's the matter with me? I can't get through a page without my thoughts flying off to something altogether extraneous, and lingering there, not at all repelled, apparently, by its utter irrelevance. Debi, Linda, Isaiah, some stupid song I chanced to hear... Is it because I've lost the habit of serious reading? If so, how do I regain it? Coffee. That's what I need. I never could settle into a book without a cup of coffee handy. Looking around, though, I see no one is drinking coffee. It's probably against the rules. Maybe I'll go to the desk and ask that woman. If nothing else, it's a good excuse to approach her in a friendly way, and efface the impression my earlier rudeness must have left. All right, let's do that. But... This woman sitting across from me. What's with her? She's staring at me, but if I raise my eyes to hers, she immediately lowers them and pretends to be absorbed in her magazine.

Linda. I read, "Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy," and I find myself visualizing, not the ghost, but Linda. Did I come here with the secret hope of running into her? If so, what are the implications? That, at age sixty-two, I have a schoolboy crush on her? Okay, it's idiotic, but I can't help remembering how glad I felt the last time, when just as I was about to sit down I heard her voice saying, "Hello." Wouldn't it be nice if I could look up and see, instead of that silly simpering old woman, Linda, with her shy smile, her slightly aquiline nose, and her eyebrows that, when she frowns, almost meet above it? Is she pretty? I don't know that I'd call her pretty, exactly... No, the word that best describes her is "pleasant." Quiet, thoughtful, in a way most young people are not nowadays. Of course, that's only my first impression, and besides, her manner with me, a man old enough almost to be her grandfather, would be different than when she's with her friends. Does she have a lot of friends? Does she have a boyfriend?

"Pardon me."

A faint gasp escapes me; I hear it with mortification.

"Forgive me," says the woman opposite me, having evidently made up her mind to address me at last. "You are very absorbed in your reading. Perhaps I shouldn't..." Her voice is barely above a whisper, as befits a library, but even so she glances about her to see if she's disturbing anyone. In fact the old man in the skullcap is scowling at her. Lowering her voice still further, she leans forward and says, "Perhaps I'm mistaken. Is your name Marcus?"

My first thought is, "I can deny it." She would blush, apologize, and take refuge in her magazine, or maybe, in her embarrassment, leave altogether – good riddance. But we are not our own masters at such moments. Who is she? Where does she know me from? A former customer of P. Marcus's? A friend of the family's? "Yes," I hear myself say.

Her glance flickers to the scowling man in the skullcap, who, perhaps foreseeing a noisily happy reunion of old friends, is stirring like a rumbling volcano, and she says, "Would you step out for a moment with me?"

She rises to her feet, lays the magazine on the table and whispers to the old woman beside her, "I'll be right back." So they do know each other. In fact... might they be sisters? I seem to notice a family resemblance. "Who cares whether they're sisters or not? What business is it of mine?" So thinking, I follow her, probably scowling no less than the old man, past the librarian's desk and out of the library into the mall, where the noise and bustle seem positively overwhelming after the relative stillness of the library.

She stops suddenly, and it's all I can do to keep from bumping into her. "Where can we talk quietly? Duthie's?"

Duthie's is the coffee shop I had been to with Linda. I feel my heart contract. "Yes, all right," I say, "but..."

"Who am I? I am Mrs. Perlman."

Mrs. Perlman. She obviously expects me to know the name. I am sorry to disappoint her, but...

"Lil Perlman. Your mother and I were friends, and you and my son went to school together."

Perlman, Perlman. Vaguely, very vaguely, I remember. "Mark Perlman?"

"Yes."

I recall the name, not much more. Quiet boy. Slightly shorter than average. He was on my hockey team one year. "Marcus, Marcus!" I hear his high, ringing voice call out for a pass. I have the puck, and he's open. I pass, he scores. What grade would that have been? Four? Five? It was the winning goal; our teammates mob us.

"Where's Mark now?" I ask, frankly not much interested.

"Oh, you don't know!"

What don't I know?

"Mark... Mark committed suicide twenty-seven years ago."

 

Fourth segment

I'm not exactly sure how I came to be outside. The sun is strong, it feels more like July than like May. I'm in the parking lot. Is my car here? Did I drive, or walk? Honestly, I don't remember. Either I wanted to drive and ended up walking, or the reverse: I wanted to walk and ended up driving. Which was it? I close my eyes and try to recreate my departure. Yes, I was afraid it would rain and took the car. Good. Find it, fast, and get out of here.

For a moment I consider taking to the highway, but no – home. Home, lock the door, draw the curtains, cut the phone. I get that way sometimes: I just have to be alone, it's a physical need as powerful as... well, sex; more so. When the spell is on me the sight of another human face can drive me to frenzy; there have been times when I am afraid of the damage I might do, though so far, fortunately, my natural timidity has always kept my most destructive impulses in check. I draw a hot bath and sit in it for hours, eyes closed. When I emerge the water is cold and the bathroom sunk in shadow; it's almost evening.

Mark Perlman committed suicide twenty-seven years ago. So? Twenty-seven years ago – he would have been thirty-five. When had I last seen him? As elementary school kids we'd played hockey together; once or twice, I think, he came over to my house – this house – to be served the traditional milk and cookies by my traditional suburban mom. Beyond that, nothing. We were friends only in the sense that we were not enemies; if we saw each other, we said hi; if we didn't, we forgot each other's existence. Wait, here's another scrap of memory. High school. Grade ten or thereabouts. He had already started to shave and went out with girls, while I, physically and mentally, was still a boy, still staying home Saturday nights and watching the hockey game. The memory is of me admiring him from a distance, wondering when it would be my turn to grow up.

I fled his mother, bolted, when the most elementary courtesy required that I express sorrow, ask for details... Then, I didn't want to know; now, in spite of myself, I do. The obvious thing to do is to look her up in the phone book and call her, apologize for my rudeness, put it down to extreme emotional upset, or whatever... After all, we live in the same neighborhood, we could bump into each other again, if not at the library then on the street, it's bound to happen sooner or later, and what will I say when it does?

What time is it? Towel round my waist, I go into the kitchen and switch on the light. Ten minutes to seven – already! How many hours had I been in the bath? What's that sound – rain? Yes, it is raining. Quite hard, too. Has it just started, or has it been raining all along and I've only now become aware of it?

I'm not hungry. Sleeping pill and to bed? Probably the best thing. That way I'll wake up at two or three in the morning, and maybe then I'll be able to read with concentration. Yes, the dead of night, not mid-afternoon when everyone is around, is the time for serious reading.

***

"Hello, is Debi Asher there please?"

"One moment please."

Is it possible? Am I dreaming?

"Hello?"

The ball is in my court, as they say. "Debi? Debi Asher?"

"Yes..."

It's fantastic, incredible. Responding to I hardly know what impulse, I dialed the next Asher on my list, not even thinking of Debi, really; certainly not hoping to make contact with her; not seriously hoping, anyway. Why did I call, then? I don't know – no reason! I thought, I'll just dial the number, get it out of my system, then take a pill and go to bed; get up later when the rest of the world is asleep and read Hamlet.

"Hello?"

"Debi, this is..." I can hang up, she'll never know it's me, she'll be puzzled for a moment, then shrug it off and go back to whatever it is she was doing.

"Steve Marcus."

"I'm sorry?"

The name means nothing to her. It's probably a different Debi Asher. Probably some high school kid – she sounds like one.

"Debi, listen, were you... were you in Vancouver in 1972?"

"1972?"

"Yes." I've regained a measure of self-possession by now. I am not a stammering schoolboy, after all, but an experienced and successful man of affairs who ran a thriving business for decades – "So behave like one!" I mentally exhort myself – and proceed, in some measure, to do so. "Debi, I – I'm sorry to take you by surprise like this. I'm not even sure I have the right Debi Asher! If I do, we met in Vancouver in1972; I was traveling from Montreal, you from California..."

"Was it 1972? Yes, I..."
"They wouldn't serve you beer, remember? Your nineteenth birthday was three weeks away?"

"That was in Victoria."

"No, Vancouver. I've been going through a diary I kept; it was Vancouver. Even without the diary I remember how... how we felt..."

"How did we feel?"

"Like... my God! Like it was the end of the world!... Hello?" Is she still there? Yes, she acknowledges her presence. Is she excited? Does this phone call mean anything at all to her? If she's all choked up with emotion, she's certainly hiding it well. "Steve Marcus," I say, a little desperately – "can you really not remember me? We were so..." So what? So nothing, really.

"I'm trying to think," she says. "Steve Marcus, Steve Marcus..." She no longer sounds like a high school girl but like an old woman who has long outgrown any feelings she might have had as a young girl. "Describe yourself," she says.

I force a laugh. "If I describe myself as I am now – "

She sees the absurdity of that without further elaboration being necessary, and says, "As you were then."

"As I was then. Well..." What can I say? I was average. Average height, average weight, neither strikingly handsome nor strikingly ugly... I could have been any nineteen-year-old on the road that summer, except maybe that in my reading I favored Nietzsche over Kerouac.

"Listen," I say. "Tell me about yourself. Have you been in Davis all this time? You still have your maiden name. Did you never marry?"

She was twice married, twice divorced, most recently two months ago, and was living with her brother; it was a temporary arrangement and it was only by the merest chance that I had caught her here. In a couple of weeks she'll be moving in with her son in San Francisco; she has four children, all grown...

"Look," I say, "let's meet in San Francisco! I'm sure you'll remember me when you see me; if not... well, I'll bring some old photos, they'll jog your memory! We'll go out, have us a couple of beers – no danger of their not serving us now, eh? We'll have some laughs, talk over old times... why not?"

There's a silence, and then, "Sure," she says, "if you want to come all the way out here just for that..."

The conversation ends with me promising to call her again as soon as I've made my arrangements. I hang up and think about taking a pill, but go to the liquor cabinet and pour myself a scotch instead.

***

I wake up the next morning remembering with crystal clarity my conversation with Debi, and yet not sure it really happened. It's still raining. Did it rain all night? I'd had a vague plan to be up all night reading, but nothing came of it; I went to bed at a quite conventional hour, and now, judging by the sound of Doug Crawford's car starting, it must be ten minutes to nine. I think I'll take a shower. I don't usually shower in the morning, but I do feel like a hot shower, somehow, and... well, it's my house, isn't it?

After my shower, still in my bathrobe, I open the front door to get the Gazette. It's no gentle rain that's falling; it's a positive downpour. And chilly, too, more like March than May. To my surprise, the paper's not there. What the hell? That's never happened before. Then I remember: I cancelled my subscription. I hurry inside and close the door, shivering. I'm chilled to the bone, as if I'd walked for hours in that cold rain out there. Do I have a fever? I touch my forehead. Yes, I think I do, just a trace of one. When I was a child, if I told my mother I wasn't feeling well, she'd take my temperature. No fever? To school, no matter how awful I felt. But if the mercury went the barest fraction of a degree past the arrow, my mother would not have let me go to school even if I begged to be allowed to go (which, for effect, I sometimes did).

Another hot shower. I feel like it. It's delightful. I could stand here all day, just letting the hot water pour over me. The shower, by the way, is in the bathroom off my parents' bedroom. As a child I hardly ever used it. I always preferred baths, as I do to this day. The bath is in the other bathroom, what we used to call "the big bathroom." In short, though I am in a house that's familiar almost to the point of invisibility, this particular corner of it is not at all familiar; is, in fact, almost strange, which no doubt accounts in part for the peculiarly intense pleasure I derive from my back-to-back hot showers.

Hunger drives me at last out of the shower and into the kitchen. But breakfast is a curiously hollow affair without the Gazette to keep me company. What's happening out there in the great wide world? I could turn on the radio, of course, or the TV, but I have an aversion to being talked at. There's a radio on top of the fridge, and a TV set in the living room, but they are both antiques, relics of my parents' day. Quite honestly, I don't even know for sure whether they work or not.

I finish my cereal and milk, and rinse out the bowl and spoon. It's still raining. It feels like the house is under attack, the way the raindrops pelt the roof. Debi, San Francisco... should I go? I'm fully awake now, but still in doubt as to whether that conversation actually took place, though I can practically hear her voice in my mind's ear and could recite verbatim every word that was said. The fact that my doubt makes no sense, that I know it makes no sense, does not defeat it. It's crazy. Is it crazy? What does "reality" mean, and how confident should we be that only the clinically insane are deprived of it? Should I call her again? "Debi, this is Steve. Listen – did I really call you last night? Did that conversation we had really take place?"

That, of course, wouldn't get me very far into her good graces. But I could accomplish the same end with slightly more subtle means. "Hi, Debi, I've made my plans, I'll see you in San Francisco on June 1." She either will or won't know what I'm talking about, and then I'll have my answer. Or will I? After all, if I can imagine one conversation that never occurred, I can imagine another...

Philosophical conundrums aside – did I really, as she put it, "want to go all the way out there just for that?" – ie, for a reunion with a girl I fleetingly knew all those years ago, who didn't remember me, who wouldn't even be that girl anymore but an old woman, unrecognizable to me, who was willing to humor me if I insisted on being humored but who all too plainly had no very warm enthusiasm for the prospect... Didn't I have anything better to do with my life?

Like what – like reading Hamlet? Maybe I was too hasty in giving up the business. I don't know... at the time it seemed like the right thing to do; I was tired, I'd had enough, there was an offer on the table that was too tempting to refuse... and so on. Still, maybe I should have thought a bit more about what I would do afterwards. Freedom – that was the pull. I yearned to be free, after decades in harness. Who wouldn't? But freedom by itself is sufficient only to the slave. Once free, you find to your surprise that freedom is a huge space that has to be filled. If free is all you are, you are nothing.

But... I was going to read. I was going to fill the space with reading. Once I had a taste for great literature. I was young then, too young to do more than skim the surface. Now I'm at an age where, if I really apply myself, I can, perhaps, come to a serious understanding about life. Isn't that a worthy undertaking?

It is, unquestionably. Well... shall I go to the library? Sure – and risk running into Mrs. Perlman? And suffer the contemptuous glances of the librarian, who thinks I'm mad? Well, there are other libraries. Or never mind libraries – there are bookstores. There is my study upstairs, where I never have to worry about finding a space.

Where is the Red Notebook? The other night I was ready to set it on fire. Maybe I should still. Maybe I should set the whole house on fire, and me and the Red Notebook with it. I'll set the fire in the kitchen, stretch out on the living room sofa, and read the Red Notebook until the flames spread there and consume us.

You're not taking this seriously, I hope. What strange turns a man's thoughts take sometimes! Yes, the mind is a curious instrument; fantasy and reality are all one to it. The distinction we make between the two is conventional, artificial. Hm. Still raining. The kitchen counter – that's where the Red Notebook is. I suddenly remember. I go into the kitchen – yes, there it is, together with its two satellites, the new red notebooks. I pick it up, open it at random. "Everyone was sad and dreamy, staring into space at the stars, contemplating the infinite, or whatever." Where would that have been? Who was "everyone"? "Right across from me was a fat, sad-eyed Oriental girl who said she had walked from Kenora, Ont. to Calgary." Calgary, then. "Her round face was young, yet somehow ancient as she stared into the music."

Not long ago I read a novel in which an old man, alone in his old house, accidentally comes across an old diary left behind, and no doubt altogether forgotten, by his son, now himself almost old and living in another city. The old man suffers pangs of conscience for invading his son's privacy, but can't resist the temptation to read on. That is precisely how I feel. These sentences I'm reading, these fragmentary incidents and scraps of feeling, have nothing to do with me; they conjure up nothing, nothing at all. No, they're not mine, they're his – my son's. I go back a page and find it's Sunday, June 18. June 18, 1972, in Calgary, on a bank of the Bow River. "Linda, incidentally, is a beautiful girl with a strange look of futility in her eyes – a futility of which she is well aware – as she endlessly goes on rolling her cigarettes. She says very little, and when you say something she giggles sadly."

Linda?

 

Fifth segment

Linda. If freedom is "a huge space that has to be filled," why not fill it with Linda? Not the Linda of 1972, of course – whoever she might have been – but the Linda of today; of yesterday, rather – or was it the day before? The Linda in the stationery shop. She's not a beautiful girl, and if there is "a strange look of futility in her eyes" I didn't see it... Did I – did he – really see it in the first Linda's eyes? Or was he, as I suspect, merely imitating some writer he admired? Why do I suspect that? First, because it sounds imitative; second, because I know he had that tendency. The truth is, the greatness he fancied he saw in himself wasn't there; all he had were the mannerisms; he was right to give it up and reconcile himself to ordinariness. There is no merit, no merit at all, in an ordinary man's stubborn refusal to acknowledge his ordinariness. Congratulations, my son. You passed life's first big test.

Can the "huge space" be filled with love? I suppose it could. I really don't know. Here I have a confession to make. I know nothing of love. Is that strange? It is true. Once upon a time, there was a girl named Debi... But she was traveling east and I was traveling west, and nothing ever came of it, and now she's an old woman who doesn't remember me. Linda is young... Yes, but... I'm talking nonsense! Come down to earth, old man! I may know nothing of love, but one thing I do know is, it's not a project; you don't choose a girl at random and say to yourself, "Hm, maybe I'll fall in love with her, it'll be something to do, since I am free and need something... some occupation..." Yes, but I do need some occupation! And... "choose a girl at random" – I'm not exactly choosing her at random; I met her by chance, and felt myself drawn to her... Mightn't that be love? Or at least the beginning of love, the first hint of it?

It might be; then again, it might not be. I close my eyes and try to see her face. It is not a beautiful face, but it is nice, with its slightly aquiline nose and the eyebrows that almost meet above it when she frowns – not an angry frown but a pensive one. Pensive. That's what she is; that word describes her to a T. Does she wear glasses? I'm not sure. Did she have makeup on? Lipstick? How unobservant I am! Was there "a strange look of futility" in her eyes? If not, what kind of look was there? Does she feel anything for me? Supposing I show up at the shop – now, this morning – will she be pleased? She seemed pleased when he met by chance at the library; it was her idea, not mine, to go for coffee. Even if it had occurred to me, I wouldn't have suggested it, I wouldn't have dared. A man my age making advances to a girl hers! But by inviting me, wasn't she as good as saying, "The age difference is not important..." No, she was saying nothing of the kind; she assumed I was married; she asked me how many children I had, and when I told her I wasn't married... How did she receive the news? What was the expression on her face? I don't remember. Yes, wait... She said her parents were divorced. Then... then Plato came up, the Republic, children raised by the state...

What time is it? The rain seems to have stopped. I go to the hall closet, slip on a jacket, and let myself out of the house. It is warm. I don't need a jacket. I go back in, hang up the jacket, go out again. I walk four blocks, then stop abruptly. Have I locked the front door? Almost certainly I did; I can see myself turning the key; but as with the conversation with Debi, the memory brings no certainty that the remembered action actually occurred. What if I haven't locked it? What's worth stealing – the Red Notebook? I have no cash in the house, and very few possessions. The furniture all goes back to my parents' day. I don't even have a computer; let that stand as a symbol of how far the world has come since I was an active part of it! No, I'm joking. I'm active enough, it's just... it's just that I'm active differently. The clouds have parted; there's a bit of pale blue sky showing, and the sun, though still veiled, is definitely gathering its strength for a sudden bursting forth.

The mall. During the walk the thought of Linda did not so much as cross my mind, but as I arrive I suddenly recall what I came for, and I am filled with a kind of terror. I see myself going into the shop, and her looking up and recognizing me with mild surprise, and then, after a perfunctory exchange of greetings, saying, "May I help you?" And what will I answer? "Actually, it's you I came to see." There, that's laying my cards on the table! And she will say, "Me! Are you crazy?"

There's no reason to subject myself to this. It's a whim, nothing more. Love? At my age? "Better face the fact," I tell myself – "if you've made it to age sixty-two without love, then love's not for you. If you've managed this long without it, you can manage a little longer. Love is not something one discovers in old age. A re-discovery I admit to be possible. But a first-time discovery? No."

On the other hand, who am I to set limits on the possible? "There's more to heaven and earth, Horatio..." How did that go? Which reminds me: what ever became of my project to read Hamlet? Not only read it but study it, learn from it? The library's over there... Yes, but the stationery shop is right here, and through the window I can see that Linda is not in it. Presiding over it instead – not that there's anything to preside over at the moment; how much business would a shop like this do, anyway? – is a middle-aged lady... Linda's mother? Linda's mom? Unquestionably she is; a glance at her nose settles the question beyond doubt. The same slightly aquiline shape; indeed, the same eyebrows, ready to meet over it at the faintest facial quiver. I am inside the shop before I quite realize what I'm doing. The lady looks up, smiles. Yes, it's Linda twenty-five years from now.

I speak first. "My sister's birthday is coming up; I wonder..."

"Of course," she says, and I am immediately struck by something in her voice – a musical quality? Yes, but... The limits of my vocabulary shock me, sometimes; me, who once dreamed of being a writer! – something not of our present time, something aristocratic, noble... I hardly know what I'm talking about. This is him, with his "strange look of futility..." The child is father to the man... Who said that?

I follow her to the section marked "Birthday." What if Linda were to walk in right now? "Hi mom... Oh! It's you!" The image is so vivid I positively start. "Is something wrong?" inquires the mother. If she were caught in a fire, or if she faced an attack by a knife-wielding rapist, even her anguished cries for help, I think, would have in them something regal, musical.

"I like this one," I say, showing it to her, "but unfortunately it's to a wife, not a sister."

"Yes, that is a nice one," she agrees. "The brother-sister cards are over here. And if it's a gentle humorous touch you have in mind – "

"You know what?" I say. "I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just remembered something. When we were kids, my sister and I, we used to make fun of each other's faces. That was the thing about us: we could say the most awful things to each other, just in fun, and instead of getting angry we'd squeal with laughter. Maybe it's because we're twins. I used to say she had the face of a chimpanzee, and she would say I had the face of a gorilla... Just stupid stuff, kid stuff, you know, but... well, we were kids, what do you expect?" I laugh, and she joins me. "I wonder," I say, "if you have anything with the face of a chimpanzee on it."

"As a matter of fact, yes, although it's not, strictly speaking, a birthday card..." She now leads me to the front of the store, to a display of comic postcards, most of them featuring animals in cute, quasi-human poses. There's a dachshund in coat and hat with a cigar dangling from its lips, a goat in sunglasses, a camel whose expression seems to hint at thoughts beyond the reach of words, and so on, and among them, sure enough, is a leering chimpanzee. "It's perfect, perfect!" I cry, with exaggerated gaiety. "It's sis to a T!"

"What a terrible thing to say!"

"No, no, it's affectionately meant. My sister and I are very close, very close... Do you know," I say, anxious to change the subject from this fictitious sister of mine, "the other day I was here to buy a notebook, and the young lady who took care of me looked remarkably like you."

"My daughter."

"Sister, I would have said." That's the man-of-the-world in me.

"Yes," she says, smiling, "she does look decidedly mature for her age."

She rings up the sale and hands me my change and my postcard, neatly enclosed in a paper bag just its size. It's clearly time for me to leave, but the thought of marching off into the mall with this silly, pointless card in my hand is so bleak that I somewhat desperately cast about for a way to delay the inevitable.

"She's studying anthropology, she told me."

"Yes. It's been her passion since earliest childhood."

"An odd passion for a child."

"Oh, I don't know..."

I cast about for something to say, but the only thing that comes to mind is a remark Linda made about her mother favoring a more practical approach to the future. That's hardly territory I can venture into without being glaringly intrusive. "Well, thank you," I say after a moment's awkward silence. The only thing that can save the situation now is Linda's coming in and being pleased to see me. She does not, and I now find myself in the passage, jostled by the crowd as I hesitate which way to turn, clutching my idiot chimpanzee card in my hand like a child clutching a balloon. The library is to the left, but straight ahead of me I see a sign marked Exit and I make for it, vaguely wishing it was the exit to more than just the mall.

The sadness that comes over me is inexpressible, inexplicable. I say "sadness" because I know no other word for it, but really, it's more than that. Loss – a sense of loss – maybe that's closer. What have I lost? Why – Linda. I'll never see her again. I can hardly go back to the store. On what pretext? A birthday card for my fictitious wife? A blue notebook? A pen? Envelopes – I am in desperate need of envelopes! I'm talking nonsense, of course. You can't lose something you never had – or maybe you can: when you realize you never had it.

Strange – there's not a cloud in the sky. Wasn't it cloudy when I walked here? Of course it was, but now, barely an hour later – or has more time passed than I think? – the sun shines bright and untroubled against an innocuous pale blue backdrop. Well, what's strange about that? Nothing, but... well, the total absence of even the faintest wisp of cloud is a little strange.

Maybe it's a sign from God. Yes, maybe it's God saying to me, "Forget Linda, forget love; there was a time for that but it's over; you've missed that boat and it's left without you; you have reached the stage of life where you'd better acknowledge Me, and this boat you'd better not miss, because there won't be another one."

Am I going out of my mind? Has my loneliness, my solitude, engulfed me to the point where... "Oh, please, please!" I hear myself cry out loud. "Get hold of yourself!"

"Sir? Are you all right?"

An elderly lady to the rescue – Mrs. Perlman! No, not Mrs. Perlman. Just an anonymous, generic elderly lady, carrying a bag of groceries, a small bag – she probably lives alone.

"Yes, I'm fine," I say. "I'm sorry..."
"Here, you've dropped something." She bends down and retrieves my tiny little bag that a wind, had there been one, would have carried off in an instant. A tentative smile plays about her lipsticked lips. Invite me for coffee, she seems to be saying as she hands it back to me. An elderly lady, I said, but actually not so very elderly; about my age, maybe even a bit younger.

"Thank you," I say. "Thank you. I sure wouldn't have wanted to lose this!"

With a smile and a nod I take myself off, marching briskly in the direction of home.

***

Before I know it I'm on the phone to Debi. "Listen," I hear myself say. "I've made my plans. I'm going to drive out there. Can you hear me? There's something funny about this connection. Hello? I'm going to drive. I'm not sure how long it'll take; I've got some stops to make along the way. Figure two weeks. Give me a number where I can reach you."

She gives me two: her son's home phone and her cell phone. Also her brother's home address. I write it all down in the red notebook, under the seven Asher telephone numbers I'd noted from the Davis phone book. Is it my imagination, or is she a little friendlier this time, a little more excited about the prospect of meeting me? Does she remember me now? Has she summoned up some vague image of my average but youthful – youthful maybe canceling out average – face? I should have asked her, I think as I hang up. On second thought, no. Why risk an answer that will puncture my hope? We'll have plenty of time to talk about all that in a couple of weeks.

My buoyancy does not last. In no mood to cook, I boil a couple of eggs for dinner and wash them down with scotch. Then I pour myself another splash, and another. Shall I drink myself into oblivion? In my student days I was a good drinker – "Marcus has a cast-iron stomach," my friends used to say – but I'm out of practice, and surely sickness would come before oblivion. Well, let it come, I don't care. But the scotch doesn't taste right, somehow. Nothing tastes right, nothing feels right. Even that delicious warm glow that the first sip of scotch always brings – it's there, and it's warm, but it isn't delicious. What's that – the doorbell? No, the telephone. Who could possibly be phoning me? Ignore it; I'm not home. But it doesn't stop. Thirteen rings, fourteen – I suddenly realize I've been unconsciously counting. Fifteen. Well, let's see who has the stronger will. Nineteen, twenty. This is crazy! "I'm not home, damn you!" My voice is a positive screech, it's a sound I've never made before. Maybe I'd better answer it? All right, I'm coming. "Hello?"

"Steve? Is that you?"

A woman's voice. Linda!

"Hello?"

"Yes, I... I'm sorry..." What am I apologizing for?

It's not Linda, of course. How would Linda know my phone number? Well, she could have looked it up... but she has more important things to do than that, and more important things to think about than me.

"Steve, does the name Helen Dahl ring any kind of a bell?"

"Helen... who? I'm sorry, I... I've had a bit to drink, my head feels like.. like it's floating off into space or something... Helen Dahl? No! It can't be!" But it is. Helen, the little girl I'd kissed as a little boy; Helen, who appeared to me in a dream the other night. I said I must have seen her face somewhere, without being immediately aware of it – how else explain the dream? – and here she is, on the phone!

She's explaining, and I'm not properly focused on what she's saying. I make an effort. Was I at the mall today? Yes. Do I remember the parking lot? Ah, so that was her! "You looked so tantalizingly familiar," she's saying. "But I couldn't place you. Suddenly, just now, it came to me. Steve Marcus! Amazing! Incredible! You've been living in that house all your life?"

"No, oh no." For some reason it embarrasses me to have her think that, and I hasten to set her straight. "No, I moved back just last year, when I retired..."

"Retired, are you? Well well! And you're home alone, drinking? Wouldn't you like company?"

She's on her way over. "Amazing, incredible," as she said. Helen Dahl. My first kiss. But I must do something, get the house in order. Where does she live? How long will it take her to get here? I pour myself some more scotch, somehow spilling a bit on the right thigh of my trousers, which mishap I shrug off without difficulty, and try to visualize her face. I cannot. The fact that she recognized me shows I have retained something of my childish self. The fact that I didn't recognize her suggests... the opposite? Very logical! So the scotch isn't short-circuiting my ability to reason, and may even be intensifying it. What else? Yes – she wore lipstick, bright red. What does that suggest? That she's conscious of her age and trying to hide it? Little Helen Dahl. "Conscious of her age and trying to hide it." I can't help giggling a little at the thought. Yes, even the littlest girls turn into old women sooner or later. Get the house in order... I haven't forgotten, but... is the house really in disorder? True, I'm not much of a housekeeper... just a guy who has very little impact on his environment. Disorder? The bed's not made, but I hardly see that mattering. What else? What else? There seems to be some thought which I absolutely must think before she gets here... What is it? It hovers at the outer rim of consciousness, close enough to annoy me, too far away to grasp. Is that the doorbell? I stumble to my feet, steady myself... How far gone am I? More than I know, perhaps. I go to the front door, fling it open – nothing, no one. Is she lost? Did I give her directions? "Idiot!" I hear myself shout. "She was born on this street! Directions!"

Helen Dahl. She had this boyfriend. Wait – here it is, here's that elusive thought I've been chasing. She was thirteen, I was fifteen, too grownup to even notice her, but she had a boyfriend and I didn't have a girlfriend... Oh my God! Is it possible? Her boyfriend was... of course! Mark Perlman! No! Is it true? Am I making it up? I swear, I don't know! This is agony – to be thinking, recalling, with perfect clarity, and yet... is it real or not, what I'm thinking and recalling with perfect clarity? Memories and thoughts do not come with labels marked "reality"!

That is a fact. They do not. I close the door, and immediately hear a car turn into the street. That will be her taxi. Or maybe her car. I go to the window and draw the curtain back just enough to be able to peep outside without being seen. Just as I thought! A taxi, pulling up in front of the house. I release the curtain and back away from the window. What is this? Panic? Yes. The great Dr. Josef Mengele is conducting a "selection," deciding who is fit to live and work and who is not. It's my turn. He casts a monocled glance in my direction, and his expression is not pleased. The doorbell rings. The knob jiggles. It has occurred to her that I might have left the door unlocked in anticipation of her arrival, and she will be disappointed that I have not. I'm sorry. I’m sorry, Helen. Helen Dahl. Really, this is simply... I don't know, simply incredible.

"Steve!" No formality – she throws herself into my arms. Our embrace is awkward; at a certain moment I become aware of myself idiotically patting her back. She disengages herself. "Let me look at you. Yes, you've aged, but you're still a child. What about me? I'm an old woman."

"Nonsense. You're two years younger than me!"

We laugh; the ice is, if not broken, cracked. But something is strange. It's not so much that I don't recognize little Helen Dahl in the person standing before me – that's hardly surprising – but that I don't recognize the woman in the parking lot.

"Here, take my coat," she says, handing it to me. "Is that your BMW in the driveway? Stupid question – who else's would it be, eh? I have a thing about BMWs. It's the kind of car my first husband always wanted, but we weren't quite in the BMW class. Financially speaking."

"Your first husband." Mark? I take her coat to the hall closet and hang it up.

"Do you know, it's funny. I only live a couple of miles away but this is the first time I've been back on this street since we moved out. And you – you actually live here!" This evidently strikes her as very funny. Her laughter is piercing and musical. It trills, like an opera singer's laugh. Is she sober? Was she drinking before she came? Maybe she needed a belt or two to work up the courage to call?

"Well, come, pour me a drink and let's get acquainted. What have you been drinking? I would have brought something, but I was so... discombobulated" – this brings on another fit of laughter. "Discombobulated – isn't that a lovely word? I'm not even altogether sure what it means, to be honest."

"Confused, disoriented..."

"Well, you see, I'm using it correctly. Steve, let's go into your room! At least let me have a quick look at it. I wouldn't be surprised to open the door and find your train tracks all set up on the floor!"

"Were you ever in my room?"

"Was I ever in your room! Don't you remember how you took me up there and showed me your train set? Once as a journalist – that's what I am, by the way, a journalist – I interviewed the president of Via Rail, and as he showed me a model of the system, pointing out the various complexities (which sailed quite over my head), I thought of you, at seven, inducting me at five into the world of electric trains! How could I help it? It was the very same experience! The solemnity on his face was... the solemnity on yours!"

My head is spinning. Certainly as a small child I had a period where I was mad about electric trains – it didn't last – but I have no memory of having shared that passion with Helen. I have no memory of her ever having been in the house, much less in my room.

"It's a den now," I say. It's not, it's still my room, and the thought of her exclaiming over how little it's changed fills me with a kind of dread I can't explain. "You're a journalist," I say, to change the subject.

"Yes, for CTV – didn't you ever see me on TV? I popped up pretty often over the years, reporting on this, reporting on that... Now I work behind the scenes. I'm an editor. Better paid, but less famous. Gain one thing, lose something else. That's life. Eh?"

"Yes, I... I suppose."