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I had lit a fire in my fireplace, and I’d poured out two coffees and two brandies, and I was settling down on the sofa next to a man who had taken me out to dinner when Ivan called after more than six months. I turned with the receiver to the wall as I absorbed the fact of Ivan’s voice, and when I glanced back at the man on my sofa, he seemed like a scrap of paper, or the handle from a broken cup, or a single rubber band—a thing that has become dislodged from its rightful place and intrudes on one’s consciousness two or three or many times before one understands that it is just a thing best thrown away.

“Still in Montreal?” I said into the phone.

“Yeah,” Ivan said. “I’m going to stay for a while.”

“What’s it like?” I said.

“Cold,” he said.

“It’s cold in New York, too,” I was able to answer.

“Well, when can you get here?” he said. “We’ll warm each other up.”

I’d begun to think that this time there would be no end to the waiting, but here he was, here was Ivan, dropping down into my life again and severing the fine threads I’d spun out toward the rest of the world.

“I can’t just leave,” I said. “I have a job, you know.”

“They’ll give you a few weeks, won’t they?” he said. “Over Christmas?”

“A few weeks,” I said, but when he was silent I was sorry I’d said it.

“We’ll talk it all over when you get up here,” he said finally. “I know it’s hard. It’s hard for me, too.”

I turned slightly, to face the window. The little plant that sat on the sill was almost leafless, I noticed, and paint was peeling slightly from the ceiling above it. How had I made myself believe this apartment was my home? This apartment was nothing.

“O.K.,” I said. “I’ll come.”

I replaced the receiver, but the man on the sofa just sat and moved his spoon back and forth in his cup of coffee with a little chiming sound.

“An old friend,” I said.

“So I assumed,” he said.

“Well,” I said, but then I couldn’t even remember why that man was there. “I think I’d better say good night.”

The man stood. “Going on a trip?”

“Soon,” I said.

“Well, give me a call when you get back,” he said. “If you want to.”

“I’m not sure that I’ll be coming back,” I said.

“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he said, nodding, as if I were telling him a long story. “Well, then, good luck.”

I flew up early one morning, leaving my apartment while it was still dark outside. I had packed, and flooded my plant with water in a hypocritical gesture that would delay, but not prevent, its death, and then I’d sat waiting for the clock face to arrive at the configuration that meant it was time I could reasonably go.

*  *  *  *  *

The airport was shaded and still in the pause before dawn, and the scattering of people there seemed to have lived for days in flight’s distended light or dark; for them, this stop was no more situated in space than a dream is.

How many planes and buses and trains I had taken, over the years, to see Ivan! And how inevitable it always felt, as if I were being conveyed to him by some law of the universe made physical.

We’d met when I was nineteen, in Atlanta, where I was working for a photographic agency. He lived with his wife, Linda, who had grown up there, and their one-year-old, Gary. But he traveled frequently, and when he would call and ask me to go with him or meet him for a weekend somewhere—well, Ivan was one of those men, and just standing next to him I felt as if I were standing in the sun, and it never occurred to me to hesitate or to ask any questions.

And Ivan warmed with me. After their early marriage, Linda had grown increasingly fearful and demanding, he told me, and years of trying to work things out with her had imposed on him the cautious reserve of an unwilling guardian. It was a habit he seemed eager to discard.

After a time, there was a divorce, and Ivan moved about from place to place, visiting and taking photographs, and I got a job in New York. But he would call, and I would lock the door of whatever apartment I was living in and go to him in strange cities, leaving each before I could break through the transparent covering behind which it lay, mysterious and inert. And I always felt the same when I saw Ivan—like an animal raised in captivity that, after years of caged, puzzled solitude, is instantly recalled by the touch of a similar creature to the natural blazing consciousness of its species.

The last time we were together, though, we had lain on a slope overlooking a sunny lake, and a stem trembled in my hand while I explained, slowly and quietly, that it would not do any longer. I was twenty-eight now, I said, and he would have to make some sort of decision about me.

“Are you talking about a decision that can be made honestly?” He held my chin up and looked into my eyes.

“That is what a decision is,” I said. “If the next step is self-evident, we don’t call it a decision.”

“I don’t want to be unfair,” he said, finally. And I came to assume, because I hadn’t heard from him since, that the decision had been made.

*  *  *  *  *

Soft winter light was rolling up onto the earth as the plane landed, and the long corridors of the airport reflected a mild, dark glow.

An official opened my suitcase and turned over a stack of my underpants. SOMETHING TO DECLARE…NOTHING TO DECLARE, I saw on signs overhead, and strange words below each message. Oh, yes—part of this city was English-speaking, part French-speaking. A sorry-looking Christmas wreath hung over the lobby, and I thought of something Ivan had said after one of his frequent trips to see Gary and Linda in Atlanta: “I can’t really have much sympathy for her. When she senses I’m not as worried about her as she’d like me to be, she takes a slight, semi-accidental overdose of something or gets herself into a little car crash.”

“She loves you that much?” I asked.

“It isn’t love,” he said. “For all her dependence, she doesn’t love me.”

“But,” I said, “is that what she thinks? Does she think she loves you that much?”

He stood up and stretched, and for a moment I thought that he hadn’t registered my question. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what she thinks.”

Near the airport exit, there was a currency-exchange bureau, and I understood that I would need new money. The man behind the cage counted out the variegated, colorful Canadian bills in front of me. “Ah,” he said, noticing my expression—he spoke with a faint but unfamiliar accent—“an unaccustomed medium of exchange, yes?”

I was directed by strangers to a little bus that took me across a plain to the city, a stony outcropping perched at the cold top of the world. There were solitary houses, heavy in the shallow film of light, and rows of low buildings, and many churches. I found a taxi and circumvented the question of language by handing the driver a piece of paper with Ivan’s address on it, and I was brought in silence to a dark, muscular Victorian house that loomed from a brick street in a close row with others of its kind.

Ivan came downstairs bringing the morning gold with him and let me in. His skin and hair were wheat and honey colors, and he smelled as if he had been sleeping in a sunny field. “Ivan,” I said, taking pleasure in speaking his name. As he held me, I felt ebbing from me a terrible pain that I had been unaware of until that moment. “I’m so tired.”

“Want to wake up, or want to go to sleep?” he said.

“Sleep,” I said, but for whole minutes I couldn’t bring myself to move.

Upstairs, the morning light, gathering strength, made the melting frost on the bedroom window glow. I slept as if I hadn’t slept for a week, and then awoke, groping hurriedly through my life to place myself. Understanding, I looked out the window through the city night shine of frost: I was in Montreal with Ivan, and I had missed the day.

*  *  *  *  *

I stood in the doorway of the living room for a moment, looking. Ivan was there, sharing a bottle of wine with two women. One of them was striking and willowy, with a spill of light curls, and the other was small and dark and fragile-looking. When had Ivan become so much older?

The small woman was studying a photograph, and her shiny hair fell across her pretty little pointy face. “No, it is wonderful, Ivan,” she was saying. She spoke precisely, as if picking her way through the words, with the same accent I had heard at the airport. “It is a portrait of an entire class. A class that votes against its own interests. It is…a photograph of false consciousness.”

“Well, it’s a damn good print, anyway,” the other woman said. “Lovely work, Ivan.”

“We’re playing Thematic Apperception Test,” Ivan said, and the dark girl blushed and primly lowered her eyes. “We’ve had responses from Quebec and England. Let’s hear from our U.S. representative.” He handed me the photograph. “What do you see?”

Two women who, to judge from this view, were middle-aged, overweight, and poor stood gazing into a shop window at a display of tawdry lingerie. High up in the window was a reflection of mounded clouds and trees in full leaf. I did not feel like discussing the picture.

“Hello,” the small girl said, intercepting my gaze as I looked up. “I am Micheline, and this is my friend Fiona.”

Fiona reached lazily over to shake hands. “Hello,” I said, allowing our attention to flow away from the photograph. “Do you live here, Fiona, or in England?”

“Oh, let’s see,” she said. “Where do I live? Well, it’s been quite some time since I’ve even seen England. I’ve been in Montreal for a while, and before that I was in L.A.”

“Really,” I said. “What were you doing there?”

“What one does,” she said. “I was working in film.”

“The industry!” Micheline said. A hectic flush beat momentarily under her white skin, as if she’d been startled by her own exclamation. “There is much money to be made there, but at what personal expense!”

“Fiona has a gallery here,” Ivan said.

“No money, no personal expense.” Fiona smiled.

“It is excellent,” Micheline said. “Fiona exhibits the most important new photographs in Canada. Soon she will have a show of Ivan’s work.”

“Wonderful,” I said, but none of the others added anything. “We’re rather on display here, Ivan,” I said. “Are you planning to do something about curtains?”

Ivan smiled. “No.” Ivan’s rare smile always stopped me cold, and I smiled back as we looked at each other.

“It is not important,” Micheline said, reclaiming the conversation. “The whole world is a window.”

“Horseshit,” Fiona said good-naturedly, and yawned.

“Yes, but that is true, Fiona,” Micheline said. “Privacy is a—what is that?—debased form of dignity. It is dignity’s…atrophied corpse.”

“How good your English has become,” Fiona said, smiling, but Ivan had nodded approvingly.

“The rigorous Northern temperament,” Fiona said to me. “Sometimes I long for just a weekend in Los Angeles again.”

“Not me!” Micheline said. She kicked her feet impatiently.

“Have you lived there as well?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “But I am sure. Beaches, hotels, drinks with little hats—”

“That’s Hawaii, I think,” I said.

“Perhaps,” Micheline said, looking sideways at me out of her doll’s face.

“So what about it?” Ivan said. “Have you two decided to stay for dinner?”

“No,” Micheline said, jumping to her feet. “Come, Fiona.” She held out her hand to Fiona, blushing deeply. “We must go.”

“All right.” Fiona yawned and stood. “But let’s have a rain check, Ivan. Micheline raves about your cooking. Maybe we’ll come back over the weekend for Micheline’s things. Sorry to have left them so long. We’ve been a while sorting things out.”

“No problem,” Ivan said. “Plenty of closet space.”

At the door, Micheline was piling on layers and layers of clothing and stamping like a little pony in anticipation of the snow.

*  *  *  *  *

“Tell me about them,” I said to Ivan after dinner, as we lay on the sofa, our feet touching. “Who are they?”

“What do you mean, ‘who’?” he said. “You met them.”

“Come on, Ivan,” I said. “All I meant was that I’d like to know more about your friends. How did you meet them? That sort of thing.”

“Actually,” he said, “I hardly know Fiona. Micheline just brought her over once before.”

“Micheline’s so extreme,” I said, smiling.

“She’s very young,” Ivan said.

“I used to be young,” I said. “But I was never that extreme, was I?”

“She’s a purist,” Ivan said. “She’s a very serious person.”

“She seemed a bit of a silly person to me,” I said. “Have she and Fiona been together long?”

“Just a month or so,” he said.

“Micheline doesn’t seem as if she’s really used to being with another woman, somehow,” I said. Ivan glanced at a page of newspaper lying on the floor below him. Some headline had caught his eye apparently. “She was sort of defiant,” I said. “Or nervous. As if she were making a statement about being gay.”

“On the contrary,” Ivan said. “She considers that to be an absolutely fraudulent opposition of categories—gay, straight. Utterly fraudulent.”

“Do you?” I said.

“What is this?” Ivan said. “Are you preparing your case against me? Yes, The People of the United States of America versus Ivan Augustine Olmstead. I know.”

“How long did she live here?” I said.

“Three months,” he said, and then neither of us said anything or moved for about fifteen minutes.

“Ivan,” I said. “I didn’t call you. You wanted me to come up here.”

He looked at me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But we’re both very tense.”

“Of course I’m tense,” I said. “I don’t hear from you for six months, then out of the blue you summon me for some kind of audience, and I don’t know what you’re going to say. I don’t know whether you want some kind of future with me, or whether we’re having our last encounter, or what.”

“Look,” he said. He sat upright on the sofa. “I don’t know how to say this to you. Because, for some reason, it seems very foreign to you, to your way of thinking. But it’s not out of the blue for me at all, you see. Because you’re always with me. But you seem to want to feel rejected.”

“I don’t want to feel rejected,” I said. “But if I’ve been rejected I’d just as soon know it.”

“You haven’t been rejected,” he said. “You can’t be rejected. You’re a part of me. But instead of enjoying what happens between us, you always worry about what has happened between us, or what will happen between us.”

“Yes,” I said. “Because there is no such thing as an independent present. How can I not worry each time I see you that it will be the last?”

“You act as if I had all the power between us,” he said. “You have just as much power as I do. But I can’t give it to you. You have to claim it.”

“If that were true,” I said, “we’d be living together at least half the time.”

“And if we were living together,” he said, “would you feel that you had to go to work with me or stay with me in the darkroom to see whether my feelings about you changed minute by minute? It’s not the quantity of time we spend together that makes us more close or less close. People are to each other what they are.”

“But that can change,” I said. “People’s interests are at odds sometimes.”

“Not really,” he said. “Not fundamentally. And you would understand that if you weren’t so interested in defending your isolating, competitive view of things.”

“What on earth are you talking about, Ivan? Are you really saying that there’s no conflict between people?”

“What I’m saying is that it’s absurd for people to be obsessed with their own little roles. People’s situations are just a fraction of their existence—the difference between those situations is superficial, it’s arbitrary. In actuality, we’re all part of one giant human organism, and one part can’t survive at the expense of another part. Would you take off your sock and put it on your hand because you were cold? Look—does the universe care whether it’s you or Louis Pasteur that’s Louis Pasteur? No. From that point of view, we’re all the same.”

“Well, Ivan,” I said, “if we’re all the same, why drag me up here? Why not just keep Micheline around? Or call in a neighbor?”

He looked at me, and he sighed. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe I just don’t care about you in the way that you need. I just don’t know. I don’t want to falsify my feelings.”

But when I saw how exhausted he looked, and miserable, loneliness froze my anger, and I was ashamed that I’d allowed myself to become childish. “Never mind,” I said. I wished that he would touch me. “Never mind. We’ll figure it out.”

*  *  *  *  *

It was not until the second week that I regained my balance and Ivan let down his guard, and we were able to talk without hidden purposes and we remembered how it felt to be happy together. Still, it seemed to me as if I were remembering every moment of happiness even as it occurred, and, remembering, mourning its death.

One day, Ivan was already dressed and sitting in the kitchen by the time I woke up. “Linda called this morning,” he said. “She let the phone ring about a hundred times before I got it. I’m amazed you slept through it.”

I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down.

“I wonder why people do that,” he said. “It’s annoying, and it’s pointless.”

“It wasn’t pointless in this case,” I said. “You woke up.”

“Want some toast?” Ivan asked. “Eggs?”

“No, thanks,” I said. I hardly ever ate breakfast. “So, is she all right?”

“Fine,” he said. “I guess.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said.

“Remember that apartment I had in Washington?” he said. “I loved that place. It was the only place I ever lived where I could get the paper delivered.”

“How’s Gary?” I said.

“Well, I don’t know,” Ivan said. “According to Linda, he’s got some kind of flu or something. She’s gotten it into her head that it’s psychosomatic, because this is the first time since he was born that I haven’t come home for Christmas.”

“Home,” I said.

“Well,” Ivan said. “Gary’s home.”

“Maybe you should go,” I said.

“He’ll have to adjust sometime,” Ivan said. “This is just Linda’s way of manipulating the situation.”

I shrugged. “It’s up to you.” I wondered, really for the first time, what Ivan’s son looked like. “Do you have a picture of Gary?”

“Somewhere, I think,” Ivan said.

“I’d like to see one,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “You mean now?”

“Well, I’d like to,” I said.

Steam rose from my coffee and faded into the bright room. Outside the window, light snow began to fall. In a few minutes Ivan came back with a wallet-sized snapshot.

“How did you get into this picture?” I said.

He took it from me and peered at it. “Oh. Some friends of Linda’s were over that day. They took it.”

“So that’s Linda,” I said. For nine years I’d been imagining the wrong woman—someone tired and aggrieved—but the woman in the photograph was finely chiseled, like Ivan. Even in her jeans she appeared aristocratic, and her expression was somewhat set, as if she had just disposed of some slight inconvenience. She and Ivan could have been brother and sister. The little boy between them, however, looked clumsy and bereft. His head was large and round and wobbly-looking, and the camera had caught him turning, his mouth open in alarm, as if he had fallen through space into the photograph. A current of fury flowed through me, leaving me as depleted as the child in the picture looked. “What if he is sick?” I said.

“Kids get sick all the time,” Ivan said.

“You could fly down Christmas Eve and come back the twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh.”

“Flying on Christmas Eve’s impossible anyhow,” he said.

“Well, you could go down tomorrow.”

“What about you?” he said.

“What about me?” I said.

“If I can even still get reservations,” he said.

“Call and see,” I said. “I’ll call.” Linda had probably never, in awe of Ivan’s honey-colored elegance that was so like her own, hesitated to touch him as I sometimes did. As I did right now.

*  *  *  *  *

The next day, Ivan bought some toys, much more cheerful and robust than the child they were for, and then I watched him pack. And then we went out to the airport together.

I took the little airport bus back alone, and I felt I had been equipped by a mysterious agency: I knew without asking how to transport myself into a foreign city, my pockets were filled with its money, and in my hand I had a set of keys to an apartment there. The snow still fell lightly, detaching itself piece by piece from the white sky, absorbing all the sound. And the figures past which we rode looked almost immobile in their heavy clothing, and not quite formed, as if they were bodies waiting to be inhabited by displaced souls. In the dark quiet of the bus, I let myself drift. Cities, the cities where I visited Ivan, were repositories of these bodies waiting to be animated, I thought sleepily, but how did a soul manage to incarnate itself in one?

All night long I slept easily, borne away on the movements of my new, unfettered life, but I awoke to a jarring silence. Ivan had taken the clock.

I looked around. It was probably quite late. The sun was already high, and the frost patterns, which seemed always on the verge of meaning, were being sucked back to the edges of the window as I stared. In the kitchen I sat and watched the light pooling in rich winter tints across the linoleum, and eventually the pink-and-pewter evening came, and frost patterns encroached on the windows again. How quickly the day had disappeared. The day had sat at the kitchen window, but the earth had simply rolled away from under it.

It was light again when I woke. I thought suddenly of the little plant on my windowsill in New York. It would be dead by now. I felt nauseated, but then I remembered I hadn’t eaten the day before.

There was nothing in the refrigerator, but in the freezer compartment I found a roll of chocolate-chip-cookie dough. How unlike Ivan to have such a thing—what circumstances had prompted him to buy it? Ah—I saw Micheline and Ivan with a shopping cart, laughing: the purists’ night off.

I searched through the pots and pans—what a lot of clatter—but there was a cookie sheet. Good. I turned on the oven and sawed through the frozen dough. Soon the kitchen was filling with warmth. But an assaultive odor underlay it, and when I opened the oven door, I found the remains of a leg of lamb from earlier in the week that we’d forgotten to put away. The bone stood out, almost translucent, and the porous sheared face of meat was still red in the center. “Get rid of all this old stuff,” I heard myself say out loud in a strange, cheerful voice, and I jabbed a large fork into it. But I had to sit for several minutes breathing deeply with my head lowered before I managed to dump the lamb into the garbage can along with the tray of dough bits and get myself back into bed, where I stayed for the rest of the day.

The next afternoon, it seemed to me that I was ready to go out of the apartment. I took a hot bath, cleansing myself carefully. Then I looked through my clothing, taking it out and putting it away, piece by piece. None of the things I’d brought with me seemed right. Steam poured from the radiators, but the veil of warmth hardly softened the little pointed particles of cold in the room.

The hall closet was full of women’s clothes, and there I found everything I needed. I supposed it all belonged to Micheline, but everything felt roomy enough, even though she looked so small. I selected a voluminous skirt, a turtleneck jersey, and a long, heavy sweater. There was a pair of boots as well—beautiful boots, fine-grained and sleek. If they belonged to Micheline, they must have been a gift. Surely she never would have chosen them for herself.

The woman who stood in the mirror was well assembled, but the face, above the heavy, dark clothing, was indistinct in the brilliant sunlight. I made up my eyes heavily, and then my mouth with a red lipstick that was sitting on Ivan’s bureau, and checked back with the mirror. Much better. Then I found a jacket that probably belonged to Ivan, and a large shawl, which I arranged around my head and shoulders.

Outside, everything was outlined in a fluid brilliance, and underfoot the snow emitted an occasional dry shriek. The air was as thin as if it might break, fracturing the landscape along which I walked: broad, flat-roofed buildings with blind windows, low upon the endless sky. There were other figures against the landscape, all bundled up like myself against the cold, and although the city was still unfathomable, I could recall no other place, and the rudiments of a past seemed to be hidden here for me somewhere, beyond my memory.

I entered a door and was plunged into noise and activity. I was in a supermarket arranged like a hallucination, with aisles shooting out in unexpected directions, and familiar and unfamiliar items perched side by side. If only I had made a list! I held my cart tightly, trusting the bright packages to draw me along correctly and guide me in my selections.

The checkout girl rang up my purchases: eggs (oh, I’d forgotten butter; well, no matter, the eggs could always be boiled, or used in something); a replacement roll of frozen cookie dough; a box of spaghetti; a jar of pickled okra from Texas; a package of mint tea; foil; soap powder; cleanser; violet toilet paper (an item I’d never seen before); and a bottle of aspirin. The girl took my money, glancing at me.

Several doors along, I stopped at a little shop filled with pastries. There were trays of jam tarts and buns, and plates piled up with little chocolate diamond shapes, and pyramids of caramelized spheres, and shelves of croissants and tortes and cookies, and the most wonderful aroma surged around me. “Madame?” said a woman in white behind the counter.

I looked up at her, over a shelf of frosted cakes that held messages coded in French. On one of them a tiny bride and groom were borne down upon by shining sugar swans, and my heart fluttered high up against my chest like a routed moth. I spoke, though, resolutely in English: “Everything looks so good.” Surely that was an appropriate thing to say—surely people said that. “Wait.” I pointed at a tray of evergreen-shaped cookies covered with green sugar crystals. Tiny bright candies had been placed on them at intervals to simulate ornaments. “There.”

“Very good,” the woman said. “The children like these very much.”

“Good,” I said. What had she meant? “I’ll take a dozen.”

“Did you have a pleasant Christmas?” she asked me, nestling my cookies into a box.

“Yes,” I said, perhaps too loudly, but she didn’t seem to notice the fire that roared over me. “And you?”

“Very good,” she said. “I was with my sister. All the children were home. But now today it feels so quiet.” She smiled, and I understood that her communication had been completed, and we both inclined our heads slightly as I left.

“Hello,” I said uncertainly to the butcher in the meat market next door. It occurred to me that I ought to stop and get something nourishing.

“What can I do for you?” the butcher asked in easy English.

“Actually,” I said dodging a swift memory of the leg of lamb in Ivan’s garbage can, “I’d like something for supper.” Ah! I had to smile—what the woman in the bakery had been telling me was how it felt to be a person when one’s sister and some children were around.

“Something in particular?” the butcher asked. “If I’m not being too nosy?”

“Please,” I said across a wall of nausea. “Sausages.” That had been good thinking—at least they would be in casings.

“Sausages,” he said. “How many sausages?”

“Not so many,” I said, trying not to think too concretely about the iridescent hunks of meat all around me.

“Let’s see,” he said. “Should we say…for two?”

“Good,” I said. Fortunately there was a chair to wait in. “Did you have a pleasant Christmas?” I asked.

“Excellent,” the butcher said. “Goose. And yours?”

“Oh, excellent,” I said. I supposed from his silence that that had been insufficient, so I continued. “It feels so quiet today, though. All the children have gone back.”

“Oh, I know that quiet,” the butcher said. “When they go.”

“They’re not exactly my children, of course,” I said. “They’re my sister’s. Stepsister’s, I mean. My sister would be too young a person to have children old enough to go back anywhere. You know,” I said, “I have a friend who believes that in a sense it doesn’t matter whether I’m a person with a stepsister who has children or whether someone else is.”

The butcher looked at me. “Interesting point,” he said. “That’s five seventy-eight with tax.”

“I know it sounds peculiar,” I said, counting out the price. “But this friend really believes that, assuming there’s a person with a stepsister, it just doesn’t ultimately matter—to the universe, for instance—whether that person happens to be me or whether that person happens to be someone else. And I was thinking—does it actually matter to you whether that person is me or that person is someone else?”

“To me…does it matter to me…” The butcher handed me my package. “Well, to me, sweetheart, you are someone else.”

“Well.” I laughed uneasily. “No. But do you mean—wait—I’m not sure I understand. That is, did you mean that I might as well be the person with the stepsister? That it’s an error to identify oneself as the occupant of a specific situation?” The butcher looked at me again. “I mean, how would you describe the difference between the place you occupy in the world and the place I occupy?”

“Well”—his eyes narrowed thoughtfully—“I’m standing over here, I see you standing over there, like that.”

“Oh—” I said.

“So,” he said. “Got everything? Know where you are?”

“Thanks,” I said. “Yes.”

“You’re all set, then,” he said. “Enjoy the sausages.”

Back at the apartment, I unpacked my purchases and put them away. Strange, that I missed Ivan so much more when we were together than when we were apart.

*  *  *  *  *

I was dozing when I heard noises in the kitchen. I went to investigate and found a man with black hair and pale, pale skin standing near the table and holding the bakery box to his ear as if it were a seashell.

“Sorry,” he said, putting it down. “The door was open. Where’s Ivan?”

“Gone,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Be back soon?”

“No,” I said. Well, I was up. I put on the kettle.

“Sit down,” he said. “Relax. I don’t bite.” He laughed—the sound of breaking dishes. “Name’s Eugene.” He held out a hand to me. “Mind if I sit for a minute, too? Foot’s killing me.”

He pulled up a chair across from me and sat, his long-lashed eyes cast down.

“What’s the matter with your foot?” I said after a while.

“Well, I’m not exactly sure. Doctor told me it was a calcium spur. Doesn’t bother me much, except just occasionally.” He fell silent for a minute. “Maybe I should see the guy again, though. Sometimes things…become exacerbated, I guess is how you’d put it. Turn into other things, almost.”

I nodded, willing him toward the door. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to have a meal.

“I was walking around, though,” he said, “and I thought I’d drop in to see Ivan.”

“I’m going to have a cup of tea,” I said. “Do you want one?”

“He doesn’t have any herb tea, does he?” Eugene said. “It’s good for the nerves. Soothing.” He was wearing heavy motorcycle boots, I saw, that were soaking wet. No wonder his feet hurt. “Yeah, Ivan owes me some money,” he said. “Thought I’d drop by and see if he had it on him by some chance.”

I put the teapot and cups on the table. I wondered how soon I could get Eugene to go.

“Where’re you from?” Eugene said. “You’re not from here, are you?”

“New York,” I said. I also wanted to get out of these clothes. They were becoming terribly uncomfortable.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. I thought so.” He laughed miserably again. “Good old rotten apple.”

“Don’t like it much, huh?” I said.

“Oh, I like it all right,” Eugene said. “I love it. I was born and raised there. Whole family’s there. Yeah, I miss it a lot. From time to time.” He sipped delicately at his tea, still looking down. Then he tossed his thick black hair back from his face, as if he were aware of my stare.

“Aren’t you cold?” I asked suddenly. “Walking around like that?” I reached over to his leather jacket.

“Oh, I’m fine, thank you, dear,” he said. “I enjoy this. Of course I’ve got a scarf on, too. Neck’s a very sensitive part of the body. Courting disaster to expose the neck to the elements. But this is my kind of weather. I’d live outside if I could.” He lifted his eyes to me. They were pale and shallow, and they caught the light strangely, like pieces of bottle glass under water. “Candy?” he said, taking a little vial from his pocket and shaking some of its powdery contents out onto the table.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Mind if I do?” He drew a wad of currency from another pocket and peeled off a large bill.

“That’s pretty,” I said, watching him roll it into a tight brown tube stippled with green and red. “I’ve never seen that one before.”

“Pretty,” he said. “You bet it’s pretty. It’s a cento. Still play money to me, though. A lot better than that stingy little monochrome crap back home, huh?”

Eugene tipped some more from the vial onto the table.

“So why don’t you go back?” I said. “If you like it so much.”

“Go back.” He sniffed loudly, eyes closed. “You know, I don’t feel this stuff the way a woman does. They say it’s a woman’s drug. I don’t get that feeling at the back of my head, like you can.” His light eyes rested on my face. “Well, I can’t go back. Not unless they extradite me.”

“For what?” Maybe I could just ask Eugene to go. Or maybe I could grab his teacup and smash it on the floor.

“Shot a guy,” he said.

“Yes?” I tucked my feet under me. This annoying skirt! I hated the feeling of wool next to my skin.

“Now, don’t get all nervous,” Eugene said. “It was completely justified. Guy tried to hurt me. I’d do it again, too. Fact, I said so to the judge. My lawyer kept telling me, ‘Shut up, maniac, shut up.’ And he told the judge, ‘Your Honor, you can see yourself my client’s as crazy as a lab rat.’ How do you like that? So I said, ‘Listen, Judge. What would you do if some cocksucker pulled a knife on you? I may be crazy, but I’m no fool.’” Eugene leaned back and put his hands against his eyes.

I poured myself some more tea. It felt thick going down. I hadn’t even had water, I remembered, for some time. “Would you like another cup?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Eugene said. “Thanks.”

“You know Ivan a long time?” he asked.

“Nine years,” I said.

“Nine years. A lot of bonds can be forged in nine years. So how come I never met you? Ivan and I hang out.”

“Oh, God, I don’t know,” I said. “It’s an on-and-off type of thing. We’re thrashing it out together now.”

“You’re thrashing it out together,” he said. “You’re thrashing it out together, but I only see one of you.”

“Right,” I said. “So how did you get to Canada, anyhow?”

“Oh. They put me in the hospital,” he said. “But I’ve got friends. Here,” he said. “Look.” He emptied a pocket onto the table. There was a key chain, and an earring, and something that I presumed was a switchblade, and a bundle of papers—business cards and phone numbers and all sorts of miscellany—that he started to read out to me. “Jesus,” he said, noticing me inspecting his knife. “You’ll take your whole arm off that way. Do it like this.” He demonstrated, flashing the blade out, then he folded it up and put it back in his pocket. “Here—look at this one.” He handed me a card covered with a meaningless mass of dots. “Now hold it up to the light.” He grabbed it back and placed it over a lamp near me. The dots became a couple engaged in fellatio. “Isn’t that something?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think you should go now, though. I have to do some things.” His face was changing and changing in front of me. He receded, rippling.

“Wait—” he said. “You don’t look good. Have you been eating right?”

“I’m all right,” I said. “I don’t care. Please leave.”

“You’re in bad shape, lady,” he said. “You’re not well. Sure you don’t want any of this?” He offered me the vial. “Pick you right up. Then we’ll fix you some more tea or something. Get some vitamins into you.”

“No, no. It’s just these clothes,” I said, plucking at them. “I’ve got to get out of these clothes.” He was beautiful, I saw. He was beautiful. He sparkled with beauty; it streamed from him in glistening sheets, as if he were emerging from a lake of it. I kicked at Micheline’s boots, but Eugene was already kneeling, and he drew them off, and the thick stockings, too, and my legs appeared, very long, almost shining in the growing dark, from beneath them.

“Got ’em,” he said, standing.

“Yes,” I said, holding my arms up. “Now get this one,” and he pulled the sweater over my head.

“Sh-h-h,” he said, folding the sweater neatly. “It’s O.K.” But I was rattling inside my body like a Halloween skeleton as he carried me to Ivan’s bed and wrapped a blanket around me.

“Look how white,” I said. “Look how white your skin is.”

“When I was in the jungle it was like leather,” he said. “Year and a half, shoe leather. Sh-h-h,” he said again, as I flinched at a noise. “It’s just this.” And I understood that it was just his knife, inside his pocket, that had made the noise when he’d dropped his clothes on the floor. “You like that, huh?” he said, holding the knife out for me.

Again and again and again I made the blade flash out, severing air from air, while Eugene waited. “That’s enough now,” he said. “First things first. You can play with that later.”

*  *  *  *  *

When we finished making love, the moon was a perfect circle high in the black window. “How about that?” Eugene said. “Nature.” We leaned against each other and looked at it. “You got any food here, by the way?” he asked. “I’m famished.”

By the time I’d located a robe—a warm, stripy thing in Ivan’s closet—Eugene was rummaging through the icebox. “You got special plans for this?” he said, holding up the violet toilet paper that apparently I’d refrigerated.

“Let’s see…” I said. “There’re some sausages.”

“Sausages,” he said. “Suckers are delicious, but they’ll kill you. Preservatives, saturated fats. Loaded with PCBs, too.”

“Really?” I said.

“Don’t you know that?” he said. “What are you smiling about? You think I’m kidding? Listen, Americans eat too much animal protein anyhow. Fiber’s where it’s at.” He nodded at me, his eyebrows raised. “What else you got?”

“There’s some pickled okra,” I said.

“Ivan’s into some heavy shit here, huh?” he said.

“Well…” It was true that I hadn’t shopped very efficiently. “Oh, there are these.” I undid the bakery box.

“Holy Christ,” Eugene said. “How do you like that—little Christmas trees. Isn’t that something!” He arranged them into a forest on the table and walked his fingers among them. “Here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green,” he sang, and it sounded like something he didn’t often do.

“Here we come awandering
so fair to be seen.
Love and joy come to you,
and to you your wassail too,
And God bless you and send you
a happy New Year,
And God send you a happy New Year.”

“What’s the matter?” he said. “You don’t like Christmas carols?” So I did harmony as he sang another verse:

“We are not daily beggars
that beg from door to door,
But we are neighbors’ children
whom you have seen before.
Love and joy come to you,
and to you your wassail too,
And God bless you and send you
a happy New Year,
And God send you a happy New Year.”

Eugene clapped. Then he made an obscene face and stuck a cookie into his mouth. “Oh, lady,” he said, holding the cookie out for me to finish. “These are fuckin’ scrumptious.”

That was true. They were awfully good, and we munched on them quietly in the moonlit kitchen.

“So what about you and Ivan?” Eugene asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m starving with Ivan, but my life away from him—my own life—I’ve just let it dry up. Turn into old bits and pieces.”

“Well, honey,” Eugene said, “that’s not right. It’s your life.”

“But nothing changes or develops,” I said. “Ivan just can’t seem to decide what he wants.”

“No?” Eugene looked away tactfully, and I laughed out loud in surprise.

“That’s true,” I said. “I guess he decided a long time ago.” I stared down at the table, into our diminished cookie forest, and I felt Eugene staring at me. “Well, I didn’t want to be the one to end it, you know?” I said. “But time does change things, even if you can’t see it happen, and eventually someone has to be the one to say, ‘Well, now things have changed.’ Anyhow, it’s not his fault. He’s given me what he could.”

Eugene nodded. “Ivan’s a solitary kind of guy. I respect him.”

“Yes,” I said. “But I wish things were different.”

“I understand, dear.” Eugene patted my hand. “I hear you.”

“What about you?” I said. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Who, me?” he said. “No, I’m just an old whore. I’ve got a wife down in the States. Couldn’t live with her anymore, though.” He sighed and looked around. “Sixteen years. So what else you got to eat here? I’m still hungry.”

“Well,” I said. “There’s a roll of cookie dough in the freezer, but it’s Ivan’s, really.”

“We should eat it, then.” Eugene laughed. “Serve the arrogant bastard right.” I looked at him. “Don’t mind me, honey,” he said. “You know I’m crazy.”

*  *  *  *  *

I woke up once in the night, with Eugene snoring loudly next to me, and when I butted my head gently into his shoulder to quiet him down he wrapped his marvelous white arms around me. “Thought I forgot about you, huh?” he said distinctly, and started to snore again.

Sunlight forced my eyes open hours later. “Shit,” said a voice near me. “What time is it?” The sun had bleached out Eugene’s luminous beauty. With his pallor and coarse black hair, he looked like a phantom that one registers peripherally on the streets. “I’ve got a business appointment at noon,” he said, pulling on his jeans. “Think it’s noon?”

“I don’t know,” I said. It felt pleasantly early. “No clock.”

“I better hit the road,” he said. “Shit.”

“Here,” I said, holding out his knife.

“Yeah, thanks.” He pocketed it and looked at me. “You be O.K. now, lady? Going to take care of yourself for a change?”

“Yes,” I said. “By the way, how much does Ivan owe you?”

“Huh?” he said. “Hey, there’s my jacket. Right on the floor. Very nice.”

“Because he mentioned it before he left,” I said.

“Yeah?” Eugene said. “Well, it doesn’t matter. I’ll come back for it, like—when? When’s that sucker going to get back?”

“No,” I said. There was really no point in waiting for Ivan. I wanted to conclude this business myself right now. “He forgot to tell me how much it was, but he left me plenty to cover.”

Eugene looked down at his boots. “Two bills.”

I put on the robe and counted out two hundred dollars from my purse. It was almost all I had left of the lively cash. “And he said thanks,” I said.

I stood at the open door until Eugene went through it. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Thanks yourself.”

At the landing he turned back to me. “Have a good one,” he called up.

*  *  *  *  *

I went back inside and put some eggs on to boil. Then I twirled slowly, making the stripes on the robe flare.

How on earth had I forgotten butter? The eggs were good, though. I enjoyed them.

After breakfast I rooted around and found a pail and sponges. It made me sad that Ivan had let the apartment get so filthy. He used to enjoy taking care of things. Then I sat down with a mystery I found on a shelf, and by the time Ivan walked in, late in the afternoon, I’d almost finished it.

“Looks great in here,” he said after he kissed me.

“I did some cleaning,” I said.

“That’s great,” he said. I thought of my own apartment. There would be a lot to do when I got home. “Jesus. Am I exhausted! That was some trip.”

“How’s Gary?” I said.

“Well, he was running a little fever when I got there, but he’s fine now,” Ivan said.

“Good,” I said. “Did he like his presents?”

“Uh-huh.” Ivan smiled. “Particularly that game that the marble rolls around in. He and I both got pretty good at it after the first few hundred hours.”

“I liked that one, too,” I said.

“He’s a good kid,” Ivan said. “He really is. I just hope Linda doesn’t make him into some kind of nervous wreck.”

“How’s she doing?” I asked.

“Well, she’s all right, I think. She’s trying to get a life together for herself at least. She’s getting a degree in dance therapy.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“She’ll be O.K. if she can just get over her dependency,” he said. “I’ll be interested to see how she does with this new thing.”

He would be monitoring her closely, I knew. What a tight family they had established, Ivan and Linda—not much room for anyone else. Of course, Gary and I had our own small parts in it. I’d probably been quite important in fencing out, oh, Micheline, for instance, just as Gary had been indispensable in fencing me out.

“Hey,” Ivan said. “Who’s been sitting in my chair?” He bent down and picked up a scarf.

“Someone named Eugene stopped by,” I said. “He said you owed him money.”

“Jesus. That’s right,” Ivan said. “Well, I’ll get around to it in the next day or so.”

“I took care of it myself,” I said.

“Really? Well, thanks. That’s great. I’ll reimburse you. Sorry you had to deal with him, though.”

“I liked him,” I said.

“You did?” Ivan said.

“You like him enough to do business with him,” I said.

“Yeah, I know I should be more compassionate,” Ivan said. “It’s just that he’s so hard to take.”

“Is any of that stuff true that he says?” I asked. “That he shot some guy? That he lived in the jungle?”

“Shot some guy? I don’t know. He has a pretty extensive fantasy life. But he fought in the war, yeah.”

“Oh,” I said. “I see. Jungle—Vietnam.”

“I keep forgetting,” Ivan said. “You’re really just a baby.”

“That must have been awful,” I said.

“Well, he could have gotten out of it if he didn’t want to do it,” Ivan said.

“He probably thought it was a good thing to do,” I said. “Besides, people can’t arrange their lives exactly the way they’d like to.”

“I disagree,” Ivan said. “People only like to think they can’t.”

“You know,” I said, trying to recall the events of the day before, “I was having some sort of conversation with a butcher about that yesterday.”

“A butcher?” Ivan said.

“Yes,” I said. “And, as I remember, he was saying something to the effect that people are only free to the extent that they recognize the boundaries of their lives.”

“Sounds pretty grim,” Ivan said. “And pretty futile.”

“Not exactly futile,” I said. “At least, I think his point was that if I know that over here is where I’m standing, well, that’s what gives rise to the consciousness that over there is where you’re standing, and automatically I get a map, a compass. So my situation—no matter how bad it is—is my source of power.”

“Well,” Ivan said. “That’s a very dangerous way of thinking, because it’s just that point of view that can be used to rationalize a lot of selfishness and oppression and greed. I’ll bet you were talking to that thief over by St. Lawrence who weighs his thumb, right?”

“Well, maybe I’m misrepresenting him,” I said. “He was pretty enigmatic.”

Ivan looked at me and smiled, but I could hardly bear the sweetness of it, so I turned away from him and went to the window.

How handsome he was! How I wished I could contain the golden, wounding hope of him. But it had begun to diverge from me—oh, who knew how long before—and I could feel myself already reforming: empty, light.

“So how are you?” Ivan said, joining me at the window.

“All right,” I said. “It’s good not to be waiting for you.”

“I’m sorry I missed Christmas here,” he said. “Montreal’s a nice place for Christmas. Next year, what do you say we try to do it right?”

He put his arm around me, and I leaned against his shoulder while we looked out at the place where I’d been walking the day before. The evening had arrived at the moment when everything is all the same soft color of a shadow, and the city seemed to be floating close, very close, outside the window. How familiar it was, as if I’d entered and explored it over years. Well, it had been a short time, really, but it would certainly be part of me, this city, long after I’d forgotten the names of the streets and the colors of the light, long after I’d forgotten the feel of Ivan’s shirt against my cheek, and the darkening sight separated from me now by a sheet of glass I could almost reach out to shatter.