With this, she stops. Slides back into the chair and lets it swallow her. I keep watching her after she’s finished. And though she doesn’t meet eyes with anyone else in the circle, I have the notion that she’s recording what everyone says just as deliberately as I am.
Next is Evelyn. The deadpan pixie in a biker jacket. I’m a little surprised to learn that she is a grad student at the University of Toronto. It isn’t her youth. It’s the outfit. She looks more like Courtney Love when she first fell for Kurt than the fellowship winner who can’t decide between Yale, Cornell or Cambridge to do her Ph.D. Then the answer comes: her planned dissertation will be a study of "Dismemberment and Female Vengeance in the 1970s Slasher Film". I remember enough of university to know that such topics are best handled by those in costume.
We’re now all the way around to the latecoming giant. When Evelyn’s finished speaking, there’s a subtle positioning of our bodies to take him in, more an adjustment of antennae to pick up a distant signal than the directness required in making eye contact. Still, all of the circle can steal a look at him except for me. Given his proximity, I would have to turn round and tuck my leg under to see him straight on. And this is something I don’t want to do. It may only be the room’s unfamiliarity, the awkwardness in meeting strangers who share little other than a craving for self-expression. But the man sitting to my left radiates a darkness of a different kind from the night outside. A strange vacancy of sympathy, of readable humanness. Despite his size, it’s as though the space he occupies is only a denser form of nothing.
"And you?” Conrad White prompts him. "What brings you to our circle?"
The giant breathes. A whistling that comes up through his chest and, when exhaled, I can feel against the back of my hand.
"I was called,” he says.
"’Called’ in the sense of pursuing your destiny, I take it? Or perhaps a more literal calling?"
"In my dreams."
"You were summoned here in your dreams?"
"Sometimes—” the man says, and it seems like the beginning of a different thought altogether. "Sometimes I have bad dreams."
"That’s fine. Perhaps you could just share your name with us?"
"William,” he says, his voice rising slightly. "My name is William."
My turn.
I say my name aloud. The sound of those elementary syllables allows me to string together the point form brief on Patrick Rush. Father of a smart little boy lucky enough to take his mother’s looks. A journalist who has always felt that something was missing from his writing. (I almost say "life” instead of "writing", a near-slip that is as telling as one might think). A man who isn’t sure if he has something to say but who now feels he has to find out once and for all.
"Very good,” Conrad White says, a note of relief in his voice. "I appreciate your being so frank. All of you. Under the circumstances, I think it only fair that I share with you who I am as well."
Conrad White tells us that he has recently "returned from exile". A novelist and poet who was publishing in Toronto, back just before the cultural explosion of the late sixties that gave rise to a viable national literature. Or, as Conrad White puts it evenly (though no less bitterly), "The days when writing in this country was practiced by unaffiliated individuals, before it took a turn toward the closed door, the favoured few, the tribalistic." He carried on with his work, increasingly feeling like an outsider while some of his contemporaries did what was unimaginable among Canadian writers up to that point: they became famous. The same hippie poets and novelists that were in his classes at UofT and reading in the same coffee houses were now being published internationally, appearing as "celebrity guests” on CBC quiz shows, receiving government grants.
But not Conrad White. He was working on a different animal altogether. Something he knew would not dovetail neatly with the preferred subject matters and stylistic modes of his successful cohorts. A novel of "ugly revelations” that, once published, proved even more controversial than he’d anticipated. The writing community (as it had begun to regard itself) turned its back on him. Though he responded with critical counter-attacks in any journal or pamphlet that would have him, the rejection left him more brokenhearted than livid. It prompted his decision to live abroad. England, at first, before moving on to India, southeast Asia, Morocco. He had only returned to Toronto in the last year. Now he conducted writing workshops such as these to pay his rent.
"I say ’workshops’, but it would be more accurate to speak of them in the singular,” Conrad White says. "For this is my first."
Outside, the snow has stopped falling. Beneath our feet the bass thud from The Fukhouse’s speakers has begun to rattle the windows in their frames. From somewhere in the streets of the market, a madman screams.
Conrad White passes a bowl around to collect our weekly fee. Then he gives us our assignment for next week. A page of a work-in-progress. It needn’t be polished, it needn’t be the beginning. Just a page of something.
Class dismissed.
I fish around for my boots by the door. None of us speak on the way out. It’s like whatever has passed between us in the preceding hour never happened at all.
When I get to the street I start homeward without a glance back at the others, and in my head, there’s the conviction that I won’t return. And yet, even as I have this thought, I know that I will. Whether the Kensington Circle can help me find my story, or whether the story is the Kensington Circle itself, I have to know how it turns out.
Emmie has Wednesday mornings off, so it’s my day to work from home and look after Sam on my own. Just four years old and he sits up at the breakfast table, perusing the Business and Real Estate and International News sections right along with me. Though he can hardly understand a word of it, he puts on a stern face—just like his old man—as he licks his thumb to turn the grim pages.
As for me, I comb the classifieds to see if Conrad White’s ad is still running, but can’t find it anywhere. Perhaps he’s decided that the one group who assembled in his apartment the night before will be all that he can handle.
Sam pushes the Mutual Funds Special Report away from him with a rueful sigh.
"Dad? Can I watch TV?"
"Ten minutes."
Sam retreats from the table and turns on a Japanimation robot laser war. I’m about to ask if he wouldn’t mind turning it down when a short piece in the City section catches my attention.
A missing person story. The victim (is one a "victim” when only missing?) being one Carol Ulrich, who is presumed to have been forcibly taken from a neighbourhood playground. There were no witnesses to the abduction—including the woman’s son, who was on the swings at the time. Residents have been advised to be alert to any strangers "acting in a stalking or otherwise suspicious manner". While authorities continue their search for the woman, they admit to having no leads in the case. The story ends ominously with the police spokesperson stating that "activity of this kind has been shown to indicate intent of repeated actions of a similar nature in the future".
It’s the sort of creepy but sadly common item I would normally pass over. But what makes me read on to the end is that the neighbourhood in question is the one we live in. The playground where the woman was taken the same one where I take Sam.
"What are you doing, Daddy?"
Sam is standing at my side. That I’m also standing is something of a surprise. I look down to see my hands on the handle of the living