Still Waters. John Moss

in London, and Susan, as he now thought of her, held a demanding secretarial position with a boss called Nigel and a friend called Fiona, names that seemed eerily exotic. Class, the English pestilence, was never an issue between them. He was educated; Susan was elegant. Neither could place the other in a social hierarchy that made any sense. They had never been good lovers; both of them were relative novices. He was selfish and she was gracious, a bad combination. Their time together was defined more by warmth than by passion. He encouraged her to visit Canada, and she invited him to meet her parents. When Morgan was engaged to be married, he had dreamed Susan would turn up in Toronto. She did, briefly, but the timing was off. He had known even she couldn’t rescue him then.

      Morgan became aware that he was comfortably ensconced on the bench opposite the wine cellar. He didn’t remember sitting down, but he was absorbed in the atmosphere of the place and it didn’t bother him that he had lost track of time. He forgot about Susan and London. They faded from consciousness like the particles of a dream.

      “What is it, Morgan?” Miranda would say. “Where have you been?”

      But he seldom answered. It didn’t seem important to sort out recollections from the swarming of information careening through the sometimes unfamiliar places in his mind. He wasn’t unstable, but wary of being too much himself.

      The oak door leading toward the den opened this time when he gave it a vigorous shove, and he found himself in a short hallway with the small bathroom to one side. The door at the far end of the corridor leading into the den stood ajar. It was an exterior door made of steel, painted and panelled to look like wood. He had noticed the night before that it had a large lock with a dead bolt, which didn’t strike him as unusual, given that it probably led in from the garage. There was a patina of dents and scratches on the corridor side that advertised its serviceability.

      Availing himself of the bathroom convenience, Morgan admired the absolute simplicity of the room. It was like being inside a tiled box — even the ceiling was tiled — and the toilet and sink were built in. The shower head draped like a pewter sunflower from high on a wall, and the shower stall area was defined only by a standing drain and a ridge in the tile on the floor. There was no mirror, there were no shelves, no pictures, nothing to intrude on the mind or distract the eye, and yet the overall effect was pleasing. Still, it didn’t encourage lingering. Maybe that was the point — a small architectural joke by Robert Griffin, perhaps not shared by anyone else.

      The thought of Griffin made Morgan uncomfortable. This was the first point of connection he had felt with the victim. The passion for koi, he understood, and the books and the carpets, but comprehending the facts of a person’s existence was different from recognition of their secret whims. What other secrets were in this place hidden by the obvious? He stood and pressed a plunger panel that was flush to the wall over the toilet and walked away from the swirling noise, washing his hands and leaving the room without glancing back.

      Morgan settled down in the den on what, from the comforting way the cushion met the weight of his body, he was sure would have been the favourite chair of the dearly departed, sustaining him through long hours of contemplation about koi and linguistics. Gazing out across the garden and lawn, Morgan could see, beyond the trunks of the giant silver maples, intimations of the city he loved like an old family home. This made him feel closer to the house surrounding him, as if it were the mantle of what might have been. Here, but for the grace of God and a lot of money, and the random perversity of genetic progression … his thoughts were outpaced by emotion.

      There was something very sensual and vaguely distressing about letting his feelings run free. Morgan was used to the effects of an unbridled intellect, but sensibility, open and indiscriminate, took him by surprise. It was knowing about wine, not tasting, that enthralled him.

      He shut his eyes and tried to envision Susan as she might be now. She looked like Miranda. He tried to focus, and the name Donna came to mind, preceding an image of someone he had forgotten he had known.

      Susan was his first love. But his first “affair” was Donna. Not with Donna, but Donna herself. She was the affair. Donna didn’t haunt him the way Susan did. She didn’t remind him of Miranda. But Donna had helped shaped who he was.

      She had worked as a waitress in a Jarvis Street diner on the edge of Cabbagetown in a nondescript building squeezed between two former mansions. He had wandered in one night on the way back to his room near the university after one of his rare visits with Fred and Darlene. He and his dad had been sitting on the stoop all evening, drinking beer. His mom was out with her friends. She had been drinking, too. When she came back, they had a raucous three-way quarrel. He couldn’t remember why. The important part of his recollection wasn’t the fight, but meeting Donna.

      “Coffee?” she had asked in the diner.

      “Please,” he answered in a slurred voice, leaning over his elbows on the grey Formica table, head in his hands.

      She brought him the coffee. “You okay?”

      He remembered looking up with tears in his eyes, even though he couldn’t remember why he was crying. Maybe it was something his mother had said, and suddenly he was confronted with childhood’s end. Maybe his father had made a crack about the effete life of a student. Or it might have been the fight itself — being drawn into domestic squalor that he wanted desperately to put behind him.

      The waitress placed her hand over his. “This one’s on me.”

      Instead of saying “what” or “thank you,” he asked, “Why?”

      “Because you’re drunk, you’re not a drinker, you need coffee.”

      “Must be lots of drunks come in here.”

      “Yeah.”

      She smiled as he stared at her face, bringing her eyes into focus. They were bright blue, sparkling in the fluorescent light. Her lipstick was a thick red, and her dark roots made her hair radiate like a platinum halo around her head. In spite of her garish makeup, she was young. They were about the same age.

      He smiled back. “Thanks. He glanced around and realized he was the only customer, then announced in a significant tone, “I’m a virgin.”

      “Good. I’m glad there’s one left.”

      “One what?”

      “Virgin.”

      “I’m a virgin. Technically. You know what I mean.”

      “I can imagine. You’re drunk. But very pretty.”

      Morgan was bewildered. No one had called him pretty before. He didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted. He decided flattery was preferable. “You’re very pretty, too. Do you want to take me home?”

      She did, and that was the beginning of Morgan’s first affair, which after ten days burned out because they had nothing to say to each other. She taught him about a woman’s body as if she were much older, and he felt secure enough that he learned with awkward enthusiasm more than he could have imagined and far less than he needed to be a good lover. It didn’t occur to him to resent her experience.

      Their last night together, after she finished the late shift and before he went to his morning class, they both knew their relationship had run its course. In a gesture to make the finality of their parting less certain, he invited her to a lecture he would be giving in two months.

      “What are you talking about?” she asked him.

      “It’s by invitation. My philosophy prof asked me to speak at a graduate seminar. It’s a big deal. They don’t usually let undergraduates speak.”