Beside her was Victor Sandhu, Ph.D., professor of semiotics, or semiology, as he preferred. He had arranged a major fellowship that would have enabled Miranda to pursue graduate studies in the Department of Linguistics at a level just above poverty. That was a significant accolade, considering the fact that she was graduating in honours anthropology and had only taken semiotics courses as electives.
The small cluster of faculty and students in the photograph was parsed, left to right, each identified either by discipline and credentials or by award. The caption ran to several hundred words, longer than some of The Varsity articles. The last words in the caption read: “Absent, co-winner of the Sandhu Semiology Fellowship: Robert Griffin.”
“No way!” she exclaimed. “No bloody way!”
Her words echoed as if the walls, though accustomed to her voice, now refused to absorb her incipient panic. She looked around, then back at The Varsity, page six.
Robert Griffin. Indisputably: co-winner… Robert Griffin.
Miranda poured herself a tumbler of red wine from an open bottle on the counter, took a sip, then reached for a wineglass from the cupboard above the sink and transferred most of the contents into the tulip crystal. She drained the dregs from the tumbler, held the bottle up to examine the label, set it down, gazed off into the middle distance, and surprised herself to find the world was blurred and that her eyes had filled with tears.
“I don’t remember Robert Griffin.” Miranda spoke out loud with a zealot’s conviction. She put her fingers to her mouth as if to stifle her own voice.
I saw his face, dead, through a veil of water, she thought. A stranger. I saw photographs of him in legal regalia and robed for his doctorate. My presence in the newspaper picture authenticates only myself. My God, we shared a prize. I didn’t collect. The rich man took it all.
The tightness of tears drying on her cheeks made her realize she had stopped crying. She was angry. She felt violated. She was appalled at her own anxiety and confused by her fear.
Miranda settled back on the sofa, resolved to penetrate the shadows that made her past seem a thronging of separate events. She assumed most people lived inside continuous narratives under occasional revision. Searching, unexpectedly, she encountered her boyfriend from their last year in high school. She smiled to herself, turned the stem of her glass between her fingers, and remembered.
She and Danny Webster had kissed a lot but had always kept their intimacies from the neck up. They talked to each other in funny voices. They played cryptic word games.
“Do you want to go to a movie?” he might ask. Someone else would have responded with a tired aphorism like, “Does a bear poop in the woods?” But not Miranda.
“Did Sandy Koufax pitch on Yom Kippur?” she would answer with a world-weary shrug, and they would both groan and go to see a replay of Cool Hand Luke.
Or she might ask, about classmates, “Do you think they’re doing it?”
And he would answer, “Is Dr. Ramsay Catholic?”
That one was tricky. Miranda’s family was Anglican, so the archbishop of Canterbury was indeed a primate of the “holy catholic church.” However, Danny was Baptist and insisted the Church of England was a breakaway Protestant sect. Yes and no. And to increase their pleasure, they both knew that Ramses were condoms. Were their friends “doing it?” They had no idea.
They were both attractive, so behaving like geeks was an ironic disguise.
At the end of the school year they hugged passionately. Miranda didn’t attend her graduation and never saw him again. She thought they had restricted themselves to kissing because that was what she wanted, and because he was a Baptist, but it turned out Baptists like sex. He was gay. According to her mother, who refused to believe the rumour, he came out at Bible College, where he was surrounded by people eager to forgive.
They had played on the margins of adult experience and had parted as innocents. She wondered if Danny Webster had discovered sex without love. Or was he happy?
Miranda walked into the bedroom and was startled by flickering shadows emanating from her screen saver. Having descended through real barracuda and drifted among parrotfish and somnolent groupers in the Cay-mans the previous winter, she found the underwater fantasy on her computer reassuring, in the same way a tacky souvenir was, brought back from a genuine adventure. Within the virtual perfection on the screen she caught sight of her face in reflection. She was drifting against the receding depths, and a prolonged shiver made her gasp for air.
She had never felt so secure, she thought, as being enfolded by the warm waters of the Caribbean, hovering beyond gravity at sixty feet down. It had seemed almost pre-conscious bliss among the mounds and tentacles of coral, breathing in a soft rhythm through an umbilicus of gear. And now visual Muzak on her computer screen was the disingenuous reminder of a stranger’s cadaver, someone misplaced in the drowned caverns of her mind.
Miranda set the Griffin papers down by the computer, switched on the gooseneck lamp, and twisted it around to shine into a closet jammed with boxes and files. She withdrew a cardboard container labelled “U of T,” and sitting on the floor, dumped the contents between her splayed legs.
Shifting the pile around with her hand, she came up with the snapshot she had been expecting. It showed an oval table surrounded by a dozen faces leaning in for the camera. On the table were books and a couple of screw-top wine bottles, along with an array of plastic cups and open potato chip bags. This was the end-of-term celebration, hosted and catered by Professor Sandhu for his semiology seminar.
Miranda had to scan for a moment to establish which indistinct features were her own, at the farthest end of the table. Standing behind her, looming over to get in the shot, was a face she had never seen before except on a corpse.
She didn’t remember him, she didn’t remember him being in the picture, this man who was older than the rest, perhaps in his forties, who aligned himself for the camera to appear connected, somehow, to the young woman in front of him. She would have sworn he wasn’t in the picture the last time she had looked. Of course, that was a decade ago. She wasn’t nostalgic about her student days.
Ten years back her ex-roommate in an act of apparent contrition for unfettered sex had come over to welcome Miranda back to Toronto. The two of them had gone through the old pictures, embarrassed they couldn’t restore identity to faces etched into memory from across seminar tables, cafeteria tables and, most of all, across tables topped with endless draft beer in the pubs around campus. Miranda could have named every kid in a class photograph from the village public school she had attended in antediluvian times, but university seemed farther away, less accessible.
Griffin had worked his way into a photograph. He had even cast a shadow like the rest of them. How real was the past, she wondered, if someone could slip into it who was never there? More to the point, how real was it if someone who was actually there could be erased?
For some reason she thought of Jason Rodriguez. He seemed like a character she had read about in a novel, an actor in a nearly forgotten movie, far less real than Robert Griffin, the proof of whose being lay on a slab in the morgue.
During the three years she had spent in Ottawa, Jason Rodriguez was Miranda’s lover. They had met at work. He was her boss, he was married, they were both outsiders. He was considerate to a fault.
Miranda had met him her first day on the job. He had kind eyes, a soft voice, and a preternatural understanding of her loneliness, something she seldom acknowledged even to herself. The first time they made love she was surprised. It happened as a sort of mutual consolation for the unfairness of life.
Their early courtship was in Spanish, which put her at a disadvantage since his parents had been in the diplomatic service before settling in Canada and that was the language of his childhood, while she had taken a first-year undergraduate course in