“Thank you for playing with him,” Rita said later that night. The boy had just left and she gazed out the window, watching him pull away in a shiny new car with his father and the woman called Jane. “It’s been a rough year for us.” Her face hollowed under the sharp cheekbones, as if something had just drained out of her.
“Anything you need before bed?” she said. “Cup of tea? Sandwich?”
No thank you, there was nothing. I could hear the distraction in her voice. Tomorrow afternoon I would be driven to the residence and she would no longer have to take care of me. I thought of her lying in bed tonight, knowing that I was in her son’s bed, caught between his sheets, his reptile mobile catching each breeze from the open window. Perhaps we were both less alone than we thought.
In the morning Rita took me for a tour of the neighbourhood. She talked quickly as we roamed the winding streets of Chinatown, past the florist with its bins of fresh cut flowers, and a restaurant where heroin addicts nodded over platters of guy ding. An ancient cook stood out front in his stained apron, his forehead shiny with sweat. He flipped through a tabloid newspaper and sipped something out of a metal cup. I told Rita that there was a place like this near the old port in Santa Clara. She didn’t respond to this observation. I wanted to tell her how we journalists would often stay up all night, that we prowled in a noisy throng through the old town, a dangerous area after dark, and how our presence would instantly fill a tiny restaurant such as this and transform it into the most sophisticated café in the city.
Instead Rita clipped along the uneven sidewalk swinging her arms. “I never get time to do my own work,” she said. “There’s always something gets in the way.”
Like a refugee poet who lands on your doorstep with nothing but his ugly shoes and a single volume of verse.
“I wonder if I’ve lost my chance, if I’m too old.” She hesitated for a moment in front of a street vendor displaying cheap jewelry.
The rain had saturated everything into darkness, the asphalt, the sidewalks, even the buildings had been drenched, leaving a pungent scent of wet cement and wood. A girl stood at the corner in her tight skirt, drawing on a cigarette while a cluster of kids in sports uniforms raced by.
“I do not think you are old,” I told her. “An artist can be any age.”
“Not a dancer,” she said. “Our knees go.”
She moved so smoothly, with such grace, like an animal who is natural in its home, unlike I, who seemed to step through this dizzy space, never sure if each foot would land correctly. I wanted to touch everything I saw, to see if it was awake or dead. Even the neon sign which jumped in its tube seemed dreamlike. It is good to travel, I told myself. Everything is new.
“I like watching you,” she said with a smile. “You see so much.”
“And now you see me.”
We laughed and for a moment her face relaxed.
A stationer’s shop was wedged between a restaurant and a post office. In its window were those mottled notebooks with firm covers, a timeless style, and an arrangement of pens and pencils.
“I would like to go in here,” I said.
“Why not?” she said with a gentle smile. “You’re a free man.”
I selected two notebooks with ruled paper and three pens with medium-thick points and a plastic envelope to contain them.
“Excuse me,” I told Rita, “but I have no money.”
“No hay problemo.” She rummaged in her purse and gave me my first Canadian money, a green twenty-dollar bill decorated on one side by a drawing of a handsome duck and its mate, and on the other by a middle-aged woman wearing pearls.
“The Queen,” Rita said, responding to my puzzled look.
“The Queen of Canada.” I smoothed the bill before passing it to the clerk. “She looks like one of my mother’s sisters.” When we left the shop I tucked the package under my arm and said, “Now I’m a writer again.”
“Next up is a pair of decent shoes.” She nodded at my sneakers fitted with Velcro tabs, the kind worn by old men who are unable to reach down and tie their laces.
“And wine,” I said, grinning. “To celebrate. And Canadian cigarettes.”
She frowned. “I don’t know if I have enough money.”
“But your CAFE friends, they will pay.” I thought of Professor Syd Baskin in his well-manicured house and soft leather slip-on shoes. I had landed in the care of an important organization, one that was able to influence the government of foreign countries and circumvent the wishes of such powerful men as the General. Just thinking this gave my step a new buoyancy.
4
RASHID WAS A TIDY MAN, AND TACITURN, like a rancher. Except he was no rancher, but a pursuer of some esoteric branch of biology which he didn’t bother to explain. We shared a tiny two-storey house in the married students’ quarters on the edge of the campus of the university. On either side our house was attached to other, similar houses, except these ones were full of children and babies. Out front, plastic toys were strewn across the lawn, and in the back a row of cotton diapers danced like seagulls on the line. Impatient mothers howled at their children to get off the road, except these mothers were astrophysicists and medievalists in their spare time. Their uniform, unvarying, consisted of dark leggings under long tunics, and flat, boatlike sandals. At dusk each day there was a strange procession: a dozen heavy-breasted women wearing loose shirts and shorts jogged by, pushing baby carriages. Skipping alongside, a slim woman shouted instructions: “Watch your posture! Pick up the pace! Don’t forget to breathe!”
In the mornings I lay in bed and listened to the lives of our neighbours, the roll of tricycle wheels across the floors, the thuds and muted crashes of family life. Standing over the bathroom sink, toothbrush in hand, I could hear, less than a metre away, another man performing the same ritual, running water, spitting, splashing his face, then pissing long and hard into the toilet bowl.
Rita showed me the small campus store, and steered me away from the frozen food section with its composed meals (too expensive) and suggested that I cook “from scratch.”
I pretended to memorize her instructions as she recited recipes for egg custard pie and spaghetti, nodding with concentration as she listed ingredients, warned of possible pitfalls, suggested shortcuts.
“It’s a cinch,” she said, leaving me with an armload of groceries on the doorstep of my little house. “If in doubt, pasta with grated cheese.”
Rashid, handy in the kitchen, concocted aromatic meatless curries that sent me reeling toward the door to find supper in the Student Union Building. Sometimes I was taken out for meals by members of the university. Just as well: my stipend was a miserly $700 a month, barely enough to cover beer and cigarettes and the odd movie. I needed to eat well when I got the chance.
Rashid had no bad habits. I would watch him chop vegetables as oil sizzled in the frying pan.
“Where did you learn to cook?”
“At home.”
Home was Pakistan.
“Didn’t you have a mother? Servants?”
“Of course,” he said. “They showed me how.”
I found something demeaning in the sight of a man chopping his own vegetables for dinner. When I tugged open the fridge door to get a beer, he winced. Rashid was a devout Muslim, despite his dissident ways. When I smoked he would make little throat-clearing noises and say, “Your money would last longer without this.”
I would not learn to cook because this was something