That was three, maybe four years ago. Three. He was forty. He opened the door, and a drenching wind hurled weather into the foyer, along with two very young, very wet women.
“Close the door, for goodness’ sake,” he said.
“Hello, Morgan. May we borrow your dryer?”
“My dryer?” He scrutinized them, trying to place them in a recognizable context.
“You know us. I’m Nancy.”
“I’m Anne,” said the other, while rainwater streamed from her mauve hair over her pouting full lips. “No last names.” She grinned, and her lips quivered. “We’re on reception. You’ve seen us at headquarters on College Street, the big new modern building —”
“I know where it is. I work there, too.”
“We know that,” said Nancy with the drowned blond hair. “That’s why we’re here.” She looked satisfied, as if she had explained everything that needed explaining.
“You work together?” Morgan blurted out. God knows, he had seen them often enough. He knew they did.
“Mostly,” said Anne, smiling hugely. Then she exchanged a knowing look with Nancy. “Sometimes we do. It just depends how things turn out. Can we borrow your dryer?” she asked, enunciating the word dryer very clearly as if he might not understand.
“I don’t use a dryer,” said Morgan.
“Your clothes dryer,” said Nancy.
“You’ve been partying,” said Morgan, stating the obvious.
By now his visitors were in the middle of the living room and he had circled around as if to prevent them from going any farther. As they danced about, trying to generate warmth, pools of water sprayed out beneath them.
“Turn your back,” said Anne with a sly curl to her swollen lips. “You mustn’t watch.”
She began to pull her soaking T-shirt over her head. Morgan turned away and stared at the exposed brick wall. He heard wet clothes puddling in piles on the floor. He had no idea what the protocol was, given the circumstances. Suddenly, he realized the lights were on full, and whirled to face them. “For pity sake, the neighbours!”
He didn’t know where to look. They were both stark naked. The neighbours across the street must be having a hard time about now, pretending they couldn’t see everything. He lunged for the overhead light switch, but when he snapped it off all that happened was the glare in the window was reduced. His table lamps still managed to cast full illumination on the entire scene. If he turned them off, too, it would signal to the entire neighbourhood that an orgy was in progress. He moved into the shadows by the spiral staircase. Maybe the neighbours would think he wasn’t home.
“What kind of music you got?” Nancy asked.
She was shaking out her hair in front of the window into the pile of dripping clothes she held in front of her. Anne was ambling around, inspecting the artwork, casual, as if she were at a gallery, wearing a little black dress and over-high pumps. Nancy dropped her clothes onto the hardwood floor beside Anne’s, avoiding the thick Gabbeh rug that so far had only been subjected to a few random droplets. She approached the stereo as if it were a potential dance partner, cocking a hip slightly off centre and coming to rest a little too close to Morgan. “Can I put on something?”
“Anything,” he said. “Please.”
He was flustered as much by the casual familiarity as by their lack of clothes.
“You like Eskimo art?” asked Anne, picking up an intricately carved miniature tableau of whalebone and ivory.
“Inuit art,” he said. “In Canada they’re Inuit.” Pedantry was a way of retrieving composure. “It means ‘the people.’ Inuit is plural. Inuk is one. Inuuk is two. The ivory is from the tusk of a narwhal. The bone is very delicate. It’s very old, from a petrified vertebra.”
Anne smiled indulgently, and her lips quivered. “Can we use the dryer? Sorry about the mess.”
She scooped up the drenched clothes and followed him into the bathroom. He opened the dryer, but she held out the end of a wad of clothes and stepped backward into the shower.
“Grab tight and we’ll wring them out,” Anne told him.
Water poured down the front of Morgan’s slacks.
“Sorry,” Anne said, her full lips swelling into another smile. She stuffed the clothes into the dryer, and he turned it on. Then she took a towel from the neat pile on the shelf over the dryer.
For a moment Morgan thought modesty had finally set in, and he offered another towel for her friend. Anne declined, saying ominously that one would be enough, and walked into the living room where Nancy was dancing with herself to music that was almost inaudible.
Kneeling on the warm dry wool of the Gabbeh, Anne stretched out to draw the puddles of water on the floor together in large, sweeping motions. Morgan couldn’t help staring, first at Anne, wondrously slender and smooth as she reached and twisted while she dabbed at the floor, with her bottom cocked upward like a beacon, then at Nancy, moving in a dream world of her own to music he could barely hear, her fulsome young body shaping the air as she moved like a Henry Moore carved out of voluptuous flesh. Giving in, Morgan sat on the bottom step of his wrought-iron staircase, absorbing it all, eyes sliding back and forth from one to the other. Anne walked over to the window, stood fully framed for a moment, gazing out at the street, then bent down once again, bottom in the air, and mopped up the remaining water.
“I’ll just throw this in with the clothes,” she said when she was finished.
He looked at the towel, dripping and mottled with residual dirt from the floor, which he tried to keep clean. He was a good housekeeper.
When she came back, she said, “Lovely and warm in here. It’s been a bugger all day, really hot. We needed the rain. Trouble is, we got soaked to the skin, absolutely drenched. It’s been a movable party. We dropped into HQ and picked up your address. We’ve noticed you, Morgan. Happy Canada Day.” She leaned over and gave him a big hug. “Shove over,” she said, sitting on the step beside him. “Hey, what’s that you’re wearing?”
“Clothes.”
“So what do you do when we’re not here?”
“Um …”
“You want to smoke dope?”
“No,” said Morgan. Then, almost in apology, he added, “I’m okay.”
“No, you’re not.” Anne smiled with her great lips less than a head’s breadth away. “Do we make you nervous?”
“No,” said Morgan. He didn’t want either to protest too much or appear nonchalant.
“I’ve got some dope,” she said, and walked over to her bag in the foyer. As she strode away from him, Morgan could see incised on her bottom, like an erotic abstract, the pattern of the wrought-iron step. He relaxed a little. It made her seem vulnerable. She turned and walked toward him. Full-frontal exposure — he felt imponderably vulnerable.
“Come sit with me on the floor,” she said.
She sat cross-legged on the thick Gabbeh, and when he approached, she turned him gently like a marionette so that he settled with his back to her and she drew him down to lie against her lap.
“Comfy?” she asked.
He looked up at her lips. Her breasts came to firm points just above his temple. He couldn’t bring them into focus at the same time, and his eyes, bleary from trying to adjust, shifted back to her lips. “Every man’s fantasy,” he said aloud. But he felt sick. She was twenty. She had the body of a girl.
He could feel her pubic hair against the back of his scalp as she moved about, preparing to light up. He nestled