Almost lost among duplicate Victoria’s Secret catalogues and an alumni magazine from the University of Toronto was a manila envelope with no return address. Miranda might have thrown it out but for the spidery handwriting. Grasping her mail, she started up the stairs, then stopped and pulled away the cellotape holding down the manila flap. There was a one-page letter, a fragile newspaper cutting, and a legal document of some sort, folded in the middle. The letter was dated yesterday. She looked at the postmark on the envelope. It was obscure but genuine. Yesterday, as well. The letter, which began rather quaintly, “My Dear Miranda,” was signed by a dead man.
Miranda shuddered, and with her mail held tentatively in hand like a urine specimen, she hurried upward to the relative security of her third-floor home.
Once inside, with the lights on and everything familiar, she set the mail down, deliberately unread, and went into her bedroom, which doubled as a study, where she methodically eased out of her clothes. In the shower she let the pulsing flow of hot water work away the tension of the day that as usual had settled into her neck and shoulders. She put on cotton pajamas imprinted with grazing moose. She flipped on her computer and walked out into the cramped kitchen, where she was momentarily surprised to see the mysterious contents of the manila envelope still on the counter.
“Why don’t you get a decent apartment,” Morgan had asked after their one brief tryst.
“Was that your problem?”
“We were good,” he had said, neither amused nor taking offence. “I thought we were very good. Did you have a problem?”
“Screw you.”
“Miranda...”
Sometimes he used her last name. Usually, the first. Tone could make it mean anything. Then it had conveyed good-natured wariness.
She always called him Morgan; she liked the sound. Soft and abrupt, a controlled expletive, like swearing at someone you loved. Yet she had found herself repeating his first name during sex. David, David. She almost never called him David to his face.
Ellen Ravenscroft had once challenged her about “the name thing.”
“His last and your first — what’s with that?”
“It’s not about power,” Miranda had responded.
“Of course it is, love. It’s always about power.”
Not always, she now thought. Sometimes words were just words.
When Morgan and she undressed that time and had faced each other, she had felt uncomfortably disconnected. She was thinking about Ellen, about how much Ellen would like to be in her place. But the moment to stop things had passed. It had seemed more intimate to resist or explain. And then she had abandoned herself, and it was as good as Morgan had suggested.
During their prolonged coital embrace — that was the term, inept as it was, that had come to her mind — she had luxuriated in the indulgent pace. Morgan was physically uninhibited — strange for a man — and yet emotionally shy. He was a lovely lover and that had frightened her. She had never been married, never lived with a man, not because she didn’t have needs, but because she needed too much.
“I like this apartment,” she had told him. “I’ve been here from day one. Second year university, after first year in residence. I shared it with a roommate. She had this room, the boudoir, and I had a fold-out in the living room. I lost the toss of a coin. Then she started having layovers — guys laid her and stayed over. Alphabetically, she was working through the student directory. I don’t think she even liked it much. I lived in her vestibule. My love life, of course, was zero. She tried buying me off, but I didn’t want leftovers. We tossed another coin and I won. She left, she became a lawyer. I practised celibacy. Turned out it didn’t take practice.”
“You must have saved a fortune by now. And no car.”
“Nor you.”
“Bad driver.”
“Bad driver, poor lover, no sense of humour. Most men won’t acknowledge their failings.”
“Miranda, I —” he had begun, stifling his protest, then touching her gently.
“It’s a clean well-lighted place.”
“Yeah, and it smells good. There’s nothing, nothing, as erotic as the smell of a single woman’s apartment.”
“Go home, Morgan.”
And he had gone.
Miranda wasn’t prepared yet to read the letter. She picked up the newspaper cutting and smoothed it on the counter. It was actually an entire tabloid page, torn along one edge and tattered as if someone had repeatedly handled it. Top, centre, a photograph. Standing third from the right, a little distorted by the glare of a flash, an earlier version of herself. She didn’t remember posing for the picture or its publication.
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