In the waxed cool of her lobby, the elevator is (for once) waiting on the main floor. Rising up in it she thinks of a phrase she can only partly remember: something that begins with “The shock of …” But the shock of what? She thinks of Declan’s funeral, sees the two wives walking tightly arm in arm on that far coast in the endless and stormless coastal rain, rain on the funeral flowers, rain on the graves. Unless it was sunny. It so often
was
sunny for a funeral. She feels it too, the sadness of sunniness, coming into her sun-blocked apartment. She also understands Ottawa now, and why in the taxi last night on the way to the station it made her feel sad. Because in Ottawa his absence was everywhere. It was more than the effect of racing fast beside dark water on the way to the train; it had to be, because she used to imagine herself going back there, a woman whose life had organized itself into some kind of triumphant order. They would run into each other on Bank Street. Then she would know what he meant to her. How much or how little. Who can know when it will die absolutely, this part of her that can only dwell on his dangerous and loving dark spirit? Because tender or brutal or dead or alive (or whoever he was or wasn’t) she knows what she will always keep on remembering most is the exact temperature of his skin.
The reference on
this page
is to “My Melancholy Baby” (lyrics by George A. Norton, music by Ernie Burnett). I also gratefully acknowledge John Updike for a somewhat reconstituted (or perhaps not all
that
reconstituted) quote from an interview in which he spoke of going home for his high-school reunion, and Czeslaw Milosz for a reference to a poem in which he wrote “everyone meditates then on the extravagance of having a separate fate.” The line “God has his merciful, if daft, devices” on
this page
is from a book by Alden Nowlan. The references to “Herr Doktor” and “Herr Enemy” are from Sylvia Plath’s
Ariel
, and the excerpts from letters that Lord Byron wrote to Lady Byron that appear on
this page
come (most recently) from
Touched with Fire
, by Kay Jamison. An excerpt from Bernard Malamud’s
The Assistant
appears on
this page
. On this same page, and also on
this page
there are either references to (or quotes from) “The Ivy Crown” by William Carlos Williams.
I would like to express my gratitude to the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council for
their support during the years I was working on this novel. I’d also like to thank the institutions where I was writer-in-residence during the years 1993-1999: Concordia University, Carleton University, the University of New Brunswick, the Ottawa Public Library, and the Saskatoon Public Library.
I am very grateful to my family and friends, and to my editor, Ellen Seligman.
Many thanks, too, to my first readers: T, Barb, Nadine, Sandra, Carole C., Carol K., Faith, and N.B. I would especially like to thank Doris Cowan.
And many thanks as well to Lisan Jutras, Anita Chong, Dafydd Watkins, and Patricia Pavey.