8   18 Dec 88   It is Sunday evening. Another week till winter break, and B and D are busy studying. D spent the whole afternoon at home. He did not take his usual Sunday afternoon “museum” outing. I asked him about it at dinner, and he said he had too much schoolwork. “What about your friend the nurse?” I asked. He did not answer, but smiled sheepishly and looked down. I am inferring that it’s over. During the week I will confirm with B and D in order to make reservations at Mont Tremblant for a week of skiing. Anyway, it has been a month since papa died. He never came out of his coma. I opened you, my journal, when I came back from the funeral, and had my pen poised over this very page, trying to write down my feelings, but no words came. If one could say that I experienced a feeling during those two days in Rimouski, among brothers and mother and other relatives, it was emptiness, around me and inside me. Around me it was as if Rimouski, in the November fog and without Tante Clotilde, simply did not exist. It was like a grey hole. Inside me it was an emptiness in the heart (un vide au cœur), the way hunger, once the pangs are gone, feels like an emptiness in the stomach. The worst moment came when we were in church and Betty took my hand, and I felt nothing. My sweet Betty, my dear child, at that point in space-time, in Rimouski, Québec, November 1988, I felt nothing for you! I was going to write “Please forgive me!” But of course there was nothing to forgive. I had simply stepped into that grey hole. We left Rimouski as soon as possible and spent the night in Rivière-du-Loup, and my love for Betty and for the absent Daniel was back in its rightful place in my heart. But I could not find the words to describe what had happened. And yet I believed that an event such as the death of a father requires to be recorded, so I waited for the words to come. Each time I opened your covers, my journal, I waited for those words, and neglected to write about what really happened. I suppose that this is what is meant by writer’s block. Well, it has been a month and the empt void is practically filled. At least I no longer feel it. And I am again feeling free to write. And I want to write about Tante Clotilde. Clotilde Bouchard, Papa’s younger sister, Dr. Palombe’s nurse, who remained single because she was not allowed to marry the man she loved because he was Anglais (actually he was Scottish, Ian Campbell), and worse yet Protestant. So she chose independence, and fostered it in me. She encouraged me to become a doctor, not a nurse, and to go to Montréal, not Québec, for university in order to broaden my horizons. I would visit her on Sunday mornings when the rest of the family went to church and we would drink tea and joke about being two at tea, deux à thé, deux athées, two atheists. But we also talked in English, which she spoke better than most French people in Rimouski (she had practice with Ian). “You will need English in Montréal,” she would say to me. She also liked to say, of the nuns who had taught her nursing, that she appreciated their teaching but not their teachings. Diagnosed with breast cancer at 60, lived with it for 5 years. Tu me manques, chère tante Clo. I miss you. Admission   In mid-December Daniel received his letter of admission to Columbia. Along with congratulations on his sterling scholastic record and test scores, it included a reminder to apply for a student visa and an admonition to maintain a rigorous course load and a strong academic performance for the remainder of his senior year. Evidently this was to prevent his lapsing into a condition that, as Ms. Casey told them, was known in the States and in Western Canada as senioritis. The term struck Daniel as bizarre: his mother, the doctor, had taught him that the ending -itis defined an inflammation, but the seniors in this condition were apathetic, the very opposite of inflamed, at least in the way that enflammé would be used in French. Soon thereafter Angie informed him that their meetings would have to stop. She had met someone and, she said, “It might get serious.” By then it was only a week till winter break, and Mireille had made plans for the three of them to go skiing at Mont Tremblant, so that Daniel’s relationship with Angie would have been interrupted anyway. Instead, it simply ended. It was a breakup of sorts, but a friendly one. Daniel had observed on previous winter vacations that ski resorts are great places for flirting. This time he would not just observe but participate. He would be, as anthropologists would say, a participant observer.   Back at school in January Daniel now began to look at his female friends as girls, nay, he had to admit to himself, as ripe-bodied seventeen-year-old women. Leslie, who now played in the Montreal Civic Youth Orchestra, was as much fun to be with as ever. But of late she had taken up smoking, perhaps in an effort to lose weight, and after two coffee dates at which she blew puffs of smoke at him he shifted his attention to Roxane, who was in his French literature class. One day in late January he told her that he would like to go cross-country skiing with her; she agreed readily. She normally went on Sundays – for the day – with a club, but he suggested a weekend getaway, just the two of them. She said, blushing, that she would have to think it over, but two days later she said that it was okay. He reserved a room with two beds at an inn in Morin Heights, and on a sunny Saturday morning in February they left in his car, with Roxane’s skis and poles alongside his rented ones on the rooftop ski rack that he had also rented. After an afternoon of skiing they came back to their room to change and, in short order, one thing led to another. Roxane was a virgin – she told Daniel that she had fooled around with girls but never with a boy – but she got into it enthusiastically. Back in their room after dinner, she was as insatiable as he was. He had been prescient in bringing a whole package of condoms. It soon became obvious at school that Roxane and Daniel were a couple. One day at home Betty approached him with a report that struck him as strange. “Some of the girls have been saying that it’s weird that you’re dating a girl that’s not hot,” she said “One of them said she’s a dyke.” “What business is it of theirs?” he asked, nonplussed. Betty giggled. “Girls are always talking about guys, about who’s dating who… I mean whom.” She giggled again. “And a cute guy like you is supposed to date a cute girl, I guess.” “Someone more like Vivian?” “Yes.” “But I like Roxane better than I liked Vivian. Would you date a guy who wasn’t cute if you really liked him?” “I don’t know.” She was blushing. “I don’t think I’m ready for dating yet.” “Have you been asked?” “Yes.” “And?” “I guess I didn’t like them enough,” she said after some reflection. “Were they cute?” “I guess so.” “There you are.” Betty said nothing, so Daniel went on. “But what might happen is that a guy who may be really nice, but who’s not what girls consider cute, might be too shy to ask a pretty girl like you.” “So what’s a girl supposed to do, O wise brother?” “The word, O inquisitive sister, is flirt. It means showing in subtle ways that you’re interested. Don’t tell me you didn’t see people doing it at Mont Tremblant.” “I saw you doing it,” she said with yet another giggle. “How about maman?” he asked. This time she laughed heartily. “Yeah, her too. But very subtly.” “Join the family,” he said. “Have I ever told you that you’re my favorite brother?” she said with a sisterly kiss on the cheek. “I love you too,” he said. Afterwards Daniel thought about the fact that he could now be regarded as being, in the common parlance, successful with women. He could not deny that his own good looks had something to do with it. It also helped that Gen McGrath had taught him to discern whether a girl was interested in doing it. But he liked to attribute his so-called success mainly to his relative indifference to women’s looks, reinforced by the fiasco of his attraction to Vivian. And so the range of his potential partners (he refused to think of them as conquests) was greatly broadened by the fact that a very pretty girl or woman did not necessarily attract him more than a not-so-pretty one. Che sia brutta, che sia bella, as Leporello sang. Roxane, who was neither brutta nor bella, was the youngest of a brood of four. Her siblings had left home, and her parents owned and jointly managed a bilingual bookstore, so that on weekdays she had the house to herself for a few hours after school. After Mireille had written her a prescription for the pill, Roxane and Daniel found themselves caught up in a whirlwind of unbridled juvenile sex that lasted about six weeks, including an outing for combined cross-country and downhill skiing at Mont Tremblant during spring break. At the end of March, with the beginning of the track season, things changed abruptly. Roxane was faced with a conflict – the coach believed that estrogen impaired a young woman’s athletic performance – and love won out over fun. Daniel was fun, but running was her love.   By mid-April, when it was obvious that he no longer had a girlfriend, Daniel began to get interest-bearing glances from Megan Kenner, an eleventh-grader – though she had already turned seventeen – in his algebra class. She was a second cousin of Betty’s classmate Amy, the daughter of Mireille’s friend George. Megan was very smart, and also rather pretty in an unassuming way. She had a round, pleasant face with large eyes and an engaging smile, girlish in a way that made her look younger than her age – she might easily be taken for fourteen – framed by soft, wavy brown hair. Her figure, by contrast, was womanly, nicely curvy if not spectacular. She was quite experienced for her age, and, as with Roxane, they could spend after-school time at her house, as she had already done with her previous boyfriends. With Megan, Gen’s “She comes first” was self-fulfilling. She liked Daniel to undress her as part of the foreplay. The more clumsily he did it, with his fingers losing their way into nooks and crannies of her well-developed body (which strangely reminded him of Fela’s sponge cake), the better she liked it. It was not unusual for her to have an orgasm before all her clothes were off. It was reassuring for him to learn that a girl as pretty as Megan – she might be a seven or eight on a scale on which Vivian was a ten – did not have to be frigid like Vivian. Megan also, unwittingly, helped confirm another of Gen’s teachings. She did not smoke cigarettes, but marijuana was another matter. On a couple of occasions she told Daniel that she had scored a joint and proposed that they share it before sex. Its effect on Megan was not obvious to him, but Daniel felt his senses dulled, not cleared, and his pleasure lessened, not enhanced. So Gen was right at least on the “drugs” part, he thought; the “drink” part would have to wait. And whenever, in the future, Megan would propose grass again, he would take a token toke without inhaling. Daniel and Megan dated until the end of the school year. When they said good-bye for the summer it was understood that this was not the end but that they would get together again, as opportunity provided, and again and again. Meanwhile, Harvey’s fling with Vivian had fizzled even faster than Daniel’s. Vivian had made a point of holding hands tightly with Harvey, or putting her arm around his waist, whenever Daniel could see them, all the while casting disdainful glances at him. Harvey was obviously embarrassed, and he and Vivian were estranged within a month.   That summer Mireille, Daniel and Betty took a six-week vacation in Western Canada – the Rockies and the Pacific Coast – and the American Northwest. They flew to Calgary, where they rented a small camper; Mireille and Daniel took turns driving. They knew that it was their last vacation together, and Betty and Daniel made a point of being extra nice to maman, never more so than on her fortieth birthday, which they celebrated in Victoria. Daniel sent postcards to his friends in Montreal, including Harvey, Leslie, Alex, Roxane and Megan. And of course to Fela and Brigitte. He enjoyed the process of isolating himself from his mother and sister and composing a personal message to each recipient. The sending of postcards was a habit that remained with him into the age of instant electronic communication. On their return to Montreal Mireille and Daniel took a trip downtown to take care of some practical matters: shopping for clothes for Daniel – the kind that would be suitable for a university student in New York – and setting up a money-market account for him in US dollars at Citibank Canada, on which he could draw in order to set up a checking account and a credit card for himself at Citibank in New York. Since the money was withdrawn from his trust account at the Bank of Montreal, representing his inheritance, he thought that he might use the occasion to talk to her about his father. He tried to bring the matter up over lunch in a downtown restaurant. But her reticence remained unchanged. While in the restaurant he noticed, some four tables away Angie Accorso at a table with a man who had his back turned to him. He waved to her. Though he was sure that she had seen him, she did not wave back. Mireille asked him who he had waved at. He told her. She turned to look at Angie, turned back and smiled without a comment.   During the next two weeks he packed – clothes, books, personal appliances including his portable stereo, and a small collection of music cassettes, but not his guitar or his soccer ball – and said good-bye to his friends. Of course there were a couple of afternoons alone with Megan. She had a new boyfriend by then, but it didn’t seem to matter. For the third time, Daniel took the overnight Greyhound bus to New York. This time he had no intention of picking up a woman along the way, and none presented herself. But the excitement of the journey kept his sleep to a scant few hours. His scattered dreams were of New York as a kind of fantasyland, more like downtown Montreal than the real New York. He woke up at each stop believing that he had already arrived, only to see that it was still dark outside. For some reason he had a hard time summoning up his actual memories of the New York that he had visited twice already. At last the image of the Low Library settled in his conscious mind, and this image was to remain his mental polestar for all his years at Columbia. When he finally arrived, the weather outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal was surprisingly pleasant for late August. The temperature was on the cool side of mild, some 16 or 17oC. The humidity was comfortable. The sky was clear, and a northeasterly breeze swept the air. He felt New York welcoming him, perhaps even returning the love that, for the third time, he felt welling up inside him. He found a taxi immediately and gave the driver the address of his dorm at Columbia, where he had a single room waiting for him. The bathroom would be shared with a double room next door, but otherwise he would be living on his own. On his own in New York! The driver, who seemed Middle Eastern, sped up the West Side Highway in silence. His radio played some excitingly rhythmic, exotic-sounding music. As the road entered the lushness of Riverside Park Daniel mused on the fact that, almost eighteen years old, he had yet to fall in love with a girl, but he was in love with a city. He thought back to his surreal dreams on the bus, and remembered that on his first trip to New York he had dreamt about Hamburg, which in his dream was also a distorted version of Montreal. The thought of Hamburg led to his father, and made him wonder if the young Miki Wilner had also fallen in love at first sight with a city. Miki, Daniel now remembered, had lived in Hamburg as a boy before he ever met Brigitte. Would he fall in love with other cities in the future? And would falling in love with a new city entail falling out of love with the old one? The future would tell. The present was here in New York. Novum Eboracum. New York, the capital of serendipity, as some journalist had recently called it.