“You shouldn’t worry,” she said. “You’re well off. At least your family doesn’t almost disown you for doing what you want to do.” Lelah’s father kept writing her letters, urging her to return to Turkey, where the family had decided on the perfect husband for her. Lelah had stalled them for one year, and maybe she could stall them for one more, but that would be her limit. She couldn’t possibly finish her thesis in that time.
Ann hadn’t seen much of her since she’d moved out. You lost sight of people quickly here, in the ever-shifting population of hopeful and despairing transients.
No one wrote her letters urging her to come home, no one had picked out the perfect husband for her. On the contrary. She could imagine her mother’s defeated look, the greying and sinking of her face, if she were suddenly to announce that she was going to quit school, trade in her ambitions for fate, and get married. Even her father wouldn’t like it. Finish what you start, he’d say, I didn’t and look what happened to me. The bungalow at the top of Avenue Road, beside a gas station, with the roar of the expressway always there, like the sea, and fumes blighting the Chinese elm hedge her mother had planted to conceal the pumps. Both her brothers had dropped out of high school; they weren’t the good students Ann had been. One worked in a print shop now and had a wife; the other had drifted to Vancouver, and no one knew what he did. She remembered her first real boyfriend, beefy, easygoing Bill Decker, with his two-tone car that kept losing the muffler. They’d spent a lot of time parked on side streets, rubbing against each other through all those layers of clothes. But even in that sensual mist, the cocoon of breath and skin they’d spun around each other, those phone conversations that existed as a form of touch, she’d known this was not something she could get too involved in. He was probably flabby by now, settled. She’d had relationships with men since then, but she had treated them the same way. Circumspect.
Not that Mrs. Nolan’s back room was any step up. Out one window there was a view of the funeral home next door; out the other was the yard, which the Nolan kids had scraped clean of grass and which was now a bog of half-frozen mud. Their dog, a mongrelized German shepherd, was kept tied there, where the kids alternately hugged and tormented it. (“Jimmy! Donny! Now you leave that dog alone!” “Don’t do that, he’s filthy! Look at you!” Ann covering her ears, reading about underground malls.) She’d tried to fix the room up, she’d hung a Madras spread as a curtain in front of the cooking area, she’d put up several prints, Braque still-lifes of guitars and soothing Cubist fruit, and she was growing herbs on her windowsill; she needed surroundings that at least tried not to be ugly. But none of these things helped much. At night she wore earplugs. She hadn’t known about the scarcity of good rooms, hadn’t realized that the whole area was a student slum, that the rents would be so high, the available places so dismal. Next year would be different; she’d get here early and have the pick of the crop. Mrs. Nolan’s was definitely a leftover. You could do much better for the money; you could even have a whole apartment, if you were willing to live in the real slum that spread in narrow streets of three-storey frame houses, fading mustard yellow and soot grey, nearer the river. Though Ann didn’t think she was quite up to that. Something in one of the good old houses, on a quiet back street, with a little stained glass, would be more like it. Her friend Jetske had a place like that.
But she was doing what she wanted, no doubt of that. In high school she had planned to be an architect, but while finishing the preliminary courses at university she had realized that the buildings she wanted to design were either impossible—who could afford them?—or futile. They would be lost, smothered, ruined by all the other buildings jammed inharmoniously around them. This was why she had decided to go into Urban Design, and she had come here because this school was the best. Or rumoured to be the best. By the time she finished, she intended to be so well-qualified, so armoured with qualifications, that no one back home would dare turn her down for the job she coveted. She wanted to rearrange Toronto. Toronto would do for a start.
She wasn’t yet too certain of the specific details. What she saw were spaces, beautiful green spaces, with water flowing through them, and trees. Not big golf-course lawns, though; something more winding, something with sudden turns, private niches, surprising vistas. And no formal flower beds. The houses, or whatever they were, set unobtrusively among the trees, the cars kept… where? And where would people shop, and who would live in these places? This was the problem: she could see the vistas, the trees and the streams or canals, quite clearly, but she could never visualize the people. Her green spaces were always empty.
She didn’t see her next-door neighbour again until February. She was coming back from the small local supermarket where she bought the food for her cheap, carefully balanced meals. He was leaning in the doorway of what, at home, she would have called a vestibule, smoking a cigarette and staring out at the rain, through the glass panes at the side of the front door. He should have moved a little to give Ann room to put down her umbrella, but he didn’t. He didn’t even look at her. She squeezed in, shook her deflated umbrella and checked her mail box, which didn’t have a key. There weren’t usually any letters in it, and today was no exception. He was wearing a white shirt that was too big for him and some greenish trousers. His feet were not bare, in fact he was wearing a pair of prosaic brown shoes. He did have tattoo marks, though, or rather scars, a set of them running across each cheek. It was the first time she had seen him from the front. He seemed a little shorter than he had when she’d glimpsed him heading towards the stairs, but perhaps it was because he had no hat on. He was curved so listlessly against the doorframe, it was almost as if he had no bones.
There was nothing to see through the front of Mrs. Nolan’s door except the traffic, sizzling by the way it did every day. He was depressed, it must be that. This weather would depress anyone. Ann sympathized with his loneliness, but she did not wish to become involved in it, implicated by it. She had enough trouble dealing with her own. She smiled at him, though since he wasn’t looking at her this smile was lost. She went past him and up the stairs.
As she fumbled in her purse for her key, Mrs. Nolan stumped out of the bathroom. “You see him?” she whispered.
“Who?” Ann said.
“Him.” Mrs. Nolan jerked her thumb. “Standing down there, by the door. He does that a lot. He’s bothering me, like. I don’t have such good nerves.”
“He’s not doing anything,” Ann said.
“That’s what I mean,” Mrs. Nolan whispered ominously. “He never does nothing. Far as I can tell, he never goes out much. All he does is borrow my vacuum cleaner.”
“Your vacuum cleaner?” Ann said, startled into responding.
“That’s what I said.” Mrs. Nolan had a rubber plunger which she was fingering. “And there’s more of them. They come in the other night, up to his room. Two more, with the same marks and everything, on their faces. It’s like some kind of, like, a religion or something. And he never gave the vacuum cleaner back till the next day.”
“Does he pay the rent?” Ann said, trying to switch the conversation to practical matters. Mrs. Nolan was letting her imagination get out of control.
“Regular,” Mrs. Nolan said. “Except I don’t like the way he comes down, so quiet like, right into my house. With Fred away so much.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” Ann said in what she hoped was a soothing voice. “He seems perfectly nice.”
“It’s always that kind,” Mrs. Nolan said.
Ann cooked her dinner, a chicken breast, some peas, a digestive biscuit. Then she washed her hair in the bathroom and put it up in rollers. She had to do that, to give it body. With her head encased in the plastic hood of her portable dryer she sat at her table, drinking instant coffee, smoking her usual half cigarette, and attempting to read a book about Roman aqueducts, from which she hoped to get some novel ideas for her current project. (An aqueduct, going right through the middle of the obligatory shopping centre? Would anyone care?) Her mind kept flicking, though, to the problem of the man next door. Ann did not often try to think about what it would be like to be a man. But this particular man … Who was he, and what was happening to him? He must be a student, everyone here was a student. And he would be intelligent, that went without saying. Probably on scholarship. Everyone here in the graduate school was on scholarship, except the real Americans, who sometimes weren’t. Or rather, the women were, but some of the men were still avoiding the draft, though President Johnson had announced he was going to do away with all that. She herself would never have made it this far without scholarships; her parents could not have afforded it.