So he was here on scholarship, studying something practical, no doubt, nuclear physics or the construction of dams, and, like herself and the other foreigners, he was expected to go away again as soon as he’d learned what he’d come for. But he never went out of the house; he stood at the front door and watched the brutish flow of cars, the winter rain, while those back in his own country, the ones that had sent him, were confidently expecting him to return some day, crammed with knowledge, ready to solve their lives… He’s lost his nerve, Ann thought. He’ll fail. It was too late in the year for him ever to catch up. Such failures, such paralyses, were fairly common here, especially among the foreigners. He was far from home, from the language he shared, the wearers of his native costume; he was in exile, he was drowning. What did he do, alone by himself in his room at night?
Ann switched her hair dryer to COOL and wrenched her mind back to aqueducts. She could see he was drowning but there was nothing she could do. Unless you were good at it you shouldn’t even try, she was wise enough to know that. All you could do for the drowning was to make sure you were not one of them.
The aqueduct, now. It would be made of natural brick, an earthy red; it would have low arches, in the shade of which there would be ferns and, perhaps, some delphiniums, in varying tones of blue. She must learn more about plants. Before entering the shopping complex (trust him to assign a shopping complex; before that he had demanded a public housing project), it would flow through her green space, in which, she could now see, there were people walking. Children? But not children like Mrs. Nolan’s. They would turn her grass to mud, they’d nail things to her trees, their mangy dogs would shit on her ferns, they’d throw bottles and pop cans into her aqueduct… And Mrs. Nolan herself, and her Noah’s Ark of seedy, brilliant foreigners, where would she put them? For the houses of the Mrs. Nolans of this world would have to go; that was one of the axioms of Urban Design. She could convert them to small offices, or single-floor apartments; some shrubs and hanging plants and a new coat of paint would do wonders. But she knew this was temporizing. Around her green space, she could see, there was now a high wire fence. Inside it were trees, flowers and grass, outside the dirty snow, the endless rain, the grunting cars and the half-frozen mud of Mrs. Nolan’s drab backyard. That was what exclusive meant, it meant that some people were excluded. Her parents stood in the rain outside the fence, watching with dreary pride while she strolled about in the eternal sunlight. Their one success.
Stop it, she commanded herself. They want me to be doing this. She unwound her hair and brushed it out. Three hours from now, she knew, it would be limp as ever because of the damp.
The next day, she tried to raise her new theoretical problem with her friend Jetske. Jetske was in Urban Design, too. She was from Holland, and could remember running through the devastated streets as a child, begging small change, first from the Germans, later from the American soldiers, who were always good for a chocolate bar or two.
“You learn how to take care of yourself,” she’d said. “It didn’t seem hard at the time, but when you are a child, nothing is that hard. We were all the same, nobody had anything.” Because of this background, which was more exotic and cruel than anything Ann herself had experienced (what was a gas pump compared to the Nazis?), Ann respected her opinions. She liked her also because she was the only person she’d met here who seemed to know where Canada was. There were a lot of Canadian soldiers buried in Holland. This provided Ann with at least a shadowy identity, which she felt she needed. She didn’t have a native costume, but at least she had some heroic dead bodies with which she was connected, however remotely.
“The trouble with what we’re doing… ,” she said to Jetske, as they walked towards the library under Ann’s umbrella. “I mean, you can rebuild one part, but what do you do about the rest?”
“Of the city?” Jetske said.
“No,” Ann said slowly. “I guess I mean of the world.”
Jetske laughed. She had what Ann now thought of as Dutch teeth, even and white, with quite a lot of gum showing above them and below the lip. “I didn’t know you were a socialist,” she said. Her cheeks were pink and healthy, like a cheese ad.
“I’m not,” Ann said. “But I thought we were supposed to be thinking in total patterns.”
Jetske laughed again. “Did you know,” she said, “that in some countries you have to get official permission to move from one town to another?”
Ann didn’t like this idea at all. “It controls the population flow,” Jetske said. “You can’t really have Urban Design without that, you know.”
“I think that’s awful,” Ann said.
“Of course you do,” Jetske said, as close to bitterness as she ever got. “You’ve never had to do it. Over here you are soft in the belly, you think you can always have everything. You think there is freedom of choice. The whole world will come to it. You will see.” She began teasing Ann again about her plastic headscarf. Jetske never wore anything on her head.
Ann designed her shopping complex, putting in a skylight and banks of indoor plants, leaving out the aqueduct. She got an A.
In the third week of March, Ann went with Jetske and some of the others to a Buckminster Fuller lecture. Afterwards they all went to the pub on the corner of the Square for a couple of beers. Ann left with Jetske about eleven o’clock and walked a couple of blocks with her before Jetske turned off towards her lovely old house with the stained glass. Ann continued by herself, warily, keeping to the lighted streets. She carried her purse under her elbow and held her furled umbrella at the ready. For once it wasn’t raining.
When she got back to the house and started to climb the stairs, it struck her that something was different. Upstairs, she knew. Absolutely, something was out of line. There was curious music coming from the room next door, a high flute rising over drums, thumping noises, the sound of voices. The man next door was throwing a party, it seemed. Good for him, Ann thought. He might as well do something. She settled down for an hour’s reading.
But the noises were getting louder. From the bathroom came the sound of retching. There was going to be trouble. Ann checked her door to make sure it was locked, got out the bottle of sherry she kept in the cupboard next to the oven, and poured herself a drink. Then she turned out the light and sat with her back against the door, drinking her sherry in the faint blue light from the funeral home next door. There was no point in going to bed: even with her earplugs in, she could never sleep.
The music and thumpings got louder. After a while there was a banging on the floor, then some shouting, which came quite clearly through Ann’s hot air register. “I’m calling the police! You hear? I’m calling the police! You get them out of here and get out yourself!” The music switched off, the door opened, and there was a clattering down the stairs. Then more footsteps—Ann couldn’t tell whether they were going up or down—and more shouting. The front door banged and the shouts continued on down the street. Ann undressed and put on her nightgown, still without turning on the light, and crept into the bathroom. The bathtub was full of vomit.