Attempting to shield her breasts, the poet also twisted away and crouched, and for a moment the two of us were crouching side by side while above us Mark Robinson brandished a white handkerchief. Then the poet left, Mark tucked his handkerchief back into his pocket, and there was nothing left for me to do but straighten up and face my fate. What was up with me? inquired Mark Robinson. I had suddenly vanished and was nowhere to be found, as if I had dropped into a hole in the ground or, he said, more appropriately for the Rocky Mountains, as if I had soared off into the sky. He knew, he said, that I wasn’t painting, because I was never at the studio when he stopped by, and he had stopped by, he said, plenty of times, and he knew something else, he added, but I shouldn’t even try to ask him where he’d heard it; he would never say, he said, because when he promised something, he kept his word, and besides, it didn’t matter whom he’d gotten it from, but he’d heard that I had gotten myself in trouble or, he said, had found myself out in the open between two historical realities which defied the imagination with their horrors and were threatening to pulverize me. While he was saying this I looked him straight in the eyes and never once blinked. If this is true, said Mark, then it’s high time for us to do what we said we’d do and go out and relive the old days. Sometimes, Mark said, reminiscing is the only path to forgetting.
Just then the director of the Literary Arts Programs joined us. Readings like the one we have just heard, he said, restore one’s faith in the power of words. He looked first at Mark, then at me, but we were silent. Had we seen, he asked, how the faces of the listeners glowed at moments, vivid with having something subtle yet essential pouring into them? As far as he was concerned, said Mark, he was always prepared to pour a little something into himself, and that, he added, always seemed to matter more than pouring anything into anyone else, except, naturally, one particular kind of pouring which two do quite nicely, he said, which he would refrain from mentioning just then. The director of the Literary Arts Programs made a disgusted-looking face and glanced over at me as if expecting my help. I said I wasn’t interested in Mark’s dodges, I was indifferent to inpourings or outpourings, and I did not agree with the director’s observation about the glowing faces, for when, I said, I turned to look around during Daniel Atijas’s reading, I did not see a single radiant face; I saw, I remarked, not even a shred of understanding, nary a crumb of readiness to go along with what the story, or, should I say, the absence of a story, was offering. The director of the Literary Arts Programs stared at me, though now with an open abhorrence, which in the corners of his eyes and elsewhere was almost hatred. The story or its absence, who cares? he said, but this reminded him that he had meant to have a word with me about Daniel Atijas. He had been meaning to, he said, for several days now but had never found me in my room or at the studio, and though some things are better done sooner, there are others, like this, he said, which it’s never too late to do.
He said all this loudly, and though he didn’t glance at Mark Robinson, I was convinced that Mark Robinson was privy to everything, and that all this had come from him. Maybe they had used a spare key and searched my studio while I was gone or while I was in my room at night sleeping? I could easily imagine Mark Robinson and the director of the Literary Arts Programs, probably with one or two of the guards from the security service, slinking along the path that led to my studio. I could not recall, however, a single moment when, upon entering the studio, it had occurred to me that something might not have been where I’d left it. For most things I had no special place to stow them; disorder was my order. Only once on the floor under the table had I come across some dark pellets, and alarmed at the thought that they might be mouse droppings, I carefully swept them up, folded them into a newspaper, and tossed them in the trash. Meanwhile, hatred had spread across the face of the director of the Literary Arts Programs, probably stoked by my silence, which he clearly read as a kind of defiance, so I decided to say something. I said I had nothing against us talking about Daniel Atijas, though I did not consider myself to be the best-qualified person as far as he, the director, was concerned. It was possible, said the director of the Literary Arts Programs, that I was not the best qualified, but considering the amount of time I’d been spending with him, I was surely better qualified than most, including him, the director of the Literary Arts Programs, who had seen him, he said, only twice — once at the reception at his house and another time in his office, where Daniel Atijas had spent only fifteen minutes.
And besides, said the director, whenever he went looking for him, no one knew where he had gone or when he’d be back, and somebody would say that Daniel Atijas was with me. So, said the director, he wanted to find out what I was up to with the man, where I was taking him, and when I’d be leaving him at least a few minutes free to meet with other people. At some point the hatred had left his face, and his eyes now leered, making me think of a derisive grin. I can’t say this did not upset me, this shift from hatred to derision, but even more insulting was the knowledge that Daniel Atijas had never mentioned being at the office of the director of the Literary Arts Programs, if only for fifteen minutes. Instantly, however, I reproached myself for reproaching him, since he never told me things like that anyway. Never, for instance, had he mentioned what he spoke about with one of the Chinese women as they walked around the streets of Banff and then along the river while I followed them from afar, ducking behind a tree from time to time, just as he had never once informed me of a single detail of his personal life, with the exception of the evening when we sat in deck chairs by the pool in which several young women were swimming, whom I used as a segue into a conversation about marriage and women in general. Then, to my great surprise, he said he had been married, but only for three years, and that he had a child, a son, who lived with the boy’s mother. That was all. He did not give his son’s name, the boy’s age, whether he was in school, what color his eyes or hair were, nor did I dare ask, caught short by his sudden candor. When he turned to me and raised his eyebrows in question, I answered that I had not yet met a woman with whom I would be prepared to share all I had, but I still believed that one day I might, that I might at any moment, including right there by the pool, meet someone who could play that role.