about koi and linguistics. Gazing out across the garden and lawn, Morgan could see, beyond the trunks of the giant silver maples, intimations of the city he loved like an old family home. This made him feel closer to the house surrounding him, as if it were the mantle of what might have been. Here, but for the grace of God and a lot of money, and the random perversity of genetic progression … his thoughts were outpaced by emotion.
There was something very sensual and vaguely distressing about letting his feelings run free. Morgan was used to the effects of an unbridled intellect, but sensibility, open and indiscriminate, took him by surprise. It was knowing about wine, not tasting, that enthralled him.
He shut his eyes and tried to envision Susan as she might be now. She looked like Miranda. He tried to focus, and the name Donna came to mind, preceding an image of someone he had forgotten he had known.
Susan was his first love. But his first “affair” was Donna. Not with Donna, but Donna herself. She was the affair. Donna didn’t haunt him the way Susan did. She didn’t remind him of Miranda. But Donna had helped shaped who he was.
She had worked as a waitress in a Jarvis Street diner on the edge of Cabbagetown in a nondescript building squeezed between two former mansions. He had wandered in one night on the way back to his room near the university after one of his rare visits with Fred and Darlene. He and his dad had been sitting on the stoop all evening, drinking beer. His mom was out with her friends. She had been drinking, too. When she came back, they had a raucous three-way quarrel. He couldn’t remember why. The important part of his recollection wasn’t the fight, but meeting Donna.
“Coffee?” she had asked in the diner.
“Please,” he answered in a slurred voice, leaning over his elbows on the grey Formica table, head in his hands.
She brought him the coffee. “You okay?”
He remembered looking up with tears in his eyes, even though he couldn’t remember why he was crying. Maybe it was something his mother had said, and suddenly he was confronted with childhood’s end. Maybe his father had made a crack about the effete life of a student. Or it might have been the fight itself — being drawn into domestic squalor that he wanted desperately to put behind him.
The waitress placed her hand over his. “This one’s on me.”
Instead of saying “what” or “thank you,” he asked, “Why?”
“Because you’re drunk, you’re not a drinker, you need coffee.”
“Must be lots of drunks come in here.”
“Yeah.”
She smiled as he stared at her face, bringing her eyes into focus. They were bright blue, sparkling in the fluorescent light. Her lipstick was a thick red, and her dark roots made her hair radiate like a platinum halo around her head. In spite of her garish makeup, she was young. They were about the same age.
He smiled back. “Thanks. He glanced around and realized he was the only customer, then announced in a significant tone, “I’m a virgin.”
“Good. I’m glad there’s one left.”
“One what?”
“Virgin.”
“I’m a virgin. Technically. You know what I mean.”
“I can imagine. You’re drunk. But very pretty.”
Morgan was bewildered. No one had called him pretty before. He didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted. He decided flattery was preferable. “You’re very pretty, too. Do you want to take me home?”
She did, and that was the beginning of Morgan’s first affair, which after ten days burned out because they had nothing to say to each other. She taught him about a woman’s body as if she were much older, and he felt secure enough that he learned with awkward enthusiasm more than he could have imagined and far less than he needed to be a good lover. It didn’t occur to him to resent her experience.
Their last night together, after she finished the late shift and before he went to his morning class, they both knew their relationship had run its course. In a gesture to make the finality of their parting less certain, he invited her to a lecture he would be giving in two months.
“What are you talking about?” she asked him.
“It’s by invitation. My philosophy prof asked me to speak at a graduate seminar. It’s a big deal. They don’t usually let undergraduates speak.”
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