surface ringed with brown circles. The apartment smelled of ginger and garlic. A large print of Van Gogh’s Starlight over the Rhone hung above the couch, and Fitzgerald stared at it for a long time. He examined the rippled lines of the light reflected in the water, and the hunched stance of the man and woman. Why were they looking at the artist, and not at the deep cobalt water shot through with the light of reflected stars? They faced away from the riverbank, away from the dark liquid at the heart of the scene. They stared out at the viewer, who could be none other than an eye looking down from the black night.
She shouldn’t be surprised, he thought.
He had written, he told himself, sitting there in his socks.
For weeks, he had sent letters reminding her of his interview date, asking if they could meet. She didn’t write back. He wrote notes in which he addressed possible objections she might have to seeing him. Was she afraid of hurting him? If so, he wanted nothing more than to see her. Perhaps she felt that because their relationship was over, they shouldn’t see each other? If this was her concern, he wrote, she should feel completely comfortable because he had accepted that the relationship was done, that their romance was finished, but it hurt him to not be able to see his closest friend. Maybe she was too busy? They would meet quickly, eat a meal like old friends—didn’t she have to eat? Did she feel that everything between them was in the past? He wrote that although the past was gone, he didn’t discount the future. Since he would be in Toronto for his interview and neither of them was deliberately travelling to see the other, this would be a perfectly neutral meeting—not evoking the past but also not requiring a future. Did she hope they would simply forget each other? Impossible.
He had written these things to her, but no reply had come. She should not be surprised to see him. He had tried to express the important but casual and enjoyable nature of a meeting. He didn’t write that he would simply come to her apartment, enter, remove his shoes, and wait. Why not? Perhaps he didn’t really think he would do it. The idea had run in his mind like a movie: she would be surprised at first, but then seeing him in her home would allow all of the old feelings to come back to her. She would hold him, she would thank him for seeking her out, she would swear to never turn away from him again.
Maybe he didn’t think any of this could be real. It was unreasonable to break into her apartment, and so perhaps he never really thought he would be sitting here like this, flipping through her pathology notes, smelling her kitchen, patting the bandages on his face to see whether they had soaked through. That’s what it was, he reminded himself, breaking and entering. Was that why he had not written about this possibility? Perhaps he had suspected that she had forgotten about his set of keys. Perhaps he had thought that had he mentioned anything about coming over on his own, she would change the locks. He hadn’t written that he would be sitting here on her couch, that he would pick up her half-finished tea, go to the microwave, heat it up, sip it—that he would wish to feel like a soothed child because she had also sipped from this cup but would find that it was just stale, microwaved jasmine tea gone bitter with the leaves steeped too long in cold water.
Five-ten.
He wondered about the one black pump on the floor. Where was its partner? He looked for it in the hallway closet, pushed through her sheaf of clothing, smelled the jackets, the sweaters—her smell had changed. Less pungent, maybe from less home cooking? Or did he remember it differently? Had she been in such a rush to get the shoe off? He looked into the bedroom briefly, the sight of the bed painful, but thankfully there was no trail of footwear leading to the mattress. He closed the bedroom door, heart pounding, still holding the tea. In September, after her parents had left, they had a perfect week, a week of playing house. It was before her classes started, and they made love on their first night in the apartment, having assembled only the bed—the rest of the furniture still in its unopened flat-packed boxes. They filled her kitchen from the stalls in Kensington Market, and went to Centre Island twice to watch children playing. Ming had been the one who would point to kids, especially mixed-race children, and say that their kids might turn out like that.
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