I was a creature of habit. Winter demanded that I remain in the city, but summer was for landscape. Once I decided to never return to Silver Islet, I was out of sorts when the heat came to New York. I made a couple of brief trips to the coast of Maine but was able to produce very little. So the next summer, on a whim, I drove to Rochester, left my car, and took the ferry to Davenport, where I visited George for a week or two. During this time I often met his dark-haired friend Augusta, who was on holiday from the Toronto General Hospital. I was admittedly grateful for the comfort of their company, these two unassuming Canadians, and a bit startled by the tenderness between them.

Early one evening, I remember, after I had returned from a walk on the beach at twilight, I removed my wet shoes and entered through the open back door. As I made my way down the hall to the stairs I passed by the dining room, where George and Augusta were still at the table. Augusta sat with her hands folded on her lap, her thin torso perfectly erect, her head lowered. George, who was diagonally across from her, had extended his arm over the width of the table so that his hand was resting on her shoulder. Neither of them was moving at all; they had not heard me enter. “Don’t,” George whispered, looking intently into Augusta’s downcast face. “Don’t.” There was an air of sadness about the tableau they formed, which was so profound it was almost suffocating, as well as a sense that nothing, no one, could move into the private region they had entered. “Don’t,” George whispered. Still, she did not look up. He shook her shoulder gently. “Don’t,” he said again. I turned away then, moved with extreme caution towards the stairs.

On another occasion, I met George in the dark hallway on my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. He had a glass of water in his hand for Augusta, who he explained had awakened from a nightmare. But most often it was George’s nightmares I was aware of, his shouting in the night, followed by Augusta’s soft murmuring, and then silence. They were able, you see, to give each other the gift of sleep.

Halfway through my visit, Augusta returned to her job in Toronto. After she’d gone, George handed me an apron and encouraged me to stand with him behind the counter in the shop. I laughed at myself in this uniform, fervently hoped no stray tourist from New York would recognize me, but the truth is I enjoyed the trade, the gossip, the tidy rows of numbers in the account book. The following summer, I insisted that I would accompany George to the China Hall the first morning after I arrived. Earning my keep, I said, as an excuse. In fact, I was eager to see the new patterns, and, by the end of a week, I was almost as excited as George when a small crate containing the latest addition to his collection arrived in the shop all the way from France.

During the first few winters after Silver Islet, those first few winters after Sara, I worked on a series of ostensibly mystical cubist paintings that have now, mercifully, all but disappeared from the face of the earth, my dealer having been instructed to purchase them for me if ever they appeared at auction, and I, in turn, having instructed myself to subsequently dispose of them as quickly as possible.

I began to frequent the theatre during this period, partly, I imagine now, so as to liberate myself from the stifling boredom of painting one revealing shaft of light after another shining on one stylized mountain after another. Sometimes a wealthy patron would give me a ticket and I would attend a concert or play that I might not otherwise have considered worthy of my attention. And so it was that in January of 1937 I found myself watching the final New York performance of Vi Desjardins’s first North American tour, about which there had been so much talk during the preceding weeks.

The seat was excellent, far too expensive for the piece of silly frippery I was forced to view at such close range. The star was beautiful, I suppose, but wearing a tawdry costume and heavily made-up. The tunes she sang — and sang quite well — were ordinary in the extreme; one wondered how she, her orchestra and chorus, remembered the melody and the words, one was so like another. Still, there was something about her, a face beneath the painted face, that held my attention and wouldn’t let go. It wasn’t until the ballroom scene, however, that I knew. It was the way she moved her arms when dancing with a partner, the line of her neck, the way she threw her head back when she laughed. I swear I could almost hear waves from twenty years before bubbling across the shore at Davenport beach. Jesus, I thought, that’s what happened to her. All those years. She hadn’t disappeared at all. She had become someone else.

When I presented myself at her dressing-room door, having used my reputation and that of the purchaser of my ticket to get past her battery of slaves and protectors, she looked at me quizzically for some thirty seconds. Breaking the silence, I told her who I was and she began to laugh, an infuriating, taunting sound that made me feel threatened, awkward, in ways I hadn’t since my teenage years. And then, in reaction, I felt determined. To seduce her.

It wasn’t a difficult task. Within minutes she had dismissed her entourage and was demanding that I take her to the rooftop lounge of her hotel so that we could drink Manhattans.

“We are, after all, in Manhattan,” she said. “And we can dance … just like old times.”

George’s younger face, its passionate, angry expression, flickered for just a moment in my mind, but I ignored it. “Five cents a dance, Vivian,” I said, leaning in a self-consciously casual way in her door frame.

Neither of us spoke about George that night. We were too busy assessing each other, circling each other like animals on the edge of aggression. We were both showing off, performing: our younger selves demanded this. What, after all, is the point of reputation if it can’t be flaunted in the face of the anonymity of the past?

Vivian was a remarkably fine dancer, but, by then, so was I. Others on the floor pulled back and watched us, and the room buzzed. She was famous, a household word. It was, she told me, what she had always wanted.

“Even then?” I asked her.

“Especially then,” she replied.

She owned a house in St. Johns Wood in London, and another somewhere in the south of France. Men appeared and disappeared at her command. She really didn’t have time for them, she claimed. Only now and then did one of them become difficult.

She eyed me closely as she told me this.

I decided to postpone rising to the bait. In all truthfulness I did not really desire her, but some angry sliver of my personality made it essential that I sleep with her. As if this single act, once accomplished, would prove my sophistication, my cleverness, my superiority.

Had I been able to suppress my lust we might have become passably good companions. She actually had the most marvellous sense of humour: abrupt, controlled, carefully balanced on the cusp of cynicism. A kind of frantic gaiety drove us forward. And then there was her beauty. Her beauty was violent and shining, almost unbearably so, especially when she laughed. Our repartee was stunning, sharp and quick — blade-bright. Everything around us spun and glittered.

Eventually I asked, “Shall I appear then?” knowing full well that I could just as easily disappear any time she or I desired it. I added that, if it made any difference, I was far from difficult.

“Why not?” she said, sweeping her dark hair away from her forehead with one perfectly manicured hand.

Suddenly nothing I looked at, neither the lights that shone in the room nor the lights I could see in the streets below me, nothing I recalled from the studio, neither the twisted tubes of paint nor the brushes arranged by size in glass jars, none of it seemed to have anything at all to do with me. It was as though I were suffering from a peculiar brain disorder that caused me to perceive what was going on around me, and to remember something as simple as my own living quarters, as if these perceptions and memories belonged to someone else. I knew then what was wrong with my current paintings; those explosions of questionably spiritual light carried nothing across the canvas that really belonged to me. I had never felt so distant from the creative as I did during that brief bubble of time in a rooftop bar overlooking the city. This disorientation was temporary, however, gone almost before it had fully caught my attention.

I smiled at the woman seated across from me and then I downed what was left of my fourth cocktail. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

Vivian was the only woman I have ever known who laughed when she made love. At the beginning I was somewhat disconcerted by this, but quite quickly I came to understand that for her this was an expression of appreciation, of pleasure. Unlike the mirth that had accompanied her witty conversation, this sound had no sharp edge, no ironic reference, and addressed itself only to the present. Memory, you see, was not a part of who Vivian was. She slipped easily in and out of roles, in and out of men’s arms. Her enjoyment was so honestly connected to the moment that it carried with it an odd kind of innocence.

We made love together in a large bed in her hotel suite. Apart from her musical laughter I remember very little else about our lovemaking except that it took place and that she wanted the lights left off. The next morning while she slept, however, I saw the young girl she had been in the past in her relaxed face, the curve of her mouth.

When she opened her eyes, her expression revealed no surprise at my presence by her side. She sat up and reached for my watch, which was lying on the bedside table, squinted at it, then buckled the strap around my wrist. “I suppose you drive,” she said.

“Yes, I have a car.” My new Packard was one of the few things about which I had been able to develop a genuine enthusiasm in recent months.

She lay down again and drew my arm close to her body. “Then take me to Canada,” she said. “I have four days before I sail. I want to see Davenport again, and George.”

I pulled back from her and looked into her face to see if she was serious. “Now?” I asked.

“Yes, now”

My studio, my daily life was miles and miles away, had nothing to do with me. “Why not,” I said.

We spent the night in an almost empty hotel somewhere in the Adirondacks. At the last moment Vivian decided that she Wanted her own room.

“You don’t mind, do you, darling?” she said. “I have to get my beauty sleep, you know.”

I assured her I did not. I was tired, recovering from a hangover, and beginning to be annoyed by the fact that I had agreed so quickly to make what was turning out to be a long journey over icy roads at the worst possible time of the year. There was no ferry, of course, in the winter, so we would have to drive along the St. Lawrence River and cross over to Canada at Ogdensburg. It was going to take us most of the next day to drive the north shore of the river and then along the edge of the Great Lake until we reached Davenport.

“I wonder if George will remember you,” I said, half seriously, the next day in the car.

“Of course he will…. How could he not?”

I laughed at her vanity. “Vivian,” I said, “it’s been more than twenty years. I don’t think he knows who you are. I mean, that you are who you are.”

“He knows who I am”

“He hasn’t said anything…. Nothing at all since the end of the war, nothing for twenty years.”

“He knows,” she repeated. She had brought a little silver flask of whisky along with her for the trip. She offered me a swallow, carefully replaced the cap, and slipped it back into her handbag. “Has he changed at all?” she asked.

“He still has the China Hall. His parents are both dead, so he’s let the grocery business go, though he still wears that apron, you know, with the pens clipped at the front.”

It was late afternoon. We were travelling west at the time, I remember, so I was constantly altering the angle of the visor to keep the low winter sun out of my eyes. “And,” I added, “he still paints on china. He’s an alderman or something now,” I said. “Something on the town council anyway. No doubt some day he’ll be mayor.”

Vivian smiled, then turned her face towards the side window of the car. “Poor George,” she said. “Who would have thought that he would ever be grown up enough to be a mayor. Remember how angry he used to be if I danced with anyone else?”

“I didn’t think you noticed that.”

“I noticed,” she said. “In fact, I quite liked it.”

We passed through Belleville, then Trenton, then Brighton. I hadn’t seen the winter lake since I had been a boy and I had never seen it from this shore. I recalled my mother talking about her skating parties. There was nothing in the ash-coloured ice near the shore that suggested play or laughter, and I wondered for the first time if maybe these outings had been as fictional as our blood kin in their impressive mausoleums.

As we got closer to Davenport, Vivian moved closer to me and touched the sleeve of my coat. “Does George have a woman?” she asked.

I could smell her perfume, recognized it from our night together. “He has a friend, a woman called Augusta. Actually, I’ve never been able to interpret their relationship.” I was lying, perhaps to myself as well as to Vivian, because even I had been able to understand that the remarkable compassion that passed between them must have been what some people called love. “She’s a nurse in Toronto,” I said. “Maybe they are just friends … I’m not certain. Anyway, he’s never married.”

Vivian smiled then. “You’re certain of this?” she asked in a teasing way, not expecting an answer. She opened her purse and removed the silver flask, which she shook near her right ear. “It’s all gone,” she said.

“No problem. I’ve got another bottle in my bag. Augusta might be there,” I added. “She sometimes gets the weekends off.”

It had already been dark for an hour or so when we drove into Davenport. I parked the Packard in front of George’s shop and turned off the motor just as the streetlights switched on. I remember this because there was a strange momentary silence in the car. And since then I have always thought of that pause as a kind of grace note at the beginning of a line of sombre music, a last chance for the theme to move in some other direction. Neither Vivian nor I showed any signs of being eager to leave the vehicle now that the journey had been accomplished. We didn’t look at each other, stared instead at the windshield, where large snowflakes were landing and then melting. I remember the way the light was caught on the surface of the empty silver flask Vivian nervously flicked backwards and forwards, and on the hood ornament of the car: a winged woman, her face slightly tilted towards the sky, the wheel of motion held firmly in her hands.