Valley of Fire. Steven Manners

it was too soon to think of endings.

      When he couldn’t hold off any longer, he excused himself. He half wondered if she would still be there when he returned. He wanted to ask but knew how foolish that would sound.

      When he returned, she was still life: coffee untouched, the same wisp of hair outlining her cheek. In his absence she had sketched him from memory on a small artist’s pad she carried with her in those days. “Do you like it?”

      “Of course I do.” His face was lean and tense, but the eyes were soft. Harder now. “Is that how you see me?”

      “I tried to capture your expression, the look in your eyes.”

      “They look sad. Sort of watery.”

      She apologized. She had imagined tears. She had thought she had said something to upset him — that was why he had left the table so abruptly.

      He explained that he had to go to the men’s room. Their first misunderstanding, one they could laugh about. He told her a story about a friend, another med student, who had a phobia about having a car accident with a full bladder — she was afraid it would burst on impact and she’d die of peritonitis.

      “She?”

      They walked through the grey desert of downtown on that cold afternoon, to a dim bistro for lunch, to Chinatown and the Old Port, a winter sea sharpness under a leaden sky, and then it was night and it snowed and they had to get back. Returning along the rise of St-Laurent, the parade of skin parlours and steamie joints and army surplus stores, all the forlorn places that become a theatre backdrop in the first act of love. They crossed downtown, the follow spot of lit windows on snow, the slow goodbye as they trudged along to her walk-up in the student ghetto.

      Cynthia was about to kiss him when she saw he was shivering and invited him in. She opened a bottle of wine, a heavy Amarone to warm them, but he was still chilled, and she told him he didn’t look well. She wrapped him in a blanket and drew a bath, adding eucalyptus to clear his head, and he remembered the oil coating his skin as he slid into the water. He was starting to feel the tension ease when she came in to bring him towels and the tension returned. She crouched beside the bath and drizzled water over his chest and saw how rigidly he held his body. “Are you self-conscious?”

      “Of course not. I’m almost a doctor.”

      Cynthia teased him about that. She thought people were driven to study the things they were most anxious about: gynecologists with mothers who died of cervical cancer; liver doctors with a family history of alcoholism. She felt deep down he was anxious about something, there was an edge to him, and it was so like Cynthia in that moment to attribute it to nervousness. It was only later that she called it arrogance, that edge.

      She had many theories — about people, about him, about her — that he would later think about. He would consider them carefully, no matter how foolish, but if he ever mentioned them again she would claim to have forgotten them. Ideas to her were like art: inspired, soaring, light as air. They were just something to experience. Why discuss them?

      “It’s important to understand everything.”

      “You can’t,” she said. “If you analyze something, all you do is drag it to earth and kill it.”

      Munin was feeling light-headed. “I drank too much tonight. What about people who become psychiatrists?”

      She said nothing, just looked at him with a sort of wistfulness as if she saw something he would never understand. He tried to press her for an answer, but she simply shook her head. Munin was always trying to shine a light into the corners to understand what we are. Cynthia must have known even then: we are the shadows. They define us.

      He drew her closer, and she tried to get away, but he pulled her into the bath. They made love that first time with her half-dressed, water churning, the tub overspilling. He held her tightly against his chest until the water cooled and she said she was chilled, they would both get pneumonia. She stripped off her clothes and wrapped them both in large towels. As she was drying his hair, he saw she had been crying. He should have said something, some word or sign to acknowledge the fact of her tears, but he didn’t like to ask a question when he didn’t already know the answer.

      Was it joy or sadness or something else? Had she seen in those first moments, on that first day, how every beginning holds in its heart an ending? Every seed, every cell, contains its own death.

      Begin in September. Begin again.

      Penelope thought of September as the start of the year, a leftover from her student days. Ridiculous, a woman her age. Married, now unmarried, what’s done is undone. She had made a new start. She was a working woman now. She had a job. That was August. In September, no job. That was when it came undone. Not fired, not terminated. They informed her they had eliminated her position.

       What does that mean — no position? I have no place? Or I’m in no position to argue?