Eventually, after a time living with a separated beekeeper outside San Francisco who measured his food with a hanging scale and refused to orgasm for spiritual reasons, she made her way back to Canada and enrolled in some arts courses while working at a city-run day care in Toronto. She bought a smelly wool duffle coat from a thrift store and an acoustic guitar, which she plucked nightly until her fingertips hardened into thimbles. In her classes she painted murky watercolors, molded lumpy sculptures, stained glass, fired ceramics, even crocheted—her capricious interests dragging her from one artistic disappointment to the next. An instructor told her that she was cursed with the aesthetic sense to know her work was dull but lacked sufficient skill to fix it. Yet she was not discouraged. It was so much easier to fail without her father or her brother peering over her shoulder.

She came across a book on the history of cinema and after reading it in one caffeine-fueled gulp, she enrolled in film full-time. Her dedication captured the eye of her instructor, yet when called upon in class, either her voice faltered or she talked in tight, senseless circles. Near the middle of the semester, a friend from class brought her to a club popular with U of T grad students, where breathtakingly awful poetry was read as they quaffed Pernod and water. Arthur was an architecture student with tortoise-shell glasses and a clumsy girth. He had a Beach Boy wholesomeness that in a sea of Dylan and Sartre imitators infantilized those around him. Without her brother to speak for her, Diane had become a blurter—offering too much, too quickly, her sentences like a verbal yard sale—and found Arthur’s habit of thinking long and hard during conversations soothing. That night she fell into his circle and drifted to a party at an off-hours theater space, where Diane drained six cans of a tasteless beer popular in Thunder Bay that Arthur’s friends drank for its “working-class authenticity.” Soon after, she kicked Arthur in the side of the knee—hard enough to topple him to the carpet—to prove some point about pain tolerance and gender. Minutes later, she was dragging him to a secluded futon with such verve that her mind didn’t return to her body for days after.

It was a mutual friend who later told Diane that Arthur was married to a woman who’d been his English professor when he was an undergraduate. In a rushing daze Diane called this woman at the university, impersonating the dean’s clerk. Her office was slated for renovation, Diane said. When would she be next out of town at a conference so they could schedule accordingly?

Diane waited weeks until the proper time to ring his bell. Her reward was a week of cab rides to converted lofts in the East End, where they smoked hash from comically large faux-Arabic pipes. Arthur got drunk enough to stand on couches and say, “Friends, countrymen. This is essential,” launching into speeches with full awareness of his own silliness, the discussions always devolving into the drug-addled men questioning meaning itself, which went down the conversational drain of Derrida and deconstructionism before the women cradled them off into the night.

Unlike Whalen, Arthur was so brazen with their meetings, it wasn’t long before he parted from his wife and Diane quickly fixed herself at his new apartment. His fridge was full of Polaroid film and homemade pickles bought from a Polish neighbor, sketches of cities and plazas spidering over every square inch of wall. He sang her “Factory Girl,” complete with a Jagger fish-mouth, and delighted in her working-class tales of Thunder Bay. He surprised her with a photo of the old elevators—including Pool 6—in Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, who admiringly wrote that they were “the first fruits of the New Age.” It was as disorienting to her as finding a portrait of Theodore or Charlie displayed prominently in a museum.

She hungered for Arthur every waking minute, and when he left to fetch Korean takeout or cigarettes, she would count seconds and watch his apartment door with the same rising panic as when watching Charlie drop into the grain bins. Arthur’s world tolerated her as a pretty curiosity. His stature, both physical and intellectual, was enough to shelter her from comments on her attendance at an unremarkable college and her dearth of artistic accomplishment.

The nights shrieked with drugs and sex and overcomplex conversation that ended in screaming matches as often as bed. Everyone was making a film, writing a book, the air a stiff meringue of ideas. It was as though you could pluck one down, staple your name to it, and attain national recognition by that time next week. She set up a desk at Arthur’s place and dared to construct a few poems, little bowls of word-salad she threw together hastily enough to disavow attachment to them. At Arthur’s urging, she read them to a few slit-eyed friends dozing on a shag carpet.

Then for her birthday Arthur gave her a 16mm camera, a Bolex he’d bought in the park from a smacked-out chess player named Steve. She wandered the city alone, shooting quick bursts of whatever caught her eye, recording snatches of sound with a reel-to-reel slung over her shoulder. A streetlight, some trash, people on benches. At the time she was enthralled by Richard Avedon’s photographs: coal miners with blackened faces shot against white, angelic backgrounds, the effect rendering his subjects eerily otherworldly, transcendent. Everyone is worth noticing, the images said and always put her in mind of Charlie and how even today she’d give everything for a photo like this of her brother, with his light-chipped eyes, slanting grin, and grain dust in his coarse hair.

Then one September day she walked to Union Station, closed her eyes for nearly half an hour, deciding that the person she saw when she opened them would be her first subject. She threw her eyes open and asked a young woman if she could film her face, dead on, looking into the lens. The woman kindly complied and after some nervous smiles and hair fiddling, gave her thirty golden seconds of raw vulnerability. She repeated this with twenty others.

When the film was developed, however, a good portion proved unusable: a milk of ghostly light spilled over each frame. Diane was devastated. She’d changed the canister improperly, and light had leaked into the black felt bag while she switched reels.

Arthur pulled a favor and arranged some free late-night time on an editing machine at the National Film Board. “Make something at least,” he’d said. There she found some usable clips and a few nice frames she managed to duplicate as stills. But it wasn’t enough. Then, on her way to the bathroom, she spotted a nest of cut footage in a waste bin nearby. Nearly in tears, she asked another editor if she could use it. “Knock yourself out,” he said.

She spliced these unwanted clips, intercutting them with her own shots of the city and people at Union Station. She laid the sound she’d recorded of a crowd roaring at a hockey game over a shot of a person sleeping. The sound of a fistfight over lovers walking, a baby gurgling over documentary clips of a bullfight, trains shunting over shots of trash. It was the public invading the private, the inside invading the outside, and the effect was disorienting. When she showed it to him, Arthur declared her film genius, adding that it was about anxiety and public space and love and dread, which confused Diane but still flushed her with pride.

A premiere was organized. The film, which she’d titled The Sky in Here, drew effusive praise from those who cared about that sort of thing. They said that it had captured the “anxiety of the age” and compared it to Joan Didion’s essays and the films of Arthur Lipsett, both of which Diane had always loved. She won a first-film award and quickly made a few more works in a similar vein with money from the Film Board and the Arts Council, garnering still more awards and praise.