“I’m sorry,” Morrison had said, “some other time, okay? I have a lot of work to do.” He was nice enough, no doubt, but Morrison didn’t want to get involved with someone he didn’t know; and he did have work to do. He felt picayune about it later when he discovered the Korean had a wife and child down in his cubbyhole with him; often in the fall they had put fishes out to dry, stringing them on the clotheslines where they twirled in the wind like plastic gas-station decorations.

He was doing the ceiling, craning his neck, with the latex oozing down the handle of the roller onto his arm, when the buzzer went. He almost hoped it was the Korean, he seldom saw anyone on the weekends. But it was Louise.

“Hi,” he said, surprised.

“I just thought I’d drop in,” she said. “I don’t use the phone any more.”

“I’m painting,” he said, partly as an excuse: he wasn’t sure he wanted her in the house. What would she demand from him?

“Can I help?” she asked, as though it was a big treat.

“Actually I was about to stop for the day,” he lied. He knew she would be better at it than he was.

He made tea in the kitchen and she sat at the table and watched him.

“I came to talk about Blake,” she said. “I have to do a paper.” Unlike him she was only a Graduate Assistant, she was taking a course.

“What aspect?” Morrison asked, not interested. Blake wasn’t his field. He didn’t mind the earlier lyrics but the prophecies bored him and the extravagant letters in which Blake called his friends angels of light and vilified his enemies he found in bad taste.

“We each have to analyze one poem in Songs of Experience. I’m supposed to do the ‘Nurse’s Song.’ But they don’t know what’s going on in that course, he doesn’t know what’s going on. I’ve been trying to get through to them but they’re all doing the one-up thing, they don’t know what’s happening. They sit there and pull each other’s papers apart, I mean, they don’t know what poetry’s supposed to be for.” She wasn’t drinking her tea.

“When’s it due?” he asked, keeping on neutral ground.

“Next week. But I’m not going to do it, not the way they want. I’m giving them one of my own poems. That says it all. I mean, if they have to read one right there in the class they’ll get what Blake was trying to do with cadences. I’m getting it xeroxed.” She hesitated, less sure of herself. “Do you think that’ll be all right?”

Morrison wondered what he would do if one of his own students tried such a ploy. He hadn’t thought of Louise as the poetry-writing type. “Have you checked with the professor about it?”

“I try to talk to him,” she said. “I try to help him but I can’t get through to him. If they don’t get what I mean though I’ll know they’re all phonies and I can just walk out.” She was twisting her cup on the table top, her lips were trembling.

Morrison felt his loyalties were being divided; also he didn’t want her to cry, that would involve dangerous comforting pats, even an arm around her shoulder. He tried to shut out an involuntary quick image of himself on top of her in the middle of the kitchen floor, getting white latex all over her fur. Not today, his mind commanded, pleaded.

As if in answer the reverberations of an organ boomed from beneath their feet, accompanied by a high quavering voice: Rock of a-ges, cleft for me… Let me HIIIDE myself… Louise took it as a signal. “I have to go,” she said. She got up and went out as abruptly as she had come, thanking him perfunctorily for the tea she hadn’t drunk.

The organ was a Hammond, owned by the woman downstairs, a native. When her husband and nubile child were home she shouted at them. The rest of the time she ran the vacuum cleaner or picked out hymn tunes and old favourites on the organ with two fingers, singing to herself. The organ was to Morrison the most annoying. At first he tried to ignore it; then he put on opera records, attempting to drown it out. Finally he recorded it with his tape recorder. When the noise got too aggravating he would aim the speakers down the hot air register and run the tape through as loudly as possible. It gave him a sense of participation, of control.

He did this now, admiring the way the tape clashed with what she was currently playing: “Whispering Hope” with an overlay of “Annie Laurie”; “The Last Rose of Summer” counterpointing “Come to the Church in the Wild-wood.” He was surprised at how much he was able to hate her: he had only seen her once, looking balefully out at him from between her hideous flowered drapes as he wallowed through the snow on his way to the garage. Her husband was supposed to keep the walk shovelled but didn’t.

Louise came back the next day before Morrison was up. He was awake but he could tell by the chill in the room—his breath was visible—and by the faint smell of oil that something had gone wrong with the furnace again. It was less trouble to stay in bed, at least till the sun was well risen, then to get up and try the various ways of keeping warm.

When the buzzer went he pulled a blanket around himself and stumbled to the door.

“I thought of something,” Louise said tragically. She was in the door before he could fend her off.

“I’m afraid it’s cold in here,” he said.

“I had to come over and tell you. I don’t use the phone any more. You should have yours taken out.”

She stomped the snow from her boots while Morrison retreated into the livingroom. There was a thick crust of frost on the insides of the windows; he lit the gas fireplace. Louise stalked impatiently around the uncarpeted floor.

“You aren’t listening,” she said. He looked out obediently at her from his blanket. “What I thought of is this: The city has no right to be here. I mean, why is it? No city should be here, this far north: it isn’t even on a lake or an important river, even. Why is it here?” She clasped her hands, gazing at him as though everything depended on his answer.

Morrison, standing on one bare foot, reflected that he had often since his arrival asked himself the same question. “It started as a trading post,” he said, shivering.

“But it doesn’t look like one. It doesn’t look like anything, it doesn’t have anything, it could be anywhere. Why is it here ?” She implored; she even clutched a corner of his blanket.

Morrison shied away. “Look,” he said, “do you mind if I get some clothes on?”

“Which room are they in?” she asked suspiciously.

“The bedroom,” he said.

“That’s all right. That room’s all right,” she said.

Contrary to his fear she made no attempt to follow him in. When he was dressed he returned to find her sitting on the floor with a piece of paper. “We have to complete the circle,” she said. “We need the others.”

“What others?” He decided she was overtired, she had been working too hard: she had deep red blotches around her eyes and the rest of her face was pale green.

“I’ll draw you a diagram of it,” she said. But instead she sat on the floor, jabbing at the paper with the pencil point. “I wanted to work out my own system,” she said plaintively, “but they wouldn’t let me.” A tear slid down her cheek.

“Maybe you need to talk to someone,” Morrison said, over-casually.

She raised her head. “But I’m talking to you. Oh,” she said, reverting to her office voice, “you mean a shrink. I saw one earlier. He said I was very sane and a genius. He took a reading of my head: he said the patterns in my brain are the same as Julius Caesar’s, only his were military and mine are creative.” She started jabbing with the pencil again.

“I’ll make you a peanut butter sandwich,” Morrison said, offering the only thing he himself wanted right then. It did not occur to him until months later when he was remembering it to ask himself how anyone could have known about the patterns in Julius Caesar’s brain. At the moment he was wondering whether Louise might not in fact be a genius. He felt helpless because of his own inability to respond; she would think him as obtuse as the others, whoever they were.