Didn’t pursue that. Should have though, now I’ll never know. What they order. Was looking as usual for the cheapest thing on the menu. Need that whole hundred and twenty-five, why waste it on food? This food. The menu a skewed effort to be Elizabethan, everything spelled with an “e” at the end. Got the Anne Boleyn Special, a hamburger with no bun, garnished with a square of red Jell-O and followed by “a glass of skime milke.” Do they know that Anne Boleyn’s head was cut off? Is that why the hamburger has no bun? What goes on in people’s minds? Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that’s wrong. They know less, that’s why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted. The symbolism of the menu, for god’s sake, why am I even thinking about it? The menu has no symbolism, it’s just some dimwit’s ill-informed attempt to be cute. Isn’t it?

You’re too complicated, Bernie used to tell her, when they were still stroking and picking at each other’s psyches. You should take it easy. Lie back. Eat an orange. Paint your toenails.

All very well for him.

Maybe he wasn’t even up yet. He used to take naps in the afternoons, he’d be lying there under the heaped-up blankets of their Queen Street West apartment (over the store that had once sold hardware but was now a weaving boutique, and the rent was climbing), face down, arms flung out to either side, his socks on the floor where he’d discarded them, one after the other, like deflated feet or stiffened blue footprints leading to the bed. Even in the mornings he would wake up slowly and fumble his way to the kitchen for some coffee, which she would already have made. That was one of their few luxuries, real coffee. She’d have been up for hours, crouching at the kitchen table, worrying away at a piece of paper, gnawing words, shredding the language. He would place his mouth, still full of sleep, on hers, and perhaps pull her back into the bedroom and down into the bed with him, into that liquid pool of flesh, his mouth sliding over her, furry pleasure, the covers closing over them as they sank into weightlessness. But he hadn’t done that for some time. He had been waking earlier and earlier; she, on the other hand, had been having trouble getting out of bed. She was losing that compulsion, that joy, whatever had nagged her out into the cold morning air, driven her to fill all those notebooks, all those printed pages. Instead she would roll herself up in the blankets after Bernie got up, tucking in all the corners, muffling herself in wool. She had begun to have the feeling that nothing was waiting for her outside the bed’s edge. Not emptiness but nothing, the zero with legs in the arithmetic book.

“I’m off,” he’d say to her groggy bundled back. She’d be awake enough to hear this; then she would lapse back into a humid sleep. His absence was one more reason for not getting up. He would be going to The Notes from Underground, which was where he seemed to spend most of his time now. He was pleased with the way it had been going, they’d had several interviews in the papers, and it was easy for her to understand how something could be thought of as a qualified success and still not make money, since the same thing had happened to her book. But she worried a little because he wasn’t doing very much painting any more. His last picture had been a try at Magic Realism. It was her, sitting at the kitchen table, wrapped in the plaid rug off the foot of the bed, with her hair in a sleazy bun at the back of her neck, looking like some kind of famine victim. Too bad the kitchen was yellow; it made her skin green. He hadn’t finished it though. Paper work, he would say. That was what he spent his mornings at the gallery doing, that and answering the phone. The three of them were supposed to take turns and he should have been off at twelve, but he usually ended up there in the afternoons, too. The gallery had attracted a few younger painters, who sat around drinking plastic cups of Nescafé and cans of beer and arguing about whether or not anyone who bought a share in the gallery should be able to have a show there and whether the gallery should take commissions, and if not how it was going to survive. They had various schemes, and they’d recently hired a girl to do public relations, posters and mailings and bothering the media. She was freelance and did it for two other small galleries and one commercial photographer. She was just starting out, Bernie said. She talked about building them up. Her name was Marika; Julia had met her at the gallery, back in the days when she’d been in the habit of dropping around in the afternoons. That seemed a long time ago.

Marika was a peach-cheeked blonde, about twenty-two or three, anyway no more than five or six years younger than Julia. Although her name suggested the exotic, a Hungarian perhaps, her accent was flat Ontario and her last name was Hunt. Either a fanciful mother or a name-changing father, or perhaps Marika had adopted the name herself. She had been very friendly to Julia. “I’ve read your book,” she said. “I don’t find time to read too many books, but I got yours out of the library because of Bernie. I didn’t think I was going to like it, but actually it’s quite good.” Julia was grateful, Bernie said too grateful, to people who said they liked her work or who had even read it. Nevertheless, she heard a voice inside her head saying, Piss right off. It was the way Marika offered her compliment: like a biscuit to a dog, part reward, part bribe, and condescending.

Since then they’d had coffee together several times. It was always Marika who dropped over, on some errand or other from Bernie. They sat in the kitchen and talked, but no real connections were made. They were like two mothers at a birthday party, sitting on the sidelines while their children whooped and gobbled: they were polite to each other, but the real focus of their attention was elsewhere. Once Marika had said, “I’ve always thought I might like to write myself,” and Julia had felt a small red explosion at the back of her neck and had almost thrown her cup of coffee at her, until she realized Marika didn’t mean it that way, she was just trying to appear interested. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll run out of material?”

“Not material, energy,” she’d said, making it sound like a joke; but it had been true, that was her fear. Weren’t they the same thing? “According to Einstein,” she said, and Marika, having missed the connection, gave her a funny look and changed the subject to films.

The last time Marika came over, Julia wasn’t even out of bed. She had no excuse, no explanation. She almost told her to go away, but Bernie needed his black notebook, the one with the phone numbers, so she had to let her in. Marika leaned in the bedroom doorway, trim in her little layered look, dangling her handwoven bag, while Julia, with unwashed hair straggling over the shoulders of her nightgown, mossmouthed and blurryminded, knelt on the floor and scrabbled through Bernie’s discarded pockets. For the first time in their life she wished he would bloody well pick up his clothes. She felt exposed by them, though she shouldn’t, they weren’t her clothes, she hadn’t dropped them. Marika exuded surprise, embarrassment and a certain glee, as if Bernie’s dirty socks and trampled jeans were Julia’s soft underbelly, which she’d always wanted to get a look at.

“I don’t know where he’s put it,” Julia said, irritated. “He’s supposed to pick them up himself,” and added, far too defensively she knew, “We share everything.”

“Of course, with your work and all,” Marika said. She was scanning the room, the greyish bed, Julia’s sweater slumped in the corner chair, the avocado with brown-edged leaves on the windowsill, their only plant. She’d grown it from the pit of a celebration avocado—she could no longer remember the reason for the rejoicing—but there was something wrong with it. Tea-leaves, you were supposed to put tea-leaves on them, or was it charcoal?