Dance of the Happy Shades

friends or whoever they are up to see you—”
    “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “And another thing, you claim to be a writer. Well I read quite a bit of material, and I never have seen your name in print. Now maybe you write under some other name?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Well I don’t doubt there are writers whose names I haven’t heard,” he said genially. “We’ll let that pass. Just you give me your word of honour there won’t be any more deceptions, or any carryings-on, et cetera, in that office you occupy—”
    My anger was delayed somehow, blocked off by a stupid incredulity. I only knew enough to get up and walk down the hall, his voice trailing after me, and lock the door. I thought—I must go. But after I had sat down in my own room, my work in front of me, I thought again how much I liked this room, how well I worked in it, and I decided not to be forced out. After all, I felt, the struggle between us had reached a deadlock. I could refuse to open the door, refuse to look at his notes, refuse to speak to him when we met. My rent was paid in advance and if I left now it was unlikely that I would get any refund. I resolved not to care. I had been taking my manuscript home every night, to prevent his reading it, and now it seemed that even this precaution was beneath me. What did it matter if he read it, any more than if the mice scampered over it in the dark?
    Several times after this I found notes on my door. I intended not to read them, but I always did. His accusations grew more specific. He had heard voices in my room. My behaviour was disturbing his wife when she tried to take her afternoon nap. (I never came in the afternoons, except on weekends.) He had found a whisky bottle in the garbage.
    I wondered a good deal about that chiropractor. It was not comfortable to see how the legends of Mr. Malley’s life were built up.
    As the notes grew more virulent our personal encounters ceased. Once or twice I saw his stooped, sweatered back disappearing as I came into the hall. Gradually our relationship passed into something that was entirely fantasy. He accused me now, by note, of being intimate with people from
Numero Cinq
. This was a coffee-house in the neighbourhood, which I imagine he invoked for symbolic purposes. I felt that nothing much more would happen now, the notes would go on, their contents becoming possibly more grotesque and so less likely to affect me.
    He knocked on my door on a Sunday morning, about eleven o’clock. I had just come in and taken my coat off and put my kettle on the hot plate.
    This time it was another face, remote and transfigured, that shone with the cold light of intense joy at discovering the proofs of sin.
    “I wonder,” he said with emotion, “if you would mind following me down the hall?”
    I followed him. The light was on in the washroom. This washroom was mine and no one else used it, but he had not given me a key for it and it was always open. He stopped in front of it, pushed back the door and stood with his eyes cast down, expelling his breath discreetly.
    “Now who done that?” he said, in a voice of pure sorrow.
    The walls above the toilet and above the washbasin werecovered with drawings and comments of the sort you see sometimes in public washrooms on the beach, and in town hall lavatories in the little decaying towns where I grew up. They were done with a lipstick, as they usually are. Someone must have got up here the night before, I thought, possibly some of the gang who always loafed and cruised around the shopping centre on Saturday nights.
    “It should have been locked,” I said, coolly and firmly as if thus to remove myself from the scene. “It’s quite a mess.”
    “It sure is. It’s pretty filthy language, in my book. Maybe it’s just a joke to your friends, but it isn’t to me. Not to mention the art work. That’s a nice thing to see when you open a door on your own premises in the morning.”
    I said, “I believe lipstick will wash off.”
    “I’m just glad I didn’t have my wife see a thing like this. Upsets a woman that’s had a nice bringing up. Now why don’t you ask your friends up here to have a party with their pails and brushes? I’d like to have a look at the people with that kind of a sense of humour.”
    I turned to walk away and he moved heavily in front of me.
    “I don’t think there’s any question how these decorations found their way onto my walls.”
    “If you’re trying to say I had