Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

establishment in Toronto.
    “And she had no business not paying you,” he said.
    “You’d think the husband might have come forward,” said Leslie. “If he was the druggist, he was the boss.”
    Mr. Vorguilla said, “He might brew up a special dose someday. For his wife.”
    It wasn’t so hard to pour out tea and offer milk and sugar and pass sandwiches, and even talk, when you knew something another person didn’t know, about a danger he was in. It was just because he didn’t know, that I could feel something other than loathing for Mr. Vorguilla. It wasn’t that he had changed in himself—or if he had changed it was probably because I had.
    Soon he said that it was time for him to get ready to go to work. He went to change his clothes. Then Leslie asked me if I would like to have supper with him.
    “Just around the corner there’s a place I go,” he said. “Nothing fancy. Nothing like Stan’s place.”
    I was glad enough to hear that it wouldn’t be anyplace fancy. I said, “Sure.” And after we had dropped off Mr. Vorguilla at the restaurant we drove in Leslie’s car to a fish and chips place. Leslie ordered the Super Dinner—though he had just consumed several chicken sandwiches—and I ordered the Regular. He had a beer and I had a Coke.
    He talked about himself. He said he wished he had gone to Teachers’ College himself instead of choosing music, which did not make for a very settled life.
    I was too absorbed in my own situation even to ask him what kind of musician he was. My father had bought me a return ticket, saying, “You never know how things are going to sit with him and her.” I had thought of that ticket at the moment I watched Queenie tucking Andrew’s letter under the waistband of her underpants. Even though I didn’t yet know that it was Andrew’s letter.
    I hadn’t just come to Toronto, or come to Toronto to get a summer job. I had come to be part of Queenie’s life. Or if necessary, part of Queenie’s and Mr. Vorguilla’s life. Even when I had the fantasy about Queenie living with me, the fantasy had something to do with Mr. Vorguilla and how she would be serving him right.
    And when I’d thought of the return ticket I was taking something else for granted. That I could go back and live with Bet and my father and be part of their life.
    My father and Bet. Mr. and Mrs. Vorguilla. Queenie and Mr. Vorguilla. Even Queenie and Andrew. These were couples and each of them, however disjointed, had now or in memory a private burrow with its own heat and disturbance, from which I was cut off. And I had to be, I wished to be, cut off, for there was nothing I could see in their lives to instruct me or encourage me.
    Leslie too was a person cut off. Yet he talked to me about various people he was connected to by ties of blood or friendship. His sister and her husband. His nieces and nephews, the married couples he visited and spent holidays with. All of these people had problems, but all had value. He talked about their jobs, lack of jobs, talents, strokes of luck, errors in judgment, with great interest but a lack of passion. He was cut off, it seemed, from love or rancor.
    I would have seen flaws in this, later in my life. I would have felt the impatience, even suspicion a woman can feel towards a man who lacks a motive. Who has only friendship to offer and offers that so easily that even if it is rejected he can move along as cheerfully as ever. Here was no solitary fellow hoping to hook up with a girl. Even I could see that. Just a person who took comfort in the moment and in a sort of reasonable facade of life.
    His company was just what I needed, though I hardly realized it. Probably he was being deliberately kind to me. As I had thought of myself as being kind to Mr. Vorguilla, or at least protecting him, so unexpectedly, a little while before.

    I was at Teachers’ College when Queenie ran away again. I got the news in a letter from my father. He said that he did not know just how or when it happened. Mr. Vorguilla hadn’t let him know for a while, and then he had, in case Queenie had come back home. My father had told Mr. Vorguilla he didn’t think there was much chance of that. In the letter to me he said that at least it wasn’t the kind of thing we could say now that Queenie wouldn’t do.
    For years, even after I was married, I would get a Christmas card from Mr. Vorguilla. Sleighs laden with bright parcels; a happy family in a decorated doorway, welcoming