Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

arms.
    And she had to go to the bathroom. She kept looking for the Visitors’ Washrooms, which she thought she had spotted when they were on their way in.
    There. She was right. A relief, but also a difficulty, because she had to move suddenly out of his range and to say, “Just a moment,” in a voice that sounded to herself distant and irritated. He said, “Yes,” and briskly headed for the Men’s, and the delicacy of the moment was lost.
    When she went out into the hot sunlight she saw him pacing by the car, smoking. He hadn’t smoked before—not in Jonas’s parents’ house or on the way here or with Aunt Muriel. The act seemed to isolate him, to show some impatience, perhaps an impatience to be done with one thing and get on to the next. She was not so sure now, whether she was the next thing or the thing to be done with.
    “Where to?” he said, when they were driving. Then, as if he thought he had spoken too brusquely, “Where would you like to go?” It was almost as if he was speaking to a child, or to Aunt Muriel—somebody he was bound to entertain for the afternoon. And Meriel said, “I don’t know,” as if she had no choice but to let herself become that burdensome child. She was holding in a wail of disappointment, a clamor of desire. Desire that had seemed to be shy and sporadic but inevitable, yet was now all of a sudden declared inappropriate, one-sided. His hands on the wheel were all his own, reclaimed as if he had never touched her.
    “How about Stanley Park?” He said. “Would you like to go for a walk in Stanley Park?”
    She said, “Oh, Stanley Park. I haven’t been there for ages,” as if the idea had perked her up and she could imagine nothing better. And she made things worse by adding, “It’s such a gorgeous day.”
    “It is. It is indeed.”
    They spoke like caricatures, it was unbearable.
    “They don’t give you a radio in these rented cars. Well, sometimes they do. Sometimes not.”
    She wound her window down as they crossed the Lion’s Gate Bridge. She asked him if he minded.
    “No. Not at all.”
    “It always means summer to me. To have the window down and your elbow out and the breeze coming in—I don’t think I could ever get used to air-conditioning.”
    “Certain temperatures, you might.”
    She willed herself to silence, till the forest of the park received them, and the high, thick trees could perhaps swallow witlessness and shame. Then she spoiled everything by her too appreciative sigh.
    “Prospect Point.” He read the sign aloud.
    There were plenty of people around, even though it was a weekday afternoon in May, with vacations not yet started. In a moment they might remark on that. There were cars parked all along the drive up to the restaurant, and line-ups on the viewing platform for the coin-use binoculars.
    “Aha.” He had spotted a car pulling out of its place. A reprieve for a moment from any need for speech, while he idled, backed to give it room, then maneuvered into the fairly narrow spot. They got out at the same time, walked around to meet on the sidewalk. He turned this way and that, as if deciding where they were to walk. Walkers coming and going on any path you could see.
    Her legs were shaking, she could not put up with this any longer.
    “Take me somewhere else,” she said.
    He looked her in the face. He said, “Yes.”
    There on the sidewalk in the world’s view. Kissing like mad.

    Take me , was what she had said. Take me somewhere else , not Let’s go somewhere else . That is important to her. The risk, the transfer of power. Complete risk and transfer. Let’s go —that would have the risk, but not the abdication, which is the start for her—in all her reliving of this moment—of the erotic slide. And what if he had abdicated in his turn? Where else ? That would not have done, either. He has to say just what he did say. He has to say, Yes .
    He took her to the apartment where he was staying, in Kitsilano. It belonged to a friend of his who was away on a fish boat, somewhere off the west coast of Vancouver Island. It was in a small, decent building, three or four stories high. All that she would remember about it would be the glass bricks around the front entrance and the elaborate, heavy hi-fi equipment of that time, which seemed to be the only furniture in the living room.
    She would have preferred another scene, and that was the one she substituted, in her memory. A narrow six-or seven-story hotel, once a