Runaway

was Japanese. A Japanese boy with the sweetly downcast face of a young priest was chopping fish at a terrifying speed behind the counter. Ollie called out, “How’s it going, Pete?” and the young man called back, “Fan-tas-tic,” in a derisive North American voice without losing a bit of his rhythm. Nancy had a flash of discomfort—was it because Ollie had used the young man’s name and the young man hadn’t used Ollie’s? And because she hoped Ollie wouldn’t notice her noticing that? Some people— some men—set such store on being friends with people in shops and restaurants.
    She couldn’t stand the idea of raw fish, so she had noodles. The chopsticks were unfamiliar to her—they didn’t seem like the Chinese chopsticks she had used once or twice—but they were all that was provided.
    Now that they were settled, she should speak about Tessa. It might be more decent, though, to wait for him to tell her.
    So she began to talk about the cruise. She said that she would never go on another one of those to save her life. It wasn’t the weather, though some of that was bad, with rain and fog cutting off the view. They got enough view, actually, more than enough to last a lifetime. Mountain after mountain and island after island and rocks and water and trees. Everybody saying, isn’t that stupendous? Isn’t that stunning?
    Stunning, stunning, stunning. Stupendous.
    They saw bears. They saw seals, sea lions, a whale. Everybody taking pictures. Sweating and cussing and afraid their fancy new cameras weren’t working right. Then off the boat and the ride on the famous railway to the famous gold-mining town and more pictures and actors dressed up like the Gay Nineties and what did most people do there? Lined up to buy fudge.
    Singsongs on the train. And on the boat, the boozing. Some people from breakfast time on. Card games, gambling. Dancing every night, with ten old women to one old man.
    “All us ribboned and curled and spangled and poufed up like doggies in a show. I’m telling you, the competition was wild.”
    Ollie laughed at various points during this story, though she caught him once looking not at her but towards the counter, with an absentminded, anxious expression. He had finished his soup and might have been thinking about what was coming next. Perhaps he, like some other men, felt slighted when his food did not come promptly.
    Nancy kept losing her grip on the noodles.
    “And God Almighty, I kept thinking, just what, whatever, am I ever doing here? Everybody had been telling me I should get away. Wilf was not himself for a few years and I’d looked after him at home. After he died people said I should get out and join things. Join the Seniors’ Book Club, join the Seniors’ Nature Walks, join the Watercolour Painting. Even the Seniors Volunteer Visitors, who go and intrude on the poor defenseless creatures in the hospital. So I just didn’t feel like doing any of that, and then everybody started with Get away, get away. My kids as well. You need a total holiday. So I shillied and shallied and I didn’t really know how to get away, and somebody said, well, you could go on a cruise. So I thought, well, I could go on a cruise.”
    “Interesting,” said Ollie. “I don’t think losing a wife would ever make it occur to me to go on a cruise.”
    Nancy hardly missed a beat. “That’s smart of you,” she said.
    She waited for him to say something about Tessa, but his fish had come and he fussed with it. He tried to persuade her to taste a bit.
    She wouldn’t. In fact, she gave up on the meal entirely, lit a cigarette.
    She said she had always been watching and waiting to see something more he had written after that piece that made all the furor. It showed he was a good writer, she said.
    He looked bewildered for a moment, as if he could not recall what she was talking about. Then he shook his head, as if he was amazed, and said that was years ago, years ago.
    “It wasn’t what I really wanted.”
    “What do you mean by that?” said Nancy. “You’re not the way you used to be, are you? You’re not the same.”
    “Of course not.”
    “I mean, there’s something just basically, physically different. You’re built differently. Your shoulders. Or am I not remembering right?”
    He said that was it, exactly. He had realized he wanted a more physical kind of life. No. What happened, in order, was that he had a return of the old demon (she supposed he meant the TB) and he