The Progress of Love

no listing for a Michael Read.”
    “All right. Try Reade, R-E-A-D-E.”
    There is indeed an M. Reade, on Davenport Road. Not a Michael but at least an M. Check back and see, then. Is there an M. Read? Read? Yes. Yes, there is an M. Read, living on Simcoe Street. And another M. Read, R-E-A-D, living on Harbord. Why didn’t she say that sooner?
    He picks Harbord on a hunch. That’s not too far from Dina’s apartment. The operator tells him the number. He tries to memorizeit. He has nothing to write with. He feels it’s important not to ask the operator to repeat the number more than once. He should not reveal that he is here in a phone booth without a pen or pencil. It seems to him that the desperate, furtive nature of his quest is apparent, and that at any moment he may be shut off, not permitted to acquire any further information about M. Read or M. Reade, on Harbord or Simcoe or Davenport, or wherever.
    Now he must start all over again. The Toronto area code. No, the operator. The memorized number. Quick, before he loses his nerve, or loses the number. If she should answer, what is he going to say? But it isn’t likely that she will answer, even if she is there. M. Read will answer. Then David must ask for Dina. But perhaps not in his own voice. Perhaps not in a man’s voice at all. He used to be able to do different voices on the phone. He could even fool Stella at one time.
    Perhaps he could do a woman’s voice, squeaky. Or a child’s voice, a little-sister voice. Is Dina there?
    “I beg your pardon, sir?”
    “Nothing. Sorry.”
    “It’s ringing now. I will let you know when to deposit your money.”
    What if M. Read is a woman? Not Michael Read at all. Mary Read. Old-age pensioner. Career girl. What are you phoning me for? Sexual harassment. Back to information, then. Try M. Read on Simcoe. Try M. Reade on Davenport. Keep trying.
    “I’m sorry. I can’t seem to get an answer.”
    The phone rings again and again in M. Read’s apartment, or house, or room. David leans against the metal shelf, where his change is waiting. A car has parked in the liquor-store lot. The couple in it are watching him. Obviously waiting to use the phone. With any luck, Ron and Mary will drive up next.
    Dina lives above an Indian-import shop. Her clothes and hair always have a smell of curry powder, nutmeg, incense, added to what David thinks of as her natural smell, of cigarettes and dope and sex. Her hair is dyed dead black. Her cheeks bear a slash of crude color and her eyelids are sometimes brick red. She tried outonce for a part in a movie some people she knew about were making. She failed to get the part because of some squeamishness about holding a tame rat between her legs. This failure humiliated her.
    David sweats now, trying not to catch her out but to catch her any way at all, to hear her harsh young voice, with its involuntary tremor and insistent obscenities. Even if hearing it, at this moment, means that she has betrayed him. Of course she has betrayed him. She betrays him all the time. If only she would answer (he has almost forgotten it’s M. Read who is supposed to answer), he could howl at her, berate her, and if he felt low enough—he would feel low enough—he could plead with her. He would welcome the chance. Any chance. At dinner, talking in a lively way to Stella and Catherine, he kept writing the name Dina with his finger on the underside of the wooden table.
    People don’t have any patience with this sort of suffering, and why should they? The sufferer must forgo sympathy, give up on dignity, cope with the ravages. And on top of that, people will take time out to tell you that this isn’t real love. These bouts of desire and dependence and worship and perversity, willed but terrible transformations—they aren’t real love.
    Stella used to tell him he wasn’t interested in love. “Or sex, even. I don’t think you’re even interested in sex, David. I think all you’re interested in is being a big bad boy.”
    Real love—that would be going on living with Stella, or taking on Catherine. A person presumed to know all about Real Love might be Ron, of Ron-and-Mary.
    David knows what he’s doing. This is the interesting part of it, he thinks, and has said. He knows that Dina is not really so wild, or so avid, or doomed, as he pretends she is, or as she sometimes pretends she is. In ten years’ time, she won’t be wrecked by her crazy life, she won’t be a glamorous whore. She’ll be a