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personality?
    That’s good, came Harry’s answer. Self-doubt is good. Most announcers are full of themselves, they’re so in love with the sound of their own voices. You don’t want a plummy sound. You don’t want to be Henry Comor the second.
    Gwen flared up. She loved Henry Comor, she told him. She had listened to “Hermit’s Choice” every Saturday night when she was sixteen.
    “Gwen, Gwen. Why weren’t you out partying?”
    Because nobody invited her. Curled up in the big armchair beside the varnished standing cabinet that contained the radio, she listened to Henry Comor interview well-known actors, writers, professors, journalists, politicians about what four books and four records they would take to a desert island, what in their solitude they would rely on for company. It was Robinson Crusoe-in-advance. Emotional seafaring on the airwaves.
    She liked Comor’s voice speaking
to
her, unhurried, and then to his guests. One of his guests, she remembered, was a professor of French who chose Stendhal’s
Scarlet and Black
as one of his four books and talked about the very sad moment in his life when he discovered that Stendhal, who was short, fat, ugly, and too intelligent to be agreeable, died young, in his fifties, without having achieved his simple aim of being loved for himself. Then there was the Montreal poet Louis Dudek, who sounded like a farm boy and chose Joyce’s
Ulysses
, since he wanted a book he could labour on. There was J. Frank Willis, the voice that reported the 1936 Moose River mine disaster with three-minute broadcasts every half hour for sixty-nine hours, day and night, without sleep. His breathing was heavy the night she heard him with Henry Comor, his voice like tires on a gravel road leading to a summer lake. He chose George Gershwin, saying that the night Gershwin died, artists gathered at the Hollywood Bowl and played his music for seven hours straight.
    Henry Comor’s voice changed, depending on his guest. Anyone with an English accent, and his own voice got moreposh. But she didn’t blame him, or any of them. She found it all too interesting. “It was wonderful company,” she said to Harry.
    Harry didn’t seem to be paying attention. But he was.
    “How did you come by that bruise?” He pointed to her throat, and her fingers went to the fading colour. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
    Outside, a car door slammed. A town where you could hear every sound. She saw a piece of paper fly across the street and wondered how much snow would fall in the winter and how cold it would get and whether she would still have a job in radio by then.
    What happened, she said finally, still staring out the window behind Harry, was a scary encounter on her way to Yellowknife. She was north of Edmonton, near the Alberta— Northwest Territories border, when she asked a nice-seeming farmer, thirty or so, not old, about a campground and he offered his lane as an overnight camping spot. In the middle of the night he came into her tiny trailer and she jerked awake, sitting up with a pounding heart. He put his finger to his lips and whispered that he liked long hair on a girl. Then he bent over and pushed his mouth hard against hers. She shoved him away and his voice turned mean.
What’s the matter? You don’t like men?
He must have used the side of his hand. Striking her across the windpipe so hard she choked. But then, amazingly, he left. She got herself dressed and peeled out of there, and when it began to get light she pulled over to the side of the road and dug out her nail scissors and cut off her long hair.
    Gwen looked over at Harry’s concerned, assessing face and said, “I know. I know what you’re thinking.” He wasthinking—she thought—that she’d put herself in danger and was lucky to have escaped. That she was asking for trouble.
    “What am I thinking, Gwen?”
    “That I’ll never get work in a hair salon.”
    He liked the joke. But that wasn’t what had been in his mind.