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fell asleep sitting up, with the bedside light on, and the cocoa mug lying on its side on the blue comforter, and her mother’s letter loosely fallen from her hand.
    —
    Margaret Wallace had written: “Each morning I awaken to the dazzling bright splendor of sunlight on water, and I lie in bed watching the long, serious, slender freighters glide past, and I try to think of the proper names for all the different blues I see dancing in the water. (Robin’s egg, indigo, sapphire.) I stretch in my wide bed, on my cool blue sheets, and don’t want to rise, and then think, I don’t have to! And sometimes I cry for joy, for the beauty and luxuriousness of my life.
    “At night it is the same. I cannot bear to go to sleep, I sit up in my old blue chair (I found a cotton batik spread in a shop in Dundarave, a spread covered with wide wild stripes of rainbow, and threw it over the chair, so it does not look the same, it is new, as I am). And I stare and stare out the window at the water, at the dark. Sometimes the moon spreads itself across the water in uneven, uneasy strips; it is always shimmering, changing, curving into new forms, as if lying very lightly and restlessly on the surface of the water, which otherwise would absorb it, drink it, cause it to vanish, unlike the reliable certain earth which only refuses and reflects. Sometimes there is no moon, but still the show of dancing lights as the cars cross over and back on the Lion’s Gate Bridge, over and back, and then the lights of the houses and the city flash and tease, and even very late at night I can see lights somewhere. I do not feel alone, I feel sufficiently accompanied, and I wonder if across the harbor, on the eastern shore, another woman is sitting with a glass of brandy in her hand, staring at the water, smiling back at me. Pandora often comes into the room at night—she likes to go about then, you know—and she often comes into my bedroom and leaps up onto my bed, just out of touching distance, and our eyes meet for a moment. I do not need to speak to her; our eyes meet, that is enough, and then she sits and watches the night with me and is elegant and understanding enough to refuse to break our happy silence with a sound. A most companionable cat.
    “What is it I am in love with, I wonder sometimes: is it Vancouver, this blue and silver city, that glitters and shines and spangles, yet is real, or is it this house,
my
house, or is it my life, my wonderful brave new freedom, or is it me, what I have become? Everything gives me such enormous pleasure: looking at myself in the mirror, in my loose and gay new clothes; walking through the rooms of my house, which respond to me as flowers do, silently but generously, almost giving off perfumes; walking the streets of this city, seeing the wet streets glisten with rain. It’s as if I am living inside a rainbow, and everything is shimmering and iridescent and fine—Do you remember, the summer we all were in Paris, seeing the movie
Peau d’Ane,
with Catherine Deneuve? Do you remember that she asked for a gown the color of the sky, and magically, she was given that gown, a whole piece of fabric which she wore, which was the most pale and glorious of blues, with real clouds floating on it? Remember the horses the knights and soldiers rode in the movie, the horses that were really red, really blue? My life is like that now, my real life is like that, like a dress made from the sky, like a blue horse, like a princess’s hair so fine and bright it seems spun from gold.
    “This morning, for breakfast—actually, it was almost lunch, it was a little after eleven when I finally rose—this morning for breakfast, I had fresh strawberries and a glass of champagne. I ate the strawberries and drank the champagne from the platinum-rimmed crystal etched with leaves which my grandmother had given me, and which your father and I used only for our most formal and pompous dinners. I wiped my hands on a linen napkin of dove gray