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visited Daniel on Palmerston (when Daniel first made him tea with the brand-new kettle), Tibor felt he’d finally entered the heaving, bubbling pool where life itself was formed. This, right here, was the organic mess from which ideas, history itself, would emerge. You could feel the surge of it. You could walk along College and feel the sidewalk cracking, the old storefronts heaving, the streets blowing with futurity. And if you were here, you were part of it. Simple as that. Living cheek by jowl with the great and the potentially great, you could be poor, be artists, be scientists and writers and intellectuals, and you could whip this world. This was what it meant to be off College. It was not Tibor’s world. Tibor lived in a basement north of Dupont, a land barren of pretty girls and Italian coffees, and as he walked north, he knew that mattered.
    Tibor had applied to Toronto, McGill, and Queen’s. He’d yet to receive an answer from any of them. He was reasonably certain that Toronto would accept him into its master’s program, but he was hoping for a federal scholarship, enough money that he could move to a new place, maybe a smaller place, more compact, where he could thrive and grow into the proportion he felt was rightly his. But an American school? He should have expected it from Daniel. And to keep it a secret too.
    Tibor propelled himself northward, legs and arms pumping past the apartment balconies where he’d rather be, furious with his own passivity, furious with the fucking Tibor Rolandness of him that he hadn’t had the temerity to imagine Harvard for himself.
    . . .
    Three weeks pass before Rafaela calls. June. For the first week, he checked his answering machine regularly and his heart jumped when the phone rang. But then nothing, and he figured that she’d gotten home and given her head a shake, realized that she was married and what had she been thinking. She seemed a practical kind of woman, one not likely to succumb to fantasy.
    So when she calls and says, “Hello, this is Rafaela,” she is answered, at first, by the blank silence of surprise.
    â€œRafaela,” he says finally. “How are you?”
    â€œI’m good, thanks, and you?”
    â€œWell, I can’t complain.” Did he really say that? He cringes, knocks a fist to his forehead.
    â€œGreat, great. I’m just calling to…” And here she, too, stumbles, uncertain of the tone and language required to set up a meeting where obviously the purpose is sex but where, just as obviously, the purpose couldn’t be overtly stated. “Are you free this Thursday afternoon?”
    Tibor does a quick mental run through his schedule. Empty, basically. Why pretend? “Thursday? Thursday’s fine. Where would you, ah…”
    â€œHow about…There’s a Second Cup on King, near Jarvis. Say twelve-thirty?”
    â€œKing and Jarvis,” he repeats, writing it down on the back of an envelope as though he might forget it otherwise. “I’ll see you there.”
    King Street is nowhere close to his home, or his work, thank goodness. Also far from the University of Toronto student ghetto. Not much chance he’d bump into anyone he knew, students or faculty. King and Jarvis, where the business and bank towers peter out, and where, just a thin block away, furniture stores and condos are shouldering aside homeless shelters, pawnshops, and prostitutes. The Second Cup—bland and in between, the perfect setting for an illicit rendezvous. An affair .
    Sometime not far into his cappuccino, he stutters to a stop. How absurd to be sitting—no, to be sunk—in a brown leather armchair with his knees uncomfortably high under posters of lavishly frothed milk, trading observations about Toronto in the summer—too humid, bad air quality, but there’s nothing like the pleasure of a beer on a street-side patio—and doesn’t it all look so utilitarian