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after Montreal’s pretty streets. It is so absurd that it almost entirely obliterates any sexual desire. The steam of latte, the brainless chatter of glossy-haired girls, the fucking endless grind and whirr of machines: it’s enough to flatten the most illicit of passions. And Rafaela. She is, after all, a quite ordinary woman with crow’s feet at her eyes and chapped lips. He watches her suck her frappuccino through a straw, eyes focused on the street outside, and he tries to hold on to the freckles and the wet red suit and the pink begonias, but they are fading fast.
    He’s about to make up an excuse about a forgotten appoint­ment or a diseased testicle when she fastens her blue eyes on him and says, “If you think you feel stupid, imagine what it’s like for me.”
    There are things that he could say, but thankfully he does not say them. Without another word, they stand and leave their quasi-coffees on the table. They walk out and across the street into St. James Park under a blue sky pulled impossibly tight. They stroll out and ahead of their self-awareness. They stroll —slowly, closely. The heat feels good with that city humidity pushing down, flowers pushing up, and the dark still-cool lake at their backs. Junkies drowse, indolent under trees, and dogwalkers stoop to pick up after their pets while under the cover of the Victorian gazebo a tourist levels his camera. By the time they reach the end of the short park, Tibor is beginning, but just beginning, to remember the colour of Rafaela’s nipples.
    Thank God the hotel is close. If they had to travel, it wouldn’t work. Imagine the two of them in her little Toyota on their way to an illicit hotel rendezvous. What radio station would they listen to? Classic rock? Country? It’s too painful to imagine. As it is, the hotel appears at the other end of the park, at the end of their walk, as though they have summoned it.
    They don’t speak in the elevator. They don’t speak when they get to their room on the seventeenth floor looking out to the north of the city. As she had in Montreal, Rafaela goes into the bathroom, leaving the door ajar as she takes her clothes off, turns the shower on. “Tibor. Aren’t you coming?”
    Metal slide of the shower curtain rings on their rod, grate of thin plastic curtain against his arm and thigh. She stands, eyes closed, head back under the streaming water. Begonias bloom through clouds of steam.
    After this encounter, they agree to meet next at Tibor’s apart­ment.
    Tibor lives on the second floor of a multiply divided Vic­torian mansion on a leafy street south of Dupont. South is better than north of Dupont, and it’s still an easy commute to suburban York University, where he teaches.
    Upstairs is a graduate student in physics at University of Toronto, in and out at all times of the day. Downstairs is a writer—not the literary but the technical type and she is almost always home. He doesn’t really know either of these neighbours, and they don’t really know him and probably wouldn’t notice who made their way up the shared walkway lined with bushes that needed clipping. But even so, Tibor feels self-conscious. Sex in the middle of the day. The floor creaks and sound travels via radiators and God knows what other conduits. Plus, there’s one elderly Portuguese lady, across the street, still dressed in mourning though no doubt her husband has been gone for years, maybe decades. And she’s always on her front veranda, not reading, not doing anything, just sitting and watching the street. She would now know this about him. That he is having sex. And so what? For once his self-consciousness doesn’t impinge because at the thought of Rafaela Tibor feels, just barely, at the base of his throat, the very edge of happiness, paper thin and hopeful.
    . . .
    Four years ago, Tibor and Daniel were still friends and somehow they’d both