Sylvia left me wallowing in pain and yet I go on lecturing grad students about MacNiece and his poem, Spring Sunshine, when I don’t feel a thing.
And then suddenly Shannon Morris, a student in my lecture, wants to interview me for the campus newspaper and hope spring eternal from the ruins of my drab routine.
She wants to interview me in the Hart House cafeteria but already I sense it’s more than an interview amd more like a date.
Am I losing it, or reading it right? I throw caution to the wind and take a chance at recovering my life.
We get coffee and sequester ourselves in a back corner, away from prying eyes.
Her first question catches me totally off-guard.
“How old are you?” she asks.
“Thirty-five,” I answer. “How old are you?”
“Are we playing a glass bead game?” she teases. “Okay, I’m game—I’m twenty-four.”
I do the arithmetic and I’m in the ballpark.
“Are you married?”
I wince. She’s hit me at my point of maximum vulnerability.
“Not now,” I concede.
“But once, eh?”
I nod.
Her eyes mist. “I’m sorry, Matthew—I didn’t…”
I put my hand on hers. “You didn’t do anything wrong—and call me Matt—Matthew’s so formal.”
Her eyes shine.
Like the Ancient Mariner I open up—start telling her the story of my life.
“Her name was Sylvia. We grew up on the same street—were high school sweethearts—lived together at university. Eventually, we got married and bought an old house in the Annex. That’s when we slowly began to drift apart.”
She’s looking at me compassionately. “That’s so sad.”
“I guess the symbolic end of our marriage came the night our old house burned down—faulty wiring apparently. Neither of us had the heart to rebuild it again. I guess Sylvia felt that way about our marriage too. She took off to Montreal and I haven’t heard from her since.”
Shannon puts down her pen and stares out the window. A few students come in and recognize us. They whisper conspiratorially, a few tables away.
“I think we’ve been made,” I joke, nodding in the direction of the now-hushed table.
“I don’t want to embarrass you, Matt—maybe this wasn’t a good locale.”
“Would you care for a drink?” I say impulsively.
She looks at me, eyes huge and dark.
“Where do you have in mind?”
“The Roof Terrace of The Park Hotel.”
“I’ve never been,” she smiles.
“Ah well, the view of the city and campus is breath-taking and the atmosphere—” I nod in the direction of our hushed audience, “definitely more subdued.”
We drive to the Hotel in my Porsche and take the elevator to the roof. I order Shiraz and we talk and drink and watch the red-gray sunset.
The Toronto skyline lights up and the car lights along University Avenue turn into luminous strings of pearls.
A warm breeze flutters her hair. In the darkness and candle lit tables I pry open my heart to her.
We talk and drink late into the night and end up at my apartment. The rest of the night is a blur.
I awake as brash sunlight forces itself into the room. She’s gone—fled to home, her dorm or wherever coeds go.
I sit pensive, on the edge of the bed, on the verge of nullity, rehearsing events.
Who am I now, you may ask? —Because, like Prospero, have many reinventions.
I’m the Phoenix.
I build my own funeral pyre to consume myself and rise again.
I have no idea when I get back to the college if she’ll even be there, or if like Sylvia, she’s already fled.
I gather the lecture notes for today’s class. The paper with the portion I’ll read aloud, lies on my still-unmade bed:
If it is worth while really
To colonize any more the already populous
Tree of knowledge, to portion and reportion
Bits of broken knowledge brittle and dead,
Whether it would not be better
To hide one’s head in the warm sand of sleep
And be buried without hustle or bother.
Exactly. What’s it all about? Is it even wortwhile to go on?
I’m tempted to slip back under the covers—to no longer rise like the Phoenix and greet the new day.
Just let me this once indulge myself and my humor, and defy spring sunshine…
And bury myself beyond creaks and cawings
In a below world, a bottom world of amber.
But I don’t. I get up and dress and head back into work to face whatever Life has in store for me…
Either Shannon’s smiling face or another bleak patch of enduring grief.
