Liberty Street Read Online Free PDF

could see the lights of city hall up ahead, and I drove there and parked the car in front of the building, and I imagined a cocktail party taking place beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows of the main floor, the genteel tinkle of champagne flutes, myself in a black dress, snow blowing into impossible drifts in the courtyard.
    My office was on the tenth floor. I looked up and saw the lights on in the office below mine, as though someone was working late, which would not be unusual. I often worked late, one spreadsheet or another on the computer screen in front of me. I could leave the car right now if I chose, use my access fob to open the front door and enter the elevator, step onto the tenth floor, and turn the light on in my office and go to work. On the other hand, I could just quit. It seemed like such a good idea, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before. I started the car and drove to a Tim Hortons and picked up a sandwich and a coffee, and then I went home.
    The bedroom door was closed and I assumed Ian was behind it, asleep, so I lay down on the couch rather than disturb him. Half an hour later, I heard a key in the front door and he came in, drunk and stumbling, dishevelled in a way that I had never before seen him.
    â€œGo to hell, Frances,” he said when he saw me on the couch, and then he went to the bedroom. But half an hour later, he came back and sat down on the couch by my feet and stared out into the dark room. He said, in a drunken voice, “Do you remember that I once asked you to marry me? No, that’s not right. I didn’t quite ask, because I was hedging my bets. I suggested we get married, and you did just what Ithought you would—you blew it off like dust, as though it wasn’t worth discussing.”
    Before I could speak, he got up, stumbled back to the bedroom, and closed the door.
    I knew the time he was talking about. People he worked with had been getting married, having babies. People his age. He was right that I hadn’t taken his suggestion seriously. I was over forty. And I was already married, which he now knew, but he hadn’t then.
    I heard sounds coming from the bedroom and realized that Ian was crying. I had never seen him cry. I was five years old the only other time I’d known a man to cry, when my mother briefly left my father and me, and I heard my father crying in the night. I’d woken up alone in my parents’ bed and heard a strange, muffled noise coming from the living room, and when I figured out it was my father crying, I thought my mother must have died. In the morning I’d fished for information by saying, “I wonder what Mom is having for breakfast,” and my father had said, “I suppose she’s having Cheerios, as usual,” and then everything seemed to be okay again, even though my mother was still not home.
    I heard another sob coming from Ian in the bedroom, and then it was quiet.
    If he hadn’t told me to go to hell—if he hadn’t left me on the couch the way he had—I might have gone to him, but I did not believe he wanted me to.
    I lay down again. All night, pictures of the city kept coming back to me—not familiar places where Ian and I had been together, but mysterious places and dark streets filled with strangers I would never know, or never remember if we did meet in a brief exchange. I felt as though my entire adult lifehere had been a series of brief exchanges. Even the people I worked with every day would remember me for only a short while if I left. “Remember Frances?” someone might say six months later. “She was difficult, aloof, not much interested in the rest of us.” I was surprised the thought had come to me so easily, that I would be remembered for being difficult, and so, I reasoned, it must be true. I could only hope that someone might jump in and say, in my defence, that I was smart, or right, or at least cared about public health and safe