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outpouring of Canadian voices, the post-colonial cry of blaming anguish. The stream of current fiction about middle-class peopleliving in cities was diluting the authentic national voice that rose from the landscape itself and—
    Oh, shut up, shut up.
    Cappuccino foam dotted the corners of his undistinguished mouth. And just one more question, Mrs. Winters—
    Of course he didn’t call me Reta, even though there might be only a year or two between us. The “Mrs.” gave him power over me: that vexing r rucking things up in the middle and making one think of such distractions as clotheslines and baking tins. He was the barking terrier, going at Mrs. Winters’s ankles, shaking out his fur and asking me to justify myself, wanting me to explain the spluttering, dying, whimpering bonfire of my life, which I would not dream of sharing. He seemed to forget he was interviewing me about Danielle Westerman’s new book.
    I understand you’re working on a second novel, said he.
    Well, yes.
    Takes nerve.
    Uh-huh.
    Actually—actually, well, he had a novel on the go himself.
    Really! What a surprise!
    At the end of the hour he did not ask for the bill. I asked for the bill. “I’ll just put it on my Visa,” I said, breaking a tenuous breadth of silence. I announced this with all the majesty I could muster over a vinyl table, like a grande dame , adding twenty years to my age, and feeling the vowels shiftingin my beautifully moulded throat. Such dignity; I surprised myself with my own resonance, and I may have managed a pained smile, displaying, no doubt, that famous overbite. He turned off the tape recorder at the word “Visa.”
    He had two young children at home, he said. Christ, what a responsibility, although he loved the little bastards. One of them was quite, quite gifted; well, they both were in their separate ways. But the work of raising kids! Never enough time to read the books he had to review, books all over the house with little markers in them, books he would never finish. So much was expected, and of course, like all journalists, he was underpaid.
    Oh, shut up.
    They also expected him to do a feature on the weekend.
    Uh-huh?
    And last week he’d actually broken the MacBunna story.
    Really? Macumba? Marimba?
    Congratulations, said Mrs. Reta Winters from Orangetown.
    Thanks.
    I should be getting on my way, I said. My parking meter. A lunch date. A long drive home.
    I understand you and your family live in a lovely old house near Orangetown…
    And then, slyly: I understand one of your daughters now lives in Toronto and…

    I’ve been here before. There is something about having an established family, a long-lasting spousal arrangement, three daughters in their teens, a house in the country, a suggestion of impermeability, that draws the curiosity of others so that they can, as Tom says, probe with probity.
    But no, this man across the table will not be feeding on my flesh, nor will his colleagues—though one can tell that he has no colleagues; there is no possibility of colleagues. He has no context for friends or co-workers, though there are the kids and there’s the wife; he’s referred to her three times now. Nicola. She has her professional life, too, he tells me, as though the matter were in dispute.
    I can’t resist. “Does Nicola—is she a journalist too?”
    “Journalist?”
    “Like you, I mean.”
    His hand jumps, and for a moment I think he’s going to turn the tape recorder on again. But no, he’s reaching into his pocket and now he’s releasing two coins onto the table. The tip. They lie there, moist from his hand. Two dimes. I focus on them with what I hope is a cool, censorious gaze.
    But he’s not looking at me. He’s looking across the room where a silver-haired man is seating himself gracefully at a table. “I’m not sure, but I think that’s Gore Vidal,” my interviewer whispers in a hungry voice. “He’s here for the writers’ festival, you know.”

    I rise and exit, as