M steps out of the shower.

J (growls): Aghhhhhh

M (gasps and shrieks): ahh!

J, laughing as ever: that was good

M smiles. How'd your shopping go?

J fairly glows as he leans against the counter, buttering a bagel for a midnight snack. I had such a good time. At half past eight the stores were closing, half stayed open until nine, but I couldn't get any shopping done in that half hour.

M looks apprehensive as is her habit. She curls her bare toes under the long edges of her pajamas, in t-shirt and bedclothes she looks dimunitive, she is a child.

So I sat down in a coffee shop, and these random people started talking to me. They were so nice! (here is voice raises in his usual elation.) They took me for a tour of London.

Just random people? M.'s face lights naturally in a smile-in-response.

Yeah, they're students at the university of london, over there. They walked me home.

Their street and the campus they had discovered the other night flashes into her mind vividly, for M. has a photographic memory. But she is imaginaing the scene now - J. in a warm coffee shop, hands over blue Nero cup. Probably poised shyly on a brown faux-leather seat, looking somewhat cold, pitiful, childlike, and interesting in his mixed British features. That attracts the group of British students' attention. She cannot imagine herself ever in the same situation, with the same results. There would be awkwardness, curious glances, indecent attraction. But she asks practically:

"Do you have contacts for these people? Can we hang out with them?" she is good at gleeful excitement, after all she is full of it.

"Yeah! Now I have four British friends" and he numbers them off on his large, capable fingers.

She later learns that they are not at all British, "but Australian, something else, and Irish"...hailing from Glasgow "which is in Scotland." she corrects J. with a smile, as if her geographical superiority gives her a better claim to their friendship! She also learns that they are "really intelligent", historians/economists, artists, and a writer. Already she feels sealed of the tribe, and wishes they would be her friend, and wonders why they weren't her friend first.

They talk too of trivia - these two good friends, of querying Notting Hill where M. states her expectations the romantic gate scene with a touch of girlish contrition in her voice, J. recounts the historians' account of fascist revival in Germany, M. quickly recalls debates on racism and bits of news she has heard but in J.'s manner you hear a note of inadequacy. "I didn't know much of the the topics" he implied, but it didn't bother him.

"People are so friendly here." J. is still fairly basking in happiness, you can tell they are both children by how easily they are made happy and how their happiness lingers. "This is a good city, maybe it's because it rains so much. I love the rain, it brings me luck."

M.'s face darkens again - the rain has not brought her much luck, she has been wet and uncomfortable she says. How the men love rain! But she wonders jealously why her omens are absent - the wonder-world of snow that has always made her believe - strongly, silently, in - she did not know what. She only knew she always felt a certain faith and content under a purple sky - "Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, the silent stars go by."

"But it doesn't top Toronto?" she queries.

They launch into their favourite architectural debate. J.'s large, noisy hands gesture animatedly as he describes the pedestrian landscape and the wonders of each district. M.'s eyes furrow, and she argues "But the scale isn't right for a pedestrian experiences. The streets are too large and wide, the skyscrapers too tall, there are large empty spaces and stretches of uninviting streets between one landmark to another. I never like to walk in Toronto." And she knows it is a sentiment she has felt since her girlhood, since her parents complained of the deceptiveness of seeing something and the time it takes to reach it. Across bitterly cold, wide open plains!

And she avers, "I still think you love Toronto because it's your first city. This doesn't beat New York for me, but I'm sure I'm biased because it was the first place I was by myself. New York was just so much fun..." she trails off in that sweet tone of remembrance.

Then she realizes it is not enough for J., so she tries to find architectural merit as justification. "In cities like New York and London you can just walk on forever, and not notice how far you've gone... there is always something to hold your attention. Whereas Toronto so quickly peters into nothingness... the bit at Union under the tunnel... west queen west at the railway bridge..."

"But they're changing that. Liebskind's building something at Union... they're surrounding the big parking lot at Air Canada center..."

It is not enough for M., but J. is excited by the change - "We'll see it happen. That interests me more than here, where everything is in place..."

M. is not convinced - it took them ten years to build a stunted subway line, she argues, the waterfront will take years before it is realized and create havoc and distress in the meantime. The architect in his eagerness neglects the immediate users in his vision, the children growing up between the scaffolding. The sawdust still thickens the air for them. She had grown up close enough to Toronto to call herself "of" it.

"But that's what's so fascinating about here - reading the palimpsest of history written over one another, how each epoch made breathing room for him(her)self in a rigid structure. Whereas in the 'New World' each man has been alloted his square on the grid."

Finally J. goes to sleep, peaceful and perfectly happy with his day's labours. She has had a day of labours too of the more wearisome sort, making appointments with the social security office, the phone and internet companies and the landlord, because nobody else would take initiative, and she feels indignantly unjustified and unappreciated. She lies awake for a long time with a cold stomach, running over the conversation and the conversation imagined from the conversation in her head. She prays for her own deliverance.