Читать книгу The Slip - Mark Sampson - Страница 8

I must confess I don’t really get the Facebook. Sorry — Facebook. Grace corrects me every time, grinning impishly at my occasional inclusion of the definite article as evidence of my fuddyduddiness and outoftouchitude. Yes, I have a Facebook account and yes, I have “friends.” Mind you, I don’t as a policy accept friend requests from strangers, current students, former students who have not yet graduated, any of my colleagues in the Philosophy department, or fellow authors whose books I’ve hated. I don’t quite grasp how all the notifications work, and I only visit the site a couple times a week. This, according to Grace, makes me anti-social. She has 1,382 “friends.” I have 46.

Which made what happened in the morning all the more baffling. I wish I could say I awoke feeling ebullient and ready to put the previous day’s unpleasantness behind me, only to be dragged into the muck by what I discovered when I checked my email. But this was not true. I awoke feeling like a shithead, and had my shitheadedness confirmed when I staggered up to my office desk, turned on my laptop, and discovered I had received eighty-seven notifications from Facebook in the last fourteen hours. This, I figured, was roughly the same number I had received in total since joining the social network in 2009.

I hunkered down and started scrolling. My inbox was flooded with names I didn’t recognize, strangers commenting on a post added by one of my “friends” in which my name had been tagged. I clicked through to the post and saw that it was — of course — a YouTube clip of yesterday’s appearance on Power Today. There were so many comments that Facebook could not display them all; could not even say how many there were. The “see previous comments” link taunted me but I refused to click on it. The ones I could see were bad enough:

Jake, that’s NOT what I said. I’m no fan of Sneed but at the end of the day, Sharpe still shouldn’t have …

Well put, Paul! This kind of language is such a big part of our culture now. I hope U of T shows some backbone and takes him to task about …

Ha! “Sharpesplaining” — love it! It’s great to see that pompous ass finally getting what he …

And one that cut me straight to the gills:

Did anyone else notice that HE WAS THE ONLY ONE NOT WEARING A POPPY!

I slapped the laptop shut.

Wandering downstairs, I felt the gravitational pull of my waiting family and girded myself for a flurry of opprobrium from Grace. But to my surprise, she rushed right over when I emerged in our kitchen to give me a hug, her chest pressing into mine, her mouth at my neck. As we held each other for an abnormally long time, I looked over to see the girls at the breakfast table: Simone was watching us over her toast, her head tilted with a kind of placid fascination; Naomi, meanwhile, sat obliviously spooning Frosted Flakes into her mouth and eyeing up a colouring book splayed out before her.

“It’s really bad,” Grace said as she let me go.

“Yeah, I get that sense. I just checked Facebook.”

“Oh, Philip, how could you say something like that on TV?”

I threw my hands up. “I don’t want to talk about it, okay? Hopefully this will all blow over in a day or so.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Grace —”

“No, seriously, come with me.” She was about to lead me over to the little alcove workspace she kept off our book-lined living room, but then paused in front of the girls. “Simone, you have ten minutes to be out the door. That includes teeth-brushing. And, Naomi, sweetie, don’t hold your spoon with a fist, okay. Hold it like a pencil.”

With this quick dispatch of motherwork done, we went to her busy little desk and she manoeuvred herself into the wheeled chair. This was where my wife, the indefatigable Grace Daly, wrote her monthly column, called The Motherlode, for a glossy women’s magazine. A popular missive about the trials and ecstasies of full-time mommyhood in the twenty-first century, the column created a certain mythos around Grace as a walk-on-water parent and did much to extend what she straight-facedly referred to as her “personal brand.” I liked her pieces well enough, but was often (and silently) struck by what she elided rather than included in them. I felt she didn’t always, for example, pay proper due to her wealthy North Toronto parents who provided her multiple levels of encouragement and support and helped to get her where she was. As for me? My own contributions to child-rearing, not to mention my tenured U of T gig that financed this whole oper­ation, made virtually no appearances in the column at all. Anyway. We had experimented with having Grace upstairs in her own office when we first moved into 4 Metcalfe Street, but she soon preferred to have her workplace here, close to the epicentre of the domestic action. On one wall of the alcove, she had hung a framed copy of the epithalamium I had written her — my sole foray into poesy, which I was embarrassed by, but which she nonetheless cherished. Atop her desk sat piles of notes, stacks of magazines, a bright mauve teapot, and a small wireless printer. On the desk’s corner rested the manuscript for her as-yet-unsold new children’s book, which despite taking nearly two years to write was only about 15,000 words long. And, in the middle of it all, was Grace’s own laptop, her chief conduit into a world populated by friends and supporters, but also enemies, frenemies, and near strangers. Yes, unlike me, Grace was fully immersed into the world of social media, a tool to connect with her cadre of fellow authors, stay-at-home moms, and other allies. But it could also, I found, bring out the worst in her. She might lose large portions of a day engrossed in a flame war over some esoteric sliver of the women’s movement, and she spent a lot of time lurking on the Facebook walls and blogs of women she vehemently disagreed with. This had led her to tape up a second note over her desk, a flash card of Sartrean parody that read HELL IS OTHER FEMINISTS. She says she keeps it there ironically, but I know it’s something she sometimes believes.

She opened the laptop and went to Facebook. At the sight of her navigation bar’s beckoning red bubbles, I could tell she, too, had several notifications waiting for her. She scrolled through her newsfeed and sure enough, there was picture after picture of me, with Facebook’s Greek chorus chiming in under each.

“Look, I told you I’ve already seen a lot of this,” I said.

“Yeah, and what about this?” She opened a new tab and went to Twitter, a site I can’t even begin to comprehend. There we found a relentless stream of censure, with the two words of my name smooshed together and placed behind the tic-tac-toe sign.

“Grace, I don’t want to look at that.”

“Or this?” She went to YouTube and found the Power Today clip: 748 comments underneath it. “Or this?” She went to cbc.ca/news and there was my picture above the scroll.

“Oh, for Christsake, boys,” I grumbled at the screen, my PEI accent returning in a burst. “Slow news day or wot?”

She wheeled back around to face me. “You have to do something about this.”

“Like what?”

“Well, we all know Cheryl Sneed is a troll, but you could start by apologizing to her publicly.”

“Apologize to her?” I said. “She’s the one who drew those comments out of me. Anyone who watches that clip can see it.”

“Philip, are you serious? Do you honestly think —” But just then her eyes flashed to something behind me and she was up and out of her chair. “Simone Beauvoir Daly, it is November — you are not wearing that.”

I turned to see that my stepdaughter — in the process of going upstairs to brush her teeth — had also changed into a fuchsia tank top, its skimpy straps revealing the tiny nubs of her shoulders. She and Grace began squabbling about this wardrobe choice, which carried them back upstairs.

I returned to the kitchen, tousled Naomi’s hair on the way to my cupboard, then got out the tin shaker and Jameson to start my own breakfast. I noticed Naomi had now abandoned her Frosted Flakes and had taken up a crayon. “What are you colouring, sweetie?” I asked as I went to my bar fridge to dig out the necessary accoutrements.

“Dine-soars,” she replied without looking up.

Ice cubes: check. I cracked about half out of the tray, and they clanged noisily into the tin. Tomato juice: check. Horseradish: check. Tabasco sauce: check. I looked back at her. “Can I see?” She held up the book to reveal a not-to-proportion T. Rex and triceratops now bludgeoned with crayon. “Another Vermeer in the making,” I declared, then pulled open my vegetable crisper. Took out the celery, then scrounged. Scrounged. Scrounged some more, moving aside torn and empty produce bags. Oh crap.

Grace and Simone appeared back in the kitchen then, the latter now wearing a grey wool cardigan over the offending tank top. “Philip,” she asked as she opened the family fridge and pulled down her lunch, “are you still taking me to that dance recital tomorrow?”

“Of course I am,” I replied, beginning to assemble my concoction despite the fact I was missing one of its chief ingredients. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Well, something bad has happened, right?”

Grace and I looked at each other.

“What’s going on?” Simone pressed.

Grace and I looked at the floor.

Simone then pulled her rhinestone-covered iPhone out of her cardigan’s pocket. “I got a text from Sarah last night,” she said, scrolling. “It reads, ‘My mom says your stepdad’s a real dickhead.’” She pushed the screen toward my face. “Do you want to read the rest of what it says?”

“No, I do not.”

“Okay, you’re now late,” Grace said. “You have to go. Right now.”

“Fine,” Simone sighed, giving a roll of her eyes. She grabbed her bookbag off the counter and threw on a coat from the front closet. “Okay, bye!” she yelled, and then was out the door.

“You know,” Grace said, “she’s convinced you’re going to renege on taking her tomorrow.”

“Well, I’m not,” I replied, dropping a celery stalk into the now completed Bloody Joseph and raising it to my lips. “And another thing: I finally remembered what we’re doing on Sunday.”

“Oh, really?” She gave me a smirk that I could only interpret as an olive branch.

“Yes. We’re having people in for brunch — Jane Elton included. And you want me to steer her in the direction of ‘Sally and the Kitchen Sink.’”

Grace took a brief but longing glance over at the chaos of her writing desk. “Do you think she’d look at it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. She’s not taking a lot of kids’ lit these days. But we’ll see.”

“Anyway,” she said, turning back to me, “I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about it right before you went on the show. I felt bad about that.”

“Yeah, well. It was quite a thing to have on my mind when I was supposed to be routing Cheryl Sneed.”

Grace made a face. “So it was my fault?”

“I didn’t say tha —”

“I’m the reason you said that horrible thing to her?”

“Look, Grace, you need to underst —”

“Let me remind you, Philip, that I wasn’t upset about the brunch. I was upset because your daughter scalded herself and you didn’t seem to care.”

“Okay, I don’t have time for this. I have class later this mor­ning. I should be up in the office finishing my prep.”

“Fine. I have to go to the Loblaws anyway. Naomi has a playdate early this afternoon, and I want to get back with the groceries in time.”

Wonderful, I thought. What a wonderful day you have ahead of you.

“Naomi, sweetie, let’s get your shoes on. We have to go.” She took the child’s near-empty cereal bowl, scraped its mushy remnants into the compost, and put the bowl in the dishwasher. She then turned to me. “Do you need anything from the store?”

I gazed briefly at my bar fridge. “I need lemons,” I told her with not a small hint of desperation.

Two hours later, I stood on Parliament Street waiting for the 65 bus to whisk me north to the Castle Frank subway station. There, in front of me, sat a Toronto Sun news box with my picture in the window.

Oh Jesus, you have to be fucking kidding me.

But no: there I was — my comb-over like a frond splayed across my skull, my red beard thick and untrimmed — taking up the tabloid’s entire front page. Alongside this mug shot ran a vertical headline that said:

“Penetrating”

Insights

on

ODS

Oh, please! I thought. Did my heinous remarks against those executives really warrant a front-page blast? And since when do Toronto Sun readers care about philosophy anyway? I couldn’t bear to take in the subhead, let alone deposit my loonie and read the entire article. Does the Sun even run articles? Isn’t it all just scantily clad girls and salacious headlines?

I turned away from the box just as the bus pulled up. As I boarded, I worried about the stares and judgments of my fellow commuters. Thankfully, they were few in number that late in the morning, and didn’t seem much interested in looking up from their phones.

“Freedom exists,” I had said, back in September, in the opening lecture to this, my survey course on the Enlightenment, “because it serves the interests of power. To understand this is to understand everything — from Herodotus to Dick Cheney.” A ballsy opening salvo, for sure, but one I felt necessary to establish what I considered to be the nomos of the period in which I am an alleged expert. That lecture hall teemed with a large congress of young people — still tanned and tank-topped from their summer vacations — who may have possessed, as a result of cultural theory courses or Mel Gibson movies, an opposite view: that the entire trajectory of Western civilization placed “freedom” in opposition to “power.” It was my mission to disabuse them of this fallacy; an eight-month pollarding that would allow sturdier branches of intellectual curiosity to grow. I knew that some of these students would go on to become vocal critics of the Enlightenment; others would end up as Bay Street biz-knobs; still others would resign themselves to a life packing groceries at the Loblaws. But I liked to think that I nonetheless laid down an explanatory foundation — even a subconscious one — of the culture we were all saddled with. The kids knew coming in what to expect from a Philip Sharpe survey course: the readings would be lengthy and intense; writing assignments would come at them fortnightly, along with two major research papers and an exam at the end of each term; extensions would not be given under any circumstances. And yes, I had certain trammels about cellphones and tardiness, but I made it clear that, in exchange for these limitations on their personal freedoms, they would be allowed to engage in a different kind of freedom: the freedom to question me, to challenge each other, to debate the ideas captured in their readings. They were here to be scholars, to be thoughtful contributors in discussions during their group work and in the broader class. Indeed, the freedom to speak their minds was the nomos of this course, because it served the interests of my power, as their professor.

I had been making great strides with this batch over the last two months. They had started out as a predictably costive crew during my lectures, and their early assignments were plagued by pleonasms and leaps in logic. Now, they could be counted on to volunteer answers to my Socratic queries; and their essays were sharper and more succinct, in no small part thanks to the efforts of my brainy, uncomplaining TA, Sebastian, an ABD (“All But the Dissertation”) fluent in four languages who earned his $8,000 a year poring over and improving these students’ sentences. What’s more, the kids were just beginning to grasp the chief tenet I wanted them to take away from this course — that the relationship between freedom and power was far more paradoxical than the current culture wars would have us believe. This relationship — while finding its origin in the ancient world (and how could my early lectures not pay passing nods to The Republic, The Nicomachean Ethics, and various Periclean bon mots?) — truly came to fruition during the Enlightenment. And far from being one homogenous groupwank about “individual freedom,” this epoch possessed codependent contradictions that helped shape the very core of Western identity and what we might still unironically refer to as civil society. Eloquent extrapolations on this earned me what I hoped to see across that sea of student bodies: nodding baseball caps, nodding ponytails, and, yes, nodding hijabs, their corresponding hand-clasped pens scribbling, scribbling.

Which made it all the more difficult to walk into that lecture hall on Tuesday morning and discover an atmosphere of unmitigated tension — airborne and palpable. Sebastian came bounding up to me from the front row when I appeared through the double doors near the stage and took me aside. “Sir,” he said, almost sotto voce, “are you interested in cancelling class today?”

“What for?” I asked.

He sucked air through his clenched teeth. “People are sort of upset with you.” I looked beyond him and, sure enough, I was getting the stink-eye from several of my young charges.

“No,” I said. “We’ll proceed.”

Sebastian nodded in acquiescence. I have to say I liked the boy a lot. He was going to make a great professor one day, in the highly unlikely event he landed a job. But he still spoke to me in the way that all TAs did — as if I possessed a sack of gold coins that I would give him at the end of the year, if only he was worthy enough.

As I moved to the lectern and took out my notes from my satchel, I could tell that two months of hard work had been undone. The class sat before me glaring, as silent as tombstones. It was like the first day all over again.

I took a long, deep breath. “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” I said, unsheepishly as I could, into the abyss. I could have said more to them; probably should have said more, facing head on what they had seen and read on Twitter and Facebook and in the Toronto-fucking-Sun. They could have asked me questions and shared their “feelings.” And we could have related what I had said on TV — that abominable blunder — to what we’d been reading and discussing all term. It was applicable, after all; and I was even a little impressed that my slip had caused such a shockwave through these tyro philosophers.

But I didn’t. Chalk it up to cowardice, I suppose. Instead, I took up my copy of Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals — a book I had first inhaled as a fifteen-year-old in Charlottetown, one that ripped through the fog of adolescence like a sunbeam — and held it aloft in a gesture that said, You’ve read this, yes? No acknowledgement, one way or the other. I pressed on, making a few biographical comments on Immanuel Kant and situating him into our somewhat jumbled chronology of the Enlightenment. Then I asked the most basic question one could to anybody who’d read the book. “Okay, people, in a nutshell, what is Kant’s categorical imperative? How does he define and explain it in the context of our reading?”

Nothing. The girls merely scowled at their desks or examined their cuticles. The boys lay slumped in their seats as if poured there by a cement truck. A few of the faces threw tight little smiles my way, but they were full of unmistakable malice.

No matter. I slogged on, working myself into a lather about Kant and his immeasurable contribution to both the Enlightenment and all of Western thought. I threaded a careful needle with our previous readings, explaining how Kant’s works had added a crucial shading to those of his contemporaries, how his introduction of deontology to the mix had crystallized so much of what the Age of Reason was trying to articulate about human nature. “It’s clear to even a casual reader what the categorical imperative means to the study of ethics,” I said, “but what about reason itself? What does the categorical imperative contribute to our notions of the rational?” Dead silence. Not even the gentle susurrus that often preceded class participation. I plugged on, detailing the difference between Kant’s categorical imperative and his hypothetical imperative. “What bearing does this distinction have on what we discussed before — about, say, the courts or even industrial relations?” Nothing. “Okay, what does it say about one-on-one interactions between people? How we treat each other?” Nothing again. Okay, kids, I thought, how does it relate to what I said about those corporate assholes on television yesterday that’s put this bowling pin up your asses? But I bit my tongue.

As we approached the end of our eighty minutes together, Sebastian and I unveiled their next fortnightly writing assignment. This was another element that set my course apart, and, to be honest, contributed most to the libellous pouting that took place about me on ratemyprofessors.com. I did not believe in handholding or steering students toward certain thesis statements. Doing so ran counter to what I considered to be the true spirit of scholarship. Sebastian worked the laptop to make their essay assignment appear on the screen behind me. It was, in total, a lengthy quote from the second section of Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, followed by the word “discuss.”

I read the quote aloud, explained a few things in it, then asked if anyone had any questions. Their silence lingered for a moment. But then one young man, wearing his baseball cap backward, raised a beefy arm off his desk.

“Yes?” I asked, pointing at him, gratitude flooding me like a fever.

“What does Kant mean by ‘rational being’?” he smirked. “What would he consider to be an irrational being? Like — a woman?”

“Shut up!” the pretty young lady sitting next to him, obviously his girlfriend, screamed. She didn’t so much punch his shoulder as shove it angrily with her fist. Two other girls, less pretty, sitting in the row in front of him, twisted around in their seats. “Asshole!” “You’re such a prick!”

Clearly some residual argument from before I entered the room. Clearly. As the commotion died down, I waggled my furry face at them, a gesticulation that said: What the fuck are you people on about? But no explanation came.

“That is all,” I snarled, gathering up my notes, and fled from the lectern.

Sebastian and I spoke little as we made our way through University College and up its ornate staircase that led to my office, where we needed to discuss Thursday’s group topics. I unlocked my office door — decorated with black-and-white images of Kant, Hume, Rousseau, Locke, Mill, and Descartes, as well as a five-by-twenty plank of PEI driftwood with the phrase SAPERE AUDE (“dare to be wise”) embossed on it — and we entered my large, book-choked lair. Too many books, in fact. The tsundoku spilled out of overstuffed shelves and across the floor and onto the chairs. (Grace had said that if we bought a small cottage in the Kawarthas — something she’d been hankering for us to do for a while now — we would have extra wall space for books, since we didn’t seem to have a square inch left at 4 Metcalfe Street or here.) Sebastian moved some out of the way so he could sit, and I took my place behind the desk, turning on my green-shaded banker’s lamp.

I glanced at my desk phone. The red message light was flashing. I never got messages on this phone. I raised a finger at Sebastian in a give-me-a-moment gesture and picked up the receiver, trying to remember how the fuck I accessed voicemail on this thing. I figured it out, and discovered I had seven messages waiting for me. The first was from Roberta Rosenbaum, a reporter with the Globe and Mail whom I dated briefly in the late ’90s when I first began freelancing for them, and with whom I was still friendly. “Oh, hey, Philip, it’s Roberta R.,” she sang into the receiver. “I bet you can guess why I’m calling. Just hoping you could give me a statement abou —” DELETE. The others were from media outlets as well: reporters from the National Post, the Toronto Sun, two AM talk radio stations, the Toronto Star, and, bringing up the rear, the CBC. I deleted each without listening all the way to the end.

Hanging up, I looked at Sebastian. “Reporters,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“Did you want me to …” and he motioned to the door.

“No, no. Stay. We have work to do.”

So we did our work, going over the group topics with stunted, false alacrity. Like me, Sebastian had Kant’s text practically memorized, and I marvelled again at how seasoned he seemed for someone not yet thirty. He took the lead in figuring out which passages to focus on and the discussion prompts we’d give the students. I agreed with each of his choices, but with a kind of torpid distraction. When he noticed this he stopped and looked at me.

“Sir …”

“Hmm?”

“Do you, do you want to talk about what happened yesterday?”

I said nothing.

“I don’t mean to pry,” he went on. “But are you going to make a statement about …” and he nodded toward my phone.

“I don’t know,” I sighed. Then I looked at him. “What do you think I should do?”

He made that lips-pulled-from-clenched-teeth face again, his throat a brief spasm of dismay. “I think you need to say something. Even if it’s a blanket apology to Sneed so we can all move on. That would be better than nothing.”

I gave a weak chortle. “My wife said the same thing this morning. I … I don’t know if I can do that.”

“Look,” he said, “I know there are lots of people in this department who hate your guts, who’d love to see you eat a big mouthful of crow over this. But there are also plenty of us who respect you deeply, who know that what you do makes an incredible contribution to the political discourse in this country. And we want to see you eat crow over this — because we respect you.”

“You know, Sebastian,” I said, finding his Gefolgschaft touching, “you really are wise beyond your years.”

He tried to smile. “Sapere aude.”

“Sapere aude,” I replied. “Okay, we can wrap up here. I think we’re in good shape for Thursday.”

“Sir …”

“Look, everything will be all right,” I told him. “Don’t worry, okay. I’ll see you Thursday.”

“Okay.”

When he was gone, I wheeled over to my computer to check email, and discovered I had an additional forty-one notifications from Facebook waiting for me. I gaped at the list of unfamiliar names. Oh, people — get a life! I began batch-deleting them when I spotted another message sitting among the rabble. It was from U of T’s dean of Arts and Sciences. I opened it and read:

Philip:

I need to talk to you about this escalating situation. Please come by my office tomorrow morning, 8:30. You don’t have a class. I checked.

My stomach filled with annoyance and dread. In the twenty-two years I’ve been billeted at U of T’s Philosophy department, I have only been summoned to the dean’s office in this manner once before. And it did not go well.

I hit REPLY.

Sure, Tom. I’ll see you then.

I arrived back at 4 Metcalfe Street about an hour later in an anxiety so thick I was practically vibrating from it. As I came inside, I was greeted by the screams of Naomi and her playdate friend racing through the house in what looked like a game of tag. They came zooming past the front entry just as I was slipping out of my Payless.

“Hi, Daddy!”

“Sweetie — sweetie! No running in the house, okay!”

She cackled at the absurdity of such a request, and the two went tearing through the kitchen together.

“Naomi, what did I just say!”

I followed them in but then stopped when I spotted Grace sitting in the living room with her friend Stacey, the other girl’s mom. Grace’s mauve teapot sat on a trivet on our coffee table, surrounded by mugs and a plate of cranberry scones. Stacey — a mere whiff of a woman despite having three kids of her own — was the author of a couple of collections of short stories, and had known Grace for years. I often marvelled, though, at how their friendship seemed to be based almost entirely on the mutual need to gossip about other people they knew in the “writing community.” It was all, it appeared to me, that they ever did when the two of them got together.

They stopped talking when I appeared in the arch of the living room. Grace brought her bright green eyes up to where I stood, but Stacey just turned away, as if she couldn’t bear to look at me. Her corncob-coloured hair fell in her face as she did.

“Did class go okay?” Grace asked.

“No. It did not.” I raked my fingers through my bushy beard. “And the dean wants to meet with me first thing tomorrow.”

“Shit.” Maybe Grace was going to say something more — something comforting to me. But if so, she was cut off then by the sound of one or both of the girls’ bodies slamming into the cupboards in the kitchen, followed by a raucous round of giggling.

Grace was on her feet. “Naomi Woolf Sharpe-Daly — please come here.” The child obeyed, immediately. “Did you not hear your father say no running through the house?” Naomi nodded, a little embarrassed. Then, her tone softening, Grace said: “Why don’t you and Kim go colour some dinosaurs? Do something quiet.” The child agreed, and scurried off.

Grace returned to the couch, assuming a position that I always read as I am the queen of all I survey. Which, of course she was. I felt wholly redundant in the wake of it, as if I were little more than a functional piece of the furniture, or perhaps a helium balloon, attracting the eye with its novelty, but ultimately pointless. I looked at my wife, hoping she would finish what she’d been about to say. I thought: C’mon, Grace. Assure me that everything is going to be all right. You owe me that. I wouldn’t be in this mess if it weren’t for YOU.

But she said nothing. She and Stacey acted as if they were waiting for me to leave. Which they were. I clued in, then: they were, before I came in the door, gossiping about me.

“Anyway,” I said. “I guess I’ll head up to the office and work on the book for a while.”

Grace nodded, as if to say, Yeah, you do that.

I stopped by the kitchen on my way. Saw atop the counter the big bag of lemons she had brought me back from Loblaws, those bright yellow shapes shimmering through the plastic. I thought then to backtrack and thank her for picking them up. (We’d been working harder to say thank you in this house.) Instead, I just tore open the bag, pulled a lemon out, then took the remainder over to my bar fridge and dropped them into the vegetable crisper. Then I began to quickly assemble a Bloody Joseph. Not that one assembles a Bloody Joseph quickly, and I could feel Grace’s and Stacey’s eyes burning me in the back of my head as I poured and squeezed and shook over my martini tin. Waiting, they were, for me to just hurry up and disappear into this huge, overpriced house.

Upstairs, in the book-lined silence of my office, I checked email once again. Eleven more notifications from the Facebook. Fuckers. I was just reaching for the mouse to delete them when another email appeared in my inbox. I startled a little when I saw that boldfaced name and subject line:

Rani Sumita

What the hell, Sharpe???

Such a vertiginous feeling, to see her name there. It had been a while. I felt my stomach sink, but also my lips twist into a smile. This was the effect Rani always had on me: a cocktail of apprehension and intrigue. I swallowed hard. Had my slip made it all the way across the pond? Opening a new tab, I went to the BBC News website. I needed to scroll a bit, but sure enough there was a thumbnail photo of me with hyperlinked text next to it that read “Philip Sharpe’s on-air gaffe.” The article behind it was probably written by one of Rani’s colleagues, and she would have no doubt seen it.

I went back to my email, opened it. It read:

What the hell, Sharpe!!! Are you serious?? What the FUCK are you saying over there?

Not exactly helpful.

Should I respond? I thought. No, just leave it for now. There is work to do, and with all this tension between you and Grace, the last thing you need is get into a flirtatious exchange with Rani. Just leave it. For now. There is work to do.

So I shut down my email, and launched Microsoft Word. Got busy on the next chapter of my counterintuitive book about Christianity and its dissidents. In paradoxo veritas.