by JoAnn McCaig
And my first thought was No! he’s probably bald and holier/ hippier than thou and I don’t know, an accountant or something. No, I want to go back to the airport with the Englishman, I want to say, “Don’t get on that plane, don’t go, let’s go back to Richdale, just one more day, no two — ”
Several months and many emails later, I meet the honest man who whisked me away from the party at the A-frame all those years ago. At Comox airport he is eager but wary, a burly guy with thinning reddish-blond hair. We have coffee, and after an hour or two of conversation, I say, “I’d like to see your place. Is it far away?”
We get in his pickup and twenty minutes later drive up to a two-and-a-half storey cedar house in a clearing surrounded by old growth forest. He stops the truck and a dog barks at the top of the stairs. Yes. The double stairs from my dream. All my bright chatter falls away.
“Ah,” is all I can manage. Drop my head, massage my temple.
He gets out, walks around to the passenger side and gently swings open the door. When I look up again, I think I glimpse a black cat in a window of the house, rubbing itself seductively against a windowpane. The man just allows me to gape, says gently, “The ground floor’s my studio. The living area’s upstairs.”
But I don’t move, not for a long time. He waits patiently. He is a patient man.
18 Or listen to as an audio book or gaze at on a screen.
CAST
JM
her SON (12)
her lover, THE MAN WHOSE TEETH DON'T
MATCH
her past lovers, TWO HONEST MEN
her imagined lover, HIM
JAKET MAXR
her children, DARCE, MATT, & ERIO
her former father-in-law, MOE
her lover, RAY (aka MISTER SUNSHINE)
her imagined lover, THE ENGLISHMAN
(a famous author)
JAY MCKAIR
her sons, BEN (17) & DANNY (12)
her mother, MARA
her lover, LELAND MACKENZIE
her other lover, GRAY
JOANN MCCAIG is a very bookish person, and is the author of a novel, The Textbook of the Rose, and of a critical study, Reading In: Alice Munro’s Archives. She taught university English for many years and now is the co-owner of an independent bookstore in Calgary.
