2001 – I have just returned from a visit to my landlady, who is also my department chairperson. When she confirmed by telephone last week that I was hired, she added that her basement apartment was available. The rent sounded reasonable. Just before noon today, I arrived in Montreal and cabbed from the airport. Her house is in posh Westmount, about halfway up the mountain. Teaching obviously pays well in Quebec. With this promise of wealth beguiling my imagination, I climbed the steps to the Scottish baronial portico and rang the doorbell.
The distant chime summoned a yipping ball of fur followed by an Amazon with black eyes suspicious beneath a heavy swatch of black hair. The dog sniffed my feet and yipped.
‘Ms Heidi Felsen!’ I said.
A nod was the answer.
‘Will Franklyn, your new tenant, ma’am. I hope I haven’t inconvenienced you by arriving too early?’
One hand held a coffee cup; the other hand, once she had the door open, returned to holding her robe shut, but not quickly enough to prevent the revelation of two considerable mounds of bosom.
She shrugged.
‘If you’d been too early I wouldn’t have answered the door. Wait there, I’ll get the key. Stay, Tinker Bell.’
She walked off along the hall into a murmur of subdued jazz piano. A fabulous dragon in multicoloured needlework ramped over the shoulders of her black silk robe. I thought it odd that she left me in the vestibule with the dog guarding me, but assumed that, like me, she values her splendid isolation.
The vestibule and the bit of hall I could see beyond were spacious and bright. A poster for something called La Galerie de l’Art de l’Âme de la Nation hung on the wall beside me; I was trying with indifferent success to translate the French text when Ms Felsen returned.
‘Stay, Tinker Bell. Tinks is a Yorkshire terrier, a sweet dog, she won’t bother you?’ She led me back down the steps and along the side of the house. ‘You have your own entrance,’ she remarked as she unlocked the door. ‘It’s very cosy.’
She waved vaguely at a couch, a dresser, a nasty chrome and plastic table with two questionable chairs, a kitchen nook with fridge and stove.
Cosy meant tiny.
‘The bathroom is in there. The couch opens out for your bed. Bed and bath linen in the closet here, and you can use the washer and dryer in the back of the main basement, through that door there.’
‘I’ll take it.’
‘You’ll want groceries, I expect. Do you know Montreal?’
‘No, I grew up in Nova Scotia – I’ve never been here before.’
‘The nearest supermarket is down the hill to Sherbrooke and right four or five blocks. Turn the fridge on now and it’ll be cold when you get back. Come and see me later and I’ll fill you in on the job.’
Back with some basic groceries, I had a sandwich and explored my new home. China and cutlery for two, a bare sufficiency of mixing bowls and pots, a toaster and a microwave. With only the window in the door, another beside it and the small one in the bathroom, it is dark. It is also quiet – I can barely hear the music from above, footsteps are muted, and the occasional murmur of conversation is indistinct. I will have all the splendid isolation I can desire.
While washing up, I reflected on the unlikely circumstances which had landed me here. Ms Felsen’s evident business-like sanity comes as something of a surprise, for, entirely illogically, I had been judging all Montrealers, or at least all Montreal women, by the whimsical eccentricity of Gudrun Sigurdardóttir, a more-or-less Montrealer with whom I spent a possibly incautious weekend during a conference in Aarhus, Denmark. In the agreeable Casablanca bar, we had absorbed perhaps a few too many glasses of Ceres Royal beer, when Gudrun insisted I should apply for a job at the Montreal junior college where she taught.
‘They won’t hire an unknown by e-mail.’
‘They will when they find out at the last minute that I’m staying here another year, and then three of the geriatrics will retire and you’ll be permanent. I know – I am a seeress, a völva in Icelandic. And don’t look at me like that – it’s a different word entirely.’
‘Well…?’
‘And the department head has a basement apartment you might be able to rent. That’s where I lived.’
‘Perhaps I’ll just try to get the job first.’
‘You’re going to love Montreal,’ she insisted, ‘because it’s full of bars just like this.’
‘And women just like you?’
‘No women are just like me,’ she replied, smiling and screwing up her chocolate-brown eyes, ‘but there are lots of babes in Montreal if that’s what you want.’
Following Gudrun’s instructions, I waited until August to e-mail my CV and application to Ms Felsen, and against all odds here I am. And Gudrun …
But nothing more of Gudrun now.
My clothes stowed away and the above account typed, I lay on the couch to read. In ten minutes I slipped into a welcome slumber.
I found myself drifting in a dream of two rounded glacier mountains. A monstrous dog yipped atop one mountain, while a multicoloured dragon ramped about the other. Then Gudrun was astride the dragon’s back – ‘I am an Icelandic vulva and I told you so!’ she cried. Shapes loomed grotesquely out of the shadows. Hums and whirrs touched the air …
Was that a tapping at the window? No, surely not.
I struggled toward consciousness into the subterranean twilight.