Maybe she’s wrong about Mitch, this time. Maybe there’s nothing going on. Maybe he’s finally settled down.

XLI

The lunch is at a restaurant called Nereids. It’s a small place, a done-over house on Queen East, with a large wellput-together stone man without any clothes on standing outside it. Roz has never been to it before, but Mitch has; she can tell by the way the hostess greets him, by the way he looks around with an amused, proprietorial eye. She can see too why he likes it: the whole place is decorated with paintings, paintings that twenty years ago could’ve got you arrested, because they are all of naked women. Naked women, and naked mermaids too, with enormous and statuesque breasts: not a droopy boob among them. Well, naked people, because the naked women do not lack for male company. Walking to their table Roz; gets a cock right in the eye, and averts her gaze.

“What is this?” she whispers, alight with curiosity and appalled glee, and with the sheer pleasure of being taken out to lunch by Mitch. “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing? I mean, is this a porn shop, or what?”

Mitch chuckles, because he likes to shock Roz a little, he likes to show that he’s above her prejudices. (Not that she’s a prude, but there’s private and there’s public; and this is public. Public privates!) He explains that this is a seafood restaurant, a

Mediterranean seafood restaurant, one of the best in the city in his opinion, but that the owner is also a painter, and some of these paintings are by him and some are by his friends, who appear to share his interests. Venus is featured, because she was after all a goddess of the sea. The fish motif accounts too for the mermaids. Roz deduces that these are not just naked people, they are mythological naked people. She can deal with that, she took it at university. Proteus blowing his conch. Or getting it blown.

“Oh,” says Roz; in her mock-naive voice. “So this is capitalA Art! Does that make it legal?” and Mitch laughs again, uneasily, and suggests that maybe she should lower her voice because she wouldn’t want to hurt people’s feelings.

If anyone else told her to lower her voice, Roz would know what to do: scream louder. But Mitch has always been able to make her feel as if she were just off the boat, head wrapped in a shawl, wiping her nose on her sleeve, and lucky to have a sleeve at that. Which boat? There are many boats in her ancestral past, as far as she can tell. Everyone she’s descended from got kicked out of somewhere else, for being too poor or too politically uncouth or for having the wrong profile or accent or hair colour.

The boat her father came over on was more or less recent, though far enough back to have arrived before the Canadiarr government walled out the Jews, in the thirties and during the war. Not that her father was even a whole Jew. Why do you inheritJewishness through the mother’s side? Tony once asked Roz. Because so many Jewish women were raped by Cossacks and whathave-you that they could never be sure who the father was. But her father was Jewish enough for Hitler, who hated mixtures more than anything.

The boat on her mother’s side was much further back. Famine caused by landlessness caused by war drove them out, a hundred and fifty years ago, Irish and Scots both. One of those families set out with five children—and arrived with none, and then the father died of cholera in Montreal and the mother remarried, as fast as she could—an Irishman whose wife had died, so he needed a new one. Men needed wives then, for such enterprises. Off they went into the semi-cleared bush, to be overtaxed and to have other children and to plant potatoes, and to chop down trees with implements they’d never used before, because how many trees were left in Ireland? A lot of legs got chopped into, by those people. Tony, who is more interested in these details than Roz is, once showed Roz an old picture—the men standing in metal washtubs, to protect their legs from their own axes. Low comedy for the English middle classes, back home, living off the avails. Stupid bogtrottersi The Irish were always good for a smirk or two, then.

All of them came steerage, of course. Whereas Mitch’s ancestors, although not created by God from the sacred mud of Toronto—they had to have got here somehow—must have come cabin. Which means they threw up into a china basin instead of onto other people’s feet, on the way across.

Big deal, but Roz is intimidated anyway. She opens the mermaid-festooned menu, and reads the items, and asks Mitch to advise her, as if she can’t make up her own mind what to put into her mouth. Roz, she tells herself. You are a suck.

She remembers the time she first went out with Mitch. She was old, she was almost twenty-two, she was over the hill. A lot of girls she’d known in high school and then in university were already married, so why wasn’t she? It was a question that looked out at her from her mother’s increasingly baffled eyes.

Roz had already had a love affair, or rather a sex affair, and then another. She hadn’t even felt too guilty about them. Although the nuns had ground it in about sex and what a sin it was, Roz was no longer a Catholic. She was once a Catholic, though, and once a Catholic, always a Catholic, according to her mother; so she’d had some qualms, after the first exhilarating sense of transgression had faded. Strangely enough, these qualms focused less on the sex itself than on the condoms—things you had to buy under the counter, not that she ever did, that was a man’s job. Condoms seemed to her inherently wicked. But they were also inherently funny. They were like rubber gloves with only one finger, and every time she saw one she had to be severe with herself or she’d get the giggles, a terrifying thought because the man might think you were laughing at him, at his dick, at its size, and that would be fatal.

But the sex was great, it was something she was good at, though neither one of these men was her idea of bliss from the neck up. One had big sticking-out ears, the other one was two inches shorter than she was, and she didn’t see going through life in flats. She wanted children, but not runry ones with jug ears.

So she hadn’t taken either of them seriously. It helped that they hadn’t taken her seriously either. Maybe it was the clown face she put on, fairly constantly by then. She needed it, that happy heedless party face, because there she was, on the shelf, still living at home, still working in her father’s business. You’ll be my right-hand man, he’d tell her. It was meant as a compliment, so she wouldn’t feel bad about not being a son. But Roz didn’t want to be a son. She didn’t want to be a man at all, right-hand or otherwise. Such a strain, being one, from what she could see; such a pretence of dignity to maintain. She could never get away with her witless frivolity act if she were a man. But then, if she were one she might not need it.

Her job in the business was fairly basic; a moron could have done it. Essentially she was a glorified fetch-it. But her father believed that everyone, even the boss’s daughter, should start at the bottom and progress up to the top. That way you got acquainted with the real workings of the business, layer by layer. If something was wrong with the secretaries, if something was wrong with Filing, there would be wrongness all the way through; and you had to know how to do those jobs yourself so you would know whether other people were doing them right or not. A lesson that has been useful to Roz, over the years.

She was learning a lot, though. She was watching her father’s style. Outrageous but effective, soft but hard, uproarious but dead serious underneath. He waited for his moment, he waited like a cat on a lawn; then he pounced. He liked to drive bargains, he liked to cut deals. Drive, cut, these verbs had an appeal for him. He liked risk, he liked walking the edge. Blocks of property disappeared into his pocket, then came out magically transformed into office buildings. If he could renovate—if there was something worth saving—he did. Otherwise it was the wrecking ball, despite whatever clutch of woolly-headed protesters might be marching around outside with Save Our Neighbourhood signs, done in crayon and stapled onto rake handles.