Sparrow Nights by David Gilmour

perhaps we could cut out the middleman entirely.”
    She looked at me suspiciously.
    “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you were to come to my house …”
    “I’m not sure about that.”
    “Hang on. You come to my house, you give me a massage there, but you get to keep all the money.”
    “That’s against house rules.”
    “We wouldn’t tell anyone. It would be a private arrangement between you and me.”
    “I don’t know,” she said, but you could see a shard of venality glint in her eye. “Are you a cop?”
    “Do I look like a cop?”
    “An old one.”
    “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” I said. “I’ll give you my name and my phone number and you can think about it. How’s that?”
    “You live nearby?”
    “Just up the street.” I handed her my card. She examined it. “My name’s not really Dr. Scobie.”
    “What do you teach?” she asked.
    “French literature.”
    You could see her mind shuffling strange cards into a new hand. She removed the undersheet from the massage table and, taking a spray bottle from the nightstand, gave it a couple of squirts and dried off the plastic with the soiled sheet.
    “All right, Professor,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”

    Several days went by during which I was unusually busy. A visiting professor from the University of Rennes delivered a good paper on Verlaine; nothing groundbreaking, but I liked the way he told us what we all already knew. I took him to dinner afterwards and we consumed a number of bottles of wine, after which the conversation turned, of course, to women. It still strikes me as curious that men talk of virtually nothing else.
    The following morning I was slightly ill and neglected to eat breakfast. By mid-afternoon I was starving, I had a raging headache and, after a student seminar on Boileau, I intended to rush home and get something to eat. The paper was presented by a young girl with a sort of Cleopatra hairdo. Short bangs, long at the back. She was Russian, I think, for I detected just a dusting of an accent. I had to remind her several times to address the class, not me, but when she did, she revealed a profile that was almost unbearably beautiful. I wanted to reach over and touch her neck, to feel her skin, which was so soft, I imagined, that it would be like putting one’s fingers in a bowl of cream. And yet I noticed that when she faced me front-on the effect was diminished somewhat, and I felt the relief that you experience sometimes when you find a flaw in a too gorgeous woman.
    Still, after the seminar I meandered slowly down the front steps of the university with the ridiculous hope that she might be there, waiting for me. But she wasn’t. I saw her riding her bicycle up the middle of the snowy street. I wanted to call out for her to be careful, but it was too transparent.
    I suddenly remembered how hungry I was. It would take too long to go home and cook a meal, so I stopped off at a large grocery store in the Manulife building to pick up a heated roast beef sandwich. I was so famished, I think I would have gunned my way to the food counter if necessary. I was rushing across the floor—I had just passed a rack of barbecue chickens, the smell from which made me even more impatient—when I looked up and saw Emma Carpenter. She was standing by a fruit tray, an orange in her hand, and she appeared to be discussing the orange with a tall, angular-featured man. A face that could wear hats.
    I broke stride for a moment. It had, after all, been more than a year since I’d seen Emma. Sensing some arrhythmic movement in the room, she looked up. And recoiled . There’s no other way to describe it. It was as if someone had thrown a glass of water on a cat. She edged closer to her companion, like a child stepping behind a parent. It was all quite involuntary, and that’s what made it so shocking. It was as if she had encountered a man who had beaten her or raped her, as if her body had remembered on its own an