Sparrow Nights by David Gilmour Page B

to his rented house on the Toronto campus. More drinking ensued, the hour got late and students drifted off home, until there was only one left, a strawberry-haired boy from Manitoulin Island. The young man, fresh to the city, had drunk considerably more than he could hold, a situation the learned professor handled by stripping him naked, fucking him in the ass and then pissing on him.
    After that Dupré looked like a positive catch . He was a consummate second-rater; everyone knew it. After twenty-eight years in North America he rigorously maintained the affectation of barely speaking English. All shrugs and pouts he was, traits that made him seem like “the real thing” in our community. In the staff lounge he made a great show of shuffling through the papers in his briefcase, ordering and reordering them into fresh stacks, as if some great activity were in full flight. Serrault, of course, despised him; thought he was a joke as a scholar, a decade “behind the coup,” as he put it. One day he caught me laughing perhaps too heartily at one of Dupré’s modest asides and quickly lowered his eyes. It made my cheeks flush with embarrassment for precisely the reason that Serrault had tried to hide it from me. He was a complicated man, but the spectre of human abasement, no matter how passing, was not among his pleasures.
    There were other matters to attend to as well. The Standards Committee had been called into emergency session. A fourth-year student had somehow slipped through the net and all but secured his undergraduate degree by taking twenty first-year courses. He’d taken them at various colleges and skilfully muddied his tracks. It was the Alice’s Restaurant approach, a strategy we’d been aware of since the late seventies. How did it happen? Whose responsibility was it? Should the student be denied his degree because of administrative incompetence? The meeting droned on into the evening, Serrault, naturally, taking the student’s side and alienating, as always, a portion of the faculty with the crisp observation that the difference between a fourth-year and a first-year course was negligible.
    “Speak for yourself,” Dupré said with a wintry smile.
    “I am,” replied Serrault, and shrugged his shoulders. One wants to cheer at those moments. Self-deprecation among the gifted leaves me breathless with admiration.
    It was well after ten at night when I got home. I poured myself a glass of wine and lay down on the couch in my study. Looking at my desk littered with papers, pencils, correspondence, academic journals, memos stuck to the computer, I felt a tingle of curious pleasure. Then the phone rang.
    It was Passion. She was downtown for the evening. Perhaps I wanted to get together. Yes, I said, that would be splendid. It had rather the aura of a date. Twenty minutes later she got out of a taxi in front of my house with a large handbag. Very large indeed. She came inside and looked at my bookshelves with a show of appreciation. It struck a slightly false note.
    It was odd to see each other outside our usual context, a bit like running into a high school teacher during summer vacation.
    “I don’t have my stuff,” she said, and touched the narrow white scar under her nose.
    “That’s all right.”
    “Do you want to do it here? On the couch?”
    “It’s a bit exposed,” I said. “What do you normally do?”
    “I don’t normally make house calls.” Again the hand to the lip.
    I went to the bottom kitchen drawer and shuffled about in the party napkins and stray forks and bits of string until I found a black candle. It had been a while since I’d entertained anyone. I set it in Emma’s bronze candlestick, lit the wick and turned out the lights. The melting wax gave off a scent of black cherries.
    “That smells nice,” Passion said, meaning, I think, that she liked the candlelight better. In the shadows she looked quite lovely, and I realized I had never had a black woman in my house