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layovers — guys laid her and stayed over. Alphabetically, she was working through the student directory. I don’t think she even liked it much. I lived in her vestibule. My love life, of course, was zero. She tried buying me off, but I didn’t want leftovers. We tossed another coin and I won. She left, she became a lawyer. I practised celibacy. Turned out it didn’t take practice.”
    â€œYou must have saved a fortune by now. And no car.”
    â€œNor you.”
    â€œBad driver.”
    â€œBad driver, poor lover, no sense of humour. Most men won’t acknowledge their failings.”
    â€œMiranda, I —” he had begun, stifling his protest, then touching her gently.
    â€œIt’s a clean well-lighted place.”
    â€œYeah, and it smells good. There’s nothing, nothing, as erotic as the smell of a single woman’s apartment.”
    â€œGo home, Morgan.”
    And he had gone.
    Miranda wasn’t prepared yet to read the letter. She picked up the newspaper cutting and smoothed it on the counter. It was actually an entire tabloid page, torn along one edge and tattered as if someone had repeatedly handled it. Top, centre, a photograph. Standing third from the right, a little distorted by the glare of a flash, an earlier version of herself. She didn’t remember posing for the picture or its publication.
    Beside her was Victor Sandhu, Ph.D., professor of semiotics, or semiology, as he preferred. He had arranged a major fellowship that would have enabled Miranda to pursue graduate studies in the Department of Linguistics at a level just above poverty. That was a significant accolade, considering the fact that she was graduating in honours anthropology and had only taken semiotics courses as electives.
    The small cluster of faculty and students in the photograph was parsed, left to right, each identified either by discipline and credentials or by award. The caption ran to several hundred words, longer than some of
The Varsity
articles. The last words in the caption read: “Absent, co-winner of the Sandhu Semiology Fellowship: Robert Griffin.”
    â€œNo way!” she exclaimed. “No bloody way!”
    Her words echoed as if the walls, though accustomed to her voice, now refused to absorb her incipient panic. She looked around, then back at
The Varsity,
page six.
    Robert Griffin. Indisputably: co-winner… Robert Griffin.
    Miranda poured herself a tumbler of red wine from an open bottle on the counter, took a sip, then reached for a wineglass from the cupboard above the sink and transferred most of the contents into the tulip crystal. She drained the dregs from the tumbler, held the bottle up to examine the label, set it down, gazed off into the middle distance, and surprised herself to find the world was blurred and that her eyes had filled with tears.
    â€œI don’t remember Robert Griffin.” Miranda spoke out loud with a zealot’s conviction. She put her fingers to her mouth as if to stifle her own voice.
    I saw his face, dead, through a veil of water,
she thought.
A stranger. I saw photographs of him in legal regalia and robed for his doctorate. My presence in the newspaper picture authenticates only myself. My God, we shared a prize. I didn’t collect. The rich man took it all.
    The tightness of tears drying on her cheeks made her realize she had stopped crying. She was angry. She felt violated. She was appalled at her own anxiety and confused by her fear.
    Miranda settled back on the sofa, resolved to penetrate the shadows that made her past seem a thronging of separate events. She assumed most people lived inside continuous narratives under occasional revision. Searching, unexpectedly, she encountered her boyfriend from their last year in high school. She smiled to herself, turned the stem of her glass between her fingers, and remembered.
    She and Danny Webster had kissed a lot but had always kept their intimacies from the neck up. They