I had flown home for the summer and there was a party at David Twombly’s house. A parmeham from Genoa with its pink hock in tinfoil. Bourbon and squares of chocolate in the alcove. West African music. That feeling when the lights dampen, David Twombly shouted. He was grave and flighty. Before you realize it’s the light that is giving you that feeling.

David had his arm around a woman visiting from Boston. Some men walk around as if they are nude.

Your wife is looking for you, the woman said to David Twombly.

I’m in Toronto most of the year, I said.

She was married, her name was Julie Hazel. She was in St. John’s collecting sound for a documentary on war. The groans men make dying on the battlefield. It is the same utterance in the throat during orgasm.

She touched her chest, as if her hand held a soldier’s larynx.

We talked for three hours and then the walk to her house. A bowl of oranges, a ceramic deer lamp. Above her stove that night a painting she did of her husband, Walt. Walter Petey. We laughed a lot, she said, when I painted that.

It’s like an icon.

A name tells you something.

Are you wearing underwear.

I’m wearing undies on my ovaries.

Three weeks later Julie Hazel said this: It seems opinion is divided on you.

Have we been seen together.

David Twombly said to me, if I were single like Gabe.

That’s unfair, I said.

I wanted to tell him.

But youre married.

David Twombly was purchasing a socket wrench at Canadian Tire. David a giant masculine cub. He cast out the usual male line on desire: sexy, young, smart, funny. Those are the four things men like to snag as they let their wet flies drift past an overhanging bough.

But David Twombly’s second wife, a woman who had dieted too much, so that her eyes bulged, a woman whose eyes were too big for her face, her face too big for her shoulders (the first thing I had seen of Carol Trask was her dress billowing out of a payphone booth), she was teaching second year English at the campus in Corner Brook and it was generally noted that both were open to having affairs.

David: There’s something vulgar about Julie Hazel. She mentioned the condition of Albert Carter.

That he vomited on his shirt and wiped it off with your drapes?

Oh you know that story.

She’s told it to me. I think it’s hilarious.

Are you guys f***ing each other?

He bought the wrench with a fifty dollar bill.

There was a fine scar in the hair above her temple.

It’s surgical, Julie said.

Youre familiar with sutures.

I’ve had an operation or two.

She described lying on a table covered with white noisy paper, the wet antiseptic, the sound of a scalpel tearing the skin, the cords of muscle. Three tense clamps prying the incision open. The carving out of a cyst. It feels, she said to the surgeon, like my skull is being scraped.

I am looking at your skull right now.

What colour is it.

White.

This thought, of a man seeing her skull, the thought was behind the very plate of bone he was scraping.

Me: Jesus.

I’m in remission.