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The traffic discombobulates Vanessa. She applies in writing to enter a stream of traffic, goes to extra innings on every left turn. Walter asks, "Do you do everything as cautiously as this?" A dangerous question, but he needs an outlet for his frustration.

"I just don't want to have an accident, I don't want to hurt anybody," she replies.

"You cause accidents driving this way."

"Well, I haven't yet," she says, and he wonders how she can be sure. How would she know of the many accidents she has precipitated by incrementally fomenting madness in the drivers who are exposed to her?

"Anyway, I'm not in a hurry. I don't need to grab at every opportunity. I'm not aggressive like that."

"Not aggressive like me, you mean."

"I didn't say that, you said that. Besides, you are too obsessed about me. You are too interested in every detail. You analyse me too much."

"I am a writer. Everything is of interest to me. And you are my muse."

"Really?" she says, grinning. Walter strokes the nape of her neck and tousles her hair.

"Yes, my duck, it's all you with me."

While she does business in a store on O'Leary Avenue he performs uttanasana, trikonasana and uttitha parsvakonasana on the parking lot, hoping it will assure his continued good humour. On the way to the coffee shop she tells him what she served Jack and the kids for supper the night before. She gives him the recipe for her pasta sauce, lists the salad ingredients, reveals the secret of the dressing.

When she parks the car he hugs her hard and will not let her go or speak another word. "I love your beautiful stories, I love them, I love them," he says, overriding her protests, "your stories about supper and washing the dishes and sitting in the living room having a cognac with Jack and then going upstairs to watch Rosemary's Baby with him, I love those stories!"

"You do it too," she says. "I have to listen to you, too."

But it is all in good humour today, all joyous and connected.

Vanessa orders a tea bun. They sit with their coffee. She says, "Will you show me the things you have written about me?"

"Maybe later when I have more confidence," he says. "But my stories are not about you, you have to remember that."

Walter's character Veronica is of course Vanessa, and she knows it. But she is invariably miffed when he stresses the purely fictional nature of the woman he writes about obsessively.

"No, Veronica is not you," he teases, watching her exasperation grow. "Veronica has grey-blue, almost silver eyes and she is modelled on a woman named Andrée whom I knew in Montreal." Vanessa rolls her eyes. "My character Frank is totally in love with Veronica even though she is a bit crazy. Veronica has a strange, haunted look ..."

"Like that dog we saw in the jeep?" Vanessa asks, shifting the subject.

"Yes, something like that."

From a restaurant window the previous week they had seen a white Samoyed waiting patiently in an old black jeep with a red kayak on its roof and Vermont license plates that read MINKE. Eventually the owner arrived - a lanky, confident 40-year-old woman with straight blond hair, long skirt and a jean jacket brightly embroidered with whales. She spoke affectionately with the dog as she attached his leash and released him from the vehicle.

Walter wanted to meet her and might have introduced himself if Vanessa had not been speaking at him, earnestly clewing up a monologue about his lack of respect for her talents, something she felt she needed to tell him. And besides, he knew that it annoyed Vanessa if his eyes rested on another woman for longer than a second.

The dog bounded across the sidewalk, placed his paws on the restaurant window and, vainly sniffing at the glass, stared at Vanessa as if he had been watching her for some time and now wanted to meet her. Two blue eyes, one indigo, one nearly silver, a mystical animal. Vanessa was transfixed.

The woman smiled in a slightly chagrined way, tugging at the leash. The dog did not move. She reasoned with him, then smiled at Walter and shrugged: this dog has a mind of its own. Finally Vanessa turned away, trembling, and the animal withdrew, glancing back as he was led away.

The tea bun arrives, steaming. Walter asks, "Does it piss you off that Veronica looks like Andrée, not you?" Vanessa does not reply. "It does, doesn't it."

"Not at all. I don't want you writing about me anyway," she pouts. Walter laughs - perhaps too flamboyantly, as it attracts the attention of the other tables - and finds himself admiring the stubbornness and umbrage in her, feeling the profound level on which he adores this beautiful, difficult, spoiled girl of a woman. He reaches across the table to place his hands on the sides of her face and gives her head a little shake, holding her physically as a father or a big brother would.

He recalls Andrée telling him years ago what she believed to be the essential statement a parent can make to a child: I trust you will do the right thing. He finds himself saying this to Vanessa in his head, insinuating it on her like a secret incantation: You will do the right thing, Vanessa. You have the knowledge, Vanessa. You will not be content with subterfuge, you will do the right thing.

But what is the right thing? Walter does not know exactly, yet. It is something to do with Jack. Things have happened that she ought to tell her husband.

In his notebook he writes: Sudden euphoria. Affection for Veronica almost too large an emotion for Frank to contain. He loved her spiritually, carnally and as a friend, all three ...

"What are you writing?" Vanessa asks.

"That Frank adores Veronica."

"That's nice," she says, buttering her bun. She knows that she is Veronica and that it just cannot be admitted by the writer of fiction who sits across from her scratching in his little book.

Walter writes: The beauty of their relationship lay spread out like a scene in a poem, English, pastoral, nineteenth century ... She says, "You know something?"

"What?" says Walter.

"I love you too."

Walter looks up. She is smiling spaciously, utterly radiant. He holds her gaze, transported, wondering if this qualifies as an epiphany, this uncanny sense of something larger than both of them that he now feels, here in the café, the sun edging their coffee mugs and tea buns and cigarette packs and notebooks.

Just one tea bun, hers, and one notebook, his, in which he records the observations he will later distill into a faithful likeness of the time.

For one carved instant all suspicions evaporated. The sun poured in. The ceiling of pain lifted. Visibility was unlimited. Vanessa has discovered a small lump in her chest near her arm and she finds it worrisome. "Jack says I should get it checked," she says. "I will let you feel it if you like."

"That would only be fair," Walter says, reaching across the table to gain access.

She blocks his hand. "No, not here! Later."

"Are you going to go to the doctor?"

"I can't be bothered. There's not much they can do, anyway. Did you know that the treatment for breast cancer hastens the disease?"

Walter has not heard that, no.

They talk about dying and who owns you when you pop off. More specifically who buries or cremates you, more of an uncertainty these days with the demise of the nuclear family. At what point does it become your brother rather than your ex-wife? At what age the children before anyone?

Jack has a space near his mother in a Winnipeg graveyard if he wants to use it, but would Vanessa bury him there? "No," she says. "Here. He would just want to get it over with."

They laugh, and she says, "I love you like a brother."

"Nothing wrong with that."

She adds, "I know you love me, too, but I don't think you like me much."

"I can't," he says. "If I liked you there would be an explosion. I would wreck your life, I would blow it apart. I don't want to do that."

She finishes her tea bun. He lights another cigarette. He feels her eyes on him as he makes another entry in his book. Walter lies on his couch reading Norman Levine's Something Happened Here. Poetry, really, dressed up as prose. It is getting late. Vanessa is going to phone in the morning and Walter fears that if he stays up much longer he will sleep through her call. Something in him wants to. In bed he reads another whole story.

He wakes to the phone ringing downstairs. He takes his time getting up. There are two messages, both from her. The second one informs him that she can't wait, she is going out for a walk. He makes a cup of tea, then calls back. When her machine cuts in he hangs up. He does not want to risk having Jack hear his voice.

He goes to his computer, diving deep into the bowels of it, the dark places. He is interested in cookies, those little identifying marks websites deposit on your hard drive so they can recognize you when you reconnect with them. What do they know about you, how much can they see, what exactly are they keeping track of? This is Walter's area of investigation. He cleans out some old files. He finds a dozen cookies and moves them to the trash. Then he resumes work on the story he has been writing. The saga of Veronica and Frank has taken a difficult turn.

At noon Vanessa gets through. They have lost the morning, and the afternoon looks bad. She has things to do downtown. She does not reveal what they are but lets slip the time and place of an appointment.

"Don't be surprised if you see me on the street when you come out," Walter says, hoping she might want to meet him. To defuse the notion that he might be pursuing her he adds, "I have something to do in that building at about that time and I will be in the coffee shop at three-thirty."

"Meeting some woman, I expect."

"No, no, hoping to see you."

"If I have time I'll stop in."

He stays at the computer until it is time to go. He rides his bicycle downtown in the cold rain. He picks up a cheque from the Writers' Co-operative. They have found him a job writing for a literacy textbook. At three he is at Pip's Café with a mug of coffee, his notebook, and his volume of Levine.

At three-thirty he spies her pausing in the window as if deciding whether to come in or not.

Well got up, hair spiked in chic, slightly dykey fashion. Some makeup. Handsome woman. God, I am in slings. Thank you Norman for these short sentences.

She sits across from him. Clean featured, even beautiful, but hard, a hardness in her eyes, a detachment, a confidence that does not sit well. She ensconces herself. He asks her how her meeting went.

"Pretty well."

"What were you actually doing at the Enterprise Centre?"

"I am working on something that I don't want to talk about yet. This is a vicious little place, people steal your ideas. This one I have told no one about, except Jack of course."

Jack. Of course Jack. And St. John's. The vicious little place.

It isn't the first time she has mentioned a project she couldn't talk about. For months she has been hinting about a March deadline for an application to get funds for some scheme or other and she refuses to tell him about that, too.

"I have big ideas. I don't want them stolen."

"It is very difficult to prove theft of ideas. Everybody has them."

"What I do want to talk to you about is my painting," she says. Which she proceeds to do. At length. The basic drawing that took hours. The purchase of the right brushes. The canvas, the frame, the overall concept, the artistic intention, the excitement she felt at actually creating something.

"It is good to paint it even if it is just therapy," Walter says.

"What do you mean?"

"Well it's an excellent hobby, something you have complete control over, something you can immerse yourself in. You don't have to think about your life, your sadness, the projects that haven't happened."

"What projects?"

Does she think he has forgotten them? He has a list! He names a few of them, including the trip to Vancouver. He recalls that someone, Nigel somebody, had asked her to interview some Newfoundland artists there for a tourism thing.

"That might still happen," she insists. But, Walter reminds her, the other initiatives, the grant proposals, the job applications, the workshops she had supposedly been invited to - about eight or nine things - have all dried up and blown away, haven't they?

"How insulting!"

"How so? It's only true, isn't it?"

"My work sucks, that's what you think, right?"

"No, no, not at all," Walter says. But it is, in fact, exactly what he thinks. She is not good enough, she only imagines she is. That is what he thinks and what he has thought for the two years he has known her, loved her, and suffered the pain of her refusal to come to terms with her unhappy marriage. He does not mind her not having skills but he can have no respect for her until she admits it. But Vanessa is not big on admitting anything.

"What I want to talk about is cookies," Walter says. Her eyes brighten. "No, no," he laughs, and he explains the computer definition of the word. She listens patiently to his spiel: secret codes hidden in your software, people putting things on your hard drive to spy on you later, the Americans analysing all satellite and Internet transmissions for intelligence purposes, all that.

He talks for a while, mechanically, then says, "You went on about your painting, I bored you with my computer stuff. We're even."

"No, I was quite interested. Was I boring you about the painting?"

"No, no," he lies. "But I have to admit I was as interested in the therapeutic nature of your painting as much as I was in the description of the work itself. After all, I haven't seen the painting and I have to trust that it is as beautiful as you say. I don't know you as a visual artist, really. But I'm sure it's good work."

Silence. She appears to be computing something. He tells her he is reading Norman Levine. The story about Gwen John, the whole war in two pages. The English artist who went to Paris, modelled for Rodin, became his lover, was happy. Then he dumped her. She wrote him every day. She visited the Luxembourg Gardens to catch glimpses of him. She stopped taking care of herself. She fled Paris during the Nazi invasion and died unrecognized in Dieppe. Her brother never got around to marking her grave.

"The salient point is: she never got over Rodin," Walter says. "She stopped taking care of herself."

"People take love too seriously," says Vanessa.

"Yes, I agree, but it happens. Some people never get over some things."

"Too bad for them," she says. Cruelly. Has she forgotten herself?

He strikes fast. Her eye cannot detect the movement. She is staring at him and suddenly she is stung. No blur, only the two positions of the eye: then, and now.

"You have killed me," Walter says. He says it without looking up.

It seems a fact: she has ruined him, he is not going to get over it, he is not taking care of himself, he will die on the street and no one will know who he is. As for the headstone, he doesn't want one. He wants no one to remember him. It's all a sham, anyway.

Now he looks at her. "I feel like Gwen John. You have destroyed me," he says.

She laughs in a mocking way, full of spite. She is the jackal who has just been bitten by the viper: wounded, yes, will perhaps die of the poison later, but still strong.

"Not likely," she says. "You have destroyed me, is the truth. What you did to me last year was abhorrent. Making me confess to Jack, how humiliating, how damaging to my marriage and my children! And when I tell you I'm thinking of leaving him you say, 'Not on my account, call me when the dust settles.' You coward ..."

She talks loudly in a confident, uncaring fashion. Her mother's voice. Behind her Walter sees his ad agency friend Jimmy come in. He has worked with him in the big building across the street, writing copy.

"... You stabbed me in the back, you destroyed me purely and it is going to take me a long, long time to get my head back, to get my life together. You did it to me, you tore into my guts, you fucked me over, you made a mess of me ..."

On she goes, pseudo jocular in tone, full bore. Walter laughs along, to protect himself. Jimmy is looking at them sidelong, listening. He has just split with his wife and he knows the sound. Walter throws in the towel.

"Hey, Jimmy, how's it going?"

"Not bad, I s'pose. How's yourself?"

Vanessa stops. Fearing the publicity. Vicious little town, all that. Walter wants to take her somewhere private and berate her mercilessly, but he knows she doesn't have time for that, she has to cook supper for Jack. He resigns himself to the fact that there will be no more conversation unless Jimmy rises from his chair and leaves. Which he doesn't.

Vanessa remains silent, maintaining a look of disgust. Suddenly she needs to go. They stand up. Walter introduces her to Jimmy. She smiles primly. Walter walks her to the door and kisses her goodbye. Her lips are hard.

He talks to Jimmy for another five minutes, about computers. Jimmy knows something about hacking. He has software he might give Walter. His friend Don knows ten times as much as he does.

"Don can float in cyberspace and find your port open and get into your computer and leave a worm there that will eat out your hard drive."

"Really."

Eat out your heart, Walter hears. Vanessa has roamed about and homed in on his port and wormed her way in. She is a destructive, irrational, conscienceless force.

He goes to the bank and deposits his small cheque. The teller helps him move his money around to stave off collapse on several fronts.

He rides home, slowly, tacking left and right on the hills. The things she has said, the things she believes. He knows that he is in pain only because he still desires her and because there can be no reconnection without the past asserting itself, no simple deletion of the grief.

Writing hurts more than the pain of what has happened to him. Not just what happened to him that afternoon or even all the days with her, but more than what has happened altogether, more than all the things that have brought him to where he is.

Unaccountably he now recalls the whales on the MINKE woman's jacket, her dog's sea-blue eyes, the red kayak atop her battered black jeep.