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I got a phone call the other night, long distance from L.A., according to the call display. I didn't recognize the number, but I was curious, so I picked up.

"Hello?"

"Hello. Is this Paul Headrick?"

"Yes. Who's calling?"

"This is Howard Kaylan. Um, I'm sorry, I'm not positive I've got the right person. Are you Paul Headrick the producer?"

"Afraid not."

'Oh, well I'm sorry to have bothered you. I'm looking for Paul Headrick the producer."

I'm not much for conversation with strangers, but I had to ask. "You're not the Howard Kaylan?"

He paused. "The Howard Kaylan," he said, leaving out the emphasis.

"Of The Turtles. Lead singer."

"That's me. Not many people recognize my name." There was suddenly a lot of stuff in his tone. Resignation. Wistfulness. Other things.

"You're my favorite sixties band. 'Happy Together' is my favorite sixties pop song."

"Really." There was that tone again.

"It's such a catchy song, so upbeat, but so sad at the same time."

"Sad. You know, you're the first person who ever noticed that."

"Really?"

"No one ever noticed that."

"But it's so sad. The first time I heard it was when you were on The Smothers Brothers. That's when I asked my parents to get me a transistor radio. And that Christmas I got your album."

I paused. I could hear him breathing. For a moment I thought he was crying.

This really happened. I feel compelled to interrupt the account to say it, even though I know - I have explained it to my creative writing students many times - that insisting on the truth of something in this way is guaranteed to produce the opposite effect. It did really happen, a conversation with Howard Kaylan, lead Turtle. We didn't talk much longer. He thanked me. I thanked him. We said goodbye.

When I told my wife, Heather, about the call she was amused. "But what's so sad about "Happy Together?" she said.

"Do you know the words?"

"No."

I sang the song. She smiled, which she always does when I sing. "So, what's sad about being happy together?" she said.

"They're not happy together. It's what the singer imagines."

"But it's so jaunty."

"That's what's sad. It's a forced jauntiness. The singer is joking at his own expense. He's afraid to even call her up - 'invest a dime' - and he can only fantasize about their life together."

"That line at the end doesn't make any sense: 'How is the weather?' What's that supposed to mean?"

"The singer is fed up with his own fantasizing; it's a non sequitur calling him back to reality. Like when I ask what you're going to say in your Booker Prize acceptance speech and you ask if I remembered to fold the laundry."

"That's a stretch. Sounds to me like he was just looking for a rhyme."

Heather is a novelist, though she won't call herself that until her first novel, just taken on by an important Toronto publisher, actually comes out. I say the definition should depend on her commitment, not the object. She is also a stern and wise critic, and she had a point about "How is the weather?" but I thought I had a point too. I noticed, also, that after each comment I made about the song she shifted the topic rather than deal with what I had said. That bothered me a lot.

People don't like to recognize sadness in others. I had actually talked about this evasiveness with Heather only a few days before. Earlier we had been having tea with some neighbours, and the conversation got around to another resident of our building, Lorraine. Lorraine is mentally ill. She talks to people who aren't there, she gets lost, she sometimes wanders around the building with her eyes fixed on the floor. Our neighbors were saying it was wrong to assume that Lorraine was unhappy. They had this line that we couldn't know what her internal life was like, and just because she was unusual and didn't "fit our norms" we shouldn't assume that she would be better off if she were more like us. Heather and I made eye contact while this sophisticated insight was being offered us, and we made a polite exit soon afterwards. That's when I talked about how people don't like to recognize sadness, and Heather said I was right, that it either made people feel guilty for not helping or it reminded them of what they were trying to deny: their own sadness. I thought that was elegantly expressed.

And here she was doing it, denying sadness, and I was telling myself this was not an important moment, that it was only about Heather's lack of interest in pop songs, and nothing else, not her guilt, not her denial, not our difference. But I felt horrible. Homeless.

I show my stories to Heather, usually before I should, before even the first draft is complete. I need to hear something that will help me carry on, and stern wisdom does just fine.

"I don't understand it," she said. She didn't like my using our real names and situations.

"Philip Roth uses his real name," I said, and she looked at the floor and then back at me, her eyes squinting just perceptibly, a clear but gentle articulation of "you're not Philip Roth," which I would not dispute.

"Why did you change it? Why not use what really happened?"

"That would mean using our real names. I thought you didn't like that."

"I don't come off very well, do I? Is that fair - to use our real names and have me be that way?"

I might have argued with her, but I could see we were in difficult territory. "Fair" is a big word with her; it's what she asks of herself with respect to her characters, that she be fair, meaning that she grant them the dignity they deserve, the attention, the seriousness, and I have to say her struggles to this end paid off in her first novel, which I admire a lot.

"Perhaps it should be straight non-fiction," she said. "Figure out what it really means to you. Get that across."

"I could try that."

She looked back at the pages, and I knew she wasn't done. "I like some of the dialogue."

I waited.

"It could use some more description. It gives the impression that because the characters are real you think you don't need to describe them. But they still need to be made real for the reader."

"Thanks."

"Why did you change the song?"

"I thought more people would know it."

"I don't know either of them. I liked what you said about the real one."

I downloaded "Happy Together" and listened to it on my headphones, thinking about who wasn't getting fairness - me, Heather, Lorraine, even our neighbors. The song seemed sadder than ever, but it wasn't the same song I had talked about on the phone.

I did get a long distance call from L.A. I was marking essays, sitting at our dining room table to catch the afternoon sun. I had Eric Clapton on, the soundtrack from Rush, mood music I can mark to. I perspire a lot when I mark so I was wearing my old North Shore Triathalon T-shirt. Part of the reason I answered the phone was that it gave me an excuse to stop marking.

"Hello?"

"Hello. Is this Paul Headrick?"

"Yes. Who's calling?"

"This is Roger Mcguinn. Um, I'm sorry, I'm not positive I've got the right person. Are you Paul Headrick the producer?"

"Afraid not."

"Oh, well I'm sorry to have bothered you. I'm looking for Paul Headrick the producer."

I had to ask. "Are you the Roger Mcguinn?" He didn't say anything. "'Mr. Spaceman' is my favorite pop song," I said.

"I wrote that," he said, which was odd, because obviously I knew - that's why I mentioned it. Maybe I was imagining things, but it sounded like there was a lot of stuff in his tone. Resignation. Wistfulness.

"It's such a sad song," I said.

"Sad? I never thought of it as sad. It's just that whole sixties escape thing. It was my 'Mr. Tambourine Man.' Why'd you think it was sad?"

"You sounded so polite, like a little kid asking for something he knew he wouldn't get: 'Won't you please take me along. I won't do anything wrong.'"

"I was just trying to make it rhyme."

"But you could have used other words. And there's that other line. 'I hope they get home all right.'"

"What's sad about that?"

"It sounds like you're projecting."

"Come again?"

"It's your own homelessness you're feeling, your own desire to 'get home all right.'"

"Hey, I'm glad you remember it, almost nobody does, but it's just a pop song, y'know?"

I pretended to laugh it off. He thanked me for liking the song and remembering, and I wished him luck finding Paul Headrick the producer.

I walked down the hall, which is lined with photos from Heather's travels in Asia and Africa - her adventurous days before we met and settled down together. Her study door was shut. I'd heard her close it while I was on the phone, which meant she was writing. She's easily distracted by noise when she writes.

We're both fine about interruptions, and she didn't mind my stopping her to recount the story. I started to tell it like a joke, but when I got to the part about the song and how Mcguinn didn't recognize the longing in his own work my voice started to choke up, and I couldn't think of what I needed to say. Heather got up from her desk and gave me a hug. She was wearing her writing clothes, grey Langara College sweat pants I gave her a couple of Christmases ago and a red hooded sweatshirt that used to be mine. "You're not responsible for everyone," she said. "Don't be so hard on yourself." Her pitch dropped into her comforting range, which reminded me of the way she speaks to Lorraine, our crazy neighbor. I should say she really is ill, Lorraine. We try, everyone in the building tries, to look out for her.

I didn't mind Heather speaking to me in that way. "I think you're right. It is a sad song," she said softly in my ear. It was comforting.

"Why wouldn't Mcguinn admit it?"

"Lots of people won't admit to their homelessness. To say that you feel homeless is to admit to failure. We're supposed to be homes unto ourselves - you know that."

I have not been fair, not at all fair. We cannot be homes unto ourselves, certainly. Believing we can be, instead of believing in each other, causes us so much trouble. But the competing narratives seem to me just postmodern trickery - clever but frustrating. The story should be about sorrow, not its own gimmicks. Most importantly, I have been unfair to Paul, even while writing from his point of view, because I have not been honest about his anxiety, which was what moved me in the first place. So I have also been unfair to myself.

Paul got a phone call from Neil Young, who was looking for another Paul Headrick. I need to be confident, first of all, that I can make people believe in that. Neil Young does make phone calls, after all. And he called here.

In his early days Young wrote "I Am a Child," one of Paul's favorite songs. Instead of enjoying the coincidence of the phone call, Paul was beating himself up for not saying something about the song before he hung up. "Nobody remembers it," he said. "I should have said something. It could have been important to him." There was a lot in his tone. Wistfulness. Resignation. Other stuff.

"I don't think Neil Young is hurting for popular acclaim," I said, and the moment I said it I knew it was bad, I'd missed the point, I'd rejected the premise - that a song forgotten could be a serious loss. I'd not paid enough attention to that "other stuff," his uneasiness about how he would respond if I responded inadequately, which I had.

"But they don't talk about that song. It's forgotten." He looked down then back at me, squinting just perceptibly, a clear but gentle articulation of his disappointment in me.

"Call him back," I said, trying not to sound glib - I didn't mean it that way. "The number's on the call display." He left my study. But I didn't hear him phone. I felt guilty, and I went into the living room.

He was sitting on the couch, listening to music with the headphones. I asked him to turn on the speakers so I could hear the song too.

"It's so sad," I said when it was over.

"Hmm, interesting," he said, which meant he disagreed.

"'I am a child. I'll last a while.' It's about the loss of childhood, innocence, imagination, everything. It's beautiful. I don't think I've ever heard a more beautiful, sadder song."

"Really?"

"Play it again."

We looked at each other as the song played, and in Paul's face I could see a mirror of my own confusion, for we had changed roles. Now it was he not hearing something I heard, not responding as deeply as I had, and that was disturbing but also funny. I believed that Paul was on the verge of laughing, as I was, that he was moving from amusement to puzzlement and back, just as I was. Then he did start to laugh, then he stopped, and then he laughed again, just a short "Ha." He stopped the song before it was over. "I guess it is sad," he said. He chuckled again but without much conviction. I laughed too, but I also felt peeved. I realized that in a way I hadn't wanted Paul to agree, and I wondered if that had always been true for him as well, that for all his anxiety about my not understanding, part of him wanted to protect the very thing he worried about: our difference. Thinking that made me feel horrible. Homeless.

Heather said she didn't think it worked, the three accounts, especially writing from her point of view, and that the comment about postmodern trickery seemed to her to be an unsuccessful preemptive strike against that very criticism. What the fictional Heather said was correct, according to her: the story is supposed to be about sorrow - our connections to our pasts, homelessness, recognition, and sorrow - and I should probably just stick with the truth, a phone call from Howard Kaylan, rather than trying to grab attention with Neil Young. I told her I didn't want to write yet another story that led to the protagonist's encountering some unlikely truth teller and then reaching an epiphany in isolation somewhere, with some convenient symbols carrying the weight of the resolution. She asked if that meant I was afraid to say I'd found a home, and then she asked if I'd folded the laundry.

I didn't get a chance to think about what Heather had said, because down in the basement laundry room I ran into Lorraine, our crazy neighbor, who, as I mentioned in the fictional accounts, really is ill. And we do look out for her. She speaks with a slight lisp, which I'm not going to attempt to reproduce here, but which, combined with her difficulties, is somehow heartbreaking. She was sorting laundry to put in the wash. I took our load out of the dryer and started folding it on the table.

"It's sad, isn't it?" said Lorraine.

"What's sad?"

"Laundry."

"Yes," I said, and thought. No one had ever noticed that before, or if they had they hadn't said anything to me. The sadness of laundry. I folded my North Shore Triathalon T-shirt, long faded, my connection to the days before runner's knee and lower back pain got me.

"It's cruel," said Lorraine, but I wasn't sure if she was still talking about laundry or even speaking to me. She was looking in her empty wicker hamper. I had forgotten, again, to attach the velcro fastener of Heather's sports bra before putting it in the dryer, and it had become stuck to my silk pullover; I knew from experience that it couldn't be removed without causing damage.

Lorraine finished putting her laundry in the washer. "What's it like outside?" she said.

"I'm not sure. I haven't been out all day."

"It was nice talking to you," she said. "You should go outside." She left the laundry room.

I used to try to distinguish my white sports socks from Heather's, till she pointed out that it made no difference if they were mixed up. I finished the laundry, folding all the socks. I looked up at the laundry room windows, but they are small, high up, and they look out directly on the adjacent building, so it's very difficult to tell what the weather is when you're down in the laundry room, and I wondered about the weather. I started to hum a song and decided to ask Heather if she would like to go for a walk.