Even with both of my parents (although if you asked my father, it’d just be one parent) making decent incomes, we could only afford a modest home in suburbs of Gatineau that sprung around the nation’s capital and incidentally, almost the country’s most expensive real estate. If my father couldn’t afford to even live in Ottawa on lawyer’s salary, the size of Claudine’s house made me start to wonder what she actually did for a living. She was a lawyer like my cousin Mike was supposedly a union boss in Montreal. Not only did she live in Ottawa proper, something which was either reserved for the bums in the downtown or the diplomats and statesmen in the uptown, but the house made 24 Sussex Drive seem like a humble cottage.

            One of the things that always struck me about the way that homes were built on the east and west coasts was the way in which east coast homes reserved space. They were characterized by staircases that led to right to the door, no toilet in the basement, a simple water closet on the main floor, perhaps a shower on the second floor and sparing bedrooms. None of these things were present in Claudine’s home. I had always assumed that fancy cars were something reserved for the overly productive imaginations of men, but the Porsche parked outside seemed to lead rather to the contrary. The car was the gutter of the house. It sparkled and dazzled more than a twice polished pearl in the Caribbean sun. It was a sprawling mansion that grew on the once empty hillside like a strangely beautiful but equally cancerous tumour. A five kilometre radius of Ottawa had been declared a green zone; hence the reason so many had flocked to Gatineau and other suburbs far from the city. It seemed that Claudine’s house was either a lucky exception to the rule or just an incredibly unusual oversight. This gave me my second bit of worry.

            I tried to appear as if such wealth was commonplace and led Claudine to the door like the gentleman I was pretending to be. With a house of such size I was amazed that the key to enter it wasn’t a giant sword, but with the exception of a peculiar gleam, it seemed similar to most others of its kind. It certainly betrayed nothing about to the door to which it unlocked. It was only when Claudine entered her home and set to work disabling various alarms that I realized the protection of so valuable an asset was not intrusted to a simple piece of metal alone.

            I stepped in, placed my boots on a rack that was nearly completely covered in shoes unsuited to the season and lost myself in a closet, looking for a hanger amongst a ridiculous variety of coats. I walked back out into the foyer and let the house soak in. This was what a home without younger siblings looked like. Not just a pile of wood clumped together around endless stacks of toys and filth, but a real house where real people could live! There weren’t any boogers hidden in the cushions of the sofas. There were no screaming competitions in the kitchen or botched violin practices that made one curse the day humans developed eardrums. The walls were free of crayon imitation cave drawings. The stereo was liberated of infantile music. The kitchen cabinets were unfettered by child-proof locks. Some of the various artifacts and decorations that lay about the house had sat so long that a thin layer of dust had been permitted to develop on them. I nearly kissed the clean floors on which I stood.

            Claudine gave me no time to worship. “Here, I have something to show you,” she said and grabbed my arm. She led me up her staircase, which I could see fully agreed with the principles of both Feng Shui and interior designing for multi-gazillionaires. The second floor was just as capacious as the first, only somehow the height made it seem grander. That why I was confused when she pushed me through the door of a plain, padded room.

            “It’s sound-proofed,” she said, somewhat conspiratorially.

            This would be my third feeling of doubt. I was wondering if she was planning on chopping me up into little pieces or performing painful genetic experiments on me. I started making for the door, hoping that she hadn’t locked it behind here. But first, I played coy.

            “Why?” I inquired.

            “It’s embarrassing, I guess.”  

            I was still confused. “What is?”

            “My collection.” She pointed behind me.

            I turned around, half expecting to see a row of stuffed corpses, their faces still contorted in utter agony and terror. Instead, there was an immaculate phonograph and hundreds of vinyl records stacked drawers against the far wall. She came up beside me and placed a record on the player with such grace and purpose that I completely forgot why it was weird to soundproof a music room in your own house.

            “Peaceful, Easy Feeling” started filling the room. The phonograph was a beautiful piece of machinery, but the vinyl was not. Every once in a while the record would crackle or even sizzle a little bit, reminding the listener that even the best of us crack eventually.

            “Doesn’t it just sound like the clearest thing in the world?” Claudine asked, though it seemed more of a statement than a question. “Like, if the Ottawa River could be music, this is what it would sound like.”

            I was thinking it would sound much better on an iPod, but I decided to let her have her moment and just say, “yeah, it really does.”

            She rolled her eyes as if I had failed some sort of secret test and leaned against the wall as the music rolled over her. She gripped her fingers against the covering with the intimate pleasure that can only come from the rolling of a gentle melody.  I sat cross-legged on the floor and pretended that my mind wasn’t exploding with boredom. She was entranced and I felt absolute nothing. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy the music; the act of simply listening seemed like such an idle activity. I couldn’t understand the music of my generation, but I did understand the pace of life that never allowed one to stop and listen. Music was supposed to be the distraction not the main event. I felt uncomfortable whenever the last of my tasks withered away and left me free.

            “You’re tense,” she stated in her soothing voice as she opened her eyes.

            “Sorry,” I replied, thinking up an in-character lie, “my mind is in the office.”

            She leaped down from her perch against the wall and approached me with the agility of the leopard and as I found out later, his vile purpose too. She sat behind me and placed her hands on my shoulders, rubbing them along the length of my back with a soft, sensual tracing that left the muscles tense and anticipating. She leaned against me and her mouth crept up to my ear.

            I heard her say, “Well, we’re just going to have to find you an escape, won’t we?”

            The speed to which I jumped to my feet must have broken the barriers of space and time. Had I been more athletic in my youth I have no doubt that the leap would have carried me out of the solar system and I would still be endlessly floating around in the cosmos, trying to remember what oxygen felt like in my lungs. I tried to make my fleeting steps to the door appear natural and unhurried, but in actuality my feet didn’t quite get the memo and I stumbled over myself in an attempt to keep up appearances as I tried to leave the place as quickly as possible. I picked myself up with the same speed as before, but this time I was forced to confront the confused visage of my poor Claudine.

            My mind was a jumbled. I fumbled off script and my mouth became a swarm of angry bees without a queen, just endless, cacophonous drones without any purpose and unifying tone. “I, I, I …” I murmured, my tongue folding itself into a shape even the most skilled of origami masters can only dream of. “I have a … a thing!” My hand rose up in victory as if the sentence were more momentous than the combined works of Shakespeare. “I got a thing that I…” there was another pause while my brilliant writing instincts were rebooting, “that I have to do right now!” It was my magnum opus. I silently cursed my tongue and burst through the door.

            The instant I was in the hall way, my breath started moving normally through my lungs. The air was more abundant, the gravity less pressing, the light more dazzling and the earth more whole with every step I took. The world had been made right again except for one small detail that appeared to me at that time as blatant as the pyramids. In that instant, Claudine was not with me and so in that narrow space in our time continuum I didn’t care about anything else. It didn’t matter one little bit. My lungs be damned, I was going back. I was a slave to her commiserating shout from the music room: “Wait!”

            I came back to door, that door between innocence and knowledge, adolescence and adulthood. She was kneeling on the padded floor, her whole body yearning for comfort, for companionship. In that moment she was as just as lonely as I was, just as isolated, as ostracized. The extra years between us, of education, of falling in love, of marriage that are supposed to dictate our lives melted away until we were just two solitary kids, trying to the play our parts in a screenplay we’d never read. I stepped forward.

            “I’m sorry,” I began, no longer bothering with character or plot development. The words came to my mouth as they were written in my heart and they poured from me like lifeblood. “I’m not used to this, is all. It’s not a world I’m familiar with.” I shrugged. “Perhaps there is no world I’m familiar with. My entire life I’ve had to rely on nobody but myself. I was never listened to as a child. Never felt significant as a teenager. Never felt necessary as an adult. I was useless to the world; I was worthless to me. Day after day nothing mattered. Year after year nothing counted and I guess I got used to it. It hurt less every day until eventually the pain subsided and my ambitions were drained from me like spaghetti in a colander.” Years later, I learned to cut pasta references from my speech, but I was still naïve back then. “And now the pain is coming is back. In meeting you, I’ve finally accomplished something that actually matters, and it terrifies me. Why do zoo animals stay in their cage even when the doors are left unlocked? I never knew until this moment. I never knew what the outside world felt like until you opened my cage, Claudine.”

            She stood and brushed herself off, though I could tell the gesture was a nervous one instead of an actual preoccupation with cleanliness. She looked down for a second and in that second my heart fell to my stomach, my whole being shook with silent apprehension. And then suddenly her eyes drifted up to catch my mine and I could see in her gaze the glittering of a million green oceans and an understanding so profound it could only mean the most pure of connections.

            “I’m new to this as well,” she said, although the true meaning of the phrase I wouldn’t learn until much later. “If you want, we’ll take it slow. There’s no reason to rush anything. I just thought…” her eyes trailed down again.

            I rushed to her like the winds of a midsummer’s night and wrapped her in my arms. I held her tender chin in my hand and brought her face back to its regal height.

            “It’s fine, darling,” I sighed. “Nothing’s wrong in all the world.”

            We kissed and danced and kissed some more. And although there a myriad conflicts encompassing the globe, a million lies told and thousand innocent men murdered, that night, it was true. No greater truth had ever been spoken.