My career is why I’m here, on this futon, under this duvet. I’m having a retrospective, my first. The name of the gallery is Sub-Versions, one of those puns that used to delight me before they became so fashionable. I ought to be pleased by this retrospective, but my feelings are mixed; I don’t like admitting I’m old enough and established enough to have such a thing, even at an alternative gallery run by a bunch of women. I find it improbable, and ominous: first the retrospective, then the morgue. But also I’m cheesed off because the Art Gallery of Ontario wouldn’t do it. Their bias is toward dead, foreign men. The duvet is in a studio that belongs to my first husband Jon. It interests me that he would have a duvet here, although his house is elsewhere. So far I’ve restrained myself from going through his medicine cabinet, in search of hairpins and female deodorants, as I once would have done. This is none of my business any longer, I can leave the hairpins to his iron-clad wife.

Staying here is possibly a silly thing to do, too retrospective. But we’ve always kept in touch because of Sarah, who is his daughter also, and after we got through the shouting and the broken glass we settled into being friends of a sort, by long distance, which is always easier than up close. When he heard about the retrospective, he offered. The price of a hotel in Toronto, he said, even a second-rate hotel, is becoming offensive. Sub-Versions would have put me up, but I didn’t mention that. I don’t like the neatness of hotels, the squeaky-clean bathtubs. I don’t like hearing my own voice echo in there, especially at night. I prefer the shedding and disorder and personal dirt of people like myself, people like Jon. Transients and nomads.

Jon’s studio is down on King Street, near the waterfront. King Street used to be one of those places you never went, a place of dingy warehouses and rumbling trucks and dubious alleyways.