After I returned to the city and to the echo-heavy building that is the Mirror’s headquarters and to my tidy desk that is stationed within it, I had every intention of drafting an official proposal concerning a local interest column on my cousin Vera. But two enmeshed events intervened to keep me from forwarding the idea to my editor. The foremost of these was an electrical fire in the annex beside mine, which resulted in irreparable smoke damage to a number of my belongings, including the entirety of my music collection and a suede armchair that was very nearly a favourite. The next event was my becoming engaged to a woman named Cara.

I am to blame entirely for this romance. Cara was a clerk at the music shop that sat between the Mirror office and my smoke-damaged home. For a period of a month, perhaps longer, I incorporated a stop at the music store into my lunch hour routine. Cara was not the reason for my frequent visits (though she would likely say otherwise). I was simply trying to not merely replenish but actually improve my lamented record collection and the shop’s location was convenient. My guilt in this crime of the heart was ordering Tchaikovsky, which women almost always equate with sensitivity. He is my own concession to the delicate, and it cost me. I have always theorized that women like men who like Tchaikovsky. I have become living proof of this theory.

What shall I say about our courtship? We talked and Cara made recommendations of records I did not buy. Somehow, we ended up at a café and later in her bed and much later in a townhouse that we shared. As to who proposed to whom, my recollection is foggy, but Cara insists that I asked her in a manner that was “endearingly shy.” This is the version she tells her friends and her mother, at whose apartment we have lunch every Sunday. I suppose this version is accurate enough.

There were and are obvious advantages to my relationship with Cara. Companionship always puts one more at ease with one’s own eccentricities. Alone, one’s compulsions can become forces of anguish and alienation. Betrothed, they twist into endearing quirks in the eye of one’s lover. This of course is so much easier than the futile quest to entirely remake one’s self to fit an ideal.

Also, Cara received an employee discount on any records she purchased, so I was able to rebuild my collection much more quickly and at less expense than I’d initially thought.

One Tuesday in November, a most unexpected thing happened. Cara walked through the door shortly after six, smiled, and then handed me a parcel. Its shape and thinness were obvious enough to render the brown paper wrapping superfluous. But then the real question was, exactly which record had she gotten me?