The truth is, the words Sophie used were inadequate. Her version of my love for George had me peep through a door ajar, slip one toe on a vestibule tile, when in fact I had dwelt in an innermost chamber of the building.

“How long were you lovers? Was it only when you were soldiering together?”

At moments like this I was tempted to scan the street-corners for someone else, anyone other than Sophie, in whom to confide. Though, as she sometimes had to remind me, her job was to insist on the truth.

“Yet,” she went on, “you were engaged twice, to women.”

“I was.”

“And the first one you say you loved.”

“I adored Eliza.”

“And your mother put a stop to it because Eliza had no money.”

“Eliza had nearly twelve thousand pounds a year.”

“Not enough for Henrietta. And your so-called fiancée, Katherine Lowther, whose portrait you carried to Quebec and had set in rubies and topaz to the tune of five hundred pounds, you never loved.”

“Not in the same way.”

“But you agreed to marry.”

“Everyone knows that. That’s not news. Why do you insist on going over the same old—”

“But why, exactly, does everyone know?”

“You’re exhausting me.”

“Everyone knows about Katherine Lowther because your mother used her to shush the story going around about you and George.”

“Nobody else has said that. I’ve never heard that anywhere except here in your tent.”

“Katherine Lowther was a cover-up story, like the marriages of gay men to respectable women since time immemorial.”

To test her theory, Sophie took me to a couple of Montreal strip clubs that first September, one on the Main and the other in the Gay Village. We took seats in a place called Stock Bar and watched a parade of young men dance around a pole. When the second fellow began to dance, Sophie said, “I like his physique better than the first one.”

The first man had been muscle-bound, substantial, and completely uninteresting to me, but not because of his body. He wore tight shorts that he never removed entirely—he simply pulled the backs down so his haunch jutted out. He did this as if casually, as if he was alone in his bedroom getting ready to put his pyjamas on and therefore needing to take the underpants off. But lo and behold, halfway through removing the underpants he was reminded of something that made him pause—a misplaced note from a lover? A lost coin—where had it gone?

He circled the pole and looked quizzically into an imagined half-distance that stopped short of our eyes. Meanwhile his pectorals shimmered, his buttocks—round and concentrated—orbited with the beat of his music.