He raises the flute and aims for my collarbone but I back across the road and flee toward the storage place of my red coat. My head and hands throb but my breast has been struck the worst blow. My loneliness for his flute, for a comrade, for a moment of conviviality with another man of the street—all combine to strike grief through my chest, and as I stumble toward Nettoyeur Serge Daoust I catch my reflection in the Bank of Montreal window. I’m a crumpled sticklegged insect, a daddy longlegs swatted against a porcelain tub.

Sophie calls this kind of talk pure self-pity.

Why haven’t I put my red coat on before today?

It amazes me how much more respect people award me whenever I wear it, though Sophie calls it unsurprising.

“They don’t even know what it is,” I remind her.

“They don’t need to know. They take one look at its military spiffiness and there you go, you’re a man they love to obey.”

“But even police and guards in the subway, and officials at the government office when I try to update my carte d’assurance maladie….”

“Especially those people! Surely you know by now that faced with a military garment bureaucrats are the most compliant of all souls.”

—

IN THE ALLEY BETWEEN SERGE DAOUST and a garment shop for teenage girls I crouch behind a recycling bin and change into my uniform. Every time I put it on I congratulate myself on having chosen the plain version. No ostentation, or, as Sophie puts it, no bells and whistles.

Its plain frock tones down the gorgeousness of the red so that while arresting, it fails to incite fear or untoward attention or ridicule. Its subdued tailoring keeps the garment elegant and respectable as my coat of 1759. It’s a classic design and I’ve always been proud of it.

I feel certain, as I smooth the creases from its having been sandwiched between the bouffant hoopla of ballgowns and the severity of hospital uniforms, the busker would not have dared assault me had I been wearing it.

The south edge of the city of Montreal opens onto what they call the Old Port, but the only old thing there, once you reach the water, is the bridges. The bridges are rickety. They are falling apart. I love the way the Champlain bridge sits squat and cantilevered over the water like an architectural mushroom, sturdy yet lightened by spokes and spans and strips that underpin its upper arc.

To feel the slightest bit human, I have to look at the bridges instead of at what city planners have done with the Old Port. They have covered it in cement: angled, vertical, stretching for officialdom. There is no place on this part of the Saint Lawrence River where a man can regain a feeling of nature. You have to go west for that, toward the Mercier Bridge and the Mohawks.