We’d left the area of the burning bushes with a powerful sense of relief. We got the giggles as we hurtled down the final slopes of the mountain, the ones that lead to the ­corner of Park and Mont-Royal. In the distance, we’d ­spotted a patrol car beginning its rounds. Shorts and jeans would be pulled up in frantic haste, more than one coitus would be irrevocably interruptus, shadows bent double would speed through the trees, warning whistles shrilled amid the weighty silence of the night.

We’d gone back up Côte Sainte-Catherine, admiring the magnificent houses that line the street. Mathieu thought they were pretentious, while I told him my long-cherished dream which I now found so laughable. I didn’t ask Mathieu back to the house and he didn’t invite himself either. But at two a.m. he was in my bed.

It was a night filled with tenderness. I hadn’t made love with a man for whom I’d felt something resembling ­affection for a very long time; I’d forgotten the pleasure of giving that’s as important as receiving, the sense of sharing that occurs when love is made not only well but with ­generosity and feeling.

And, something that’s very important for me, we laughed a lot. At our fears and our shyness and our hesitations. While finding it all very touching, of course. We got all ­emotional about the hokey, almost adolescent side of our relations, which we found it amusing to call our dates, and we swore we’d keep on that way because adult love is usually intolerable and always painful. We weren’t missing a single cliché.

The next morning he got up to go to work. Since the Cinéma Parisien is near Eaton’s I went along with him to buy a pass for the Festival des Films du Monde. Luckily there were still some left. I bought the programme and spent the rest of the morning looking through it. So I was going to spend the rest of my vacation in front of a movie screen—I, whose knowledge of world films is limited to what’s shown in Montreal, i.e., practically nothing. But to be with Mathieu I’d have done a lot worse. I realized that and refused to succumb to my usual anxiety.