I said we would certainly try to be there. Doug was being nothing but charming, as if to make up for any earlier unpleasantness, but still I felt relief at leaving, at finding my way to the front door and out to the street. I drove home trying to sort out how I felt about it all. I didn’t have any great powers of intuition or foresight, but I was pretty sure that Doug was not an angel walking among us.

Gossip

Oscar returned from Maine and the writer’s conference spent, exalted, and in love.

Heartsick, he went for long, solitary hikes up Mount Tam and returned to Viridian’s scratched and sore. Or he holed up in his room, writing furiously, emerging only for supplies of alcohol and sandwiches. The lady was a fiction writer, another one of the conference staff. She lived in Montreal. They were going to see each other again as soon as possible. He couldn’t find his passport; it was expired anyway. How long did it take to get a passport renewed? Or wait, somebody told him you only needed a passport to enter Canada if you flew. He could drive. Then he would only need a driver’s license.

They’d met the first night and talked for hours. So incredible! It was as if they’d been saving up words their entire lives, just to share with each other. Things had progressed from there. She was brilliant, or as Oscar said, “blazing brilliant.” He’d bought all her books, he was reading them straight through. She was reading his books, too. She completely got them, what he was doing, what he was trying to do. He was writing new poems. For her, about her. He hadn’t stopped writing since they’d met. They’d both cried when they had to leave. They were inconsolable! They’d talked every day since, emailed, wrote.

“He always falls in love at conferences,” Sacha said. She and Viridian and I sat on the screened porch. Oscar had been pacing back and forth on the breezeway, oblivious to us, then he stalked into the house. We were drinking iced coffee and watching the sprinklers I’d set up send fine bands of spray through the air. If you looked into the water just right, you saw a rainbow.

“He’s not the only one,” Viridian said. “These shipboard romances.” She sighed, as if she’d witnessed too many such cruises.

“At least it’s not a student this time. I know Irene, she’s quite nice,” Sacha said. “I’m fairly sure she has a long-term partner in Montreal. I hope she’s decent to Oscar, lets him walk away with his poems and some beautiful memories.”

“We’re shocking Carla,” Viridian warned.

“No you’re not. But they sound like teenagers.”

This made them both laugh. “Exactly,” Viridian said. “It’s always passionately sincere and it’s going to last forever. “