The boat also reeks of mildew. It smells like mildew and diesel fuel and kerosene and rotting food and body odour. Bob says a real sailor smells just like that. It gives me the willies, because he’s got big plans for the boat and me, he says. Plans and dreams so detailed I know they were made long before me, not because of me or with me, and the plans will go on after me and I know this, but I hum inside my head so I don’t have to think about it. I regretted getting married the moment I started walking down the aisle.

It was only a few months ago that Bob suggested this new adventure, and very quickly after that, the boat had been moved and he had started work in Mission. And then he had come back into Vancouver to see me. It was a Monday night. He arrived without even a phone call. I was about to get into the bathtub as I did every evening. There was the sound of keys in the door. He came in with the mail he had picked up in the foyer and set it on the table before kissing me.

Before his new medical job he had worked at an affluent Kitsilano clinic part-time, a clinic geared toward high-powered professionals and offering evening and weekend appointments for their jet-­setting patients. Bob had insisted on calling himself a “temp” even though the correct word was “locum.”

He had worked in the high North, in Rankin Inlet and Churchill, before deciding he wanted to be a sailor. When he came back from his one and only sailing trip, he decided to “try out” Vancouver, where we met at a party. He didn’t pay any attention to me until he heard my last name. He worshipped my famous distant Slocum cousin. Bob proposed very quickly after he saw me in action on his sail boat. He had invited me for a sail but when the winds came up he didn’t seem to know what he was doing and so I took over without saying a word. We got married after a year and then he went back up north to make money to save for the big round-the-world sailing trip he wanted us to embark on.

It was “sexy medicine,” he said, working with the Inuit. They appreciated him. Bob in turn appreciated the great stories he could tell at parties, how exotic they made him seem. And now this clinic outside of the city in Mission was some sort of progressive clinic, with a bunch of hippie doctors. They needed someone to fill in for them on occasional weekdays and weekends. He could start right away. It was the spice he needed. That’s how Bob described it. A bit of curry. A bit of muktuk. A taste of walrus. This would be the perfect way to bring back some excitement to our lives. We could still keep the city apartment, he said. It was a reasonable compromise. This would give Bob, and me, some adventure with like-minded people. My trips out to Mission would be a retreat from the city. I grew up in the country, so it would be perfect! I could work on my dissertation. Fantastic all around! And so he accepted the job and moved the boat.