wildcat

Ran into the Lonely Novelist the other week.

The Lonely Novelist was someone Joy and I would see often, around town, usually when we were up in the Second Story bookshop/cafe, drinking organic herbal tea and eating enormous cookies while we worked on whatever stories or poems were the centre of our gigantic soul-crushing universes that week. He was tall, but not too tall; he was tall in that way that suggested he'd been too tall at some point in his adolescence, had been very awkward and gangly and was only now -- in his thirties -- getting to be comfortable with it. He had tall hair. He wore secondhand brown buttondowns. The Lonely Novelist spent his time typing away -- we presumed -- at a novel on his laptop. He gazed longingly at us as we nattered while we wrote, read things out to each other, and engaged in serious literary discussion.

And by "serious literary discussion," I mean we talked about boys and lipstick, because we're like teenaged characters in a Margaret Atwood short story. And by "boys and lipstick," I mean we were usually talking about booze and our own inability to function and interact with society in any kind of meaningful way.

And then we stopped going, because we'd graduated, Second Story closed down, and Joy went off into the wild environs of Japan. And the Lonely Novelist receded into the mists, except I saw him on the street one day with some short woman (although perhaps it was merely an issue of scale rather than any innate shortness on her part) that one time. But otherwise he was rendered a footnote.

And we were at the Intelligence Ball, this nerd-themed party at Element the other week. Michael, Christian, Penny, Suzanne and I.

And the Lonely Novelist. He circulated. It was all very shark-infested waters with him, rotating through the club over and over while our group sat at a table, drinking cocktails and reserving judgement (Judgement later occurred on the dance floor, and it was delicious). Over and over, he passed by, looking at us out of the corner of his eye.

It seemed he had, perhaps, taken a bit of a liking to Penny, as is the way of these things.

And he was dancing on one side of the dance floor and we were dancing on the other side (well, the girls and I were dancing -- Michael and Christian maintained appropriate regal posture from the railing beside the dance floor), and he kept getting closer. And Penny said she could tell he was prone to megalomania and neurotic compulsions, which meant she'd probably end up in some kind of disastrous relationship with him. "One day you're going to divorce that man," I said.

And it's true: the Lonely Novelist is the sort of man you divorce one day, in a fit of pique, after an unsettling and unrealistic marriage. Plates would never be smashed on purpose, but they would be smashed. He'd be unsuccessful and you'd grow to hate each other and there would be dinner parties where the comments were never quite veiled enough and eventually you'd leave him. You'd leave him and there would be recriminations and drunken phone calls and stories would turn up in Geist Magazine, stories where the character that stands in for you has the same initials, because he'd have no sense of decorum whatsoever.