In October, when I was visiting, a chilly wind blew always from the lake, piling up fog that was beige with whitish highlights like a field of October corn. I felt alone. On the subway people wore woolly jackets over their sweaters, sitting bowed against the dismalness of the growing cold. By January they would be long used to it, but that was because by then the summer would be dead and in a frozen grave, permitting the mourning to take place with detachment, irony, and eventually even joy as the extremists joined the strong fierce red-cheeked battalions of winter, gloating in fresh stinging winds; but at the moment summer was newly deceased, still paling and cooling and clotting on a bed of crunchy leaves. So each subway passenger was alone like some Arctic traveller who, homesick while the wind groaned, stretched a hand out of the sleeping bag and ate dry cereal, pushing the cold back a few steps. I knew a little about what cold was. Toronto was not cold yet. On the borders of Canada lay snowdrifts as pure and rich as cream. In summer the mud had been wet between them. It was just above freezing — much colder with the wind chill. Beside the Arctic Ocean was a ridge of pumice-like rock, and then a long low snow-ridge, flat on top like a barn roof, that was almost the same color as the sky. When I tried to read or write there my fingers quickly became numb. The wind grew more forceful; the tent-fly was caked with ice, and my wet boots froze. That was not cold yet; that was still summer. But now the sea had begun to freeze, and down in Toronto we knew that even without knowing it. On the subway we felt cold. Each passenger hunched with his hands in his pockets or deep inside his sleeves, longing to retract arms and legs within his heartwarmed torso to resist the cold, as a sphere of glowing blood. The men glared or sadly gazed; the women wrinkled themselves into frumpishness or followed the flashing stations with clear and angry eyes.
At night it was so much colder still that loneliness overcame lethargic sadness. That was why at night the girls in their thick coats seemed to offer promises of warm cuddlings. It was like Walter Benjamin in Moscow in 1926, pursuing Asja Lacis and scribbling:
Asja would not give herself to him anymore. Her hair was as weightless as milkweed down. But one evening they pushed their coats off the bed and he lay down with her on top of him. They started kissing. He put his hands inside her warm sweater.
As I rode the subway on those foggy Toronto nights, I looked at the women and felt that I could have gone home with them to be warm, but I never asked any of them, and when I reached my stop I went out without looking back.
This happened night after night. Night after night I derived pleasure from sitting across from the women of Toronto, imagining holding them in my arms in their dark warm bedrooms. Night after night I passed through the turnstile and ascended to Yonge Street, where the clammy wind tried to steal my hat. Then late one evening I came out into the silver, frosty air, and the wind was ready for me. It snatched my hat and whirled it over the roofs of buildings. It tweaked my nose and earlobes with burning mischievous fingers. It caught me up and lifted me above the lake. I saw my hat far ahead of me, a black star whirling higher to cap one of the delicious white stars of winter. Because I had fallen in love with the wind, I was permitted to become the white star, and my black cap sailed lovingly down onto my head. I was in the bedroom of the wind. The wind wanted to play with me, love me and eat me. I married the wind, and rode the wind all night.
In the morning I woke up naked on an island of dark wet gar-tersnakes and birches whose leaves were speckled and orange. The wind came to kiss me, and sent an orange rain upon the sand. When I stopped blinking, the trees were bare and the snakes had slipped underground.
I was not cold. My body was as red as a brick. It glowed and tingled and pricked. I found a thicket of Indian pipe in the sand and picked them, made black-jointed flutes with which to serenade the wind, and the wind, still loving me, raised the lake about me, sloshed cold violet-green water about me in glee until it burned pleasantly on the rims of my ears.
Then the wind got tired of me. I don't know why. I had striven to be entertaining and different at all times. My own joy had certainly not diminished. But it didn't matter. This was divorce. My clothes fell down upon me with a thump, and in the dead calm I began to shiver.
