hen we get home we're dripping wet and Louise changes, then comes into my room where she sits huddled and shivering under an old brown army blanket. I'm wanting to change too, but she's laughing and teasing me in her childish way. She sits on my floor mattress when the downstairs front door opens. Louise begins to scream, "Michel, Michel, quick, he's boddering me." And she lets fly a stream of French which sends Michel flying through the door and at me. I'm protesting, saying I don't know what the hell's going on, but I'm speaking in English while she's saying things in French. Michel grabs her by the wrist, glares at me, then out they go with a slam of my door. We don't talk much after that. Mornings I find myself in the Parc La Fontane watching the fountains, dozing off on the park benches, wandering around in the same clothes, watching people, feeding pigeons, content with nothing. I take out a membership at the Public Library and read Tolstoy and Chekov. Sparse prose feels right for this emptiness. Nights I sit and stare at the colored lights that play across the fountains. It's as close to drugs as I get, and as I'm usually spaced-out and slightly hungover, I find that the fountains, the little lake and canoes, the lovers' silhouettes in the street-lamps, create a reality which holds me like a figurine in a glass-ball shake-up toy. But, I'm not built for formlessness and assemblage yet, and by late summer I've gotten very sick. Fever, sweating, long delirious dreams. Days go by, and I can't seem to get up. Never a thought to find a doctor. My money is low and I'm strung out. Then one afternoon my course books for next September's classes at the Maryland college arrive. My parents have forwarded them to me along with $110, the last of my savings account. I open Hemingway and move my rattan chair nearer to the window. A breeze blows across me and I feel alive. The cries-cross wash lines are now fascinating, so many types and colors of clothes on them. The fire escapes zig-zag up and down the backs of the old brick buildings. Shadows play with sunlight. It is an abstract painting, and I want a bottle of wine to celebrate. By mid-August my time in Montreal is ending. I'm drifting. I sit in cathedrals and watch old penitents pray. My room is too empty to hold me any longer, yet exactly how and when I'll leave remains unknown. One night, my brother-in-law arrives at my door with his backpack. He's come to visit Expo, and Montreal, and me. For three days we tour the small circle I've circumscribed: the orange dots, the park of colored fountains, Expo and the sidewalk cafes, Jean-Louis' circle of bohemians. They perform for him: make hilarious sculptings from pyramids of beer glasses, chicken bones, and grapes; fling themselves across parked car hoods, and howl with laughter at baby shoes dangling from mirrors, hood ornaments, and parking meters. Their contemptuous chagrin at bourgeois culture makes Marcel Duchamp grin as they guide us down any avenue, erasing the boundaries of the gallery and the street, reframing where and what art is, destroying ordinary forms and performing original responses as they stagger back to their garrets. In the morning we shove leftover sausages and Portuguese rolls into our backpacks and leave while they are sleeping it off. It took us nearly three days to hitch to Cape Cod, winding our way through the network of rural dirt roads where farmers drive short distances slowly in old trucks with baby shoes and crucifixes hanging from their perfectly acceptable rearview mirrors.