Free A by Andre Alexis Page B

nondescript, filled (in Baddeley’s mind) with would-be artists and sad foreigners, with low-rent criminals and aspiring young professionals. Yet, what better place for a man who sought anonymity? It was just the neighbourhood for a genius like Andrews, when you really thought about it.
    (Parkdale was on the other side of town from his rooming house, but it was still possible — perhaps even likely — that he had met Andrews on a street somewhere. No, on second thought, it was not likely. He could not have passed a man like Avery Andrews — a poet whose mind and spirit were indissociable from his (that is, Baddeley’s) own soul — without recognizing him at once.)
    Then again, had Marva Wilson been telling the truth or had she been saying any old thing in order to impress Gil? That was the question and, when asked, Gil could not say for certain. Marva had sounded sincere, he’d said. But, then, Gil Davidoff did not believe that any woman to whom he’d made love could be insincere, acute sexual gratitude being very like sodium pentothal. Baddeley was skeptical about the “truth-telling” that happens after lovemaking. He himself had managed to lie while talking to women with whom he’d just copulated. Actually, he had not lied. He had, once or twice, avoided speaking the truth in order to spare his lover’s feelings. But the point still stood: Why should a woman not be able to fabricate or stretch a truth in similar circumstances? Worse yet, a host of mitigations occurred to him: Marva was telling the truth about some aspectd of her story (the cardigan, say) but not others; Marva was telling the truth but Andrews had moved from Parkdale; Marva was lying but knew the truth; Marva had been the victim of a man claiming to be Avery Andrews ...
    Still, thanks to Gil Davidoff, Baddeley had been given a hint, a provocation, somewhere to look or, if Marva proved unreliable, somewhere it was pointless to look.



Parkdale was a two-hour walk from Cabbagetown. (Baddeley could not afford the streetcar.) And though Cowan was not a long street, it was just long enough — almost a kilometre, running from south of Springhurst north to Queen Street — to be difficult for one man to patrol on his own. At which end of Cowan should he begin? Should he walk up and down the street looking for a man in a yellow cardigan? He — that is Baddeley – would almost certainly look suspicious. And what would he do if he actually found Avery Andrews? How would he address him? What would he say? How would Andrews react?
    These were all questions to which Baddeley gave himself easy answers. Excited by even the faintest possibility of meeting Andrews, he refused to allow practical concerns to stand between himself and the poet. He would walk up and down Cowan. For one week, beginning at the furthest point south, he would walk the southernmost end of the street: Springhurst to King. The following week, he would walk north between King and Queen. In the event he met a man in a cardigan and reddish oxfords, he would follow him about for a day, watching to see where the man went and to which address he returned. Once he’d found the man’s house, he would — at some later time — break in and leave a copy of Time and Mr. Andrews somewhere prominent: on the kitchen counter, say, or on a living room table. How could Andrews — if it was Andrews — be anything but intrigued by such an intrusion? More: once Andrews had read the manuscript, he would — wouldn’t he? — welcome Baddeley’s company. (And if the man he found was not Andrews? Well, that would be unfortunate, it’s true, but there were worse things in life — weren’t there? — than a home invader who stole nothing but left a manuscript behind.)
    Baddeley set out in search of Andrews the day after learning about Marva. He was immediately rewarded. At eleven o’clock on his first morning