“An open space, with trees. Do you know what the defining quality of open spaces is?”
“Okay, okay.”
“So does that sound okay? Not that we couldn’t…I don’t even mean we couldn’t go to bed. I just want to be cautious. I’m not sure how else to do this.”
I took a breath. “We can try.”
“Okay, then if you’re free tomorrow…”
I glanced out the window. “The weather is supposed to be terrible, right?”
“Yeah, but we could go to a museum, maybe? There’s a place called The Rooms. Lots of interesting stuff, usually. Art gallery, archives…”
I could suddenly picture it: Paul wandering around an archive talking about history trivia, and I loved it. I wanted every minute I could get, especially if we got to hold hands for some of it. Maybe this was just like a high school romance, in the worst possible way.
“Archives?” I said.
“I know it doesn’t sound?—”
“I want to visit the archives with a history teacher.”
“You’re being sarcastic.”
“No, I’m completely serious. Because you’re going to have a lot of deep feelings about fishing licenses in the 1800s.”
“I actually do have strong feelings about the history of fishing licenses.”
I grinned. “Is this where you take your students?”
“Every year. I can give you my whole lecture if you like.”
“I’ll insist.”
Paul pickedme up and drove me through the rain to The Rooms, a museum and cultural center up the hill near the center of town. We spent half the day there, wandering around, having lunch, and looking at exhibits on indigenous culture and local art. I coaxed Paul until he went into teacher mode, which involved providing neat mental lists of facts interrupted by bouts of boyish enthusiasm.
“I mean, St. John’s is the oldest English-speaking city in North America. Discovered in the 1490s, founded in 1583. The pilgrims were twenty-five years later than that.”
“What’s the oldest non-English-speaking city?”
“If you mean continuously inhabited, I believe that is Cholula, Mexico, which is twenty-five hundred years old. Showoffs.”
Teacher Paul was different than Improv Paul. In improv, he was free, occasionally cocky, a bit sexual, and very witty. As a teacher, he bounced between funny and intellectually serious. He could quote a movie or dive into an analysis of the province’s poverty levels and supply chain problems. I liked both versions of him: the one who could go into film noir detective voice and the one who could explain why bottom trawling was harming coastal communities. And then there was the one who had kissed me like he wanted to keep doing it forever.
“So why did you decide on teaching?” I asked.
“That took some time.” Paul told me he had grown up in a little town where his father had become a mechanic after he was injured in a fishing accident.
“We had four generations of fishing, mining, and logging,” he said.
“Newfoundland’s greatest hits.”
“And I was sure I was going to do the same myself until my dad got injured on his boat. Kind of took the shine off it when you realized you could lose the use of your left arm.”
“So you decided to become an actor?”
“No. First I discovered the video rental shop.”
“They still have those?”
