Judith Elaine Cowan

Is It Wrong Judith Elaine Cowan

The party was in an immense nineteenth-century apartment above a shop on Yonge Street, a vast, dim space lit only by the streetlights casting their beams in through the towering windows. Sitting on a collapsed chesterfield, I gazed up into layers of smoke at the twelve-foot ceiling, impressed that someone had soundproofed it with square market-style egg cartons. A hundred years earlier, those windows would have been draped with heavy brocade curtains. The room might have been furnished with mahogany sideboards, curio cabinets, plush armchairs, and flowered carpets. Maybe there'd been palm trees or tall ferns in brass pots, and a square piano draped in fringed velvet. All of that had been swept away. Now there was only the sound system, the old sofa, a dusty scatter of straight chairs. And lounging in the second-hand light, listening to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, I was thrilled by the transcendency of the moment, and imagined the Victorian ghosts of a sturdy mercantile family staring out in astonishment from their other dimension. This was heightened, multi-layered reality, an instant of magical stasis in the poignant time-loop between the bourgeois and the bohemian.