Open Secrets

by Alice Munro

  “No, no. I just feel I know them all. Not personally. Well—personally. Yes, personally. What other way is there to know them? I mean, I haven’t met them, face-to-face. But in their books? Surely that’s what they intend? I know them. I know them to the point where they bore me. Just like anybody you know. Don’t you find that?”

  She drifted over to the table where I had laid out the New Directions paperbacks.

  “Here’s the new bunch, then,” she said. “Oh, my,” she said, widening her eyes at the photographs of Ginsberg and Corso and Ferlinghetti. She began reading, so attentively that I thought the next thing she said must be part of some poem.

  “I’ve gone by and I’ve seen you here,” she said. She put the book down and I realized she meant me. “I’ve seen you sitting in here, and I’ve thought a young woman would probably like to be outside some of the time. In the sun. I don’t suppose you’d consider hiring me to sit there, so you could get out?”

  “Well, I would like to—” I said.

  “I’m not so dumb. I’m fairly knowledgeable, really. Ask me who wrote Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It’s all right, you don’t have to laugh.”

  “I would like to, but I really can’t afford to.”

  “Oh, well. You’re probably right. I’m not very chic. And I would probably foul things up. I would argue with people if they were buying books I thought were dreadful.” She did not seem disappointed. She picked up a copy of The Dud Avocado and said, “There! I have to buy this, for the title.”

  She gave a little whistle, and the man it seemed to be meant for looked up from the table of books he had been staring at, near the back of the store. I had known he was there but had not connected him with her. I thought he was just one of those men who wander in off the street, alone, and stand looking about, as if trying to figure out what sort of place this is or what the books are for. Not a drunk or a panhandler, and certainly not anybody to be worried about—just one of a number of shabby, utterly uncommunicative old men who belong to the city somewhat as the pigeons do, moving restlessly all day within a limited area, never looking at people’s faces. He was wearing a coat that came down to his ankles, made of some shiny, rubberized, liver-colored material, and a brown velvet cap with a tassle. The sort of cap a doddery old scholar or a clergyman might wear in an English movie. There was, then, a similarity between them—they were both wearing things that might have been discards from a costume box. But close up he looked years older than she. A long, yellowish face, drooping tobacco-brown eyes, an unsavory, straggling mustache. Some faint remains of handsomeness, or potency. A quenched ferocity. He came at her whistle—which seemed half serious, half a joke—and stood by, mute and self-respecting as a dog or a donkey, while the woman prepared to pay.

  At that time, the government of British Columbia applied a sales tax to books. In this case it was four cents.

  “I can’t pay that,” she said. “A tax on books. I think it is immoral. I would rather go to jail. Don’t you agree?”

  I agreed. I did not point out—as I would have done with anybody else—that the store would not be let off the hook on that account.

  “Don’t I sound appalling?” she said. “See what this government can do to people? It makes them into orators.”

  She put the book in her bag without paying the four cents, and never paid the tax on any future occasion.

  I described the two of them to the Notary Public. He knew at once who I meant.

  “I call them the Duchess and the Algerian,” he said. “I don’t know what the background is. I think maybe he’s a retired terrorist. They go around the town with a wagon, like scavengers.”

  I got a note asking me to supper on a Sunday evening. It was signed Charlotte, without a surname, but the wording and handwriting were quite formal.

  My husband Gjurdhi and I would be delighted—

  Up until then I had not wished for any invitations of this sort and would have been embarrassed and disturbed to get one. So the pleasure I felt surprised me. Charlotte held out a decided promise; she was unlike the others whom I wanted to see only in the store.

  The building where they lived was on Pandora Street. It was covered with mustard stucco and had a tiny, tiled vestibule that reminded me of a public toilet. It did not smell, though, and the apartment was not really dirty, just horrendously untidy. Books were stacked against the walls, and pieces of patterned cloth were hung up droopily to hide the wallpaper. There were bamboo blinds on the window, sheets of colored paper—surely flammable—pinned over the light bulbs.

  “What a darling you are to come,” cried Charlotte. “We were afraid you would have tons more interesting things to do than visiting ancient old us. Where can you sit down? What about here?” She took a pile of magazines off a wicker chair. “Is that comfortable? It makes such interesting noises, wicker. Sometimes I’ll be sitting here alone and that chair will start creaking and cracking exactly as if someone were shifting around in it. I could say it was a presence, but I’m no good at believing in that rubbish. I’ve tried.”

  Gjurdhi poured out a sweet yellow wine. For me a long-stemmed glass that had not been dusted, for Charlotte a glass tumbler, for himself a plastic cup. It seemed impossible that any dinner could come out of the little kitchen alcove, where foodstuffs and pots and dishes were piled helter-skelter, but there was a good smell of roasting chicken, and in a little while Gjurdhi brought out the first course—platters of sliced cucumber, dishes of yogurt. I sat in the wicker chair and Charlotte in the single armchair. Gjurdhi sat on the floor. Charlotte was wearing her slacks, and a rose-colored T-shirt which clung to her unsupported breast. She had painted her toenails to match the T-shirt. Her bracelets clanked against the plate as she picked up the slices of cucumber. (We were eating with our fingers.) Gjurdhi wore his cap and a dark-red silky dressing gown over his trousers. Stains had mingled with its pattern.

  After the cucumber, we ate chicken cooked with raisins in golden spices, and sour bread, and rice. Charlotte and I were provided with forks, but Gjurdhi scooped the rice up with the bread. I would often think of this meal in the years that followed, when this kind of food, this informal way of sitting and eating, and even some version of the style and the untidiness of the room, would become familiar and fashionable. The people I knew, and I myself, would give up—for a while—on dining-room tables, matching wineglasses, to some extent on cutlery or chairs. When I was being entertained, or making a stab at entertaining people, in this way, I would think of Charlotte and Gjurdhi and the edge of true privation, the risky authenticity that marked them off from all these later imitations. At the time, it was all new to me, and I was both uneasy and delighted. I hoped to be worthy of such exoticism but not to be tried too far.

  Mary Shelley came to light shortly. I recited the titles of the later novels, and Charlotte said dreamily, “Per-kin War-beck. Wasn’t he the one—wasn’t he the one who pretended to be a little Prince who was murdered in the Tower?”

  She was the only person I had ever met—not a historian, not a Tudor historian—who had known this.

  “That would make a movie,” she said. “Don’t you think? The question I always think about Pretenders like that is who do they think they are? Do they believe it’s true, or what? But Mary Shelley’s own life is the movie, isn’t it? I wonder there hasn’t been one made. Who would play Mary, do you think? No. No, first of all, start with Harriet. Who would play Harriet?

  “Someone who would look well drowned,” she said, ripping off a golden chunk of chicken. “Elizabeth Taylor? Not a big enough part. Susannah York?

  “Who was the father?” she wondered, referring to Harriet’s unborn baby. “I don’t think it was Shelley. I’ve never thought so. Do you?”

  This was all very well, very enjoyable, but I had hoped we would get to explanations—personal revelations, if not exactly confidences. You did expect some of that, on occasions like this. Hadn’t Sylvia, at my own table, told about the town in Northern Ontario and about Nels
on’s being the smartest person in the school? I was surprised at how eager I found myself, at last, to tell my story. Donald and Nelson—I was looking forward to telling the truth, or some of it, in all its wounding complexity, to a person who would not be surprised or outraged by it. I would have liked to puzzle over my behavior, in good company. Had I taken on Donald as a father figure—or as a parent figure, since both my parents were dead? Had I deserted him because I was angry at them for deserting me? What did Nelson’s silence mean, and was it now permanent? (But I did not think, after all, that I would tell anybody about the letter that had been returned to me last week, marked “Not Known at This Address.”)

  This was not what Charlotte had in mind. There was no opportunity, no exchange. After the chicken, the wineglass and the tumbler and cup were taken away and filled with an extremely sweet pink sherbet that was easier to drink than to eat with a spoon. Then came small cups of desperately strong coffee. Gjurdhi lit two candles as the room grew darker, and I was given one of these to carry to the bathroom, which turned out to be a toilet with a shower. Charlotte said the lights were not working.

  “Some repairs going on,” she said. “Or else they have taken a whim. I really think they take whims. But fortunately we have our gas stove. As long as we have a gas stove we can laugh at their whims. My only regret is that we cannot play any music. I was going to play some old political songs—‘I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,’ ” she sang in a mocking baritone. “Do you know that one?”

  I did know it. Donald used to sing it when he was a little drunk. Usually the people who sang “Joe Hill” had certain vague but discernible political sympathies, but with Charlotte I did not think this would be so. She would not operate from sympathies, from principles. She would be playful about what other people took seriously. I was not certain what I felt about her. It was not simple liking or respect. It was more like a wish to move in her element, unsurprised. To be buoyant, self-mocking, gently malicious, unquenchable.

  Gjurdhi, meanwhile, was showing me some of the books. How had this started? Probably from a comment I made—how many of them there were, something of that sort—when I stumbled over some on my way back from the toilet. He was bringing forward books with bindings of leather or imitation leather—how could I know the difference?—with marbled endpapers, watercolor frontispieces, steel engravings. At first, I believed admiration might be all that was required, and I admired everything. But close to my ear I heard the mention of money—was that the first distinct thing I had ever heard Gjurdhi say?

  “I only handle new books,” I said. “These are marvellous, but I don’t really know anything about them. It’s a completely different business, books like these.”

  Gjurdhi shook his head as if I had not understood and he would now try, firmly, to explain again. He repeated the price in a more insistent voice. Did he think I was trying to haggle with him? Or perhaps he was telling me what he had paid for the book? We might be having a speculative conversation about the price it might be sold for—not about whether I should buy it.

  I kept saying no, and yes, trying to juggle these responses appropriately. No, I cannot take them for my store. Yes, they are very fine. No, truly, I’m sorry, I am not the one to judge.

  “If we had been living in another country, Gjurdhi and I might have done something,” Charlotte was saying. “Or even if the movies in this country had ever got off the ground. That’s what I would love to have done. Got work in the movies. As extras. Or maybe we are not bland enough types to be extras, maybe they would have found bit parts for us. I believe extras have to be the sort that don’t stand out in a crowd, so you can use them over and over again. Gjurdhi and I are more memorable than that. Gjurdhi in particular—you could use that face.”

  She paid no attention to the second conversation that had developed, but continued talking to me, shaking her head indulgently at Gjurdhi now and then, to suggest that he was behaving in a way she found engaging, though perhaps importunate. I had to talk to him softly, sideways, nodding all the while in response to her.

  “Really you should take them to the Antiquarian Bookstore,” I said. “Yes, they are quite beautiful. Books like these are out of my range.”

  Gjurdhi did not whine, his manner was not ingratiating. Peremptory, rather. It seemed as if he would give me orders, and would be most disgusted if I did not capitulate. In my confusion I helped myself to more of the yellow wine, pouring it into my unwashed sherbet glass. This was probably a dire offense. Gjurdhi looked horridly displeased.

  “Can you imagine illustrations in modern novels?” said Charlotte, finally consenting to tie the two conversations together. “For instance, in Norman Mailer? They would have to be abstracts. Don’t you think? Sort of barbed wire and blotches?”

  I went home with a headache and a feeling of jangled inadequacy. I was a prude, that was all, when it came to mixing up buying and selling with hospitality. I had perhaps behaved clumsily, I had disappointed them. And they had disappointed me. Making me wonder why I had been asked.

  I was homesick for Donald, because of “Joe Hill.”

  I also had a longing for Nelson, because of an expression on Charlotte’s face as I was leaving. A savoring and contented look that I knew had to do with Gjurdhi, though I hardly wanted to believe that. It made me think that after I walked downstairs and left the building and went into the street, some hot and skinny, slithery, yellowish, indecent old beast, some mangy but urgent old tiger, was going to pounce among the books and the dirty dishes and conduct a familiar rampage.

  A day or so later I got a letter from Donald. He wanted a divorce, so that he could marry Helen.

  I hired a clerk, a college girl, to come in for a couple of hours in the afternoon, so I could get to the bank, and do some office work. The first time Charlotte saw her she went up to the desk and patted a stack of books sitting there, ready for quick sale.

  “Is this what the office managers are telling their minions to buy?” she said. The girl smiled cautiously and didn’t answer.

  Charlotte was right. It was a book called Psycho-Cybernetics, about having a positive self-image.

  “You were smart to hire her instead of me,” Charlotte said. “She is much niftier-looking, and she won’t shoot her mouth off and scare the customers away. She won’t have opinions.”

  “There’s something I ought to tell you about that woman,” the clerk said, after Charlotte left.

  That part is not of interest.

  “What do you mean?” I said. But my mind had been wandering, that third afternoon in the hospital. Just at the last part of Charlotte’s story I had thought of a special-order book that hadn’t come in, on Mediterranean cruises. Also I had been thinking about the Notary Public, who had been beaten about the head the night before, in his office on Johnson Street. He was not dead but he might be blinded. Robbery? Or an act of revenge, outrage, connected with a layer of his life that I hadn’t guessed at?

  Melodrama and confusion made this place seem more ordinary to me, but less within my grasp.

  “Of course it is of interest,” I said. “All of it. It’s a fascinating story.”

  “Fascinating,” repeated Charlotte in a mincing way. She made a face, so she looked like a baby vomiting out a spoonful of pap. Her eyes, still fixed on me, seemed to be losing color, losing their childish, bright, and self-important blue. Fretfulness was changing into disgust. An expression of vicious disgust, she showed, of unspeakable weariness—such as people might show to the mirror but hardly ever to one another. Perhaps because of the thoughts that were already in my head, it occurred to me that Charlotte might die. She might die at any moment. At this moment. Now.

  She motioned at the water glass, with its crooked plastic straw. I held the glass so that she could drink, and supported her head. I could feel the heat of her scalp, a throbbing at the base of her skull. She drank thirstily, and the terrible look left her face.

  She said, “Stale.”

  “I think i
t would make an excellent movie,” I said, easing her back onto the pillows. She grabbed my wrist, then let it go.

  “Where did you get the idea?” I said.

  “From life,” said Charlotte indistinctly. “Wait a moment.” She turned her head away, on the pillow, as if she had to arrange something in private. Then she recovered, and she told a little more.

  Charlotte did not die. At least she did not die in the hospital. When I came in rather late, the next afternoon, her bed was empty and freshly made up. The nurse who had talked to me before was trying to take the temperature of the woman tied in the chair. She laughed at the look on my face.

  “Oh, no!” she said. “Not that. She checked out of here this morning. Her husband came and got her. We were transferring her to a long-term place out in Saanich, and he was supposed to be taking her there. He said he had the taxi outside. Then we get this phone call that they never showed up! They were in great spirits when they left. He brought her a pile of money, and she was throwing it up in the air. I don’t know—maybe it was only dollar bills. But we haven’t a clue where they’ve got to.”

  I walked around to the apartment building on Pandora Street. I thought they might simply have gone home. They might have lost the instructions about how to get to the nursing home and not wanted to ask. They might have decided to stay together in their apartment no matter what. They might have turned on the gas.

  At first I could not find the building and thought that I must be in the wrong block. But I remembered the corner store and some of the houses. The building had been changed—that was what had happened. The stucco had been painted pink; large, new windows and French doors had been put in; little balconies with wrought-iron railings had been attached. The fancy balconies had been painted white, the whole place had the air of an ice-cream parlor. No doubt it had been renovated inside as well, and the rents increased, so that people like Charlotte and Gjurdhi could have no hope of living there. I checked the names by the door, and of course theirs were gone. They must have moved out some time ago.