by Alice Munro
If this had not happened, the meeting would never have taken place.
Another old person was coming along the sidewalk. A man, not tall, but upright and muscular, bald to the crown of his head, where there was a frill of fine white hair, blowing every which way just as hers did. An open-necked denim shirt, old jacket and pants. Nothing that made him look as if he was trying to resemble the young men on the street—no ponytail or kerchief or jeans. And yet he could never have been mistaken for the sort of man she had been seeing daily for the last couple of weeks.
She knew almost right away. It was Ollie. But she stopped dead, having a considerable reason for believing that this could not be true.
Ollie. Alive. Ollie.
And he said, “Nancy!”
The expression on her face (once she got over a moment of terror, which he didn’t seem to notice) must be pretty much the same as the expression on his. Incredulity, hilarity, apology.
What was the apology about? The fact that they had not parted as friends, that they had never been in touch with each other in all these years? Or for the changes that had taken place in each of them, the way they had to present themselves now, no hope for it.
Nancy had more reason to be shocked than he had, surely. But she would not bring that up for a moment. Not until they got their bearings.
“I’m just here overnight,” she said. “I mean, last night and tonight. I’ve been on a cruise to Alaska. With all the other old widows. Wilf is dead, you know. He’s been dead for nearly a year. I’m starving. I’ve been walking and walking. I hardly know how I got here.”
And she added, quite foolishly, “I didn’t know you lived here.” Because she hadn’t thought of his living anywhere. But she hadn’t been absolutely sure of his being dead, either. As far as she could make out, Wilf hadn’t had any news of that kind. Though she could not get much out of Wilf, he had slipped out of reach, even during the short time she had been on that jaunt to see Tessa in Michigan.
Ollie was saying that he didn’t live in Vancouver, he too was in town just briefly. He had come for a medical thing, at the hospital, just a routine sort of thing. He lived on Texada Island. Where that was, he said, was too complicated to explain. Enough to say that it took three boats, three ferries, to get there from here.
He led her to a dirty white Volkswagen van, parked on a side street, and they drove to a restaurant. The van smelled of the ocean, she thought, of seaweed and fish and rubber. And it turned out that fish was what he ate now, never meat. The restaurant, which had no more than half a dozen little tables, was Japanese. A Japanese boy with the sweetly downcast face of a young priest was chopping fish at a terrifying speed behind the counter. Ollie called out, “How’s it going, Pete?” and the young man called back, “Fan-tas-tic,” in a derisive North American voice without losing a bit of his rhythm. Nancy had a flash of discomfort—was it because Ollie had used the young man’s name and the young man hadn’t used Ollie’s? And because she hoped Ollie wouldn’t notice her noticing that? Some people set such store on being friends with people in shops and restaurants.
She couldn’t stand the idea of raw fish, so she had noodles. The chopsticks were unfamiliar to her—they didn’t seem like the Chinese chopsticks she had used once or twice—but they were all that was provided.
Now that they were settled, she should speak about Tessa. It might be more decent, though, to wait for him to tell her.
So she began to talk about the cruise. She said that she would never go on another one of those to save her life. It wasn’t the weather, though some of that was bad, with rain and fog cutting off the view. They got enough view, actually, more than enough to last a lifetime. Mountain after mountain and island after island and rocks and water and trees. Everybody saying, isn’t that stupendous? Isn’t that stunning?
Stunning, stunning, stunning. Stupendous.
They saw bears. They saw seals, sea lions, a whale. Everybody taking pictures. Sweating and cussing and afraid their fancy new cameras weren’t working right. Then off the boat and the ride on the famous railway to the famous gold-mining town and more pictures and actors dressed up like the Gay Nineties and what did most people do there? Lined up to buy fudge.
Singsongs on the train. And on the boat, the boozing. Some people from breakfast time on. Card games, gambling. Dancing every night, with ten old women to one old man.
“All us ribboned and curled and spangled and poufed up like doggies in a show. I’m telling you, the competition was wild.”
Ollie laughed at various points during this story, though she caught him once looking not at her but towards the counter, with an absentminded, anxious expression. He had finished his soup and might have been thinking about what was coming next. Perhaps he, like some other men, felt slighted when his food did not come promptly.
Nancy kept losing her grip on the noodles.
“And God Almighty, I kept thinking, just what, whatever, am I ever doing here? Everybody had been telling me I should get away. Wilf was not himself for a few years and I’d looked after him at home. After he died people said I should get out and join things. Join the Seniors’ Book Club, join the Seniors’ Nature Walks, join the Watercolour Painting. Even the Seniors Volunteer Visitors, who go and intrude on the poor defenseless creatures in the hospital. So I just didn’t feel like doing any of that, and then everybody started with Get away, get away. My kids as well. You need a total holiday. So I shillied and shallied and I didn’t really know how to get away, and somebody said, well, you could go on a cruise. So I thought, well, I could go on a cruise.”
“Interesting,” said Ollie. “I don’t think losing a wife would ever make it occur to me to go on a cruise.”
Nancy hardly missed a beat. “That’s smart of you,” she said.
She waited for him to say something about Tessa, but his fish had come and he fussed with it. He tried to persuade her to taste a bit.
She wouldn’t. In fact, she gave up on the meal entirely, lit a cigarette.
She said she had always been watching and waiting to see something more he had written after that piece that made all the furor. It showed he was a good writer, she said.
He looked bewildered for a moment, as if he could not recall what she was talking about. Then he shook his head, as if he was amazed, and said that was years ago, years ago.
“It wasn’t what I really wanted.”
“What do you mean by that?” said Nancy. “You’re not the way you used to be, are you? You’re not the same.”
“Of course not.”
“I mean, there’s something just basically, physically different. You’re built differently. Your shoulders. Or am I not remembering right?”
He said that was it, exactly. He had realized he wanted a more physical kind of life. No. What happened, in order, was that he had a return of the old demon (she supposed he meant the TB) and he realized that he was doing all the wrong kinds of things, so he changed. That was years ago now. He apprenticed to a boatbuilder. Then he got in with a man who ran deep-sea fishing. He looked after boats for a multimillionaire. This was in Oregon. He worked his way back up to Canada, and he hung around here—Vancouver—for a while and then picked up a bit of land on Sechelt—waterfront, when it was still going cheap. He started a kayak business. Building, renting, selling, giving lessons. There came a time he began to feel that Sechelt was too crowded, and he let his land go for practically nothing to a friend. He was the only person he knew of who hadn’t made money from land on Sechelt.
“But my life’s not about money,” he said.
He heard about land you could get on Texada Island. And now he didn’t often leave there. He did this and that to make a living. Some kayak business still, and some fishing. He hired out as a handyman, a housebuilder, a carpenter.
“I get by,” he said.
He described to her the house he had built for himself, in outside appearance a shack, but delightful inside, at least to him. A sleeping loft with a little round
window. Everything he needed right where he could put his hand to it, out in the open, nothing in cupboards. A short walk from the house he had a bathtub sunk in the earth, in the middle of a bed of sweet herbs. He would carry hot water to it by the pailful and lounge there under the stars, even in the winter.
He grew vegetables, and shared them with the deer.
All the time he was telling her this, Nancy had an unhappy feeling. It was not disbelief—in spite of the one major discrepancy. It was more a feeling of increasing puzzlement, then of disappointment. He was talking the way some other men talked. (For instance, a man she had spent time with on the cruise ship—where she had not been so consistently standoffish, so unsociable, as she had led Ollie to believe.) Plenty of men never had a word to say about their lives, beyond when and where. But there were others, more up-to-date, who gave these casual-sounding yet practiced speeches in which it was said that life was indeed a bumpy road, but misfortunes had pointed the way to better things, lessons were learned, and without a doubt joy came in the morning.
She did not object to other men talking this way—she could usually think about something else—but when Ollie did it, leaning across the rickety little table, and across the wooden platter of alarming pieces of fish, a sadness spread through her.
He was not the same. He was truly not the same.
And what about her? Oh, the trouble there was that she was quite the same. Talking about the cruise, she had got all keyed up—she had enjoyed listening to herself, to the description that was pouring out of her. Not that that was really the way she used to talk to Ollie—it was more the way she wished she had talked, and had sometimes talked to him in her mind, after he was gone. (Not until she got over being angry at him, of course.) Something would come up that made her think, I wish I could tell Ollie about that. When she talked the way she wanted to other people, she sometimes went too far. She could see what they were thinking. Sarcastic, or critical, or even bitter. Wilf would not use those words, but he would perhaps be thinking them, she never could tell. Ginny would smile, but not the way she used to smile. In her unmarried middle age she had become secretive, mild, and charitable. (The secret came out shortly before her death when she admitted to having become a Buddhist.)
So Nancy had missed Ollie a lot without ever figuring out just what it was that she missed. Something troublesome burning in him like a low-grade fever, something she couldn’t get the better of. The things that had got on her nerves during that short time she had known him turned out to be just the things, in retrospect, that shone.
Now he talked earnestly. He smiled into her eyes. She was reminded of the handy way he used to have of being charming. But she had believed that was never to be used on her.
She was half-afraid he would say, “I’m not boring you, am I?” or, “Isn’t life amazing?”
“I have been incredibly lucky,” he said. “Lucky in my life. Oh, I know some people would not say so. They’d say I hadn’t stuck with anything, or that I hadn’t made any money. They’d say I wasted that time when I was down-and-out. But that’s not true.
“I heard the call,” he said, raising his eyebrows, half smiling at himself. “Seriously I did. I heard the call to get out of the box. Out of the got-to-do-something-big box. Out of the ego box. I’ve been lucky all along. Even lucky that I got struck down with TB. Kept me out of college, where I’d have clogged my head up with a lot of nonsense. And it would have kept me from being drafted if the war had come along sooner.”
“You couldn’t have been drafted anyway once you were a married man,” said Nancy.
(She had been in a cynical enough mood, once, to wonder out loud to Wilf whether that could have been the reason for the marriage.
“Other people’s reasons aren’t a great concern of mine,” Wilf had said. He said there was not going to be a war, anyway. And there hadn’t been, for another decade.)
“Well, yes,” said Ollie. “But actually that wasn’t a thoroughly legal arrangement. I was ahead of my time, Nancy. But it always slips my mind that I wasn’t really married. Maybe because Tessa was a very deep and serious sort of woman. If you were with her you were with her. No easygoing sort of thing with Tessa.”
“So,” said Nancy, as lightly as she could manage. “So. You and Tessa.”
“It was the Crash stymied everything,” Ollie said.
What he meant by this, he went on to say, was that most of the interest, and consequently the funding, had dried up. The funding for the investigations. There was a change in thinking, with the scientific community turning away from what they must have judged to be frivolity. Some experiments were still going on for a while, but in a half-arsed way, he said, and even the people who had seemed the most interested, the most committed—people who had contacted him, said Ollie, it wasn’t as if he had contacted them—those people were the first to be out of reach, to fail to answer your letters or get in touch, until they finally sent you a note by their secretaries to say the whole deal was off. He and Tessa were treated like dirt by these people, like annoyances and opportunists, once the wind had changed.
“Academics,” he said. “After all we went through, putting ourselves at their disposal. I have no use for them.”
“I’d have thought you were dealing mostly with doctors.”
“Doctors. Career builders. Academics.”
To move him out of this byway of old injuries and ill temper, Nancy asked about the experiments.
Most of them had involved cards. Not ordinary cards but special ESP cards, with their own symbols. A cross, a circle, a star, wavy lines, a square. They would have one card of each symbol faceup on the table, the rest of the deck shuffled and held facedown. Tessa was supposed to say which symbol in front of her would match the symbol on the top card of the deck. That was the open matching test. The blind matching test was the same, except the five key cards were facedown as well. Other tests increasing in difficulty. Sometimes dice were used, or coins. Sometimes nothing but an image in the mind. Series of mind images, nothing written down. Subject and examiner in the same room, or in separate rooms, or a quarter of a mile apart.
Then the success rate Tessa got was measured against the results you would get from pure chance. Law of probability, which he believed was twenty percent.
Nothing in the room but a chair and a table and a light. Like an interrogation room. Tessa would emerge from there wrung out. The symbols bothered her for hours, wherever she looked. Headaches began.
And the results were inconclusive. All kinds of objections were coming up, not about Tessa but about whether the tests were flawed. It was said that people have preferences. When they flip a coin, for instance, more people will guess heads than tails. They just will. All that. And added to it what he had said previously, about the climate then, the intellectual climate, putting such investigations into the realm of frivolity.
Darkness was falling. The CLOSED sign was put up on the restaurant door. Ollie had trouble reading the bill. It turned out that the reason he had come down to Vancouver, the medical problem, had to do with his eyes. Nancy laughed, and took the bill from him, and paid.
“Of course—aren’t I a rich widow?”
Then, because they were not through with their conversation—nowhere near through, as Nancy saw it—they went up the street to a Denny’s, to drink coffee.
“Maybe you’d rather someplace fancier?” Ollie said. “Maybe you were thinking of a drink?”
Nancy said quickly that she’d done enough drinking on the boat to last her for a while.
“I’ve done enough to last me my whole life,” said Ollie. “I’ve been off it for fifteen years. Fifteen years, nine months, to be exact. You always know an old drunk when he counts the months.”
During the period of the experiments, the parapsychologists, he and Tessa had made a few friends. They got to know people who made a living from their abilities. Not in the interests of so-called science but by what they called fortune-telling, or mind reading, o
r telepathy, or psychic entertainment. Some people settled down in a good location, operating out of a house or a storefront, and stayed for years. Those were the ones who went in for giving personal advice, predicting the future, doing astrology, and some sorts of healing. Others put on public performances. That might mean hitching up with Chautauqua-like shows made up of lectures and readings and scenes from Shakespeare and somebody singing opera and slides of travels (Education not Sensation), all the way down the ladder to the cut-rate carnivals that mixed in bits of burlesque and hypnotism and some near-naked woman wrapped up in snakes. Naturally Ollie and Tessa liked to think of themselves as belonging to the first category. Education not sensation was indeed what they had in mind. But there too the timing was not lucky. That higher-class sort of thing was almost done for. You could listen to music and get a certain amount of education on the radio, and people had seen all the travelogues they needed to see at the church hall.
The only way to make any money that they discovered was to go with the travelling shows, to operate in town halls or at fall fairs. They shared the stage with the hypnotists and snake ladies and dirty monologuists and strippers in feathers. That sort of thing, too, was winding down, but the war coming along gave it an odd sort of boost. Its life was artificially prolonged for a while when gas rationing stopped people from getting to the city nightclubs or the big movie houses. And television had not yet arrived to entertain them with magic stunts while they sat on their couches at home. The early fifties, Ed Sullivan, et cetera—that really was the end.
Nevertheless there were good crowds for a time, full houses—Ollie enjoyed himself sometimes, warming up the audience with an earnest but intriguing little lecture. And soon he had become part of the act. They had had to work out something a little more exciting, with more drama or suspense to it, than what Tessa had been doing alone. And there was another factor to be considered. She stood up to it well, as far as her nerves and physical endurance went, but her powers, whatever they were, didn’t prove so reliable. She started to flounder. She had to concentrate as she never had done before, and it often didn’t work. The headaches persisted.