Runaway

by Alice Munro

  What most people suspect is true. Such performances are full of tricks. Full of fakery, full of deception. Sometimes that’s all it is. But what people—most people—hope for is occasionally also true. They hope that it’s not all fake. And it’s because performers like Tessa, who are really honorable, know about this hope and understand it—who could understand it better?—that they can begin to use certain tricks and routines, guaranteed to get the right results. Because every night, every night, you have to get those results.

  Sometimes the means are crude, obvious as the false partition in the box of the lady who is sawed in half. A hidden mike. More likely a code is used, worked out between the person onstage and the partner on the floor. These codes can be an art in themselves. They are secret, nothing written down.

  Nancy asked if his code, his and Tessa’s, was an art in itself?

  “It had a range,” he said, his face brightening. “It had nuance.”

  Then he said, “Actually we could be pretty hokey, too. I had a black cloak I wore—”

  “Ollie. Really. A black cloak?”

  “Absolutely. A black cloak. And I’d get a volunteer and take off the cloak and wrap it around him or her, after Tessa had been blindfolded—somebody from the audience did that, made sure it was a proper blindfold—and I’d call out to her, ‘Who have I got in the cloak?’ Or ‘Who is the person in the cloak?’ Or I’d say ‘coat.’ Or ‘black cloth.’ Or, ‘What have I got?’ Or ‘Who do you see?’ ‘What color hair?’ ‘Tall or short?’ I could do it with the words, I could do it with tiny inflections of my voice. Going into more and more detail. That was just our opening shot.”

  “You should write about that.”

  “I did intend to. I thought of an exposé sort of thing. But then I thought, who would care anyway? People want to be fooled, or they don’t want to be fooled. They don’t go on evidence. Another thing I thought of was a mystery novel. It’s a natural milieu. I thought it would make a lot of money and we could get out. And I thought about a movie script. Did you ever see that Fellini movie—?”

  Nancy said no.

  “Hogwash, anyway. I don’t mean the Fellini movie. I mean the ideas I had. At that time.”

  “Tell me about Tessa.”

  “I must have written you. Didn’t I write you?”

  “No.”

  “I must have written Wilf.”

  “I think he would have told me.”

  “Well. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I was at too low a point then.”

  “What year was it?”

  Ollie could not remember. The Korean War was on. Harry Truman was president. It seemed at first as if Tessa only had the flu. But she did not get better, she grew weaker, and became covered with mysterious bruises. She had leukemia.

  They were holed up in a town in the mountains in the heat of summer. They had been hoping to get to California before winter. They were not able even to make it to their next booking. The people they had been travelling with went on without them. Ollie got some work at the radio station in the town. He had developed a good voice doing the show with Tessa. He read the news on the radio, and he did a lot of the ads. He wrote some of them, too. Their regular man was off taking the gold cure, or something, in a hospital for drunks.

  He and Tessa moved from the hotel to a furnished apartment. There was no air-conditioning, naturally, but luckily it had a bit of a balcony with a tree hanging over it. He pushed the couch up there so Tessa could get the fresh air. He didn’t want to have to take her to the hospital—money came into this too, of course, for they had no insurance of any kind—but he also thought she was more peaceful there, where she could watch the leaves stirring. But eventually he had to take her in, and there in a matter of a couple of weeks, she died.

  “Is she buried there?” said Nancy. “Didn’t you think that we would send you money?”

  “No,” he said. “No, to both. I mean, I didn’t think of asking. I felt that it was my responsibility. And I had her cremated. I skipped town with the ashes. I managed to get to the Coast. It was practically the last thing she had said to me, that she wanted to be cremated and she wanted to be scattered on the waves of the Pacific Ocean.”

  So that was what he had done, he said. He remembered the Oregon coast, the strip of beach between the ocean and the highway, the fog and chilliness of the early morning, the smell of the seawater, the melancholy booming of the waves. He had taken off his shoes and socks and rolled up his pant legs and waded in, and the gulls came after him to see if he had anything for them. But it was only Tessa he had.

  “Tessa—,” said Nancy. Then she couldn’t go on.

  “I became a drunk after that. I functioned after a fashion, but for a long time I was deadwood at the center. Till I just had to pull out of it.”

  He did not look up at Nancy. There was a heavy moment, while he fingered the ashtray.

  “I suppose you found that life goes on,” said Nancy.

  He sighed. Reproach and relief.

  “Sharp tongue, Nancy.”

  He drove her back to the hotel where she was staying. There was a lot of clanking of gear in the van, and a shuddering and rattling throughout the vehicle itself.

  The hotel was not particularly expensive or luxurious—there was no doorman about, no mound of carnivorous-looking flowers to be glimpsed within—and yet when Ollie said, “I bet there hasn’t been any old heap like this drive up here in a while,” Nancy had to laugh and agree with him.

  “What about your ferry?”

  “Missed it. Ages ago.”

  “Where will you sleep?”

  “Friends in Horseshoe Bay. Or I’ll be all right in here, if I don’t feel like waking them up. I’ve slept here enough times before.”

  Her room had two beds in it. Twin beds. She might get a dirty look or two, trailing him in, but surely she could stand that. Since the truth would be a far cry from what anybody might be thinking.

  She took a preparatory breath.

  “No, Nancy.”

  All this time she had been waiting for him to say one true word. All this afternoon or maybe a good part of her life. She had been waiting, and now he had said it.

  No.

  It might have been taken as a refusal of the offer she had not quite made. It could have struck her as arrogant, insufferable. But in fact what she heard was clear and tender and seemed at the moment as full of understanding as any word that had ever been spoken to her. No.

  She knew the danger of anything she might say. The danger of her own desire, because she didn’t really know what sort of desire it was, what it was for. They had shied away from whatever that was years ago, and they would surely have to do so now that they were old—not terribly old, but old enough to appear unsightly and absurd. And unfortunate enough to have spent their time together lying.

  For she had been lying too, in her silence. And for the time being, she would go on lying.

  “No,” he said again, with humility but without embarrassment. “It wouldn’t turn out well.”

  Of course it wouldn’t. And one reason was that the first thing she was going to do when she got home was write to that place in Michigan and find out what had happened to Tessa, and bring her back to where she belonged.

  The road is easy if you know enough to travel light.

  The piece of paper Adam-and-Eve had sold to her remained in her jacket pocket. When she finally fished it out—back home, after not having worn that jacket again for nearly a year—she was bewildered and irritated by the words that were stamped on it.

  The road wasn’t easy. The letter to Michigan had come back unopened. Apparently no such hospital existed anymore. But Nancy discovered that there were inquiries you could make, and she set out to make them. There were authorities to be written to, records to be unearthed if possible. She did not give up. She would not admit that the trail had gone cold.

  In the case of Ollie, she was maybe going to have to admit it. She had sent a letter to Texada Island—think
ing that address might be enough, there must be so few people there that any of them could be found. But it had come back to her, with one word written on the envelope. Moved.

  She could not bear to open it up and read what she had said. Too much, she was sure.

  FLIES ON THE WINDOWSILL

  She is sitting in Wilf’s old recliner in the sunroom of her own house. She does not intend to go to sleep. It is a bright afternoon late in the fall—in fact, it is Grey Cup day, and she is supposed to be at a potluck party, watching the game on television. She made an excuse at the last moment. People are getting used to her doing this sort of thing now—some still say they are worried about her. But when she does show up old habits or needs reassert themselves and she sometimes can’t help turning into the life of the party. So they stop worrying for a while.

  Her children say that they hope she has not taken to Living in the Past.

  But what she believes she is doing, what she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it.

  She doesn’t believe she is sleeping when she finds herself entering another room. The sunroom, the bright room behind her, has shrunk into a dark hall. The hotel key is in the door of the room, as she believes the keys used to be, though this is not something she has ever encountered in her own life.

  It is a poor kind of place. A worn-out room for worn-out travellers. A ceiling light, a rod with a couple of wire hangers on it, a curtain of pink and yellow flowered material that can be pulled around to hide the hanging clothes from view. The flowered material may be meant to supply the room with a note of optimism or even gaiety, but for some reason it does the opposite.

  Ollie lies down on the bed so suddenly and heavily that the springs give out a miserable whine. It seems that he and Tessa get around by car now, and he does all the driving. Today in the first heat and dust of spring it has made him extraordinarily tired. She cannot drive. She has made a good deal of noise opening the costume case and more noise behind the thin plank partition of the bathroom. He pretends to be asleep when she comes out, but through the slits of his eyelids he sees her looking into the dresser mirror, which is speckled in spots where the backing has flecked away. She is wearing the yellow satin ankle-length skirt, and the black bolero, with the black shawl patterned with roses, the fringe half a yard long. Her costumes are her own idea, and they are neither original nor becoming. Her skin is rouged now, but dull. Her hair is pinned and sprayed, its rough curls flattened into a black helmet. Her eyelids are purple and her eyebrows lifted and blackened. Crow’s wings. The eyelids pressed down heavily, like punishment, over her faded eyes. In fact her whole self seems to be weighted down by the clothes and the hair and the makeup.

  Some noise that he did not mean to make—of complaint or impatience—has reached her. She comes to the bed and bends down to remove his shoes.

  He tells her not to bother.

  “I have to go out again in a minute,” he says. “I have to go and see them.”

  Them means the people at the theater, or the organizers of the entertainment, whoever they are.

  She says nothing. She stands in front of the mirror looking at herself, and then still bearing the weight of her heavy costume and hair—it is a wig—and of her spirit, she walks around the room as if there are things to be done, but she cannot settle herself to do anything.

  Even when she bent to take off Ollie’s shoes she has not looked into his face. And if he shut his eyes the moment he landed on the bed—she thinks this—it might have been to avoid looking into her face. They have become a professional couple, they sleep and eat and travel together, close to the rhythms of each other’s breathing. Yet never, never—except during the time when they are bound together by their shared responsibility to the audience—can they look into each other’s faces, for fear that they will catch sight of something that is too frightful.

  There is no proper space against a wall for the dresser with the tarnished mirror—part of it juts across the window, cutting off what light can get in. She looks at it dubiously for a moment, then concentrates her strength to move one corner of it a few inches out into the room. She catches her breath and pulls aside the dirty net curtain. There on the farthest corner of the windowsill, in a spot usually hidden by the curtain and the dresser, is a little pile of dead flies.

  Somebody who was in this room recently has passed the time killing these flies, and has then collected all the little bodies and found this place to hide them in. They are neatly piled up into a pyramid that does not quite hold together.

  She cries out at the sight. Not with disgust or alarm but with surprise, and you might say with pleasure. Oh, oh, oh. Those flies delight her, as if they were the jewels they turn into when you put them under a microscope, all blue and gold and emerald flashes, wings of sparkling gauze. Oh, she cries but it cannot be because she sees insect radiance on the windowsill. She has no microscope and they have lost all their luster in death.

  It is because she saw them here, she saw the pile of tiny bodies, all jumbled and falling to dust together, hidden in this corner. She saw them in their place before she put a hand on the dresser or shifted the curtain. She knew they were there, in the way that she knows things.

  But for a long time, she hasn’t. She hasn’t known anything and has been relying on rehearsed tricks and schemes. She has almost forgotten, she has doubted, that there ever was any other way.

  She has roused Ollie now, broken into his uneasy snatch of rest. What is it, he says, did something sting you? He groans as he stands up.

  No, she says. She points at the flies.

  I knew they were there.

  Ollie understands at once what this means to her, what a relief it must be, though he cannot quite enter into her joy. This is because he too has nearly forgotten some things—he has nearly forgotten that he ever believed in her powers, he is now only anxious for her and for himself, that their counterfeit should work well.

  When did you know?

  When I looked in the mirror. When I looked at the window. I don’t know when.

  She is so happy. She never used to be happy or unhappy about what she could do—she took it for granted. Now her eyes are shining as if she has had the dirt rinsed out of them, and her voice sounds as if her throat has been freshened with sweet water.

  Yes, yes, he says. She reaches up and puts her arms around his neck and presses her head against his chest so tightly that she makes the papers rustle in his inside pocket.

  These are secret papers that he has got from a man he met in one of these towns—a doctor who is known to look after touring people and to oblige them sometimes by performing services that are beyond the usual. He has told the doctor that he is concerned about his wife, who lies on her bed and stares at the ceiling for hours at a time with a look of hungry concentration on her face, and goes for days without saying a word, except what is necessary in front of an audience (this is all true). He has asked himself, then the doctor, if her extraordinary powers may not after all be related to a threatening imbalance in her mind and nature. Seizures have occurred in her past, and he wonders if something like that could be on the way again. She is not an ill-natured person or a person with any bad habits, but she is not a normal person, she is a unique person, and living with a unique person can be a strain, in fact perhaps more of a strain than a normal man can stand. The doctor understands this and has told him of a place that she might be taken to, for a rest.

  He is afraid she will ask what the noise is that she can surely hear as she presses against him. He does not want to say papers and have her ask, what papers?

  But if her powers have really come back to her—this is what he thinks, with a return of his nearly forgotten, fascinated regard for her—if she is as she used to be, isn’t it possible that she could know what was in such papers without ever laying her eyes on them?

  She does know something, but she is trying not to know.

&nb
sp; For if this is what it means to get back what she once had, the deep-seeing use of her eyes and the instant revelations of her tongue, might she not be better off without? And if it’s a matter of her deserting those things, and not of them deserting her, couldn’t she welcome the change?

  They could do something else, she believes, they could have another life.

  He says to himself that he will get rid of the papers as soon as he can, he will forget the whole idea, he too is capable of hope and honor.

  Yes. Yes. Tessa feels all menace go out of the faint crackle under her cheek.

  The sense of being reprieved lights all the air. So clear, so powerful, that Nancy feels the known future wither under its attack, skitter away like dirty old leaves.

  But deep in that moment some instability is waiting, that Nancy is determined to ignore. No use. She is aware already of being removed, drawn out of those two people and back into herself. It seems as if some calm and decisive person—could it be Wilf?—has taken on the task of leading her out of that room with its wire hangers and its flowered curtain. Gently, inexorably leading her away from what begins to crumble behind her, to crumble and darken tenderly into something like soot and soft ash.

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