by Alice Munro
And she had to go to the bathroom. She kept looking for the Visitors’ Washrooms, which she thought she had spotted when they were on their way in.
There. She was right. A relief, but also a difficulty, because she had to move suddenly out of his range and to say, “Just a moment,” in a voice that sounded to herself distant and irritated. He said, “Yes,” and briskly headed for the Men’s, and the delicacy of the moment was lost.
When she went out into the hot sunlight she saw him pacing by the car, smoking. He hadn’t smoked before—not in Jonas’s parents’ house or on the way here or with Aunt Muriel. The act seemed to isolate him, to show some impatience, perhaps an impatience to be done with one thing and get on to the next. She was not so sure now, whether she was the next thing or the thing to be done with.
“Where to?” he said, when they were driving. Then, as if he thought he had spoken too brusquely, “Where would you like to go?” It was almost as if he was speaking to a child, or to Aunt Muriel—somebody he was bound to entertain for the afternoon. And Meriel said, “I don’t know,” as if she had no choice but to let herself become that burdensome child. She was holding in a wail of disappointment, a clamor of desire. Desire that had seemed to be shy and sporadic but inevitable, yet was now all of a sudden declared inappropriate, one-sided. His hands on the wheel were all his own, reclaimed as if he had never touched her.
“How about Stanley Park?” He said. “Would you like to go for a walk in Stanley Park?”
She said, “Oh, Stanley Park. I haven’t been there for ages,” as if the idea had perked her up and she could imagine nothing better. And she made things worse by adding, “It’s such a gorgeous day.”
“It is. It is indeed.”
They spoke like caricatures, it was unbearable.
“They don’t give you a radio in these rented cars. Well, sometimes they do. Sometimes not.”
She wound her window down as they crossed the Lion’s Gate Bridge. She asked him if he minded.
“No. Not at all.”
“It always means summer to me. To have the window down and your elbow out and the breeze coming in—I don’t think I could ever get used to air-conditioning.”
“Certain temperatures, you might.”
She willed herself to silence, till the forest of the park received them, and the high, thick trees could perhaps swallow witlessness and shame. Then she spoiled everything by her too appreciative sigh.
“Prospect Point.” He read the sign aloud.
There were plenty of people around, even though it was a weekday afternoon in May, with vacations not yet started. In a moment they might remark on that. There were cars parked all along the drive up to the restaurant, and line-ups on the viewing platform for the coin-use binoculars.
“Aha.” He had spotted a car pulling out of its place. A reprieve for a moment from any need for speech, while he idled, backed to give it room, then maneuvered into the fairly narrow spot. They got out at the same time, walked around to meet on the sidewalk. He turned this way and that, as if deciding where they were to walk. Walkers coming and going on any path you could see.
Her legs were shaking, she could not put up with this any longer.
“Take me somewhere else,” she said.
He looked her in the face. He said, “Yes.”
There on the sidewalk in the world’s view. Kissing like mad.
Take me, was what she had said. Take me somewhere else, not Let’s go somewhere else. That is important to her. The risk, the transfer of power. Complete risk and transfer. Let’s go—that would have the risk, but not the abdication, which is the start for her—in all her reliving of this moment—of the erotic slide. And what if he had abdicated in his turn? Where else? That would not have done, either. He has to say just what he did say. He has to say, Yes.
He took her to the apartment where he was staying, in Kitsilano. It belonged to a friend of his who was away on a fish boat, somewhere off the west coast of Vancouver Island. It was in a small, decent building, three or four stories high. All that she would remember about it would be the glass bricks around the front entrance and the elaborate, heavy hi-fi equipment of that time, which seemed to be the only furniture in the living room.
She would have preferred another scene, and that was the one she substituted, in her memory. A narrow six- or seven-story hotel, once a fashionable place of residence, in the West End of Vancouver. Curtains of yellowed lace, high ceilings, perhaps an iron grill over part of the window, a fake balcony. Nothing actually dirty or disreputable, just an atmosphere of long accommodation of private woes and sins. There she would have to cross the little lobby with head bowed and arms clinging to her sides, her whole body permeated by exquisite shame. And he would speak to the desk clerk in a low voice that did not advertise, but did not conceal or apologize for, their purpose.
Then the ride in the old-fashioned cage of the elevator, run by an old man—or perhaps an old woman, perhaps a cripple, a sly servant of vice.
Why did she conjure up, why did she add that scene? It was for the moment of exposure, the piercing sense of shame and pride that took over her body as she walked through the (pretend) lobby, and for the sound of his voice, its discretion and authority speaking to the clerk the words that she could not quite make out.
That might have been his tone in the drugstore a few blocks away from the apartment, after he had parked the car and said, “Just a moment in here.” The practical arrangements which seemed heavy-hearted and discouraging in married life could in these different circumstances provoke a subtle heat in her, a novel lethargy and submission.
After dark she was carried back again, driven through the park and across the bridge and through West Vancouver, passing only a short distance from the house of Jonas’s parents. She arrived at Horseshoe Bay at almost the very last moment, and walked onto the ferry. The last days of May are among the longest of the year, and in spite of the ferry-dock lights and the lights of the cars streaming into the belly of the boat, she could see some glow in the western sky and against it the black mound of an island—not Bowen but one whose name she did not know—tidy as a pudding set in the mouth of the bay.
She had to join the crowd of jostling bodies making their way up the stairs, and when the passenger deck was reached she sat in the first seat she saw. She did not even bother as she usually did to look for a seat next to a window. She had an hour and a half before the boat docked on the other side of the strait, and during this time she had a great deal of work to do.
No sooner had the boat started to move than the people beside her began to talk. They were not casual talkers who had met on the ferry but friends or family who knew each other well and would find plenty to say for the entire crossing. So she got up and went out on deck, climbed to the top deck, where there were always fewer people, and sat on one of the bins that contained life preservers. She ached in expected and unexpected places.
The job she had to do, as she saw it, was to remember everything—and by “remember” she meant experience it in her mind, one more time—then store it away forever. This day’s experience set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside.
She held on to two predictions, the first one comfortable, and the second easy enough to accept at present, though no doubt it would become harder for her, later on.
Her marriage with Pierre would continue, it would last.
She would never see Asher again.
Both of these turned out to be right.
Her marriage did last—for more than thirty years after that, until Pierre died. During an early and fairly easy stage of his illness, she read aloud to him, getting through a few books that they had both read years ago and meant to go back to. One of these was Fathers and Sons. After she had read the scene in which Bazarov declares his violent love for Anna Sergeyevna, and Anna is horrified, they broke off for a discussion. (Not an argument—they had grown too tender for tha
t.)
Meriel wanted the scene to go differently. She believed that Anna would not react in that way.
“It’s the writer,” she said. “I don’t usually ever feel that with Turgenev, but here I feel it’s just Turgenev coming and yanking them apart and he’s doing it for some purpose of his own.”
Pierre smiled faintly. All his expressions had become sketchy. “You think she’d succumb?”
“No. Not succumb. I don’t believe her, I think she’s as driven as he is. They’d do it.”
“That’s romantic. You’re wrenching things around to make a happy ending.”
“I didn’t say anything about the ending.”
“Listen,” said Pierre patiently. He enjoyed this sort of conversation, but it was hard on him, he had to take little rests to collect his strength. “If Anna gave in, it’d be because she loved him. When it was over she’d love him all the more. Isn’t that what women are like? I mean if they’re in love? And what he’d do— he’d take off the next morning maybe without even speaking to her. That’s his nature. He hates loving her. So how would that be any better?”
“They’d have something. Their experience.”
“He would pretty well forget it and she’d die of shame and rejection. She’s intelligent. She knows that.”
“Well,” said Meriel, pausing for a bit because she felt cornered. “Well, Turgenev doesn’t say that. He says she’s totally taken aback. He says she’s cold.”
“Intelligence makes her cold. Intelligent means cold, for a woman.”
“No.”
“I mean in the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century, it does.”
That night on the ferry, during the time when she thought she was going to get everything straightened away, Meriel did nothing of the kind. What she had to go through was wave after wave of intense recollection. And this was what she would continue to go through—at gradually lengthening intervals—for years to come. She would keep picking up things she’d missed, and these would still jolt her. She would hear or see something again—a sound they made together, the sort of look that passed between them, of recognition and encouragement. A look that was in its way quite cold, yet deeply respectful and more intimate than any look that would pass between married people, or people who owed each other anything.
She remembered his hazel-gray eyes, the close-up view of his coarse skin, a circle like an old scar beside his nose, the slick breadth of his chest as he reared up from her. But she could not have given a useful description of what he looked like. She believed that she had felt his presence so strongly, from the very beginning, that ordinary observation was not possible. Sudden recollection of even their early, unsure, and tentative moments could still make her fold in on herself, as if to protect the raw surprise of her own body, the racketing of desire. My-love-my-love, she would mutter in a harsh, mechanical way, the words a secret poultice.
When she saw his picture in the paper, no immediate pangs struck her. The clipping had been sent by Jonas’s mother, who as long as she lived insisted on keeping in touch, and reminding them, whenever she could, of Jonas. “Remember the doctor at Jonas’s funeral?” she had written above the small headline. “Bush Doctor Dead in Air Crash.” It was an old picture, surely, blurred in its newspaper reproduction. A rather chunky face, smiling— which she would never have expected him to do for the camera. He hadn’t died in his own plane but in the crash of a helicopter on an emergency flight. She showed the clipping to Pierre. She said, “Did you ever figure out why he came to the funeral?”
“They might have been buddies of a sort. All those lost souls up north.”
“What did you talk to him about?”
“He told me about one time he took Jonas up to teach him to fly. He said ‘Never again.’ ”
Then he asked, “Didn’t he drive you someplace? Where?”
“To Lynn Valley. To see Aunt Muriel.”
“So what did you talk about?”
“I found him hard to talk to.”
The fact that he was dead did not seem to have much effect on her daydreams—if that was what you could call them. The ones in which she imagined chance meetings or even desperately arranged reunions, had never had a foothold on reality, in any case, and were not revised because he was dead. They had to wear themselves out in a way she did not control and never understood.
When she was on her way home that night it had started to rain, not very hard. She had stayed out on the deck of the ferry. She got up and walked around and could not sit down again on the lid of the life-jacket bin without getting a big wet spot on her dress. So she stayed looking at the froth stirred up in the wake of the boat, and the thought occurred to her that in a certain kind of story— not the kind that anybody wrote anymore—the thing for her to do would be to throw herself into the water. Just as she was, packed full of happiness, rewarded as she would surely never be again, every cell in her body plumped up with a sweet self-esteem. A romantic act that could be seen—from a forbidden angle—as supremely rational.
Was she tempted? She was probably just letting herself imagine being tempted. Probably nowhere near yielding, though yielding had been the order of that day.
It wasn’t until after Pierre was dead that she remembered one further detail.
Asher had driven her to Horseshoe Bay, to the ferry. He had got out of the car and come around to her side. She was standing there, waiting to say good-bye to him. She made a move towards him, to kiss him—surely a natural thing to do, after the last few hours— and he had said, “No.”
“No,” he said. “I never do.”
Of course that wasn’t true, that he never did. Never kissed out in the open, where anybody could see. He had done it just that afternoon, at Prospect Point.
No.
That was simple. A cautioning. A refusal. Protecting her, you might say, as well as himself. Even if he hadn’t bothered about that, earlier in the day.
I never do was something else altogether. Another kind of cautioning. Information that could not make her happy, though it might be intended to keep her from making a serious mistake. To save her from the false hopes and humiliation of a certain kind of mistake.
How did they say good-bye, then? Did they shake hands? She could not remember.
But she heard his voice, the lightness and yet the gravity of his tone, she saw his resolute, merely pleasant face, she felt the slight shift out of her range. She didn’t doubt that the recollection was true. She did not see how she could have suppressed it so successfully, for all this time.
She had an idea that if she had not been able to do that, her life might have been different.
How?
She might not have stayed with Pierre. She might not have been able to keep her balance. Trying to match what had been said at the ferry with what had been said and done earlier the same day would have made her more alert and more curious. Pride or contrariness might have played a part—a need to have some man eat those words, a refusal to learn her lesson—but that wouldn’t have been all. There was another sort of life she could have had—which was not to say she would have preferred it. It was probably because of her age (something she was always forgetting to take account of ) and because of the thin cool air she breathed since Pierre’s death, that she could think of that other sort of life simply as a kind of research which had its own pitfalls and achievements.
Maybe you didn’t find out so much, anyway. Maybe the same thing over and over—which might be some obvious but unsettling fact about yourself. In her case, the fact that prudence—or at least some economical sort of emotional management—had been her guiding light all along.
The little self-preserving movement he made, the kind and deadly caution, the attitude of inflexibility that had grown a bit stale with him, like an outmoded swagger. She could view him now with an everyday mystification, as if he had been a husband.
She wondered if he’d stay that way, or if she had some new role waiting for him, some use stil
l to put him to in her mind, during the time ahead.
Queenie
“Maybe you better stop calling me that,” Queenie said, when she met me at Union Station.
I said, “What? Queenie?”
“Stan doesn’t like it,” she said. “He says it reminds him of a horse.”
It was more of a surprise to me to hear her say “Stan” than it was to have her let me know she wasn’t Queenie anymore, she was Lena. But I could hardly have expected that she would still be calling her husband Mr. Vorguilla after a year and a half of marriage. During that time I hadn’t seen her, and when I’d caught sight of her a moment ago, in the group of people waiting in the station, I almost hadn’t recognized her.
Her hair was dyed black and puffed up around her face in whatever style it was that in those days succeeded the beehive. Its beautiful corn-syrup color—gold on top and dark underneath—as well as its silky length, was forever lost. She wore a yellow print dress that skimmed her body and ended inches above her knees. The Cleopatra lines drawn heavily around her eyes, and the purply shadow, made her eyes seem smaller, not larger, as if they were deliberately hiding. She had pierced ears now, gold hoops swinging from them.
I saw her look at me with some surprise as well. I tried to be bold and easygoing. I said, “Is that a dress or a frill around your bum?” She laughed, and I said, “Was it ever hot on the train. I’m sweating like a pig.”
I could hear how my voice sounded, as twangy and hearty as my stepmother Bet’s.
Sweating like a pig.
Now on the streetcar going to Queenie’s place I couldn’t stop sounding stupid. I said, “Are we still downtown?” The high buildings had been quickly left behind, but I didn’t think you could call this area residential. The same sort of shops and buildings went on over and over again—a dry cleaner, a florist, a grocery store, a restaurant. Boxes of fruit and vegetables out on the sidewalk, signs for dentists and dressmakers and plumbing suppliers in the second-story windows. Hardly a building higher than that, hardly a tree.