by Alice Munro
One day I went to the Toowong Cemetery to look for some graves. The cemetery was more magnificent and ill-kempt than cemeteries are in Canada. The inscriptions on some of the splendid white stones had a surprising informality. “Our Wonderful Mum,” and “A Fine Fellow.” I wondered what this meant, about Australians, and then I thought how we are always wondering what things mean, in another country, and how I would talk this over with X.
The sexton came out of his little house, to help me. He was a young man in shorts, with a full-blown sailing ship tattooed on his chest. Australia Felix was its name. A harem girl on the underside of one arm, a painted warrior on top. The other arm decorated with dragons and banners. A map of Australia on the back of one hand; the Southern Cross on the back of the other. I didn’t like to peer at his legs, but had an impression of complicated scenes like a vertical comic strip, and a chain of medallions wreathed in flowers, perhaps containing girls’ names. I took care to get all these things straight, because of the pleasure of going home and telling X.
He too would bring things home: conversations on the bus; word derivations; connections he had found.
We were not afraid to use the word love. We lived without responsibility, without a future, in freedom, with generosity, in constant but nor wearying celebration. We had no doubt that our happiness would last out the little time required. The only thing we reproached ourselves for was laziness. We wondered if we would later regret not going to the Botanical Gardens to see the lotus in bloom, not having seen one movie together; we were sure we would think of more things we wished we had told each other.
4
I dreamed that X wrote me a letter. It was all done in clumsy block printing and I thought, that’s to disguise his handwriting, that’s clever. But I had great trouble reading it. He said he wanted us to go on a trip to Cuba. He said the trip had been offered to him by a clergyman he met in a bar. I wondered if the clergyman might be a spy. He said we could go skiing in Vermont. He said he did not want to interfere with my life but he did want to shelter me. I loved that word. But the complications of the dream multiplied. The letter had been delayed. I tried to phone him and I couldn’t get the telephone dial to work. Also it seemed I had the responsibility of a baby, asleep in a dresser drawer. Things got more and more tangled and dreary, until I woke. The word shelter was still in my head. I had to feel it shrivel. I was lying on a mattress on the floor of Kay’s apartment at the corner of Queen and Bathurst streets at eight o’clock in the morning. The windows were open in the summer heat, the streets full of people going to work, the streetcars stopping and starting and creaking on the turn.
This is a cheap, pleasant apartment with high windows, white walls, unbleached cotton curtains, floorboards painted in a glossy gray. It has been a cheap temporary place for so long that nobody ever got around to changing it, so the wainscoting is still there, and the old-fashioned perforated screens over the radiators. Kay has some beautiful faded rugs, and the usual cushions and spreads, to make the mattresses on the floor look more like divans and less like mattresses. A worn-out set of bedsprings is leaning against the wall, covered with shawls and scarves and pinned-up charcoal sketches by Kay’s former lover, the artist. Nobody can figure a way to get the springs out of here, or imagine how they got up here in the first place.
Kay makes her living as a botanical illustrator, doing meticulous drawings of plants for textbooks and government handbooks. She lives on a farm, in a household of adults and children who come and go and one day are gone for good. She keeps this place in Toronto, and comes down for a day or so every couple of weeks. She likes this stretch of Queen Street, with its taverns and secondhand stores and quiet derelicts. She doesn’t stand much chance here of running into people who went to Branksome Hall with her, or danced at her wedding. When Kay married, her bridegroom wore a kilt, and his brother officers made an arch of swords. Her father was a brigadier-general; she made her debut at Government House. I often think that’s why she never tires of a life of risk and improvisation, and isn’t frightened by the sound of brawls late at night under these windows, or the drunks in the doorway downstairs. She doesn’t feel the threat that I would feel, she never sees herself slipping under.
Kay doesn’t own a kettle. She boils water in a saucepan. She is ten years younger than I am. Her hips are narrow, her hair long and straight and dark and streaked with gray. She usually wears a beret and charming, raggedy clothes from the secondhand stores. I have known her six or seven years and during that time she has often been in love. Her loves are daring, sometimes grotesque.
On the boat from Centre Island she met a paroled prisoner, a swarthy tall fellow with an embroidered headband, long gray-black hair blowing in the wind. He had been sent to jail for wrecking his ex-wife’s house, or her lover’s house; some crime of passion Kay boggled at, then forgave. He said he was part Indian and when he had cleared up some business in Toronto he would take her to his native island off the coast of British Columbia, where they would ride horses along the beach. She began to take riding lessons.
During her break-up with him she was afraid for her life. She found threatening, amorous notes pinned to her nightgowns and underwear. She changed her locks, she went to the police, but she didn’t give up on love. Soon she was in love with the artist, who had never wrecked a house but was ruled by signs from the spirit world. He had gotten a message about her before they met, knew what she was going to say before she said it, and often saw an ominous blue fire around her neck, a yoke or a ring. One day he disappeared, leaving those sketches, and a lavish horrible book on anatomy which showed real sliced cadavers, with innards, skin, and body hair in their natural colors, injected dyes of red or blue illuminating a jungle of blood vessels. On Kay’s shelves you can read a history of her love affairs: books on prison riots, autobiographies of prisoners, from the period of the parolee; this book on anatomy and others on occult phenomena, from the period of the artist; books on caves, books by Albert Speer, from the time of the wealthy German importer who taught her the word spelunker; books on revolution which date from the West Indian.
She takes up a man and his story wholeheartedly. She learns his language, figuratively or literally. At first she may try to disguise her condition, pretending to be prudent or ironic. “Last week I met a peculiar character—” or, “I had a funny conversation with a man at a party, did I tell you?” Soon a tremor, a sly flutter, an apologetic but stubborn smile. “Actually I’m afraid I’ve fallen for him, isn’t that terrible?” Next time you see her she’ll be in deep, going to fortune-tellers, slipping his name into every other sentence; with this mention of the name there will be a mushy sound to her voice, a casting down of the eyes, an air of cherished helplessness, appalling to behold. Then comes the onset of gloom, the doubts and anguish, the struggle either to free herself or to keep him from freeing himself; the messages left with answering services. Once she disguised herself as an old woman, with a gray wig and a tattered fur coat; she walked up and down, in the cold, outside the house of the woman she thought to be her supplanter. She will talk coldly, sensibly, wittily, about her mistake, and tell discreditable things she has gleaned about her lover, then make desperate phone calls. She will get drunk, and sign up for rolfing, swim therapy, gymnastics.
In none of this is she so exceptional. She does what women do. Perhaps she does it more often, more openly, just a bit more illadvisedly, and more fervently. Her powers of recovery, her faith, are never exhausted. I joke about her, everybody does, but I defend her too, saying that she is not condemned to living with reservations and withdrawals, long-drawn-out dissatisfactions, inarticulate wavering miseries. Her trust is total, her miseries are sharp, and she survives without visible damage. She doesn’t allow for drift or stagnation and the spectacle of her life is not discouraging to me.
She is getting over someone now; the husband, the estranged husband, of another woman at the farm. His name is Roy; he too is an anthropologist.
“It’s real
ly a low ebb falling in love with somebody who’s lived at the farm,” she says. “Really low. Somebody you know all about.”
I tell her I’m getting over somebody I met in Australia, and that I plan to be over him just about when I get the book done, and then I’ll go and look for another job, a place to live.
“No rush, take it easy,” she says.
I think about the words “getting over.” They have an encouraging, crisp, everyday sound. They are in tune with Kay’s present mood. When love is fresh and on the rise she grows mystical, tentative; in the time of love’s decline, and past the worst of it, she is brisk and entertaining, straightforward, analytical.
“It’s nothing but the desire to see yourself reflected,” she says. “Love always comes back to self-love. The idiocy. You don’t want them, you want what you can get from them. Obsession and self-delusion. Did you every read those journals of Victor Hugo’s daughter, I think that’s who it was?”
“No.”
“I never did either, but I read about them. The part I remember, the part I remember reading about, that struck me so, was where she goes out into the street after years and years of loving this man, obsessively loving him, and she meets him. She passes him in the street and she either doesn’t recognize him or she does but she can’t connect the real man any more with the person she loves, in her head. She can’t connect him at all.”
5
When I knew X in Vancouver he was a different person. A serious graduate student, still a Lutheran, stocky and resolute, rather a prig in some people’s opinion. His wife was more scatterbrained; a physiotherapist named Mary, who liked sports and dancing. Of the two, you would have said she might be the one to run off. She had blonde hair, big teeth; her gums showed. I watched her play baseball at a picnic. I had to go off and sit in the bushes, to nurse my baby. I was twenty-one, a simple-looking girl, a nursing mother. Fat and pink on the outside; dark judgements and strenuous ambitions within. Sex had not begun for me, at all.
X came around the bushes and gave me a bottle of beer.
“What are you doing back here?”
“I’m feeding the baby.”
“Why do you have to do it here? Nobody would care.”
“My husband would have a fit.”
“Oh. Well, drink up. Beer’s supposed to be good for your milk, isn’t it?”
That was the only time I talked to him, so far as I can remember. There was something about the direct approach, the slightly clumsy but determined courtesy, my own unexpected, lightened feeling of gratitude, that did connect with his attentions to women later, and his effect on them. I am sure he was always patient, unalarming; successful, appreciative, sincere.
6
I met Dennis in the Toronto Reference Library and he asked me out to dinner.
Dennis is a friend of X’s, who came to visit us in Australia. He is a tall, slight, stiff, and brightly smiling young man—not so young either, he must be thirty-five—who has an elaborately courteous and didactic style.
I go to meet him thinking he may have a message for me. Isn’t it odd, otherwise, that he would want to have dinner with an older woman he has met only once before? I think he may tell me whether X is back in Canada. X told me that they would probably come back in July. Then he was going to spend a year writing his book. They might live in Nova Scotia during that year. They might live in Ontario.
When Dennis came to see us in Australia, I made a curry. I was pleased with the idea of having a guest and glad that he arrived in time to see the brief evening light on the gully. Our house like the others was built out on posts, and from the window where we ate we looked out over a gully like an oval bowl, ringed with small houses and filled with jacaranda, poinciana, frangipani, cypress, and palm trees. Leaves like fans, whips, feathers, plates; every bright, light, dark, dusty, glossy shade of green. Guinea fowl lived down there, and flocks of rackety kookaburras took to the sky at dusk. We had to scramble down a steep dirt bank under the house to get to the wash-hut, and peg the clothes on a revolving clothesline. There we encountered spider-webs draped like tent-tops, matched like lids and basins with one above and one below. We had to watch out for the one little spider that weaves a conical web and has a poison for which there is no antidote.
We showed Dennis the gully and told him this was a typical old Queensland house with the high tongue-and-groove walls and the ventilation panels over the doors filled with graceful carved vines. He did not look at anything with much interest, but talked about China, where he had just been. X said afterwards that Dennis always talked about the last place he’d been and the last people he’d seen, and never seemed to notice anything, but that he would probably be talking about us, and describing this place, to the next people he had dinner with, in the next city. He said that Dennis spent most of his life travelling, and talking about it, and that he knew a lot of people just well enough that when he showed up somewhere he had to be asked to dinner.
Dennis told us that he had seen the recently excavated Army Camp at Sian, in China. He described the rows of life-sized soldiers, each of them so realistic and unique, some still bearing traces of the paint which had once covered them and individualized them still further. Away at their backs, he said, was a wall of earth. The terra-cotta soldiers looked as if they were marching out of the earth.
He said it reminded him of X’s women. Row on row and always a new one appearing at the end of the line.
“The Army marches on,” he said.
“Dennis, for God’s sake,” said X.
“But do they really come out of the earth like that?” I said to Dennis. “Are they intact?”
“Are which intact?” said Dennis with his harsh smile. “The soldiers or the women? The women aren’t intact. Or not for long.”
“Could we get off the subject?” said X.
“Certainly. Now to answer your question,” said Dennis, turning to me. “They are very seldom found as whole figures. Or so I understand. Their legs and torsos and heads have to be matched up, usually. They have to be put together and stood on their feet.”
“It’s a lot of work, I can tell you,” said X, with a large sigh.
“But it’s not that way with the women,” I said to Dennis. I spoke with a special, social charm, almost flirtatiously, as I often do when I detect malice. “I think the comparison’s a bit off. Nobody has to dig the women out and stand them on their feet. Nobody put them there. They came along and joined up of their own free will and some day they’ll leave. They’re not a standing army. Most of them are probably on their way to someplace else anyway.”
“Bravo,” said X.
When we were washing the dishes, late at night, he said, “You didn’t mind Dennis saying that, did you? You didn’t mind if I went along with him a little bit? He has to have his legends.”
I laid my head against his back, between the shoulder blades. “Does he? No. I thought it was funny.”
“I bet you didn’t know that soap was first described by Pliny and was used by the Gauls. I bet you didn’t know they boiled goat’s tallow with the lye from the wood ashes.”
“No. I didn’t know that.”
7
Dennis hasn’t said a word about X, or about Australia. I wouldn’t have thought his asking me to dinner strange, if I had remembered him better. He asked me so he would have somebody to talk to. Since Australia, he has been to Iceland, and the Faeroe Islands. I ask him questions. I am interested, and surprised, even shocked, when necessary. I took trouble with my makeup and washed my hair. I hope that if he does see X, he will say that I was charming.
Besides his travels Dennis has his theories. He develops theories about art and literature, history, life.
“I have a new theory about the life of women. I used to feel it was so unfair the way things happened to them.”
“What things?”
“The way they have to live, compared to men. Specifically with aging. Look at you. Think of the way your life would be, if y
ou were a man. The choices you would have. I mean sexual choices. You could start all over. Men do. It’s in all the novels and it’s in life too. Men fall in love with younger women. Men want younger women. Men can get younger women. The new marriage, new babies, new families.”
I wonder if he is going to tell me something about X’s wife; perhaps that she is going to have a baby.
“It’s such a coup for them, isn’t it?” he says in his malicious, sympathetic way. “The fresh young wife, the new baby when other men their age are starting on grandchildren. All those men envying them and trying to figure out how to do the same. It’s the style, isn’t it? It must be hard to resist starting over and having that nice young mirror to look in, if you get the opportunity.”
“I think I might resist it,” I say cheerfully, not insistently. “I don’t really think I’d want to have a baby, now.”