by Alice Munro
The middle-aged impresario Monsieur Dulac was played by a twenty-four-year-old travel agent. And Mathias, who was Eurydice’s former boyfriend, presumably around her own age, was played by the manager of a shoe store, who was married and a father of children.
Brian wanted to know why Monsieur le Directeur hadn’t cast these two the other way round.
“That’s the way he does things,” Pauline said. “What he sees in us is something only he can see.”
For instance, she said, the waiter was a clumsy Orphée.
“He’s only nineteen, he’s so shy Jeffrey has to keep at him. He tells him not to act like he’s making love to his grandmother. He has to tell him what to do. Keep your arms around her a little longer, stroke her here a little. I don’t know how it’s going to work—I just have to trust Jeffrey, that he knows what he’s doing.”
“‘Stroke her here a little’?” said Brian. “Maybe I should come around and keep an eye on these rehearsals.”
When she had started to quote Jeffrey Pauline had felt a giving-way in her womb or the bottom of her stomach, a shock that had travelled oddly upwards and hit her vocal cords. She had to cover up this quaking by growling in a way that was supposed to be an imitation (though Jeffrey never growled or ranted or carried on in any theatrical way at all).
“But there’s a point about him being so innocent,” she said hurriedly. “Being not so physical. Being awkward.” And she began to talk about Orphée in the play, not the waiter. Orphée has a problem with love or reality. Orphée will not put up with anything less than perfection. He wants a love that is outside of ordinary life. He wants a perfect Eurydice.
“Eurydice is more realistic. She’s carried on with Mathias and with Monsieur Dulac. She’s been around her mother and her mother’s lover. She knows what people are like. But she loves Orphée. She loves him better in a way than he loves her. She loves him better because she’s not such a fool. She loves him like a human person.”
“But she’s slept with those other guys,” Brian said.
“Well with Mr. Dulac she had to, she couldn’t get out of it. She didn’t want to, but probably after a while she enjoyed it, because after a certain point she couldn’t help enjoying it.”
So Orphée is at fault, Pauline said decidedly. He looks at Eurydice on purpose, to kill her and get rid of her because she is not perfect. Because of him she has to die a second time.
Brian, on his back and with his eyes wide open (she knew that because of the tone of his voice) said, “But doesn’t he die too?”
“Yes. He chooses to.”
“So then they’re together?”
“Yes. Like Romeo and Juliet. Orphée is with Eurydice at last. That’s what Monsieur Henri says. That’s the last line of the play. That’s the end.” Pauline rolled over onto her side and touched her cheek to Brian’s shoulder—not to start anything but to emphasize what she said next. “It’s a beautiful play in one way, but in another it’s so silly. And it isn’t really like Romeo and Juliet because it isn’t bad luck or circumstances. It’s on purpose. So they don’t have to go on with life and get married and have kids and buy an old house and fix it up and—”
“And have affairs,” said Brian. “After all, they’re French.”
Then he said, “Be like my parents.”
Pauline laughed. “Do they have affairs? I can imagine.”
“Oh sure,” said Brian. “I meant their life.”
“Logically I can see killing yourself so you won’t turn into your parents,” Brian said. “I just don’t believe anybody would do it.”
“Everybody has choices,” Pauline said dreamily. “Her mother and his father are both despicable in a way, but Orphée and Eurydice don’t have to be like them. They’re not corrupt. Just because she’s slept with those men doesn’t mean she’s corrupt. She wasn’t in love then. She hadn’t met Orphée. There’s one speech where he tells her that everything she’s done is sticking to her, and it’s disgusting. Lies she’s told him. The other men. It’s all sticking to her forever. And then of course Monsieur Henri plays up to that. He tells Orphée that he’ll be just as bad and that one day he’ll walk down the street with Eurydice and he’ll look like a man with a dog he’s trying to lose.”
To her surprise, Brian laughed.
“No,” she said. “That’s what’s stupid. It’s not inevitable. It’s not inevitable at all.”
They went on speculating, and comfortably arguing, in a way that was not usual, but not altogether unfamiliar to them. They had done this before, at long intervals in their married life—talked half the night about God or fear of death or how children should be educated or whether money was important. At last they admitted to being too tired to make sense any longer, and arranged themselves in a comradely position and went to sleep.
FINALLY A rainy day. Brian and his parents were driving into Campbell River to get groceries, and gin, and to take Brian’s father’s car to a garage, to see about a problem that had developed on the drive up from Nanaimo. This was a very slight problem, but there was the matter of the new-car warranty’s being in effect at present, so Brian’s father wanted to get it seen to as soon as possible. Brian had to go along, with his car, just in case his father’s car had to be left in the garage. Pauline said that she had to stay home because of Mara’s nap.
She persuaded Caitlin to lie down too—allowing her to take her music box to bed with her if she played it very softly. Then Pauline spread the script on the kitchen table and drank coffee and went over the scene in which Orphée says that it’s intolerable, at last, to stay in two skins, two envelopes with their own blood and oxygen sealed up in their solitude, and Eurydice tells him to be quiet.
“Don’t talk. Don’t think. Just let your hand wander, let it be happy on its own.”
Your hand is my happiness, says Eurydice. Accept that. Accept your happiness.
Of course he says he cannot.
Caitlin called out frequently to ask what time it was. She turned up the sound of the music box. Pauline hurried to the bedroom door and hissed at her to turn it down, not to wake Mara.
“If you play it like that again I’ll take it away from you. Okay?”
But Mara was already rustling around in her crib, and in the next few minutes there were sounds of soft, encouraging conversation from Caitlin, designed to get her sister wide awake. Also of the music being quickly turned up and then down. Then of Mara rattling the crib railing, pulling herself up, throwing her bottle out onto the floor, and starting the bird cries that would grow more and more desolate until they brought her mother.
“I didn’t wake her,” Caitlin said. “She was awake all by herself. It’s not raining anymore. Can we go down to the beach?”
She was right. It wasn’t raining. Pauline changed Mara, told Caitlin to get her bathing suit on and find her sand pail. She got into her own bathing suit and put her shorts over it, in case the rest of the family arrived home while she was down there. (“Dad doesn’t like the way some women just go right out of their cottages in their bathing suits,” Brian’s mother had said to her. “I guess he and I just grew up in other times.”) She picked up the script to take it along, then laid it down. She was afraid that she would get too absorbed in it and take her eyes off the children for a moment too long.
The thoughts that came to her, of Jeffrey, were not really thoughts at all—they were more like alterations in her body. This could happen when she was sitting on the beach (trying to stay in the half shade of a bush and so preserve her pallor, as Jeffrey had ordered) or when she was wringing out diapers or when she and Brian were visiting his parents. In the middle of Monopoly games, Scrabble games, card games. She went right on talking, listening, working, keeping track of the children, while some memory of her secret life disturbed her like a radiant explosion. Then a warm weight settled, reassurance filling up all her hollows. But it didn’t last, this comfort leaked away, and she was like a miser whose windfall has vanished and who is convinced s
uch luck can never strike again. Longing buckled her up and drove her to the discipline of counting days. Sometimes she even cut the days into fractions to figure out more exactly how much time had gone.
She thought of going into Campbell River, making some excuse, so that she could get to a phone booth and call him. The cottages had no phones—the only public phone was in the hall of the lodge. But she did not have the number of the hotel where Jeffrey worked. And besides that, she could never get away to Campbell River in the evening. She was afraid that if she called him at home in the daytime his mother the French teacher might answer. He said his mother hardly ever left the house in the summer. Just once, she had taken the ferry to Vancouver for the day. Jeffrey had phoned Pauline to ask her to come over. Brian was teaching, and Caitlin was at her play group.
Pauline said, “I can’t. I have Mara.”
Jeffrey said, “Who? Oh. Sorry.” Then “Couldn’t you bring her along?”
She said no.
“Why not? Couldn’t you bring some things for her to play with?”
No, said Pauline. “I couldn’t,” she said. “I just couldn’t.” It seemed too dangerous to her, to trundle her baby along on such a guilty expedition. To a house where cleaning fluids would not be bestowed on high shelves, and all pills and cough syrups and cigarettes and buttons put safely out of reach. And even if she escaped poisoning or choking, Mara might be storing up time bombs—memories of a strange house where she was strangely disregarded, of a closed door, noises on the other side of it.
“I just wanted you,” Jeffrey said. “I just wanted you in my bed.”
She said again, weakly, “No.”
Those words of his kept coming back to her. I wanted you in my bed. A half-joking urgency in his voice but also a determination, a practicality, as if “in my bed” meant something more, the bed he spoke of taking on larger, less material dimensions.
Had she made a great mistake with that refusal? With that reminder of how fenced in she was, in what anybody would call her real life?
THE BEACH was nearly empty—people had got used to its being a rainy day. The sand was too heavy for Caitlin to make a castle or dig an irrigation system—projects she would only undertake with her father, anyway, because she sensed that his interest in them was wholehearted, and Pauline’s was not. She wandered a bit forlornly at the edge of the water. She probably missed the presence of other children, the nameless instant friends and occasional stone-throwing water-kicking enemies, the shrieking and splashing and falling about. A boy a little bigger than she was and apparently all by himself stood knee-deep in the water farther down the beach. If these two could get together it might be all right; the whole beach experience might be retrieved. Pauline couldn’t tell whether Caitlin was now making little splashy runs into the water for his benefit or whether he was watching her with interest or scorn.
Mara didn’t need company, at least for now. She stumbled towards the water, felt it touch her feet and changed her mind, stopped, looked around, and spotted Pauline. “Paw. Paw,” she said, in happy recognition. “Paw” was what she said for “Pauline,” instead of “Mother” or “Mommy.” Looking around overbalanced her—she sat down half on the sand and half in the water, made a squawk of surprise that turned to an announcement, then by some determined ungraceful maneuvers that involved putting her weight on her hands, she rose to her feet, wavering and triumphant. She had been walking for half a year, but getting around on the sand was still a challenge. Now she came back towards Pauline, making some reasonable, casual remarks in her own language.
“Sand,” said Pauline, holding up a clot of it. “Look. Mara. Sand.”
Mara corrected her, calling it something else—it sounded like “whap.” Her thick diaper under her plastic pants and her terry-cloth playsuit gave her a fat bottom, and that, along with her plump cheeks and shoulders and her sidelong important expression, made her look like a roguish matron.
Pauline became aware of someone calling her name. It had been called two or three times, but because the voice was unfamiliar she had not recognized it. She stood up and waved. It was the woman who worked in the store at the lodge. She was leaning over the balcony and calling, “Mrs. Keating. Mrs. Keating? Telephone, Mrs. Keating.”
Pauline hoisted Mara onto her hip and summoned Caitlin. She and the little boy were aware of each other now—they were both picking up stones from the bottom and flinging them out into the water. At first she didn’t hear Pauline, or pretended not to.
“Store,” called Pauline. “Caitlin. Store.” When she was sure Caitlin would follow—it was the word “store” that had done it, the reminder of the tiny store in the lodge where you could buy ice cream and candy and cigarettes and mixer—she began the trek across the sand and up the flight of wooden steps above the sand and the salal bushes. Halfway up she stopped, said, “Mara, you weigh a ton,” and shifted the baby to her other hip. Caitlin banged a stick against the railing.
“Can I have a Fudgsicle? Mother? Can I?”
“We’ll see.”
“Can I please have a Fudgsicle?”
“Wait.”
The public phone was beside a bulletin board on the other side of the main hall and across from the door to the dining room. A bingo game had been set up in there, because of the rain.
“Hope he’s still hanging on,” the woman who worked in the store called out. She was unseen now behind her counter.
Pauline, still holding Mara, picked up the dangling receiver and said breathlessly, “Hello?” She was expecting to hear Brian telling her about some delay in Campbell River or asking her what it was she had wanted him to get at the drugstore. It was just the one thing—calamine lotion—so he had not written it down.
“Pauline,” said Jeffrey. “It’s me.”
Mara was bumping and scrambling against Pauline’s side, anxious to get down. Caitlin came along the hall and went into the store, leaving wet sandy footprints. Pauline said, “Just a minute, just a minute.” She let Mara slide down and hurried to close the door that led to the steps. She did not remember telling Jeffrey the name of this place, though she had told him roughly where it was. She heard the woman in the store speaking to Caitlin in a sharper voice than she would use to children whose parents were beside them.
“Did you forget to put your feet under the tap?”
“I’m here,” said Jeffrey. “I didn’t get along well without you. I didn’t get along at all.”
Mara made for the dining room, as if the male voice calling out “Under the N—” was a direct invitation to her.
“Here. Where?” said Pauline.
She read the signs that were tacked up on the bulletin board beside the phone.
No PERSON UNDER FOURTEEN YEARS OF AGE NOT ACCOMPANIED BY ADULT ALLOWED IN BOATS OR CANOES.
FISHING DERBY.
BAKE AND CRAFT SALE, ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S CHURCH.
YOUR LIFE IS IN YOUR HANDS. PALMS AND CARDS READ. REASONABLE AND ACCURATE. CALL CLAIRE. “In a motel. In Campbell River.”
PAULINE KNEW where she was before she opened her eyes. Nothing surprised her. She had slept but not deeply enough to let go of anything.
She had waited for Brian in the parking area of the lodge, with the children, and had asked him for the keys. She had told him in front of his parents that there was something else she needed, from Campbell River. He asked, What was it? And did she have any money?
“Just something,” she said, so he would think that it was tampons or birth control supplies, that she didn’t want to mention. “Sure.”
“Okay but you’ll have to put some gas in,” he said.
Later she had to speak to him on the phone. Jeffrey said she had to do it.
“Because he won’t take it from me. He’ll think I kidnapped you or something. He won’t believe it.”
But the strangest thing of all the things that day was that Brian did seem, immediately, to believe it. Standing where she had stood not so long before, in the public hallway of
the lodge—the bingo game over now but people going past, she could hear them, people on their way out of the dining room after dinner—he said, “Oh. Oh. Oh. Okay” in a voice that would have to be quickly controlled, but that seemed to draw on a supply of fatalism or foreknowledge that went far beyond that necessity.
As if he had known all along, all along, what could happen with her.
“Okay,” he said. “What about the car?”
He said something else, something impossible, and hung up, and she came out of the phone booth beside some gas pumps in Campbell River.
“That was quick,” Jeffrey said. “Easier than you expected.”
Pauline said, “I don’t know.”
“He may have known it subconsciously. People do know.”
She shook her head, to tell him not to say any more, and he said, “Sorry.” They walked along the street not touching or talking.
THEY’D HAD to go out to find a phone booth because there was no phone in the motel room. Now in the early morning looking around at leisure—the first real leisure or freedom she’d had since she came into that room—Pauline saw that there wasn’t much of anything in it. Just a junk dresser, the bed without a headboard, an armless upholstered chair, on the window a Venetian blind with a broken slat and curtain of orange plastic that was supposed to look like net and that didn’t have to be hemmed, just sliced off at the bottom. There was a noisy air conditioner—Jeffrey had turned it off in the night and left the door open on the chain, since the window was sealed. The door was shut now. He must have got up in the night and shut it.
This was all she had. Her connection with the cottage where Brian lay asleep or not asleep was broken, also her connection with the house that had been an expression of her life with Brian, of the way they wanted to live. She had no furniture anymore. She had cut herself off from all the large solid acquisitions like the washer and dryer and the oak table and the refinished wardrobe and the chandelier that was a copy of the one in a painting by Vermeer. And just as much from those things that were particularly hers—the pressed-glass tumblers that she had been collecting and the prayer rug which was of course not authentic, but beautiful. Especially from those things. Even her books, she might have lost. Even her clothes. The skirt and blouse and sandals she had put on for the trip to Campbell River might well be all she had now to her name. She would never go back to lay claim to anything. If Brian got in touch with her to ask what was to be done with things, she would tell him to do what he liked—throw everything into garbage bags and take it to the dump, if that was what he liked. (In fact she knew that he would probably pack up a trunk, which he did, sending on, scrupulously, not only her winter coat and boots but things like the waist cincher she had worn at her wedding and never since, with the prayer rug draped over the top of everything like a final statement of his generosity, either natural or calculated.)