by Alice Munro
“Squeamish,” he said, in that same artificially and hatefully tender voice, as if he were licking fanatically at something loathsome. “You’re a squeamish little slut.”
Georgia told him that she would lean on the horn if he didn’t stop. She would lean on the horn if he didn’t get out of the car. She would yell for somebody to call the police. She did lean against the horn as they struggled. He pushed her away, with a whimpering curse such as she’d heard from him at other times, when it meant something different. He got out.
She could not believe that such ill will had erupted, that things had so stunningly turned around. When she thought of this afterward—a good long time afterward—she thought that perhaps he had acted for conscience’s sake, to mark her off from Laura. Or to blot out what he had said to her last time. To humiliate her because he was frightened. Perhaps. Or perhaps all this seemed to him simply a further, and genuinely interesting, development in lovemaking.
She would have liked to talk it over with Maya. But the possibility of talking anything over with Maya had disappeared. Their friendship had come suddenly to an end.
The night after the incident at Clover Point, Georgia was sitting on the living-room floor playing a bedtime card game with her sons. The phone rang, and she was sure that it was Miles. She had been thinking all day that he would call, he would have to call to explain himself, to beg her pardon, to say that he had been testing her, in a way, or had been temporarily deranged by circumstances that she knew nothing about. She would not forgive him immediately. But she would not hang up.
It was Maya.
“Guess what weird thing happened,” Maya said. “Miles phoned me. Your Miles. It’s O.K., Raymond isn’t here. How did he even know my name?”
“I don’t know,” said Georgia.
She had told him it, of course. She had offered wild Maya up for his entertainment, or to point out what a novice at this game she herself was—a relatively chaste prize.
“He says he wants to come and talk to me,” Maya said. “What do you think? What’s the matter with him? Did you have a fight?… Yes? Oh, well, he probably wants me to persuade you to make up. I must say he picked the right night. Raymond’s at the hospital. He’s got this balky woman in labor; he may have to stay and do a section on her. I’ll phone and tell you how it goes. Shall I?”
After a couple of hours, with the children long asleep, Georgia began to expect Maya’s call. She watched the television news, to take her mind off expecting it. She picked up the phone to make sure there was a dial tone. She turned off the television after the news, then turned it on again. She started to watch a movie; she watched it through three commercial breaks without going to the kitchen to look at the clock.
At half past midnight she went out and got into her car and drove to Maya’s house. She had no idea what she would do there. And she did not do much of anything. She drove around the circular drive with the lights off. The house was dark. She could see that the garage was open and Raymond’s car was not there. The motorcycle was nowhere in sight.
She had left her children alone, the doors unlocked. Nothing happened to them. They didn’t wake up and discover her defection. No burglar, or prowler, or murderer surprised her on her return. That was a piece of luck that she did not even appreciate. She had gone out leaving the door open and the lights on, and when she came back she hardly recognized her folly, though she closed the door and turned out some lights and lay down on the living-room sofa. She didn’t sleep. She lay still, as if the smallest movement would sharpen her suffering, until she saw the day getting light and heard the birds waking. Her limbs were stiff. She got up and went to the phone and listened again for the dial tone. She walked stiffly to the kitchen and put on the kettle and said to herself the words a paralysis of grief.
A paralysis of grief. What was she thinking of? That was what she would feel, how she might describe the way she would feel, if one of her children had died. Grief is for serious matters, important losses. She knew that. She would not have bartered away an hour of her children’s lives to have had the phone ring at ten o’clock last night, to have heard Maya say, “Georgia, he’s desperate. He’s sorry; he loves you very much.”
No. But it seemed that such a phone call would have given her a happiness that no look or word from her children could give her. Than anything could give her, ever again.
She phoned Maya before nine o’clock. As she was dialling, she thought that there were still some possibilities to pray for. Maya’s phone had been temporarily out of order. Maya had been ill last night. Raymond had been in a car accident on his way home from the hospital.
All these possibilities vanished at the first sound of Maya’s voice, which was sleepy (pretending to be sleepy?) and silky with deceit. “Georgia? Is that Georgia? Oh, I thought it was going to be Raymond. He had to stay over at the hospital in case this poor wretched woman needed a C-section. He was going to call me—”
“You told me that last night,” said Georgia.
“He was going to call me—Oh, Georgia, I was supposed to call you! Now I remember. Yes. I was supposed to call you, but I thought it was probably too late. I thought the phone might wake up the children. I thought, Oh better just leave it till morning!”
“How late was it?”
“Not awfully. I just thought.”
“What happened?”
“What do you mean, what happened?” Maya laughed, like a lady in a silly play. “Georgia, are you in a state?”
“What happened?”
“Oh, Georgia,” said Maya, groaning magnanimously but showing an edge of nerves. “Georgia, I’m sorry. It was nothing. It was just nothing. I’ve been rotten, but I didn’t mean to be. I offered him a beer. Isn’t that what you do when somebody rides up to your house on a motorcycle? You offer him a beer. But then he came on very lordly and said he only drank Scotch. And he said he’d only drink Scotch if I would drink with him. I thought he was pretty high-handed. Pretty high-handed pose. But I really was doing this for you, Georgia—I was wanting to find out what was on his mind. So I told him to put the motorcycle behind the garage, and I took him to sit in the back garden. That was so if I heard Raymond’s car I could chase him out the back way and he could walk the motorcycle down the lane. I am not about to unload anything new onto Raymond at this point. I mean even something innocent, which this started out to be.”
Georgia, with her teeth chattering, hung up the phone. She never spoke to Maya again. Maya appeared at her door, of course, a little while later, and Georgia had to let her in, because the children were playing in the yard. Maya sat down contritely at the kitchen table and asked if she could smoke. Georgia did not answer. Maya said she would smoke anyway and she hoped it was all right. Georgia pretended that Maya wasn’t there. While Maya smoked, Georgia cleaned the stove, dismantling the elements and putting them back together again. She wiped the counters and polished the taps and straightened out the cutlery drawer. She mopped the floor around Maya’s feet. She worked briskly, thoroughly, and never quite looked at Maya. At first she was not sure whether she could keep this up. But it got easier. The more earnest Maya became—the further she slipped from sensible remonstrance, half-amused confession, into true and fearful regret—the more fixed Georgia was in her resolve, the more grimly satisfied in her heart. She took care, however, not to appear grim. She moved about lightly. She was almost humming.
She took a knife to scrape out the grease from between the counter tiles by the stove. She had let things get into a bad way.
Maya smoked one cigarette after another, stubbing them out in a saucer that she fetched for herself from the cupboard. She said, “Georgia, this is so stupid. I can tell you, he’s not worth it. It was nothing. All it was was Scotch and opportunity.”
She said, “I am really sorry. Truly sorry. I know you don’t believe me. How can I say it so you will?”
And, “Georgia, listen. You are humiliating me. Fine. Fine. Maybe I deserve it. I do deserve it. B
ut after you’ve humiliated me enough we’ll go back to being friends and we’ll laugh about this. When we’re old ladies, I swear we’ll laugh. We won’t be able to remember his name. We’ll call him the motorcycle sheikh. We will.”
Then, “Georgia, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to throw myself on the floor? I’m about ready to. I’m trying to keep myself from snivelling, and I can’t. I’m snivelling, Georgia. O.K.?”
She had begun to cry. Georgia put on her rubber gloves and started to clean the oven.
“You win,” said Maya. “I’ll pick up my cigarettes and go home.”
She phoned a few times. Georgia hung up on her. Miles phoned, and Georgia hung up on him, too. She thought he sounded cautious but smug. He phoned again and his voice trembled, as if he were striving just for candor and humility, bare love. Georgia hung up at once. She felt violated, shaken.
Maya wrote a letter, which said, in part, “I suppose you know that Miles is going back to Seattle and whatever home fires he keeps burning there. It seems the treasure thing had fallen through. But you must have known he was bound to go sometime and you’d have felt rotten then, so now you’ve got the rotten feeling over with. So isn’t that O.K.? I don’t say this to excuse myself. I know I was weak and putrid. But can’t we put it behind us now?”
She went on to say that she and Raymond were going on a long-planned holiday to Greece and Turkey, and that she hoped very much that she would get a note from Georgia before she left. But if she didn’t get any word she would try to understand what Georgia was telling her, and she would not make a nuisance of herself by writing again.
She kept her word. She didn’t write again. She sent, from Turkey, a pretty piece of striped cloth large enough for a tablecloth. Georgia folded it up and put it away. She left it for Ben to find after she moved out, several months later.
“I’m happy,” Raymond tells Georgia. “I’m very happy, and the reason is that I’m content to be an ordinary sort of person with an ordinary calm life. I am not looking for any big revelation or any big drama or any messiah of the opposite sex. I don’t go around figuring out how to make things more interesting. I can say to you quite frankly I think Maya made a mistake. I don’t mean she wasn’t very gifted and intelligent and creative and so on, but she was looking for something—maybe she was looking for something that just is not there. And she tended to despise a lot that she had. It’s true. She didn’t want the privileges she had. We’d travel, for example, and she wouldn’t want to stay in a comfortable hotel. No. She had to go on some trek that involved riding on poor, miserable donkeys and drinking sour milk for breakfast. I suppose I sound very square. Well, I suppose I am. I am square. You know, she had such beautiful silver. Magnificent silver. It was passed down through her family. And she couldn’t be bothered to polish it or get the cleaning woman to polish it. She wrapped it all up in plastic and hid it away. She hid it away—you’d think it was a disgrace. How do you think she envisaged herself? As some kind of hippie, maybe? Some kind of free spirit? She didn’t even realize it was her money that kept her afloat. I’ll tell you, some of the free spirits I’ve seen pass in and out of this house wouldn’t have been long around her without it.
“I did all I could,” said Raymond. “I didn’t scoot off and leave her, like her Prince of Fantasy Land.”
Georgia got a vengeful pleasure out of breaking with Maya. She was pleased with the controlled manner in which she did it. The deaf ear. She was surprised to find herself capable of such control, such thoroughgoing punishment. She punished Maya. She punished Miles, through Maya, as much as she could. What she had to do, and she knew it, was to scrape herself raw, to root out all addiction to the gifts of those two pale prodigies. Miles and Maya. Both of them slippery, shimmery—liars, seducers, finaglers. But you would have thought that after such scourging she’d have scuttled back into her marriage and locked its doors, and appreciated what she had there as never before.
That was not what happened. She broke with Ben. Within a year, she was gone. Her way of breaking was strenuous and unkind. She told him about Miles, though she spared her own pride by leaving out the part about Miles and Maya. She took no care—she had hardly any wish—to avoid unkindness. On the night when she waited for Maya to call, some bitter, yeasty spirit entered into her. She saw herself as a person surrounded by, living by, sham. Because she had been so readily unfaithful, her marriage was a sham. Because she had gone so far out of it, so quickly, it was a sham. She dreaded, now, a life like Maya’s. She dreaded just as much a life like her own before this happened. She could not but destroy. Such cold energy was building in her she had to blow her own house down.
She had entered with Ben, when they were both so young, a world of ceremony, of safety, of gestures, concealment. Fond appearances. More than appearances. Fond contrivance. (She thought when she left that she would have no use for contrivance anymore.) She had been happy there, from time to time. She had been sullen, restless, bewildered, and happy. But she said most vehemently, Never, never. I was never happy, she said.
People always say that.
People make momentous shifts, but not the changes they imagine.
Just the same, Georgia knows that her remorse about the way she changed her life is dishonest. It is real and dishonest. Listening to Raymond, she knows that whatever she did she would have to do again. She would have to do it again, supposing that she had to be the person she was.
Raymond does not want to let Georgia go. He does not want to part with her. He offers to drive her downtown. When she has gone, he won’t be able to talk about Maya. Very likely Anne has told him that she does not want to hear any more on the subject of Maya.
“Thank you for coming,” he says on the doorstep. “Are you sure about the ride? Are you sure you can’t stay to dinner?”
Georgia reminds him again about the bus, the last ferry. She says no, no, she really wants to walk. It’s only a couple of miles. The late afternoon so lovely, Victoria so lovely. I had forgotten, she says.
Raymond says once more, “Thank you for coming.”
“Thank you for the drinks,” Georgia says. “Thank you, too. I guess we never believe we are going to die.”
“Now, now,” says Raymond.
“No. I mean we never behave—we never behave as if we believed we were going to die.”
Raymond smiles more and more and puts a hand on her shoulder. “How should we behave?” he says.
“Differently,” says Georgia. She puts a foolish stress on the word, meaning that her answer is so lame that she can offer it only as a joke.
Raymond hugs her, then involves her in a long chilly kiss. He fastens onto her with an appetite that is grievous but unconvincing. A parody of passion, whose intention neither one of them, surely, will try to figure out.
She doesn’t think about that as she walks back to town through the yellow-leafed streets with their autumn smells and silences. Past Clover Point, the cliffs crowned with broombushes, the mountains across the water. The mountains of the Olympic Peninsula, assembled like a blatant backdrop, a cutout of rainbow tissue paper. She doesn’t think about Raymond, or Miles, or Maya, or even Ben.
She thinks about sitting in the store in the evenings. The light in the street, the complicated reflections in the windows. The accidental clarity.
Wigtime
When her mother was dying in the Walley Hospital, Anita came home to take care of her—though nursing was not what she did anymore. She was stopped one day in the corridor by a short, broad-shouldered, broad-hipped woman with clipped grayish-brown hair.
“I heard you were here, Anita,” this woman said, with a laugh that seemed both aggressive and embarrassed. “Don’t look so dumfounded!”
It was Margot, whom Anita had not seen for more than thirty years.
“I want you to come out to the house,” Margot said. “Give yourself a break. Come out soon.”
Anita took a day off and went to see her. Margot and her husband had buil
t a new house overlooking the harbor, on a spot where there used to be nothing but scrubby bushes and children’s secret paths. It was built of gray brick and was long and low. But high enough at that, Anita suggested—high enough to put some noses out of joint across the street, in the handsome hundred-year-old houses with their prize view.
“Bugger them,” said Margot. “They took up a petition against us. They went to the Committee.”
But Margot’s husband already had the Committee sewed up.
Margot’s husband had done well. Anita had already heard that. He owned a fleet of buses that took children to school and senior citizens to see the blossoms in Niagara and the fall leaves in Haliburton. Sometimes they carried singles clubs and other holidayers on more adventurous trips—to Nashville or Las Vegas.
Margot showed her around. The kitchen was done in almond—Anita made a mistake, calling it cream—with teal-green and butter-yellow trim. Margot said that all that natural-wood look was passé. They did not enter the living room, with its rose carpet, striped silk chairs, and yards and yards of swooping pale-green figured curtains. They admired it from the doorway—all exquisite, shadowy, inviolate. The master bedroom and its bath were done in white and gold and poppy red. There was a Jacuzzi and a sauna.
“I might have liked something not so bright myself,” said Margot. “But you can’t ask a man to sleep in pastels.”
Anita asked her if she ever thought about getting a job.
Margot flung back her head and snorted with laughter. “Are you kidding? Anyway, I do have a job. Wait till you see the big lunks I have to feed. Plus this place doesn’t exactly run itself on magic horsepower.”
She took a pitcher of sangria out of the refrigerator and put it on a tray, with two matching glasses. “You like this stuff? Good. We’ll sit and drink out on the deck.”
Margot was wearing green flowered shorts and a matching top. Her legs were thick and marked with swollen veins, the flesh of her upper arms was dented, her skin was brown, mole-spotted, leathery from lots of sun. “How come you’re still thin?” she asked with amusement. She flipped Anita’s hair. “How come you’re not gray? Any help from the drugstore? You look pretty.” She said this without envy, as if speaking to somebody younger than herself, still untried and unseasoned.