The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [24]
She had a strong, lined face, and long straight hair. She wore jeans and an embroidered smock and a man’s sweater.
“Ten years ago I was living in a commune in the States. Now I’m here. I work sometimes eighteen hours a day. I have to pack the crew’s lunch yet tonight. I cook and bake, cook and bake. John does the rest.”
“Do you have someone to clean?”
“We can’t afford to hire anybody. John does it. He does the laundry—everything. We had to buy a mangle for the sheets. We had to put in a new furnace. We got a bank loan. I thought that was funny, because I used to be married to a bank manager. I left him.”
“I’m on my own now, too.”
“Are you? You can’t be on your own forever. I met John, and he was in the same boat.”
“I was living with a man in Kingston, in Ontario.”
“Were you? John and I are extremely happy. He used to be a minister. But when I met him he was doing carpentry. We both had sort of dropped out. Did you talk to Mr. Stanley?”
“Yes.”
“Had you ever heard of Willa Cather?”
“Yes.”
“That’d make him happy. I don’t read hardly at all, it doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m a visual person. But I think he’s a wonderful character, old Mr. Stanley. He’s a real old scholar.”
“Has he been coming here for a long time?”
“No, he hasn’t. This is just his third year. He says he’s wanted to come here all his life. But he couldn’t. He had to wait till some relative died, that he was looking after. Not a wife. A brother maybe. Anyway he had to wait. How old do you think he is?”
“Seventy? Seventy-five?”
“That man is eighty-one. Isn’t that amazing? I really admire people like that. I really do. I admire people that keep going.”
“THE MAN I was living with—that is, the man I used to live with, in Kingston,” said Lydia, “was putting some boxes of papers in the trunk of his car once, this was out in the country, at an old farmhouse, and he felt something nudge him and he glanced down. It was about dusk, on a pretty dark day. So he thought this was a big friendly dog, a big black dog giving him a nudge, and he didn’t pay much attention. He just said go on, now, boy, go away now, good boy. Then when he got the boxes arranged he turned around. And he saw it was a bear. It was a black bear.”
She was telling this later that same evening, in the kitchen.
“So what did he do then?” said Lawrence, who was the boss of the telephone work crew. Lawrence and Lydia and Eugene and Vincent were playing cards.
Lydia laughed. “He said, excuse me. That’s what he claims he said.” “Papers all he had in the boxes? Nothing to eat?”
“He’s a writer. He writes historical books. This was some material he needed for his work. Sometimes he has to go and scout out material from people who are very strange. That bear hadn’t come out of the bush. It was a pet, actually, that had been let off its chain, for a joke. There were two old brothers there, that he got the papers from, and they just let it off its chain to give him a scare.”
“That’s what he does, collects old stuff and writes about it?” Lawrence said. “I guess that’s interesting.”
She immediately regretted having told this story. She had brought it up because the men were talking about bears. But there wasn’t much point to it unless Duncan told it. He could show you himself, large and benign and civilized, with his courtly apologies to the bear. He could make you see the devilish old men behind their tattered curtains.
“You’d have to know Duncan,” was what she almost said. And hadn’t she told this simply to establish that she had known Duncan—that she had recently had a man, and an interesting man, an amusing and adventurous man? She wanted to assure them that she was not always alone, going on her aimless travels. She had to show herself attached. A mistake. They were not likely to think a man adventurous who collected old papers from misers and eccentrics, so that he could write books about things that had happened a hundred years ago. She shouldn’t even have said that Duncan was a man she had lived with.