The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [31]
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I think these conversations are fine when you’re mildly troubled and interested but not when you’re desperate.”
“You’re desperate?”
She felt suddenly tired, almost too tired to speak. The room where she and the doctor were talking had a dark-blue carpet, blue-and-green-striped upholstery. There was a picture of boats and fishermen on the wall. Collusion somewhere, Lydia felt. Fake reassurance, provisional comfort, earnest deceptions.
‘‘No.’’
It seemed to her that she and Duncan were monsters with a lot of heads, in those days. Out of the mouth of one head could come insult and accusation, hot and cold, out of another false apologies and slimy pleas, out of another just such mealy, reasonable, true-and-false chat as she had practised with the doctor. Not a mouth would open that had a useful thing to say, not a mouth would have the sense to shut up. At the same time she believed—though she didn’t know she believed it—that these monster heads with their cruel and silly and wasteful talk could all be drawn in again, could curl up and go to sleep. Never mind what they’d said; never mind. Then she and Duncan with hope and trust and blank memories could reintroduce themselves, they could pick up the undamaged delight with which they’d started, before they began to put each other to other uses.
When she had been in Toronto a day she tried to retrieve Duncan, by phone, and found that he had acted quickly. He had changed to an unlisted number. He wrote to her in care of her employer, that he would pack and send her things.
LYDIA HAD BREAKFAST with Mr. Stanley. The telephone crew had eaten and gone off to work before daylight.
She asked Mr. Stanley about his visit with the woman who had known Willa Cather.
“Ah,” said Mr. Stanley, and wiped a corner of his mouth after a bite of poached egg. “She was a woman who used to run a little restaurant down by the dock. She was a good cook, she said. She must have been, because Willa and Edith used to get their dinners from her. She would send it up with her brother, in his car. But sometimes Willa would not be pleased with the dinner—perhaps it would not be quite what she wanted, or she would think it was not cooked as well as it might be—and she would send it back. She would ask for another dinner to be sent.” He smiled, and said in a confidential way, “Willa could be imperious. Oh, yes. She was not perfect. All people of great abilities are apt to be a bit impatient in daily matters.”
Rubbish, Lydia wanted to say, she sounds a proper bitch.
Sometimes waking up was all right, and sometimes it was very bad. This morning she had wakened with the cold conviction of a mistake—something avoidable and irreparable.
“But sometimes she and Edith would come down to the café,” Mr. Stanley continued. “If they felt they wanted some company, they would have dinner there. On one of these occasions Willa had a long talk with the woman I was visiting. They talked for over an hour. The woman was considering marriage. She had to consider whether to make a marriage that she gave me to understand was something of a business proposition. Companionship. There was no question of romance, she and the gentleman were not young and foolish. Willa talked to her for over an hour. Of course she did not advise her directly to do one thing or the other, she talked to her in general terms very sensibly and kindly and the woman still remembers it vividly. I was happy to hear that but I was not surprised.”
“What would she know about it, anyway?” Lydia said.
Mr. Stanley lifted his eyes from his plate and looked at her in grieved amazement.
“Willa Cather lived with a woman,” Lydia said.
When Mr. Stanley answered he sounded flustered, and mildly upbraiding.
“They were devoted,” he said.
“She never lived with a man.”
“She knew things as an artist knows them. Not necessarily by experience.”
“But what if they don’t know them?” Lydia persisted. “What if they don’t?”
He went back to eating his egg as if he had not