The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [62]
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