The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [63]
We showed Dennis the gully and told him this was a typical old Queensland house with the high tongue-and-groove walls and the ventilation panels over the doors filled with graceful carved vines. He did not look at anything with much interest, but talked about China, where he had just been. X said afterwards that Dennis always talked about the last place he’d been and the last people he’d seen, and never seemed to notice anything, but that he would probably be talking about us, and describing this place, to the next people he had dinner with, in the next city. He said that Dennis spent most of his life travelling, and talking about it, and that he knew a lot of people just well enough that when he showed up somewhere he had to be asked to dinner.
Dennis told us that he had seen the recently excavated Army Camp at Sian, in China. He described the rows of life-sized soldiers, each of them so realistic and unique, some still bearing traces of the paint which had once covered them and individualized them still further. Away at their backs, he said, was a wall of earth. The terra-cotta soldiers looked as if they were marching out of the earth.
He said it reminded him of X’s women. Row on row and always a new one appearing at the end of the line.
“The Army marches on,” he said.
“Dennis, for God’s sake,” said X.
“But do they really come out of the earth like that?” I said to Dennis. “Are they intact?”
“Are which intact?” said Dennis with his harsh smile. “The soldiers or the women? The women aren’t intact. Or not for long.”
“Could we get off the subject?” said X.
“Certainly. Now to answer your question,” said Dennis, turning to me. “They are very seldom found as whole figures. Or so I understand. Their legs and torsos and heads have to be matched up, usually. They have to be put together and stood on their feet.”
“It’s a lot of work, I can tell you,” said X, with a large sigh.
“But it’s not that way with the women,” I said to Dennis. I spoke with a special, social charm, almost flirtatiously, as I often do when I detect malice. “I think the comparison’s a bit off. Nobody has to dig the women out and stand them on their feet. Nobody put them there. They came along and joined up of their own free will and some day they’ll leave. They’re not a standing army. Most of them are probably on their way to someplace else anyway.”
“Bravo,” said X.
When we were washing the dishes, late at night, he said, “You didn’t mind Dennis saying that, did you? You didn’t mind if I went along with him a little bit? He has to have his legends.”
I laid my head against his back, between the shoulder blades. “Does he? No. I thought it was funny.”
“I bet you didn’t know that soap was first described by Pliny and was used by the Gauls. I bet you didn’t know they boiled goat’s tallow with the lye from the wood ashes.”
“No. I didn’t know that.”
7
Dennis hasn’t said a word about X, or about Australia. I wouldn’t have thought his asking me to dinner strange, if I had remembered him better. He asked me so he would have somebody to talk to. Since Australia, he has been to Iceland, and the Faeroe Islands. I ask him questions. I am interested, and surprised, even shocked, when necessary. I took trouble with my makeup and washed my hair. I hope that if he does see X, he will say that I was charming.
Besides his travels Dennis has his theories. He develops theories about art and literature, history, life.
“I have a new theory about the life of women. I used to feel it was so unfair the way things happened to them.”
“What things?”
“The way they have to live, compared to men. Specifically with aging. Look at you. Think of the way your life would be, if you were a man. The choices you would have. I mean sexual choices. You could start all over. Men do. It’s in all the novels and it’s in life too. Men fall in love with younger women. Men want younger women. Men can get younger women. The new marriage,