The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [64]
I wonder if he is going to tell me something about X’s wife; perhaps that she is going to have a baby.
“It’s such a coup for them, isn’t it?” he says in his malicious, sympathetic way. “The fresh young wife, the new baby when other men their age are starting on grandchildren. All those men envying them and trying to figure out how to do the same. It’s the style, isn’t it? It must be hard to resist starting over and having that nice young mirror to look in, if you get the opportunity.”
“I think I might resist it,” I say cheerfully, not insistently. “I don’t really think I’d want to have a baby, now.”
“That’s it, that’s just it, though, you don’t get the opportunity! You’re a woman and life only goes in one direction for a woman. All this business about younger lovers, that’s just froth, isn’t it? Do you want a younger lover?”
“I guess not,” I say, and pick my dessert from a tray. I pick a rich creamy pudding with pureed chestnuts at the bottom of it and fresh raspberries on top. I purposely ate a light dinner, leaving plenty of room for dessert. I did that so I could have something to look forward to, while listening to Dennis.
“A women your age can’t compete,” says Dennis urgently. “You can’t compete with younger women. I used to think that was so rottenly unfair.”
“It’s probably biologically correct for men to go after younger women. There’s no use whining about it.”
“So the men have this way of renewing themselves, they get this refill of vitality, while the women are you might say removed from life. I used to think that was terrible. But now my thinking has undergone a complete reversal. Do you know what I think now? I think women are the lucky ones! Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because they are forced to live in the world of loss and death! Oh, I know, there’s face-lifting, but how does that really help? The uterus dries up. The vagina dries up.”
I feel him watching me. I continue eating my pudding.
“I’ve seen so many parts of the world and so many strange things and so much suffering. It’s my conclusion now that you won’t get any happiness by playing tricks on life. It’s only by natural renunciation and by accepting deprivation, that we prepare for death and therefore that we get any happiness. Maybe my ideas seem strange to you?”
I can’t think of anything to say.
8
Often I have a few lines of a poem going through my head, and I won’t know what started it. It can be a poem or rhyme that I didn’t even know I knew, and it needn’t be anything that conforms to what I think is my taste. Sometimes I don’t pay any attention to it, but if I do, I can usually see that the poem, or the bit of it I’ve got hold of, has some relation to what is going on in my life. And that may not be what seems to be going on.
For instance last spring, last autumn in Australia, when I was happy, the line that would go through my head, at a merry clip, was this:
“Even such is time, that takes in trust—”
I could not go on, though I knew trust rhymed with dust, and that there was something further along about “and in the dark and silent grave, shuts up the story of our days.” I knew the poem was written by Sir Walter Raleigh on the eve of his execution. My mood did not accord with such a poem and I said it, in my head, as if it was something pretty and lighthearted. I did not stop to wonder what it was doing in my head in the first place.
And now that I’m trying to look at things soberly I should remember what we said when our bags were packed and we were waiting for the taxi. Inside the bags our clothes that had shared drawers and closet space, tumbled together in the wash, and been pegged together on the clothesline where the kookaburras sat, were all sorted and separated and would not rub together any more.
“In a way I’m glad it’s over and nothing spoiled it. Things are so often spoiled.”
“I know.”
“As it is, it’s been perfect.”
I said that. And that was a lie. I had cried once, thought I was ugly, thought he was bored. But he said, “Perfect.”
On the plane the words of the poem were going through