The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [66]
I go looking for earrings. All day looking for earrings which I can see so clearly in my mind. I want little filigree balls of silver, of diminishing size, dangling. I want old and slightly tarnished silver. It’s a style I well remember; you’d think the secondhand stores would be sure to have them. But I can’t find them, I can’t find anything resembling them, and they seem more and more necessary. I go into a little shop on a side street near College and Spadina. The shop is all done up in black paper with cheap, spooky effects—for instance a bald, naked mannequin sitting on a stepladder, dangling some beads. A dress such as I wore in the fifties, a dance dress of pink net and sequins, terribly scratchy under the arms, is displayed against the black paper in a way that makes it look sinister, and desirable.
I look around for the tray of jewelry. The salesgirls are busy dressing a customer hidden from me by a three-way mirror. One salesgirl is fat and gypsyish with a face warmly colored as an apricot. The other is spiky and has a crest of white hair surrounded by black haft, like a skunk. They are shrieking with pleasure as they bring hats and beads for the customer to try. Finally everybody is satisfied and a beautiful young lady, who is not a young lady at all but a pretty boy dressed up as a lady, emerges from the shelter of the mirror. He is wearing a black velvet dress with long sleeves and a black lace yoke; black pumps and gloves; a little black hat with a dotted veil. He is daintily and discreetly made up; he has a fringe of brown curls; he is the prettiest and most ladylike person I have seen all day. His smiling face is tense and tremulous. I remember how when I was ten or eleven years old I used to dress up as a bride in old curtains, or as a lady in rouge and a feathered hat. After all the effort and contriving and my own enchantment with the finished product there was a considerable letdown. What are you supposed to do now? Parade up and down on the sidewalk? There is a great fear and daring and disappointment in this kind of display.
He has a boyish, cracking voice. He is brash and timid. “How do I look, momma?”
“You look very nice.”
10
I am at a low point. I can recognize it. That must mean I will get past it.
I am at a low point, certainly. I cannot deal with all that assails me unless I get help and there is only one person I want help from and that is X. I can’t continue to move my body along the streets unless I exist in his mind and in his eyes. People have this problem frequently, and we know it is their own fault and they have to change their way of thinking, that’s all. It is not an honorable problem. Love is not serious though it may be fatal. I read that somewhere and I believe it. Thank God I don’t know where he is. I can’t telephone him, write letters to him, waylay him on the street.
A man I had broken with used to follow me. Finally he persuaded me to go into a café and have a cup of tea with him.
“I know what a spectacle I am,” he said. “I know if you did have any love left for me this would destroy it.”
I said nothing.
He beat the spoon against the sugar bowl.
“What do you think of, when you’re with me?”
I meant to say, “I don’t know,” but instead I said, “I think of how much I want to get away.”
He reared up trembling and dropped the spoon on the floor. “You’re free of me,” he said in a choking voice.
This is the scene both comic and horrible, stagy and real. He was in desperate need, as I am now, and I didn’t pity him, and I’m not sorry I didn’t.
11
I have had a pleasant dream that seems far away from my waking state. X and I and some other people I didn’t know or can’t remember were wearing innocent athletic underwear outfits, which changed at some point into gauzy bright white clothes, and these turned out to be not just clothes but our substances, our flesh and bones and in a sense our