The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [67]
12
I go along the street to Rooneem’s Bakery and sit at one of their little tables with a cup of coffee. Rooneem’s is an Estonian bakery where you can usually find a Mediterranean housewife in a black dress, a child looking at the cakes, and a man talking to himself.
I sit where I can watch the street. I have a feeling X is somewhere in the vicinity. Within a thousand miles, say, within a hundred miles, within this city. He doesn’t know my address but he knows I am in Toronto. It would not be so difficult to find me.
At the same time I’m thinking that I have to let go. What you have to decide, really, is whether to be crazy or not, and I haven’t the stamina, the pure, seething will, for prolonged craziness.
There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can’t know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you’ve reached it. I believe this.
When you start really letting go this is what it’s like. A lick of pain, furtive, darting up where you don’t expect it. Then a lightness. The lightness is something to think about. It isn’t just relief. There’s a queer kind of pleasure in it, not a self-wounding or malicious pleasure, nothing personal at all. It’s an uncalled-for pleasure in seeing how the design wouldn’t fit and the structure wouldn’t stand, a pleasure in taking into account, all over again, everything that is contradictory and persistent and unaccommodating about life. I think so. I think there’s something in us wanting to be reassured about all that, right alongside—and at war with—whatever there is that wants permanent vistas and a lot of fine talk.
I think about my white dream and how it seemed misplaced. It strikes me that misplacement is the clue, in love, the heart of the problem, but like somebody drunk or high I can’t quite get a grasp on what I see.
What I need is a rest. A deliberate sort of rest, with new definitions of luck. Not the sort of luck Dennis was talking about. You’re lucky to be sitting in Rooneem’s drinking coffee, with people coming and going, eating and drinking, buying cakes, speaking Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and other languages that you can try to identify.
13
Kay is back from the country. She too has a new outfit, a dark-green schoolgirl’s tunic worn without a blouse or brassiere. She has dark-green knee socks and saddle oxfords.
“Does it look kinky?”
“Yes it does.”
“Does it make my arms look dusky? Remember in some old poem a woman had dusky arms?”
Her arms do look soft and brown.
“I meant to get down on Sunday but Roy came over with a friend and we all had a corn roast. It was lovely. You should come out there. You should.”
“Some day I will.”
“The kids ran around like beautiful demons and we drank up the mead. Roy knows how to make fertility dolls. Roy’s friend is Alex Walther, the anthropologist. I felt I should have known about him but I didn’t. He didn’t mind. He’s a nice man. Do you know what he did? After dark when we were sitting around the fire he came over to me and just sighed, and laid his head on my lap. I thought it was such a nice simple thing to do. Like a St. Bernard. I’ve never had anybody do that before.”
Prue
Prue used to live with Gordon. This was after Gordon had left his wife and before he went back to her—a year and four months in all. Some time later, he and his wife were divorced. After that came a period of indecision, of living together off and on; then the wife went away to New Zealand, most likely for good.
Prue did not go back to Vancouver Island, where Gordon had met her when she was working as a dining-room hostess in a resort hotel. She got a job in Toronto, working