The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [73]
And, of course, Valerie knew Roberta because Roberta’s husband, Andrew, is her cousin. They never cared much for each other— Valerie and Roberta’s husband—and each of them has described the other to Roberta as a stick. Andrew used to say that Valerie was a queer-looking stick and utterly sexless, and when Roberta told Valerie that she was leaving him Valerie said, “Oh, good. He is such a stick.” Roberta was pleased to find such sympathy and pleased that she wouldn’t have to dredge up acceptable reasons; apparently Valerie thought his being a stick was reason enough. At the same time Roberta had a wish to defend her husband and to inquire how on earth Valerie could presume to know whether he was a stick or wasn’t. She can’t get over wishing to defend him; she feels he had such bad luck marrying her.
When Roberta moved out and left Halifax, she came and stayed with Valerie in Toronto. There she met George, and he took her off to see his farm. Now Valerie says they are her creation, the result of her totally inadvertent matchmaking.
“It was the first time I ever saw love bloom at close quarters,” she says. “It was like watching an amaryllis. Astounding.”
But Roberta has the idea that, much as she likes them both and wishes them well, love is really something Valerie could do without being reminded of. In Valerie’s company you do wonder sometimes what all the fuss is about. Valerie wonders. Her life and her presence, more than any opinion she expresses, remind you that love is not kind or honest and does not contribute to happiness in any reliable way.
When she talked to Roberta about George (this was before she knew Roberta was in love with him), Valerie said, “He’s a mysterious man, really. I think he’s very idealistic, though he’d hate to hear me say that. This farm he’s bought. This self-sufficient, remote, productive life in the country.” She went on to talk about how he had grown up in Timmins, the son of a Hungarian shoemaker, youngest of six children and the first to finish high school, let alone go to university. “He’s the sort of person who would know what to do in a street fight but doesn’t know how to swim. He brought his old crabby, bent-over father down to Toronto and took care of him till he died. I think he drops women rather hard.”
Roberta listened to all this with great interest and a basic disregard, because what other people knew about George already seemed inessential to her. She was full of alarm and delight. Being in love was nothing she had counted on. The most she’d hoped for was a life like Valerie’s. She had illustrated a couple of children’s books and thought she could get more commissions; she could rent a room out in the Beaches, in East Toronto, paint the walls white, sit on cushions instead of chairs, and learn to be self-disciplined and self-indulgent, as she thought solitary people must be.
VALERIE AND ROBERTA walk through the house, carrying a bottle of cold wine and two of Valerie’s grandmother’s water goblets. Roberta thinks Valerie’s house is exactly what people have in mind when they say longingly “a house in the country” or, more particularly, “an old brick farmhouse.” The warm, pale-red brick with the light brick trim, the vines and elms, the sanded floors and hooked rugs and white walls, the chipped wash-jug set on a massive chest of drawers in front of a dim mirror. Of course, Valerie has had fifteen years to bring this about. She and her husband bought the house as a summer place, and then when he died she sold their city house and moved to an apartment and put her money and her energy into this. George bought his house and land two years ago, having been introduced to this part of the country by Valerie,