The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [78]
She proceeds from the “Turkish March” to a try at “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” Roberta, listening to the piano at the same time she’s listening to Valerie talking humorously and despairingly about her fear of Kimberly, her dislike of intruders, her indefensible reluctance to relinquish her children, thinks, No, it wasn’t a mistake. What does she mean by that? She means it wasn’t a mistake to leave her husband. Whatever happens, it wasn’t a mistake. It was necessary. Otherwise she wouldn’t have known.
“This is a bad time for you,” Valerie says judiciously. “There is just a spectacular lot of strain.”
“That’s what I say to myself,” says Roberta. “But sometimes I think that’s not it. It’s not the house, it’s not the children. It’s just something black that rises.”
“Oh, there’s always something black,” says Valerie, grumbling.
“I think about Andrew—what was I doing to him? Setting things up to find the failure in him, railing at him, then getting cold feet and making up. Gradually the need to get rid of him would build again, but I was always sure it was his fault—if he’d just do this or that I could love him. So horrible for him that he turned into—remember what you said he was? A stick.”
“He was a stick,” says Valerie. “He always was. You’re not responsible for everything.”
“I think about it, because I wonder if that’s what George is doing to me. He wants to be rid of me, then he doesn’t, then he does, then he can’t admit that, even to himself; he has to set up failures. I feel I know what Andrew went through. Not that I’d go back. Never. But I see it.”
“I doubt if things happen so symmetrically.”
“I don’t think so, either, really. I don’t think you get your punishment in such a simple way. Isn’t it funny how you’re attracted—I am—to the idea of a pattern like that? I mean, the idea is attractive, of there being that balance. But not the experience. I’d like to avoid them.”
“You forget how happy you are when you’re happy.” “And vice versa. It’s like childbirth.”
GEORGE HAS FINISHED scything and is cleaning the blade. He can hear the piano through the open windows of Valerie’s house, and erratic streams of sweet, cold air are coming up from the river. He feels much better now, either because of the simple exercise or from the relief of feeling unobserved; perhaps it’s just good to get away from the mountainous demands of his own place. He wonders if it’s Roberta playing. The music fits in nicely with what he’s doing: first the cheerful, workaday “Turkish March,” to go along with the scything; now, as he stands cleaning the blade and smelling the cut grass, the subtle congratulations—even if a bit uncertainly delivered—of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” As always, when his mood truly lifts, when the dawn breaks, he wants to go and find Roberta and envelop her, assure her—assure himself—that no real damage has been done. He hoped to be able to do that last night when they went drinking, but he couldn’t; something still held him back.
He recalls Roberta’s first visit to his house. That was in late August or early September, about a year ago now. They staged an indecorous sort of picnic, cooking feasts and playing records, hauling a mattress out into the yard. Clear nights, with Roberta pointing out to him the unlikely ways the stars tie up into their constellations, and every day pure gold. Roberta saying he must get it all straight now: she is forty-three years old, which is six years too old for him; she has left her husband because everything between them seemed artificial; but she hates saying that, because it may be just cant, she isn’t sure what she means, and above all, she doesn’t know what she’s capable of. She seemed to him courageous, truthful, without vanity. How out of this could come such touchiness, tearfulness, weariness, such a threat of collapse he cannot imagine.
But the first impression