The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [80]
“It was highly respectable,” says Roberta. “We went to the Queen’s Hotel in Logan. To the Lounge—that’s what they call it. The posh place to drink.”
“George wouldn’t take you out to any old beer parlor,” says Ruth. “George is a closet conservative.”
“It’s true,” says Valerie. “George believes you should take ladies only to nice places.”
“And children should be seen and not heard,” says Angela.
“Not seen, either,” says George.
“Which is confusing to everyone, because he comes on like a raving radical,” says Ruth.
“This is a treat,” says George, “getting a free analysis. Actually, it was quite dissolute, and Roberta probably doesn’t remember, on account of being so polluted, as Eva says. She bewitched a fellow who did toothpick tricks.”
Roberta says it was a game where you made a word out of toothpicks, then took a toothpick away or rearranged what was there and made another word, and so on.
“I hope not dirty words?” says Eva.
“I never talked like that when I was her age,” Angela says. “I was your pre-permissive child.”
“And after we got tired of the game, or after he did, because I was tired of it quite soon, he showed me pictures of his wife and himself on their Mediterranean cruise. He was with another lady last night, because his wife is dead now, and if he forgot where the pictures were taken this lady reminded him. She said she didn’t think he’d ever get over it.”
“The cruise or his wife?” says Ruth, while George is saying that he had a conversation with a couple of Dutch farmers who wanted to take him for a ride in their plane.
“I don’t think I went,” George adds.
“I dissuaded you,” says Roberta, not looking at him. “‘Dissuaded’ sounds so lovely,” says Ruth. “It’s so smooth. I must be thinking of suède.”
Eva asks what it means.
“Persuaded not to,” says Roberta. “I persuaded George not to go for a plane ride at one o’clock in the morning with the rich Dutch farmers. Instead, we all had an adventure getting the man from the Mediterranean cruise into his car so his girlfriend could drive him home.”
Ruth and Kimberly get up to remove the soup bowls, and David goes to put on a record of Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony. This is his mother’s request. David says it’s syrupy.
They are quiet, waiting for the music to start. Eva says, “How did you guys fall in love anyway? Was it a physical attraction?”
Ruth knocks her gently on the head with a soup bowl. “You ought to have your jaws wired shut,” she says. “Don’t forget I’m learning how to cope with disturbed children.”
“Didn’t it bother you, Mom being so much older?”
“You see what I mean about her?” Angela says.
“What do you know about love?” says George grandly. “Love suffereth long, and is kind. Similar to myself in that respect. Love is not puffed up …”
“I think that is a particular kind of love,” says Kimberly, setting down the vegetables. “If you’re quoting.”
Under cover of a conversation about translation and the meanings of words (a subject of which George knows little but about which he is soon making sweeping, provocative statements, true to his classroom technique), Roberta says to Valerie, “The man’s girlfriend said that the wonderful thing was that his wife had done the whole Mediterranean cruise with a front-end loader.”
“A what?”
“Front-end loader. I looked blank, too, so she said, ‘You know, his wife had one of those operations and she had to wear one of those bag things.’”
“Oh, God help us.”
“She had big fat arms and a sprayed blonde hairdo. The wife did, in the pictures. The girlfriend was something the same, but trimmer. The wife had such a lewd, happy look. A good-times look.”
“And a front-end loader.”
So you see against what odds, and with what unpromising-looking persons, love takes root and flourishes, and I myself have no front-end loader, merely some wrinkles and slackness and sallowness and subtle withering. This is what Roberta is saying to herself. It’s not my fault, she says to herself, as she has said so often before. Usually when she says it it’s a whine, a plea, a whimper. Now it says itself matter-of-factly