The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [82]
Valerie has got George talking about Italy. Ruth and David and Kimberly and Angela have started talking about something else. Roberta hears Angela’s voice speaking with impatience and authority, and with an eagerness, a shyness, only she can detect.
“Acid rain …” Angela is saying.
Eva flicks her fingers against Roberta’s arm. “What are you thinking?” she says.
“I don’t know.”
“You can’t not know. What are you thinking?”
“About life.”
“What about life?”
“About people.”
“What about people?”
“About the dessert.”
Eva flicks harder, giggling. “What about the dessert?”
“I thought it was O.K.”
Sometime later Valerie has occasion to say that she was not born in the nineteenth century, in spite of what David may think. David says that everybody born in this country before the Second World War was to all intents and purposes brought up in the nineteenth century, and that their thinking is archaic.
“We are more than products of our upbringing,” Valerie says. “As you yourself must hope, David.” She says that she has been listening to all this talk about overpopulation, ecological disaster, nuclear disaster, this and that disaster, destroying the ozone layer—it’s been going on and on, on and on for years, talk of disaster—but here they sit, all healthy, relatively sane, with a lovely dinner and lovely wine inside them, in the beautiful, undestroyed countryside.
“The Incas eating off gold plates while Pizarro was landing on the coast,” says David.
“Don’t talk as if there’s no solution,” says Kimberly.
“I think maybe we’re destroyed already,” Ruth says dreamily. “I think maybe we’re anachronisms. No, that’s not what I mean. I mean relics. In some way we are already. Relics.”
Eva raises her head from her folded arms on the table. Her curtain veil is pulled down over one eye; her makeup has leaked beyond its boundaries, so that her whole face is a patchy flower. She says in a loud, stern voice, “I am not a relic,” and they all laugh.
“Certainly not!” says Valerie, and then begins the yawning, the pushing back of chairs, the rather sheepish and formal smiles, the blowing out of candles: time to go home.
“Smell the river now!” Valerie tells them. Her voice sounds forlorn and tender, in the dark.
“A GIBBOUS MOON.”
It was Roberta who told George what a gibbous moon was, and so his saying this is always an offering. It is an offering now, as they drive between the black cornfields.
“So there is.”
Roberta doesn’t reject the offering with silence, but she doesn’t welcome it, either. She is polite. She yawns, and there is a private sound to her yawn. This isn’t tactics, though she knows indifference is attractive. The real thing is. He can spot an imitation; he can always withstand tactics. She has to go all the way, to where she doesn’t care. Then he feels how light and distant she is and his love revives. She has power. But the minute she begins to value it it will begin to leave her. So she is thinking, as she yawns and wavers on the edge of caring and not caring. She’d stay on this edge if she could.
The half-ton truck bearing George and Roberta, with Eva and Angela in the back, is driving down the third concession road of Weymouth Township, known locally as the Telephone Road. It is a gravel road, fairly wide and well travelled. They turned on to it from the River Road, a much narrower road, which runs past Valerie’s place. From the corner of the River Road to George’s gate is a distance of about two and a quarter miles. Two side roads cut this stretch of the Telephone Road at right angles. Both these roads have stop signs; the Telephone Road is a through road. The first crossroad they have already passed. Along the second crossroad, from the west, a dark-green 1969 Dodge is travelling at between eighty and ninety miles an hour. Two young men are returning from a party to their