The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [94]
I am about to say, “Leslie,” which is the name of Julie’s husband. “Don’t say ‘Leslie,’” Julie says. “You know that doesn’t count. I can’t help it. It doesn’t count. So I was thinking, I was ready to make a joke about it but I was thinking, how I’d like to get some crumbs, even!”
“Douglas is better than crumbs,” I say. “Yes he is.”
WHEN THE CONFERENCE last May had ended and the buses were standing at the door of the summer hotel, waiting to take people back to Toronto or to the airport, I went into Julie’s room and found her doing up her backpack.
“I’ve got us a ride to Toronto,” I said. “If you’d rather that than the bus. Remember the man I introduced you to last night? Douglas Reider?”
“All right,” said Julie. “I’m mildly sick of all these people. Do we have to talk?”
“Not much. He will.”
I helped her hoist her backpack. She probably doesn’t own an overnight case. She was wearing her hiking boots and a denim jacket. She wasn’t faking. She could have walked to Toronto. Every summer she and her husband and some of their children walk the Bruce Trail. Other things fit the picture. She makes her own yogurt, and whole-grain bread, and granola. You’d think I would have worried about introducing her to Douglas, who is driven by any display of virtue into the most extraordinary provocations. I’ve heard him tell people that yogurt causes cancer, and smoking is good for your heart, and whales are an abomination. He does this lightheartedly but with absolute assurance, and adds a shocking, contemptuous embroidery of false statistics and invented detail. The people he takes on are furious or confused or wounded—sometimes all of those things at once. I don’t remember thinking about how Julie would have handled him, but I suppose, if I did think about it, I must have decided that she would be all right. Julie isn’t simple. She knows her own stratagems, her efforts, her doubts. You couldn’t get at her through her causes.
Julie and I have been friends for years. She is a children’s librarian, in Toronto. She helped me get the job I have now, or at least, she told me about it. I drive a bookmobile in the Ottawa Valley. I have been divorced for a long time, and so it is natural that Julie should talk to me about a problem she says she cannot discuss with many people. It is a question, more than a problem. The question is: should Julie herself try living alone? She says her husband Leslie is cold-hearted, superficial, stubborn, emotionally stingy, loyal, honest, high-minded, and vulnerable. She says she never really wants him. She says she thinks she might miss him more than she could stand, or perhaps just being alone would be more than she could stand. She says she has no illusions about being able to attract another man. But sometimes she feels her emotions, her life, her something-or-other—all that is being wasted.
I listen, and think this sounds like the complaints many women make, and in fact it sounds a lot like the complaints I used to make, when I was married. How much is this meant, how deep does it go? How much is it an exercise that balances the marriage and keeps it afloat? I’ve asked her, has she ever been in love, in love with somebody else? She says she once thought she was, with a boy she met on the beach, but it was all nonsense, it all evaporated. And once in recent years a man thought he was in love with her, but that was nonsense too, nothing came of it. I tell her that being alone has its grim side, certainly; I tell her to think twice. I think that I am in some ways a braver person than Julie, because I have taken the risk. I have taken more than one risk.
JULIE AND DOUGLAS REIDER and I had lunch at a restaurant in an old white wooden building overlooking a small lake. The lake is one of a chain of lakes, and there was a dock where the lake boats used to come in before the road was built; boats brought the holidayers