The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [96]
“Old kooks,” Douglas said.
“Still, the image prevails somewhere,” Julie said. “The Director of the Conference Centre came and talked to the Chairman this morning and asked if she wanted a list of the people who were out of their rooms during the night. Can you imagine them thinking we’d want to know that?”
“Wouldn’t we?” I said.
“I mean, officially. How do they get that kind of information on people, anyway?”
“Spies,” said Douglas. “A.G.P.M. Amateur Guardians of the Public Morality. I’m a member myself. It’s like being a fire warden.”
Julie didn’t pick this up. Instead she said morosely, “It’s the younger ones, I guess.”
“Envious of the Sexual Revolution,” said Douglas, shaking his head. “Anyway I thought it was all over. Isn’t it all over?” he said, looking at me.
“So I understand,” I said.
“Well that’s not fair,” said Julie. “For me it never happened. No, really. I wish I’d been born younger. I mean, later. Why not be honest about it?” Sometimes she set herself up to be preposterously frank. There was something willed and coquettish—childishly coquettish—about this; yet it seemed not playful. It seemed, at the moment, necessary. It made me nervous for her. We were working down into our second bottle of wine and she had drunk more than either Douglas or I had.
“Well all right,” she said. “I know it’s funny. Twice in my life there have been possibilities and both turned out very funny. I mean very strange. So I think it is not meant. No. Not God’s will.”
“Oh, Julie,” I said.
“You don’t know the whole story,” she said.
I thought that she really was getting drunk, and I ought to do what I could to keep the tone light, so I said, “Yes, I know. You met a psychology student while you were throwing a cake into the sea.”
I was glad that Douglas laughed.
“Really?” he said. “Did you always throw your cakes into the sea? Were they that bad?”
“Very good,” said Julie, speaking in an artificial, severely joking style. “Very good and very elaborate. Gateau St. Honoré. A monstrosity. It’s got cream and custard and butterscotch. No. The reason I was throwing it into the sea—and I’ve told you this,” she said to me, “was that I had a secret problem at the time. I had a problem about food. I was just newly married and we were living in Vancouver, near Kitsilano Beach. I was one of those people who gorge, then purge. I used to make cream puffs and eat them all one after the other, or make fudge and eat a whole panful, then take mustard and water to vomit or else massive doses of epsom salts to wash it through. Terrible. The guilt. I was compelled. It must have had something to do with sex. They say now it does, don’t they?
“Well, I made this horrific cake and I pretended I was making it for Leslie, but by the time I got it finished I knew I was making it for myself, I was going to end up eating it all myself, and I went to put it in the garbage but I knew I might fish it out again. Isn’t that disgusting? So I put the whole mess in a brown paper bag and I went down to the rocky end of the beach and I heaved it into the sea. But—this boy saw me. He gave me a look, so I knew what he thought. What’s naturally the first thought, when you see a girl throw a brown paper bag into the sea? I had to tell him it was a cake. I said I’d goofed on the ingredients and I was ashamed it was such a failure. Then within fifteen minutes’ conversation I was telling him the truth, which I never dreamed of telling anybody. He told me he was a psychology student at U.B.C. but he had dropped out because they were all behaviorists there. I didn’t know—I didn’t know what a behaviorist was.
“So,” said Julie, resigned now, and marveling. “So, he became my boyfriend. For about six weeks. He wanted me to read Jung. He had very tight curly hair the color of mouse-skin. We’d lie behind the rocks and neck up a storm. It was February or March, still pretty cold. He could only meet me one day a week, always the same day. We didn’t progress very far. The