The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [97]
“Oh, Julie,” I said, though I had heard this before. Mention of suicide is like innards pushing through an incision; you have to push it back and clap some pads on, quickly.
“It wasn’t that bad. He was recovering. I’m sure he did recover. He was just a very intense kid who’d had a crisis. But I was so scared. I was scared because I felt I wasn’t too far from being loony myself. With the gorging and vomiting and so on. And at the same time he confessed that he was really only seventeen years old. He’d lied to me about his age. That really did it. To think I’d been fooling around with a boy three years younger than I was. That shamed me. I told him a pack of lies about how I understood and it didn’t matter and I’d meet him next week and I went home and told Leslie I couldn’t stand living in a basement apartment any more, we had to move. I cried. I found us a place on the North Shore within a week. I never would go to Kits Beach. When the kids were little and we took them to the beach I would always insist on Spanish Banks or Ambleside. I wonder what became of him.”
“Probably he’s okay,” I said. “He is probably a celebrated Jungian.” “Or a celebrated behaviorist,” said Douglas. “Or a sportscaster.
You don’t look as if you ate too many cream puffs now.”
“I got over it. I think when I got pregnant. Life is so weird.” Douglas ceremonially poured out the rest of the wine.
“You said two occasions,” he said to Julie. “Are you going to leave us hanging?”
It’s all right, I thought, he isn’t bored or put off, he likes her. While she talked I had been watching him, wondering. Why is there always this twitchiness, when you introduce a man to a woman friend, about whether the man will be bored or put off?
“The other was weirder,” said Julie. “At least I understand it less. I shouldn’t bother telling such stupid stuff but now I’m on the brink I suppose I will. Well. This puzzles me. It bewilders me totally. This was in Vancouver too, but years later. I joined what was called an Encounter Group. It was just a sort of group-therapy thing for ordinary functioning miserable mixed-up people. That sort of thing was very in at the time and it was the West Coast. There was a lot of talk about getting rid of masks and feeling close to one another, which it’s easy to laugh at but I think it did more good than harm. And it was all sort of new. I must sound as if I’m trying to justify myself. Like saying, I was doing macramé fifteen years ago before it was the fad. When it’s probably better never to have done macramé, ever.”
Douglas said, “I don’t even know what macramé is.”
“That’s best of all,” I said.
“A man from California, named Stanley, was running several of these groups. He wouldn’t have said he was running them. He was very low-key. But he got paid. We did pay him. He was a psychologist. He had lovely long curly dark hair and of course he had a beard too, but beards were nothing by then. He sort of barged around in an awkward innocent way. He’d say, ‘Well, this is going to sound kind of crazy but I wonder—’ He had a technique of making everybody feel they were smarter than he was. He was very sincere. He’d say, ‘You— don’t—realize—how lovable you are.’ No. I’m making him sound such a phony. It’s got to be more complicated than that. Anyway, before long he wrote me a letter. Stanley did. It was an appreciation of my mental and physical and spiritual qualities and he said he had fallen in love with me.
“I was very mature about it. I wrote back and said he hardly knew me. He wrote oh, yes, he did. He phoned to apologize for being such a nuisance. He said he couldn’t help himself. He asked if we could have coffee. No harm. We had coffee various times. I’d be doing the cheery conversation and he’d break in and say