The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [98]
“And about half a year after this started, another woman in our group phoned me up one day. She told me all hell had broken loose. Some woman in one of the groups had confessed to her husband she was sleeping with Stanley. The husband got very mad, he wasn’t a group person, and the story got out and then another woman, and another and another, revealed the same thing, they confessed they were sleeping with Stanley, and pretty soon there was no blame attached, it was like being a victim of witchcraft. It turned out he’d been quite systematic, he’d picked one from each group, and he already had one in the group I was in so presumably it wasn’t to be me. Always a married woman, not a single one who could get bothersome. Nine of them. Really. Nine women.”
Douglas said, “Busy.”
“All the men took that attitude,” Julie said. “They all chortled.
Except of course the husbands. There was a big sort of official meeting of group people at one of the women’s houses. She had a lovely kitchen with a big chopping block in the middle and I remember thinking, did they do it on that? Everybody was too cool to say they were shocked about adultery or anything like that so we had to say we were mad at Stanley’s betrayal of trust. Actually I think some women were mad about being left out. I said that, as a kind of joke. I never told a word about how he’d been acting with me. If there’d been anybody else getting the same treatment I was, she didn’t tell either. Some of the chosen women cried. Then they’d comfort each other and compare notes. What a scene, now when I think of it! And I was so bewildered. I couldn’t put it together. How can you put it together? I thought of Stanley’s wife. She was a nice-looking rather nervous girl with lovely long legs. I used to meet her sometimes and to think: little do you know what your husband’s been saying to me. And there were all those other women meeting her and thinking, little do you know, etcetera. Maybe she knew about them all, us all, maybe she was thinking: little do you know how many others there are. Is it possible? I’d said to him once, you know this is really just a farce, and he said, don’t say that, don’t say that to me! I thought he might cry. So what can you make of it? The energy. I don’t mean just the physical part of it. In a way that’s the least of it.”
“Did the husbands get him?” Douglas said.
“A delegation went to see him. He didn’t deny anything. He said he acted in good faith and from good motives and their possessiveness and jealousy was the problem. But he had to leave town, his groups had collapsed, he and his wife and their little kids left town in the van. But he sent back bills. Everybody got their bills. The women he’d been sleeping with got theirs with the rest. I got mine. No more letters, just the bill. I paid. I think most people paid. You had to think of the wife and kids.
“So there you are. I only attract the bizarre. And a good thing, because I’m married all along and virtuous at heart in spite of whatever I may have said. We should have coffee.”
WE DROVE on the back roads, in the sandy country, poor country, south of Lake Simcoe. Grass blows on the dunes. We hardly saw another car. We got out the road map to see where we were, and Douglas sidetracked to drive us through a village where he had once almost got his hands on a valuable diary. He