The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [99]
“They dread exposure,” Douglas said. “Unto the third and fourth generation.”
“Not like me,” said Julie. “Laying bare my ridiculous almost-affairs. I don’t care.”
“Back and side lay bare, lay bare,” sang Douglas. “Both foot and hand go cold—”
“I can lay bare,” I said. “It may not be very entertaining.”
“Will we risk it?” Douglas said.
“But it is interesting,” I said. “I was thinking back at the restaurant about a visit I went on with a man I was in love with. This was before you came down to Toronto, Julie. We were going to visit some friends of his who had a place up in the hills on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. I’ve never seen such a house. It was like a series of glass cubes with ramps and decks joining them together. The friends were Keith and Caroline. They were married, they had children, but the children weren’t there. The man I was with wasn’t married, he hadn’t been married for a long time. I asked him on the way up what Keith and Caroline were like, and he said they were rich. I said that wasn’t much of a description. He said it was Caroline’s money, her daddy owned a brewery. He told me which one. There was something about the way he said ‘her daddy’ that made me see the money on her, the way he saw it, like long lashes or a bosom—like a luxuriant physical thing. Inherited money can make a woman seem like a treasure. It’s not the same with money she’s made herself, that’s just brassy and ordinary. But then he said, she’s very neurotic, she’s really a bitch, and Keith’s just a poor honest sod who works for the government. He’s an A.D.M., he said. I didn’t know what that was.”
“Assistant Deputy Minister,” Julie said.
“Even cats and children know that,” said Douglas.
“Thank you,” said Julie.
I was sitting in the middle. I turned mostly towards Julie as I talked.
“He said they liked to have some friends who weren’t rich people or government people, people they could think of as eccentric or independent or artistic, sometimes a starveling artist Caroline could get her hooks into, to torment and show off and be bountiful with.”
“Sounds as if he didn’t like his friends much,” Julie said.
“I don’t know if he’d think of it that way. Liking or disliking. I expected them to be physically intimidating, at least I expected her to be, but they were little people. Keith was very fussy and hospitable. He had little freckled hands. I think of his hands because he was always handing you a drink or something to eat or a cushion for your back. Caroline was a wisp. She had long limp hair and a high white forehead and she wore a gray cotton dress with a hood. No makeup. I felt big and gaudy. She stood with her head bent and her hands up the sleeves of the dress while the men talked about the house. It was new. Then she said in her wispy voice how much she loved the way it was in the winter with the snow deep outside and the white rugs and the white furniture. Keith seemed rather embarrassed by her and said it was like a squash court, no depth perception. I felt sympathetic because she seemed just on the verge of making some sort of fool of herself. She seemed to be pleading with you to reassure her, and yet reassuring her seemed to involve you in a kind of fakery. She was like that. There was such a strain around her. Every subject seemed to get caught up in such emotional extravagance and fakery. The man I was with got very brusque with her, and I thought that was mean. I thought, even if she’s faking, it shows she wants to feel something, doesn’t it, oughtn’t decent people to help her? She just didn’t seem to know how.
“We sat out on a deck having drinks. Their house guest appeared. His name was Martin and he was in his early twenties. Maybe a bit older. He had a pretty superior style. Caroline asked him in a very submissive way if he would get some blankets—it was chilly on the deck—and when he went off she said he was a playwright. She said he was just a marvelous, marvelous playwright