Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [15]
“Extraordinary,” Joyce said later. “You feel that no matter what you said she might give you a lecture. I didn’t dare inquire about the virgin birth.”
Jon said, “She’s strong. That’s the main thing. I took a look at her arms.”
When Jon says “strong” he means just what the word used to mean. He means she could carry a beam.
While Jon works he listens to CBC Radio. Music, but also news, commentaries, phone-ins. He sometimes reports Edie’s opinions on what they have listened to.
Edie does not believe in evolution.
(There had been a phone-in program in which some people objected to what was being taught in the schools.)
Why not?
“Well, it’s because in those Bible countries,” Jon said, and then he switched into his firm monotonous Edie voice, “in those Bible countries they have a lot of monkeys and the monkeys were always swinging down from the trees and that’s how people got the idea that monkeys just swung down and turned into people.”
“But in the first place—” said Joyce.
“Never mind. Don’t even try. Don’t you know the first rule about arguing with Edie? Never mind and shut up.”
Edie also believed that big medical companies knew the cure for cancer, but they had a bargain with doctors to keep the information quiet because of the money they and the doctors made.
When “Ode to Joy” was played on the radio she had Jon shut it off because it was so awful, like a funeral.
Also, she thought Jon and Joyce—well, really Joyce—should not leave wine bottles with wine in them right out in sight on the kitchen table.
“That’s her business?” said Joyce.
“Apparently she thinks so.”
“When does she get to examine our kitchen table?”
“She has to go through to the toilet. She can’t be expected to piss in the bush.”
“I really don’t see what business—”
“And sometimes she comes in and makes a couple of sandwiches for us—”
“So? It’s my kitchen. Ours.”
“It’s just that she feels so threatened by the booze. She’s still pretty fragile. It’s a thing you and I can’t understand.”
Threatened. Booze. Fragile.
What words were these for Jon to use?
She should have understood, and at that moment, even if he himself was nowhere close to knowing. He was falling in love.
Falling. That suggests some time span, a slipping under. But you can think of it as a speeding up, a moment or a second when you fall. Now Jon is not in love with Edie. Tick. Now he is. No way this could be seen as probable or possible, unless you think of a blow between the eyes, a sudden calamity. The stroke of fate that leaves a man a cripple, the wicked joke that turns clear eyes into blind stones.
Joyce set about convincing him that he was mistaken. He had so little experience of women. None, except for her. They had always thought that experimenting with various partners was childish, adultery was messy and destructive. Now she wondered, Should he have played around more?
And he had spent the dark winter months shut up in his workshop, exposed to the confident emanations of Edie. It was comparable to getting sick from bad ventilation.
Edie would drive him crazy, if he went ahead and took her seriously.
“I’ve thought of that,” he said. “Maybe she already has.”
Joyce said that was stupid adolescent talk, making himself out to be dumbstruck, helpless.
“What do you think you are, some knight of the Round Table? Somebody slipped you a potion?”
Then she said she was sorry. The only thing to do, she said, was to take this up as a shared program. Valley of the shadow. To be seen someday as a mere glitch in the course of their marriage.
“We will ride this out,” she said.
Jon looked at her distantly, even kindly.
“There is no ‘we,’” he said.
How could this have happened? Joyce asks it of Jon and of herself and then of others. A heavy-striding heavy-witted carpenter’s apprentice in baggy pants and flannel shirts and—as long as the winter lasted—a dull thick sweater flecked with sawdust. A mind that plods inexorably from one cliché or foolishness