Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [33]
“We start with Greeks. It’s a survey course,” I said, when I could speak.
“Oh yes. Greece. Well as far as you’ve got with the Greeks, who is your favorite—oh, no, just a minute. It will fall apart more easily like this.”
There followed a demonstration of separating and removing the meat from the bones of a Cornish hen—nicely done, and without condescension, rather as if it was a joke we might share.
“Your favorite?”
“We haven’t got to him yet, we’re doing the pre-Socratics,” I said. “But Plato.”
“Plato is your favorite. So you read ahead, you don’t just stay where you’re supposed to? Plato. Yes, I could have guessed that. You like the cave?”
“Yes.”
“Yes of course. The cave. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
When I was sitting down, the most flagrant part of me was out of sight. If my breasts had been tiny and ornamental, like Nina’s, instead of full and large nippled and bluntly serviceable, I could have been almost at ease. I tried to look at him when I spoke, but against my will I would suffer waves of flushing. When this happened I thought his voice changed slightly, becoming soothing and politely satisfied. Just as if he’d made a winning move in a game. But he went on talking nimbly and entertainingly, telling me about a trip he had made to Greece. Delphi, the Acropolis, the famous light that you believed couldn’t be true but was true, the bare bones of the Peloponnesus.
“And then to Crete—do you know about the Minoan civilization?”
“Yes.”
“Of course you do. Of course. And you know the way the Minoan ladies dressed?”
“Yes.”
I looked into his face this time, his eyes. I was determined not to squirm away, not even when I felt the heat on my throat.
“Very nice, that style,” he said almost sadly. “Very nice. It’s odd the different things that are hidden in different eras. And the things that are displayed.”
Dessert was vanilla custard and whipped cream, with bits of cake in it, and raspberries. He ate only a few bites of his. But after failing to settle down enough to enjoy the first course, I was determined not to miss out on anything rich and sweet, and I fixed my appetite and attention on every spoonful.
He poured coffee into small cups and said that we would drink it in the library.
My buttocks made a slapping noise, as I loosened myself from the sleek upholstery of the dining room chair. But this was almost covered up by the clatter of the delicate coffee cups on the tray in his shaky old grasp.
Libraries in a house were known to me only from books. This one was entered through a panel in the dining room wall. The panel swung open without a sound, at a touch of his raised foot. He apologized for going ahead of me, as he had to do since he carried the coffee. To me it was a relief. I thought that our backsides—not just mine but everybody’s—were the most beastly part of the body.
When I was seated in the chair he indicated, he gave me my coffee. It was not so easy to sit here, out in the open, as it had been at the dining room table. That chair had been covered with smooth striped silk, but this one was upholstered in some dark plush material, which prickled me. An intimate agitation was set up.
The light in this room was brighter than it had been in the dining room, and the books lining the walls had an expression more disturbing and reproving than the look of the dim dining room with its landscape pictures and light-absorbing panels.
For a moment, as we left one room for the other, I had had some notion of a story—the sort of story I had heard of but that few people then got the chance to read—in which the room referred to as a library would turn out to be a bedroom, with soft lights and puffy cushions and all manner of downy coverings. I did not have time to figure out what I would do in such circumstances, because the room we were in was plainly nothing but a library. The reading lights, the books on the shelves, the invigorating smell of coffee. Mr. Purvis pulling out a book, riffling through its leaves,