The Progress of Love

by Alice Munro

  This a tone that warns Stella, and she tries to deflect Mary. “What are you going to do with the material you brought back from Morocco?”

  “I can’t decide. It would make a gorgeous dress but it’s hardly me. I might just end up putting it on a bed.”

  “There’s so many activities, you can just keep up forever,” Ron says. “For instance skiing. Cross-country. We were out nineteen days in the month of February. Beautiful weather this year. We don’t have to drive anywhere. We just go down the back lane—”

  “I try to keep up my interests, too,” says David. “I think it keeps you young.”

  “There is no doubt it does!”

  David has one hand in the inner pocket of his jacket. He brings out something he keeps cupped in his palm, shows it to Ron with a deprecating smile.

  “One of my interests,” he says.

  “Want to see what I showed Ron?” David says later. They are driving along the bluffs to the nursing home.

  “No, thank you.”

  “I hope Ron liked it,” David says pleasantly.

  He starts to sing. He and Stella met while singing madrigals at university. Or that’s what Stella tells people. They sang other things, too, not just madrigals. “David was a skinny innocent bit of a lad with a pure sweet tenor and I was a stocky little brute of a girl with a big deep alto,” Stella likes to say. “There was nothing he could do about it. Destiny.”

  “O, Mistress mine, where are you roaming?” sings David, who has a fine tenor voice to this day:

  “O, Mistress mine, where are you roaming?

  O, Mistress mine, where are you roaming?

  O, stay and hear, your true love’s coming,

  O, stay and hear, your true love’s coming,

  Who can sing, both High and Low.”

  Down on the beach, at either end of Stella’s property, there are long, low walls of rocks that have been stacked in baskets of wire, stretching out into the water. They are there to protect the beach from erosion. On one of these walls, Catherine is sitting, looking out at the water, with the lake breeze blowing her filmy dress and her long hair. She could be posed for a picture. She might be advertising something, Stella thinks—either something very intimate, and potentially disgusting, or something truly respectable and rather splendid, like life insurance.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” says Stella. “Is there anything the matter with her eyes?”

  “Eyes?” says David.

  “Her eyesight. It’s just that she doesn’t seem to be quite focussing, close up. I don’t know how to describe it.”

  Stella and David are standing at the living-room window. Returned from the nursing home, they each hold a fresh, restorative drink. They have hardly spoken on the way home, but the silence has not been hostile. They are feeling chastened and reasonably companionable.

  “There isn’t anything wrong with her eyesight that I know of.”

  Stella goes into the kitchen, gets out the roasting pan, rubs the roast of pork with cloves of garlic and fresh sage leaves.

  “You know, there’s a smell women get,” says David, standing in the living-room doorway. “It’s when they know you don’t want them anymore. Stale.”

  Stella slaps the meat over.

  “Those groins are going to have to be rewired entirely,” she says. “The wire is just worn to cobwebs in some places. You should see. The power of water. It can wear out tough wire. I’ll have to have a work party this fall. Just make a lot of food and ask some people over and make sure enough of them are able-bodied. That’s what we all do.”

  She puts the roast in the oven and rinses her hands.

  “It was Catherine you were telling me about last summer, wasn’t it? She was the one you said was inclined to be fey.”

  David groans. “I said what?”

  “Inclined to be fey.” Stella bangs around, getting out apples, potatoes, onions.

  “All right, tell me,” says David, coming into the kitchen to stand close to her. “Tell me what I said?”

  “That’s all, really. I don’t remember anything else.”

  “Stella. Tell me all I said about her.”

  “I don’t, really. I don’t remember.”

  Of course she remembers. She remembers the exact tone in which he said “inclined to be fey.” The pride and irony in his voice. In the throes of love, he can be counted on to speak of the woman with tender disparagement—with amazement, even. He likes to say that it’s crazy, he does not understand it, he can plainly see that this person isn’t his kind of person at all. And yet, and yet, and yet. And yet it’s beyond him, irresistible. He told Stella that Catherine believed in horoscopes, was a vegetarian, and painted weird pictures in which tiny figures were enclosed in plastic bubbles.

  “The roast,” says Stella, suddenly alarmed. “Will she eat meat?”

  “What?”

  “Will Catherine eat meat?”

  “She may not eat anything. She may be too spaced out.”

  “I’m making an apple-and-onion casserole. It’ll be quite substantial. Maybe she’ll eat that.”

  Last summer, he said, “She’s a hippie survivor, really. She doesn’t even know those times are gone. I don’t think she’s ever read a newspaper. She hasn’t the remotest idea of what’s going on in the world. Unless she’s heard it from a fortune-teller. That’s her idea of reality. I don’t think she can read a map. She’s all instinct. Do you know what she did? She went to Ireland to see the Book of Kells. She’d heard the Book of Kells was in Ireland. So she just got off the plane at Shannon Airport, and asked somebody the way to the Book of Kells. And you know what, she found it!”

  Stella asked how this fey creature earned the money for trips to Ireland.

  “Oh, she has a job,” David said. “Sort of a job. She teaches art, part time. God knows what she teaches them. To paint by their horoscopes, I think.”

  Now he says, “There’s somebody else. I haven’t told Catherine. Do you think she senses it? I think she does. I think she senses it.”

  He is leaning against the counter, watching Stella peel apples. He reaches quickly into his inside pocket, and before Stella can turn her head away he is holding a Polaroid snapshot in front of her eyes.

  “That’s my new girl,” he says.

  “It looks like lichen,” says Stella, her paring knife halting. “Except it’s rather dark. It looks to me like moss on a rock.”

  “Don’t be dumb, Stella. Don’t be cute. You can see her. See her legs?”

  Stella puts the paring knife down and squints obediently. There is a flattened-out breast far away on the horizon. And the legs spreading into the foreground. The legs are spread wide—smooth, golden, monumental: fallen columns. Between them is the dark blot she called moss, or lichen. But it’s really more like the dark pelt of an animal, with the head and tail and feet chopped off. Dark silky pelt of some unlucky rodent.

  “Well, I can see now,” she says, in a sensible voice.

  “Her name is Dina. Dina without an ‘h.’ She’s twenty-two years old.”

  Stella won’t ask him to put the picture away, or even to stop holding it in front of her face.

  “She’s a bad girl,” says David. “Oh, she’s a bad girl! She went to school to the nuns. There are no bad girls like those convent-school girls, once they decide to go wild! She was a student at the art college where Catherine teaches. She quit. Now she’s a cocktail waitress.”

  “That doesn’t sound so terribly depraved to me. Deirdre was a cocktail waitress for a while when she was at college.”

  “Dina’s not like Deirdre.”

  At last, the hand holding the picture drops, and Stella picks up her knife and resumes peeling the apples. But David doesn’t put the picture away. He starts to, then changes his mind.

  “The little witch,” he says. “She torments my soul.”

  His voice when he talks about this girl seems to Stella peculiarly artificial. But who is she to say, with David, what is
artificial and what is not? This special voice of his is rather high-pitched, monotonous, insistent, with a deliberate, cruel sweetness. Whom does he want to be cruel to—Stella, Catherine, the girl, himself? Stella gives a sigh that is noisier and more exasperated than she meant it to be and puts down an apple half-peeled. She goes into the living room and looks out the window.

  Catherine is climbing off the wall. Or she’s trying to. Her dress is caught in the wire.

  “That pretty li’l old dress is giving her all sorts of trouble today,” Stella says, surprising herself with the bad accent and a certain viciousness of tone.

  “Stella. I wish you’d keep this picture for me.”

  “Me keep it?”

  “I’m afraid I’ll show it to Catherine. I keep wanting to. I’m afraid I will.”

  Catherine has disengaged herself, and has spotted them at the window. She waves, and Stella waves back.

  “I’m sure you have others,” says Stella. “Pictures.”

  “Not with me. It’s not that I want to hurt her.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “She makes me want to hurt her. She hangs on me with her weepy looks. She takes pills. Mood elevators. She drinks. Sometimes I think the best thing to do would be to give her the big chop. Coup de grâce. Coup de grâce, Catherine. Here you are. Big chop. But I worry about what she’ll do.”

  “Mood elevator,” says Stella. “Mood elevator, going up!”

  “I’m serious, Stella. Those pills are deadly.”

  “That’s your affair.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I didn’t even mean it to be. Whenever something slips out like that, I always pretend I meant it, though. I’ll take all the credit I can get!”

  These three people feel better at dinnertime than any of them might have expected. David feels better because he has remembered that there is a telephone booth across from the liquor store. Stella always feels better when she has cooked a meal and it has turned out so well. Catherine’s reasons for feeling better are chemical.

  Conversation is not difficult. Stella tells stories that she has come across in doing research for her article, about wrecks on the Great Lakes. Catherine knows something about wrecks. She has a boyfriend—a former boyfriend—who is a diver. David is gallant enough to assert that he is jealous of this fellow, does not care to hear about his deep-water prowess. Perhaps this is the truth.

  After dinner, David says he needs to go for a walk. Catherine tells him to go ahead. “Go on,” she says merrily. “We don’t need you here. Stella and I will get along fine without you!” Stella wonders where this new voice of Catherine’s comes from, this pert and rather foolish and flirtatious voice. Drink wouldn’t do it. Whatever Catherine has taken has made her sharper, not blunter. Several layers of wispy apology, tentative flattery, fearfulness, or hopefulness have simply blown away in this brisk chemical breeze.

  But when Catherine gets up and tries to clear the table it becomes apparent that the sharpening is not physical. Catherine bumps into a corner of the counter. She makes Stella think of an amputee. Not much cut off, just the tips of her fingers and maybe her toes. Stella has to keep an eye on her, relieving her of the dishes before they slide away.

  “Did you notice the hair?” says Catherine. Her voice goes up and down like a Ferris wheel; it dips and sparkles. “He’s dyeing it!”

  “David is?” says Stella, in genuine surprise.

  “Every time he’d think of it, he’d tilt his head back, so you couldn’t get too close a look. I think he was afraid you’d say something. He’s slightly afraid of you. Actually, it looks very natural.”

  “I really didn’t notice.”

  “He started a couple of months ago. I said, ‘David, what does it matter—your hair was getting gray when I fell in love with you, do you think it’s going to bother me now?’ Love is strange, it does strange things. David is actually a sensitive person—he’s a vulnerable person.” Stella rescues a wineglass that is drooping from Catherine’s fingers. “It can make you mean. Love can make you mean. If you feel dependent on somebody, then you can be mean to them. I understand that in David.”

  They drink mead at dinner. This is the first time Stella has tried this batch of homemade mead and she thinks now how good it was, dry and sparkling. It looked like champagne. She checks to see if there is any left in the bottle. About half a glass. She pours it out for herself, sets her glass behind the blender, rinses the bottle.

  “You have a good life here,” Catherine says.

  “I have a fine life. Yes.”

  “I feel a change coming in my life. I love David, but I’ve been submerged in this love for so long. Too long. Do you know what I mean? I was down looking at the waves and I started saying, ‘He loves me, he loves me not.’ I do that often. Then I thought, Well, there isn’t any end to the waves, not like there is to a daisy. Or even like there is to my footsteps, if I start counting them to the end of the block. I thought, The waves never, ever come to an end. So then I knew, this is a message for me.”

  “Just leave the pots, Catherine. I’ll deal with them later.”

  Why doesn’t Stella say, “Sit down, I can manage better by myself”? It’s a thing she has said often to helpers less inept than Catherine. She doesn’t say it because she’s wary of something. Catherine’s state seems so brittle and delicate. Tripping her up could have consequences.

  “He loves me, he loves me not,” says Catherine. “That’s the way it goes. It goes forever. That’s what the waves were trying to tell me.”

  “Just out of curiosity,” says Stella, “do you believe in horoscopes?”

  “You mean have I had mine done? No, not really. I know people who have. I’ve thought about it. I guess I don’t quite believe in it enough to spend the money. I look at those things in the newspapers sometimes.”

  “You read the newspapers?”

  “I read parts. I get one delivered. I don’t read it all.”

  “And you eat meat? You ate pork for dinner.”

  Catherine doesn’t seem to mind being interrogated, or even to notice that this is an interrogation.

  “Well, I can live on salads, particularly at this time of year. But I do eat meat from time to time. I’m a sort of very lackadaisical vegetarian. It was fantastic, that roast. Did you put garlic on it?”

  “Garlic and sage and rosemary.”

  “It was delicious.”

  “I’m glad.”

  Catherine sits down suddenly, and spreads out her long legs in a tomboyish way, letting her dress droop between them. Hercules, who has slept all through dinner on the fourth chair, at the other side of the table, takes a determined leap and lands on what there is of her lap.

  Catherine laughs. “Crazy cat.”

  “If he bothers you, just bat him off.”

  Freed now of the need to watch Catherine, Stella gets busy scraping and stacking the plates, rinsing glasses, cleaning off the table, shaking the cloth, wiping the counters. She feels well satisfied and full of energy. She takes a sip of the mead. Lines of a song are going through her head, and she doesn’t realize until a few words of this song reach the surface that it’s the same one David was singing, earlier in the day. “What’s to come is still unsure!”

  Catherine gives a light snore, and jerks her head up. Hercules doesn’t take fright, but tries to settle himself more permanently, getting his claws into her dress.

  “Was that me?” says Catherine.

  “You need some coffee,” Stella says. “Hang on. You probably shouldn’t go to sleep right now.”

  “I’m tired,” says Catherine stubbornly.

  “I know. But you shouldn’t go to sleep right now. Hang on, and we’ll get some coffee into you.”

  Stella takes a hand towel from the drawer, soaks it in cold water, holds it to Catherine’s face.

  “There, now,” says Stella. “You hold it, I’ll start the coffee. We’re not going to have you passing out here, are we? David would carry on about
it. He’d say it was my mead or my cooking or my company, or something. Hang on, Catherine.”

  David, in the phone booth, begins to dial Dina’s number. Then he remembers that it’s long distance. He must dial the operator. He dials the operator, asks how much the call will cost, empties his pockets of change. He picks out a dollar and thirty-five cents in quarters and dimes, stacks it ready on the shelf. He starts dialling again. His fingers are shaky, his palms sweaty. His legs, gut, and chest are filled with a rising commotion. The first ring of the phone, in Dina’s cramped apartment, sets his innards bubbling. This is craziness. He starts to feed in quarters.

  “I will tell you when to deposit your money,” says the operator. “Sir? I will tell you when to deposit it.” His quarters clank down into the change return and he has trouble scooping them out. The phone rings again, on Dina’s dresser, in the jumble of makeup, panty hose, beads and chains, long feathered earrings, a silly cigarette holder, an assortment of windup toys. He can see them: the green frog, the yellow duck, the brown bear—all the same size. Frogs and bears are equal. Also some space monsters, based on characters in a movie. When set going, these toys will lurch and clatter across Dina’s floor or table, spitting sparks out of their mouths. She likes to set up races, or put a couple of them on a collision course. Then she squeals, and even screams with excitement, as they go their unpredictable ways.

  “There doesn’t seem to be any answer, sir.”

  “Let it ring a few more times.”

  Dina’s bathroom is across the hall. She shares it with another girl. If she is in the bathroom, even in the bathtub, how long will it take her to decide whether to answer it at all? He decides to count ten rings more, starting now.

  “Still no answer, sir.”

  Ten more.

  “Sir, would you like to try again later?”

  He hangs up, having thought of something. Immediately, energetically, he dials information.

  “For what place, sir?”

  “Toronto.”

  “Go ahead, sir.”

  He asks for the phone number of a Michael Read. No, he does not have a street address. All he has is the name—the name of her last, and perhaps not quite finished with, boyfriend.