The Progress of Love

by Alice Munro

  “I have no listing for a Michael Read.”

  “All right. Try Reade, R-E-A-D-E.”

  There is indeed an M. Reade, on Davenport Road. Not a Michael but at least an M. Check back and see, then. Is there an M. Read? Read? Yes. Yes, there is an M. Read, living on Simcoe Street. And another M. Read, R-E-A-D, living on Harbord. Why didn’t she say that sooner?

  He picks Harbord on a hunch. That’s not too far from Dina’s apartment. The operator tells him the number. He tries to memorize it. He has nothing to write with. He feels it’s important not to ask the operator to repeat the number more than once. He should not reveal that he is here in a phone booth without a pen or pencil. It seems to him that the desperate, furtive nature of his quest is apparent, and that at any moment he may be shut off, not permitted to acquire any further information about M. Read or M. Reade, on Harbord or Simcoe or Davenport, or wherever.

  Now he must start all over again. The Toronto area code. No, the operator. The memorized number. Quick, before he loses his nerve, or loses the number. If she should answer, what is he going to say? But it isn’t likely that she will answer, even if she is there. M. Read will answer. Then David must ask for Dina. But perhaps not in his own voice. Perhaps not in a man’s voice at all. He used to be able to do different voices on the phone. He could even fool Stella at one time.

  Perhaps he could do a woman’s voice, squeaky. Or a child’s voice, a little-sister voice. Is Dina there?

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “Nothing. Sorry.”

  “It’s ringing now. I will let you know when to deposit your money.”

  What if M. Read is a woman? Not Michael Read at all. Mary Read. Old-age pensioner. Career girl. What are you phoning me for? Sexual harassment. Back to information, then. Try M. Read on Simcoe. Try M. Reade on Davenport. Keep trying.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t seem to get an answer.”

  The phone rings again and again in M. Read’s apartment, or house, or room. David leans against the metal shelf, where his change is waiting. A car has parked in the liquor-store lot. The couple in it are watching him. Obviously waiting to use the phone. With any luck, Ron and Mary will drive up next.

  Dina lives above an Indian-import shop. Her clothes and hair always have a smell of curry powder, nutmeg, incense, added to what David thinks of as her natural smell, of cigarettes and dope and sex. Her hair is dyed dead black. Her cheeks bear a slash of crude color and her eyelids are sometimes brick red. She tried out once for a part in a movie some people she knew about were making. She failed to get the part because of some squeamishness about holding a tame rat between her legs. This failure humiliated her.

  David sweats now, trying not to catch her out but to catch her any way at all, to hear her harsh young voice, with its involuntary tremor and insistent obscenities. Even if hearing it, at this moment, means that she has betrayed him. Of course she has betrayed him. She betrays him all the time. If only she would answer (he has almost forgotten it’s M. Read who is supposed to answer), he could howl at her, berate her, and if he felt low enough—he would feel low enough—he could plead with her. He would welcome the chance. Any chance. At dinner, talking in a lively way to Stella and Catherine, he kept writing the name Dina with his finger on the underside of the wooden table.

  People don’t have any patience with this sort of suffering, and why should they? The sufferer must forgo sympathy, give up on dignity, cope with the ravages. And on top of that, people will take time out to tell you that this isn’t real love. These bouts of desire and dependence and worship and perversity, willed but terrible transformations—they aren’t real love.

  Stella used to tell him he wasn’t interested in love. “Or sex, even. I don’t think you’re even interested in sex, David. I think all you’re interested in is being a big bad boy.”

  Real love—that would be going on living with Stella, or taking on Catherine. A person presumed to know all about Real Love might be Ron, of Ron-and-Mary.

  David knows what he’s doing. This is the interesting part of it, he thinks, and has said. He knows that Dina is not really so wild, or so avid, or doomed, as he pretends she is, or as she sometimes pretends she is. In ten years’ time, she won’t be wrecked by her crazy life, she won’t be a glamorous whore. She’ll be a woman tagged by little children in the laundromat. The delicious, old-fashioned word “trollop,” which he uses to describe her, doesn’t apply to her, really—has no more to do with her than “hippie” had to do with Catherine, a person he cannot now bear to think about. He knows that sooner or later, if Dina allows her disguise to crack, as Catherine did, he will have to move on. He will have to do that anyway—move on.

  He knows all this and observes himself, and such knowledge and observation has no effect at all on his quaking gut, zealous sweat glands, fierce prayers.

  “Sir? Do you want to keep on trying?”

  The nursing home that they visited, earlier in the day, is called the Balm of Gilead Home. It is named after the balm-of-Gilead trees, a kind of poplar, that grow plentifully near the lake. A large stone mansion built by a nineteenth-century millionaire, it is now disfigured by ramps and fire escapes.

  Voices summoned Stella, from the clusters of wheelchairs on the front lawn. She called out various names in answer, detoured to press hands and drop kisses. Vibrating here and there like a fat hummingbird.

  She sang when she rejoined David:

  “I’m your little sunbeam, short and stout,

  Turn me over, pour me out!”

  Out of breath, she said, “Actually it’s teapot. I don’t think you’ll see much change in Daddy. Except the blindness is total now.”

  She led him through the green painted corridors, with their low false ceilings (cutting the heating costs), their paint-by-number pictures, their disinfectant—and other—smells. Out on a back porch, alone, her father sat wrapped in blankets, strapped into his wheelchair so that he wouldn’t fall out.

  Her father said, “David?”

  The sound seemed to come from a wet cave deep inside him, to be unshaped by lips or jaws or tongue. These could not be seen to move. Nor did he move his head.

  Stella went behind the chair and put her arms around his neck. She touched him very lightly.

  “Yes, it’s David, Daddy,” she said. “You knew his step!”

  Her father didn’t answer. David bent to touch the old man’s hands, which were not cold, as he expected, but warm and very dry. He laid the whiskey bottle in them.

  “Careful. He can’t hold it,” said Stella softly. David kept his own hands on the bottle while Stella pushed up a chair, so that he could sit down opposite her father.

  “Same old present,” David said.

  His father-in-law made an acknowledging sound.

  “I’m going to get some glasses,” Stella said. “It’s against the rules to drink outside, but I can generally get them to bend the rules a bit. I’ll tell them it’s a celebration.”

  To get used to looking at his father-in-law, David tried to think of him as a post-human development, something new in the species. Survival hadn’t just preserved, it had transformed him. Bluish-gray skin, with dark-blue spots, whitened eyes, a ribbed neck with delicate deep hollows, like a smoked-glass vase. Up through this neck came further sounds, a conversational offering. It was the core of each syllable that was presented, a damp vowel barely held in shape by surrounding consonants.

  “Traffic—bad?”

  David described conditions on the freeway and on the secondary highways. He told his father-in-law that he had recently bought a car, a Japanese car. He told how he had not, at first, been able to get anything close to the advertised mileage. But he had complained, he had persisted, had taken the car back to the dealer. Various adjustments had been tried, and now the situation had improved and the figure was satisfactory, if not quite what had been promised.

  This conversation seemed welcome. His father-in-law appeared to follow it. He nodded, and on his narr
ow, elongated, bluish, post-human face there were traces of old expressions. An expression of shrewd and dignified concern, suspicion of advertising and of foreign cars and car dealers. There was even a suggestion of doubt—as in the old days—that David could be trusted to handle such things well. And relief that he had done so. In his father-in-law’s eyes David would always be somebody learning how to be a man, somebody who might never learn, might never achieve the steadfastness and control, the decent narrowness of range. David, who preferred gin to whiskey, read novels, didn’t understand the stock market, talked to women, and had started out as a teacher. David, who had always driven small cars, foreign cars. But that was all right now. Small cars were not a sign of any of the things they used to be a sign of. Even here on the bluffs above Lake Huron at the very end of life, certain shifts had registered, certain changes had been understood, by a man who couldn’t grasp or see.

  “Hear anything about—Lada?”

  It happens luckily that David has a colleague who drives a Lada, and many boring lunch and coffee breaks have been taken up with the discussion of this car’s strengths and failings and the difficulty of getting parts. David recounted these, and his father-in-law seemed satisfied.

  “Gray. Dort. Gray-Dort. First car—ever drove. Yonge Street. Sixty miles. Sixty miles. Uh. Uh. Hour”

  “He certainly never drove a Gray-Dort down Yonge Street at sixty miles an hour,” said Stella when they had got her father and his bottle back to his room, had said goodbye, and were walking back through the green corridors. “Never. Whose Gray-Dort? They were out of production long before he had the money to buy a car. And he’d never have taken the risk with anybody else’s. It’s his fantasy. He’s reached the stage where that’s his big recreation—fixing up the past so anything he wishes had happened did happen. Wonder if we’ll get to that stage? What would your fantasy be, David? No. Don’t tell me!”

  “What would yours be?” said David.

  “That you didn’t leave? That you didn’t want to leave? I bet that’s what you think mine would be, but I’m not so sure! Daddy was so pleased to see you, David. A man just means more, for Daddy. I suppose if he thought about you and me he’d have to be on my side, but that’s all right, he doesn’t have to think about it.”

  Stella, at the nursing home, seemed to have regained some sleekness and suppleness of former times. Her attentions to her father, and even to the wheelchair contingent, brought back a trace of deferential grace to her movements, a wistfulness to her voice. David had a picture of her as she had been twelve or fifteen years before. He saw her coming across the lawn at a suburban party, carrying a casserole. She was wearing a sundress. She always claimed in those days that she was too fat for pants, though she was not half so fat as now. Why did this picture please him so much? Stella coming across the lawn, with her sunlit hair—the gray in it then merely made it ash blond—and her bare toasted shoulders, crying out greetings to her neighbors, laughing, protesting about some cooking misadventure. Of course the food she brought would be wonderful, and she brought not only food but the whole longed-for spirit of the neighborhood party. With her overwhelming sociability, she gathered everybody in. And David felt quite free of irritation, though there were times, certainly, when these gifts of Stella’s had irritated him. Her vivacious exasperation, her exaggeration, her wide-eyed humorous appeals for sympathy had irritated him. For others’ entertainment he had heard her shaping stories out of their life—the children’s daily mishaps and provocations, the cat’s visit to the vet, her son’s first hangover, the perversity of the power lawnmower, the papering of the upstairs hall. A charming wife, a wonderful person at a party, she has such a funny way of looking at things. Sometimes she was a riot. Your wife’s a riot.

  Well, he forgave her—he loved her—as she walked across the lawn. At that moment, with his bare foot, he was stroking the cold, brown, shaved, and prickly calf of another neighborhood wife, who had just come out of the pool and had thrown on a long, concealing scarlet robe. A dark-haired, childless, chain-smoking woman, given—at least at that stage in their relationship—to tantalizing silences. (His first, that one, the first while married to Stella. Rosemary. A sweet dark name, though finally a shrill trite woman.)

  It wasn’t just that. The unexpected delight in Stella just as she was, the unusual feeling of being at peace with her, didn’t come from just that—the illicit activity of his big toe. This seemed profound, this revelation about himself and Stella—how they were bound together after all, and how as long as he could feel such benevolence toward her, what he did secretly and separately was somehow done with her blessing.

  That did not turn out to be a notion Stella shared at all. And they weren’t so bound, or if they were it was a bond he had to break. We’ve been together so long, couldn’t we just tough it out, said Stella at the time, trying to make it a joke. She didn’t understand, probably didn’t understand yet, how that was one of the things that made it impossible. This white-haired woman walking beside him through the nursing home dragged so much weight with her—a weight not just of his sexual secrets but of his middle-of-the-night speculations about God, his psychosomatic chest pains, his digestive sensitivity, his escape plans, which once included her and involved Africa or Indonesia. All his ordinary and extraordinary life—even some things it was unlikely she knew about—seemed stored up in her. He could never feel any lightness, any secret and victorious expansion, with a woman who knew so much. She was bloated with all she knew. Nevertheless he put his arms around Stella. They embraced, both willingly.

  A young girl, a Chinese or Vietnamese girl, slight as a child in her pale-green uniform, but with painted lips and cheeks, was coming along the corridor, pushing a cart. On the cart were paper cups and plastic containers of orange and grape juice.

  “Juice time,” the girl was calling, in her pleasant and indifferent singsong. “Juice time. Orange. Grape. Juice.” She took no notice of David and Stella, but they let go of each other and resumed walking. David did feel a slight, very slight, discomfort at being seen by such a young and pretty girl in the embrace of Stella. It was not an important feeling—it simply brushed him and passed—but Stella, as he held the door open for her, said, “Never mind, David. I could be your sister. You could be comforting your sister. Older sister.”

  “Madam Stella, the celebrated mind reader.”

  It was strange, the way they said these things. They used to say bitter and wounding things, and pretend, when they said them, to be mildly amused, dispassionate, even kindly. Now this tone that was once a pretense had soaked down, deep down, through all their sharp feelings, and the bitterness, though not transformed, seemed stale, useless and formal.

  • • •

  A week or so later, when she is tidying up the living room, getting ready for a meeting of the historical society that is to take place at her house, Stella finds the picture, a Polaroid snapshot. David has left it with her after all—hiding it, but not hiding it very well, behind the curtains at one end of the long living-room window, at the spot where you stand to get a view of the lighthouse.

  Lying in the sun had faded it, of course. Stella stands looking at it, with a dust cloth in her hand. The day is perfect. The windows are open, her house is pleasantly in order, and a good fish soup is simmering on the stove. She sees that the black pelt in the picture has changed to gray. It’s a bluish or greenish gray now. She remembers what she said when she first saw it. She said it was lichen. No, she said it looked like lichen. But she knew what it was at once. It seems to her now that she knew what it was even when David put his hand to his pocket. She felt the old cavity opening up in her. But she held on. She said, “Lichen.” And now, look, her words have come true. The outline of the breast has disappeared. You would never know that the legs were legs. The black has turned to gray, to the soft, dry color of a plant mysteriously nourished on the rocks.

  This is David’s doing. He left it there, in the sun.

  Stella’s words ha
ve come true. This thought will keep coming back to her—a pause, a lost heartbeat, a harsh little break in the flow of the days and nights as she keeps them going.

  MONSIEUR LES DEUX CHAPEAUX

  “Is that your brother out there?” Davidson said. “What’s he up to?”

  Colin went over to the window to see what Ross was up to. Not much. Ross was using the long-handled clippers to clip the grass along the sidewalk to the front door of the school. He was working at a normal rate and seemed to be paying attention to what he was doing.

  “What’s he up to?” Davidson said.

  Ross was wearing two hats. One was the green-and-white peaked cap he had got last summer at the feed store, and the other one, on top, was the old floppy hat of pinkish straw that their mother wore in the garden.

  “Search me,” said Colin. Davidson was going to think that was smart-arse.

  “You mean why has he got the two hats on? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. Maybe he forgot.”

  This was in the front office, during school hours on Friday afternoon, the secretaries bent over their desks but keeping their ears open. Colin had a gym class going on at the moment—he had just come into the office to find out what had happened about a boy who had begged off sick half an hour before—and he hadn’t expected to find Davidson prowling around here. He hadn’t come prepared to provide explanations about Ross.

  “Is he a forgetful kind of person?” the principal said.

  “No more than average.”

  “Maybe it’s supposed to be funny.”

  Colin was silent.

  “I’ve got a sense of humor myself but you can’t start being funny around kids. You know the way they are. They’ll see enough to laugh at anyway, without giving them extra. They’ll make any little thing an excuse for distraction and then you know what you’ve got.”

  “You want me to go out and talk to him?” Colin said.