Selected Stories

by Alice Munro

  The other place that Maya liked was a hippie restaurant on Blanshard Street, where you sat on dirty plush cushions tied to the tops of stumps and ate brown rice with slimy vegetables and drank cloudy cider. (At the Moghul’s Court, Maya and Georgia drank only gin.) When they lunched at the hippie restaurant, they wore long, cheap, pretty Indian cotton dresses and pretended to be refugees from a commune, where they had both been the attendants or concubines of a folksinger named Bill Bones. They made up several songs for Bill Bones, all mild and tender blue-eyed songs that contrasted appallingly with his greedy and licentious ways. Bill Bones had very curious personal habits.

  When they weren’t playing these games, they talked in a headlong fashion about their lives, childhoods, problems, husbands.

  “That was a horrible place,” Maya said. “That school.”

  Georgia agreed.

  “They were poor boys at a rich kids’ school,” Maya said. “So they had to try hard. They had to be a credit to their families.”

  Georgia would not have thought Ben’s family poor, but she knew that there were different ways of looking at such things.

  Maya said that whenever they had people in for dinner or the evening, Raymond would pick out beforehand all the records he thought suitable and put them in a suitable order. “I think sometime he’ll hand out conversational topics at the door,” Maya said.

  Georgia revealed that Ben wrote a letter every week to the great-aunt who had sent him to school.

  “Is it a nice letter?” said Maya.

  “Yes. Oh, yes. It’s very nice.”

  They looked at each other bleakly, and laughed. Then they announced—they admitted—what weighed on them. It was the innocence of these husbands—the hearty, decent, firm, contented innocence. That is a wearying and finally discouraging thing. It makes intimacy a chore.

  “But do you feel badly,” Georgia said, “talking like this?”

  “Of course,” said Maya, grinning and showing her large perfect teeth—the product of expensive dental work from the days before she had charge of her own looks. “I have another reason to feel badly,” she said. “But I don’t know whether I do. I do and I don’t.”

  “I know,” said Georgia, who up until that moment hadn’t known, for sure.

  “You’re very smart,” Maya said. “Or I’m very obvious. What do you think of him?”

  “A lot of trouble,” Georgia said judiciously. She was pleased with that answer, which didn’t show how flattered she felt by the disclosure, or how heady she found this conversation.

  “You aren’t just a-whistlin’ ‘Dixie,’ ” Maya said, and she told the story about the abortion. “I am going to break up with him,” she said. “Any day now.”

  But she kept on seeing Harvey. She would relate, at lunch, some very disillusioning facts about him, then announce that she had to go, she was meeting him at a motel out on the Gorge Road, or at the cabin he had on Prospect Lake.

  “Must scrub,” she said.

  She had left Raymond once. Not for Harvey. She had run away with, or to, a musician. A pianist—Nordic and sleepy-looking but bad-tempered—from her society-lady, symphony-benefit days. She travelled with him for five weeks, and he deserted her in a hotel in Cincinnati. She then developed frightful chest pains, appropriate to a breaking heart. What she really had was a gallbladder attack. Raymond was sent for, and he came and got her out of the hospital. They had a little holiday in Mexico before they came home.

  “That was it, for me,” Maya said. “That was your true and desperate love. Nevermore.”

  What, then, was Harvey?

  “Exercise,” said Maya.

  GEORGIA got a part-time job in a bookstore, working several evenings a week. Ben went away on his yearly cruise. The summer turned out to be unusually hot and sunny for the West Coast. Georgia combed her hair out and stopped using most of her makeup and bought a couple of short halter dresses. Sitting on her stool at the front of the store, showing her bare brown shoulders and sturdy brown legs, she looked like a college girl—clever but full of energy and bold opinions. The people who came into the store liked the look of a girl—a woman—like Georgia. They liked to talk to her. Most of them came in alone. They were not exactly lonely people, but they were lonely for somebody to talk to about books. Georgia plugged in the kettle behind the desk and made mugs of raspberry tea. Some favored customers brought in their own mugs. Maya came to visit and lurked about in the background, amused and envious.

  “You know what you’ve got?” she said to Georgia. “You’ve got a salon! Oh, I’d like to have a job like that! I’d even like an ordinary job in an ordinary store, where you fold things up and find things for people and make change and say thank you very much, and colder out today, will it rain?”

  “You could get a job like that,” said Georgia.

  “No, I couldn’t. I don’t have the discipline. I was too badly brought up. I can’t even keep house without Mrs. Hanna and Mrs. Cheng and Sadie.”

  It was true. Maya had a lot of servants, for a modern woman, though they came at different times and did separate things and were nothing like an old-fashioned household staff. Even the food at her dinner parties, which seemed to show her own indifferent touch, had been prepared by someone else.

  Usually, Maya was busy in the evenings. Georgia was just as glad, because she didn’t really want Maya coming into the store, asking for crazy titles that she had made up, making Georgia’s employment there a kind of joke. Georgia took the store seriously. She had a serious, secret liking for it that she could not explain. It was a long, narrow store with an old-fashioned funnelled entryway between two angled display windows. From her stool behind the desk Georgia was able to see the reflections in one window reflected in the other. This street was not one of those decked out to receive tourists. It was a wide east-west street filled in the early evening with a faintly yellow light, a light reflected off pale stucco buildings that were not Very high, plain storefronts, nearly empty sidewalks. Georgia found this plainness liberating after the winding shady streets, the flowery yards and vine-framed windows of Oak Bay. Here the books could come into their own, as they never could in a more artful and enticing suburban bookshop. Straight long rows of paperbacks. (Most of the Penguins then still had their orange-and-white or blue-and-white covers, with no designs or pictures, just the unadorned, unexplained titles.) The store was a straight avenue of bounty, of plausible promises. Certain books that Georgia had never read, and probably never would read, were important to her, because of the stateliness or mystery of their titles. In Praise of Folly. The Roots of Coincidence. The Flowering of New England. Ideas and Integrities.

  Sometimes she got up and put the books in stricter order. The fiction was shelved alphabetically, by author, which was sensible but not very interesting. The history books, however, and the philosophy and psychology and other science books were arranged according to certain intricate and delightful rules—having to do with chronology and content—that Georgia grasped immediately and even elaborated on. She did not need to read much of a book to know about it. She got a sense of it easily, almost at once, as if by smell.

  At times the store was empty, and she felt an abundant calm. It was not even the books that mattered then. She sat on the stool and watched the street—patient, expectant, by herself, in a finely balanced and suspended state.

  She saw Miles’ reflection—his helmeted ghost parking his motorcycle at the curb—before she saw him. She believed that she had noted his valiant profile, his pallor, his dusty red hair (he took off his helmet and shook out his hair before coming into the store), and his quick, slouching, insolent, invading way of moving, even in the glass.

  It was no surprise that he soon began to talk to her, as others did. He told her that he was a diver. He looked for wrecks, and lost airplanes, and dead bodies. He had been hired by a rich couple in Victoria who were planning a treasure-hunting cruise, getting it together at the moment. Their names, the destination were all secr
ets. Treasure-hunting was a lunatic business. He had done it before. His home was in Seattle, where he had a wife and a little daughter.

  Everything he told her could easily have been a lie.

  He showed her pictures in books—photographs and drawings, of mollusks, jellyfish, the Portuguese man-of-war, sargasso weed, the Caribbean flying fish, the girdle of Venus. He pointed out which pictures were accurate, which were fakes. Then he went away and paid no more attention to her, even slipping out of the store while she was busy with a customer. Not a hint of a goodbye. But he came in another evening, and told her about a drowned man wedged into the cabin of a boat, looking out the watery window in an interested way. By attention and avoidance, impersonal conversations in close proximity, by his oblivious prowling, and unsmiling, lengthy, gray-eyed looks, he soon had Georgia in a disturbed and not disagreeable state. He stayed away two nights in a row, then came in and asked her, abruptly, if she would like a ride home on his motorcycle.

  Georgia said yes. She had never ridden on a motorcycle in her life. Her car was in the parking lot; she knew what was bound to happen.

  She told him where she lived. “Just a few blocks up from the beach,” she said.

  “We’ll go to the beach, then. We’ll go and sit on the logs.”

  That was what they did. They sat for a while on the logs. Then, though the beach was not quite dark or completely deserted, they made love in the imperfect shelter of some broom bushes. Georgia walked home, a strengthened and lightened woman, not in the least in love, favored by the universe.

  “My car wouldn’t start,” she told the baby-sitter, a grandmother from down the street. “I walked all the way home. It was lovely, walking. Lovely. I enjoyed it so much.”

  Her hair was wild, her lips were swollen, her clothes were full of sand.

  HER LIFE filled up with such lies. Her car would be parked beside outlying beaches, on the logging roads so conveniently close to the city, on the wandering back roads of the Saanich Peninsula. The map of the city that she had held in her mind up till now, with its routes to shops and work and friends’ houses, was overlaid with another map, of circuitous routes followed in fear (not shame) and excitement, of flimsy shelters, temporary hiding places, where she and Miles made love, often within hearing distance of passing traffic or a hiking party or a family picnic. And Georgia herself, watching her children on the roundabout, or feeling the excellent shape of a lemon in her hand at the supermarket, contained another woman, who only a few hours before had been whimpering and tussling on the ferns, on the sand, on the bare ground, or, during a rainstorm, in her own car—who had been driven hard and gloriously out of her mind and drifted loose and gathered her wits and made her way home again. Was this a common story? Georgia cast an eye over the other women at the supermarket. She looked for signs—of dreaminess or flaunting, a sense of drama in a woman’s way of dressing, a special rhythm in her movements.

  How many, she asked Maya.

  “God knows,” said Maya. “Do a survey.”

  Trouble began, perhaps, as soon as they said that they loved each other. Why did they do that—defining, inflating, obscuring whatever it was they did feel? It seemed to be demanded, that was all—just the way changes, variations, elaborations in the lovemaking itself might be demanded. It was a way of going further. So they said it, and that night Georgia couldn’t sleep. She did not regret what had been said or think that it was a lie, though she knew that it was absurd. She thought of the way Miles sought to have her look into his eyes during lovemaking—something Ben expressly did not do—and she thought of how his eyes, at first bright and challenging, became cloudy and calm and sombre. That way she trusted him—it was the only way. She thought of being launched out on a gray, deep, baleful, magnificent sea. Love.

  “I didn’t know this was going to happen,” she said in Maya’s kitchen the next day, drinking her coffee. The day was warm, but she had put on a sweater to huddle in. She felt shaken, and submissive.

  “No. And you don’t know,” said Maya rather sharply. “Did he say it too? Did he say he loved you too?”

  Yes, said Georgia, yes, of course.

  “Look out, then. Look out for next time. Next time is always pretty tricky when they’ve said that.”

  And so it was. Next time a rift opened. At first they simply tested it, to see if it was there. It was almost like a new diversion to them. But it widened, it widened. Before any words were said to confirm that it was there, Georgia felt it widen, she coldly felt it widen, though she was desperate for it to close. Did he feel the same thing? She didn’t know. He too seemed cold—pale, deliberate, glittering with some new malicious intent.

  They were sitting recklessly, late at night, in Georgia’s car among the other lovers at Clover Point.

  “Everybody here in these cars doing the same thing we’re doing,” Miles had said. “Doesn’t that idea turn you on?”

  He had said that at the very moment in their ritual when they had been moved, last time, to speak brokenly and solemnly of love.

  “You ever think of that?” he said. “I mean, we could start with Ben and Laura. You ever imagine how it would be with you and me and Ben and Laura?”

  Laura was his wife, at home in Seattle. He had not spoken of her before, except to tell Georgia her name. He had spoken of Ben, in a way that Georgia didn’t like but passed over.

  “What does Ben think you do for fun,” he’d said, “while he is off cruising the ocean blue?”

  “Do you and Ben usually have a big time when he gets back?”

  “Does Ben like that outfit as much as I do?”

  He spoke as if he and Ben were friends in some way, or at least partners, co-proprietors.

  “You and me and Ben and Laura,” he said, in a tone that seemed to Georgia insistently and artificially lecherous, sly, derisive. “Spread the joy around.”

  He tried to fondle her, pretending not to notice how offended she was, how bitterly stricken. He described the generous exchanges that would take place among the four of them abed. He asked whether she was getting excited. She said no, disgusted. Ah, you are but you won’t give in to it, he said. His voice, his caresses grew more bullying. What is so special about you, he asked softly, despisingly, with a hard squeeze at her breasts. Georgia, why do you think you’re such a queen?

  “You are being cruel and you know you’re being cruel,” said Georgia, pulling at his hands. “Why are you being like this?”

  “Honey, I’m not being cruel,” said Miles, in a slippery mock-tender voice. “I’m being horny. I’m horny again is all.” He began to pull Georgia around, to arrange her for his use. She told him to get out of the car.

  “Squeamish,” he said, in that same artificially and hatefully tender voice, as if he were licking fanatically at something loathsome. “You’re a squeamish little slut.”

  Georgia told him that she would lean on the horn if he didn’t stop. She would lean on the horn if he didn’t get out of the car. She would yell for somebody to call the police. She did lean against the horn as they struggled. He pushed her away, with a whimpering curse such as she’d heard from him at other times, when it meant something different. He got out.

  She could not believe that such ill will had erupted, that things had so stunningly turned around. When she thought of this afterward—a good long time afterward—she thought that perhaps he had acted for conscience’ sake, to mark her off from Laura. Or to blot out what he had said to her last time. To humiliate her because he was frightened. Perhaps. Or perhaps all this seemed to him simply a further, and genuinely interesting, development in lovemaking.

  She would have liked to talk it over with Maya. But the possibility of talking anything over with Maya had disappeared. Their friendship had come suddenly to an end.

  THE NIGHT after the incident at Clover Point, Georgia was sitting on the living-room floor playing a bedtime card game with her sons. The phone rang, and she was sure that it was Miles. She had been thinking all day that
he would call, he would have to call to explain himself, to beg her pardon, to say that he had been testing her, in a way, or had been temporarily deranged by circumstances that she knew nothing about. She would not forgive him immediately. But she would not hang up.

  It was Maya.

  “Guess what weird thing happened,” Maya said. “Miles phoned me. Your Miles. It’s okay, Raymond isn’t here. How did he even know my name?”

  “I don’t know,” said Georgia.

  She had told him it, of course. She had offered wild Maya up for his entertainment, or to point out what a novice at this game she herself was—a relatively chaste prize.

  “He says he wants to come and talk to me,” Maya said. “What do you think? What’s the matter with him? Did you have a fight? … Yes? Oh, well, he probably wants me to persuade you to make up. I must say he picked the right night. Raymond’s at the hospital. He’s got this balky woman in labor; he may have to stay and do a section on her. I’ll phone and tell you how it goes. Shall I?”

  After a couple of hours, with the children long asleep, Georgia began to expect Maya’s call. She watched the television news, to take her mind off expecting it. She picked up the phone to make sure there was a dial tone. She turned off the television after the news, then turned it on again. She started to watch a movie; she watched it through three commercial breaks without going to the kitchen to look at the clock.

  At half past midnight she went out and got into her car and drove to Maya’s house. She had no idea what she would do there. And she did not do much of anything. She drove around the circular drive with the lights off. The house was dark. She could see that the garage was open and Raymond’s car was not there. The motorcycle was nowhere in sight.