by Alice Munro
And on a tide of vanity, of silly gratification, she had sallied out of the Ladies Room, leaving the purse behind.
She climbed the bank to the street and started back to the theater by the straightest route. She walked as fast as she could. There was no shade along the street, and there was busy traffic, in the heat of the late afternoon. She was almost running. That caused the sweat to leak out from under the shields in her dress. She trekked across the baking parking lot—now empty—and up the hill. No more shade up there, and nobody in sight around the theater building.
But it was not locked. In the empty lobby she stood a moment to get her sight back after the outdoor glare. She could feel her heart thumping, and the drops of moisture popping out on her upper lip. The ticket booths were closed, and so was the refreshment counter. The inner theater doors were locked. She took the stairway down to the washroom, her shoes clattering on the marble steps.
Let it be open, let it be open, let it be there.
No. There was nothing on the smooth veined counter, nothing in the wastebaskets, nothing on any hook on the back of any door.
A man was mopping the floor of the lobby when she came upstairs. He told her that it might have been turned in to the Lost and Found, but the Lost and Found was locked. With some reluctance he left his mopping and led her down another stairs to a cubbyhole containing several umbrellas, parcels, and even jackets and hats and a disgusting-looking brownish fox scarf. But no paisley-cloth shoulder purse.
“No luck,” he said.
“Could it be under my seat?” she begged, though she was sure it could not be.
“Already been swept in there.”
There was nothing for her to do then but climb the stairs, walk through the lobby, and go out onto the street.
She walked in the other direction from the parking lot, seeking shade. She could imagine Joanne saying that the cleaning man had already stashed her purse away to take home to his wife or his daughter, that is what they were like in a place like this. She looked for a bench or a low wall to sit down on while she figured things out. She didn’t see such a thing anywhere.
A large dog came up behind her and knocked against her as it passed. It was a dark-brown dog, with long legs and an arrogant, stubborn expression.
“Juno. Juno,” a man called. “Watch where you’re going.
“She is just young and rude,” he said to Robin. “She thinks she owns the sidewalk. She’s not vicious. Were you afraid?”
Robin said, “No.” The loss of her purse had preoccupied her and she had not thought of an attack from a dog being piled on top of that.
“When people see a Doberman they are often frightened. Dobermans have a reputation to be fierce, and she is trained to be fierce when she’s a watchdog, but not when she’s walking.”
Robin hardly knew one breed of dog from another. Because of Joanne’s asthma, they never had dogs or cats around the house.
“It’s all right,” she said.
Instead of going ahead to where the dog Juno was waiting, her owner called her back. He fixed the leash he was carrying onto her collar.
“I let her loose down on the grass. Down below the theater. She likes that. But she ought to be on the leash up here. I was lazy. Are you ill?”
Robin did not even feel surprised at this change in the conversation’s direction. She said, “I lost my purse. It was my own fault. I left it by the washbasin in the Ladies Room at the theater and I went back to look but it was gone. I just walked away and left it there after the play.”
“What play was it today?”
“Antony and Cleopatra,” she said. “My money was in it and my train ticket home.”
“You came on the train? To see Antony and Cleopatra?”
“Yes.”
She remembered the advice their mother had given to her and to Joanne about travelling on the train, or travelling anywhere. Always have a couple of bills folded and pinned to your underwear. Also, don’t get into a conversation with a strange man.
“What are you smiling at?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you can go on smiling,” he said, “because I will be happy to lend you some money for the train. What time does it go?”
She told him, and he said, “All right. But before that you should have some food. Or you will be hungry and not enjoy the train ride. I haven’t anything with me, because when I go to take Juno on her walk I do not bring any money. But it isn’t far to my shop. Come with me and I’ll get it out of the till.”
She had been too preoccupied, until now, to notice that he spoke with an accent. What was it? It was not French or Dutch—the two accents that she thought she could recognize, French from school and Dutch from the immigrants who were sometimes patients in the hospital. And the other thing she took note of was that he spoke of her enjoying the train ride. Nobody she knew would speak of a grown person doing that. But he spoke of it as being quite natural and necessary.
At the corner of Downie Street, he said, “We turn this way. My house is just along here.”
He said house, when he had said shop before. But it could be that his shop was in his house.
She was not worried. Afterwards she wondered about that. Without a moment’s hesitation she had accepted his offer of help, allowed him to rescue her, found it entirely natural that he should not carry money with him on his walks but could get it from the till in his shop.
A reason for this might have been his accent. Some of the nurses mocked the accents of the Dutch farmers and their wives—behind their backs, of course. So Robin had got into the habit of treating such people with special consideration, as if they had speech impediments, or even some mental slowness, though she knew that this was nonsense. An accent, therefore, roused in her a certain benevolence and politeness.
And she had not looked at him at all closely. At first she was too upset, and then it was not easy, because they were walking side by side. He was tall, long-legged, and walked quickly. One thing she had noticed was the sunlight glinting on his hair, which was cut short as stubble, and it seemed to her that it was bright silver. That is, gray. His forehead, being broad and high, also shone in the sun, and she had somehow got the impression that he was a generation beyond her—a courteous, yet slightly impatient, schoolteacherly, high-handed sort of person, who demanded respect, never intimacy. Later, indoors, she was able to see that the gray hair was mixed with a rusty red—though his skin had an olive tint unusual for a redhead—and that his indoor movements were sometimes awkward, as if he wasn’t used to having company in his living space. He was probably not more than ten years older than she was.
She had trusted him for faulty reasons. But she had not been mistaken to do so.
The shop really was in a house. A narrow brick house left over from earlier days, on a street otherwise lined with buildings built to be shops. There was the sort of front door and step and window that a regular house would have, and in the window was an elaborate clock. He unlocked the door, but did not turn around the sign that said Closed. Juno crowded in ahead of them both, and again he apologized for her.
“She thinks it’s her job to check that there’s nobody in here who shouldn’t be, and not anything different from when she went out.”
The place was full of clocks. Dark wood and light wood, painted figures and gilded domes. They sat on shelves and on the floor and even on the counter across which business could be transacted. Beyond that, some sat on benches with their insides exposed. Juno slipped between them neatly, and could be heard thumping up a stairs.
“Are you interested in clocks?”
Robin said “No,” before she thought of being polite.
“All right, then I do not have to go into my spiel,” he said, and led her along the path Juno had taken, past the door of what was probably a toilet, and up the steep stairway. Then they were in a kitchen where all was clean and bright and tidy, and Juno was waiting beside a red dish on the floor, flopping her ta
il.
“You just wait,” he said. “Yes. Wait. Don’t you see we have a guest?”
He stood aside for Robin to enter the big front room, which had no rug on the wide painted floorboards and no curtains, only shades, on the windows. There was a hi-fi system taking up a good deal of space along one wall, and a sofa along the wall opposite, of the sort that would pull out to make a bed. A couple of canvas chairs, and a bookcase with books on one shelf and magazines on the others, tidily stacked. No pictures or cushions or ornaments in sight. A bachelor’s room, with everything deliberate and necessary and proclaiming a certain austere satisfaction. Very different from the only other bachelor premises Robin was familiar with—Willard Greig’s, which seemed more like a forlorn encampment established casually in the middle of his dead parents’ furniture.
“Where would you like to sit?” he said. “The sofa? It is more comfortable than the chairs. I will make you a cup of coffee and you sit here and drink it while I make some supper. What do you do other times, between when the play is over and the train is going home?”
Foreigners talked differently, leaving a bit of space around the words, the way actors do.
“Walk,” Robin said. “And I get something to eat.”
“The same today, then. Are you bored when you eat alone?”
“No. I think about the play.”
The coffee was very strong, but she got used to it. She did not feel that she should offer to help him in the kitchen, as she would have done with a woman. She got up and crossed the room almost on tiptoe and helped herself to a magazine. And even as she picked it up she knew this would be useless—the magazines were all printed on cheap brown paper in a language she could neither read nor identify.
In fact she realized, once she had it open on her lap, that she could not even identify all the letters.
He came in with more coffee.
“Ah,” he said. “So do you read my language?”
That sounded sarcastic, but his eyes avoided her. It was almost as if, inside his own place, he had turned shy.
“I don’t even know what language it is,” she answered.
“It is Serbian. Some people say Serbo-Croatian.”
“Is that where you come from?”
“I am from Montenegro.”
Now she was stumped. She did not know where Montenegro was. Beside Greece? No—that was Macedonia.
“Montenegro is in Yugoslavia,” he said. “Or that is what they tell us. But we don’t think so.”
“I didn’t think you could get out of those countries,” she said. “Those Communist countries. I didn’t think you could just leave like ordinary people and get out into the West.”
“Oh, you can.” He spoke as if this did not interest him very much, or as if he had forgotten about it. “You can get out if you really want to. I left nearly five years ago. And now it is easier. Very soon I am going back there and then I expect I will be leaving again. Now I must cook your dinner. Or you will go away hungry.”
“Just one thing,” said Robin. “Why can’t I read these letters? I mean, what letters are they? Is this the alphabet where you come from?”
“The Cyrillic alphabet. Like Greek. Now I’m cooking.”
She sat with the strangely printed pages open in her lap and thought that she had entered a foreign world. A small piece of a foreign world on Downie Street in Stratford. Montenegro. Cyrillic alphabet. It was rude, she supposed, to keep asking him things. To make him feel like a specimen. She would have to control herself, though now she could come up with a host of questions.
All the clocks below—or most of them—began to chime the hour. It was already seven o’clock.
“Is there any later train?” he called from the kitchen.
“Yes. At five to ten.”
“Will that be all right? Will anybody worry about you?”
She said no. Joanne would be displeased, but you could not exactly call that being worried.
Supper was a stew or thick soup, served in a bowl, with bread and red wine.
“Stroganoff,” he said. “I hope you like it.”
“It’s delicious,” she said truthfully. She was not so sure about the wine—she would have liked it sweeter. “Is this what you eat in Montenegro?”
“Not exactly. Montenegrin food is not very good. We are not famous for our food.”
So then it was surely all right to say, “What are you famous for?”
“What are you?”
“Canadian.”
“No. What are you famous for?”
That vexed her, she felt stupid. Yet she laughed.
“I don’t know. I guess nothing.”
“What Montenegrins are famous for is yelling and screaming and fighting. They’re like Juno. They need discipline.”
He got up to put on some music. He did not ask what she wanted to hear, and that was a relief. She did not want to be asked which composers she preferred, when the only two she could think of were Mozart and Beethoven and she was not sure she could tell their work apart. She really liked folk music, but she thought he might find that preference tiresome and condescending, linking it up to some idea she had of Montenegro.
He put on a kind of jazz.
Robin had never had a lover, or even a boyfriend. How had this happened, or not happened? She did not know. There was Joanne, of course, but there were other girls, similarly burdened, who had managed. A reason might have been that she had not given the matter enough attention, soon enough. In the town she lived in, most girls were seriously attached to somebody before they finished high school, and some didn’t finish high school, but dropped out to get married. The girls of the better class, of course—the few girls whose parents could afford to send them to college—were expected to detach themselves from any high school boyfriend before going off to look for better prospects. The discarded boys were soon snapped up, and the girls who had not moved quickly enough then found themselves with slim pickings. Beyond a certain age, any new man who arrived was apt to come equipped with a wife.
But Robin had had her opportunity. She had gone away to train to be a nurse, which should have given her a fresh start. Girls who trained to be nurses got a chance at doctors. There too, she had failed. She didn’t realize it at the time. She was too serious, maybe that was the problem. Too serious about something like King Lear and not about making use of dances and tennis games. A certain kind of seriousness in a girl could cancel out looks. But it was hard to think of a single case in which she envied any other girl the man she had got. In fact she couldn’t yet think of anybody she wished she had married.
Not that she was against marriage altogether. She was just waiting, as if she was a girl of fifteen, and it was only now and then that she was brought up against her true situation. Occasionally one of the women she worked with would arrange for her to meet somebody, and then she would be shocked at the prospect that had been considered suitable. And recently even Willard had frightened her, by making a joke about how he should move in someday, and help her look after Joanne.
Some people were already excusing her, even praising her, taking it for granted that she had planned from the beginning to devote her life to Joanne.
When they had finished eating he asked her if she would like to take a walk along the river before she caught her train. She agreed, and he said that they could not do that unless he knew her name.
“I might want to introduce you,” he said.
She told him.
“Robin like the bird?”
“Like Robin Redbreast,” she said, as she had often said before, without thinking about it. Now she was so embarrassed that all she could do was go on speaking recklessly.
“It’s your turn now to tell me yours.”
His name was Daniel. “Danilo. But Daniel here.”
“So here is here,” she said, still in this saucy tone which was the result of embarrassment at Robin Redbreast. “But where is there? In Montenegro—do you live in a town or the
country?”
“I lived in the mountains.”
While they were sitting in the room above his shop there had been a distance, and she had never feared—and never hoped—that the distance would be altered by any brusque or clumsy or sly movement of his. On the few occasions when this had happened with other men she had felt embarrassed for them. Now of necessity she and this man walked fairly close to each other and if they met someone their arms might brush together. Or he would move slightly behind her to get out of the way and his arm or chest knocked for a second against her back. These possibilities, and the knowledge that the people they met must see them as a couple, set up something like a hum, a tension, across her shoulders and down that one arm.
He asked her about Antony and Cleopatra, had she liked it (yes) and what part she had liked best. What came into her mind then were various bold and convincing embraces, but she could not say so.
“The part at the end,” she said, “where she is going to put the asp on her body”—she had been going to say breast, then changed it, but body did not sound much better—“and the old man comes in with the basket of figs that the asp is in and they joke around, sort of. I think I liked it because you didn’t expect that then. I mean, I liked other things too, I liked it all, but that was different.”
“Yes,” he said. “I like that too.”
“Did you see it?”
“No. I’m saving my money now. But I read a lot of Shakespeare once, students read it when they were learning English. In the daytime I learned about clocks, in the nighttime I learned English. What did you learn?”
“Not so much,” she said. “Not in school. After that I learned what you have to, to be a nurse.”
“That’s a lot to learn, to be a nurse. I think so.”
After that they spoke about the coolness of the evening, how welcome it was, and how the nights had lengthened noticeably, though there was still all August to get through. And about Juno, how she had wanted to come with them but had settled down immediately when he reminded her that she had to stay and guard the shop. This talk felt more and more like an agreed-upon subterfuge, like a conventional screen for what was becoming more inevitable all the time, more necessary, between them.
