by Alice Munro
Now, at this conference, Julie said, who, who, were the typical librarians? Where could you find them? Indeed, she said, you might think there had been a too-strenuous effort to knock that image on the head.
“But it isn’t a calculated knocking-on-the-head,” she said. “It really is one of those refuge-professions.” Which didn’t mean, she said, that all the people in it were scared and spiritless. Far from it. It was full of genuine oddities and many flamboyant and expansive personalities.
“Old kooks,” Douglas said.
“Still, the image prevails somewhere,” Julie said. “The Director of the Conference Centre came and talked to the Chairman this morning and asked if she wanted a list of the people who were out of their rooms during the night. Can you imagine them thinking we’d want to know that?”
“Wouldn’t we?” I said.
“I mean, officially. How do they get that kind of information on people, anyway?”
“Spies,” said Douglas. “A.G.P.M. Amateur Guardians of the Public Morality. I’m a member myself. It’s like being a fire warden.”
Julie didn’t pick this up. Instead she said morosely, “It’s the younger ones, I guess.”
“Envious of the Sexual Revolution,” said Douglas, shaking his head. “Anyway I thought it was all over. Isn’t it all over?” he said, looking at me.
“So I understand,” I said.
“Well that’s not fair,” said Julie. “For me it never happened. No, really. I wish I’d been born younger. I mean, later. Why not be honest about it?” Sometimes she set herself up to be preposterously frank. There was something willed and coquettish—childishly coquettish—about this; yet it seemed not playful. It seemed, at the moment, necessary. It made me nervous for her. We were working down into our second bottle of wine and she had drunk more than either Douglas or I had.
“Well all right,” she said. “I know it’s funny. Twice in my life there have been possibilities and both turned out very funny. I mean very strange. So I think it is not meant. No. Not God’s will.”
“Oh, Julie,” I said.
“You don’t know the whole story,” she said.
I thought that she really was getting drunk, and I ought to do what I could to keep the tone light, so I said, “Yes, I know. You met a psychology student while you were throwing a cake into the sea.”
I was glad that Douglas laughed.
“Really?” he said. “Did you always throw your cakes into the sea? Were they that bad?”
“Very good,” said Julie, speaking in an artificial, severely joking style. “Very good and very elaborate. Gateau St. Honoré. A monstrosity. It’s got cream and custard and butterscotch. No. The reason I was throwing it into the sea—and I’ve told you this,” she said to me, “was that I had a secret problem at the time. I had a problem about food. I was just newly married and we were living in Vancouver, near Kitsilano Beach. I was one of those people who gorge, then purge. I used to make cream puffs and eat them all one after the other, or make fudge and eat a whole panful, then take mustard and water to vomit or else massive doses of epsom salts to wash it through. Terrible. The guilt. I was compelled. It must have had something to do with sex. They say now it does, don’t they?
“Well, I made this horrific cake and I pretended I was making it for Leslie, but by the time I got it finished I knew I was making it for myself, I was going to end up eating it all myself, and I went to put it in the garbage but I knew I might fish it out again. Isn’t that disgusting? So I put the whole mess in a brown paper bag and I went down to the rocky end of the beach and I heaved it into the sea. But—this boy saw me. He gave me a look, so I knew what he thought. What’s naturally the first thought, when you see a girl throw a brown paper bag into the sea? I had to tell him it was a cake. I said I’d goofed on the ingredients and I was ashamed it was such a failure. Then within fifteen minutes’ conversation I was telling him the truth, which I never dreamed of telling anybody. He told me he was a psychology student at U.B.C. but he had dropped out because they were all behaviorists there. I didn’t know—I didn’t know what a behaviorist was.
“So,” said Julie, resigned now, and marveling. “So, he became my boyfriend. For about six weeks. He wanted me to read Jung. He had very tight curly hair the color of mouse-skin. We’d lie behind the rocks and neck up a storm. It was February or March, still pretty cold. He could only meet me one day a week, always the same day. We didn’t progress very far. The upshot was—well, the upshot was, really, that I discovered he was in a mental hospital. That was his day out. I don’t know if I discovered that first or the scars on his neck. Did I say he had a beard? Beards were very unusual then. Leslie abhorred them. He’s got one himself now. He’d tried to cut his throat. Not Leslie.”
“Oh, Julie,” I said, though I had heard this before. Mention of suicide is like innards pushing through an incision; you have to push it back and clap some pads on, quickly.
“It wasn’t that bad. He was recovering. I’m sure he did recover. He was just a very intense kid who’d had a crisis. But I was so scared. I was scared because I felt I wasn’t too far from being loony myself. With the gorging and vomiting and so on. And at the same time he confessed that he was really only seventeen years old. He’d lied to me about his age. That really did it. To think I’d been fooling around with a boy three years younger than I was. That shamed me. I told him a pack of lies about how I understood and it didn’t matter and I’d meet him next week and I went home and told Leslie I couldn’t stand living in a basement apartment any more, we had to move. I cried. I found us a place on the North Shore within a week. I never would go to Kits Beach. When the kids were little and we took them to the beach I would always insist on Spanish Banks or Ambleside. I wonder what became of him.”
“Probably he’s okay,” I said. “He is probably a celebrated Jungian.” “Or a celebrated behaviorist,” said Douglas. “Or a sportscaster.
You don’t look as if you ate too many cream puffs now.”
“I got over it. I think when I got pregnant. Life is so weird.” Douglas ceremonially poured out the rest of the wine.
“You said two occasions,” he said to Julie. “Are you going to leave us hanging?”
It’s all right, I thought, he isn’t bored or put off, he likes her. While she talked I had been watching him, wondering. Why is there always this twitchiness, when you introduce a man to a woman friend, about whether the man will be bored or put off?
“The other was weirder,” said Julie. “At least I understand it less. I shouldn’t bother telling such stupid stuff but now I’m on the brink I suppose I will. Well. This puzzles me. It bewilders me totally. This was in Vancouver too, but years later. I joined what was called an Encounter Group. It was just a sort of group-therapy thing for ordinary functioning miserable mixed-up people. That sort of thing was very in at the time and it was the West Coast. There was a lot of talk about getting rid of masks and feeling close to one another, which it’s easy to laugh at but I think it did more good than harm. And it was all sort of new. I must sound as if I’m trying to justify myself. Like saying, I was doing macramé fifteen years ago before it was the fad. When it’s probably better never to have done macramé, ever.”
Douglas said, “I don’t even know what macramé is.”
“That’s best of all,” I said.
“A man from California, named Stanley, was running several of these groups. He wouldn’t have said he was running them. He was very low-key. But he got paid. We did pay him. He was a psychologist. He had lovely long curly dark hair and of course he had a beard too, but beards were nothing by then. He sort of barged around in an awkward innocent way. He’d say, ‘Well, this is going to sound kind of crazy but I wonder—’ He had a technique of making everybody feel they were smarter than he was. He was very sincere. He’d say, ‘You— don’t—realize—how lovable you are.’ No. I’m making him sound such a phony. It’s got to be more complicated than that. Anyway, before long he wrote me a letter. Sta
nley did. It was an appreciation of my mental and physical and spiritual qualities and he said he had fallen in love with me.
“I was very mature about it. I wrote back and said he hardly knew me. He wrote oh, yes, he did. He phoned to apologize for being such a nuisance. He said he couldn’t help himself. He asked if we could have coffee. No harm. We had coffee various times. I’d be doing the cheery conversation and he’d break in and say I had beautiful eyebrows. He’d say he wondered what my nipples were like. I have very ordinary eyebrows. I stopped having coffee and he took to lurking around my house in his old van. He did. I’d be shopping in the supermarket and there he’d be beside me peering into the dairy goods, with his woebegone expression. I’d get sometimes three letters a day from him, rhapsodies about myself and how much I meant to him and confessions of self-doubt and how he didn’t want to turn into a guru and how good I was for him because I was so aloof and wise. What rot. I knew it was all ludicrous but I won’t deny I got to depend on it, in a way. I knew the exact time of day the postman came. I decided I wasn’t too old to wear my hair long.
“And about half a year after this started, another woman in our group phoned me up one day. She told me all hell had broken loose. Some woman in one of the groups had confessed to her husband she was sleeping with Stanley. The husband got very mad, he wasn’t a group person, and the story got out and then another woman, and another and another, revealed the same thing, they confessed they were sleeping with Stanley, and pretty soon there was no blame attached, it was like being a victim of witchcraft. It turned out he’d been quite systematic, he’d picked one from each group, and he already had one in the group I was in so presumably it wasn’t to be me. Always a married woman, not a single one who could get bothersome. Nine of them. Really. Nine women.”
Douglas said, “Busy.”
“All the men took that attitude,” Julie said. “They all chortled.
Except of course the husbands. There was a big sort of official meeting of group people at one of the women’s houses. She had a lovely kitchen with a big chopping block in the middle and I remember thinking, did they do it on that? Everybody was too cool to say they were shocked about adultery or anything like that so we had to say we were mad at Stanley’s betrayal of trust. Actually I think some women were mad about being left out. I said that, as a kind of joke. I never told a word about how he’d been acting with me. If there’d been anybody else getting the same treatment I was, she didn’t tell either. Some of the chosen women cried. Then they’d comfort each other and compare notes. What a scene, now when I think of it! And I was so bewildered. I couldn’t put it together. How can you put it together? I thought of Stanley’s wife. She was a nice-looking rather nervous girl with lovely long legs. I used to meet her sometimes and to think: little do you know what your husband’s been saying to me. And there were all those other women meeting her and thinking, little do you know, etcetera. Maybe she knew about them all, us all, maybe she was thinking: little do you know how many others there are. Is it possible? I’d said to him once, you know this is really just a farce, and he said, don’t say that, don’t say that to me! I thought he might cry. So what can you make of it? The energy. I don’t mean just the physical part of it. In a way that’s the least of it.”
“Did the husbands get him?” Douglas said.
“A delegation went to see him. He didn’t deny anything. He said he acted in good faith and from good motives and their possessiveness and jealousy was the problem. But he had to leave town, his groups had collapsed, he and his wife and their little kids left town in the van. But he sent back bills. Everybody got their bills. The women he’d been sleeping with got theirs with the rest. I got mine. No more letters, just the bill. I paid. I think most people paid. You had to think of the wife and kids.
“So there you are. I only attract the bizarre. And a good thing, because I’m married all along and virtuous at heart in spite of whatever I may have said. We should have coffee.”
WE DROVE on the back roads, in the sandy country, poor country, south of Lake Simcoe. Grass blows on the dunes. We hardly saw another car. We got out the road map to see where we were, and Douglas sidetracked to drive us through a village where he had once almost got his hands on a valuable diary. He showed us the very house. An old woman had burned it, finally—or that was what she told him—because parts of it were scandalous.
“They dread exposure,” Douglas said. “Unto the third and fourth generation.”
“Not like me,” said Julie. “Laying bare my ridiculous almost-affairs. I don’t care.”
“Back and side lay bare, lay bare,” sang Douglas. “Both foot and hand go cold—”
“I can lay bare,” I said. “It may not be very entertaining.”
“Will we risk it?” Douglas said.
“But it is interesting,” I said. “I was thinking back at the restaurant about a visit I went on with a man I was in love with. This was before you came down to Toronto, Julie. We were going to visit some friends of his who had a place up in the hills on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. I’ve never seen such a house. It was like a series of glass cubes with ramps and decks joining them together. The friends were Keith and Caroline. They were married, they had children, but the children weren’t there. The man I was with wasn’t married, he hadn’t been married for a long time. I asked him on the way up what Keith and Caroline were like, and he said they were rich. I said that wasn’t much of a description. He said it was Caroline’s money, her daddy owned a brewery. He told me which one. There was something about the way he said ‘her daddy’ that made me see the money on her, the way he saw it, like long lashes or a bosom—like a luxuriant physical thing. Inherited money can make a woman seem like a treasure. It’s not the same with money she’s made herself, that’s just brassy and ordinary. But then he said, she’s very neurotic, she’s really a bitch, and Keith’s just a poor honest sod who works for the government. He’s an A.D.M., he said. I didn’t know what that was.”
“Assistant Deputy Minister,” Julie said.
“Even cats and children know that,” said Douglas.
“Thank you,” said Julie.
I was sitting in the middle. I turned mostly towards Julie as I talked.
“He said they liked to have some friends who weren’t rich people or government people, people they could think of as eccentric or independent or artistic, sometimes a starveling artist Caroline could get her hooks into, to torment and show off and be bountiful with.”
“Sounds as if he didn’t like his friends much,” Julie said.
“I don’t know if he’d think of it that way. Liking or disliking. I expected them to be physically intimidating, at least I expected her to be, but they were little people. Keith was very fussy and hospitable. He had little freckled hands. I think of his hands because he was always handing you a drink or something to eat or a cushion for your back. Caroline was a wisp. She had long limp hair and a high white forehead and she wore a gray cotton dress with a hood. No makeup. I felt big and gaudy. She stood with her head bent and her hands up the sleeves of the dress while the men talked about the house. It was new. Then she said in her wispy voice how much she loved the way it was in the winter with the snow deep outside and the white rugs and the white furniture. Keith seemed rather embarrassed by her and said it was like a squash court, no depth perception. I felt sympathetic because she seemed just on the verge of making some sort of fool of herself. She seemed to be pleading with you to reassure her, and yet reassuring her seemed to involve you in a kind of fakery. She was like that. There was such a strain around her. Every subject seemed to get caught up in such emotional extravagance and fakery. The man I was with got very brusque with her, and I thought that was mean. I thought, even if she’s faking, it shows she wants to feel something, doesn’t it, oughtn’t decent people to help her? She just didn’t seem to know how.
“We sat out on a deck having drinks. Their house guest appeared. His name was Martin and he was in his ea
rly twenties. Maybe a bit older. He had a pretty superior style. Caroline asked him in a very submissive way if he would get some blankets—it was chilly on the deck—and when he went off she said he was a playwright. She said he was just a marvelous, marvelous playwright but his plays were too European to be successful here, they were too spare and rigorous. Too spare and rigorous. Then she said, oh, the state of the theater, the state of literature in this country, it is an embarrassment, isn’t it? It is the triumph of the second-rate. I thought, she mustn’t know that I am a contributor to this sorry situation. Because at that time I was the assistant editor of a little magazine, you know, it was Thousand Islands, and I had published a poem or two. But right then she asked if I could put Martin in touch with some of the people I knew through the magazine. Straight from insult to asking favors, in that suffering sensitive little voice. I began to think she was a bitch, all right. When Martin came back with the blankets she went into a fit of shivering that was practically a ballet act and thanked him as if she was going to weep. He just dumped a blanket on her, and that way I knew they were lovers. The man I was with had told me she had lovers. What he said was, Caroline’s a sexual monster. I asked if he had ever slept with her, and he said oh, yes, long ago. I wanted to ask something about his not liking her, hadn’t that been any sort of impediment, but I knew that would be a very stupid question.
“Martin asked me to go for a walk. We walked down a great flight of steps and sat on a bench by the water, and he turned out to be sinister. He was vicious about some people he said he knew, in the theater in Montreal. He said that Caroline used to be fat and after she lost weight she had to have tucks taken in her belly, because the skin was so loose. He had a stuffy smell. He smoked those little cigars. I began to feel sorry for Caroline all over again. This is what you have to put up with, for the sake of your fantasies. If you have to have a literary-genius lover, this is what you’re liable to end up with. If you’re a fake, worse fakes will get you. That was what I was thinking.
