The Beggar Maid

by Alice Munro

  “Never mind the trucks,” Jocelyn said. “Never mind the old mythology. Clifford wants to leave me again.”

  They settled down to drinking and talking about what Clifford and Jocelyn should do. This was not an unfamiliar conversation. What does Clifford really want? Does he really want not to be married to Jocelyn or does he want something unattainable? Is he going through a middle-age crisis?

  “Don’t be so banal,” Clifford said to Rose. She was the one who said middle-age crisis. “I’ve been going through this ever since I was twenty-five. I’ve wanted out ever since I got in.”

  “That is new, for Clifford to say that,” said Jocelyn. She went out to the kitchen to get some cheese and grapes. “For him to actually come out and say that,” she yelled from the kitchen. Rose avoided looking at Clifford, not because they had any secrets but because it seemed a courtesy to Jocelyn not to look at each other while she was out of the room.

  “What is happening now,” said Jocelyn, coming back with a platter of cheese and grapes in one hand and a bottle of gin in the other, “is that Clifford is wide open. He used to bitch and stew and some other bilge would come out that had nothing to do with the real problem. Now he just comes out with it. The great blazing truth. It’s a total illumination.”

  Rose had a bit of difficulty catching the tone. She felt as if living in the country had made her slow. Was Jocelyn’s talk a parody, was she being sarcastic? No. She was not.

  “But then I go and deflate the truth for you,” said Clifford, grinning. He was drinking beer from the bottle. He thought beer was better for him than gin. “It’s absolutely true I’ve wanted out ever since I got in. And it’s also true that I wanted in, and I wanted to stay in. I wanted to be married to you and I want to be married to you and I couldn’t stand being married to you and I can’t stand being married to you. It’s a static contradiction.”

  “It sounds like hell,” Rose said.

  “I didn’t say that. I am just making the point that it is no middleage crisis.”

  “Well, maybe that was oversimplifying,” said Rose. Nevertheless, she said firmly, in the sensible, down-to-earth, countrified style she was adopting for the moment, all they were hearing about was Clifford. What did Clifford really want, what did Clifford need? Did he need a studio, did he need a holiday, did he need to go to Europe by himself? What made him think, she said, that Jocelyn could be endlessly concerned about his welfare? Jocelyn was not his mother.

  “And it’s your fault,” she said to Jocelyn, “for not telling him to put up or shut up. Never mind what he really wants. Get out or shut up. That’s all you need to say to him. Shut up or get out,” she said to Clifford with mock gruffness. “Excuse me for being so unsubtle. Or frankly hostile.”

  She didn’t run any risk at all by sounding hostile, and she knew it. She would run a risk by being genteel and indifferent. The way she was talking now was a proof that she was their true friend and took them seriously. And so she did, up to a point.

  “She’s right, you fucking son-of-a-bitch,” said Jocelyn experimentally. “Shut up or get out.”

  When Jocelyn called Rose on the phone, years ago, to read her the poem Howl, she was not able, in spite of her usual boldness of speech, to say the word fuck. She tried to force herself, then she said, “Oh, it’s stupid, but I can’t say it. I’m going to have to say eff. You’ll know what I mean when I say eff?”

  “But she said it’s your fault,” said Clifford. “You want to be the mother. You want to be the grownup. You want to be long-suffering.”

  “Balls,” said Jocelyn. “Oh, maybe. Maybe, yes. Maybe I do.”

  “I bet at school you were always latching on to those kids with the problems,” said Clifford with his tender grin. “Those poor kids, the ones with acne or awful clothes or speech impediments. I bet you just persecuted those poor kids with friendliness.”

  Jocelyn picked up the cheese knife and waved it at him.

  “You be careful. You haven’t got acne or a speech impediment. You are sickeningly good-looking. And talented. And lucky.”

  “I have nearly insuperable problems coming to terms with the adult male role,” said Clifford priggishly. “The psych says so.”

  “I don’t believe you. Psychs never say anything like nearly insuperable. And they don’t use that jargon. And they don’t make those judgments. I don’t believe you, Clifford.”

  “Well, I don’t really go to the psych at all. I go to the dirty movies down on Yonge.”

  Clifford went off to sit in the sauna.

  Rose watched him leave the room. He was wearing jeans, and a T-shirt that said Just passin thru. His waist and hips were as narrow as a twelve-year-old’s. His gray hair was cut in a very short brush cut, showing his skull. Was this the way musicians wore their hair nowadays, when politicians and accountants were bushy and bearded, or was it Clifford’s own perversity? His tan looked like pancake makeup, though it was probably all real. There was something theatrical about him altogether, tight and glittery and taunting. Something obscene about his skinniness and sweet, hard smile.

  “Is he well?” she said to Jocelyn. “He’s terribly thin.”

  “He wants to look like that. He eats yogurt and black bread.”

  “You can never split up,” Rose said, “because your house is too beautiful.” She stretched out on the hooked rug. The living room had white walls, thick white curtains, old pine furniture, large bright paintings, hooked rugs. On a low round table at her elbow was a bowl of polished stones for people to pick up and hold and run through their fingers. The stones came from Vancouver beaches, from Sandy Cove and English Bay and Kitsilano and Ambleside and Dundarave. Jerome and Adam had collected them a long time ago.

  Jocelyn and Clifford left British Columbia soon after Clifford returned from his provincial tour. They went to Montreal, then to Halifax, then to Toronto. They seemed hardly to remember Vancouver. Once they tried to think of the name of the street where they had lived and it was Rose who had to supply it for them. When Rose lived in Capilano Heights she used to spend a lot of time remembering the parts of Ontario where she had lived, being faithful, in a way, to that earlier landscape. Now that she was living in Ontario she put the same sort of effort into remembering things about Vancouver, puzzling to get details straight, that were in themselves quite ordinary. For instance, she tried to remember just where you waited for the Pacific Stage bus, when you were going from North Vancouver to West Vancouver. She pictured herself getting on that old green bus around one o’clock, say, on a spring day. Going to baby-sit for Jocelyn. Anna with her, in her yellow slicker and rainhat. Cold rain. The long, swampy stretch of land as you went into West Vancouver. Where the shopping centers and high-rises are now. She could see the streets, the houses, the old Safeway, St. Mawes Hotel, the thick closing-in of the woods, the place where you got off the bus at the little store. Black Cat cigarettes sign. Cedar dampness as you walked in through the woods to Jocelyn’s house. Deadness of early afternoon. Nap time. Young women drinking coffee looking out of rainy windows. Retired couples walking dogs. Pad of feet on the thick mold. Crocuses, early daffodils, the cold bulbs blooming. That profound difference of the air close to the sea, the inescapable dripping vegetation, the stillness. Anna pulling on her hand, Jocelyn’s brown wooden cottage ahead. Such a rich weight of apprehension, complications descending as she neared that house.

  Other things she was not so keen on remembering.

  She had wept on the plane, behind her sunglasses, all the way from Powell River. She wept, sitting in the waiting room at the Vancouver airport. She was not able to stop weeping and go home to Patrick. A plainclothes policeman sat down beside her, opened his jacket to show her his badge, asked if there was anything he could do for her. Someone must have summoned him. Terrified at being so conspicuous, she fled to the Ladies’. She didn’t think to comfort herself with a drink, didn’t think of looking for the bar. She never went to bars then. She didn’t take a tranquilizer, didn’t have a
ny, didn’t know about them. Maybe there weren’t such things.

  The suffering. What was it? It was all a waste, it reflected no credit. An entirely dishonorable grief. All mashed pride and ridiculed fantasy. It was as if she had taken a hammer and deliberately smashed her big toe. That’s what she thinks sometimes. At other times she thinks it was necessary, it was the start of wrecks and changes, the start of being where she is now instead of in Patrick’s house. Life making a gigantic fuss, as usual, for a small effect.

  Patrick could not speak when she told him. He had no lecture prepared. He didn’t speak for a long time but followed her around the house while she kept justifying herself, complaining. It was as if he wanted her to go on talking, though he couldn’t credit what she was saying, because it would be much worse if she stopped.

  She didn’t tell him the whole truth. She said that she had “had an affair” with Clifford, and by the telling gave herself a dim secondhand sort of comfort, which was pierced, presently, but not really destroyed, by Patrick’s look and silence. It seemed ill-timed, unfair of him, to show such a bare face, such an inappropriate undigestible chunk of grief.

  Then the phone rang, and she thought it would be Clifford, experiencing a change of heart. It was not Clifford, it was a man she had met at Jocelyn’s party. He said he was directing a radio play, and he needed a country girl. He remembered her accent.

  Not Clifford.

  She would rather not think of any of this. She prefers to see through metal window-frames of dripping cedars and salmonberry bushes and the proliferating mortal greenery of the rain forest some small views of lost daily life. Anna’s yellow slicker. The smoke from Jocelyn’s foul fire.

  Do you want to see the junk I’ve been buying?” said Jocelyn, and took Rose upstairs. She showed her an embroidered skirt and a deepred satin blouse. A daffodil-colored silk pajama suit. A long shapeless rough-woven dress from Ireland.

  “I’m spending a fortune. What I would once have thought was a fortune. It took me so long. It took us both so long, just to be able to spend money. We could not bring ourselves to do it. We despised people who had color television. And you know something—color television is great! We sit around now and say, what would we like? Maybe one of those little toaster-ovens for the cottage? Maybe I’d like a hair blower? All those things everybody else has known about for years but we thought we were too good for. You know what we are, we say to each other? We’re Consumers! And it’s Okay!

  “And not just paintings and records and books. We always knew they were okay. Color TV! Hair dryers! Waffle irons!”

  “Remote-control birdcages!” Rose cried cheerfully.

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Heated towels.”

  “Heated towel racks, dummy! They’re lovely.”

  “Electric carving knives, electric toothbrushes, electric toothpicks.”

  “Some of those things are not as bad as they sound. Really they’re not.”

  Another time when Rose came down Jocelyn and Clifford had a party. When everyone had gone home the three of them, Jocelyn and Clifford and Rose, sat around on the living-room floor, all fairly drunk, and very comfortable. The party had gone well. Rose was feeling a remote and wistful lust; a memory lust, maybe. Jocelyn said she didn’t want to go to bed.

  “What can we do?” said Rose. “We shouldn’t drink anymore.”

  “We could make love,” Clifford said.

  Jocelyn and Rose said, “Really?” at exactly the same time. Then they linked their little fingers and said, “Smoke goes up the chimney.”

  Following which, Clifford removed their clothes. They didn’t shiver, it was warm in front of the fire. Clifford kept switching his attention nicely from one to the other. He got out of his own clothes as well. Rose felt curious, disbelieving, hardly willing, slightly aroused and, at some level she was too sluggish to reach for, appalled and sad. Though Clifford paid preliminary homage to them both, she was the one he finally made love to, rather quickly on the nubbly hooked rug. Jocelyn seemed to hover above them making comforting noises of assent.

  The next morning Rose had to go out before Jocelyn and Clifford were awake. She had to go downtown on the subway. She found she was looking at men with that speculative hunger, that cold and hurtful need, which for a while she had been free of. She began to get very angry. She was angry at Clifford and Jocelyn. She felt that they had made a fool of her, cheated her, shown her a glaring lack, that otherwise she would not have been aware of. She resolved never to see them again and to write them a letter in which she would comment on their selfishness, obtuseness, and moral degeneracy. By the time she had the letter written to her own satisfaction, in her head, she was back in the country again and had calmed down. She decided not to write it. Sometime later she decided to go on being friends with Clifford and Jocelyn, because she needed such friends occasionally, at that stage of her life.

  Providence

  Rose had a dream about Anna. This was after she had gone away and left Anna behind. She dreamed she met Anna walking up Gonzales Hill. She knew she was coming from school. She went up to speak to her but Anna walked past not speaking. No wonder. She was covered with clay that seemed to have leaves or branches in it, so that the effect was of dead garlands. Decoration; ruination. And the clay or mud was not dry, it was still dripping off her, so that she looked crude and sad, a botched heavy-headed idol.

  “Do you want to come with me, do you want to stay with Daddy?” Rose had said to her, but Anna had refused to answer, saying instead, “I don’t want you to go.” Rose had got a job at a radio station in a town in the Kootenay mountains.

  Anna was lying in the four-poster bed where Patrick and Rose used to sleep, where Patrick now slept alone. Rose slept in the den.

  Anna would go to sleep in that bed, then Patrick would carry her to her own bed. Neither Patrick nor Rose knew when this stopped being occasional, and became essential. Everything in the house was out of kilter. Rose was packing her trunk. She did it in the daytime when Patrick and Anna were not around. She and Patrick spent the evenings in different parts of the house. Once she went into the dining room and found him putting fresh Scotch tape on the snapshots in the album. She was angry at him for doing this. She saw a snapshot of herself, pushing Anna on a swing in the park; herself smirking in a bikini; true lies.

  “It wasn’t any better then,” she said. “Not really.” She meant that she had always been planning, at the back of her mind, to do what she was doing now. Even on her wedding day she had known this time would come, and that if it didn’t she might as well be dead. The betrayal was hers.

  “I know that,” said Patrick angrily.

  But of course it had been better, because she hadn’t started to try to make the break come, she had forgotten for long stretches that it would have to come. Even to say she had been planning to break, had started to break, was wrong, because she had done nothing deliberately, nothing at all intelligently, it had happened as painfully and ruinously as possible with all sorts of shilly-shallying and reconciling and berating, and right now she felt as if she was walking a swinging bridge and could only keep her eyes on the slats ahead, never look down or around.

  “Which do you want?” she said softly to Anna. Instead of answering, Anna called out for Patrick. When he came she sat up and pulled them both down on the bed, one on each side of her. She held on to them, and began to sob and shake. A violently dramatic child, sometimes, a bare blade.

  “You don’t have to,” she said. “You don’t have fights anymore.”

  Patrick looked across at Rose without accusation. His customary look for years, even when they were making love, had been accusing, but he felt such pain on Anna’s account that all accusation was wiped out. Rose had to get up and go out, leaving him to comfort Anna, because she was afraid a great, deceptive rush of feeling for him was on the way.

  It was true, they did not have fights anymore. She had scars on her wrists and her body, which she had made (not qui
te in the most dangerous places) with a razor blade. Once in the kitchen of this house Patrick had tried to choke her. Once she had run outside and knelt in her nightgown, tearing up handfuls of grass. Yet for Anna this bloody fabric her parents had made, of mistakes and mismatches, that anybody could see ought to be torn up and thrown away, was still the true web of life, of father and mother, of beginning and shelter. What fraud, thought Rose, what fraud for everybody. We come from unions which don’t have in them anything like what we think we deserve.

  She wrote to Tom, to tell him what she was going to do. Tom was a teacher at the University of Calgary. Rose was a little bit in love with him (so she said to friends who knew about the affair: a little bit in love). She had met him here a year ago—he was the brother of a woman she sometimes acted with in radio plays—and since then she had stayed with him once in Victoria. They wrote long letters to each other. He was a courtly man, a historian, he wrote witty and delicately amorous letters. She had been a little afraid that when she announced that she was leaving Patrick, Tom would write less often, or more guardedly, in case she might be hoping for too much from him. Getting ideas. But he did not, he was not so vulgar or so cowardly; he trusted her.

  She said to her friends that leaving Patrick had nothing to do with Tom and that she would probably not see Tom any more often than she had before. She believed that, but she had chosen between the job in the mountain town and one on Vancouver Island because she liked the idea of being closer to Calgary.

  In the morning Anna was cheerful, she said it was all right. She said she wanted to stay. She wanted to stay in her school, with her friends. She turned halfway down the walk to wave and shriek at her parents.

  “Have a happy divorce!”

  Rose had thought that once she got out of Patrick’s house she would live in a bare room, some place stained and shabby. She would not care, she would not bother making a setting for herself, she disliked all that. The apartment which she found—the upstairs of a brown brick house halfway up the mountainside—was stained and shabby, but she immediately set to work to fix it up. The red-and-gold wallpaper (these places, she was to discover, were often tricked out with someone’s idea of elegant wallpaper) had been hastily put on, and was ripping and curling away from the baseboard. She bought some paste and pasted it down. She bought hanging plants and coaxed them not to die. She put up amusing posters in the bathroom. She paid insulting prices for an Indian bedspread, baskets and pottery and painted mugs, in the only shop in town where such things were to be found. She painted the kitchen blue and white, trying to get the colors of willow-pattern china. The landlord promised to pay for the paint but didn’t. She bought blue candles, some incense, a great bunch of dried gold leaves and grass. What she had, when all this was finished, was a place which belonged quite recognizably to a woman, living alone, probably no longer young, who was connected, or hoped to be connected, with a college or the arts. Just as the house she had lived in before, Patrick’s house, belonged recognizably to a successful business or professional man with inherited money and standards.