Moons of Jupiter (29 page)

“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.”

W
E 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 early 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.

“Well. Dinner. There was lots of wine, and brandy afterwards, and Keith kept fussing, but nobody was easy. Martin was poisonous in an obvious sneering way, trying to get one up on everybody, but Caroline was poisonous in an exquisitely moral way, she'd take every topic and twist it, so that somebody seemed crass. Martin and the man I was with finally got into a filthy argument, it was filthy mean, and Caroline cooed and whimpered. The man I was with got up and said he was going to bed, and Martin wrapped himself up in a big sulk and Caroline all of a sudden started being sweet to Keith, drinking brandy with him, ignoring Martin.

“I went to my room and the man I was with was there, in bed, though we'd been given separate rooms. Caroline was very decorous in spite of all. He stayed the night. He was furious. Before, during, and after making love, he kept on the subject of Martin, what a slimy fraud he was, and I agreed. But he's their problem, I said. So he said, they're welcome to him, the posturing shit, and at last he went to sleep and I did too, but in the middle of the night I woke up. I wakened with a revelation. Occasionally you do. I rearranged myself and listened to his breathing, and I thought—he's in love with Caroline. I knew it. I knew it. I was trying not to know it, not just because it wasn't encouraging but also because it didn't seem decent, for me to know it. But once you know something like that you never can really stop. Everything seemed clear to me. For instance Martin. That was an arrangement. She'd arranged to have the old lover and the new lover there together, just to stir things up. There was something so crude about it, but that didn't mean it wouldn't work. There
was something crude about
her
. All that poetic stuff, the sensibility stuff, it was crudely done; she wasn't a talented fake, but that didn't matter. What matters is to want to do it enough. To have the will to disturb. To be a femme fatale you don't have to be slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just have to have the will to disturb.

“And I thought, why should I be surprised? Isn't this just what you always hear? How love isn't rational, or in one's best interests, it doesn't have anything to do with normal preferences?”

“Where do you always hear that?” Douglas said.

“It's standard. There's the intelligent sort of love that makes an intelligent choice. That's the kind you're supposed to get married on. Then there's the kind that's anything but intelligent, that's like a possession. And that's the one, that's the one, everybody really values. That's the one nobody wants to have missed out on.”

“Standard,” said Douglas.

“You know what I mean. You know it's true. All sorts of hackneyed notions are true.”

“Hackneyed,” he said. “That's a word you don't often hear.” “That's a sad story,” Julie said.

“Yours were sad too,” I said.

“Mine were really sort of ridiculous. Did you ask him if he was in love with her?”

“Asking wouldn't have got me anywhere,” I said. “He'd brought me there to counter her with. I was his sensible choice. I was the woman he liked. I couldn't stand that. I couldn't stand it. It was so humiliating. I got very touchy and depressed. I told him he didn't really love me. That was enough. He wouldn't stand for anybody telling him things about himself.”

W
E STOPPED
at a country church within sight of the highway.

“Something to soothe the spirit, after all these hard-luck stories, and before the Sunday traffic,” Douglas said.

We walked around the graveyard first, looking at the oldest tomb-stones, reading names and dates aloud.

I read out a verse I found.

“Afflictions sore long time she bore,

Physicians were in vain,

Till God did please to give her ease,

And waft her from her Pain.”

“Waft,” I said. “That sounds nice.”

Then I felt something go over me—a shadow, a chastening. I heard the silly sound of my own voice against the truth of the lives laid down here. Lives pressed down, like layers of rotting fabric, disintegrating dark leaves. The old pain and privation. How strange, indulged, and culpable they would find us—three middle-aged people still stirred up about love, or sex.

The church was unlocked. Julie said that was very trusting of them, even Anglican churches which were supposed to be open all the time were usually locked up nowadays, because of vandals. She said she was surprised the diocese let them keep it open.

“How do you know about dioceses?” said Douglas.

“My father was a parson. Couldn't you guess?”

It was colder inside the church than outside. Julie went ahead, looking at the Roll of Honour, and memorial plaques on the walls. I looked over the back of the last pew at a row of footstools, where people could kneel to pray. Each stool was covered with needlework, in a different design.

Douglas put his hand on my shoulder blade, not around my shoulders. If Julie turned she wouldn't notice. He brushed his hand down my back and settled at my waist, applying a slight pressure to the ribs before he passed behind me and walked up the outer aisle, ready to explain something to Julie. She was trying to read the Latin on a stained-glass window.

On one footstool was the Cross of St. George, on another the Cross of St. Andrew.

I hadn't expected there would be any announcement from him, either while I was telling the story, or after it was over. I did not think that he would tell me that I was right, or that I was wrong. I heard him translating, Julie laughing, but I couldn't attend. I felt that I had been overtaken—stumped by a truth about myself, or at least a fact,
that I couldn't do anything about. A pressure of the hand, with no promise about it, could admonish and comfort me. Something unresolved could become permanent. I could be always bent on knowing, and always in the dark, about what was important to him, and what was not.

On another footstool there was a dove on a blue ground, with the olive branch in its mouth; on another a lamp, with lines of straight golden stitching to show its munificent rays; on another a white lily. No—it was a trillium. When I made this discovery, I called out for Douglas and Julie to come and see it. I was pleased with this homely emblem, among the more ancient and exotic. I think I became rather boisterous, from then on. In fact all three of us did, as if we had each one, secretly, come upon an unacknowledged spring of hopefulness. When we stopped for gas, Julie and I exclaimed at the sight of Douglas's credit cards, and declared that we didn't want to go back to Toronto. We talked of how we would all run away to Nova Scotia, and live off the credit cards. Then when the crackdown came we would go into hiding, change our names, take up humble occupations. Julie and I would work as barmaids. Douglas could set traps for lobsters. Then we could all be happy.

Visitors

Mildred had just come into the kitchen and was looking at the clock, which said five to two. She had thought it might be at least half past. Wilfred came in from the back, through the utility room, and said, “Hadn't you ought to be out there keeping them company?”

His brother Albert's wife, Grace, and her sister, Vera, were sitting out in the shade of the carport making lace tablecloths. Albert was out at the back of the house, sitting beside the patch of garden where Wilfred grew beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Every half-hour Wilfred checked to see which tomatoes were ripe enough to pick. He picked them half-ripe and spread them out on the kitchen windowsill, so the bugs wouldn't get them.