“He wished her to be controlled and matter-of-fact, as he was, and not to lay claim to any sorrow that—he would be sure—she could not really feel.” Fiction by Alice Munro.
In a hotel room in Vancouver, Meriel as a young woman is putting on her short white summer gloves. She wears a beige linen dress and a flimsy white scarf over her hair. Dark hair, at that time. She smiles, because she has remembered something that Queen Sirikit of Thailand said, or was quoted as saying, in a magazine. A quote within a quote—something Queen Sirikit said that Balmain had said.Meriel smiles at that, not as you’d smile at a joke but as at an endearing absurdity.
Meriel had hoped that wouldn’t happen. Jonas slept on the living-room couch and in the morning threw the covers on the floor for her to pick up. He kept Pierre awake half the night, talking about things that had happened when they were teen-agers, or even younger. His name for Pierre was “Piss-hair,” a nickname from those years, and he referred to other old friends as Stinkpool and Doc and Buster, never by the names Meriel had always heard—Stan and Don and Rick.
Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving.
Jonas’s mother might not have been listening. Looking across the room, she said, “That’s the doctor who looked after him. He flew down from Smithers in his own plane. Really, we thought that was so good of him.”“Yes. Well. I suppose he gets around that way, to attend to people in the bush.” At the funeral service, the minister had compared Jonas’s life on earth to the life of a baby in the womb. The baby, he said, knows nothing of any other existence and inhabits its warm, dark, watery cave with not an inkling of the great, bright world it will soon be thrust into. And we on earth have an inkling, but are really quite unable to imagine the light that we will enter, after we have survived the travail of death.
She crossed the room to him now with no such foolishness in mind. She had to remind him that they must soon go their separate ways. He was driving to Horseshoe Bay to catch the next ferry, and she would have to get across the North Shore to Lynn Valley, by bus. She had arranged to take this chance to visit a woman her dead mother had loved and admired, and in fact had named her for, and whom Meriel had always called Aunt, though they were not related by blood. Aunt Muriel.
What Meriel planned to do after that was to visit with Aunt Muriel—possibly even sit through supper with her—then catch the bus from Lynn Valley to the downtown bus depot and board the late-evening bus, which would take her to the ferry, and home. She didn’t know what had started this. Unease, simply because she so seldom talked to a stranger nowadays? The oddity of riding alone in a car with a man who wasn’t her husband?
Aunt Muriel was sitting by herself, in a wheelchair, in the dim corridor just outside her own bedroom door. She was fat and glimmering—but that was because of being swathed in an asbestos apron so she could smoke a cigarette. Meriel believed that when she had said goodbye to her, months and seasons ago, she had been sitting in the same chair in the same spot—though without the asbestos apron, which must accord with some new rule, or reflect some further decline.
“We need some chairs,” she said. She leaned forward, waved the cigarette hand in the air, tried to whistle. “Service, please. Chairs.”“What’s your husband’s name?”“That’s right. But the man who’s with me—”Aunt Muriel belonged to Meriel’s grandmother’s generation, rather than her mother’s. She had been Meriel’s mother’s art teacher at school, first an inspiration, then an ally, then a friend.
“Better,” she said, and retrieved her story. “Oh, you knew what you were doing but you pretended not to. One time, they had a blindfold on me. Not out in the woods, that was inside. It was all right, I consented. It didn’t work so well, though—I mean, I did know. There probably wasn’t anybody there that I wouldn’t have recognized, anyway.”
Around a corner, with doors open on rooms where people lay asleep or perhaps watching from their beds, the doctor touched Meriel between her shoulder blades and moved his hand down her back to her waist. She realized that he was picking at the cloth of her dress, which had stuck to her damp skin when she sat pressed against the chair back. The dress was also damp under her arms.
“Where to?” he said, when they were driving. Then, as if he thought he had spoken too brusquely, “Where would you like to go?” It was almost as if he were speaking to a child, or to Aunt Muriel—somebody he was bound to entertain for the afternoon. And Meriel said, “I don’t know,” as if she had no choice but to let herself become that sullen, burdensome child. She was holding in a wail of disappointment, a clamor of desire.
Then the ride in the old-fashioned cage of the elevator, run by an old man—or perhaps an old woman, perhaps a cripple, a sly servant of vice. She had to join the crowd of jostling bodies making their way up the stairs, and when she reached the passenger deck she sat in the first seat she saw. She did not even bother, as she usually did, to look for a seat next to a window. She had an hour and a half before the boat docked on the other side of the strait, and during this time she had a great deal of work to do.
Her marriage did last, for more than thirty years after that—until Pierre died. During an early and not too painful stage of his illness, she read aloud to him, getting through a few books that they had both read years ago and meant to go back to. One of these was “Fathers and Sons.” After she had read the scene in which Bazarov declares his violent love for Anna Sergeyevna, and Anna is horrified, they broke off for a discussion. “It’s the writer,” she said.
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