Mischief

Alice Munro

Alice Munro (b. 1931) is a Canadian short story writer and winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize, which honours her complete body of work. She has been awarded Canada’s Governor General’s Award for fiction three times, the Giller Prize twice and is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize for Fiction. She was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998 for her collection, The Love of a Good Woman.

Rose fell in love with Clifford at a party which Clifford and Jocelyn gave and Patrick and Rose attended. They had been married about three years at this time, Clifford and Jocelyn a year or so longer.

Clifford and Jocelyn lived out past West Vancouver, in one of those summer cottages, haphazardly winterized, that used to line the short curving streets between the lower highway and the sea. The party was in March, on a rainy night. Rose was nervous about going to it. She felt almost sick as they drove through West Vancouver, watched the neon lights weeping in the puddles on the road, listened to the condemning tick of the windshield wipers. She would often afterwards look back and see herself sitting beside Patrick, in her low-cut black blouse and black velvet skirt which she hoped would turn out to be the right thing to wear; she was wishing they were just going to the movies. She had no idea that her life was going to be altered.

Patrick was nervous too, although he would not have admitted it. Social life was a puzzling, often disagreeable business for them both. They had arrived in Vancouver knowing nobody. They followed leads. Rose was not sure whether they really longed for friends, or simply believed they ought to have them. They dressed up and went out to visit people, or tidied up the living room and waited for the people who had been invited to visit them. In some cases they established steady visiting patterns. They had some drinks, during those evenings, and around eleven or eleven-thirty – which hardly ever came soon enough – Rose went out to the kitchen and made coffee and something to eat. The things she made to eat were usually squares of toast, with a slice of tomato on top, then a square of cheese, then a bit of bacon, the whole thing broiled and held together with a toothpick. She could not manage to think of anything else.

It was easier for them to become friends with people Patrick liked than with people Rose liked because Rose was very adaptable, in fact deceitful, and Patrick was hardly adaptable at all. But in this case, the case of Jocelyn and Clifford, the friends were Rose’s. Or Jocelyn was. Jocelyn and Rose had known enough not to try to establish couple-visiting. Patrick disliked Clifford without knowing him because Clifford was a violinist; no doubt Clifford disliked Patrick because Patrick worked in a branch of his family’s department store. In those days the barriers between people were still strong and reliable; between arty people and business people; between men and women.

Rose did not know any of Jocelyn’s friends, but understood they were musicians and journalists and lecturers at the University and even a woman writer who had had a play performed on the radio. She expected them to be intelligent, witty, and easily contemptuous. It seemed to her that all the time she and Patrick were sitting in the living rooms, visiting or being visited, really clever and funny people, who had a right to despise them, were conducting irregular lives and parties elsewhere. Now came the chance to be with those people, but her stomach rejected it, her hands were sweating.

Jocelyn and Rose had met in the maternity ward of the North Vancouver General Hospital. The first thing Rose saw, on being taken back to the ward after having Anna, was Jocelyn sitting up in bed reading the Journals of André Gide. Rose knew the book by its colors, having noticed it on the drugstore stands. Gide was on the list of writers she meant to work through. At that time she read only great writers.

The immediately startling and comforting thing to Rose, about Jocelyn, was how much Jocelyn looked like a student, how little she had let herself be affected by the maternity ward. Jocelyn had long black braids, a heavy pale face, thick glasses, no trace of prettiness, and an air of comfortable concentration.

A woman in the bed beside Jocelyn was describing the arrangement of her kitchen cupboards. She would forget to tell where she kept something – rice, say, or brown sugar – and then she would have to start all over again, making sure her audience was with her by saying “Remember on the right hand highest shelf next the stove, that’s where I keep the packages of soup but not the canned soup, I keep the canned soup underneath the counter in with the canned goods, well, right next to that—”

Other women tried to interrupt, to tell how they kept things, but they were not successful, or not for long. Jocelyn sat reading, and twiddling the end of a braid between her fingers, as if she was in a library, at college, as if she was researching for a paper, and this world of other women had never closed down on her at all. Rose wished she could manage as well.

She was still dazed from the birth. Whenever she closed her eyes she saw an eclipse, a big black ball with a ring of fire. That was the baby’s head, ringed with pain, the instant before she pushed it out. Across this image, in disturbing waves, went the talking woman’s kitchen shelves, dipping under their glaring weight of cans and packages. But she could open her eyes and see Jocelyn, black and white, braids falling over her hospital nightgown. Jocelyn was the only person she saw who looked calm and serious enough to match the occasion.

Soon Jocelyn got out of bed, showing long white unshaved legs and a stomach still stretched by pregnancy. She put on a striped bathrobe. Instead of a cord, she tied a man’s necktie around her waist. She slapped across the hospital linoleum in her bare feet. A nurse came running, warned her to put on slippers.

“I don’t own any slippers.”

“Do you own shoes?” said the nurse rather nastily.

“Oh, yes. I own shoes.”

Jocelyn went back to the little metal cabinet beside her bed and took out a pair of large, dirty, run-over moccasins. She went off making as sloppy and insolent a noise as before.

Rose was longing to know her.

The next day Rose had her own book out to read. It was The Last Puritan, by George Santayana, but unfortunately it was a library copy; the title on the cover was rubbed and dim, so it was impossible that Jocelyn should admire Rose’s reading material as Rose had admired hers. Rose didn’t know how she could get to talk to her.

The woman who had explained about her cupboards was talking about how she used her vacuum cleaner. She said it was very important to use all the attachments because they each had a purpose and after all you had paid for them. Many people didn’t use them. She described how she vacuumed her living-room drapes. Another woman said she had tried to do that but the material kept getting bunched up. The authoritative woman said that was because she hadn’t been doing it properly.

Rose caught Jocelyn’s eye around the corner of her book.

“I hope you polish your stove knobs,” she said quietly.

“I certainly do,” said Jocelyn.

“Do you polish them every day?”

“I used to polish them twice a day but now that I have the new baby I just don’t know if I’ll get around to it.”

“Do you use that special stove-knob polish?”

“I certainly do. And I use the special stove-knob cloths that come in that special package.”

“That’s good. Some people don’t.”

“Some people will use anything.”

“Old dishrags.”

“Old snotrags.”

“Old snot.”

After this their friendship bloomed in a hurry. It was one of those luxuriant intimacies that spring up in institutions; in schools, at camp, in prison. They walked in the halls, disobeying the nurses. They annoyed and mystified the other women. They became hysterical as schoolgirls, from the things they read aloud to each other. They did not read Gide or Santayana but the copies of True Love and Personal Romances which they had found in the waiting room.

“It says here you can buy false calves,” Rose read. “I don’t see how you’d hide them, though. I guess you strap them on your legs. Or maybe they just sit here inside your stockings but wouldn’t you think they’d show?”

“On your legs?” said Jocelyn. “You strap them on your legs? Oh, false calves! False calves! I thought you were talking about false calves! False baby cows!”

Anything like that could set them off.

“False baby cows!”

“False tits, false bums, false baby cows!”

“What will they think of next!”

The vacuum-cleaning woman said they were always butting in and spoiling other people’s conversations and she didn’t see what was so funny about dirty language. She said if they didn’t stop the way they carried on they would sour their milk.

“I’ve been wondering if maybe mine is sour,” Jocelyn said. “It’s an awfully disgusting color.”

“What color?” Rose asked.

“Well. Sort of blue.”

“Good God, maybe it’s ink!”

The vacuum-cleaning woman said she was going to tell the nurse they were swearing. She said she was no prude, but. She asked if they were fit to be mothers. How was Jocelyn going to manage to wash diapers, when anybody could see she never washed her dressing gown?

Jocelyn said she planned to use moss, she was an Indian.

“I can believe it,” the woman said.

After this Jocelyn and Rose prefaced many remarks with: I’m no prude, but.

“I’m no prude but would you look at this pudding!”

“I’m no prude but it feels like this kid has a full set of teeth.”

The nurse said, wasn’t it time for them to grow up?

Walking in the halls, Jocelyn told Rose that she was twenty-five, that her baby was to be called Adam, that she had a two-year-old boy at home, named Jerome, that her husband’s name was Clifford and that he played the violin for a living. He played in the Vancouver Symphony. They were poor. Jocelyn came from Massachusetts and had gone to Wellesley College. Her father was a psychiatrist and her mother was a pediatrician. Rose told Jocelyn that she came from a small town in Ontario and that Patrick came from Vancouver Island and that his parents did not approve of the marriage.

“In the town I come from,” Rose said, exaggerating, “everybody says yez. What’ll yez have? How’re yez doin.”

“Yez?”

“Youse. It’s the plural of you.”

“Oh. Like Brooklyn. And James Joyce. Who does Patrick work for?”

“His family’s store. His family has a department store.”

“So aren’t you rich now? Aren’t you too rich to be in the ward?”

“We just spent all our money on a house Patrick wanted.”

“Didn’t you want it?”

“Not so much as he did.”

That was something Rose had never said before.

They plunged into more random revelations.

Jocelyn hated her mother. Her mother had made her sleep in a room with white organdy curtains and had encouraged her to collect ducks. By the time she was thirteen Jocelyn had probably the largest collection in the world of rubber ducks, ceramic ducks, wooden ducks, pictures of ducks, embroidered ducks. She had also written what she described as a hideously precocious story called “The Marvelous Great Adventures of Oliver the Grand Duck,” which her mother actually got printed, and distributed to friends and relatives at Christmas time.

“She is the sort of person who just covers everything with a kind of rotten smarminess. She sort of oozes over everything. She never talks in a normal voice, never. She’s coy. She’s just so filthy coy. Naturally she’s a great success as a pediatrician. She has these rotten coy little names for all the parts of your body.”

Rose, who would have been delighted with organdy curtains, perceived the fine lines, the ways of giving offence, that existed in Jocelyn’s world. It seemed a much less crude and provisional world than her own. She doubted if she could tell Jocelyn about Hanratty but she began to try. She delivered Flo and the store in broad strokes. She played up the poverty. She didn’t really have to. The true facts of her childhood were exotic enough to Jocelyn, and of all things, enviable.

“It seems more real,” Jocelyn said. “I know that’s a romantic notion.”

They talked of their youthful ambitions. (They really believed their youth to be past.) Rose said she had wanted to be an actress though she was too much of a coward ever to walk on a stage. Jocelyn had wanted to be a writer but was shamed out of it by memories of the Grand Duck.

“Then I met Clifford,” she said. “When I saw what real talent was, I knew that I would probably just be fooling around, trying to write, and I’d be better off nurturing him, or whatever the hell it is I do for him. He is really gifted. Sometimes he’s a squalid sort of person. He gets away with it because he is really gifted.”

“I think that is a romantic notion,” Rose said firmly and jealously. “That gifted people ought to get away with things.”

“Do you? But great artists always have.”

“Not women.”

“But women usually aren’t great artists, not in the same way.”

These were the ideas of most well-educated, thoughtful, even unconventional or politically radical young women of the time. One of the reasons Rose did not share them was that she had not been well educated. Jocelyn said to her, much later in their friendship, that one of the reasons she found it so interesting to talk to Rose, from the start, was that Rose had ideas but was uneducated. Rose was surprised at this, and mentioned the college she had attended in Western Ontario. Then she saw by an embarrassed withdrawal or regret, a sudden lack of frankness in Jocelyn’s face – very unusual with her – that that was exactly what Jocelyn had meant.

After the difference of opinion about artists, and about men and women artists, Rose took a good look at Clifford when he came visiting in the evening. She thought him wan, self-indulgent, and neurotic-looking. Further discoveries concerning the tact, the effort, the sheer physical energy Jocelyn expended on this marriage (it was she who fixed the leaky taps and dug up the clogged drains) made Rose certain that Jocelyn was wasting herself, she was mistaken. She had a feeling that Jocelyn did not see much point in marriage with Patrick, either.

At first the party was easier than Rose had expected. She had been afraid that she would be too dressed-up; she would have liked to wear her toreador pants but Patrick would never have stood for it. But only a few of the girls were in slacks. The rest wore stockings, earrings, outfits much like her own. As at any gathering of young women at that time, three or four were noticeably pregnant. And most of the men were in suits and shirts and ties, like Patrick. Rose was relieved. Not only did she want Patrick to fit into the party; she wanted him to accept the people there, to be convinced they were not all freaks. When Patrick was a student he had taken her to concerts and plays and did not seem overly suspicious of the people who participated in them; indeed he rather favored these things, because they were detested by his family, and at that time – the time he chose Rose – he was having a brief rebellion against his family. Once he and Rose had gone to Toronto and sat in the Chinese temple room at the Museum, looking at the frescoes. Patrick told her how they were brought in small pieces from Shansi province; he seemed quite proud of his knowledge, and at the same time disarmingly, uncharacteristically humble, admitting he had got it all on a tour. It was since he had gone to work that he had developed harsh opinions and delivered wholesale condemnations. Modern Art was a Hoax. Avant-garde plays were filthy. Patrick had a special, mincing, spitting way of saying avant-garde, making the words seem disgustingly pretentious. And so they were, Rose thought. In a way, she could see what he meant. She could see too many sides of things; Patrick had not that problem.

Except for some great periodic fights she was very docile with Patrick, she tried to keep in favor. It was not easy to do so. Even before they were married he had a habit of delivering reproving lectures, in response to a simple question or observation. Sometimes in those days she would ask him a question in the hope that he would show off some superior knowledge that she could admire him for, but she was usually sorry she had asked, the answer was so long and had such a scolding tone, and the knowledge wouldn’t be so superior, either. She did want to admire him, and respect him; it seemed that was a leap she was always on the edge of taking.

Later she thought that she did respect Patrick, but not in the way he wanted to be respected, and she did love him, not in the way he wanted to be loved. She didn’t know it then. She thought she knew something about him, she thought she knew that he didn’t really want to be whatever he was zealously making himself into. That arrogance might be called respect; that highhandedness, love. It didn’t do anything to make him happy.

A few men wore jeans and turtlenecks or sweatshirts. Clifford was one of them, all in black. It was the time of the beatniks in San Francisco. Jocelyn had called Rose up on the phone and read her Howl. Clifford’s skin looked very tanned, against the black, his hair was long for the time and almost as light a color as unbleached cotton; his eyes too were very light in color, a bright gray-blue. He looked small and cat-like to Rose, rather effeminate; she hoped Patrick wouldn’t be too put off by him.

There was beer to drink, and a wine punch. Jocelyn, who was a splendid cook, was stirring a pot of jambalaya. Rose made a trip to the bathroom to remove herself from Patrick, who seemed to want to stick close to her (she thought he was being a watchdog; she forgot that he might be shy). When she came out he had moved on. She drank three cups of punch in quick succession and was introduced to the woman who had written the play. To Rose’s surprise this woman was one of the drabbest, least confident-looking people in the room.

“I liked your play,” Rose told her. As a matter of fact she had found if mystifying, and Patrick had thought it was revolting. It seemed to be about a woman who ate her own children. Rose knew that was symbolic, but couldn’t quite figure out what it was symbolic of.

“Oh, but the production was terrible!” the woman said. In her embarrassment, her excitement and eagerness to talk about her play, she sprayed Rose with punch. “They made it so literal. I was afraid it would just come across as gruesome and I meant it to be quite delicate, I meant it to be so different from the way they made it.” She started telling Rose everything that had gone wrong, the miscasting, the chopping of the most important – the crucial – lines. Rose felt flattered, listening to these details, and tried inconspicuously to wipe away the spray.

“But you did see what I meant?” the woman said.

“Oh, yes!”

Clifford poured Rose another cup of punch and smiled at her.

“Rose, you look delicious.”

Delicious seemed an odd word for Clifford to use. Perhaps he was drunk. Or perhaps, hating parties altogether as Jocelyn said he did, he had taken on a role; he was the sort of man who told a girl she looked delicious. He might be adept at disguises, as Rose thought she herself was getting to be. She went on talking to the writer and a man who taught English Literature of the Seventeenth Century. She too might have been poor and clever, radical and irreverent for all anybody could tell.

A man and a girl were embracing passionately in the narrow hall. Whenever anybody wanted to get through, this couple had to separate but they continued looking at each other, and did not even close their mouths. The sight of those wet open mouths made Rose shiver. She had never been embraced like that in her life, never had her mouth opened like that. Patrick thought French-kissing was disgusting.

A little bald man named Cyril had stationed himself outside the bathroom door, and was kissing any girl who came out, saying, “Welcome, sweetheart, so glad you could come, so glad you went.”

“Cyril is awful,” the woman writer said. “Cyril thinks he has to try to act like a poet. He can’t think of anything to do but hang around the john and upset people. He thinks he’s outrageous.”

“Is he a poet?” Rose said.

The lecturer in English Literature said, “He told me he had burned all his poems.”

“How flamboyant of him,” Rose said. She was delighted with herself for saying this, and with them for laughing.

The lecturer began to think of Tom Swifties.

“I can never think of any of those things,” said the writer mournfully, “I care too much about language.”

Loud voices were coming from the living room. Rose recognized Patrick’s voice, soaring over and subduing everyone else’s. She opened her mouth to say something, anything, to cover him up – she knew some disaster was on the way – but just then a tall, curly-haired, elated-looking man came through the hall, pushing the passionate couple unceremoniously apart, holding up his hands for attention.

“Listen to this,” he said to the whole kitchen. “There’s this guy in the living room you wouldn’t believe him. Listen.”

There must have been a conversation about Indians going on in the living room. Now Patrick had taken it over.

“Take them away,” said Patrick. “Take them away from their parents as soon as they’re born and put them in a civilized environment and educate them and they will turn out just as good as whites any day.” No doubt he thought he was expressing liberal views. If they thought this was amazing, they should have got him on the execution of the Rosenbergs or the trial of Alger Hiss or the necessity for nuclear testing.

Some girl said mildly, “Well, you know, there is their own culture.”

“Their culture is done for,” said Patrick. “Kaput.” This was a word he was using a good deal right now. He could use some words, clichés, editorial phrases – massive reappraisal was one of them – with such relish and numbing authority that you would think he was their originator, or at least that the very fact of his using them gave them weight and luster.

“They want to be civilized,” he said. “The smarter ones do.”

“Well, perhaps they don’t consider they’re exactly uncivilized,” said the girl with an icy demureness that was lost on Patrick.

“Some people need a push.”

The self-congratulatory tones, the ripe admonishment, caused the man in the kitchen to throw up his hands, and wag his head in delight and disbelief. “This has got to be a Socred politician.”

As a matter of fact Patrick did vote Social Credit.

“Yes, well, like it or not,” he was saying, “they have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.”

“Kicking and steaming?” someone repeated.

“Kicking and screaming into the twentieth century,” said Patrick, who never minded saying anything again.

“What an interesting expression. So humane as well.”

Wouldn’t he understand now, that he was being cornered, being baited and laughed at? But Patrick, being cornered, could only grow more thunderous. Rose could not listen any longer. She headed for the back passage, which was full of all the boots, coats, bottles, tubs, toys, that Jocelyn and Clifford had pitched out of the way for the party. Thank God it was empty of people. She went out of the back door and stood burning and shivering in the cool wet night. Her feelings were as confused as anybody’s can get. She was humiliated, she was ashamed of Patrick. But she knew that it was his style that most humiliated her, and that made her suspect something corrupt and frivolous in herself. She was angry at those other people who were cleverer, or at least far quicker, than he was. She wanted to think badly of them. What did they care about Indians, really? Given a chance to behave decently to an Indian, Patrick might just come out ahead of them. This was a long shot, but she had to believe it. Patrick was a good person. His opinions were not good, but he was. The core of Patrick, Rose believed, was simple, pure and trustworthy. But how was she to get at it, to reassure herself, much less reveal it to others?

She heard the back door close and was afraid that Jocelyn had come out looking for her. Jocelyn was not someone who could believe in Patrick’s core. She thought him stiff-necked, thick-skulled, and essentially silly.

It was not Jocelyn. It was Clifford. Rose didn’t want to have to say anything to him. Slightly drunk as she was, woebegone, wet-faced from the rain, she looked at him without welcome. But he put his arms around her and rocked her.

“Oh Rose. Rose baby. Never mind. Rose.”

So this was Clifford.

For five minutes or so they were kissing, murmuring, shivering, pressing, touching. They returned to the party by the front door. Cyril was there. He said, “Hey, wow, where have you two been?”

“Walking in the rain,” said Clifford coolly. The same light possibly hostile voice in which he had told Rose she looked delicious. The Patrick-baiting had stopped. Conversation had become looser, drunker, more irresponsible. Jocelyn was serving jambalaya. She went to the bathroom to dry her hair and put lipstick on her rubbed-bare mouth. She was transformed, invulnerable. The first person she met coming out was Patrick. She had a wish to make him happy. She didn’t care now what he had said, or would say.

“I don’t think we’ve met, sir,” she said, in a tiny flirtatious voice she used with him sometimes, when they were feeling easy together. “But you may kiss my hand.”

“For crying out loud,” said Patrick heartily, and he did squeeze her and kiss her, with a loud smacking noise, on the cheek. He always smacked when he kissed. And his elbows always managed to dig in somewhere and hurt her.

“Enjoying yourself?” Rose said.

“Not bad, not bad.”

During the rest of the evening, of course, she was playing the game of watching Clifford while pretending not to watch him, and it seemed to her he was doing the same, and their eyes met, a few times, without expression, sending a perfectly clear message that rocked her on her feet. She saw him quite differently now. His body that had seemed small and tame now appeared to her light and slippery and full of energy; he was like a lynx or a bobcat. He had his tan from skiing. He went up Seymour Mountain and skied. An expensive hobby, but one which Jocelyn felt could not be denied him, because of the problems he had with his image. His masculine image, as a violinist, in this society. So Jocelyn said. Jocelyn had told Rose all about Clifford’s background: the arthritic father, the small grocery store in a town in upstate New York, the poor tough neighborhood. She had talked about his problems as a child; the inappropriate talent, the grudging parents, the jeering schoolmates. His childhood left him bitter, Jocelyn said. But Rose no longer believed that Jocelyn had the last word on Clifford.

The party was on a Friday night. The phone rang the next morning, when Patrick and Anna were at the table eating eggs.

“How are you?” said Clifford.

“Fine.”

“I wanted to phone you. I thought you might think I was just drunk or something. I wasn’t.”

“Oh, no.”

“I’ve thought about you all night. I thought about you before, too.”

“Yes.” The kitchen was dazzling. The whole scene in front of her, of Patrick: and Anna at the table, the coffee pot with dribbles down the side, the jar of marmalade, was exploding with joy and possibility and danger. Rose’s mouth was so dry she could hardly talk.

“It’s a lovely day,” she said. “Patrick and Anna and I might go up the mountain.”

“Patrick’s home?”

“Yes.”

“Oh God. That was dumb of me. I forgot nobody else works Saturdays. I’m over here at a rehearsal.”

“Yes.”

“Can you pretend it’s somebody else? Pretend it’s Jocelyn.”

“Sure.”

“I love you, Rose,” said Clifford, and hung up.

“Who was that?” said Patrick.

“Jocelyn.”

“Does she have to call when I’m home?”

“She forgot. Clifford’s at a rehearsal so she forgot other people aren’t working.” Rose delighted in saying Clifford’s name. Deceitfulness, concealment, seemed to come marvelously easy to her; that might almost be a pleasure in itself.

“I didn’t realize they’d have to work Saturdays,” she said, to keep on the subject. “They must work terribly long hours.”

“They don’t work any longer hours than normal people, it’s just strung out differently. He doesn’t look capable of much work.”

“He’s supposed to be quite good. As a violinist.”

“He looks like a jerk.”

“Do you think so?”

“Don’t you?”

“I guess I never considered him, really.”

Jocelyn phoned on Monday and said she didn’t know why she gave parties, she was still wading through the mess.

“Didn’t Clifford help clean it up?”

“You are joking. I hardly saw him all weekend. He rehearsed Saturday and played yesterday. He says parties are my idea, I can deal with the aftermath. It’s true. I get these fits of gregariousness, a party is the only cure. Patrick was interesting.”

“Very.”

“He’s quite a stunning type, really, isn’t he?”

“There are lots and lots like him. You just don’t get to meet them.”

“Woe is me.”

This was just like any other conversation with Jocelyn. Their conversations, their friendship, could go on in the same way. Rose did not feel bound by any loyalty to Jocelyn because she had divided Clifford. There was the Clifford Jocelyn knew, the same one she had always presented to Rose; there was also the Clifford Rose knew, now. She thought Jocelyn could be mistaken about him. For instance, when she said his childhood had left him bitter. What Jocelyn called bitterness seemed to Rose something more complex and more ordinary; just the weariness, suppleness, deviousness, meanness, common to a class. Common to Clifford’s class, and Rose’s. Jocelyn had been insulated in some ways, left stern and innocent. In some ways she was like Patrick.

From now on Rose did see Clifford and herself as being one sort of people, and Jocelyn and Patrick, though they seemed so different, and so disliked each other, as being another sort. They were whole and predictable. They took the lives they were leading absolutely seriously. Compared to them, both Clifford and Rose were shifty pieces of business.

If Jocelyn fell in love with a married man, what would she do? Before she even touched his hand, she would probably call a conference. Clifford would be invited, and the man himself, and the man’s wife, and very likely Jocelyn’s psychiatrist. (In spite of her rejection of her family Jocelyn believed that going to a psychiatrist was something everybody should do at developing or adjusting stages of life and she went herself, once a week.) Jocelyn would consider the implications; she would look things in the face. Never try to sneak her pleasure. She had never learned to sneak things. That was why it was unlikely that she would ever fall in love with another man. She was not greedy. And Patrick was not greedy either now, at least not for love.

If loving Patrick was recognizing something good, and guileless, at the bottom of him, being in love with Clifford was something else altogether. Rose did not have to believe that Clifford was good, and certainly she knew he was not guileless. No revelation of his duplicity or heartlessness, towards people other than herself, could have mattered to her. What was she in love with, then, what did she want of him? She wanted tricks, a glittering secret, tender celebrations of lust, a regular conflagration of adultery. All this after five minutes in the rain.

Six months or so after that party Rose lay awake all night. Patrick slept beside her in their stone and cedar house in a suburb called Capilano Heights, on the side of Grouse Mountain. The next night it was arranged that Clifford would sleep beside her, in Powell River, where he was playing with the touring orchestra. She could not believe that this would really happen. That is, she placed all her faith in the event, but could not fit it into the order of things that she knew.

During all these months Clifford and Rose had never gone to bed together. They had not made love anywhere else, either. This was the situation: Jocelyn and Clifford did not own a car. Patrick and Rose owned a car, but Rose did not drive it. Clifford’s work did have the advantage of irregular hours, but how was he to get to see Rose? Could he ride the bus across the Lions Gate Bridge, then walk up her suburban street in broad daylight, past the neighbors’ picture windows? Could Rose hire a baby sitter, pretend she was going to see the dentist, take the bus over to town, meet Clifford in a restaurant, go with him to a hotel room? But they didn’t know which hotel to go to; they were afraid that without luggage they would be turned out on the street, or reported to the Vice Squad, made to sit in the Police Station while Jocelyn and Patrick were summoned to come and get them. Also, they didn’t have enough money.

Rose had gone over to Vancouver, though, using the dentist excuse, and they had sat in a café, side by side in a black booth, kissing and fondling, right out in public in a place frequented by Clifford’s students and fellow musicians; what a risk to take. On the bus going home Rose looked down her dress at the sweat blooming between her breasts and could have fainted at the splendor of herself, as well as at the thought of the risk undertaken. Another time, a very hot August afternoon, she waited in an alley behind the theater where Clifford was rehearsing, lurked in the shadows then grappled with him deliriously, unsatisfactorily. They saw a door open, and slipped inside. There were boxes stacked all around. They were looking for some nesting spot when a man spoke to them.

“Can I do anything for you?”

They had entered the back storeroom of a shoe store. The man’s voice was icy, terrifying. The Vice Squad. The Police Station. Rose’s dress was undone to the waist.

Once they met in a park, where Rose often took Anna, and pushed her on the swings. They held hands on a bench, under cover of Rose’s wide cotton skirt. They laced their fingers together and squeezed painfully. Then Anna surprised them, coming up behind the bench and shouting, “Boo! I caught you!” Clifford turned disastrously pale. On the way home Rose said to Anna, “That was funny when you jumped out behind the bench. I thought you were still on the swing.”

“I know,” said Anna.

“What did you mean, you’d caught us?”

“I caught you,” said Anna, and giggled, in what seemed to Rose a disturbingly pert and knowledgeable way.

“Would you like a fudgsicle? I would!” Rose said gaily, with thoughts of blackmail and bargains, Anna dredging this up for her psychiatrist in twenty years’ time. The episode made her feel shaky and sick and she wondered if it had given Clifford a distaste for her. It had, but only temporarily.

As soon as it was light she got out of bed and went to look at the day, to see if it would be good for flying. The sky was clear; no sign of the fog that often grounded planes at this time of year. Nobody but Clifford knew she was going to Powell River. They had been planning this for six weeks, ever since they knew he was going on tour. Patrick thought she was going to Victoria, where she had a friend whom she had known at college. She had pretended, during the past few weeks, to have been in touch with this friend again. She had said she would be back tomorrow night. Today was Saturday. Patrick was at home to look after Anna.

She went into the dining room to check the money she had saved from Family Allowance checks. It was in the bottom of the silver muffin dish. Thirteen dollars. She meant to add that to what Patrick gave her to get to Victoria. Patrick always gave her money when she asked, but he wanted to know how much and what for. Once when they were out walking she wanted to go into a drugstore; she asked him for money and he said, with no more than customary sternness, “What for?” and Rose began to cry, because she had been going to buy vaginal jelly. She might just as well have laughed, and would have, now. Since she had fallen in love with Clifford, she never quarreled with Patrick.

She figured out again the money she would need. The plane ticket, the money for the airport bus, from Vancouver, and for the bus or maybe it would have to be a taxi into Powell River, something left over for food and coffee. Clifford would pay for the hotel. The thought filled her with sexual comfort, submissiveness, though she knew Jerome needed new glasses, Adam needed rubber boots. She thought of that neutral, smooth, generous bed, which already existed, was waiting for them. Long ago when she was a young girl (she was now twenty-three) she had often thought of bland rented beds and locked doors, with such luxuriant hopes, and now she did again, though for a time in between, before and after she was married, the thought of anything connected with sex irritated her, rather in the way Modern Art irritated Patrick.

She walked around the house softly, planning her day as a series of actions. Take a bath, oil and powder herself, put her diaphragm and jelly in her purse. Remember the money. Mascara, face cream, lipstick. She stood at the top of the two steps leading down into the living room. The walls of the living room were moss green, the fireplace was white, the curtains and slipcovers had a silky pattern of gray and green and yellow leaves on a white background. On the mantel were two Wedgwood vases, white with a circlet of green leaves. Patrick was very fond of these vases. Sometimes when he came home from work he went straight into the living room and shifted them around a bit on the mantel, thinking their symmetrical position had been disturbed.

“Has anybody been fooling around with these vases?”

“Well of course. As soon as you leave for work I rush in and juggle them around.”

“I meant Anna. You don’t let her touch them, do you?”

Patrick didn’t like to hear her refer to the vases in any joking way. He thought she didn’t appreciate the house. He didn’t know, but maybe could guess what she had said to Jocelyn, the first time Jocelyn came here, and they were standing where Rose stood now, looking down at the living room.

“The department store heir’s dream of elegance.”

At this treachery even Jocelyn looked abashed. It was not exactly true. Patrick dreamed of getting much more elegant. And it was not true in the implication that it had all been Patrick’s choice, and that Rose had always held aloof from it. It had been Patrick’s choice, but there were a lot of things she had liked at one time. She used to climb up and polish the glass drops of the dining-room chandelier, using a cloth dipped in water and baking soda. She liked the chandelier; its drops had a blue or lilac cast. But people she admired would not have chandeliers in their dining rooms. It was unlikely that they would have dining rooms. If they did, they would have thin white candles stuck into the branches of a black metal candle-holder, made in Scandinavia. Or else they would have heavy candles in wine bottles, loaded with drippings of colored wax. The people she admired were inevitably poorer than she was. It seemed a bad joke on her, after being poor all her life in a place where poverty was never anything to be proud of, that now she had to feel apologetic and embarrassed about the opposite condition – with someone like Jocelyn, for instance, who could say middle-class prosperity so viciously and despisingly.

But if she hadn’t been exposed to other people, if she hadn’t learned from Jocelyn, would she still have liked the house? No. She must have been souring on it, anyway. When people came to visit for the first time Patrick always took them on a tour, pointing out the chandelier, the powder room with concealed lighting, by the front door, the walk-in closets and the louvered doors opening on to the patio. He was as proud of this house, as eager to call attention to its small distinctions, as if he, not Rose, had grown up poor. Rose had been uneasy about these tours from the start, and tagged along in silence, or made deprecating remarks which Patrick did not like. After a while she stayed in the kitchen, but she could still hear Patrick’s voice and she knew beforehand everything he would say. She knew that he would pull the dining-room curtains and point to the small illuminated fountain – Neptune with a fig-leaf – he had put in the garden, and then he would say, “Now there is our answer to the suburban swimming-pool mania!”

After she bathed she reached for a bottle of what she thought was baby oil, to pour over her body. The clear liquid ran down over her breasts and belly, stinging and burning. She looked at the label and saw that this was not baby oil at all, it was nail polish remover. She scrubbed it off, splashed herself with cold water, towelled desperately, thinking of ruined skin, the hospital; grafts, scars, punishment.

Anna was scratching sleepily but urgently at the bathroom door. Rose had locked it, for this preparation, though she didn’t usually lock it when she took a bath. She let Anna in.

“Your front is all red,” Anna said, as she hoisted herself on to the toilet. Rose found the baby oil and tried to cool herself with it. She used too much, and got oily spots on her new brassiere.

She had thought Clifford might write to her while he was touring, but he did not. He called her from Prince George, and was business-like.

“When do you get into Powell River?”

“Four o’clock.”

“Okay, take the bus or whatever they have into town. Have you ever been there?”

“No.”

“Neither have I. I only know the name of our hotel. You can’t wait there.”

“How about the bus depot? Every town has a bus depot.”

“Okay, the bus depot. I’ll pick you up there probably about five o’clock, and we can get you into some other hotel. I hope to God there’s more than one. Okay then.”

He was pretending to the other members of the orchestra that he was spending the night with friends in Powell River.

“I could go and hear you play,” Rose said. “Couldn’t I?”

“Well. Sure.”

“I’d be very inconspicuous. I’d sit at the back. I’ll disguise myself as an old lady. I love to hear you play.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t mind?”

“No.”

“Clifford?”

“Yes?”

“You still want me to come?”

“Oh, Rose.”

“I know. It’s just the way you sound.”

“I’m in the hotel lobby. They’re waiting for me. I’m supposed to be talking to Jocelyn.”

“Okay I know. I’ll come.”

“Powell River. The bus depot. Five o’clock.”

This was different from their usual telephone conversations. Usually they were plaintive and silly; or else they worked each other up so that they could not talk at all.

“Heavy breathing there.”

“I know.”

“We’ll have to talk about something else.”

“What else is there?”

“Is it foggy where you are?”

“Yes. Is it foggy where you are too?”

“Yes. Can you hear the foghorn?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t it a horrible sound?”

“I don’t mind it, really I sort of like it.”

“Jocelyn doesn’t. You know how she describes it? She says it’s the sound of a cosmic boredom.”

They had at first avoided speaking of Jocelyn and Patrick at all. Then they spoke of them in a crisp practical way, as if they were adults, parents, to be outwitted. Now they could mention them almost tenderly, admiringly, as if they were their children.

There was no bus depot in Powell River. Rose got into the airport limousine with four other passengers, all men, and told the driver she wanted to go to the bus depot.

“You know where that is?”

“No,” she said. Already she felt them all watching her.

“Did you want to catch a bus?”

“No.”

“Just wanted to go to the bus depot?”

“I planned to meet somebody there.”

“I didn’t even know there was a bus depot here,” said one of the passengers.

“There isn’t, that I know of,” said the driver. “Now there is a bus, it goes down to Vancouver in the morning and it comes back at night, and it stops at the old men’s home. The old loggers’ home. That’s where it stops. All I can do is take you there. Is that all right?”

Rose said it would be fine. Then she felt she had to go on explaining.

“My friend and I just arranged to meet there because we couldn’t think where else. We don’t know Powell River at all and we just thought, every town has a bus depot!”

She was thinking that she shouldn’t have said my friend, she should have said my husband. They were going to ask her what she and her friend were doing here if neither of them knew the town.

“My friend is playing in the orchestra that’s giving a concert here tonight. She plays the violin.”

All looked away from her, as if that was what a lie deserved. She was trying to remember if there was a female violinist. What if they should ask her name?

The driver let her off in front of a long two-story wooden building with peeling paint.

“I guess you could go in the sunporch, there at the end. That’s where the bus picks them up, anyway.”

In the sunporch there was a pool table. Nobody was playing. Some old men were playing checkers; others watched. Rose thought of explaining herself to them but decided not to; they seemed mercifully uninterested. She was worn out by her explanations in the limousine.

It was ten past four by the sunporch clock. She thought she could put in the time till five by walking around the town.

As soon as she went outside she noticed a bad smell, and became worried, thinking it might come from herself. She got out the stick cologne she had bought in the Vancouver airport – spending money she could not afford – and rubbed it on her wrists and neck. The smell persisted, and at last she realized it came from the pulp mills. The town was difficult to walk around in because the streets were so steep, and in many places there was no sidewalk. There was no place to loiter. She thought people stared at her, recognizing a stranger. Some men in a car yelled at her. She saw her own reflection in store windows and understood that she looked as if she wanted to be stared at and yelled at. She was wearing black velvet toreador pants, a tight-fitting highnecked black sweater and a beige jacket which she slung over her shoulder, though there was a chilly wind. She who had once chosen full skirts and soft colors, babyish angora sweaters, scalloped necklines, had now taken to wearing dramatic sexually advertising clothes. The new underwear she had on at this moment was black lace and pink nylon. In the waiting room at the Vancouver airport she had done her eyes with heavy mascara, black eyeliner, and silver eyeshadow; her lipstick was almost white. All this was a fashion of those years and so looked less ghastly than it would seem later, but it was alarming enough. The assurance with which she carried such a disguise fluctuated considerably. She would not have dared parade it in front of Patrick or Jocelyn. When she went to see Jocelyn she always wore her baggiest slacks and sweaters. Nevertheless when she opened the door Jocelyn would say, “Hello, Sexy,” in a tone of friendly scorn. Jocelyn herself had become spectacularly unkempt. She dressed exclusively in old clothes of Clifford’s. Old pants that didn’t quite zip up on her because her stomach had never flattened out after Adam, and frayed white shirts Clifford had once worn for performances. Apparently Jocelyn thought the whole business of keeping your figure and wearing makeup and trying to look in any way seductive was sourly amusing, beneath contempt; it was like vacuuming the curtains. She said that Clifford felt the same way. Clifford, reported Jocelyn, was attracted by the very absence of female artifice and trappings; he liked unshaved legs and hairy armpits and natural smells. Rose wondered if Clifford had really said this, and why. Out of pity, or comradeliness; or as a joke?

Rose found a public library and went in and looked at the titles of the books, but she could not pay attention. There was a fairly incapacitating though not unpleasant buzzing throughout her head and body. At twenty to five she was back in the sunporch, waiting.

She was still waiting at ten past six. She had counted the money in her purse. A dollar and sixty-three cents. She could not go to a hotel. She did not think they would let her stay in the sunporch all night. There was nothing at all that she could do except pray that Clifford might still arrive. She did not believe he would. The schedule had been changed; he had been summoned home because one of the children was sick; he had broken his wrist and couldn’t play the violin; Powell River was not a real place at all but a bad-smelling mirage where guilty travelers were trapped for punishment. She wasn’t really surprised. She had made the jump that wasn’t to be made, and this was how she had landed.

Before the old men went in to supper she asked them if they knew of a concert being given that night in the high school auditorium. They answered grudgingly, no.

“Never heard of them giving no concerts here.”

She said that her husband was playing in the orchestra, it was on tour from Vancouver, she had flown up to meet him; she was supposed to meet him here.

Here?

“Maybe got lost,” said one of the old men in what seemed to her a spiteful, knowing way. “Maybe your husband got lost, heh? Husbands always getting lost!”

It was nearly dark out. This was October, and further north than Vancouver. She tried to think what to do. The only thing that occurred to her was to pretend to pass out, then claim loss of memory. Would Patrick ever believe that? She would have to say she had no idea what she was doing in Powell River. She would have to say she didn’t remember anything she had said in the limousine, didn’t know anything about the orchestra. She would have to convince policemen and doctors, be written about in the newspapers. Oh, where was Clifford, why had he abandoned her, could there have been an accident on the road? She thought she should destroy the piece of paper in her purse, on which she had written his instructions. She thought that she had better get rid of her diaphragm as well.

She was going through her purse when a van parked outside. She thought it must be a police van; she thought the old men must have phoned up and reported her as a suspicious character.

Clifford got out and came running up the sunporch steps. It took her a moment to recognize him.

They had beer and hamburgers in one of the hotels, a different hotel from the one where the orchestra was staying. Rose’s hands were shaking so that she slopped the beer. There had been a rehearsal he hadn’t counted on, Clifford said. Then he had been about half an hour looking for the bus depot.

“I guess it wasn’t such a bright idea, the bus depot.”

Her hand was lying on the table. He wiped the beer off with a napkin, then put his own hand over hers. She thought of this often, afterwards.

“We better get you checked in here.”

“Don’t we check in together?”

“Better if it’s just you.”

“Ever since I got here,” Rose said, “it has been so peculiar. It has been so sinister. I felt everybody knew.” She started telling him, in what she hoped was an entertaining way, about the limousine driver, the other passengers, the old men in the Loggers’ Home. “It was such a relief when you showed up, such a terrible relief. That’s why I’m shaking.” She told him about her plan to fake amnesia and the realization that she had better throw her diaphragm away. He laughed, but without delight, she thought. It seemed to her that when she spoke of the diaphragm his lips tightened, in reproof or distaste.

“But it’s lovely now,” she said hastily. This was the longest conversation they had ever had, face to face.

“It was just your guilt-feelings,” he said. “Which are natural.”

He stroked her hand. She tried to rub her finger on his pulse, as they used to do. He let go. Half an hour later, she was saying, “Is it all right if I still go to the concert?”

“Do you still want to?”

“What else is there to do?”

She shrugged as she said this. Her eyelids were lowered, her lips full and brooding. She was doing some sort of imitation, of Barbara Stanwyck perhaps, in similar circumstances. She didn’t intend to do an imitation, of course. She was trying to find some way to be so enticing, so aloof and enticing, that she would make him change his mind.

“The thing is, I have to get the van back. I have to pick up the other guys.”

“I can walk. Tell me where it is.”

“Uphill from here, I’m afraid.”

“That won’t hurt me.”

“Rose. It’s much better this way, Rose. It really is.”

“If you say so.” She couldn’t manage another shrug. She still thought there must be some way to turn things around and start again. Start again; set right whatever she had said or done wrong; make none of this true. She had already made the mistake of asking what she had said or done wrong and he had said, nothing. Nothing. She had nothing to do with it, he said. It was being away from home for a month that had made him see everything differently. Jocelyn. The children. The damage.

“It’s only mischief,” he said.

He had got his hair cut shorter than she had ever seen it. His tan had faded. Indeed, indeed, he looked as if he had shed a skin, and it was the skin that had hankered after hers. He was again the pale, and rather irritable, but dutiful, young husband she had observed paying visits to Jocelyn in the maternity ward.

“What is?”

“What we’re doing. It’s not some big necessary thing. It’s ordinary mischief.”

“You called me from Prince George.” Barbara Stanwyck had vanished, Rose heard herself begin to whine.

“I know I did.” He spoke like a nagged husband.

“Did you feel like this then?”

“Yes and no. We’d made all the plans. Wouldn’t it have been worse if I’d told you on the phone?”

“What do you mean, mischief?”

“Oh, Rose.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. If we went ahead with this, what good do you think it would do anybody? Rose? Really?”

“Us,” Rose said. “It would do us good.”

“No it wouldn’t. It would end up in one big mess.”

“Just once.”

“No.”

“You said just once. You said we would have a memory instead of a dream.”

“Jesus. I said a lot of puke.”

He had said her tongue was like a little warmblooded snake, a pretty snake, and her nipples like berries. He would not care to be reminded.

Overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla: Glinka

Serenade for Strings: Tchaikovsky

Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral:

First Movement

The Moldau: Smetana

William Tell Overture: Rossini

She could not hear any of this music for a long time without a specific attack of shame, that was like a whole wall crumbling in on her, rubble choking her.

Just before Clifford left on tour, Jocelyn had phoned Rose and said that her baby sitter could not come. It was the day she went to see her psychiatrist. Rose offered to come and look after Adam and Jerome. She had done this before. She made the long trip on three buses, taking Anna with her.

Jocelyn’s house was heated by an oil stove in the kitchen, and an enormous stone fireplace in the small living room. The oil stove was covered with spill-marks; orange peel and coffee grounds and charred wood and ashes tumbled out of the fireplace. There was no basement and no clothes dryer. The weather was rainy, and the ceiling-racks and stand-up racks were draped with damp graying sheets and diapers, hardening towels. There was no washing machine either. Jocelyn had washed those sheets in the bathtub.

“No washer or dryer but she’s going to a psychiatrist,” said Patrick, to whom Rose sometimes disloyally reported what she knew he would like to hear.

“She must be crazy,” Rose said. She made him laugh.

But Patrick didn’t like her going to baby-sit.

“You’re certainly at her beck and call,” he said. “It’s a wonder you don’t go and scrub her floors for her.”

As a matter of fact, Rose did.

When Jocelyn was there, the disorder of the house had a certain willed and impressive quality. When she was gone, it became unbearable. Rose would go to work with a knife, scraping at ancient crusts of Pablum on the kitchen chairs, scouring the coffee pot, wiping the floor. She did spare some time for investigation. She went into the bedroom – she had to watch out for Jerome, a precocious and irritating child – and looked at Clifford’s socks and underwear, all crumpled in with Jocelyn’s old nursing brassieres and torn garter belts. She looked to see if he had a record on the turntable, wondering if it would be something that would make him think of her.

Telemann. Not likely. But she played it, to hear what he had been hearing. She drank coffee from what she believed to be his dirty breakfast cup. She covered the casserole of Spanish rice from which he had taken his supper the night before. She sought out traces of his presence (he didn’t use an electric razor, he used old-fashioned shaving soap in a wooden bowl), but she believed that his life in that house, Jocelyn’s house, was all pretense, and waiting, like her own life in Patrick’s house.

When Jocelyn came home Rose felt she ought to apologize for the cleaning she had done, and Jocelyn, really wanting to talk about her fight with the psychiatrist who reminded her of her mother, agreed that it certainly was a cowardly mania, this thing Rose had about housecleaning, and she had better go to a psych herself, if she ever wanted to get rid of it. She was joking; but going home on the bus, with Anna cranky and no preparations made for Patrick’s supper, Rose did wonder why she always seemed to be on the wrong end of things, disapproved of by her own neighbors because she didn’t pay enough attention to housework, and reproved by Jocelyn for being insufficiently tolerant of the natural chaos and refuse of life. She thought of love, to reconcile herself. She was loved, not in a dutiful, husbandly way but crazily, adulterously, as Jocelyn and her neighbors were not. She used that to reconcile herself to all sorts of things: to Patrick, for instance, turning over in bed with an indulgent little clucking noise that meant she was absolved of all her failings for the moment, they were to make love.

The sane and decent things Clifford had said cut no ice with Rose at all. She saw that he had betrayed her. Sanity and decency were never what she had asked of him. She watched him, in the auditorium of the Powell River High School. She watched him playing his violin, with a somber and attentive expression she had once seen directed towards herself. She did not see how she could do without.

In the middle of the night she phoned him, from her hotel to his.

“Please talk to me.”

“That’s okay,” said Clifford, after a moment’s silence. “That’s okay, Joss.”

He must have a roommate, whom the phone might have wakened. He was pretending to talk to Jocelyn. Or else he was so sleepy he really thought she was Jocelyn.

“Clifford, it’s me’.”

“That’s okay,” Clifford said. “Take it easy. Go to sleep.”

He hung up the phone.

Jocelyn and Clifford are living in Toronto. They are not poor anymore. Clifford is successful. His name is seen on record jackets, heard on the radio. His face and more frequently his hands have appeared on television as he labors at his violin. Jocelyn has dieted and become slender, has had her hair cut and styled; it is parted in the middle and curves away from her face, with a wing of pure white rising from each temple.

They live in a large brick house on the edge of a ravine. There are bird-feeders in the back yard. They have installed a sauna. Clifford spends a good deal of time sitting there. He thinks that will keep him from becoming arthritic, like his father. Arthritis is his greatest fear.

Rose used to go to see them sometimes. She was living in the country, by herself. She taught at a community college and liked to have a place to stay overnight when she came in to Toronto. They seemed glad to have her. They said she was their oldest friend.

One time when Rose was visiting them Jocelyn told a story about Adam. Adam had an apartment in the basement of the house. Jerome lived downtown, with his girlfriend. Adam brought his girls here.

“I was reading in the den,” said Jocelyn, “when Clifford was out. I heard this girl, down in Adam’s apartment, saying no, no! The noise from his apartment comes straight up into the den. We warned him about that, we thought he’d be embarrassed—”

“I didn’t think he’d be embarrassed,” said Clifford.

“But he just said, we should put on the record player. So, I kept hearing the poor unknown girl bleating and protesting, and I didn’t know what to do. I thought these situations are really new, there are no precedents, are you supposed to stop your son from raping some girl if that’s what he’s doing, right under your nose or at least under your feet? I went downstairs eventually and I started getting all the family skis out of the closet that backs on his bedroom, I stayed there slamming those skis around, thinking I’d say I was going to polish them. It was July. Adam never said anything to me. I wish he’d move out.”

Rose told about how much money Patrick had and how he had married a sensible woman even richer than he was, who had made a dazzling living room with mirrors and pale velvet and a wire sculpture like blasted bird cages. Patrick did not mind Modern Art any more.

“Of course it isn’t the same,” said Rose to Jocelyn, “it isn’t the same house. I wonder what she has done with the Wedgwood vases.”

“Maybe she has a campy laundry room. She keeps the bleach in one and the detergent in the other.”

“They sit perfectly symmetrically on the shelf.”

But Rose had her old, old, twinge of guilt.

“Just the same, I like Patrick.”

Jocelyn said, “Why?”

“He’s nicer than most people.”

“Silly rot,” said Jocelyn. “And I bet he doesn’t like you.”

“That’s right,” Rose said. She started to tell them about her trip down on the bus. It was one of the times when she was not driving her car, because too many things were wrong with it and she could not afford to get it fixed.

“The man in the seat across from me was telling me about how he used to drive big trucks. He said we never seen trucks in this country like they got in the States.” She put on her country accent. “In the Yewnited States they got these special roads what they call turnpikes, and only trucks is allowed to go on them. They get serviced on these roads from one end of the country to the other and so most people never sees them at all. They’re so big the cab is half the size of a bus and they got a driver in there and an assistant driver and another driver and another assistant driver havin a sleep. Toilet and kitchen and beds and all. They go eighty, ninety miles an hour, because there is never no speed limit on them turnpikes.”

“You are getting very weird,” said Clifford. “Living up there.”

“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 middle-age 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 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 highrises 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 any, 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 deep-red 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 T.V.! 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 of lust, maybe. Jocelyn said she didn’t want to go to bed.

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

“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.