The Children Stay by Alice Munro. Part 6.
Watch on KineScope.
Most of the time she didn’t mention him; she circled around that pleasure. She described all the others, instead. The hairdresser and the harbor pilot and the waiter and the old man who claimed to have once acted on the radio. He played Orphée’s father and gave Jeffrey the most trouble, because he had the stubbornest notions of his own, about acting
The middle-aged impresario Monsieur Dulac was played by a twenty-four-year-old travel agent.
And Mathias, who was Eurydice’s former boyfriend, presumably around her own age, was played by the manager of a shoe store, who was married and a father of children.
Brian wanted to know why Monsieur le Directeur hadn’t cast these two the other way round.
“That’s the way he does things,” Pauline said. “What he sees in us is something only he can see.”
For instance, she said, the waiter was a clumsy Orphée.
“He’s only nineteen, he’s so shy Jeffrey has to keep at him. He tells him not to act like he’s making love to his grandmother. He has to tell him what to do. Keep your arms around her a little longer, stroke her here a little. I don’t know how it’s going to work—I just have to trust Jeffrey, that he knows what he’s doing.”
“‘Stroke her here a little’?” said Brian. “Maybe I should come around and keep an eye on these rehearsals.”
When she had started to quote Jeffrey Pauline had felt a giving-way in her womb or the bottom of her stomach, a shock that had travelled oddly upwards and hit her vocal cords. She had to cover up this quaking by growling in a way that was supposed to be an imitation (though Jeffrey never growled or ranted or carried on in any theatrical way at all).
“But there’s a point about him being so innocent,” she said hurriedly. “Being not so physical.
Being awkward.” And she began to talk about Orphée in the play, not the waiter. Orphée has a problem with love or reality. Orphée will not put up with anything less than perfection. He wants a love that is outside of ordinary life. He wants a perfect Eurydice.
“Eurydice is more realistic. She’s carried on with Mathias and with Monsieur Dulac. She’s been around her mother and her mother’s lover. She knows what people are like. But she loves Orphée.
She loves him better in a way than he loves her. She loves him better because she’s not such a fool.
She loves him like a human person.”
“But she’s slept with those other guys,” Brian said.
“Well with Mr. Dulac she had to, she couldn’t get out of it. She didn’t want to, but probably after a
while she enjoyed it, because after a certain point she couldn’t help enjoying it.”
So Orphée is at fault, Pauline said decidedly. He looks at Eurydice on purpose, to kill her and get
rid of her because she is not perfect. Because of him she has to die a second time.
Brian, on his back and with his eyes wide open (she knew that because of the tone of his voice)
said, “But doesn’t he die too?”
“Yes. He chooses to.”
“So then they’re together?”
“Yes. Like Romeo and Juliet. Orphée is with Eurydice at last. That’s what Monsieur Henri says. That’s the last line of the play. That’s the end.” Pauline rolled over onto her side and touched her cheek to Brian’s shoulder—not to start anything but to emphasize what she said next. “It’s a beautiful play in one way, but in another it’s so silly. And it isn’t really like Romeo and Juliet because it isn’t bad luck or circumstances. It’s on purpose. So they don’t have to go on with life and get married and have kids and buy an old house and fix it up and—”
“And have affairs,” said Brian. “After all, they’re French.” Then he said, “Be like my parents.”
Pauline laughed. “Do they have affairs? I can imagine.”
“Oh sure,” said Brian. “I meant their life.”
“Logically I can see killing yourself so you won’t turn into your parents,” Brian said. “I just don’t
believe anybody would do it.”
“Everybody has choices,” Pauline said dreamily. “Her mother and his father are both despicable in a way, but Orphée and Eurydice don’t have to be like them. They’re not corrupt. Just because she’s slept with those men doesn’t mean she’s corrupt. She wasn’t in love then. She hadn’t met Orphée.
There’s one speech where he tells her that everything she’s done is sticking to her, and it’s disgust-ing. Lies she’s told him. The other men. It’s all sticking to her forever. And then of course Monsieur Henri plays up to that. He tells Orphée that he’ll be just as bad and that one day he’ll walk down the street with Eurydice and he’ll look like a man with a dog he’s trying to lose.”
To her surprise, Brian laughed.
“No,” she said. “That’s what’s stupid. It’s not inevitable. It’s not inevitable at all.” They went on speculating, and comfortably arguing, in a way that was not usual, but not altogether unfamiliar to them. They had done this before, at long intervals in their married life-talked half the night about God or fear of death or how children should be educated or whether money was important. At last they admitted to being too tired to make sense any longer, and arranged themselves in a comradely position and went to sleep.