The Children Stay by Alice Munro. Part 2.
Watch on KineScope.
She was asked if she would like to be in this play by a man she met at a barbecue, in June. The people at the barbecue were mostly teachers and their wives or husbands—it was held at the house of the principal of the high school where Brian teaches. The woman who taught French was a widow—she had brought her grown son who was staying for the summer with her and working as a night clerk in a downtown hotel. She told everybody that he had got a job teaching at a college in western Washington State and would be going there in the fall.
Jeffrey Toom was his name. “Without the B,” he said, as if the staleness of the joke wounded him.
It was a different name from his mother’s, because she had been widowed twice, and he was the son of her first husband. About the job he said, “No guarantee it’ll last, it’s a one-year appointment.”
What was he going to teach?
“Dram-ah,” he said, drawing the word out in a mocking way.
He spoke of his present job disparagingly, as well.
“It’s a pretty sordid place,” he said. “Maybe you heard—a hooker was killed there last winter. And then we get the usual losers checking in to OD or bump themselves off.”
People did not quite know what to make of this way of talking and drifted away from him. Except for Pauline.
“I’m thinking about putting on a play,” he said. “Would you like to be in it?” He asked her if she had ever heard of a play called Eurydice.
Pauline said, “You mean Anouilh’s?” and he was unflatteringly surprised. He immediately said he didn’t know if it would ever work out. “I just thought it might be interesting to see if you could do something different here in the land of Noël Coward.”
Pauline did not remember when there had been a play by Noël Coward put on in Victoria, though she supposed there had been several. She said, “We saw The Duchess of Malfi last winter at the college. And the little theater did A Resounding Tinkle, but we didn’t see it.”
“Yeah. Well,” he said, flushing. She had thought he was older than she was, at least as old as Brian (who was thirty, though people were apt to say he didn’t act it), but as soon as he started talking to her, in this offhand, dismissive way, never quite meeting her eyes, she suspected that he was younger than he’d like to appear. Now with that flush she was sure of it.
As it turned out, he was a year younger than she was. Twenty-five.
She said that she couldn’t be Eurydice; she couldn’t act. But Brian came over to see what the conversation was about and said at once that she must try it.
“She just needs a kick in the behind,” Brian said to Jeffrey. “She’s like a little mule, it’s hard to get her started. No, seriously, she’s too self-effacing, I tell her that all the time. She’s very smart. She’s actually a lot smarter than I am.”
At that Jeffrey did look directly into Pauline’s eyes—impertinently and searchingly—and she was the one who was flushing.
He had chosen her immediately as his Eurydice because of the way she looked. But it was not because she was beautiful. “I’d never put a beautiful girl in that part,” he said. “I don’t know if I’d ever put a beautiful girl on stage in anything. It’s too much. It’s distracting.”
So what did he mean about the way she looked? He said it was her hair, which was long and dark and rather bushy (not in style at that time), and her pale skin (“Stay out of the sun this summer”) and most of all her eyebrows.
“I never liked them,” said Pauline, not quite sincerely. Her eyebrows were level, dark, luxuriant.
They dominated her face. Like her hair, they were not in style. But if she had really disliked them, wouldn’t she have plucked them?
Jeffrey seemed not to have heard her. “They give you a sulky look and that’s disturbing,” he said.
“Also your jaw’s a little heavy and that’s sort of Greek. It would be better in a movie where I could get you close up. The routine thing for Eurydice would be a girl who looked ethereal. I don’t want ethereal.”