Alice Munros Best

probably like to be outside some of the time. In the sun. I don’t suppose you’d consider hiring me to sit there, so you could get out?”
    “Well, I would like to –” I said.
    “I’m not so dumb. I’m fairly knowledgeable, really. Ask me who wrote Ovid’s
Metamorphoses.
It’s all right, you don’t have to laugh.”
    “I would like to, but I really can’t afford to.”
    “Oh, well. You’re probably right. I’m not very chic. And I would probably foul things up. I would argue with people if they were buying books I thought were dreadful.” She did not seem disappointed. She picked up a copy of
The Dud Avocado
and said, “There! I have to buy this, for the title.”
    She gave a little whistle, and the man it seemed to be meant for looked up from the table of books he had been staring at, near the back of the store. I had known he was there but had not connected him with her. I thought he was just one of those men who wander in off the street, alone, and stand looking about, as if trying to figure out what sort of place this is or what the books are for. Not a drunk or a panhandler, and certainly not anybody to be worried about – just one of a number of shabby, utterly uncommunicative old men who belong to the city somewhat as the pigeons do, moving restlessly all day within a limited area, never looking at people’s faces. He was wearing a coat that came down to his ankles, made of some shiny, rubberized, liver-colored material, and a brown velvet cap with a tassel. The sort of cap a doddery old scholar or a clergyman might wear in an English movie. There was, then, a similarity between them – they were both wearing things that might have been discards from a costume box. But close up he looked years older than she. A long, yellowish face, drooping tobacco-brown eyes, an unsavory, straggling mustache. Some faint remains of handsomeness, or potency. A quenched ferocity. He came at her whistle – which seemed half serious, half a joke – and stood by, mute and self-respecting as a dog or a donkey, while the woman prepared to pay.
    At that time, the government of British Columbia applied a sales tax to books. In this case it was four cents.
    “I can’t pay that,” she said. “A tax on books. I think it is immoral. I would rather go to jail. Don’t you agree?”
    I agreed. I did not point out – as I would have done with anybody else – that the store would not be let off the hook on that account.
    “Don’t I sound appalling?” she said. “See what this government can do to people? It makes them into
orators
.”
    She put the book in her bag without paying the four cents, and never paid the tax on any future occasion.
    I described the two of them to the Notary Public. He knew at once who I meant.
    “I call them the Duchess and the Algerian,” he said. “I don’t know what the background is. I think maybe he’s a retired terrorist. They go around the town with a wagon, like scavengers.”
    I GOT A NOTE asking me to supper on a Sunday evening. It was signed Charlotte, without a surname, but the wording and handwriting were quite formal.
    My husband Gjurdhi and I would be delighted –
    Up until then I had not wished for any invitations of this sort and would have been embarrassed and disturbed to get one. So the pleasure I felt surprised me. Charlotte held out a decided promise; she was unlike the others whom I wanted to see only in the store.
    The building where they lived was on Pandora Street. It was covered with mustard stucco and had a tiny, tiled vestibule that reminded me of a public toilet. It did not smell, though, and the apartment was not really dirty, just horrendously untidy. Books were stacked against the walls, and pieces of patterned cloth were hung up droopily to hide the wallpaper. There were bamboo blinds on the window, sheets of colored paper – surely flammable – pinned over the light bulbs.
    “What a darling you are to come,” cried Charlotte. “We were afraid you would have tons more interesting things to do than visiting ancient old us. Where can you sit down? What about here?” She took a pile of magazines off a wicker chair. “Is that comfortable? It makes such interesting noises, wicker. Sometimes I’ll be sitting here alone and that chair will start creaking and cracking exactly as if someone were shifting around in it. I could say it was a presence, but I’m no good at believing in that rubbish. I’ve tried.”
    Gjurdhi poured out a sweet