Alice Munros Best

property and what he had done with it. It was true that he was a taxidermist.
    Bea and Peter had some trouble finding Ladner’s house. It was just a basic A-frame in those days, hidden by the trees. They found the driveway at last and parked there and got out of the car. Bea was expecting to be introduced and taken on a tour and considerably bored for an hour or two, and perhaps to have to sit around drinking beer or tea while Peter Parr consolidated a friendship.
    Ladner came around the house and confronted them. It was Bea’s impression that he had a fierce dog with him. But this was not the case. Ladner did not own a dog. He was his own fierce dog.
    Ladner’s first words to them were “What do you want?”
    Peter Parr said that he would come straight to the point. “I’ve heard so much about this wonderful place you’ve made here,” he said. “AndI’ll tell you right off the bat, I am an educator. I educate high-school kids, or try to. I try to give them a few ideas that will keep them from mucking up the world or blowing it up altogether when their time comes. All around them what do they see but horrible examples? Hardly one thing that is positive. And that’s where I’m bold enough to approach you, sir. That’s what I’ve come here to ask you to consider.”
    Field trips. Selected students. See the difference one individual can make. Respect for nature, cooperation with the environment, opportunity to see at first hand.
    “Well, I am not an educator,” said Ladner. “I do not give a fuck about your teenagers, and the last thing I want is a bunch of louts shambling around my property smoking cigarettes and leering like half-wits. I don’t know where you got the impression that what I’ve done here I’ve done as a public service, because that is something in which I have zero interest. Sometimes I let people go through but they’re the people I decide on.”
    “Well, I wonder just about us,” said Peter Parr. “Just us, today – would you let us have a look?”
    “Out of bounds today,” said Ladner. “I’m working on the trail.”
    Back in the car, heading down the gravel road, Peter Parr said to Bea, “Well, I think that’s broken the ice, don’t you?”
    This was not a joke. He did not make that sort of joke. Bea said something vaguely encouraging. But she realized – or had realized some minutes before, in Ladner’s driveway – that she was on the wrong track with Peter Parr. She didn’t want any more of his geniality, his good intentions, his puzzling and striving. All the things that had appealed to her and comforted her about him were now more or less dust and ashes. Now that she had seen him with Ladner.
    She could have told herself otherwise, of course. But such was not her nature. Even after years of good behavior, it was not her nature.
    She had a couple of friends then, to whom she wrote and actually sent letters that tried to investigate and explain this turn in her life. She wrote that she would hate to think she had gone after Ladner because he was rude and testy and slightly savage, with the splotch on the side of his face that shone like metal in the sunlight coming through the trees. She would hate to think so, because wasn’t that the way in all the drearyromances – some brute gets the woman tingling and then it’s goodbye to Mr. Fine-and-Decent?
    No, she wrote, but what she did think – and she knew that this was very regressive and bad form – what she did think was that some women, women like herself, might be always on the lookout for an insanity that could contain them. For what was living with a man if it wasn’t living inside his insanity? A man could have a very ordinary, a very unremarkable, insanity, such as his devotion to a ball team. But that might not be enough, not big enough – and an insanity that was not big enough simply made a woman mean and discontented. Peter Parr, for instance, displayed kindness and hopefulness to a fairly fanatical degree. But in the end, for me, Bea wrote, that was not a suitable insanity.
    What did Ladner offer her, then, that she could live inside? She didn’t mean just that she would be able to accept the importance of learning the habits of porcupines and writing fierce letters on the subject to journals that she, Bea, had never before heard of. She meant also that she would be able to live surrounded by implacability, by ready doses of indifference which at times might seem like scorn.
    So she explained