Alice Munros Best

and that she had taken to giving dinner parties and having babies, just as wives used to do.
    “I wouldn’t laugh,” he said to Grant, who did not think he had been laughing. “And if I were you I’d try to prepare Fiona.”
    So Grant went off to find Fiona in Meadowlake – the old Meadowlake – and got into a lecture theater instead. Everybody was waiting there for him to teach his class. And sitting in the last, highest row was a flock of cold-eyed young women all in black robes, all in mourning, who never took their bitter stares off him and conspicuously did not write down, or care about, anything he was saying.
    Fiona was in the first row, untroubled. She had transformed the lecture room into the sort of corner she was always finding at a party – somehigh-and-dry spot where she drank wine with mineral water, and smoked ordinary cigarettes and told funny stories about her dogs. Holding out there against the tide, with some people who were like herself, as if the dramas that were being played out in other corners, in bedrooms and on the dark verandah, were nothing but childish comedy. As if charity was chic, and reticence a blessing.
    “Oh, phooey,” Fiona said. “Girls that age are always going around talking about how they’ll kill themselves.”
    But it wasn’t enough for her to say that – in fact, it rather chilled him. He was afraid that she was wrong, that something terrible had happened, and he saw what she could not – that the black ring was thickening, drawing in, all around his windpipe, all around the top of the room.
    HE HAULED HIMSELF out of the dream and set about separating what was real from what was not.
    There had been a letter, and the word “ RAT ” had appeared in black paint on his office door, and Fiona, on being told that a girl had suffered from a bad crush on him, had said pretty much what she said in the dream. The colleague hadn’t come into it, the black-robed women had never appeared in his classroom, and nobody had committed suicide. Grant hadn’t been disgraced, in fact he had got off easily when you thought of what might have happened just a couple of years later. But word got around. Cold shoulders became conspicuous. They had few Christmas invitations and spent New Year’s Eve alone. Grant got drunk, and without its being required of him – also, thank God, without making the error of a confession – he promised Fiona a new life.
    The shame he felt then was the shame of being duped, of not having noticed the change that was going on. And not one woman had made him aware of it. There had been the change in the past when so many women so suddenly became available – or it seemed that way to him – and now this new change, when they were saying that what had happened was not what they had had in mind at all. They had collaborated because they were helpless and bewildered, and they had been injured by the whole thing, rather than delighted. Even when they had takenthe initiative they had done so only because the cards were stacked against them.
    Nowhere was there any acknowledgement that the life of a philanderer (if that was what Grant had to call himself – he who had not had half as many conquests or complications as the man who had reproached him in his dream) involved acts of kindness and generosity and even sacrifice. Not in the beginning, perhaps, but at least as things went on. Many times he had catered to a woman’s pride, to her fragility, by offering more affection – or a rougher passion – than anything he really felt. All so that he could now find himself accused of wounding and exploiting and destroying self-esteem. And of deceiving Fiona – as of course he had deceived her – but would it have been better if he had done as others had done with their wives and left her?
    He had never thought of such a thing. He had never stopped making love to Fiona in spite of disturbing demands elsewhere. He had not stayed away from her for a single night. No making up elaborate stories in order to spend a weekend in San Francisco or in a tent on Manitoulin Island. He had gone easy on the dope and the drink and he had continued to publish papers, serve on committees, make progress in his career. He had never had any intention of throwing up work and marriage and taking to the country to practice carpentry or keep bees.
    But something like that had happened after all. He took an early retirement with a reduced pension. The cardiologist had died, after