Alice Munros Best

hair has turned into a silvery fluff, and his face is lined. But nothing dreadful has happened to him – no pouches or jowls or alcoholic flush or sardonic droop of defeat. He is still thin, and straight, and sharp-shouldered, still fresh-smelling, spotless, appropriately, expensively dressed. He’ll make a brittle, elegant old man, with an obliging boy’s smile. There’s that sort of shine on both of them, Maya once said glumly. She was speaking of Raymond and Ben. Maybe we should soak them in vinegar, she said.
    The room has changed more than Raymond has. An ivory leather sofa has replaced Maya’s tapestry-covered couch, and of course all the old opium-den clutter, Maya’s cushions and pampas grass and the gorgeous multicolored elephant with the tiny sewn-on mirrors – that’s all gone. The room is beige and ivory, smooth and comfortable as the new blond wife, who sits on the arm of Raymond’s chair and maneuvers his arm around her, placing his hand on her thigh. She wears slick-looking white pants and a cream-on-white appliquéd sweater, with gold jewelry. Raymond gives her a couple of hearty and defiant pats.
    “Are you going someplace?” he says. “Possibly shopping?”
    “Righto,” says the wife. “Old times.” She smiles at Georgia. “It’s okay,” she says. “I really do have to go shopping.”
    When she has gone, Raymond pours drinks for Georgia and himself. “Anne is a worrywart about the booze,” he says. “She won’t put salt on the table. She threw out all the curtains in the house to get rid of the smell of Maya’s cigarettes. I know what you may be thinking: Friend Raymond has got hold of a luscious blonde. But this is actually a very serious girl, and a very steady girl. I had her in my office, you know, quite a while before Maya died. I mean, I had her
working
in my office. I don’t mean that the way it sounds! She isn’t as young as she looks, either. She’s thirty-six.”
    Georgia had thought forty. She is tired of the visit already, but she has to tell about herself. No, she is not married. Yes, she works. She and the friend she lives with have a farm and a publishing business. Touch and go, not much money. Interesting. A male friend, yes.
    “I’ve lost all track of Ben somehow,” Raymond says. “The last I heard, he was living on a boat.”
    “He and his wife sail around the West Coast every summer,” Georgia says. “In the winter they go to Hawaii. The Navy lets you retire early.”
    “Marvellous,” says Raymond.
    Seeing Raymond has made Georgia think that she has no idea what Ben looks like now. Has he gone white-haired, has he thickened around the middle? Both of these things have happened to her – she has turned into a chunky woman with a healthy olive skin, a crest of white hair, wearing loose and rather splashy clothes. When she thinks of Ben, she sees him still as a handsome Navy officer, with a perfect Navy look – keen and serious and self-effacing. The look of someone who longed, bravely, to be given orders. Her sons must have pictures of him around – they both see him, they spend holidays on his boat. Perhaps they put the pictures away when she comes to visit. Perhaps they think of protecting these images of him from one who did him hurt.
    On the way to Maya’s house – Raymond’s house – Georgia walked past another house, which she could easily have avoided. A house in Oak Bay, which in fact she had to go out of her way to see.
    It was still the house that she and Ben had read about in the real-estate columns of the Victoria
Colonist.
Roomy bungalow under picturesque oak trees. Arbutus, dogwood, window seats, fireplace, diamond-paned windows, character. Georgia stood outside the gate and felt a most predictable pain. Here Ben had cut the grass, here the children had made their paths and hideaways in the bushes, and laid out a graveyard for the birds and snakes killed by the black cat, Domino. She could recall the inside of the house perfectly – the oak floors she and Ben had laboriously sanded, the walls they had painted, the room where she had lain in drugged misery after having her wisdom teeth out. Ben had read aloud to her, from
Dubliners.
She couldn’t remember the title of the story. It was about a timid poetic sort of young man, with a mean pretty wife. Poor bugger, said Ben when he’d finished it.
    Ben liked fiction, which was surprising in a man who also liked sports, and had been popular at school.
    She ought to have stayed