Alice Munros Best

lipstick, and her skin was rough and pale, with marks like faint bird tracks in the hollows of her cheeks. This lack of color, this roughness of texture about her seemed a splendid assertion of quality. How indifferent she looked, how arrogant and indifferent, with her bare feet, her unpainted toenails, her queer robe. The only thing that she had done to her face was to paint her eyebrows blue – to pluck out all the hairs of her eyebrows, in fact, and paint the skin blue. Not an arched line – just a little daub of blue over each eye, like a swollen vein.
    Georgia, whose dark hair was teased, whose eyes were painted in the style of the time, whose breasts were stylishly proffered, found all this disconcerting, and wonderful.
    Harvey was the other person there whose looks Georgia found impressive. He was a short man with heavy shoulders, a slight potbelly, puffy blue eyes, and a pugnacious expression. He came from Lancashire. His gray hair was thin on top but worn long at the sides – combed over his ears in a way that made him look more like an artist than a surgeon. “He doesn’t even look to me exactly clean enough to be a surgeon,” Georgia said to Ben afterward. “Wouldn’t you think he’d be something like a sculptor? With gritty fingernails? I expect he treats women badly.” She was recalling how he had looked at her breasts. “Not like Raymond,” she said. “Raymond worships Maya. And he is extremely clean.”
    (Raymond has the kind of looks everybody’s mother is crazy about, Maya was to say to Georgia, with slashing accuracy, a few weeks after this.)
    The food that Maya served was no better than you would expect at a family dinner, and the heavy silver forks were slightly tarnished. But Raymond poured good wine that he would have liked to talk about. He did not manage to interrupt Harvey, who told scandalous and indiscreet hospital stories, and was blandly outrageous about necrophilia and masturbation. Later, in the living room, the coffee was made and served with some ceremony. Raymond got everybody’s attention as he ground the beans in a Turkish cylinder. He talked about the importance of the aromatic oils. Harvey, halted in mid-anecdote, watched with an unkindly smirk, Hilda with patient polite attention. It was Maya who gave her husband radiant encouragement, hung about him like an acolyte, meekly and gracefully assisting. She served the coffee in beautiful little Turkish cups, which she and Raymond had bought in a shop in San Francisco, along with the coffee grinder. She listened demurely to Raymond talking about the shop, as if she recalled other holiday pleasures.
    Harvey and Hilda were the first to leave. Maya hung on Raymond’s shoulder, saying goodbye. But she detached herself once they were gone, her slithery grace and wifely demeanor discarded. She stretched out casually and awkwardly on the sofa and said, “Now, don’t you go yet. Nobody gets half a chance to talk while Harvey is around – you have to talk after.”
    And Georgia saw how it was. She saw that Maya was hoping not to be left alone with the husband whom she had aroused – for whatever purposes – by her showy attentions. She saw that Maya was mournful and filled with a familiar dread at the end of her dinner party. Raymond was happy. He sat down on the end of the sofa, lifting Maya’s reluctant feet to do so. He rubbed one of her feet between his hands.
    “What a savage,” Raymond said. “This is a woman who won’t wear shoes.”
    “Brandy!” said Maya, springing up. “I knew there was something else you did at dinner parties. You drink brandy!”
    “He loves her but she doesn’t love him,” said Georgia to Ben, just after she had remarked on Raymond’s worshipping Maya and being very clean. But Ben, perhaps not listening carefully, thought she was talking about Harvey and Hilda.
    “No, no, no. There I think it’s the other way round. It’s hard to tell with English people. Maya was putting on an act for them. I have an idea about why.”
    “You have an idea about everything,” said Ben.
    GEORGIA AND MAYA became friends on two levels. On the first level, they were friends as wives; on the second as themselves. On the first level, they had dinner at each other’s houses. They listened to their husbands talk about their school days. The jokes and fights, the conspiracies and disasters, the bullies and the victims. Terrifying or pitiable school fellows and teachers, treats and humiliations. Maya