The Progress of Love

gone out in tears more than once, got into her car, driven back to Toronto. Her lover, a cheerful Marxist from a Caribbean island, whom she doesn’t bring home, says that old men, successful old men, in a capitalist industrial society are almost purely evil; there is nothing left in them but raging defenses and greed. Denise argues with him, too. Her father is not an old man, in the first place. Her father is a good person, underneath.
    “I’m sick of your male definitions and airtight male arguments,” she says. Then she says thoughtfully, “Also, I’m sick of hearing myself say ‘male’ like that.” She knows better than to bring up the fact that if she lasts through the argument, her father will give her a check for the Centre.
    Today her resolve has held. She has caught the twinkle of the bait but has been able to slip past, a clever innocent-seeming fish, talking mostly to Magda, admiring various details of house renovation. Laurence, an ironic-looking, handsome man with a full gray mustache and soft, thinning gray-brown hair, a tall man with a little sag now to his shoulders and his stomach, has got up several times and walked to the lake and back, to the road and back, has sighed deeply, showing his dissatisfaction with this female talk.
    Finally he speaks abruptly to Denise, breaking through what Magda is saying.
    “How is your mother?”
    “Fine,” says Denise. “As far as I know, fine.”
    Isabel lives far away, in the Comox Valley, in British Columbia.
    “So—how is the goat farming?”
    The man Isabel lives with is a commercial fisherman who usedto be a TV cameraman. They live on a small farm and rent the land, or part of it, to a man who raises goats. At some point, Denise revealed this fact to Laurence (she has taken care not to reveal the fact that the man is several years younger than Isabel and that the relationship is periodically “unstable”), and Laurence has ever since insisted that Isabel and her paramour (his word) are engaged in goat farming. His questions bring to mind a world of rural hardship: muddy toil with refractory animals, poverty, some sort of ghastly outdated idealism.
    “Fine,” says Denise, smiling.
    Usually she argues, points out the error in fact, accuses him of distortion, ill will, mischief.
    “Enough counterculture left out there to buy goat milk?”
    “I would think so.”
    Laurence’s lips twitch under his mustache impatiently. She keeps on looking at him, maintaining an expression of innocent, impudent cheerfulness. Then he gives an abrupt laugh.
    “Goat milk!” he says.
    “Is this the new in-joke?” says Magda. “What am I missing? Goat milk?”
    Laurence says, “Magda, did you know that on my fortieth birthday Denise took me up in a plane?”
    “I didn’t actually fly it,” says Denise.
    “My fortieth birthday, 1969. The year of the moon shot. The moon shot was actually just a couple of days after. She’d heard me say I often wished I could get a look at this country from a thousand feet up. I’d go over it flying from Ottawa to Toronto, but I’d never see anything.”
    “I only paid enough for him to go up, but as it happened we all went up, in a five-seater,” Denise says. “For the same price.”
    “We all went except Isabel,” says Laurence. “Somebody had to bow out, so she did.”
    “I made him drive—Dad drive—blindfolded to the airport,” says Denise to Magda. “That is, not drive blindfolded”—they were all laughing— “ride blindfolded, so he wouldn’t know where we were going and it would be a complete surprise.”
    “Mother drove,” says Laurence. “I imagine I could have driven blindfolded better. Why did she drive and not Isabel?”
    “We had to go in Grandma’s car. The Peugeot wouldn’t take us all, and I had to have us all go to watch you because it was my big deal. My present. I was an awful stage manager.”
    “We flew all down the Rideau Lake system,” Laurence says. “Mother loved it. Remember she’d had a bad experience that morning, with the hippies? So it was good for her. The pilot was very generous. Of course he had his wife working. She made cakes, didn’t she?”
    Denise says, “She was a caterer.”
    “She made my birthday cake,” says Laurence. “That same birthday. I found that out later.”
    “Didn’t Isabel?” says Magda. “Didn’t Isabel make the cake?”
    “The oven wasn’t working,” says Denise, her voice gone cautionary and slightly regretful.
    “Ah,”