The Progress of Love

wanted to—but there was real kindness and consideration behind this impulse, as well. Robert thought so. “I knew she wouldn’t want not to know,” Karen said, and that was true. Nobody would want not to know. To go out into the street, not knowing. To go around doing all the usual daily things, not knowing. He himself felt troubled, even slightly humiliated, to think that he hadn’t known; Peg hadn’t let him know.
    Talk ran backward from the events of the morning. Where were the Weebles seen, and in what harmlessness and innocence, and how close to the moment when everything was changed?
    She had stood in line at the Bank of Montreal on Friday afternoon.
    He had got a haircut on Saturday morning.
    They were together, buying groceries, in the I.G.A. on Friday evening at about eight o’clock.
    What did they buy? A good supply? Specials, advertised bargains, more than enough to last for a couple of days?
    More than enough. A bag of potatoes, for one thing.
    Then reasons. The talk turned to reasons. Naturally. There had been no theories put forward in the diner. Nobody knew the reason, nobody could imagine. But by the end of the afternoon there were too many explanations to choose from.
    Financial problems. He had been mixed up in some bad investment scheme in Hamilton. Some wild money-making deal that had fallen through. All their money was gone and they would have to live out the rest of their lives on the old-age pension.
    They had owed money on their income taxes. Being an accountant, he thought he know how to fix things, but he had been found out. He would be exposed, perhaps charged, shamed publicly, left poor. Even if it was only cheating the government, it would still be a disgrace when that kind of thing came out.
    Was it a lot of money?
    Certainly. A lot.
    It was not money at all. They were ill. One of them or both of them. Cancer. Crippling arthritis. Alzheimer’s disease. Recurrent mental problems. It was health, not money. It was suffering and helplessness they feared, not poverty.
    A division of opinion became evident between men and women. It was nearly always the men who believed and insisted that the trouble had been money, and it was the women who talked of illness. Who would kill themselves just because they were poor, said some women scornfully. Or even because they might go to jail? It was always a woman, too, who suggested unhappiness in the marriage, who hinted at the drama of a discovered infidelity or the memory of an old one.
    Robert listened to all these explanations but did not believe any of them. Loss of money, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease. Equallyplausible, these seemed to him, equally hollow and useless. What happened was that he believed each of them for about five minutes, no longer. If he could have believed one of them, hung on to it, it would have been as if something had taken its claws out of his chest and permitted him to breathe.
    (“They weren’t Gilmore people, not really,” a woman said to him in the bank. Then she looked embarrassed. “I don’t mean like you.”)
    Peg kept busy getting some children’s sweaters, mitts, snow-suits ready for the January sale. People came up to her when she was marking the tags, and she said, “Can I help you,” so that they were placed right away in the position of being customers, and had to say that there was something they were looking for. The Arcade carried ladies’ and children’s clothes, sheets, towels, knitting wool, kitchenware, bulk candy, magazines, mugs, artificial flowers, and plenty of other things besides, so it was not hard to think of something.
    What was it they were really looking for? Surely not much in the way of details, description. Very few people actually want that, or will admit they do, in a greedy and straightforward way. They want it, they don’t want it. They start asking, they stop themselves. They listen and they back away. Perhaps they wanted from Peg just some kind of acknowledgment, some word or look that would send them away, saying, “Peg Kuiper is absolutely shattered.” “I saw Peg Kuiper. She didn’t say much but you could tell she was absolutely shattered.”
    Some people tried to talk to her, anyway.
    “Wasn’t that terrible what happened down by you?”
    “Yes, it was.”
    “You must have known them a little bit, living next door.”
    “Not really. We hardly knew them at all.”
    “You never noticed anything that would’ve led you to think this could’ve