Who Do You Think You Are

pretend it’s somebody else? Pretend it’s Jocelyn.” “Sure.”
    “I love you, Rose,” said Clifford, and hung up.
    “Who was that?” said Patrick.
    “Jocelyn.”
    “Does she have to call when I’m home?”
    “She forgot. Clifford’s at a rehearsal so she forgot other people aren’t working.” Rose delighted in saying Clifford’s name. Deceitfulness, concealment, seemed to come marvelously easy to her; that might almost be a pleasure in itself.
    “I didn’t realize they’d have to work Saturdays,” she said, to keep on the subject. “They must work terribly long hours.”
    “They don’t work any longer hours than normal people, it’s just strung out differently. He doesn’t look capable of much work.”
    “He’s supposed to be quite good. As a violinist.” “He looks like a jerk.”
    “Do you think so?”
    “Don’t you?”
    “I guess I never considered him, really.”
    J OCELYN PHONED on Monday and said she didn’t know why she gave parties, she was still wading through the mess.
    “Didn’t Clifford help clean it up?”
    “You are joking. I hardly saw him all weekend. He rehearsed Saturday and played yesterday. He says parties are my idea, I can deal with the aftermath. It’s true. I get these fits of gregariousness, a party is the only cure. Patrick was interesting.”
    “Very.”
    “He’s quite a stunning type, really, isn’t he?”
    “There are lots and lots like him. You just don’t get to meet them.” “Woe is me.”
    This was just like any other conversation with Jocelyn. Their conversations, their friendship, could go on in the same way. Rose did not feel bound by any loyalty to Jocelyn because she had divided Clifford. There was the Clifford Jocelyn knew, the same one she had always presented to Rose; there was also the Clifford Rose knew, now. She thought Jocelyn could be mistaken about him. For instance, when she said his childhood had left him bitter. What Jocelyn called bitterness seemed to Rose something more complex and more ordinary; just the weariness, suppleness, deviousness, meanness, common to a class. Common to Clifford’s class, and Rose’s. Jocelyn had been insulated in some ways, left stem and innocent. In some ways she was like Patrick.
    From now on Rose did see Clifford and herself as being one sort of people, and Jocelyn and Patrick, though they seemed so different, and so disliked each other, as being another sort. They were whole and predictable. They took the lives they were leading absolutely seriously. Compared to them, both Clifford and Rose were shifty pieces of business.
    If Jocelyn fell in love with a married man, what would she do? Before she even touched his hand, she would probably call a conference. Clifford would be invited, and the man himself, and the man’s wife, and very likely Jocelyn’s psychiatrist. (In spite of her rejection of her family Jocelyn believed that going to a psychiatrist was something everybody should do at developing or adjusting stages of life and she went herself, once a week.) Jocelyn would consider the implications; she would look things in the face. Never try to sneak her pleasure. She had never learned to sneak things. That was why it was unlikely that she would ever fall in love with another man. She was not greedy. And Patrick was not greedy either now, at least not for love.
    If loving Patrick was recognizing something good, and guileless, at the bottom of him, being in love with Clifford was something else altogether. Rose did not have to believe that Clifford was good, and certainly she knew he was not guileless. No revelation of his duplicity or heartlessness, towards people other than herself, could have mattered to her. What was she in love with, then, what did she want of him? She wanted tricks, a glittering secret, tender celebrations of lust, a regular conflagration of adultery. All this after five minutes in the rain.
    Six months or so after that party Rose lay awake all night. Patrick slept beside her in their stone and cedar house in a suburb called Capilano Heights, on the side of Grouse Mountain. The next night it was arranged that Clifford would sleep beside her, in Powell River, where he was playing with the touring orchestra. She could not believe that this would really happen. That is, she placed all her faith in the event, but could not fit it into the order of things that she knew.
    During all these months Clifford and Rose had never gone to bed together. They had not made love