Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro Read Free Book Online

table.
    “That’s her business?” said Joyce.
    “Apparently she thinks so.”
    “When does she get to examine our kitchen table?”
    “She has to go through to the toilet. She can’t be expected to piss in the bush.”
    “I really don’t see what business-”
    “And sometimes she comes in and makes a couple of sandwiches for us-”
    “So? It’s my kitchen. Ours.”
    “It’s just that she feels so threatened by the booze. She’s still pretty fragile. It’s a thing you and I can’t understand.”
    Threatened. Booze. Fragile.
    What words were these for Jon to use?
    She should have understood, and at that moment, even if he himself was nowhere close to knowing. He was falling in love.
    Falling. That suggests some time span, a slipping under. But you can think of it as a speeding up, a moment or a second when you fall. Now Jon is not in love with Edie. Tick. Now he is. No way this could be seen as probable or possible, unless you think of a blow between the eyes, a sudden calamity. The stroke of fate that leaves a man a cripple, the wicked joke that turns clear eyes into blind stones.
    Joyce set about convincing him that he was mistaken. He had so little experience of women. None, except for her. They had always thought that experimenting with various partners was childish, adultery was messy and destructive. Now she wondered, Should he have played around more?
    And he had spent the dark winter months shut up in his workshop, exposed to the confident emanations of Edie. It was comparable to getting sick from bad ventilation.
    Edie would drive him crazy, if he went ahead and took her seriously.
    “I’ve thought of that,” he said. “Maybe she already has.”
    Joyce said that was stupid adolescent talk, making himself out to be dumbstruck, helpless.
    “What do you think you are, some knight of the Round Table? Somebody slipped you a potion?”
    Then she said she was sorry. The only thing to do, she said, was to take this up as a shared program. Valley of the shadow. To be seen someday as a mere glitch in the course of their marriage.
    “We will ride this out,” she said.
    Jon looked at her distantly, even kindly.
    “There is no ‘we,’” he said.
    How could this have happened? Joyce asks it of Jon and of herself and then of others. A heavy-striding heavy-witted carpenter’s apprentice in baggy pants and flannel shirts and-as long as the winter lasted-a dull thick sweater flecked with sawdust. A mind that plods inexorably from one cliché or foolishness to the next and proclaims every step of the journey to be the law of the land. Such a person has eclipsed Joyce with her long legs and slim waist and long silky braid of dark hair. Her wit and her music and the second-highest IQ.
    “I’ll tell you what I think it was,” says Joyce. This is later on, when the days have lengthened and the dandles of swamp lilies flame in the ditches. When she went to teach music wearing tinted glasses to hide eyes that were swollen from weeping and drinking, and instead of driving home after work drove to Willingdon Park where she hoped Jon would come looking for her, fearing suicide. (He did that, but only once.)
    “I think it was that she’d been on the streets,” she said. “Prostitutes get themselves tattooed for business reasons, and men are aroused by that sort of thing. I don’t mean the tattoos-well that too, of course, they’re aroused by that too-I mean the fact of having been for sale. All that availability and experience. And now reformed. It’s your fucking Mary Magdalene, that’s what it is. And he’s such an infant sexually, it all makes you sick.”
    She has friends now to whom she can talk like this. They all have stories. Some of them she knew before, but not as she knows them now. They confide and drink and laugh till they cry. They say they can’t believe it. Men. What they do. It’s so sick and stupid. You can’t believe it.
    That’s why it’s true.
    In the midst of this talk Joyce feels