Alice Munro - Open Secrets

Gail lies on the sofa pressing this letter with both hands against her stomach. Many things are changed. He has been in Walley, then — he has been told how she sold the shop and started out on her great world trip. But wouldn’t he have heard that anyway, from Cleata? Maybe not, Cleata was close-mouthed. And when she went into the hospital, just before Gail left, she said, “I don’t want to see or hear from anybody for a while or bother with letters. These treatments are bound to be a bit melodramatic.”

Cleata is dead.

Gail knew that Cleata would die, but somehow thought that everything would hold still, nothing could really happen there while she, Gail, remained here. Cleata is dead and Will is alone except for Sandy, and Sandy perhaps has stopped being of much use to him.

There is a knock on the door. Gail jumps up in a great disturbance, looking for a scarf to cover her hair. It is the manager, calling her false name.

“I just wanted to tell you I had somebody here asking questions. He asked me about Miss Thornaby and I said, Oh, she’s dead. She’s been dead for some time now. He said, Oh, has she? I said, Yes, she has, and he said, Well, that’s strange.”

“Did he say why?” Gail says, “Did he say why it was strange?”

“No. I said, She died in the hospital and I’ve got an American lady in the flat now. I forgot where you told me you came from. He sounded like an American himself, so it might’ve meant something to him. I said, There was a letter come for Miss Thornaby after she was dead, did you write that letter? I told him I sent it back. Yes, he said, I wrote it, but I never got it back. There must be some kind of mistake, he said.”

Gail says there must be. “Like a mistaken identity,” she says.

“Yes. Like that.”

Dear Ms. Thornaby ,

It has come to my attention that you are dead. I know that life is strange, but I have never found it quite this strange before. Who are you and what is going on? It seems this rigamarole about the Thornabys must have been just that — a rigamarole. You must certainly be a person with time on your hands and a fantasizing turn of mind. I resent being taken in but I suppose I understand the temptation. I do think you owe me an explanation now as to whether or not my explanation is true and this is some joke. Or am I dealing with some “fashion buyer” from beyond the grave? (Where did you get that touch or is it the truth? )

When Gail goes out to buy food, she uses the back door of the building, she takes a roundabout route to the shops. On her return by the same back-door route, she comes upon the young red-haired man standing between the dustbins. If he had not been so tall, you might have said that he was hidden there. She speaks to him but he doesn’t answer. He looks at her through tears, as if the tears were nothing but a wavy glass, something usual.

“Is your father sick?” Gail says to him. She has decided that this must be the relationship, though the age gap seems greater than usual between father and son, and the two of them are quite unalike in looks, and the young man’s patience and fidelity are so far beyond — nowadays they seem even contrary to — anything a son customarily shows. But they go beyond anything a hired attendant might show, as well.

“No,” the young man says, and though his expression stays calm, a drowning flush spreads over his face, under the delicate redhead’s skin.

Lovers, Gail thinks. She is suddenly sure of it. She feels a shiver of sympathy, an odd gratification.

Lovers.

She goes down to her mailbox after dark and finds there another letter.

I might have thought that you were out of town on one of your fashion-buying jaunts but the manager tells me you have not been away since taking the flat, so I must suppose your “leave of absence” continues. He tells me also that you are a brunette. I suppose we might exchange descriptions — and then, with trepidation, photographs — in the brutal manner of people meeting through newspaper ads. It seems that in my attempt to get to know you I am willing to make quite a fool of myself. Nothing new of course in that.…

Gail does not leave the apartment for two days. She does without milk, drinks her coffee black. What will she do when she runs out of coffee? She eats odd meals — tuna fish spread on crackers when she has no bread to make a sandwich, a dry end of cheese, a couple of mangos. She goes out into the upstairs hall of the Miramar — first opening the door a crack, testing the air for an occupant — and walks to the arched window that overlooks the street. And from long ago a feeling comes back to her — the feeling of watching a street, the visible bit of a street, where a car is expected to appear, or may appear, or may not appear. She even remembers now the cars themselves — a blue Austin mini, a maroon Chevrolet, a family station wagon. Cars in which she travelled short distances, illicitly and in a bold daze of consent. Long before Will.

She doesn’t know what clothes Will will be wearing, or how his hair is cut, or if he will have some change in his walk or expression, some change appropriate to his life here. He cannot have changed more than she has. She has no mirror in the apartment except the little one on the bathroom cupboard, but even that can tell her how much thinner she has got and how the skin of her face has toughened. Instead of fading and wrinkling as fair skin often does in this climate, hers has got a look of dull canvas. It could be fixed up — she sees that. With the right kind of makeup a look of exotic sullenness could be managed. Her hair is more of a problem — the red shows at the roots, with shiny strands of gray. Nearly all the time she keeps it hidden by a scarf.

When the manager knocks on her door again, she has only a second or two of crazy expectation. He begins to call her name. “Mrs. Massie, Mrs. Massie! Oh, I hoped you’d be in. I wondered if you could just come down and help me. It’s the old bloke downstairs, he’s fallen off the bed.”

He goes ahead of her down the stairs, holding to the railing and dropping each foot shakily, precipitately, onto the step below.

“His friend isn’t there. I wondered. I didn’t see him yesterday. I try and keep track of people but I don’t like to interfere. I thought he probably would’ve come back in the night. I was sweeping out the foyer and I heard a thump and I went back in there — I wondered what was going on. Old bloke all by himself, on the floor.”

The apartment is no larger than Gail’s, and laid out in the same way. It has curtains down over the bamboo blinds, which make it very dark. It smells of cigarettes and old cooking and some kind of pine-scented air freshener. The sofa bed has been pulled out, made into a double bed, and the old man is lying on the floor beside it, having dragged some of the bedclothes with him. His head without the toupee is smooth, like a dirty piece of soap. His eyes are half shut and a noise is coming from deep inside him like the noise of an engine hopelessly trying to turn over.

“Have you phoned the ambulance?” Gail says.

“If you could just pick up the one end of him,” the manager says. “I have a bad back and I dread putting it out again.”

“Where is the phone?” says Gail. “He may have had a stroke. He may have broken his hip. He’ll have to go to the hospital.”

“Do you think so? His friend could lift him back and forth so easy. He had the strength. And now he’s disappeared.”

Gail says, “I’ll phone.”

“Oh, no. Oh, no. I have the number written down over the phone in my office. I don’t let any other person go in there.”

Left alone with the old man, who probably cannot hear her, Gail says, “It’s all right. It’s all right. We’re getting help for you.” Her voice sounds foolishly sociable. She leans down to pull the blanket up over his shoulder, and to her great surprise a hand flutters out, searches for and grabs her own. His hand is slight and bony, but warm enough, and dreadfully strong. “I’m here, I’m here,” she says, and wonders if she is impersonating the red-haired young man, or some other young man, or a woman, or even his mother.