Read Online The Progress of Love by Alice Munro - Free Book Online Page A

Read’s apartment, or house, or room. David leans against the metal shelf, where his change is waiting. A car has parked in the liquor-store lot. The couple in it are watching him. Obviously waiting to use the phone. With any luck, Ron and Mary will drive up next.
    Dina lives above an Indian-import shop. Her clothes and hair always have a smell of curry powder, nutmeg, incense, added to what David thinks of as her natural smell, of cigarettes and dope and sex. Her hair is dyed dead black. Her cheeks bear a slash of crude color and her eyelids are sometimes brick red. She tried outonce for a part in a movie some people she knew about were making. She failed to get the part because of some squeamishness about holding a tame rat between her legs. This failure humiliated her.
    David sweats now, trying not to catch her out but to catch her any way at all, to hear her harsh young voice, with its involuntary tremor and insistent obscenities. Even if hearing it, at this moment, means that she has betrayed him. Of course she has betrayed him. She betrays him all the time. If only she would answer (he has almost forgotten it’s M. Read who is supposed to answer), he could howl at her, berate her, and if he felt low enough—he would feel low enough—he could plead with her. He would welcome the chance. Any chance. At dinner, talking in a lively way to Stella and Catherine, he kept writing the name Dina with his finger on the underside of the wooden table.
    People don’t have any patience with this sort of suffering, and why should they? The sufferer must forgo sympathy, give up on dignity, cope with the ravages. And on top of that, people will take time out to tell you that this isn’t real love. These bouts of desire and dependence and worship and perversity, willed but terrible transformations—they aren’t real love.
    Stella used to tell him he wasn’t interested in love. “Or sex, even. I don’t think you’re even interested in sex, David. I think all you’re interested in is being a big bad boy.”
    Real love—that would be going on living with Stella, or taking on Catherine. A person presumed to know all about Real Love might be Ron, of Ron-and-Mary.
    David knows what he’s doing. This is the interesting part of it, he thinks, and has said. He knows that Dina is not really so wild, or so avid, or doomed, as he pretends she is, or as she sometimes pretends she is. In ten years’ time, she won’t be wrecked by her crazy life, she won’t be a glamorous whore. She’ll be a woman tagged by little children in the laundromat. The delicious, old-fashioned word “trollop,” which he uses to describe her, doesn’t apply to her, really—has no more to do with her than “hippie” had to do with Catherine, a person he cannot now bear to think about. He knows that sooner or later, if Dina allows her disguise to crack,as Catherine did, he will have to move on. He will have to do that anyway—move on.
    He knows all this and observes himself, and such knowledge and observation has no effect at all on his quaking gut, zealous sweat glands, fierce prayers.
    “Sir? Do you want to keep on trying?”
    The nursing home that they visited, earlier in the day, is called the Balm of Gilead Home. It is named after the balm-of-Gilead trees, a kind of poplar, that grow plentifully near the lake. A large stone mansion built by a nineteenth-century millionaire, it is now disfigured by ramps and fire escapes.
    Voices summoned Stella, from the clusters of wheelchairs on the front lawn. She called out various names in answer, detoured to press hands and drop kisses. Vibrating here and there like a fat hummingbird.
    She sang when she rejoined David:
“I’m your little sunbeam, short and stout ,
Turn me over, pour me out!”
    Out of breath, she said, “Actually it’s teapot. I don’t think you’ll see much change in Daddy. Except the blindness is total now.”
    She led him through the green painted corridors, with their low false