First Impressions: Lichen by Alice Munro

Reader beware: I go into detail about the content of the story after the cut.
 
I read this story in Penguin's anthology of eleven of Munro's short stories about love, entitled "The Progress of Love."

Lichen, which takes place in a small town by Lake Huron, is about a divorced couple, David and Stella. They have been divorced for eight years at the start of the story, although they were married for much longer than that; they're probably in their mid- to late-forties. David, with his girlfriend Catherine, is visiting Stella at her cottage home, as he does every year for his father-in-law's birthday. Together, they visit the senior's home where David gives the 90-year old the same gift he always does: a bottle of Scotch whiskey.
 

From the beginning of this story, it is apparent that David is a jerk. He doesn't require any sympathy and as a young woman, I raged a little. "Who is this guy, talking about women like they're meat?" After catching a glimpse of his ex-wife for the first time in a year, his first comment is that she looks like a "troll." When he first saw Catherine he thought she was in her early thirties, only to be disappointed later on to find out that she is closer to forty. He unabashedly admits to creating a mystique around women and subsequently dumps them when that mystique fades into reality.

He is the sort of human being more interested in being infatuated with the image of a woman than being in love with a real woman, and he is fully aware of this fact. In the face of it, he pushes away any rationale thought; he is too addicted to the sweaty palms, fluttering heart, and twisted gut feeling of pining over a woman who doesn't want him. He doesn't want to be wanted or loved, nor does he want to love; he just wants to want what he can't have. 

Unfortunately, as much as I'd like to rage at him  for being a jerk, his emotions and actions are not exclusive to the male sex. Any human being is capable of being as much of a jerk as David is and Munro describes his thoughts and actions in a familiar stream of thought third person narrative. "Yes," I think to myself, "I've acted like David before." So I won't rage at him, but I won't sympathize with him either, because everyone's aloud to be infatuated. He, however, never learns to grow up and out of the infatuation like most people do. Technically, he's a grown man, but in reality, as his father-in-law astutely notes, he is a man perpetually learning how to be a man. He's too caught up in fantasies, but not the good fantasies, the ones that when you finally wake up, you realize all the destruction you've caused, and all the people you've hurt, and that you've alienated yourself from anyone willing to love you.

Which is where Stella comes in. David considers her his harbor of secrets, as if her physical weight is the direct result of Stella carrying around everything that she knows about him. In fact, she knows him better than he knows himself: she reads his thoughts near the end of the story to which he replies, "Madam Stella, the celebrated mind reader." Its almost ironic that he calls her a troll at the beginning of the story, because she could frankly reply, "You have made me this way with your ugly secrets."

In fact, there are only two times that the narrator provides a glimpse into Stella's mind: during her conversation with Catherine, where you learn that Stella is a very astute and observant, and that she has a good memory, and at the end of the story. Her friendly relationship with David is probably a facade; during their divorce they didn't get along so well. Time eroded the bitterness between the them, but David, oblivious to everything but his wanton lust, has overestimated the closeness of their relationship. I really don't know why he thinks he can talk as freely with his ex-wife as he does, but from what Munro shows us, it seems like Stella just tolerates him, something David is unaware of.

Case in point? While his girlfriend is on the beach and he is alone with his ex-wife, he confesses to a new obsession: a twenty-two year old "bad girl." Without thought, he pulls out a naked polaroid of the young girl who is old enough to be his daughter, and shoves it into Stella's face. The young girl's legs are spread wide open, her pubic hair on display so that Stella initially says it looks like "lichen."

It's that same polaroid, which David had hidden behind the curtains of her living room window, that she finds a week or so after his visit. He hid it there because he was afraid that he would 'accidentally' show it to Catherine. The polaroid no longer shows the image of a young naked girl; it was discoloured by the sunlight and is now unrecognizable. It embodies David's self-centered lust, his inability to love, and the destruction that it has caused. The gaping hole that he created within her heart quakes open, but for the sake of their children, her father, and perhaps for the man that she had loved for 21 years, she closes it up again.