Friend of My Youth (17 page)

There was a bouquet of lilacs in the center of the table. They got in the way of the serving dishes and dropped their messy flowers on the tablecloth. Murray became more and more irritated at the sight of them, and at last he said, “Barbara—do we really have to have those flowers on the table?” (The fed-up voice of a proper husband.) “We can’t even see around them to talk.”

At the moment, nobody was talking.

Barbara bent forward, shamelessly showing cleavage. She lifted the bouquet without a word, creating a shower of lilac blossoms onto the cloth and the meat platter. One of her earrings fell off and landed in the applesauce.

They should have laughed then. But nobody was able to. Barbara gave Murray a look of doom. He thought that they might as well get up now, they might as well get up from the table and abandon the unwanted food and inert conversation. They might as well go their own ways.

Victor picked the earring out of the applesauce with a spoon. He wiped it on his napkin and, bowing slightly to Barbara, laid it beside her plate. He said, “I have been trying to think who it is that is the heroine of a book that you remind me of.”

Barbara clipped the earring back onto her ear. Beatrice looked past or through her husband’s head at the tasteful but inexpensive wallpaper—cream medallions on an ivory ground—that Murray’s mother had chosen for the gardener’s cottage.

“It is Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtsev,” said Victor. “She is the fiancée—”

“I know who she is,” said Barbara. “I think she’s a pain.”

Murray knew by the abrupt halt of her words that she had been about to say “pain in the arse.”

“It’s Beatrice,” Murray said to Barbara as he helped her do the dishes. He had apologized about the lilacs. He said that it was Beatrice who had unnerved him, who had blighted the evening for them all. “Victor isn’t himself with her,” he said. “He had his light hidden under a bushel.” He thought of Beatrice descending on Victor to extinguish him. Her jabbing bones. Her damp skirts.

“I could do without either one,” said Barbara, and it was then that they had the exchange about conspicuous people and secret missions. But they ended up finishing the wine and laughing about the behavior of Adam and Felicity.

Victor began to come around in the evenings. Apparently the dinner party had not signalled for him any break or difficulty in
the friendship. In fact, it seemed to have brought him a greater ease. He was able now to say something about his marriage—not a complaint or an explanation, just something like “Beatrice wants …” or, “Beatrice believes …”—and be sure that a good deal would be understood.

And after a while he said more.

“Beatrice is impatient that I do not have the barn ready for the horses, but I have to first deal with the drainage problems and the tiles have not come. So it is not a very fine atmosphere on the farm. But a beautiful summer. I am happy here.”

Finally he said, “Beatrice has the money. You know that? So she is obliged to call the piper. No—have I got that wrong?”

It was as Murray had suspected.

“He married her for her money and now he has to work for it,” said Barbara. “But he gets time for visiting.”

“He can’t work all day and all evening,” Murray said. “He doesn’t come by for coffee in the daytime anymore.”

This was the way they continued to talk about Victor—Barbara sniping, Murray defending. It had become a game. Murray was relieved to see that Barbara didn’t make Victor feel unwelcome; she didn’t seem displeased when he showed up in the evenings.

He usually arrived around the time that Murray was putting the lawnmower away or picking up some of the children’s toys or draining the wading pool or moving the sprinkler on his mother’s lawn. (His mother, as usual, was spending part of the summer far away, in the Okanagan Valley.) Victor would try to help, bending to these tasks like a bemused and gentle robot. Then they moved the two wooden lawn chairs to the middle of the yard and sat down. They could hear Barbara working in the kitchen, without turning the lights on, because, she said, they made her hot. When she had finished, she would take a shower and come out into the yard barefoot, barelegged, her long hair wet, smelling of lemon soap. Murray went into the house and made three drinks, with gin and tonic and ice and limes. Usually he forgot
that Barbara didn’t keep the limes in the refrigerator, and had to call out demanding to know where they were or if she had forgotten to buy any. Victor vacated his chair and stretched out on the grass, his cigarette glowing in the half-dark. They looked up and tried to see a satellite—still a rare and amazing thing to see. They could hear sprinklers, and sometimes distant shrieks, police sirens, laughter. That was the sound of television programs, coming through the open windows and screen doors along the street. Sometimes there was the slap of screen doors closing as people left those programs behind for a moment, and boisterous but uncertain voices calling into the other back yards where people sat drinking, as they did, or watching the sky. There was a sense of people’s lives audible but solitary, floating free of each other under the roof of beech and maple branches in front of the houses, and in the cleared spaces behind, just as people in the same room, talking, float free on the edge of sleep. The sound of ice cubes tinkling unseen was meditative, comforting.

Sometimes the three of them played a game that Barbara had invented or adapted from something else. It was called Oranges and Apples, and she used it to keep the children occupied on car trips. It was a game of choices, going from very easy to very hard. Peanut butter or oatmeal porridge was where you might start, going on to peanut butter or applesauce, which was harder. The really hard choices could be between two things you liked very much or two things you disliked very much or between things that were for some reason almost impossible to compare. There was no way to win. The pleasure was in thinking up tormenting choices or in being tormented by them, and the end came only when somebody cried, “I give up. I can’t stand it. It’s too stupid. I don’t want to think about it anymore!”

Would you rather eat fresh corn on the cob or homemade strawberry ice cream?

Would you sooner dive into a cool lake on a blistering hot day or enter a warm kitchen where there is fresh bread baking after you’ve walked through a bog in a snowstorm?

Would you prefer to make love to Mrs. Khrushchev or Mrs. Eisenhower?

Would you rather eat a piece of cold pork fat or listen to a speech at the Kiwanis luncheon?

Things were going badly at the farm. The well water was not safe to drink. The tops of the potatoes wilted from a blight. Insects of many sorts invaded the house, and the drains were still not completed. But it seemed that this was nothing compared to the human malevolence. One evening before Barbara came out to join them, Victor said to Murray, “I cannot eat any longer at the farm. I must eat all my meals at the coffee shop.”

“Is it as unpleasant as all that?” said Murray.

“No, no. It is always unpleasant, but what I have discovered now is worse than the unpleasantness.”

Poison. Victor said that he had found a bottle of prussic acid. He did not know how long Beatrice had had it but he did not think very long. There was no use for it on the farm. There was only the one use that he could think of.

“Surely not,” said Murray. “She wouldn’t do that. She isn’t crazy. She isn’t a poisoning sort of person.”

“But you have no idea. You have no idea what sort of person she is or what she might do. You think she would not poison, she is an English lady. But England is full of murders and often it is the ladies and gentlemen and the husbands and wives. I cannot eat in her house. I wonder if I am safe even to sleep there. Last night I lay awake beside her, and in her sleep she was as cold as a snake. I got up and lay on the floor in the other room.”

Murray remembered then the caretaker’s apartment, empty now for years. It was on the third floor of the store building, at the back.

“Well, if you really think so,” he said. “If you really want to move out …” And after Victor had accepted, with surprise,
relief, and gratitude, Murray said, “Barbara will get it cleaned up for you.”

It did not occur to him at that time that he himself or Victor might be capable of sweeping out and scrubbing some dirty rooms. It did not occur to Barbara, either. She cleaned out the apartment the next day, and provided sheets and towels and a few pots and dishes, though of course she was skeptical about the danger of poisoning. “What good would he be to her dead?”

Victor got a job immediately. He became the night watchman at the surface installation of the salt mine. He liked working at night. He didn’t have the use of a car anymore, so he walked to work at midnight and back to the apartment in the morning. If Murray was in the store before eight-thirty, he would hear Victor climbing the back stairs. How did he sleep, in the bright daylight in that little box of a room under the hot flat roof?

“I sleep beautifully,” Victor said. “I cook, I eat, I sleep. I have relief. It is all of a sudden peace.”

And one day Murray came home unexpectedly, in the middle of the afternoon.

Those words took shape in his mind afterward. They were so trite and sombre.
One day I came home unexpectedly
 … Is there ever a story of a man who comes home unexpectedly and finds a delightful surprise?

He came home unexpectedly, and he found—not Victor and Barbara in bed together. Victor was not in the house at all—nobody was in the house. Victor was not in the yard. Adam was in the yard, splashing in the plastic pool. Not far away from the pool Barbara was lying on the faded quilt, stained with sun-tan oil, that they used when they went to the beach. She was wearing her strapless black bathing suit, a garment that resembled a corset and would not be considered at all attractive in a few years’ time. It cut straight across the thighs, and pushed them together; it tightly confined the waist and stomach and
hips, and uplifted and thrust out the breasts so that they appeared to be made of something at least as firm as Styrofoam. Her arms, legs, chest, and shoulders looked white in the sun, though they would show a tan when she came indoors. She was not reading, though she had a book open beside her. She was lying on her back with her arms loose at her sides. Murray was just about to call to her through the screen door, but he didn’t.

Why not? He saw her lift one arm, to shield her eyes. Then she lifted her hips, she changed her position slightly. The movement might have been seen as entirely natural, casual—one of those nearly involuntary adjustments that our bodies make. What told Murray that it wasn’t? Some pause or deliberateness, a self-consciousness, about that slight swelling and settling of the flesh made it clear to him—a man who knew this woman’s body—that the woman wasn’t alone. In her thoughts, at least, she wasn’t alone.

Murray moved to the window over the sink. The yard was hidden from the back alley and the delivery platform at the back of the store by a high cedar hedge. But it was possible to see the back yard—the part of the back yard where Barbara lay—from the apartment window of the third floor. Barbara had not put up any curtains in the apartment. And Murray saw Victor sitting there, in that window. Victor had brought a chair over so that he could sit and look out at his ease. There was something odd about his face, as if he had a gas mask on.

Murray went to the bedroom and got the binoculars that he had bought recently. (He had thought of going for country walks and teaching the children to know the birds.) He moved very quietly through the house. Adam was making quite a lot of distracting noise outside.

When he looked at Victor through the binoculars, he saw a face like his own—a face partly hidden by binoculars. Victor had them, too. Victor was looking through binoculars at Barbara.

It appeared that he was naked—at least, what you could see of him was naked—sitting on a straight-backed chair at the window in his hot room. Murray could feel the heat of the room
and the sweat-slicked hard seat of the chair and the man’s powerful but controlled and concentrated excitement. And looking at Barbara he could feel the glow along the surface of her body, the energy all collected at the skin, as she gave herself up to this assault. She lay not quite still—there was a constant ripple passing over her, with little turns and twitches. Stirrings, shiftings. It was unbearable to watch. In the presence of her child in the middle of the day, in her own back yard, she lay on the grass inviting him. Promising—no, she was already providing—the most exquisite cooperation. It was obscene and enthralling and unbearable.

Murray could see himself—a man with binoculars watching a man with binoculars watching a woman. A scene from a movie. A comedy.

He did not know where to go. He could not go out into the yard and put a stop to this. He could not go back to the store and be aware of what was going on over his head. He left the house and got out the car, which he kept in his mother’s garage, and went for a drive. Now he had another set of words to add to
One day I came home unexpectedly: I understood that my life had changed
.

But he did not understand it. He said, My life has changed, my life has been changed, but he did not understand it at all.

He drove around the back streets of Walley and over a railway crossing, out into the country. Everything looked as usual and yet like a spiteful imitation of itself. He drove with the windows down, trying to get a breeze, but he was going too slowly. He was driving at the town speed outside the town limits. A truck honked to get by him. This was in front of the brickyard. The noise of the truck’s horn and the sunlight glaring off the bricks hit him all at once, banged him on the head so that he whimpered, as if he had a hangover.

Daily life continued, ringed by disaster as by a jubilant line of fire. He felt his house transparent, his life transparent—but still standing—himself a stranger, soft-footed and maliciously observant.

What more would be revealed to him? At supper his daughter said, “Mommy, how come we never go to the beach this summer?” and it was hard to believe she didn’t know everything.