Friend of My Youth (29 page)

The way he cheated Ruth Ann was more complicated, and had to do with persuading her to declare herself a part-time employee of his when she wasn’t. This got him out of paying certain benefits to her. He wouldn’t be surprised if she had figured all that out, and had made a few little adjustments of her own. That was what she would do—never say anything, never argue, but quietly get her own back. And as long as she just got her own back—he’d soon notice if it was any more—he wouldn’t say anything, either. She and he both believe that if people don’t look out for themselves what they lose is their own fault. He means to take care of Ruth Ann eventually anyway.

If Joan found out what he had done, she probably wouldn’t say anything, either. The interesting part, to her, would not be the money. She has some instinct lacking in that regard. The interesting part would be: why? She’d worry that around and get her curious pleasure out of it. This fact about her brother would
lodge in her mind like a hard crystal—a strange, small, light-refracting object, a bit of alien treasure.

He didn’t cheat Matilda when he sold her the house. She got that at a very good price. But he told her that the hot-water heater he had put in a year or so before was new, and of course it wasn’t. He never bought new appliances or new materials when he was fixing up the places he owned. And three years ago last June, at a dinner dance in the Valhalla Inn, Matilda said to him, “My hot-water heater gave out. I had to replace it.”

They were not dancing at the time. They were sitting at a round table, with some other people, under a canopy of floating balloons. They were drinking whiskey.

“It shouldn’t have done that,” Morris said.

“Not after you’d put it in new,” said Matilda, smiling. “You know what I think?”

He kept looking at her, waiting.

“I think we should have another dance before we have anything more to drink!”

They danced. They had always danced easily together, and often with some special flourish. But this time Morris felt that Matilda’s body was heavier and stiffer than it had been—her responses were tardy, then overdone. It was odd that her body should seem unwilling when she was smiling and talking to him with such animation, and moving her head and shoulders with every sign of flirtatious charm. This, too, was new—not at all what he was used to from her. Year after year she had danced with him with a dreamy pliancy and a serious face, hardly talking at all. Then, after she had had a few drinks, she would speak to him about her secret concerns. Her concern. Which was always the same. It was Ron, the Englishman. She hoped to hear from him. She stayed here, she had come back here, so that he would know where to find her. She hoped, she doubted, that he would divorce his wife. He had promised, but she had no faith in him. She heard from him eventually. He said he was on the move, he would write again. And he did. He said that he was going to look her up. The letters were posted in Canada, from different, distant
cities. Then she didn’t hear. She wondered if he was alive; she thought of detective agencies. She said she didn’t speak of this to anybody but Morris. Her love was her affliction, which nobody else was permitted to see.

Morris never offered advice; he never laid a comforting hand on her except as was proper, in dancing. He knew exactly how he must absorb what she said. He didn’t pity her, either. He had respect for all the choices she had made.

It was true that the tone had changed before the night at the Valhalla Inn. It had taken on a tartness, a sarcastic edge, which pained him and didn’t suit her. But this was the night he felt it all broken—their long complicity, the settled harmony of their dancing. They were like some other middle-aged couple, pretending to move lightly and with pleasure, anxious not to let the moment sag. She didn’t mention Ron, and Morris, of course, did not ask. A thought started forming in his mind that she had seen him finally. She had seen Ron or heard that he was dead. Seen him, more likely.

“I know how you could pay me back for that heater,” she teased him. “You could put in a lawn for me! When has that lawn of mine ever been seeded? It looks terrible; it’s riddled with creeping Charlie. I wouldn’t mind having a decent lawn. I’m thinking of fixing up the house. I’d like to put burgundy shutters on it to counter the effect of all that gray. I’d like a big window in the side. I’m sick of looking out at the nursing home. Oh, Morris, do you know they’ve cut down your walnut trees! They’ve levelled out the yard, they’ve fenced off the creek!”

She was wearing a long, rustling peacock-blue dress. Blue stones in silver disks hung from her ears. Her hair was stiff and pale, like spun taffy. There were dents in the flesh of her upper arms; her breath smelled of whiskey. Her perfume and her makeup and her smile all spoke to him of falsehood, determination, and misery. She had lost interest in her affliction. She had lost her nerve to continue as she was. And in her simple, dazzling folly, she had lost his love.

“If you come around next week with some grass seed and show me how to do it, I’ll give you a drink,” she said. “I’ll even make you supper. It embarrasses me to think that all these years you’ve never sat down at my table.”

“You’d have to plow it all up and start fresh.”

“Plow it all up, then! Why don’t you come Wednesday? Or is that your evening with Ruth Ann Leatherby?”

She was drunk. Her head dropped against his shoulder, and he felt the hard lump of her earring pressing through his jacket and shirt into his flesh.

The next week, he sent one of his workmen to plow up and seed Matilda’s lawn, for nothing. The man didn’t stay long. According to him, Matilda came out and yelled at him to get off her property, what did he think he was doing there, she could take care of her own yard. You better scram, she said to him.

“Scram.” That was a word Morris could remember his own mother using. And Matilda’s mother had used it, too, in her old days of vigor and ill will. Mrs. Buttler, Mrs. Carbuncle.
Scram out of here
. Deadeye Dick.

He did not see Matilda for some time after that. He didn’t run into her. If some business had to be done at the courthouse, he sent Ruth Ann. He got word of changes that were happening, and they were not in the direction of burgundy shutters or house renovation.

“Oh, what avails the sceptred race!” says Joan suddenly when they are driving back to the apartment. And as soon as they get there she goes to the bookcase—it’s the same old glass-fronted bookcase. Morris didn’t sell that, though it’s almost too high for this living room. She finds their mother’s
Anthology of English Verse
.

“First lines,” she says, going to the back of the book.

“Sit down and be comfortable, why don’t you?” says Ruth Ann, coming in with the late-afternoon drinks. Morris gets whiskey-and-water, Joan and Ruth Ann white-rum-and-soda. A
liking for this drink has become a joke, a hopeful bond, between the two women, who understand that they are going to need something.

Joan sits and drinks, pleased. She runs her finger down the page. “Oh what, oh what—” she murmurs.

“Oh, what the form divine!” says Morris, with a great sigh of retrieval and satisfaction.

They were taught specialness, Joan thinks, without particular regret. The tag of poetry, the first sip of alcohol, the late light of an October afternoon may be what’s making her feel peaceful, indulgent. They were taught a delicate, special regard for themselves, which made them go out and grab what they wanted, whether love or money. But that’s not altogether true, is it? Morris has been quite disciplined about love, and abstemious. So has she been about money—in money matters she has remained clumsy, virginal.

There’s a problem, though, a hitch in her unexpected pleasure. She can’t find the line. “It’s not in here,” she says. “How can it not be in here? Everything Mother knew was in here.” She takes another, businesslike drink and stares at the page. Then she says, “I know! I know!” And in a few moments she has it; she is reading to them, in a voice full of playful emotion:

Morris has taken off his glasses. He’ll do that now in front of Joan. Maybe he started doing it sooner in front of Ruth Ann. He rubs at the scar as if it were itchy. His eye is dark, veined with gray. It isn’t hard to look at. Under its wrapping of scar tissue it’s as harmless as a prune or a stone.

“So that’s it,” Morris says. “So I wasn’t wrong.”

Georgia once took a creative-writing course, and what the instructor told her was: Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think.

Eventually she wrote a story that was about her grandfather killing chickens, and the instructor seemed to be pleased with it. Georgia herself thought that it was a fake. She made a long list of all the things that had been left out and handed it in as an appendix to the story. The instructor said that she expected too much, of herself and of the process, and that she was wearing him out.

The course was not a total loss, because Georgia and the instructor ended up living together. They still live together, in Ontario, on a farm. They sell raspberries, and run a small publishing business. When Georgia can get the money together, she goes to Vancouver to visit her sons. This fall Saturday she has taken the ferry across to Victoria, where she used to live. She did this on an impulse that she doesn’t really trust, and by midafternoon, when she walks up the driveway of the splendid stone
house where she used to visit Maya, she has already been taken over some fairly shaky ground.

When she phoned Raymond, she wasn’t sure that he would ask her to the house. She wasn’t sure that she even wanted to go there. She had no notion of how welcome she would be. But Raymond opens the door before she can touch the bell, and he hugs her around the shoulders and kisses her twice (surely he didn’t use to do this?) and introduces his wife, Anne. He says he has told her what great friends they were, Georgia and Ben and he and Maya. Great friends.

Maya is dead. Georgia and Ben are long divorced.

They go to sit in what Maya used to call, with a certain flat cheerfulness, “the family room.”

(One evening Raymond had said to Ben and Georgia that it looked as if Maya wasn’t going to be able to have any children. “We try our best,” he said. “We use pillows and everything. But no luck.”

“Listen, old man, you don’t do it with pillows,” Ben said boisterously. They were all a little drunk. “I thought you were the expert on all the apparatus, but I can see that you and I are going to have to have a little talk.”

Raymond was an obstetrician and gynecologist.

By that time Georgia knew all about the abortion in Seattle, which had been set up by Maya’s lover, Harvey. Harvey was also a doctor, a surgeon. The bleak apartment in the run-down building, the bad-tempered old woman who was knitting a sweater, the doctor arriving in his shirtsleeves, carrying a brown-paper bag that Maya hysterically believed must contain the tools of his trade. In fact, it contained his lunch—an egg-and-onion sandwich. Maya had the smell of that in her face all the time he and Mme. Defarge were working her over.

Maya and Georgia smiled at each other primly while their husbands continued their playful conversation.)

Raymond’s curly brown hair has turned into a silvery fluff, and his face is lined. But nothing dreadful has happened to
him—no pouches or jowls or alcoholic flush or sardonic droop of defeat. He is still thin, and straight, and sharp-shouldered, still fresh-smelling, spotless, appropriately, expensively dressed. He’ll make a brittle, elegant old man, with an obliging boy’s smile. There’s that sort of shine on both of them, Maya once said glumly. She was speaking of Raymond and Ben. Maybe we should soak them in vinegar, she said.

The room has changed more than Raymond has. An ivory leather sofa has replaced Maya’s tapestry-covered couch, and of course all the old opium-den clutter, Maya’s cushions and pampas grass and the gorgeous multicolored elephant with the tiny sewn-on mirrors—that’s all gone. The room is beige and ivory, smooth and comfortable as the new blond wife, who sits on the arm of Raymond’s chair and maneuvers his arm around her, placing his hand on her thigh. She wears slick-looking white pants and a cream-on-white appliquéd sweater, with gold jewelry. Raymond gives her a couple of hearty and defiant pats.

“Are you going someplace?” he says. “Possibly shopping?”

“Righto,” says the wife. “Old times.” She smiles at Georgia. “It’s O.K.,” she says. “I really do have to go shopping.”

When she has gone, Raymond pours drinks for Georgia and himself. “Anne is a worrywart about the booze,” he says. “She won’t put salt on the table. She threw out all the curtains in the house to get rid of the smell of Maya’s cigarettes. I know what you may be thinking: Friend Raymond has got hold of a luscious blonde. But this is actually a very serious girl, and a very steady girl. I had her in my office, you know, quite a while before Maya died. I mean, I had her
working
in my office. I don’t mean that the way it sounds! She isn’t as young as she looks, either. She’s thirty-six.”