Friend of My Youth

once before. Also, she and Reuel were invited to a big anniversary party next weekend; she had to get the present. A man was coming to look at the drains.
    Reuel was so late getting home that she began to be afraid he’d had an accident. He’d had to go around by Orangeville, to deliver Lana to the home of her aunt. He’d pretended to be a high-school teacher transporting a member of the band. (The real teacher had been told, meanwhile, that Lana’s aunt was sick and Lana was in Orangeville looking after her.) Reuel’s stomach was upset, naturally, after those notes. He sat at the kitchen table chewing tablets and drinking milk. Margot made coffee, to sober herself for the fray.
    Reuel said it was all innocent. An outing for the girl. Like Margot, he’d felt sorry for her. Innocent.
    Margot laughed at that. She laughed, telling about it.
    “I said to him, ‘Innocent! I know your innocent! Who do you think you’re talking to,’ I said, ‘Teresa?’ And he said,
‘Who?’
No, really. Just for a minute he looked blank, before he remembered. He said, ‘Who?’ ”
    Margot thought then, What punishment? Who for? She thought, he’ll probably marry that girl and there’ll be babies for sure and pretty soon not enough money to go around.
    Before they went to bed at some awful hour in the morning, she had the promise of her house.
    “Because there comes a time with men, they really don’t want the hassle. They’d rather weasel out. I bargained him down to the wire, and I got pretty near everything I wanted. If he got balky about something later on, all I’d have to say was ‘Wigtime!’ I’d told him the whole thing—the wig and the van and where I sat and everything. I’d say that in front of the kids or anybody, and none of them would know what I was talking about. But he’d know! Reuel would know.
Wigtime!
I still say it once in a while, whenever I think it’s appropriate.”
    She fished a slice of orange out of her glass and sucked, then chewed on it. “I put a little something else in this besides the wine,” she said. “I put a little vodka, too. Notice?”
    She stretched her arms and legs out in the sun.
    “Whenever I think it’s—appropriate.”
    Anita thought that Margot might have given up on vanity but she probably hadn’t given up on sex. Margot might be able to contemplate sex without fine-looking bodies or kindly sentiments. A healthy battering.
    And what about Reuel—what had he given up on? All Margot’s hard bargaining would just be coming up against one thing—whether Reuel was ready or not.
    Bargaining. Bargaining, calculations, houses and money. Anita could not imagine that. How did you turn love and betrayal into solid goods? She had opted instead for arrivals and departures, emotions at the boiling point, a faithfulness to one kind of feeling, which often involved being faithless to almost everything else.
    “Now you,” said Margot, with an ample satisfaction. “I told you something. Time for you to tell me. Tell me how you decided to leave your husband.”
    Anita told her what had happened in a restaurant in British Columbia. Anita and her husband, on a holiday, went into a roadside restaurant, and Anita saw there a man who reminded her of a man she had been in love with—no, perhaps she had better say infatuated with—years and years ago. The man in the restaurant had a pale-skinned, heavy face, with a scornful and evasive expression, which could have been a dull copy of the face of the man she loved, and his long-legged body could have been a copy of that man’s body if it had been struck by lethargy. Anita could hardly tear herself away when it came time to leave the restaurant. She understood that expression—she felt that she was tearing herself away, she got loose in strips and tatters. All the way up the Island Highway, between the dark enclosing rows of tall fir and spruce tress, and on the ferry to Prince Rupert, shefelt an absurd pain of separation. She decided that if she could feel such a pain, if she could feel more for a phantom than she could ever feel in her marriage, she had better go.
    So she told Margot. It was more difficult than that, of course, and it was not so clear.
    “Then did you go and find that other man?” said Margot.
    “No. It was one-sided. I couldn’t.”
    “Somebody else, then?”
    “And somebody else, and somebody else,” said Anita, smiling. The other night when she had been sitting beside her mother’s bed, waiting