Friend of My Youth

her?”
    “I never got anything,” Neil says. “I just knew these other guys who did. It was my brother Jonathan made the money off her. I wonder what he’d say if I reminded him now.”
    “Older guys, too—you said older guys, too. Don’t tell me you just sat back and watched and never got your share.”
    “That’s what I
am
telling you. I never got anything.”
    Brenda clicks her tongue, tut-tut, and empties her glass andmoves it around on the table, looking skeptically at the wet circles.
    “Want another?” Neil says. He takes the glass out of her hand.
    “I’ve got to go,” she says. “Soon.” You can make love in a hurry if you have to, but you need time for a fight. Is that what they’re starting on? A fight? She feels edgy but happy. Her happiness is tight and private, not the sort that flows out from you and fuzzes everything up and makes you good-naturedly careless about what you say. The very opposite. She feels light and sharp and unconnected. When Neil brings her back a full glass, she takes a drink from it at once, to safeguard this feeling.
    “You’ve got the same name as my husband,” she says. “It’s funny I never thought of that before.”
    She has thought of it before. She just hasn’t mentioned it, knowing it’s not something Neil would like to hear.
    “Cornelius isn’t the same as Neil,” he says.
    “It’s Dutch. Some Dutch people shorten it to Neil.”
    “Yeah, but I’m not Dutch, and I wasn’t named Cornelius, just Neil.”
    “Still, if his had been shortened you’d be named the same.”
    “His isn’t shortened.”
    “I never said it was. I said if it had been.”
    “So why say that if it isn’t?”
    He must feel the same thing she does—the slow but irresistible rise of a new excitement, the need to say, and hear, dire things. What a sharp, releasing pleasure there is in the first blow, and what a dazzling temptation ahead—destruction. You don’t stop to think why you want that destruction. You just do.
    “Why do we have to drink every time?” Neil says abruptly. “Do we want to turn ourselves into alcoholics or something?”
    Brenda takes a quick sip and pushes her glass away. “Who has to drink?” she says.
    She thinks he means they should drink coffee, or Cokes. But he gets up and goes to the dresser where he keeps his clothes, opens a drawer, and says, “Come over here.”
    “I don’t want to look at any of that stuff,” she says.
    “You don’t even know what it is.”
    “Sure I do.”
    Of course she doesn’t—not specifically.
    “You think it’s going to bite you?”
    Brenda drinks again and keeps looking out the window. The sun is getting down in the sky already, pushing the bright light across the table to warm her hands.
    “You don’t approve,” Neil says.
    “I don’t approve or disapprove,” she says, aware of having lost some control, of not being as happy as she was. “I don’t care what you do. That’s you.”
    “I don’t approve or disapprove,” says Neil, in a mincing voice. “Don’t care what you do.”
    That’s the signal, which one or the other had to give. A flash of hate, pure meanness, like the glint of a blade. The signal that the fight can come out into the open. Brenda takes a deep drink, as if she very much deserved it. She feels a desolate satisfaction. She stands up and says, “Time for me to go.”
    “What if I’m not ready to go yet?” Neil says.
    “I said me, not you.”
    “Oh. You got a car outside?”
    “I can walk.”
    “That’s five miles back to where the van is.”
    “People have walked five miles.”
    “In shoes like that?” says Neil. They both look at her yellow shoes, which match the appliquéd-satin birds on her turquoise sweater. Both things bought and worn for him!
    “You didn’t wear those shoes for walking,” he says. “You wore them so every step you took would show off your fat arse.”
    She walks along the lakeshore road, in the gravel, which bruises her feet through the shoes and makes her pay attention to each step, lest she should twist an ankle. The afternoon is now toocold for just a sweater. The wind off the lake blows at her sideways, and every time a vehicle passes, particularly a truck, an eddy of stiff wind whirls around her and grit blows into her face. Some of the trucks slow down, of course, and some cars do, too, and men yell at her out of the windows. One car skids onto the gravel and stops ahead of her. She stands still, she cannot think what