Friend of My Youth

feel pain, for one thing—but growing wary as he gets older, scared of “paying the teint to hell,” and longing for a human climate, so seducing a bold girl and instructing her how she can get him free. She has to do it by holding on to him, holding on no matter what horror the fairies can change him into, holding on until all their tricks are exhausted, and they let him go. Of course Dudley’s style was old-fashioned, of course he mocked himself, a little. But that was only on the surface. This reciting was like singing. You could parade your longing without fear of making a fool of yourself.
    “They shaped him in her arms at last
,
    A mother-naked man;
    She wrapt him in her green mantle
,
    And so her true love wan!”
    You and Miss Dobie, you are a pair.
    “We saw the place where she went to meet him,” Hazel said. “On the way back, Antoinette showed it to me. Down by the river.” She thought that it was a wonder to be here, in the middle of these people’s lives, seeing what she’d seen of their scheming, their wounds. Jack was not here, Jack was not here after all, but she was.
    “Carterhaugh?” Dudley said, sounding scornful and excited. “That’s not down by the river! Antoinette doesn’t know what she’s talking about! That’s the high field, it overlooks the river. That’s where the fairy rings were. Fungi. If the moon were out, we could drive out tonight and look at it.”
    Hazel could feel something, as if a cat had jumped into her lap. Sex. She felt her eyes widen, her skin tighten, her limbs settle, attentively. But the moon was not going to be out—that was the other thing his tone made clear. He poured out more whisky, and it wasn’t in aid of a seduction. All the faith and energy, the adeptness, the forgetfulness that is necessary to manage even a tiny affair—Hazel knew, for she’d had two tiny affairs, one at college and one at a teachers’ conference—all that was beyond them at present. They would let the attraction wash over them and ebb away. Antoinette would have been willing, Hazel was sure of that. Antoinette would have tolerated someone who was going away, who didn’t really matter, who was only a sort of American. That was another thing to make them draw back—Antoinette’s acceptance. That was enough to make them thoughtful, fastidious.
    “The little girl,” Dudley said, in a quieter voice. “Was she there?”
    “No. She goes to kindergarten.” Hazel thought how little was required, really—a recitation—to turn her mind from needling to comforting.
    “Does she? What a name that child has got. Tania.”
    “That’s not so odd a name,” Hazel said. “Not nowadays.”
    “I know. They all have outlandish international names, like Tania and Natasha and Erin and Solange and Carmen. No one has family names. Those girls with the rooster hair I see on the streets. They pick the names. They’re the mothers.”
    “I have a granddaughter named Brittany,” Hazel said. “And I have heard of a little girl called Cappuccino.”
    “Cappuccino! Is that true? Why don’t they call one Cassoulet? Fettucini? Alsace-Lorraine?”
    “They probably do.”
    “Schleswig-Holstein! There’s a good name for you!”
    “But when did you see her last?” Hazel said. “Tania?”
    “I don’t see her,” Dudley said. “I don’t go out there. We have financial matters, but I don’t go out.”
    Well, you ought to go, she was about to say to him. You must go, and not make stupid arrangements that Antoinette can step in and spoil, as she did today. He was the one, however, who spoke first. He leaned across and spoke to her with slightly drunken sincerity.
    “What am I to do? I can’t make two women happy.”
    A statement that might have been thought fatuous, conceited, evasive.
    Yet it was true. Hazel was stopped. It was true. At first the claim seemed to be all Judy’s, because of her child and her loneliness and her lovely hair. But why did Antoinette have to lose out, just because she had been in the running for a long time, could calculate, and withstand defections, and knew how to labor at her looks? Antoinette must have been useful and loyal and perhaps privately tender. And she didn’t even ask for a man’s whole heart. She might shut her eyes to a secret visit once in a while. (She’d be sick, though; she’d have to turn her head away and vomit.) Judy wouldn’t put up with that at all. She’d be bursting with ballad fervor, all vows and imprecations. He