Friend of My Youth

couldn’t bear such suffering, such railing. So had Antoinette foiled him today for his own good? That was the way she must see it—the way he might see it, too, after a little while. Even now, perhaps—now that the ballad had stirred and eased his heart.
    Jack had said something like that once. Not about two women, but about making a woman—well, it was Hazel—happy. She thought back to what he had said.
I could make you very happy
. He meant that he could give her an orgasm. It was something men said then, when they were trying to persuade you, and that was what they meant. Perhaps they still said it. Probably they were not so indirect nowadays. And he had been quite right about what he promised. But nobody had said that to Hazel before, and she was amazed, taking the promise at face value. It seemed rash and sweeping to her, dazzling but presumptuous. She had to try to see herself, then, as somebody who could be
made happy
. The whole worrying, striving, complicated bundleof Hazel—was that something that could just be picked up and
made happy
?
    One day, about twenty years later, she was driving down the main street of Walley and she saw Jack. He was looking out the front window of the appliance store. He wasn’t looking in her direction, he didn’t see the car. This was while she was going to college. She had errands to do, classes to get to, papers, labs, housework. She could notice things only if she was halted for a minute or two, as she was now, waiting for the light. She noticed Jack—how slim and youthful he looked, in his slacks and pullover—how gray and insubstantial. She didn’t have anything like a clear intimation that he was going to die there, in the store. (He did die there; he slumped over while talking to a customer—but that was years later.) She didn’t take account, all at once, of what his life had become—two or three nights a week at the Legion, the other nights spent lying on the sofa from supper to bedtime, watching television, drinking. Three drinks, four. Never mean, never noisy, he never passed out. He rinsed his glass at the kitchen sink before he went to bed. A life of chores, routines, seasons, pleasantries. All she saw was the stillness about him, a look you could have called ghostly. She saw that his handsomeness—a particular Second World War handsomeness, she felt, with a wisecracking edge to it and a proud passivity—was still intact but drained of power. A ghostly sweetness was what he showed her, through the glass.
    She could be striving toward him, now as much as then. Full of damaging hopes, and ardor, and accusations. She didn’t let herself then—she thought about an exam, or groceries. And if she let herself now, it would be like testing the pain in a lost limb. A quick test, a twinge that brings the whole shape into the air. That would be enough.
    She was a little drunk herself by this time, and she thought of saying to Dudley Brown that perhaps he
was
making those twowomen happy. What could she mean by that? Maybe that he was giving them something to concentrate on. A hard limit that you might someday get past in a man, a knot in his mind you might undo, a stillness in him you might jolt, or an absence you might make him regret—that sort of thing will make you pay attention, even when you think you’ve taught yourself not to. Could it be said to make you happy?
    Meanwhile, what makes a man happy?
    It must be something quite different.

Oranges and Apples

    “I hired a looker from out Shawtown,” Murray’s father said. “She’s a Delaney, but so far she doesn’t seem to have any bad habits. I put her in Men’s Wear.”
    This was in the spring of 1955. Murray was just out of college. He’d come home and seen at once what fate was waiting for him. Anybody could see it, written on his father’s darkened, scooped-out face, rising almost daily in his father’s stomach—the hard loaf that would kill before winter. In six months Murray would be in charge, sitting in the little lookout office that hung like a cage at the back of the store, over Linoleum.
    Zeigler’s then was still called Zeigler’s Department Store. It was about the same age as the town itself. The present building—three stories high, red brick, the name in angled gray brick letters that had always looked, to Murray, puzzlingly jaunty and Oriental—had gone up in 1880, replacing an earlier building of wood. The store did not deal in groceries or hardware anymore, but they