Friend of My Youth

Victor—Barbara sniping, Murray defending. It had become a game. Murray was relieved to see that Barbara didn’t make Victor feel unwelcome; she didn’t seem displeased when he showed up in the evenings.
    He usually arrived around the time that Murray was putting the lawnmower away or picking up some of the children’s toys or draining the wading pool or moving the sprinkler on his mother’s lawn. (His mother, as usual, was spending part of the summer far away, in the Okanagan Valley.) Victor would try to help, bending to these tasks like a bemused and gentle robot. Then they moved the two wooden lawn chairs to the middle of the yard and sat down. They could hear Barbara working in the kitchen, without turning the lights on, because, she said, they made her hot. When she had finished, she would take a shower and come out into the yard barefoot, barelegged, her long hair wet, smelling of lemon soap. Murray went into the house and made three drinks, with gin and tonic and ice and limes. Usually he forgotthat Barbara didn’t keep the limes in the refrigerator, and had to call out demanding to know where they were or if she had forgotten to buy any. Victor vacated his chair and stretched out on the grass, his cigarette glowing in the half-dark. They looked up and tried to see a satellite—still a rare and amazing thing to see. They could hear sprinklers, and sometimes distant shrieks, police sirens, laughter. That was the sound of television programs, coming through the open windows and screen doors along the street. Sometimes there was the slap of screen doors closing as people left those programs behind for a moment, and boisterous but uncertain voices calling into the other back yards where people sat drinking, as they did, or watching the sky. There was a sense of people’s lives audible but solitary, floating free of each other under the roof of beech and maple branches in front of the houses, and in the cleared spaces behind, just as people in the same room, talking, float free on the edge of sleep. The sound of ice cubes tinkling unseen was meditative, comforting.
    Sometimes the three of them played a game that Barbara had invented or adapted from something else. It was called Oranges and Apples, and she used it to keep the children occupied on car trips. It was a game of choices, going from very easy to very hard. Peanut butter or oatmeal porridge was where you might start, going on to peanut butter or applesauce, which was harder. The really hard choices could be between two things you liked very much or two things you disliked very much or between things that were for some reason almost impossible to compare. There was no way to win. The pleasure was in thinking up tormenting choices or in being tormented by them, and the end came only when somebody cried, “I give up. I can’t stand it. It’s too stupid. I don’t want to think about it anymore!”
    Would you rather eat fresh corn on the cob or homemade strawberry ice cream?
    Would you sooner dive into a cool lake on a blistering hot day or enter a warm kitchen where there is fresh bread baking after you’ve walked through a bog in a snowstorm?
    Would you prefer to make love to Mrs. Khrushchev or Mrs. Eisenhower?
    Would you rather eat a piece of cold pork fat or listen to a speech at the Kiwanis luncheon?
    Things were going badly at the farm. The well water was not safe to drink. The tops of the potatoes wilted from a blight. Insects of many sorts invaded the house, and the drains were still not completed. But it seemed that this was nothing compared to the human malevolence. One evening before Barbara came out to join them, Victor said to Murray, “I cannot eat any longer at the farm. I must eat all my meals at the coffee shop.”
    “Is it as unpleasant as all that?” said Murray.
    “No, no. It is always unpleasant, but what I have discovered now is worse than the unpleasantness.”
    Poison. Victor said that he had found a bottle of prussic acid. He did not know how long Beatrice had had it but he did not think very long. There was no use for it on the farm. There was only the one use that he could think of.
    “Surely not,” said Murray. “She wouldn’t do that. She isn’t crazy. She isn’t a poisoning sort of person.”
    “But you have no idea. You have no idea what sort of person she is or what she might do. You think she would not poison, she is an English lady. But England is full of murders and often it is the ladies and gentlemen