Friend of My Youth

and the husbands and wives. I cannot eat in her house. I wonder if I am safe even to sleep there. Last night I lay awake beside her, and in her sleep she was as cold as a snake. I got up and lay on the floor in the other room.”
    Murray remembered then the caretaker’s apartment, empty now for years. It was on the third floor of the store building, at the back.
    “Well, if you really think so,” he said. “If you really want to move out …” And after Victor had accepted, with surprise,relief, and gratitude, Murray said, “Barbara will get it cleaned up for you.”
    It did not occur to him at that time that he himself or Victor might be capable of sweeping out and scrubbing some dirty rooms. It did not occur to Barbara, either. She cleaned out the apartment the next day, and provided sheets and towels and a few pots and dishes, though of course she was skeptical about the danger of poisoning. “What good would he be to her dead?”
    Victor got a job immediately. He became the night watchman at the surface installation of the salt mine. He liked working at night. He didn’t have the use of a car anymore, so he walked to work at midnight and back to the apartment in the morning. If Murray was in the store before eight-thirty, he would hear Victor climbing the back stairs. How did he sleep, in the bright daylight in that little box of a room under the hot flat roof?
    “I sleep beautifully,” Victor said. “I cook, I eat, I sleep. I have relief. It is all of a sudden peace.”
    And one day Murray came home unexpectedly, in the middle of the afternoon.
    Those words took shape in his mind afterward. They were so trite and sombre.
One day I came home unexpectedly
… Is there ever a story of a man who comes home unexpectedly and finds a delightful surprise?
    He came home unexpectedly, and he found—not Victor and Barbara in bed together. Victor was not in the house at all—nobody was in the house. Victor was not in the yard. Adam was in the yard, splashing in the plastic pool. Not far away from the pool Barbara was lying on the faded quilt, stained with sun-tan oil, that they used when they went to the beach. She was wearing her strapless black bathing suit, a garment that resembled a corset and would not be considered at all attractive in a few years’ time. It cut straight across the thighs, and pushed them together; it tightly confined the waist and stomach andhips, and uplifted and thrust out the breasts so that they appeared to be made of something at least as firm as Styrofoam. Her arms, legs, chest, and shoulders looked white in the sun, though they would show a tan when she came indoors. She was not reading, though she had a book open beside her. She was lying on her back with her arms loose at her sides. Murray was just about to call to her through the screen door, but he didn’t.
    Why not? He saw her lift one arm, to shield her eyes. Then she lifted her hips, she changed her position slightly. The movement might have been seen as entirely natural, casual—one of those nearly involuntary adjustments that our bodies make. What told Murray that it wasn’t? Some pause or deliberateness, a self-consciousness, about that slight swelling and settling of the flesh made it clear to him—a man who knew this woman’s body—that the woman wasn’t alone. In her thoughts, at least, she wasn’t alone.
    Murray moved to the window over the sink. The yard was hidden from the back alley and the delivery platform at the back of the store by a high cedar hedge. But it was possible to see the back yard—the part of the back yard where Barbara lay—from the apartment window of the third floor. Barbara had not put up any curtains in the apartment. And Murray saw Victor sitting there, in that window. Victor had brought a chair over so that he could sit and look out at his ease. There was something odd about his face, as if he had a gas mask on.
    Murray went to the bedroom and got the binoculars that he had bought recently. (He had thought of going for country walks and teaching the children to know the birds.) He moved very quietly through the house. Adam was making quite a lot of distracting noise outside.
    When he looked at Victor through the binoculars, he saw a face like his own—a face partly hidden by binoculars. Victor had them, too. Victor was looking through binoculars at Barbara.
    It appeared that he was naked—at least, what you could see of him was naked—sitting on a straight-backed chair at the