Friend of My Youth
destruction, he thought. Another sentence in his head:
This is the destruction of love
. He fell asleep at once and woke up and had her again. She was full of a new compliance and passivity and she kissed him goodbye at breakfast with what seemed to him a strange, new, glistening sympathy. The sun shone every day, and in the mornings, particularly, it hurt his eyes. They were drinking more—three or four drinks now, instead of two—in the evenings, and he was putting more gin in them.
There came a time every afternoon when he couldn’t stay in the store any longer, so he drove out into the country. He drove through the inland towns—Logan, Carstairs, Dalby Hill. Sometimes he drove as far as the hunting camp that had belonged to his father and now belonged to him. There he got out and walked, or sat on the steps of the neglected, boarded-up cabin. Sometimes he felt in all his trouble a terrible elation. He was being robbed. He was being freed of his life.
That summer, as in other summers, there came a Sunday when they spent the day picking blackberries along the country roads. Murray and Barbara and Adam and Felicity picked blackberries, and on the way home they bought sweet corn at a farmer’s stand. Barbara made the annual supper of the first corn on the cob with the first fresh-blackberry pie. The weather had changed even as they were picking the berries, and when they bought the corn the farmer’s wife was putting up the shutters on her stand and had loaded what she hadn’t sold into the back of a truck. They were her last customers. The clouds were dark, and the kind ofwind they hadn’t felt for months was lifting the boughs of the trees and tearing off the dry leaves. A few drops of rain slapped the windshield, and by the time they reached Walley they were driving through a full-blown rainstorm. The house was so chilly that Murray turned on the furnace, and with the first wave of heat a cellar smell was driven through the house—that forgotten cave smell of roots, earth, damp concrete.
Murray went out in the rain and picked up the sprinkler, the plastic pool. He shoved the lawn chairs under the eaves.
“Is our summer over?” he said to Barbara, shaking the rain off his head.
The children watched “Walt Disney,” and the boiling of the corn clouded the windows. They ate the supper. Barbara washed the dishes while Murray put the children to bed. When he shut the door on them and came out to the kitchen, he found Barbara sitting at the table in the near dark, drinking coffee. She was wearing one of last winter’s sweaters.
“What about Victor?” Murray said. He turned on the lights. “Did you leave any blankets for him over in the apartment?”
“No,” said Barbara.
“Then he’ll be cold tonight. There’s no heat on in the building.”
“He can come and get some blankets if he’s cold,” said Barbara.
“He wouldn’t come and ask,” Murray said.
“Why not?”
“He just wouldn’t.”
Murray went to the hall closet and found two heavy blankets. He carried them into the kitchen.
“Don’t you think you better take these over?” He laid them on the table, in front of her.
“Why not you?” said Barbara. “How do you even know he’s there?”
Murray went to the window over the sink. “His light’s on. He’s there.”
Barbara got up stiffly. She shuddered, as if she’d been holding herself tightly and now felt a chill.
“Is that sweater going to be enough?” said Murray. “Don’t you need a coat? Aren’t you going to comb your hair?”
She went into the bedroom. When she came out, she was wearing her white satin blouse and black pants. She had combed her hair and put on some new, very pale lipstick. Her mouth looked bleached-out, perverse, in her summer-tanned face.
Murray said, “No coat?”
“I won’t have time to get cold.”
He laid the blankets on her arms. He opened the door for her.
“It’s Sunday,” she said. “The doors’ll be locked.”
“Right,” said Murray, and got the spare keys from the kitchen hook. He made sure she knew which one of them opened the side door of the building.
He watched the glimmer of her blouse until it vanished, and then he walked all through the house very quickly, taking noisy breaths. He stopped in the bedroom and picked up the clothes she had taken off. Her jeans and shirt and sweater. He held them up to his face and smelled them and thought, This is like a play. He wanted to see if she had changed her
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