Friend of My Youth

underpants. He shook out her jeans but the pants weren’t there. He looked in the clothes hamper but he didn’t see them. Could she have been sly enough to slip them under the children’s things? What was the use of being sly now?
    Her jeans had the smell jeans get when they’ve been worn a while without being washed—a smell not just of the body but of its labors. He could smell cleaning powder in them, and old cooking. And there was flour that she’d brushed off on them tonight, making the pastry for the pie. The smell of the shirt was of soap and sweat and perhaps of smoke. Was it smoke—was it cigarette smoke? He wasn’t sure, as he sniffed again, that it was smoke at all. He thought of his mother saying that Barbara was not well educated. His mother’s clothes would never smell thisway, of her body and her life. She had meant that Barbara was not well-mannered, but couldn’t she also have meant—
hose?
A loose woman. When he heard people say that, he’d always thought of an unbuttoned blouse, clothes slipping off the body, to indicate its appetite and availability. Now he thought that it could mean just that—loose. A woman who could get loose, who wasn’t fastened down, who was not reliable, who could roll away.
    She had got loose from her own family. She had left them completely. Shouldn’t he have understood by that how she could leave him?
    Hadn’t he understood it, all the time?
    He had understood that there would be surprises.
    He went back to the kitchen. (
He stumbles into the kitchen
.) He poured himself half a tumbler of gin, without tonic or ice. (
He pours half a tumbler of gin
.) He thought of further humiliations. His mother would get a new lease on life. She would take over the children. He and the children would move into his mother’s house. Or perhaps the children would move and he would remain here, drinking gin. Barbara and Victor might come to see him, wanting to be friends. They might establish a household and ask him over in the evenings, and he might go.
    No. They would not think of him. They would banish the thought of him, they would go away.
    As a child, Murray had seldom got into fights. He was diplomatic and good-humored. But eventually he had been in a fight and had been knocked to the ground of the Walley school-yard, knocked out, probably, for half a minute. He lay on his back in a daze, and saw the leaves on a bough above him turn into birds—black, then bright as the sun poked through and the wind stirred them. He was knocked into a free, breezy space where every shape was light and changeable and he himself the same. He lay there and thought, It’s
happened to me
.
    The flight of seventy-eight steps from the beach to the park on top of the cliffs is called the Sunset Steps. Beside these stepsthere is a sign on which the time of the sunset is posted for every day from the beginning of June to the end of September. “ SEE THE SUN SET TWICE ,” the sign says, with an arrow pointing to the steps. The idea is that if you run very quickly from the bottom to the top of the steps you can see the last arc of the sun disappear a second time. Visitors think that this notion, and the custom of posting the sunset time, must be an old Walley tradition. Actually, it is a new wrinkle dreamed up by the Chamber of Commerce.
    The boardwalk is new as well. The old-fashioned bandstand in the park is new. There was never a bandstand there before. All this charm and contrivance pleases visitors—Murray can hardly be against it; he is in the tourist business himself—and nowadays it pleases the townspeople as well. During that summer in the sixties, when Murray spent so much time driving around the country, it looked as if everything from an earlier time was being torn up, swept away, left to rot, disregarded. The new machinery was destroying the design of the farms, trees were cut down for wider roads, village stores and schools and houses were being abandoned. Everybody alive seemed to be yearning toward parking lots and shopping centers and suburban lawns as smooth as paint. Murray had to face up to being out of step, to having valued, as if they were final, things that were only accidental and temporary.
    Out of such facing up, no doubt, came the orgy of smashing and renovating, which he was to get into a few months later.
    And now it looks as if the world has come round to Murray’s old way of thinking. People are restoring old houses and building new houses with old-style