Friend of My Youth

treasure.”
    Walking the deck, away from Bugs, Jeanine asked Averill, “You mind telling me how old you are?”
    Averill said twenty-three, and Jeanine sighed. She said that she was forty-two. She was married, but not accompanied by her husband. She had a long tanned face with glossy pinkish-mauve lips and shoulder-length hair, thick and smooth as an oak plank. She said that people often told her she looked as if she was from California, but actually she was from Wisconsin. She was from a small city in Wisconsin, where she had been the hostess of a radio phone-in show. Her voice was low and persuasive and full of satisfaction, even if she disclosed a problem, a grief, a shame.
    She said, “Your mother is charming.”
    Averill said, “People either think that or they can’t stand her.”
    “Has she been ill long?”
    “She’s recuperating,” said Averill. “She had pneumonia last spring.” This was what they had agreed to say.
    Jeanine was more eager to be friends with Bugs than Bugs was to be friends with her. Nevertheless Bugs slid into her customary half-intimacy, confiding some things about the professor and disclosing the name she had thought up for him: Dr. Faustus. His wife’s name was Tudor Rose. Jeanine thought these names appropriate and funny. Oh, delightful, she said.
    She did not know the name that Bugs had given her. Glamour Puss.
    Averill walked around the deck and listened to people talking. She thought about how sea voyages were supposed to be about getting away from it all, and how “it all” presumablymeant your life, the way you lived, the person you were at home. Yet in all the conversations she overheard people were doing just the opposite. They were establishing themselves—telling about their jobs and their children and their gardens and their dining rooms. Recipes were offered, for fruitcake and compost heaps. Also ways of dealing with daughters-in-law and investments. Tales of illness, betrayal, real estate.
I said. I did. I always believe. Well, I don’t know about you, but I
.
    Averill, walking past with her face turned toward the sea, wondered how you got to do this. How did you learn to be so stubborn and insistent and to claim your turn?
    I did it all over last fall in blue and oyster
.
    I’m afraid I have never been able to see the charms of opera
.
    That last was the professor, imagining that he could put Bugs in her place. And why did he say he was afraid?
    Averill didn’t get to walk alone for very long. She had her own admirer, who would stalk her and cut her off at the rail. He was an artist, a Canadian artist from Montreal, who sat across from her in the dining room. When he was asked, at the first meal, what kind of pictures he painted, he had said that his latest work was a figure nine feet high, entirely wrapped in bandages, which bore quotations from the American Declaration of Independence. How interesting, said some polite Americans, and the artist said with a tight sneer, I’m glad you think so.
    “But why,” said Jeanine, with her interviewer’s adroit response to hostility (a special rich kindness in the voice, a more alert and interested smile), “why did you not use Canadian quotations of some sort?”
    “Yes, I was wondering that, too,” said Averill. Sometimes she tried to get into conversations this way, she tried to echo or expand the things that other people said. Usually it did not work well.
    Canadian quotations turned out to be a sore subject with the artist. Critics had taken him to task for that very thing, accusing him of insufficient nationalism, missing the very pointthat he was trying to make. He ignored Jeanine, but followed Averill from the table and harangued her for what seemed like hours, developing a ferocious crush on her as he did so. Next morning he was waiting to go in to breakfast with her, and afterward he asked her if she had ever done any modelling.
    “
Me?
” said Averill. “I’m way too fat.”
    He said he didn’t mean with clothes on. If he had been another sort of artist, he said (she gathered that the other sort was the sort he despised), he would have picked her out immediately as a model. Her big golden thighs (she was wearing shorts, which she didn’t put on again), her long hair like caramelized sugar, her square shoulders and unindented waist. A goddess figure, goddess coloring, goddess of the harvest. He said she had a pure and childish scowl.
    Averill thought that she must remember to keep