Friend of My Youth

smiling.
    He was a stocky, swarthy, irritable-looking man. Bugs named him Toulouse-Lautrec.
    Men had fallen in love with Averill before. Twice she had promised to marry them, then had had to get out of it. She had slept with the ones she was engaged to, and with two or three others. Actually, four others. She had had one abortion. She was not frigid—she did not think so—but there was something about her participation in sex that was polite and appalled, and it was always a relief when they let go of her.
    She dealt with the artist by granting him a conversation early in the day, when she felt strong and almost lighthearted. She didn’t sit down with him, and during the afternoon and evening she kept him at arm’s length. Part of her strategy was to take up with Jeanine. That was all right, as long as Jeanine talked about her own life and didn’t move in on Averill’s.
    “Your mother is a gallant woman and very charming,” Jeanine said. “But charming people can be very manipulative. You live with her, don’t you?”
    Averill said yes, and Jeanine said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I hope I’m not being too intrusive? I hope I haven’t offended you?”
    Averill was really only puzzled, in a familiar way. Why did people so quickly take for granted that she was stupid?
    “You know, I’ve gotten so used to interviewing people,” Jeanine said. “I’m actually quite bad at ordinary conversation. I’ve forgotten how to communicate in a nonprofessional situation. I’m too blunt and I’m too
interested
. I need help with that.”
    The whole point about coming on this trip, she said, was to get herself back to normal reality and find out who she really was when not blatting away into a microphone. And to find out who she was outside of her marriage. It was an agreement between her husband and herself, she said, that every so often they would take these little trips away from each other, they would test the boundaries of the relationship.
    Averill could hear what Bugs would have to say about that. “Test the boundaries of the relationship,” Bugs would say. “She means get laid aboard ship.”
    Jeanine said that she did not rule out a shipboard romance. That is, before she had a look at the available men she had not ruled it out. Once she got a look, she resigned herself. Who could it be? The artist was short and ugly and anti-American. That in itself wouldn’t have been entirely off-putting, but he was infatuated with Averill. The professor had a wife on board—Jeanine was not going to scramble around copulating in linen closets. Also he was long-winded, had little grainy warts on his eyelids, and was taken up with Bugs. All the other men were out for one reason or another—they had wives with them, or they were too old to please her or too young for her to please them, or they were chiefly interested in each other or in members of the crew. She would have to use the time to give her skin a good overhaul and to read a book all the way through.
    “Who would you pick, though,” she said to Averill, “if you were picking for me?”
    “What about the captain?” said Averill.
    “Brilliant,” Jeanine said. “A long shot, but brilliant.”
    She found out that the captain’s age was O.K.—he wasfifty-four. He was married, but his wife was back in Bergen. He had three children, grown up or nearly. He himself was not a Norwegian but a Scot, born in Edinburgh. He had gone to sea at sixteen and had captained this freighter for ten years. Jeanine discovered all this by asking him. She told him that she was going to do an article for a magazine, on passenger-carrying freighters. (She might really do this.) He gave her a tour of the ship and included his own cabin. She thought that a good sign.
    His cabin was spick-and-span. There was a photograph of a large, pleasant-looking woman wearing a thick sweater. The book he was reading was by John le Carré.
    “He won’t give her a tumble,” Bugs said. “He’s too canny for her. A canny Scot.”
    Averill had not thought twice about revealing Jeanine’s confidences, if they were confidences. She was used to bringing home all information, all enlivening tidbits—home to the apartment on Huron Street, to the cabin on the boat deck, to Bugs. All stirred into the busy pot. Bugs herself was a marvel at egging people on—she got extravagant tangled revelations from unlikely sources. So far as Averill knew, she had not kept anything a secret.
    Bugs said that Jeanine