Friend of My Youth

this, feels the promise of it, though so far she is not sure of anything.
    Her husband was included in the invitation to look at the frazil ice. But it was only Joan who got up and drove to the riverbank. There she met John Brolier and his two children and his hosts’ two children in the freezing, pink, snowbound winter dawn. And he really did tell her about frazil ice, about how it forms over the rapids without ever quite getting a chance to freeze solid, and how when it is swept over a deep spot it mounds up immediately, magnificently. He said that this was how they had discovered where the deep holes were in the riverbed. And he said, “Look, if you can ever get away—if it’s possible—will you let me know? I really want to see you. You know I do. I want to, very much.”
    He gave her a piece of paper that he must have had ready. A box number written on it, of a postal station in Toronto. He didn’t even touch her fingers. His children were capering around, trying to get his attention. When can we go skating? Can we go to the warplanes museum? Can we go and see the Lancaster Bomber? (Joan saved this up to tell her husband, who would enjoy it, in view of John Brolier’s pacifism.)
    She did tell her husband, and he teased her. “I think thatjerk with the monk’s haircut has taken a shine to you,” he said. How could her husband believe that she could fall in love with a man who wore a fringe of thinning hair combed down over his forehead, who had rather narrow shoulders and a gap between his front teeth, five children from two wives, an inadequate income, an excitable and pedantic way of talking, and a proclaimed interest in the writings of Alan Watts? (Even when the time came when he had to believe it, he couldn’t.)
    When she wrote, she mentioned lunch, a drink, or coffee. She did not tell him how much time she had left open. Perhaps that was all that would happen, she thinks. She would go to see her woman friend after all. She has put herself, though cautiously, at this man’s disposal. Walking to the post office, checking her looks in shopwindows, she feels herself loosed, in jeopardy. She has done this, she hardly knows why. She only knows that she cannot go back to the life she was living or to the person she was before she went out that Sunday morning to the river. Her life of shopping and housekeeping and married lovemaking and part-time work in the art-gallery bookstore, and dinner parties and holidays and ski outings at Camp Fortune—she cannot accept that as her only life, she cannot continue it without her sustaining secret. She believes that she does mean to continue it, and in order to continue it she must have this other. This other what? This investigation—to herself she still thinks of it as an investigation.
    Put like that, what she was up to might sound coldhearted indeed. But how can a person be called coldhearted who walks to the post office every morning in such a fainthearted condition, who trembles and holds her breath as she turns the key in the lock, and walks back to Morris’s apartment feeling so drained, bewildered, deserted? Unless this, too, is part of what she is investigating?
    Of course she has to stop and talk to people about her son and daughter and her husband and her life in Ottawa. She has to recognize high-school friends and recall her childhood, and allthis seems tedious and irritating to her. The houses themselves, as she walks past—their tidy yards and bright poppies and peonies in bloom—seem tedious to the point of being disgusting. The voices of people who talk to her strike her as harsh and stupid and self-satisfied. She feels as if she had been shunted off to some corner of the world where the real life and thoughts, the uproar and energy of the last few years have not penetrated at all. They have not very effectively penetrated Ottawa, either, but there, at least, people have heard rumors, they have tried imitations, they have got wind of what might be called profound, as well as trivial, changes of fashion. (Joan and her husband, in fact, make fun of some of these people—those who showily take up trends, go to encounter groups and holistic healers, and give up drink for dope.) Here even the trivial changes have hardly been heard of. Back in Ottawa next week, and feeling especially benevolent toward her husband, eager to fill up their time together with chat, Joan will say, “I’d have given thanks if somebody had even handed me an