Friend of My Youth

Morris seems to use it with unconscious emphasis, a son’s respect—it’s as if the only way he can properly talk about this, or have the right to talk about it, were in his mother’s language. Matilda ran off and married that man with the mustache, and it turned out that her mother’s suspicions, her extravagant accusations had for once some grounds. The boyfriend turned out to be a bigamist. He had a wife in England, which was where he came from. After he had been with Matilda three or four years—fortunately, there were no children—the other wife, the real wife, tracked him down. The marriage to Matilda was annulled; Matilda came back to Logan, came back to live with her mother, and got a job in the courthouse.
    “How could she?” says Joan. “Of all the stupid things to do.”
    “Well. She was young,” says Morris, with a trace of stubbornness or discomfort in his voice.
    “I don’t mean
that
. I mean coming back.”
    “Well, she had her mother,” Morris says, apparently without irony. “I guess she didn’t have anybody else.”
    Looming above Joan, with his dark-lensed eye, and the suit laid like a body over his arms, he looks gloomy and troubled. His face and neck are unevenly flushed, mottled. His chin trembles slightly and he bites down on his lower lip. Does he know how his looks give him away? When he starts to talk again, it’s in a reasonable, explanatory tone. He says that he guesses it didn’t much matter to Matilda where she lived. In a way, according to her, her life was over. And that was where he, Morris, came into the picture. Because every once in a while Matilda had to go to functions. Political banquets. Retirement banquets. Functions. It was a part of her job, and it would be awkward if she didn’t go. But it was also awkward for her to go alone—she needed an escort. And she couldn’t go with a man who might get ideas, not understanding how things stood. Not understanding that Matilda’s life, or a certain part of Matilda’s life, was over. She needed somebody who understood the whole business and didn’t need explanations. “Which is me,” says Morris.
    “Why does she think that way?” says Joan. “She’s not so old. I bet she’s still good-looking. It wasn’t her fault. Is she still in love with him?”
    “I don’t think it’s my place to ask her any questions.”
    “Oh, Morris!” Joan says, in a fond dismissive voice that surprises her, it sounds so much like her mother’s. “I bet she is. In love with him still.”
    Morris goes off to hang his evening clothes in a closet in the apartment, where they can wait for his next summons to be Matilda’s escort.
    In bed that night, lying awake, looking out at the street light shining through the fresh leaves on the square, squat tower of the Baptist church, Joan has something to think about besides her own plight. (She thinks of that, too, of course.) She thinks of Morris and Matilda dancing. She sees them in Holiday Innballrooms, on golf-club dance floors, wherever it is that the functions are held. In their unfashionable formal clothes, Matilda’s hair in a perfect sprayed bouffant, Morris’s face glistening with the sweat of courteous effort. But it probably isn’t an effort; they probably dance very well together. They are so terribly, perfectly balanced, each with stubbornly preserved and wholeheartedly accepted flaws. Flaws they could quite easily disregard or repair. But they would never do that. Morris in love with Matilda—in that stern, unfulfilled, lifelong way—and she in love with her bigamist, stubbornly obsessed with her own mistake and disgrace. They dance in Joan’s mind’s eye—sedate and absurd, romantic. Who but Morris after all, with his head full of mortgages and contracts, could turn out to be such a romantic?
    She envies him. She envies them.
    She has been in the habit of putting herself to sleep with a memory of John Brolier’s voice—his hasty, lowered voice when he said, “I want to, very much.” Or she pictured his face; it was a medieval face, she thought—long and pale and bony, with the smile she dismissed as tactical, the sober, glowing, not dismissible dark eyes. Her imagining won’t work tonight; it won’t open the gates for her into foggy, tender territory. She isn’t able to place herself anywhere but here, on the hard single bed in Morris’s apartment—in her real and apparent life. And nothing that works for Morris and Matilda is going to work for