Friend of My Youth

her. Not self-denial, the exaltation of balked desires, no kind of high-flown helplessness. She is not to be so satisfied.
    She knows that, and she knows what she will have to do. She casts her mind ahead—inadmissibly, shamefully, she casts her mind ahead, fumbling for the shape of the next lover.
    That won’t be necessary.
    What Joan has forgotten altogether is that mail comes to small-town post offices on Saturday. Saturday isn’t a mailless day here. Morris has gone to see what’s in his box; he hands her the letter. The letter sets up a time and place. It is very brief, andsigned only with John Brolier’s initials. This is wise, of course. Such brevity, such caution, is not altogether pleasing to Joan, but in her relief, her transformation, she doesn’t dwell on it.
    She tells Morris the story she meant to tell him had the letter come earlier. She has been summoned by her college friend, who got word that she was here. While she washes her hair and packs her things, Morris takes her car to the cut-rate gas bar north of town and fills up the tank.
    Waving goodbye to Morris, she doesn’t see any suspicion on his face. But perhaps a little disappointment. He has two days less to be with someone now, two days more to be alone. He wouldn’t admit to such a feeling. Maybe she imagines it. She imagines it because she has a feeling that she’s waving to her husband and her children as well, to everybody who knows her, except the man she’s going to meet. All so easily, flawlessly deceived. And she feels compunction, certainly. She is smitten by their innocence; she recognizes an irreparable tear in her life. This is genuine—her grief and guilt at this moment are genuine, and they’ll never altogether vanish. But they won’t get in her way, either. She is more than glad; she feels that she has no choice but to be going.
    III—Rose Matilda
    Ruth Ann Leatherby is going with Joan and Morris to the cemetery. Joan is a little surprised about this, but Morris and Ruth Ann seem to take it for granted. Ruth Ann is Morris’s bookkeeper. Joan has known of her for years, and may even have met her before. Ruth Ann is the sort of pleasant-looking, middle-sized, middle-aged woman whose looks you don’t remember. She lives now in one of the bachelor apartments in the basement of Morris’s building. She is married, but her husband hasn’t been around for a long time. She is a Catholic, so has not thought about getting a divorce. There is some tragedy in herbackground—a house fire, a child?—but it has been thoroughly absorbed and is not mentioned.
    It is Ruth Ann who got the hyacinth bulbs to plant on their parents’ graves. She had heard Morris say it would be nice to have something growing there, and when she saw the bulbs on sale at the supermarket she bought some. A wife-woman, thinks Joan, observing her. Wife-women are attentive yet self-possessed, they are dedicated but cool. What is it that they are dedicated to?
    Joan lives in Toronto now. She has been divorced for twelve years. She has a job managing a bookstore that specializes in art books. It’s a pleasant job, though it doesn’t pay much; she has been lucky. She is also lucky (she knows that people say she is lucky, for a woman of her age) in having a lover, a friend-lover—Geoffrey. They don’t live together; they see each other on weekends and two or three times during the week. Geoffrey is an actor. He is talented, cheerful, adaptable, poor. One weekend a month he spends in Montreal with a woman he used to live with and their child. On these weekends, Joan goes to see her children, who are grown up and have forgiven her. Her son, too, is an actor—in fact, that’s how she met Geoffrey. Her daughter is a journalist, like her father. And what is there to forgive? Many parents got divorced, most of them shipwrecked by affairs, at about the same time. It seems that all sorts of marriages begun in the fifties without misgivings, or without misgivings that anybody could know about, blew up in the early seventies, with a lot of spectacular—and, it seems now, unnecessary, extravagant—complications. Joan thinks of her own history of love with no regret but some amazement. It’s as if she had once gone in for skydiving.
    And sometimes she comes to see Morris. Sometimes she gets Morris to talk about the very things that used to seem incomprehensible and boring and sad to her. The peculiar structure of earnings and pensions and mortgages and loans