Friend of My Youth

him,” said Georgia to Ben, just after she had remarked on Raymond’s worshipping Maya and being very clean. But Ben, perhaps not listening carefully, thought she was talking about Harvey and Hilda.
    “No, no, no. There I think it’s the other way round. It’s hard to tell with English people. Maya was putting on an act for them. I have an idea about why.”
    “You have an idea about everything,” said Ben.
    Georgia and Maya became friends on two levels. On the first level, they were friends as wives; on the second as themselves. On the first level, they had dinner at each other’s houses. They listened to their husbands talk about their school days. The jokes and fights, the conspiracies and disasters, the bullies and the victims. Terrifying or pitiable schoolfellows and teachers, treats and humiliations. Maya asked if they were sure they hadn’t read all that in a book. “It sounds just like a story,” she said. “A boys’ story about school.”
    They said that their experiences were what the books were all about. When they had talked enough about school, they talked about movies, politics, public personalities, places they had travelled to or wanted to travel to. Maya and Georgia could join in then. Ben and Raymond did not believe in leaving women out of the conversation. They believed that women were every bit as intelligent as men.
    On the second level, Georgia and Maya talked in each other’s kitchens, over coffee. Or they had lunch downtown. There were two places, and only two, where Maya liked to have lunch. One was the Moghul’s Court—a seedy, grandiose bar in a large, grim railway hotel. The Moghul’s Court had curtains of moth-eaten pumpkin-colored velvet, and desiccated ferns, and waiters who wore turbans. Maya always dressed up to go there, in droopy, silky dresses and not very clean white gloves and amazing hats that she found in secondhand stores. She pretended to be a widow who had served with her husband in various outposts of the Empire. She spoke in fluty tones to the sullen young waiters, asking them, “Could you be so good as to …” and then telling them they had been terribly, terribly kind.
    She and Georgia worked out the history of the Empire widow, and Georgia was added to the story as a grumpy, secretly Socialistic hired companion named Miss Amy Jukes. The widow’s name was Mrs. Allegra Forbes-Bellyea. Her husband had been Nigel Forbes-Bellyea. Sometimes Sir Nigel. Most of one rainy afternoon in the Moghul’s Court was spent in devising the horrors of the Forbes-Bellyea honeymoon, in a damp hotel in Wales.
    The other place that Maya liked was a hippie restaurant on Blanshard Street, where you sat on dirty plush cushions tied to the tops of stumps and ate brown rice with slimy vegetables and drank cloudy cider. (At the Moghul’s Court, Maya and Georgia drank only gin.) When they lunched at the hippie restaurant, they wore long, cheap, pretty Indian cotton dresses and pretended to be refugees from a commune, where they had both been the attendants or concubines of a folksinger named Bill Bones. They made up several songs for Bill Bones, all mild and tender blue-eyed songs that contrasted appallingly with his greedy and licentious ways. Bill Bones had very curious personal habits.
    When they weren’t playing these games, they talked in a headlong fashion about their lives, childhoods, problems, husbands.
    “That was a horrible place,” Maya said. “That school.”
    Georgia agreed.
    “They were poor boys at a rich kids’ school,” Maya said. “So they had to try hard. They had to be a credit to their families.”
    Georgia would not have thought Ben’s family poor, but she knew that there were different ways of looking at such things.
    Maya said that whenever they had people in for dinner or the evening, Raymond would pick out beforehand all the records he thought suitable and put them in a suitable order. “I think sometime he’ll hand out conversational topics at the door,” Maya said.
    Georgia revealed that Ben wrote a letter every week to the great-aunt who had sent him to school.
    “Is it a nice letter?” said Maya.
    “Yes. Oh, yes. It’s very nice.”
    They looked at each other bleakly, and laughed. Then they announced—they admitted—what weighed on them. It was the innocence of these husbands—the hearty, decent, firm, contented innocence. That is a wearying and finally discouraging thing. It makes intimacy a chore.
    “But do you feel badly,”