Friend of My Youth

by Alice Munro

  “Honey, Zerlina is just not a household word,” Bugs said to her afterward. “Also, professors are dumb. They are dumber than ordinary. I could be nice and say they know about things we don’t, but as far as I’m concerned they don’t know shit.”

  But she let the professor sit beside her and tell her things about himself every morning. She told Averill what she’d learned. He walked the deck for one hour before breakfast. At home he walked six miles a day. He had caused a certain amount of scandal at the university a few years ago by marrying his young wife (his dimwit wife, said Bugs), whose name was Leslie. He had made enemies, stirred up envy and discontent among his colleagues with his dalliance, and then by divorcing his wife and marrying this girl who was one year younger than his oldest child. From then on, certain people were out to get him, and they did. He was a biologist, but he had devised a sort of general-science course—he called it a scientific-literacy course—for students in the humanities: a lively, unalarming course that he hoped would be a modest breakthrough. He got the approval of the higher-ups, but the course was scuttled by members of his own department, who devised all kinds of cumbersome, silly requirements and prerequisites. He retired early.

  “I think that was it,” Bugs said. “I couldn’t keep my mind on it. Also, young women can make very frustrating mates for older men. Youth can be boring. Oh, yes. With an older woman a man can relax. The rhythms of her thoughts and memories—yes, the rhythms of her thoughts and memories will be more in harmony with his. What puke!”

  Down the deck the young wife, Leslie, sat working on a needlepoint cover for a dining-room chair. This was the third cover she had done. She needed six altogether. The two women she sat with were glad to admire her pattern—it was called Tudor Rose—and they talked about needlepoint covers that they had made. They described how these fitted in with the furnishings of their houses. Leslie sat between them, somewhat protected. She was a soft, pink-skinned, brown-haired girl whose youth was draining away. She invited kindness, but Bugs had not been very kind to her when she hauled the needlepoint out of her bag.

  “Oh, my,” said Bugs. She threw up her hands and waggled her skinny fingers. “These hands,” she said, and got the better of a fit of coughing—“these hands have done plenty of things I am not proud of, but I must say they have never picked up a knitting needle or an embroidery needle or a crochet hook or even sewn on a button if there was a safety pin handy. So I’m hardly the person to appreciate, my dear.”

  Leslie’s husband laughed.

  Averill thought that what Bugs said was not completely true. It was Bugs who had taught her how to sew. Bugs and Averill both took a serious interest in clothes and were attentive to fashion, in a playful, unintimidated way. Some of their best hours together had been spent in cutting up material, pinning it together, getting inspirations.

  The caftans, the loose tops that Bugs wore on the boat, were patchworks of silk and velvet and brightly patterned cotton and crocheted lace—all from old dresses and curtains and tablecloths that Averill had picked up at secondhand stores. These creations were greatly admired by Jeanine, an American woman on the boat, who was making friends zealously.

  “Where did you find those gorgeous things?” said Jeanine, and Bugs said, “Averill. Averill made them. Isn’t she clever?”

  “She’s a genius,” said Jeanine. “You’re a genius, Averill.”

  “She should make theatre costumes,” Bugs said. “I keep telling her.”

  “Yes, why don’t you?” said Jeanine.

  Averill flushed and could not think of anything to say, anything to placate Bugs and Jeanine, who were smiling at her.

  Bugs said, “I’m just as glad she’s not, though. I’m just as glad she’s here. Averill is my treasure.”

  Walking the deck, away from Bugs, Jeanine asked Averill, “You mind telling me how old you are?”

  Averill said twenty-three, and Jeanine sighed. She said that she was forty-two. She was married, but not accompanied by her husband. She had a long tanned face with glossy pinkish-mauve lips and shoulder-length hair, thick and smooth as an oak plank. She said that people often told her she looked as if she was from California, but actually she was from Wisconsin. She was from a small city in Wisconsin, where she had been the hostess of a radio phone-in show. Her voice was low and persuasive and full of satisfaction, even if she disclosed a problem, a grief, a shame.

  She said, “Your mother is charming.”

  Averill said, “People either think that or they can’t stand her.”

  “Has she been ill long?”

  “She’s recuperating,” said Averill. “She had pneumonia last spring.” This was what they had agreed to say.

  Jeanine was more eager to be friends with Bugs than Bugs was to be friends with her. Nevertheless Bugs slid into her customary half-intimacy, confiding some things about the professor and disclosing the name she had thought up for him: Dr. Faustus. His wife’s name was Tudor Rose. Jeanine thought these names appropriate and funny. Oh, delightful, she said.

  She did not know the name that Bugs had given her. Glamour Puss.

  Averill walked around the deck and listened to people talking. She thought about how sea voyages were supposed to be about getting away from it all, and how “it all” presumably meant your life, the way you lived, the person you were at home. Yet in all the conversations she overheard people were doing just the opposite. They were establishing themselves—telling about their jobs and their children and their gardens and their dining rooms. Recipes were offered, for fruitcake and compost heaps. Also ways of dealing with daughters-in-law and investments. Tales of illness, betrayal, real estate. I said. I did. I always believe. Well, I don’t know about you, but I.

  Averill, walking past with her face turned toward the sea, wondered how you got to do this. How did you learn to be so stubborn and insistent and to claim your turn?

  I did it all over last fall in blue and oyster.

  I’m afraid I have never been able to see the charms of opera.

  That last was the professor, imagining that he could put Bugs in her place. And why did he say he was afraid?

  Averill didn’t get to walk alone for very long. She had her own admirer, who would stalk her and cut her off at the rail. He was an artist, a Canadian artist from Montreal, who sat across from her in the dining room. When he was asked, at the first meal, what kind of pictures he painted, he had said that his latest work was a figure nine feet high, entirely wrapped in bandages, which bore quotations from the American Declaration of Independence. How interesting, said some polite Americans, and the artist said with a tight sneer, I’m glad you think so.

  “But why,” said Jeanine, with her interviewer’s adroit response to hostility (a special rich kindness in the voice, a more alert and interested smile), “why did you not use Canadian quotations of some sort?”

  “Yes, I was wondering that, too,” said Averill. Sometimes she tried to get into conversations this way, she tried to echo or expand the things that other people said. Usually it did not work well.

  Canadian quotations turned out to be a sore subject with the artist. Critics had taken him to task for that very thing, accusing him of insufficient nationalism, missing the very point that he was trying to make. He ignored Jeanine, but followed Averill from the table and harangued her for what seemed like hours, developing a ferocious crush on her as he did so. Next morning he was waiting to go in to breakfast with her, and afterward he asked her if she had ever done any modelling.

  “Me?” said Averill. “I’m way too fat.”

  He said he didn’t mean with clothes on. If he had been another sort of artist, he said (she gathered that the other sort was the sort he despised), he would have picked her out immediately as a model. Her big golden thighs (she was wearing shorts, which she didn’t put on again), her long hair like caramelized sugar, her square shoulders and unindented waist. A goddess figure, goddess coloring, goddess of the harvest. He said she had a pure and childish sco
wl.

  Averill thought that she must remember to keep 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 was fifty-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 was a type she had seen before. Glitz on the surface and catastrophe underneath. A mistake to get too chummy with her, she told Averill, but she remained fairly chummy herself. She told Jeanine stories that Averill had heard before.

  She told about Averill’s father, whom she did not describe as a jerk or an admirer but as a cautious old bugger. Old to her way of thinking—in his forties. He was a doctor, in New York. Bugs was living there; she was a young singer trying to get her start. She went to him for a sore throat, sore throats being the bugbear of her life.

  “Eye, ear, nose, and throat man,” Bugs said. “How was I to know he wouldn’t stop there?”

  He had a family. Of course. He came to Toronto, once, to a medical conference. He saw Averill.

  “She was standing up in her crib, and when she saw him she howled like a banshee. I said to him, Do you think she’s got my voice? But he was not in the mood for jokes. She scared him off. Such a cautious old bugger. I think he only slipped up the once.

  “I’ve always used bad language,” Bugs said. “I like it. I liked it long before it got to be so popular. When Averill had just started to school, the teacher phoned and asked me to come in for a talk. She said she was concerned about some words that Averill was using. When Averill broke her pencil or anything, she said, Oh, shit. Or maybe, Oh, fuck. She said whatever she was used to hearing me say at home. I never warned her. I just thought she’d realize. And how could she? Poor Averill. I was a rotten mother. And that’s not the worst part. Do you think I owned up to that teacher and said she got it from me? Indeed not! I behaved like a lady. Oh dear. Oh, I do appreciate you telling me. Oh dear. I’m an awful person. Averill always knew it. Didn’t you, Averill?”

  Averill said yes.

  On the fourth day, Bugs stopped going down to the dining room for dinner.

  “I notice I’m getting a bit gray around the gills by that time,” she said. “I don’t want to turn the professor off. He may not be so stuck on older women as he lets on.”

  She said she ate enough at breakfast and lunch. “Breakfast was always my best meal. And here I eat a huge breakfast.”

  Averill came back from dinner with rolls and fruit.

  “Lovely,” said Bugs. “Later.”

  She had to sleep propped up.

  “Maybe the nurse has oxygen,” Averill said. There was no doctor on the ship, but there was a nurse. Bugs did not want to see her. She did not want oxygen.

  “These are not bad,” she said of her coughing fits. “They are not as bad as they sound. Just little spasms. I’ve been figuring out—what they are punishment for. Seeing I never smoked. I thought maybe—singing in church and not believing? But no. I think—Sound of Music. Maria. God hates it.”

  Averill and Jeanine played poker in the evenings with the artist and the Norwegian first mate. Averill always went back to the boat deck a few times to check on Bugs. Bugs would be asleep or pretending to be asleep, the fruit and buns by her bed untouched. Averill pulled out of the game early. She did not go to bed immediately, though she had made a great point of being so sleepy that she could not keep her eyes open. She slipped into the cabin to retrieve the uneaten buns, then went out on deck. She sat on the bench beneath the window. The window was always wide open on the warm, still night. Averill sat there and ate the buns as quietly as she could, biting with care through the crisp, delicious crust. The sea air made her just as hungry as it was supposed to do. Or else it was having somebody in love with her—the tension. Under those circumstances she usually gained weight.

  She could listen to Bugs’ breathing. Little flurries and halts, ragged accelerations, some snags, snores, and achiev
ed straight runs. She could hear Bugs half-wake, and shift and struggle and prop herself higher up in the bed. And she could watch the captain, when he came out for his walk. She didn’t know if he saw her. He never indicated. He never looked her way. He looked straight ahead. He was getting his exercise, at night, when there would be the least chance of having to be sociable. Back and forth, back and forth, close to the rail. Averill stayed still—she felt like a fox in the brush. A night animal, watching him. But she didn’t think he would be startled if she should move or call out. He was alert to everything on the ship, surely. He knew she was there but could ignore her, out of courtesy, or his own sense of confidence.

  She thought of Jeanine’s designs on him, and agreed with Bugs that they were doomed to failure. Averill would be disappointed if they were not doomed to failure. The captain did not seem to her a needy man. He did not need to disturb you, or flatter, or provoke, or waylay you. None of that look at me, listen to me, admire me, give me. None of that. He had other things on his mind. The ship, the sea, the weather, the cargo, his crew, his commitments. The passengers must be an old story to him. Cargo of another sort, requiring another sort of attention. Idle or ailing, lustful or grieving, curious, impatient, mischievous, remote—he would have seen them all before. He would know things about them right away, but never more than he needed to know. He would know about Jeanine. An old story.

  How did he decide when to go in? Did he time himself, did he count his steps? He was gray-haired and straight-backed, with a thickness of body around the waist and the stomach speaking not of indulgence but of a peaceable authority. Bugs had not thought up any name for him. She had called him a canny Scot, but beyond that she had taken no interest. There were no little tags about him for Bugs to get hold of, no inviting bits of showing-off, no glittery layers ready to flake away. He was a man made long ago, not making himself moment by moment and using whomever he could find in the process.