Free When We Argued All Night by Alice Mattison

their right hands over and down, as if they flung off something slimy.
    â€”You know, we could go to the lake, Myra said now.
    â€”What lake?
    â€”Gus’s cabin.
    â€”Oh! he said. Myra read not minds but the edge of minds. She knew he had not stopped thinking about the cabin in the mountains. Harold had known her now for two years but had not been to bed with her. Myra was too scary. She’d know too well what he was thinking. Myra would laugh.
    â€”Do you still know Gus? Harold said. The thought was distressing, but the thought of the cabin was exciting. He stood up and she stood too. They entered the park and began walking.
    â€”Of course I know him, said Myra.
    â€”But how is that possible? Harold said. You’re not still . . . you know?
    â€”What do you mean, how is it possible? said Myra. There are lots of ways to know people. Maybe he’ll let us go there. I can ask, at least.
    He wondered whether she meant she spent her time with him differently—having renounced him, perhaps, imitating the characters in James despite her protestations. He wanted to go. He didn’t want to quarrel.
    â€”He’d lend it to us? he said. Or he’d be there?
    â€”I’ll find out.
    Harold didn’t want to be the guest of the man who had had an affair with Myra—of the man and his wife. But the cabin was too small for guests, as they’d proved when they’d been there. He couldn’t stop asking questions. You mean you’re friends? Does his wife know about you and Gus?
    â€”I’m tired, Myra said. They sat down on a bench near the boat pond. Children brought toy boats to float in the pond, and nursemaids looked after the children—even now, even in the Depression, people had nursemaids or might be nursemaids. He speculated on whether nursemaids would favor a revolution.
    â€”I don’t know if she knows, Myra said. It’s not a thing we discuss.
    â€”But how can you be her friend?
    Myra ignored his question. Look, I’ll ask him, she said. Then she added, I wonder what she gets paid—tilting her head toward a uniformed woman. She could be mean to the kid and nobody would know.
    Her mind went from topic to topic, sometimes responding to something he hadn’t yet said. Myra seemed to have no preconceptions, and she hadn’t worked out a set of ideas or ideals in advance, so she might think anything about anything—Gus, Henry James, the women in the park, who might be oppressed working people and might be Cinderella’s stepsisters. She didn’t think in categories and didn’t seem to have an inward list of ideas she believed. Harold had made up his mind about so much: he envied her freedom of thought. He felt old. What would it be like to read a newspaper with that kind of freshness, without ready opinions about Roosevelt, about Hitler and the Jews, about the threat of war? Surely Myra knew she was against Hitler. The Germans had gone from harassing Jews and depriving them of rights to dispossessing them, settling them in concentration camps. Wouldn’t Myra know right away that this was wrong? She didn’t look at each story about Hitler with an open mind, surely, curious to see if this time, perhaps, he’d make sense? Of course, her feelings weren’t just the same as his—she wasn’t Jewish. And sometimes—was there a thrill to this or only the curiosity that arises from repulsion?—sometimes there was the tiniest hint that, long ago and out of earshot of Harold or anyone like him, she might have been part of some nasty conversations about Jews. No, Myra was no more anti-Semitic than any other gentile, but surely they all—well.
    The point, though, had nothing to do with Hitler and the Jews. It had to do with sex. The point was that if Myra saw a man and wanted to sleep with him, she did not flip open a book of personal rules that included Stay away from married men , or any other kind of men,