Christine Schutt - Prosperous Friends

*

Clive, at the top of the stairs to the terrace, saw Sally walking toward the angel in a large coat that looked like something her mother might have worn. (He should give Sally the money he knew she needed.) Sally’s mother, a long unbuttoned girl swinging bell-like and wide, had once walked willingly, smilingly toward him — for an entire roll of film, she moved agreeably among the pigeons. Ah, acqua alta in the Piazza San Marco, all awash yet staunchly swept, and the coffeehouse, famous. He saw in his daughter his once-cheerful wife, Meg, in the piazza, winter, a happy winter for them both despite a year of crepe and tears. That first Christmas after Clive’s father’s death when his mother had asked him please, couldn’t we all do something other than New York, far away but family?

Italy then.

On a colder afternoon, Clive and Meg shut their shared umbrella and shook themselves out at the araby that was the entrance to the Caffè Florian. Here we are! Sorry! Hardly sorry, but bed-warm beneath their coats. “We were happy,” Clive said to Sally now. “Your mother and I, and we made my mother happy, too, at a time when, I think, she didn’t expect to feel much of anything.” Across a room, distantly tinseled — bar pin, bracelet, ring — his mother once at the Hotel Gritti on the Grand Canal, New Year’s Eve, a widow in a loose sheath, black — black beaded; she sat uncertainly holding a flute of something pingy. At his father’s memorial service, his mother had told Clive not to expect such a turnout for her — and there wasn’t.

In a companionable moment, he put his arm around the soft shape of his daughter. The bowed softness of his daughter, the cushioned arms, not his mother’s arms or his, but hers, Sally’s. Children are always entirely themselves — so Dinah said. Dinah, his second, sturdy wife, he missed her.

As if his daughter knew his thoughts, she asked after Dinah.

“Dinah is fine,” he said, with some relief to be walking in the sun, walking north, northeast from Bethesda Terrace to the Conservatory Garden, some considerable distance, though he was fit, Clive; he still ran. He was ready for spring. Dinah was crazed for it but otherwise fine.

“There’s already spring interest here. Look at that!” he said.

The early dogwood’s yellow had arrived, no more than dots on twigs, yet they brightened the bark-chip mulch and blackened leaves that had toughed out winter. He liked the yellows better than the pinks to come or the Conservatory Garden’s rigid plantings of tulips, now just spikes, but the penitent Lenten rose was up in borders, and he liked that perennial very much.

“Look inside,” he said, and Sally bent down next to Clive and looked inside the surprise of the muted hellebore.

They had seen more spring than he had expected. “That was pleasant,” he said and meant it, glad not to have talked about money or that woman Sally lived with — anything to do with Sally’s messy grown-up life.

“I thought we could pick up Wisia at school together” was Sally’s hopeful invitation at the gates to the Conservatory Garden.

But no, he couldn’t come to school. A friend had called, not someone she knew.

“Man or woman?”

“What business is it of yours?”

“Why won’t you see Mom?”

The answer he had was too harsh, and he didn’t know why he went ahead and said, “For the same reason I don’t see you that often. You both make me sad.”

“If you think we’re disappointing, Dad. Really, to be stingy at your age.”

He made as if to take off her head and didn’t stop short but hit her in the neck with his hand. He hit her but not that hard.

“That hurt.”

“Wasn’t very hard.”

“Says who?” Sally backed into the street and waved down a cab, all the while holding a hand against her neck. “Enjoy the rest of your visit,” Sally said, before she shut the door.

He would. Goddamn her. He had perversely persevered, had lunched, dined, breakfasted with Sally, walked with Sally, listened to her litany of insufficiencies — starting with funds! He could have been seeing Isabel Bourne. His surprise was considerable then when Sally appeared the next day at Torvold’s gallery. She startled them both, Clive and the convincing young adult (spotty beard but deep voice) there to interview Clive. “This is a surprise.” Clive stood up. “My daughter,” Clive said, by way of introduction to the young man named. . he’d already forgotten.

“I’m sorry,” she said to the young man and then again to both of them. “Really, I am.” Sally looked closely at her watch, pressed her ear to the face of it. “Go ahead,” she said, then, “Oh, no, is that recording?”

“No,” the young man said. “No, I turned it off.”

“Lucky,” she said although it seemed to Clive she was the unluckiest person. She was too timorous to make a wider way through the world, yet it gladdened him to know he was predominant still and could shut her up with just a look. Clive sternly watched her walk to the other end of the gallery with its glassy island of a table and low seating that conformed to it. Onto this shoreline Sally dropped as if she had been pushed.

“I’ll just wait,” she said, and she took off her watch and peered closely at it, longer than was necessary, and she did not look back at Clive; rather, she seemed to be talking to her watch. Had she been drinking? He wasn’t going to give her any more money no matter what it was for.

The interviewer, ever hopeful, said, “Italy?”

Yes. His mother had taken him. He was eight years old and he liked looking at paintings, especially the noisy terrors recorded in Renaissance paintings, paintings of those suspect and traitorous early Christians so inventively tortured, drawn and quartered, boiled, burned, defenestrated. Some figures had no more dimension than drapery, flayed as they were or flung from the Tarpeian Rock. The dogs, unleashed, were outraged, bullet-headed hounds in the likeness of Cerberus — savage mouths.

“I couldn’t stop looking,” Clive said, although his own horrible imaginings dismayed him. Now, for instance, he thought of Sally and the ways she might be hurt, had been hurt — on her own, by him, by others. The bruise on her neck had a black center she should have concealed — it was not becoming. Why didn’t she know? She was forty and he was. . didn’t matter; work was life’s imperative. Wisia was eight — his age when first he saw Pauline Borghese. Such a slender invitation, breasts no more than suggestions, Canova’s Pauline reclined on her marble chaise under a vague wrap.

Clive talked about the massacre of the innocents, another image first encountered with his mother in Italy. He had always suspected adults of violence, but up until then he had not seen that much of it. His own parents were model and kind. (In truth, his mother was neither, but Clive felt no obligation to be truthful.)

A gunshot. That’s what it sounded like when Sally dropped the heavy coffee-table book on the floor.

“If there’s a better time,” the young man said.

“No, no, no, no, no. Now is fine,” he said, but he could hear at the other end of the gallery, Sally was making those sounds he knew for the mewling preamble to I’m sad. I’m tired. I’m sorry, though she didn’t mean it. Clive moved his chair closer to the young man, saying, “I’m not going to look back at her.” But he was looking back. Yesterday in a flirtatious coat, she had swayed for attention. Look at me, listen to me, help me: the tedious refrain to Sally’s song of herself. Her neediness unsettled him or was it unseated him?

But he talked on. He had given so many interviews in his lifetime: Clive had grown up in Boston, which was as far as he went besides acknowledging he had had parents. He liked to hint at having known harder times as if his impeccable academic background had come by way of scholarships. “I’ve a brother and a sister, both older, not artists.” He had loved to draw from the beginning, but from whom had he inherited his gift? His mother, yes, she had had such ambitions.